Every Little Movement: Popular Theatre and the ‘Crisis of Category’ in English Dramatic Modernism

TY - CHAP

T1 - Every Little Movement

T2 - Popular Theatre and the ‘Crisis of Category’ in English Dramatic Modernism

AU - Poore, Benjamin

AU - Jones, Kelly

PY - 2010

Y1 - 2010

N2 - This chapter introduces a critical framework through which to analyse the relationship between popular theatrical entertainments of the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries and the dramatic fare of the legitimate stage. In doing so, the chapter examines how theatrical entertainments of this period staged, to appropriate Marjorie Garber’s term, ‘a crisis of category’ as the genericproperties and characteristics of both the popular and legitimate stages overlapped, effecting a crisis of identity for types of performance at both ends of the cultural spectrum. Focusing on the music hall entertainments of performers such as Vesta Tilley and Marie Lloyd, as well as the Savoy operetta from W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the chapter explores how the dialogue forged between the popular and legitimate stages invited a critique of the structure, status, the function of theatrical self-awareness, as well as the strategies of stage representation in both music-hall performance and the operetta. The chapter goes on to investigate how strategies of cross-dressing, a deliberate stepping outside of the boundaries of the melodrama and problem play, and the use of the aside, all features of the theatrical entertainments of the popular music-hall stage, were variously employed, appropriated and exploited in Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt and George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer(1893), Press Cuttings (1909), Fanny’s First Play (1911), and Passion, Poisonand Petrifaction (1905). The paper will draw upon this series of case studies todemonstrate the ways in which these playwrights even whilst exercising authorialcontrol over the legitimate stage play, by employing such strategies, invite playful interference with the representations of gender, race, interrogating the stability of genre, and stage representation itself. Whilst refraining from assertions that the work of either dramatist can be viewed as modernist, the chapter seeks to argue that if modernism can be, at least partially, defined as art which displays a formal suspicion of the claims of realist representation, and which attempts new modes of representation which are highly self-aware of their status as art and artifice, then music hall, as well Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt and Bernard Shaw’s can be seen to anticipate the modern.

AB - This chapter introduces a critical framework through which to analyse the relationship between popular theatrical entertainments of the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries and the dramatic fare of the legitimate stage. In doing so, the chapter examines how theatrical entertainments of this period staged, to appropriate Marjorie Garber’s term, ‘a crisis of category’ as the genericproperties and characteristics of both the popular and legitimate stages overlapped, effecting a crisis of identity for types of performance at both ends of the cultural spectrum. Focusing on the music hall entertainments of performers such as Vesta Tilley and Marie Lloyd, as well as the Savoy operetta from W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the chapter explores how the dialogue forged between the popular and legitimate stages invited a critique of the structure, status, the function of theatrical self-awareness, as well as the strategies of stage representation in both music-hall performance and the operetta. The chapter goes on to investigate how strategies of cross-dressing, a deliberate stepping outside of the boundaries of the melodrama and problem play, and the use of the aside, all features of the theatrical entertainments of the popular music-hall stage, were variously employed, appropriated and exploited in Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt and George Bernard Shaw’s The Philanderer(1893), Press Cuttings (1909), Fanny’s First Play (1911), and Passion, Poisonand Petrifaction (1905). The paper will draw upon this series of case studies todemonstrate the ways in which these playwrights even whilst exercising authorialcontrol over the legitimate stage play, by employing such strategies, invite playful interference with the representations of gender, race, interrogating the stability of genre, and stage representation itself. Whilst refraining from assertions that the work of either dramatist can be viewed as modernist, the chapter seeks to argue that if modernism can be, at least partially, defined as art which displays a formal suspicion of the claims of realist representation, and which attempts new modes of representation which are highly self-aware of their status as art and artifice, then music hall, as well Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt and Bernard Shaw’s can be seen to anticipate the modern.

M3 - Chapter

SN - 9781933146669

SP - 7

EP - 30

BT - Origins of English Dramatic Modernism 1870-1914

A2 - Meyer-Dinkgrafe, D.

A2 - Tague, G.

PB - Academica Press

ER -