Jacky Bratton's latest book, The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London, 1830–1870, puts into practice the methodology delineated in her earlier work, New Readings in Theatre History (2003), and continues to examine the neglected, often occluded, histories of the nineteenth-century stage. This study, divided into two parts, “Mapping” and “Making,” examines the material and discursive formation of the West End, and then turns specifically to the theater that developed in this context. Bratton deliberately and convincingly deconstructs the story of theatrical decline and fall that supposedly marked this period and meaningfully reinserts women into this narrative. As interested in interrogating the history of theater historiography as in presenting an account of this particular era, Bratton's poststructuralist framing is emblematic of the innovative and fruitful ways that the field of theater and performance studies has interrogated its own grand narratives and binary thinking. Bratton's book is part of a growing body of exciting scholarship that rereads the past in ways that make clear what is at stake in the present. Bratton's analysis is a contribution to the ongoing debates about commercialism and art (she concludes with Henry Irving's provocative observation that “the theater must be carried on as a business, or it will fail as an art” [208]) and our ever-growing understanding of the ways in which women did and continue to exert power and influence.

In chapter 1, myriad untold stories emerge as Bratton examines the origins of the West End as an entertainment hub. Guiding the reader through this remarkably diverse recreational terrain, first as a female and then as a male walker, Bratton introduces us to a world of near miraculous invention and variety. Everything from woolwork displays, gigantic globes, masquerades, polka dancing, concerts, and scientific lectures, among countless other leisure activities, was on offer to attract the middle classes, and Bratton does an excellent job suggesting both the ephemerality and the persistence of the search for pleasure—whatever that might mean—at this symbolically loaded locale. Continuing her survey of the West End in chapter 2, Bratton moves from the conditions on the ground to a more conceptual understanding of this terrain. Focusing on a single issue of The Era, a trade paper, Bratton claims to “extrapolate, from its layout, tone and especially its advertisements, a taxonomic, classed view of the entertainment world to which it is a guide, finding there a fuller and more balanced context for the work of the men and women of the theatre” (6). The West End theater, as this reading reveals, was the direct beneficiary of a number of quasi-theatrical activities that allayed middle-class anxieties about performance. Through dramatic readings, travel lectures delivered in front of elaborate panoramas, and comical/musical evenings enjoyed in a space designed to downplay the commercial aspect of the endeavor, the aspirational middle classes were being re-formed for the theater, Bratton suggests, as much as the theater, as the traditional narrative goes, was being reformed to suite them.

In chapter 3, Bratton focuses specifically on the discursive construction of the West End theater by insiders. As the section title “Real Men Don't Write Plays” indicates, Bratton identifies an underlying gender crisis as a primary cause of women's occlusion from the official story of the making of the West End stage. The male writers of British bohemia, fearing the feminization of their profession, “described their Bohemia . . . as if it were a homosocial space, involving no women” (96). Unlike the Parisian cafes frequented by the French bohemians of both genders, the all-male clubs in the West End made it difficult for women to fully participate in the business of the theater. However, as Bratton observes, “[I]n the theater, capital was cultural and corporeal and women were partially its possessors for that reason” (105). Often as members of well-established theatrical families (cultural capital) and actresses (corporeal capital), women were very much a part of the West End theater establishment.

Turning to the theater itself in part 2, Bratton shows how these women exerted a distinct and pervasive influence on the development of the West End stage. Despite the solidification of the ideology of separate spheres, this time of transition allowed women to slip through “stressed out openings” created by this “moment of aporia” (117) and gain positions of power. In chapter 4, “Performing the Crisis,” Bratton proposes that certain actresses were uniquely qualified to enact this sense of dislocation and transformation. Transvestite performances such as those of Eliza Vestris and Celine Celeste would have resonated with audiences immersed in the “category crisis” (118) that marked the early Victorian period. Moving beyond performance in chapter 5, Bratton examines the ways in which some women made it to the very heart of the West End theater business, often through marriage, ambitiously pursuing their careers while maintaining their reputations as respectable women. Bratton's story challenges traditional narratives of lucky actresses who married out of the theater and instead examines a cohort of ambitious, intelligent women who married in. Besides the more well-known cases of Eliza Vestris, Ellen Kean, and Marie Bancroft, Bratton identifies a wide range of women who used marriage to promote their theatrical careers, many quite successfully.

Acknowledging the multitude of factors that contributed to the making of the West End theater during the mid-nineteenth century—commercial interests, elitist agendas, pervasive adaptations of Dickens, and the satirical bent of many of the playwrights who wrote for both the stage and the comic journal Punch—women specifically, Bratton claims, played an important role. For example, it was Mary Ann Keeley's performance of Dickens's characters, transvestite and straight, that elevated the source material to new levels of gender-inflected knowing humor and compelling pathos. Red-hot melodrama and screaming farce dominated at The Adelphi under Celine Celeste, representing an “affective and somatic” (197) type of theater (coded feminine) that was contrasted negatively, in the grand narrative of the West End stage, with the more sophisticated realistic theater (coded masculine) that supplanted it. Burlesques featured at The Strand under the management of the Swansboroughs epitomized both the cathartic emotionalism and humor of The Adelphi lineup and a type of participatory mode that created, however temporarily, a sense of community.

Bratton's study makes clear that the theater these women created can be traced directly to the present-day affective and communal experiences that continue to draw pleasure-seekers to the West End. A groundbreaking contribution, this book will be of interest to those in the fields of theater history, performance studies, literature, women's studies, and cultural studies. Good scholarship is generative as well as informative, and The Making of the West End Stage promises to open new avenues of inquiry about the complex relationship between gender and genre on the Victorian stage.