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HUMANITIES return, to do this to create a cOlnpell:mg the self as much as it is about the 1"'.ocn.o,"'t- for narrative as it does for the fascinate and inform a reader in these three ultimate of northern narrative. fC:Y.:fTInnTT ...........II-"...U-..' editors. The Edwardian Theatre: PP"'~;':r:l1'1n"'''J> and the one of his likeliest heirs. • ........., .... ITT one would have liked a book L'-"......O';;' ....,LJ.V.L. of Davis's theatres West' by , 268 LEITERS IN CANADA 1996 tUlderground railway, theirbig old touring houses emptied and turned into music halls or cinemas. What was left were genuinely local phenomena such as the Yiddish theatre of Whitechapel, created by waves of east European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, and the melodramas of the Standard in Shoreditch, mostly about beautiful women teetering on various moral brinks, of a kind too naive and hot-blooded for West End audiences. There are equally valuable essays by Dennis Kennedy, on the new audience that sought out Shaw's plays and Granville Barker's productions and were trained by Barker to remove their 'matinee hats,' and by Victor Emeljanow, on the two failed attempts by Edwardian critics to define their calling by forming a professional association to lay down rules for it. To define themselves as more than reviewers and publicists, they'd have had to agree on what more the theatre can be than a commodity. They were never able to do so, in spite of the presence among them of William Archer, Max BeerbohID, J.T. Grein, and A.B. Walkley, probably the most fastidious of them all but too haughty to admit that theatre could be more than amusement. YOW1ger essayists muddy their research by mixing it with deconstruction , whose end they clearly feel is to uncover discreditable skeletons in the cupboards of the past. Peter Bailey bogs down an interesting study of the line of musicals about working girls, from The Shop Girl (1896) to Our Miss Gibbs (1909), in an attempt to convict them of purveying covert sex ('parasexuality,' he calls it imposingly) and 'commodifying' the new class of employed young women by calling them 'girls.' It's a pity he didn't extend his research to talking to a few women old enough to recall the shows. They might have explained to him why they still held'girl lunches' in their old age, to recall jokily the days of their youth and sexual freedom. 'There was nothing para about it/ they could have told him. 'Those shows were all-about sex, boys and girls fanning their feathers at each other like peacocks, and we knew it. That's why we enjoyed them.' They might have talked himout ofhintingdarkly thatLottieCollins's 'Tararaboomdeay' was orgasmic in effect. Similarly, J.5. Bratton sniffs around the regiment of women entertainers who impersonated men on the music halls for signs of hidden lesbianism. Who knows, there may have been some, but she ignores the simpler explanation that what appealed to their audiences was the cleverness of their performances. Again, Tracy Davis turns an interesting survey of capital formation in the theatre into a hunt for reasons why so few women became managers. Unsurprisingly, she finds that bankers were less willing to lend money to them than to men. But she never stops to ask how many women wanted to manage theatres. In the years before 1914, most of the money earned in the theatre came from touring; a successful actress might spend six or eight months of the year on the road. To own a theatre, or the HUMANITIES 269 lease of one, would simply have been an encumbrance. Managers tended to be people who disliked touring and played golf, like George Alexander of the St James's. The built-in flaw of the deconstructive project seems to be that, to decode the past successfully, you need to imagine its inhabitants as too stupid to recognize the codes they're writing. The essay which gives the liveliest sense of the Edwardian theatre is John Stokes's study of the career of Rebecca West as a feminist theatre critic. There's no decoding her - she...

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