Victorians on the Contemporary Stage

The Victorians are a fixture of contemporary theatre. I don’t mean their own drama, although of course Oscar Wilde is performed continually from London’s West End to high school productions in Cedar City, Utah. Even Dion Boucicault – a name better known to theatre historians than to theatre buffs – regularly finds an audience. In the last few years, New York alone has seen Boucicault’s The London Assurance at the Roundabout Theatre (1997), both The Streets of New York (2001) and The Colleen Bawn (2003) at The Irish Rep, and The Shaughraun at the Storm Theatre (2008). Yet, while regular productions of Victorian plays clearly constitute an important part of Victorian afterlife, in this roundtable article I explore the many recent adaptations of Victorian literature and other materials into new plays and musicals. In the first few paragraphs I establish that there is at present a phenomenal interest in portraying the Victorians on stage, listing and categorizing current plays based on Victorian novels and biographies. Then I analyse how contemporary drama and musical theatre depict the Victorians by focusing on a few examples of shows that address current issues through a Victorian lens, including dramas about Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin and the musicals The King and I and Jane Eyre. Along the way, I point out that examining representation of Victorian literature and culture on the contemporary stage leads to reciprocal insights about the Victorians and about us.

A brief (and far from exhaustive) tally of theatrical adaptations during the last two decades demonstrates their numbers and variety. The 1990s and 2000s have brought us several blockbuster musicals such as a sumptuous revival of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s The King and I (1996), which again won many of the awards it had garnered in 1951, including the Tony for Best Musical; it opened at London’s Palladium in 2000. Another smash was the pop spectacular Jekyll and Hyde (New York 1997) by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse. While The King and I is ultimately based on Anna Leonowens’s autobiographical travelogues,¹ novels such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde most often provide the Victorian raw material to reach the current musical stage, as in a string of shows with the ‘the Musical’ appended to their titles: Paul Gordon’s Jane Eyre: The Musical (2000 in New York, 2008 in London), Christopher Tookey and Hugh Thomas’s Hard Times: The Musical (London 2000), and – from American literature – Little Women: The Musical (2005). If we include Edwardian literary and historical sources, then The Secret Garden, by Lucy Simon and Marsha Norman, opened in New York in 1991 to critical acclaim; Maury Yeston’s Titanic: The Musical (New York 1997) won multiple Tonys and talk-show host Rosie O’Donnell’s very public championship.² Additional shows based on Victorian novels during this time were Wildhorn’s Dracula (New York 2004) and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White (2004 in London, 2005 in New York). The innovative Richard Doyle productions of the 1979 Stephen Sondheim classic Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in London (2004) and New York (2005) brought renewed excitement about the show to critics and audiences, as did the Tim Burton film based on Sondheim’s musical (2007). Non-musical plays based on Victorian literature have also flourished; a prime example is another important revival making its way from Britain to Canada and the United States: the 1980 Royal Shakespeare Company tour-de-force Nicholas Nickleby (2007), a six and a half-hour Dickensian marathon. The Pre-Raphaelites and decadents are perennial sources of dramatic inspiration, as demonstrated not only by Peter Whelan’s The Earthly Paradise (London 2004) but also by numerous plays about Oscar Wilde and even John Ruskin.

A rush of new plays about Wilde opened toward the end of the 1990s, coinciding with the approaching centenary of his death in 2000. They included Moisés Kaufman’s off-Broadway success Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde (1997), which draws on Wilde’s trial transcripts, and David Hare’s The...