Fantasies of Empire: The Empire Theatre of Varieties and the Licensing Controversy of 1894 (review)

Theatrical censorship comes in many forms: in Britain, in particular, the licensing decisions of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office have long been the focus of scholarly investigation of censorship in the playhouse. Yet, even after the abolition of state censorship in 1968, the power of individuals to impose censorship on ethical grounds was clearly highlighted by the 1982 private prosecution brought against Michael Bogdanov, director of Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain, on the grounds of gross indecency, by the moral campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Although the charges were withdrawn prior to trial, Whitehouse’s action was a reminder of the power that individuals can wield in the name of the community-at-large as self-appointed standard bearers for moral probity. Less than a hundred years earlier and in vastly different circumstances, the attack on the ethical conduct of the Empire Theatre of Varieties, situated at the heart of London’s West End, had also indicated the power of the individual to intervene in and even alter the circumstances and content of performance in the late nineteenth century.

Fantasies of Empire is a painstaking reconstruction of the events and context around the attempt by Laura Ormiston Chant, of the National Vigilance Society, to deprive the Empire Theatre of its license in 1894; it is a stunningly good example of the sort of micro-history that, at its best, enriches our knowledge of the theatrical past through detailed research and careful analysis of the data uncovered. In bringing to life this extraordinary episode in the English theatre of the 1890s, Donohue, the doyen of nineteenth-century British theatre historians, provides a balanced and informed account of events that highlight some of the cultural and moral ambivalences of the late Victorian period, creating a carefully structured narrative that exposes the hypocrisies and uncertainties of the time.

Donohue commences his study by clearly setting up the two principal antagonists in this controversy: Chant and the music hall impresario, George Edwardes. The values that inform the opinions of both are clearly delineated, and the nature of the Empire itself, its position at the upper end of the music hall market, its imperial associations, and the content of its programs are all established. After a series of visits to the Empire, Chant and a number of her associates, shocked in particular at the presence of so many prostitutes in the promenades and by the scantily clad ballet girls, whom they believed inflamed the libidos of males in the audience, sought to oppose the annual renewal of its license through representing their concerns to the Theatres and Music Halls Committee of the London County Council (LCC). The sale of alcoholic drinks at the theatre (which was crucial to its profit margins) was also targeted.

The Empire was a highly successful theatre, sumptuously furnished and magnificently illuminated by electric light, which paid huge dividends to its shareholders. The acts it offered to its public were among the best of their type to be found in the country. Thus Edwardes was not too worried about the moral objections raised by what the Daily Telegraph called “Prudes on the Prowl,” assuming that the scale of his enterprise and its adherence to the economic ethos of the day would protect him. Chant believed that the Empire’s ballets (two of which constituted part of each evening’s performance) seemed to exist “for the express purpose of displaying the bodies of women to the utmost extent,” while not attempting to hide what “common sense & common decency requires should be hidden” (69). But even more outrageous, from her perspective, were the number of encounters between men-about-town and prostitutes in the five-shilling lounge. The theatre as a resort of prostitutes, as the place where they publicly plied their trade, perhaps with the tacit approval of the management, was at the heart of her attack. Chant wished to achieve the...