"Hedda Is All of Us": Late-Victorian Women at the Matinee

In December 1896, H. E. M. Stutfield attended a matinee performance of Ibsen's Little Eyolf at the Avenue Theatre in London. Looking around the seats before the performance began, he noticed, somewhat uneasily, that most of the spectators were women. Later, in the pages of Blackwood's, he describes the audience:

I arrived early, but found the house already full. There was a small sprinkling of males, but woman had assembled in force to do honour to the Master who headed the revolt of her sex. The new culture and the newest chiffon were alike represented in the audience [. . .] Through a forest of colossal and befeathered hats I obtained occasional glimpses of the stage and the performers. (113)

Stutfield's experience at the Ibsen matinee was not atypical, nor was his unease. Of the Ibsen plays premiered in London between 1880 and 1900, all but three were originally produced as matinees, and male reviewers often found themselves in an unaccustomed and uncomfortable minority. ¹ Indeed, women in matinee audiences sometimes outnumbered men by as much as twelve to one (Burnand 422).

As originally conceived in the 1870s, the theatrical matinee had two purposes: the first was to extend the number of performances of a popular play, the second to encourage new dramatists and performers by giving them a venue for untried works. ² Yet because both popular and independent matinees were dominated by women--as spectators, actresses, and dramatic protagonists--they served a further purpose, providing a space for the observation and critique of staged femininity. Thus the matinee encouraged the development not only of a new drama but also of a new feminist self-consciousness. Stutfield's description of Ibsen's matinee audience comes at the center of what is, after all, a discussion about the emergence of feminism. A hundred years later, we can appreciate his prescience. For it is clear that the Ibsen matinees of the 1890s contributed to the creation of turn-of-the-century feminism, a feminism that would later realize itself in the theatricalized struggles of the Edwardian suffragette movement.

Ibsen's dramas succeeded during the heyday of the theatrical matinee, when nearly sixty percent of all plays produced in London theaters were performed in the afternoon. ³ Some of these matinees were simply extra performances of popular evening productions, but more than half were independent ventures, produced in rented theaters for afternoon performances only. The Ibsen matinees were independent productions, for although the translation and publication of his early work had given Ibsen a small but ardent following in London, West End theatrical managers were--with only one exception--unwilling to risk a full-scale evening production of his controversial "woman's plays" (qtd. in Robins 16). Devoted Ibsenites thus had little choice but to take advantage of the space offered by the matinee. Accordingly, eight of the eleven Ibsen plays premiered in London in the 1880s and 1890s were produced as independent matinees, often by actresses who felt, as actress and producer Elizabeth Robins put it, that the plays offered them "not only [. . .] vivid pleasure [. . .] but--what I cannot find any other word for than--self respect" (15). ⁴ At the matinee, Ibsen enjoyed an unanticipated success. Indeed, so popular were several of these productions that they were eventually moved to the evening bill. Still, male managers remained wary and with the single exception of An Enemy of the People (one of the few Ibsen plays that clearly was not a "woman's play"), the longer evening runs of Ibsen were all determined by and subsequent to successful matinee runs.

As the matinee depended for its very existence on women spectators, so, too, did the development of experimental theater. Theater critics of the 1890s grudgingly acknowledged this dependence: as A. B. Walkley ruefully noted in a matinee review, "without womankind, the modern drama would cease to exist" ("Chocolate Drama" 68). The modern dramas of Ibsen...