The Politics of the Pantomime extract

Table of Contents

Part One The Spectacle of Pantomime

1 The gorgeous Christmas pantomime

2 ‘The best out of London’: spectacle, status and tradition

Part Two The Social Referencing of Pantomime

3 Local hits and topical allusions

Appendix: the topical song

4 The politics of the pantomime

 

Extract from The Politics of the Pantomime

Taken from the Introduction

... there is an implicit assumption that, essentially, all pantomimes are the same, albeit produced to different standards. For many years, theatre historiographers regarded Victorian provincial pantomime in a similar light: they focused on London, in particular giving preference to the histories of the patent theatres and, to an extent, assuming homogeneity of those productions that occurred beyond Euston station. In this book I intend to redress this imbalance and to examine pantomime productions in the three urban centres of Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester in order to establish the variety and traditions that characterised provincial pantomime. In particular, I will illustrate how the managers of each theatre appealed to their audiences by reflecting specific aspects of regional and local identity in the annual production...

Although the provincial pantomime has languished in critical commentaries, there was always an awareness of the range and quality of productions. In English Plays, Booth cited Leopold Wagner’s 1881 comment on the importance of regional pantomime and the latter’s brief listing of the main centres such as Birmingham, but there has remained until very recently a critical reliance on London performance and production. Shepherd and Womack succinctly address this issue of ‘metropolitan domination’ in their introduction to English Drama. They argue that ‘Since the late sixteenth century, theatrical production in Britain has been organized in an increasingly unitary system whose centre, socially, economically and politically, is London.’ The authors appreciate that while ‘this hierarchy has been continually deplored and resisted’ and ‘there are times … when theatre is more inventive, popular and energetic at the edges than it is at the centre, that fact doesn’t shift the structural relation in itself’.¹ This ‘hierarchy’ in relation to pantomime has been evident in works throughout the twentieth century. More especially, it is a hierarchy that invariably defers to a single theatre – the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane – and which depends on inherited assumptions. In ‘Imperial Transgressions’, Jim Davis cited a nineteenth-century review in the Star newspaper, in which the Drury Lane pantomime was described as a ‘national institution’.² Similarly, Booth, in his ‘Introduction’ to volume five of English Plays, stated that ‘Drury Lane … dominated English pantomime in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century’ and cited Theatre of 1882, which claimed that ‘Drury Lane pantomime is an English Institution’.³ ... The Drury Lane theatre was of course important and its pantomimes influential, but that fact should not be permitted to overshadow pantomimes produced at other theatres, especially those in the provinces. Although Drury Lane set a benchmark for production trends, those trends were not slavishly followed, and provincial theatres such as the Theatre Royal at Birmingham actively strove to establish their own unique identity. In Theatre in the Victorian Age Booth highlighted the fact that improved transport in the nineteenth century meant that audience members could and often did visit the theatre in more than one town.⁴ Certainly evidence from provincial newspapers demonstrates that Christmas and pantomime excursion rail trips were advertised in Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham, enlarging the potential topography of audiences to all the outlying areas, towns and cities. Nottingham advertised trips to the pantomime from Sheffield, Leicester and Derby, as well as routes from Lincolnshire; the Birmingham theatres advertised rail trips across the Black Country and Derbyshire, to Malvern and Worcester; and Christmas trips to Manchester were advertised from Sheffield and Liverpool, the manager of the Theatre Royal in the 1890s boasting audiences ‘from as far south as Swansea … Carlisle in the north, and Hull in the east’.⁵ If economic conditions were favourable to audiences visiting more than one theatre, managements would have endeavoured to offer different elements in their pantomimes. It is far more useful therefore to regard Drury Lane as the setter of national trends that were subject to regional differences and influences and which were tailored to the tastes of local audiences... Each of the three towns (each town achieved city status at a different time during the second half of the century: Manchester in 1853, Birmingham in 1889 and Nottingham in 1897) ... had a distinct identity and my examination of regional pantomime necessarily employs a micro-historical methodology in the study of the range of theatres in each city.⁶ For theatre historians writing in the twenty-first century it has become standard practice to engage with the environment in which performances were produced. Further, and thanks notably to Tracy C. Davis’s seminal work The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914, which not only addressed theatre business practices but also sought to engage with regional archive materials, the historiography of Victorian theatre has been reinvigorated in the last ten years by consideration of what in 1989 Michael Booth called ‘the business of theatre’.⁷ My research therefore engages with the socio-economic and political contexts, available financial evidence, promotional materials, scripts (published and manuscript) and newspaper reports for the range of theatres. It is this business aspect of regional pantomime production that forms the focus of my study: how theatre managers produced and promoted pantomimes for their local and regional audiences. However, although the expectations of audiences and – in terms of topical referencing – their experiences framed the writing and presentation of each pantomime, I have not sought to empirically establish those audiences. Rather, I have used the textual evidence of reviews, promotional materials and the scripts to source a notion of audience, a notion that defined the managerial policies at each theatre. Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow briefly address this concept in Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880. In noting the local places referred to in the Pavilion Theatre pantomimes in 1844 and 1859, they suggest that ‘None of this proves conclusively that the theatre was attracting a primarily local audience, but it does suggest that managements were aware of the drawing power of depicting local settings on stage.’⁸ The audience-drawing power of pantomimes at regional theatres depended on more than scene settings: references to local issues, traditions and the promoted status of theatres, managers, authors and location all formed a part of the theatre-going experience.

 

1. Shepherd and Womack, English Drama, p. x.

2. J. Davis, ‘Imperial Transgressions’, p. 148.

3. Booth, English Plays, p. 54.

4. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age, pp. 14–16.

5. ‘The Secrets of Pantomime Production. By Our Special Commissioner’, Manchester Weekly Times, 22 December 1893, p. 8.

6. In their introduction to The Performing Century: Nineteenth Century Theatre’s History (Basingstoke and New York, 2007), the editors T.C. Davis and P. Holland refer to micro-historical processes as ‘Marxist-inflected’. This is not, I believe, a universal application, and I use the term in relation to New Historicist rather than Marxist methodologies.

7. T.C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge, 2000). Booth used the phrase ‘the business of theatre’ in his review of John Pick’s The West End in the article ‘Studies in Nineteenth Century British Theatre 1980–1989’, Nineteenth Century Theatre, 20/1 (1992), p. 53.

8. J. Davis and V. Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 (Hatfield, 2001), p. 68. Booth earlier suggested that the East End pantomimes were produced for ‘neighbourhood audiences’ and had ‘their own pantomime traditions’ (English Plays, p. 54).