Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians by Benjamin Poore (review)

Benjamin Poore's study provides original readings of Victorians on the contemporary British stage—from Edward Bond's Early Morning (1968) to Polly Teale's Brontë (2005)—convincingly showing how constructions of Victorians and Victorianism are dialectically related to their respective cultural contexts. But the book does much more than this—it relates these constructions of Victorianism to films, television series, and architecture—and thereby also makes important contributions in the fields of neo-Victorian studies, media studies, and cultural studies in general.

The very broad and panoramic scope becomes apparent from the very first page. Poore uses the current fascination for all things Victorian as point of departure and demonstrates how revivals of plays by Shaw and Wilde, adaptations of novels for the stage, television, and film, historiographic metafiction by John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, and Sarah Waters, in short, the predilection for Victorian and neo-Victorian texts, frame and to a certain extent also shape the Victorians onstage. Thanks to a sophisticated methodology based on New Historicism, New Materialism, and Foucauldian archaeology, enhanced by a self-conscious "presentist" and "anecdotalist" perspective, the study manages to gauge the interplay of Victorian past and contemporary theatrical representations. At the same time, it also discerns the impact of neo-Victorianism in other media and contemporary political, economic, and social discourses (most prominently the debate of "Victorian values" associated with Margaret Thatcher). The stage Victorians are shown to serve as multipurpose constructs: "national bogey figures" (3) or "scapegoats" (14) against whom Britons can construct themselves as free and liberated, or nostalgic "hauntings" of the past.

The six chapters are arranged chronologically and provide varying thematic focuses. Chapter 1 analyzes Bond's Early Morning as a groundbreaking play in its own right and as part of the late 1960s protest culture, which expressed its skepticism toward the establishment by favoring clothes inspired by Victorian models. The end of censorship and the play's Marxist critique are combined with a reading of Bond's play as Freudian dream-work and satire in the style of Monty Python.

Chapter 2 deals with plays premiered between 1968 and 1982 dramatizing the Empire, in a first step connecting them with then-prevalent discourses on national identity for a Britain which, according to Dean Acheson's famous dictum, had "lost an empire and has not yet found a role." Criticism of imperialism and capitalism serves as vehicle for an exploration of family structures, gender roles, and sexualities. Here, Poore's "presentist" perspectives prove highly productive. After discussing the libertarian, left-wing impetus of plays such as Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep North, Tony Harrison's Phaedra Britannica, and Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, the chapter highlights peculiarities and blind spots of 1970s plays, which not seldom make rape a joking matter and paedophilia or incest a viable option for uninhibited expressions of sexuality, and thereby proves that "representation of sex is actually a historically bound sexuality that was very much of its time" (57).

Chapters 3 and 5 have a closer look at complementary phenomena—the revivals and reappropriations of Dickens and the Brontës—with chapter 4 on biofictional plays as transition from the overtly to the implicitly political. The adaptations of Dickens's novels for the stage—most famously David Edgar's The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby—are read as reactions to the Thatcherite evocation of supposedly Victorian values and the promotion of individualism and self-help. The debates between Right and Left are condensed into two opposing "structures of feeling" (in the sense of Raymond Williams): while Thatcher, Tebbitt, and the like favor a discourse of self-help and traditional (family) values, critics reframe this ideological construction of the past as "Hard Times." By means of a careful and meticulous analysis of Nicholas Nickleby, the chapter retraces the appropriation of popular theatrical techniques such as melodrama and music hall and relates them to the celebration of community—both...