British Theatre in the 1890s: Essays on Drama and the Stage ed. by Richard Foulkes (review)

134 Book Reviews meoted by Tracy C. Davis) between the social position of the Victorian actress, the stage portrayal of women in Victorian and Edwardian plays, and actresses' widespread pornographic exploitation. Such considerations might well alter the book's somewhat dubious conclusion that Irish culture achieves modernity by refuting an apparently eternal nationalist obsession: a "context of violence and tradition ... always there, always oppressively shaping identity" (191). Nevertheless, and despite these qualifications, this book is a scholarly and critically rigorous achievement. For anyone involved in the study of Irish theatre, it is, undoubtedly , essential reading. UONEL PD...KINGTON, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, GALWAY, IRELAND RICHARD FOULKES, ed. British Theatre in the 1890s; Essays on Drama and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992. pp. xiii, 2I 4, illustrated. $54.95. These twelve papers were offered by a group of leading scholars at a conference at the University of Leicester in 1990. As the twentieth century approaches its end. the last decade of the nineteenth attracts increasing attention. While few of the articles included here attempt to draw overt comparisons, readers will no doubt make several of their own, A century ago the theatre was threatened by outside forces: censorship. and impending competition from a new medium. As Tracy Davis points out in "Indecency and vigilance in the music halls." the censors have been resurrected; and every decade brings another competing medium. Will "virtual reality" finally kill the theatre? Probably not. we infer from this book: as long as the theatre can change to meet the challenge, it will endure. That is the underlying theme of the last paper, Josephine Harrop's delightful little piece on the portable theatres that toured the "smalls" from the I820S until well into this century. Drawing upon the private papers and memories of survivors of theatrical families. she names some ninety peripatetic companies that carried their wood and canvas playhouses around the country by wagon or train, playing a daily repertoire that ranged from Hamlet to Maria Martin. Another theme that emerges from several papers is variety: the contrasts in repertoire . acting and staging styles which were available to the playgoer in the 18905. That will be familiar to those of us who oscillate between Stratford and the Fringe. Michael Read, for example, acknowledges that lL. Toole was an actor of the old school by 1890. but also traces his influence forward through"the "halls" to silent film and Chaplin . One of the benefits ofa book of this kind is the illuminating glimpses it affords of neglected figures like Toole, Louis Calvert and Frank Benson. Some of the papers are very crisply focussed. For instance. Ralph Berry sets out to rehabilitate Benson. It is an historian's obligation to assess a critic's viewpoint, and Berry notes that Max Beerbohm's influential ridicule of Benson's athleticism comes from "a professional aesthete. a finished dandy." Nobody ridicules Olivier for being Book Reviews 135 athletic. David Mayer's account of "toga plays," notably Wilson Barrett's production of The Sign ofthe Cross. argues that the drama succeeded because the audience recognized the immediacy of its central theme, that "imperial power and Christian virtue can coexist." The theme of conflict between the fin de siecie naughtiness for which the decade was notorious. and the resistance of what Tracy Davis calls "the moral majority ," is the focus of Joel H. Kaplan's penetrating paper. "Pineroticism and the problem play; Mrs Tanqueray, Mrs Ebbsmith, and 'Mrs. Pat."· Jim Davis centres his account of Martin Harvey 's The Only Wayan the thesis that in a decade which Holbrook Jackson described as "a battleground between two types of culture, which he defined as the Yellow Book and the Yellow Press," the death of Sydney Canon played to the Boer War jingoism of the latter by exhibiting the spirit of self-sacrifice for a greater cause. Some of the articles focus less clearly. Hugh Maguire's piece on theatre architecture centres on the point that British theatres were architecturally less distinguished than those on the continent, but he does not discuss the economic differences that shaped the buildings. He seems to disapprove of architects "pandering" to the comfort and convenience of the audience. It...