Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes by Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell (review)

534 Book Reviews impact on playwrights of the electronic media. and Ruby Cohn provides a timely reminder lhat re-fashioning a classical text can crea~e thrilling perfonnance art, as did the giant puppets in Timberlake Wenenbaker's Love 0/ a Nightingale. An unusual slant on playwrights is provided by The~dore Sh~ with his American-style interest in "roads to success." How did writers make it into the theatre, what training did they have, what degrees did they take and where? Intriguing considerations, along with questions about cultural and financial structures, the Arts Council, career patterns and so on. AU in all. this is an invigorating, provocative, highly informative collection of essays. It casts a searching light on some of the liveliest, most innovative, eccentric and promising theatre movements in Britain today. KA1HAR1NE WORTH, ROYAL HOLWWAY COLLEGE, LONDON JOEL H. KAPLAN and SHBn.A SlOWElL. Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994. pp. xiii, 220, illustrated, $49.951£30.00. The farrUliar formula of a simulacrum - theatre creates fashion, theatre is fashion, fashion creates theatre, fashion is theatre - in this case is tightly historicized and demon· strated as a product of specific actions. Kaplan and Stowell trace two and a half decades of intersection between the theatre and fashion industries, culminating in couture 's collapse into a Banhesian hypertrophy, stripped of signification and unable to assist in argumentation of a play's political meaning or a character's social standing. so that while fashion can itself remain the topic of drama, it is merely as a showcase of style: Ironically. then, it is Oscar Wilde whom Kaplan and Stowell identify as the first principal deployer of fashion on the London stage: signaling counter-textual meanings, not by using beauty for art's sake as much as for visual destabilising of moral expectations based upon gender politics. According to this model, the relegation of Ibsen to ~e minor theatrical leagues is inevitable: he,simply does not provide enough OpJXlrtunities to show off goOd frocks. Shaw might be said to have fallen into a similar trap with his satire The Philanderer, never managing to make the political points attractive by draping women attractively. This is rectified very blatantly in Pygmalion, and fashion may have been part of Stella Campbell's arsenal of retribution against Shaw if the intentionality ascribed to her later gown's reception is accurate. No wonder Shaw was frustrated by his loss of control over the production: he was undennined by the bombastic actormanager Herbert Beerbohm Tree but also in the f'mal Act by Campbell's choice to portray Eliza as a clothes-conscious freethinker, a "dramatically nonsensical" deflection of the character's marooning as a class anomaly. Cause and effect is sometimes too forcefully argued - if The S~cond Mrs. Tanqueray is a direct reaction to Hedda Gabler, as Kaplan and Stowell assert, why was it two years in coming? - but the overall argument about society drama's deployment of Book Reviews 535 the visual semiosis of women's dress to round oul sexual signification is extremely compelling. Fo1iowing two chapters on the theatres of high socie.ty ("problem" plays), in the third chapter high society is brought to recognize gritty reality in the feminist play Warp and Woof This book is exemplary in its consideration of the specific circumstances of production to account for reception, both in the historicization of the production text's meaning and in the surrounding context of commodification and commercialism. Puns are tempting, but in all seriousness·it is materialist criticism in two complementary respects: the close attention paid to the tangible fabrics, line, cut, and design allows the socioeconomic circumstances into which these gowns are placed to connect variously with ideological conviction or intellectual vacuity. In Edith Lyltelton 's Warp and Woof, the fashion industry itself is given material reality on stage, and society women's complicity in the oppression of seamstresses is the polemic. Women arc shown literally as the constructions of their clothing, providing the missing link. between society plays and Ibsen to fonn a true social play; it is the fufsome provision of parades of the modiste's handiwork that accounts...