Since 1895. Vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of British Theatre (review)

The soubriquet "Cambridge History" holds out the promise of diligent, authoritative scholarship but also, perhaps, the possibility of a certain quality of staidness. This volume of the Cambridge History of British Theatre is full of excellent and consistently interesting scholarship; it is a very, very good history book. It is rich, detailed, and varied in research and documentation and tells dozens of engaging stories about performance, performers, managers, conditions of work, plays, and much more. Eminent and emergent scholars alike present consistently smart and self-reflexive historiographic practice, making the collection useful to the reader interested in not only particular information and arguments but also critical practice. And although it is in many ways comprehensive, the volume is open enough to invite speculation on what themes, arguments, issues, and patterns are most present, even if implicit, and on what might be the next chapter "since 2004" (or 2002, when the writing apparently stopped so the volume could go to press).

Framing material includes a useful parallel chronology of "theatrical" and "political and social" events, over forty black-and-white photographs, an extensive bibliography, and a vast, thirty-page, double-columned index. The heart of the book is made up of twenty-three critical essays, organized into three chronological but interestingly overlapping parts: 1895-1946 (with eight chapters); Scottish and Welsh Theatres, 1895-2002 (with only four chapters); and 1940-2002 (with eleven chapters, by far the longest section). Most chapters have a fairly wide remit - for example, Dennis Kennedy's opening "British Theatre 1895-1946: Art, Entertainment, Audiences - an Introduction" or Colin Chambers's "Developments in the Profession of Theatre, 1946-2000." It is a credit to the authors and the collection, though, that such chapters deliver a vast amount of information, while nevertheless emphasizing argument and adopting a historiographic approach. Interspersed amongst these longer chapters is a handful of short case studies on Cicely Hamilton's Diana of Dobson's (Christine Dymkowski), Ena Lamont Stewart's Men Should Weep (Nadine Holdsworth), Theatre Workshop's Oh What a Lovely War (Derek Paget), performances of the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd (Hazel Walford Davies), and the labour-strike year of 1926 (Steve Nicholson). These are enormously satisfying because they allow sharply focused argument, often rigorously enact a particular historiographic approach thereby demonstrating its value, show the resonance of other chapters' broader arguments when situated within particular contexts, and do serious, detailed work on events that demonstrably deserve more critical attention.

The strengths of the volume are legion. Historiographic self-reflexivity is customary but rarely overbearing. Thomas Postlewait's "The London Stage, 1895-1918" complicates a dominant narrative of the early twentieth-century London theatre that pits the actor-manager against the new theatre movement. Holdsworth's chapter on Men Should Weep compares the original 1947 Glasgow Unity production with 7:84 (Scotland)'s 1982 production to explore differences in texts, production aesthetic and politics, and sociopolitical contexts. In "British Theatre, 1940-2002: An Introduction," Baz Kershaw begins by outlining the complexities of this period and its theatre. In response to these complexities, he proposes "to think of theatre systematically as integral to wider ecologies," to think, in other words, of the "flux of interdependencies between, say, theatres and companies, economics and aesthetics, state institutions and artists and so on" (293). If there is a defining shared quality across the dozens of parts of this enormous volume, this is it: the volume offers not only histories of British theatre in the period but theatre ecologies of the period; it is concerned not only with the ways theatre has been influenced by its "contexts" (however inseparable, near, or distant they may be) but also with the ways "a nation's theatre is necessarily and importantly expressive of, even when resistant to, the values that predominate at the time," as the series' general editor, Peter Thomson, puts it (xvi).

In practice, this commitment to exploring the ecologies of...