Description
This paper develops some ideas from my recent monograph, Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre (Palgrave 2012). ‘Analogue Nostalgia’ considers what has prompted the latest revival of interest in the Victorian and Edwardian music hall, and how this relates to other neo-Victorian forms of stage comedy. The paper takes as a particular focus Red Ladder’s recent musical Big Society!, staged at the Leeds City Varieties in 2012. Where music hall goes on the contemporary stage, I argue, melodrama is never far behind, and in referencing these styles, I propose that comedians and theatre artists are actually signalling a nostalgia for the political certainties of the 1980s, when music hall and melodrama were last consistently popular stage tools. The paper suggests that the 2010s is witnessing a ‘spectral recession’, a de-industrialised, service-sector re-run of the 1980s where whole bands of society appear unaffected by the global crisis in capitalism. In response to this, theatre companies are again reaching for Victorian and Edwardian analogies and seeking to celebrate an 1890s/1980s idea of community. Yet without a cohesive programme for political change, such shows can only really offer moments of lone, sumptuous pleasure and role-playing for the audience member, in ways which I compare to new trends in publishing after the advent of the e-reader, a similarly ‘spectral’ development.| Period | 15 Feb 2012 |
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| Event type | Conference |
| Location | York, United KingdomShow on map |