Edwardian Theatre

Book Reviews Edwardian Theatre Michael R. Booth and Joel H. Kaplan, eds. The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xii + 243pp. $49.95 MOST BOOKS that begin as conference papers are a very mixed bag. When they come from Cambridge University Press they are also grotesquely overpriced. This one collects eleven essays, eight of them presented at a conference on the Edwardian stage. The others were invited to fill out what remains a slender book in every sense of the adjective. Inevitably, now, gender-related papers proliferate, and five are here, all so thin—one on Rebecca West hardly fits the Edwardian frame in any case—that they can be written off. Another, on gender-play and role reversal in the music halls, has possibilities unfulfilled in what seems to be an early draft. One essay, drearily titled "Edwardian Management and the Structures of Industrial Capitalism," probes the reasons why men have been more successful than women in finding capitalization for play production, coming up with the non-news that women rarely had independent wealth, or incomes that might attract guarantors. Still another, on a single forgettable melodrama which made the translation from stage to early film, seems marginal in the extreme, an appendage to stretch the book. It is a relief to leave the West End drama for Jim Davis's "The East End," about the demographic homogeneity which created through immigration late in the nineteenth century a uniquely responsive theaterloving community, whether the offerings were by Shakespeare or Goldfadden. Jacob Gordin even offered The Jewish King Lear, an import in Yiddish (like most East End fare) from New York. Two legitimate houses and a music hall presented pantomimes, melodramas, moralities , histories and comedies, some written by playwrights and performed by actors who would find English-speaking fame in the West End after Yiddish successes in Whitechapel, Hackney and Shoreditch. After the Great War the mobility of their clientele left them without audiences. The two essays which substantiate the book's title are "The New Drama and the New Audience," by Dennis Kennedy, and "Towards an Ideal Spectator: Theatregoing and the Edwardian Critic," by Victor 65 ELT 41:1 1998 Emeljanow. "The reform movements that originated in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century," Kennedy writes, "flew in the face of the established theatrical system which treated plays as commodities and audiences as consumers of product[s]." Edwardian playwrights and producers who did not emerge from the commercial Victorian system, he contends, sought to convince audiences of the "spiritual" values of their offerings. And the audiences did not need to be huge, nor the plays potential long runs, but just a sufficiency of committed patrons to make the productions marginally viable. In fact, if modernist writers and producers were too successful, they were obviously doing something fundamentally wrong. As Kennedy puts it, "If audiences get too large, or the monetary rewards [become] too great, by definition the work is not on the cutting edge." This was an extreme strategy to work by in England, where there was no tradition of state-subsidized theaters. Rather, the system was attuned to the profit motive and the long run, but there emerged brave souls who strove to modernize the stage in the face of the daunting realities. Kennedy notes, for example, J. T. Grein's Independent Theatre Society, which by virtue of its censorship-circumventing "private" performances (open, that is, only to members), could be daring. Yet it never had more than 175 members and £400 a year in income during any of its seven years of productive life, which included the productions of Ibsen's Ghosts and Shaw's Widowers' Houses. The Stage Society, which limited membership to 300 and performed only on Sunday evenings, when commercial theaters were dark and professional actors were available, was just as deliberately marginal and exclusive. Even so, the police turned up at the Royalty Theatre for the Society's first event, a showing of Shaw's You Never Can Tell, to question the legality of a Sunday performance, however "private," and Frederick Whelen (an unsung hero of the Edwardian theater) kept them "adroitly involved...