The Edwardian Theatre Essays on Performance and the Stage

This book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias still have resonance today.

This 1996 book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude towards the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing upon the economics of theatre management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theatre, and the cinema. Individual chapters also offer fresh insights into key aspects of the Edwardian stage such as a definition of the theatre of the time, gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall, as well as issues related to politics and the suffrage movement.

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction Joel H. Kaplan; 1. What is Edwardian theatre? Joseph Donohue; 2. 'Naughty but Nice': musical comedy and the rhetoric of the girl, 1892–1914 Peter Bailey; 3. Varieties of life: the making of the Edwardian music hall Dave Russell; 4. Beating the bounds: gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall J. S. Bratton; 5. Edwardian management and the structures of industrial capitalism Tracy C. Davis; 6. The New Drama and the new audience Dennis Kennedy; 7. Towards an ideal spectator: theatregoing and the Edwardian critic Victor Emeljanow; 8. Suffrage critics and political action: a feminist agenda Sheila Stowell; 9. 'A woman of genius': Rebecca West at the theatre John Stokes; 10. The East End Jim Davis; 11. Changing horses in mid-ocean: The Whip in Britain and America David Mayer; Index.

This 1996 book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era which still has resonance today. The essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing upon the economics of theatre management, the creation of new audiences and the politics of playgoing.