The Music Hall & Popular Culture

Book Reviews The Music Hall & Popular Culture Barry J. Faulk. Music Hall and Modernity: The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. xii + 224 pp. $42.95 WILTON'S MUSIC HALL, the only surviving grand hall left in London , exists in a fragile condition just off the famous Cable Street in Stepney. It closed as a music hall as early as 1880, the evangelical antihall campaigner Frederick Charrington buying the freehold in 1888 and turning it into a mission (it helped feed the starving during the 1889 Dock Strike and served several generations of seamen). It was boarded up in 1964, and left to rot, caught in limbo by council changes, shifts in planning law and general indifference. The space began to be used for one-off performances in the late 1990s once the London Music Hall Trust acquired the freehold of the building. If you're lucky, you might catch a weekend when it opens to the public. Recently, the hall held a sound installation: you could walk into the crepuscular light of the main hall, clamber up precarious stairs to amble around the notorious sexualised space of the promenade at the back of the theatre, and listen to the febrile sounds of spectral voices singing old music-hall songs, some so crude as to belie the very idea of sublimation. It is one of the few spaces that still genuinely conjures a lost Victorian East End: dilapidation and the lingering smell of damp somehow seem appropriate accompaniment for an evocation of a vanished popular culture. Barry Faulk's engaging book is a long way from the rude pleasures of Gus Elen, Little Tich or Marie Lloyd's suggestive rendition of The Girl Who Got Her Ticket Punched. Instead, Faulk is interested in investigating how the music hall was mediated by a generation of middleclass professional critics who were part of the transformation of the old penny gaffs and local music halls into the highly capitalised world of variety entertainment in the 1890s, when the big West End halls like the Alhambra, the Empire and the Palace Theatre of Varieties opened. For a number of critics at the turn of the century, Faulk argues, the music hall was a new site for the articulation of a national popular ideology , invoking a certain portrait of the halls and their audiences that began to incorporate this popular culture into a quintessential expres194 BOOK REVIEWS sion of sentimental Englishness. Much historical work has been done on this conservative function of the music hall, its virulent jingoism, xenophobia and quietism. Yet the late-Victorian accounts were also written in the language of the expert who mourned the decline from the "authentic" music hall of bygone days into its current vulgarity and the mixed-class confusions of variety theatre. T. S. Eliot's preposterous essay on the death of Marie Lloyd in 1922 was only a late addition to this discourse, Eliot claiming that Lloyd's death marked the demise of the lower classes tout court and signalled the likely collapse of civilisation . If nostalgic evocation of a lost era has been central to middle-class writing about the halls since the very beginning (Faulk would recognise this trace in my own evocation of Wilton's perhaps), then he inevitably spends much time looking at the music-hall writings of Arthur Symons, the aesthete who produced a dissident version of the halls. Faulk is particularly sensitive at picking out how Symons began by trying to mark himself out as an aficionado of the halls, a private passion that is anxious not to impose critical "expertise." Something about the permeability of audience and performers in the halls, in contrast to theatre, undermined the aesthetic authority of the critical gaze for Symons. From the start, Symons constantly privileged the glimpse into backstage worlds of actresses and his beloved dancers falling in and out of roles, and this move productively troubled any chance of reducing the halls to an objective spectacle or simple moral judgment. Indeed, Faulk recovers Symons's backstage interview with the dancer Cyrene, doing comparative criticism of high kicks in London and Paris. This presents a slightly different Symons from...