In recent years, feminist theatre and performance historians have challenged the anticommercial bias that often characterized early feminist scholarship. Rather than dismiss or ignore women's involvement in commercial entertainment because it fails to promote a particular feminist agenda, revisionist historians have insisted on rethinking questions of female agency and reexamining the complex negotiations that informed the daily lives of women working in the commercial theatre industry. Long an advocate for new approaches to theatre historiography, Jacky Bratton extends her previous work and that of her feminist colleagues in her new publication, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870.
In this book, Bratton offers a lively, meticulously researched, and carefully structured argument about women's centrality to the formation of London's West End in the mid-nineteenth century. Rejecting dominant narratives that treat the period between 1840 and 1870 as an embarrassing low point in British theatre history and view the “formation of the West End as an unfortunate pitfall in the development of theatrical art,” she offers a “different way of seeing” the district's development (1–2). In fact, what Bratton presents are multiple modes of understanding the West End as a geographic region, discursive space, gendered battleground, and imagined community.
Bratton organizes The Making of the West End Stage into two parts of three chapters each, drawing upon the historiographic methodologies she first advanced in New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge University Press, 2003). In the first part, entitled “Mapping,” she “attempts a denser, more particularised characterization of the West End entertainment world by several kinds of mapping” (5). In Chapter 1, “Why the West End?,” Bratton borrows from Michel de Certeau's approach to understanding the city as an urban text and takes her readers on two fictionalized walks through the streets of mid-nineteenth-century London. The journey of Bratton's first imagined stroller, a woman, begins in the piazza of Covent Garden near the Theatres Royal Covent Garden and Drury Lane, continues into Leicester Square, and eventually past the shops on Oxford Street to St. James's Hall in Regent's Circus. At each stop along the journey, Bratton comments on what the stroller might have chosen to see or purchase. Her second imagined stroller, a man, moves differently through the city, walking past periodical offices, gentlemen's clubs, and taverns, before choosing to spend his time at one of a number of West End entertainments. By outlining these two journeys, Bratton not only introduces readers to the geography of nineteenth-century London, but also illustrates how gender profoundly influenced one's experience of the city.
After surveying the West End from the ground, Bratton takes a different approach to mapping, turning in Chapter 2, “The Era: Hierarchies, Seriousness and the Organ of the Profession,” to the pages of the theatrical profession's most important trade journal, The Era. Through a close analysis of the columns and advertisements from the journal's 6 April 1856 issue, she identifies “a cryptic web of interpellation addressed to the many-faceted middle classes—serious as well as gay” (51). In Chapter 3, “Bohemian Domesticity: The City of the Mind,” Bratton shifts her topographic focus to the imaginary realm, analyzing how the construction of a Bohemian social sphere and lifestyle both excluded women from its ranks and gendered playwriting as a feminine activity unworthy of the “serious” male writer.
In “Making,” the second part of the book, Bratton looks more closely at “dimensions of space and gender” through “genealogical and feminist methods” (7), spotlighting the careers of specific performers, managers, playwrights, and entrepreneurs. In Chapter 4, “Performing the Crisis,” she uses Marjorie Garber's concept of “category panic” (7)—which occurs during historical moments when traditional identity categories of gender, sexuality, class, and so on shift radically, much to the distress of dominant social groups—to discuss the popularity of cross-dressing female performers in the 1830s and 1840s. She argues that the shifting definition of gentlemanly respectability increasingly discouraged male performers from showing suffering or evoking pathos, resulting in new expressive opportunities opening up for women; through their portrayal of colorful breeches characters, women helped “the law-abiding, anxious general public . . . enjoy and also rule out many kinds of aberrant behaviour, and come to a safer grasp of its own place” (144).
In Chapter 5, “The Shaping of West End Management,” Bratton shows how women shaped West End theatrical enterprises as managers, directors, executives, and performers, often through close partnerships with male family members. Advocating a “genealogical model for the understanding of women as holding power” (147) (first advanced in New Readings), she resists the tendency to write about women as oppressed, illuminating instead their active involvement in the daily operations of many of the West End's most influential theatres from the 1840s onward. Chapter 6, “Showtime,” continues the discussion of women's contribution to theatre management by looking more closely at how different theatres developed their own distinctive bills and what we would today identify as brand identities to cater to distinct audience constituencies. Of particular importance, she argues, were the many rival stage adaptations of Charles Dickens's novels, which appealed to a public hungry for the novelist's unique representation of modern city life and its inhabitants. Through their collaborations with Dickens, female theatre managers and their male partners transformed the West End into a key destination for Londoners looking to understand and redefine themselves.
The Making of the West End Stage is innovative in methodology and argument. Yet I was surprised not to see a more thorough engagement with other important “spatial turn” books such as Michael McKinnie's City Stages (University of Toronto Press, 2007), D.J. Hopkins's City/Stage/Globe: Performance and Space in Shakespeare's London (Routledge, 2008), or Hopkins, Orr, and Solga's edited collection Performance and the City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), which includes several articles that extend de Certeau's approach to “walking in the city” through an emphasis on performance. I imagine that Bratton might have engaged in exciting and useful ways with some of these texts and thereby situated her work within a broader conversation about space, performance, and the development of urban districts.
This critique aside, The Making of the West End Stage is an impressive, accessible, and important book that not only foregrounds the vital contribution of women to the formation of the West End but also presents a range of historiographic methodologies in a thoughtful, meticulous way. It will undoubtedly appeal to students and scholars interested in questions of gender, space, urban development, and Victorian cultural politics.
