The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870 by Jacky Bratton (review)

The subject of Jacky Bratton’s The Making of the West End Stage is the “blank period in [the] theatre history” (2) of the London stage between romanticism and modernism. Her focus is the West End, which – rather than being seen as subject to the theatrical hiatus commonly supposed – is revealed as a dynamic, energetic, and innovative space in the mid-nineteenth century. The book’s aim, in particular, is to show how women helped shape a new Victorian theatrical culture, and it offers a meticulously researched and highly illuminating study of gender and theatre in early-and mid-Victorian London.

The Making of the West End Stage is divided into two parts: the first maps the spatial and cultural dimensions of the West End, while the second looks at individuals and the theatres they performed in and managed. Chapter one takes a journey across London from the perspective of a woman strolling from the elite residential area, St. James, in the west, to the retail district of Oxford Street, in the north. Moving south to the Strand, the home of the periodical press, in chapter two, the reader is given the perspective of a popular journalist. A single issue of The Era (April 6, 1856) is subjected to close scrutiny. The news of the day includes the end of the Crimean War and a fire at Covent Garden Theatre. The Era was a trade paper for theatrical professionals; its articles, reviews, and advertisements indicate that it was also a guide for middle-class theatregoers seeking a diversity of entertainment, from Italian opera to pleasure gardens or the emergent music hall.

Chapter three explores the way the West End became the home of British Bohemia. Notable is the absence of women from mythologizings of this Bohemian construction, which, unlike its Continental counterpart, is often seen as a homo-social space. And yet Bratton uncovers a very different reality, in which women assumed central roles as entertainers, directors, lessees, and managers. Her careful excavation of detail from primary sources succeeds in challenging the notion that male actor-managers dominated theatrical culture with serious drama and Shakespearean productions. Instead, we see a much more female-dominated world of burlesque, extravaganza, and musicals. Her examples include women largely overlooked in modern debate (Celine Celeste), as well as more familiar figures (Eliza Vestris).

Part Two of the book opens at chapter four with the first Parliamentary Select Committee on the Theatre in 1832, while chapter five looks at the second select committee of 1866. These two events frame the formation of the West End. During this period, women emerged as leaders in theatrical performance, creativity, and economics. Bratton asks why women should have occupied such prominent positions and concludes that the expansion of the leisure industry engendered male anxieties surrounding the feminization of the writer and actor, and, in turn, a space for women to occupy new roles. Onstage, women created transvestite performances that in the early- to mid-nineteenth century “came into being to help negotiate as well as to represent social change” (119). In opera and ballet, in child roles, and in Shakespearean productions, women regularly played male characters. Bratton quotes Fanny Kemble as stating that the only Romeo she ever starred opposite who “looked the part” was Ellen Tree (131). Shakespeare’s bold young lover was so far outside the increasing constraints of British masculinity that the role was best played by a woman.

Young women often began their careers as cross-dressing performers and later moved into managerial positions. Opera singer Eliza Vestris found fame on the 1820s London stage by showing her shapely legs in breeches in operatic burlesque. In 1830, she leased the Olympic but continued to perform in male costume in J.R. Planché’s classical burlesques. After her marriage to actor Charles Mathews in 1838, husband and...