London in a Box: Englishness and Theatre in Revolutionary America by Odai Johnson (review)

In 1751, a nineteen-year-old George Washington accompanied his brother Lawrence to Barbados, on a trip that the Washington family hoped would cure Lawrence's tuberculosis. As a son of a prominent family, George also aspired to absorb some of the gentility on display by the plantation owners of the island, gentility that was in much shorter supply in the relative backwater of Virginia. The capital, Bridgetown, far outstripped Virginia's Williamsburg in size, population, opulence, and glamour. With its balls and gentlemen's clubs and afternoon teas, it was the closest thing to London he had ever experienced. On his return, Washington could not see his hometown in the same light: it struck him as provincial and shabby.

The only place where Washington could relive the splendor of Bridgetown, and by extension the even grander metropolis of London, was at the theater, where British gentility was on display three or more nights a week during season. As Odai Johnson argues, "the theatre in America … [was] the single most concentrated school for manufacturing Britishness: British manners, British identity, British taste, British values, and British material and social culture" (2). Every night's playbill featured a comedy, often a comedy of manners, that was set in Britain and played out Britishness to its colonial audience.

At the center of this performance of British identity was the impresario David Douglass. Douglass had taken over the American Company from Lewis Hallam, Sr., after Hallam died in Jamaica, and married his widow for good measure. Douglass brought the company to North America in 1758, first setting up shop in Williamsburg and then moving up and down the East Coast, eventually establishing a network of theaters (initially Douglass was refused permission to open a theater in New York, so he started a "Histrionic Academy," putatively to teach acting but really to stage plays. Quickly, his subterfuge was discovered, and ultimately he lobbied successfully for thirteen performances, which pulled him and the company out of debt). For Johnson, Douglass's company was "London in a box, and colonists had a strong desire to emulate that urbane capital" (24). Reviews of productions praised actors by comparing them to British performers, and virtually all the plays the company put on were of British origin, from Shakespearean works to contemporary comedies.

Johnson tells a fascinating story of the pre-Revolutionary theater and Douglass's outsize role in it. He has done deep and broad research into the American Company and the world that surrounded it, not surprisingly, given his long immersion in the history of the colonial and Revolutionary-era American stage. He is astute in his formulation of colonial theater as offering "a transatlantic memory of a genteel, aristocratic world, a simulacrum of urbane refinement for those who could not participate in the original" (54). The pre-Revolutionary theater was not the rowdy, demotic environment of the years of the early Republic, when ticket prices plummeted and where workingmen talked back to the stage. It was predominantly the resort of gentlemen who were willing to travel hard miles to see a play, and—if Washington and Thomas Jefferson are any proof—would "go to the play" multiple times a week.

Johnson tells this story from the arrival of Douglass and his company in the mid-1750s to the mandate by the Continental Congress to ban theatrical performances in 1774, and he tells it with verve and energy. He is a terrific writer who knows this material inside and out. And that might be the source of the greatest weakness of London in a Box. The book is a kind of receptacle itself, in which Johnson has stuffed as much information as he could about a huge array of historical phenomena, both directly related to Douglass, the American Company, and the transmission of Britishness in the eighteenth-century theater, and others not so much: the history of the colonies; narratives of Scottish gentlemen's clubs...