Pantomime Pageant

Provides an international forum where theatrical scholarship and practice can meet to question dramatic assumptions.

Focuses on the variety and independence of pantomime in the provinces, especially Nottingham, Birmingham, and Manchester. Explores official and local censorship and the relationships between local theaters, managers, authors and audiences.

Featuring contributions by new and established nineteenth-century theatre scholars, this collection of critical essays is the first of its kind devoted solely to Victorian pantomime. It takes us through the various manifestations of British pantomime in the Victorian period and its ambivalent relationship with Victorian values.

Of all the theatrical genres most prized by the Victorians, pantomime is the only one to have survived continuously into the twenty-first century. It remains as true today as it was in the 1830s, that a visit to the pantomime constitutes the first theatrical experience of most children and now, as then, a successful pantomime season is the key to the financial health of most theatres. Everyone went to the pantomime, from Queen Victoria and the royal family to the humblest of her subjects. It appealed equally to West End and East End, to London and the provinces, to both sexes and all ages. Many Victorian luminaries were devotees of the pantomime, notably among them John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and W.E. Gladstone. In this vivid and evocative account of the Victorian pantomime, Jeffrey Richards examines the potent combination of slapstick, spectacle and subversion that ensured the enduring popularity of the form. The secret of its success, he argues, was its continual evolution. It acted as an accurate cultural barometer of its times, directly reflecting current attitudes, beliefs and preoccupations, and it kept up a flow of instantly recognisable topical allusions to political rows, fashion fads, technological triumphs, wars and revolutions, and society scandals. Richards assesses throughout the contribution of writers, producers, designers and stars to the success of the pantomime in its golden age. This book is a treat as rich and appetizing as turkey, mince pies and plum pudding.

British Theatre in the Great War deals with a theatrical phase customarily dismissed by those charting twentieth-century developments. What becomes clear is that assessment by unsuitable literary criteria has masked the importance of the war years in British theatrical history. In avoiding a texts bias, the book reveals a period of unsurpassed prosperity in which the stage's substantial contribution to the war effort is only one notable feature. That it also saw the commercial theater's absorption of Continental avant-gardeism by way of revue, the last great epoch of music hall, the rise of the Old Vic with a project in opera and Shakespeare, and the unprecedented popularity of opera everywhere--this was surely the most fruitful period of Thomas Beecham's theatrical career--is compelling argument for revaluation. In his reassessment of this period, Dr. Williams extensively examines scripts and press coverage, providing a comprehensive overview from popular pantomime to the specialist work of the private stage as well as discussion of such issues as working conditions and censorship.

Focusing on Thomas Burke's bestselling collection of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916), this book contextualises the burgeoning cult of Chinatown in turn-of-the-century London. London's 'Chinese Quarter' owed its notoriety to the Yellow Perilism that circulated in Britain at the fin-de-siècle, a demonology of race and vice masked by outward concerns about degenerative metropolitan blight and imperial decline. Anne Witchard's interdisciplinary approach enables her to displace the boundaries that have marked Chinese studies, literary studies, critiques of Orientalism and empire, gender studies, and diasporic research, as she reassesses this critical moment in London's history. In doing so, she brings attention to Burke's hold on popular and critical audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. A much-admired and successful author in his time, Burke in his Chinatown stories destabilizes social orthodoxies in highly complex and contradictory ways. For example, his writing was formative in establishing the 'queer spell' that the very mention of Limehouse would exert on the public imagination, and circulating libraries responded to Burke's portrayal of a hybrid East End where young Cockney girls eat Chow Mein with chopsticks in the local cafés and blithely gamble their housekeeping money at Fan Tan by banning Limehouse Nights. Witchard's book forces us to rethink Burke's influence and shows that China and chinoiserie served as mirrors that reveal the cultural disquietudes of western art and culture.