In late July ninety-seven scholars convened at Downing College of the University of Cambridge for the Society for Theatre Research's conference ‘Theatre in the Regency Era: Plays, Performance, Practice, 1795–1843’. The participants identified themselves not only as theatre historians but also as historians of art, dance and music, and the conference put these fields of research into productive dialogue. There were themed panels in which certain specific topics could be discussed in depth as well as frequent opportunities to chat informally, leading to important exchanges of ideas across fields. The wonderful plenary sessions were especially enlightening, and sparked much discussion among participants throughout the three-day event.

The conference began with a visit to Cambridge's Barnwell/Festival Theatre, designed by William Wilkins (1778–1839) in 1814. Conference participants toured the remarkably well-preserved theatre, now in use as a Buddhist centre. Exploring this building from the space below the stage, which bore evidence of several different kinds of trap doors, to the uppermost gallery, a cramped space in and out of which hundreds would have poured through a single staircase, gave a certain concreteness to the conference's proceedings. Regency theatre was not just a phenomenon to be talked about in the abstract, through reading plays and scores and viewing drawings, but a living practice.

This idea of practice was explored most fully in the lecture-performance entitled ‘Reconstructing Late Eighteenth-Century Acting: “Mechanical Rules” v. “Abnormis Gratia”’, given by Jed Wentz (Conservatorium van Amsterdam) and João Luís Paixão (The Hague). The two talented performers explained the detailed instructions found, for example, in Gilbert Austin's Chironomia (1806), in which recitation was paired with gesture and facial expressions taken from Charles Le Brun's Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1698). They demonstrated the laborious discipline required to practise these speeches in tandem with the gestures and facial expressions deemed appropriate for each word, and then showed how the prescribed actions could, with imagination and improvisatory interpretation, be transformed into surprisingly moving and powerful performances.

This plenary session was not the only presentation in which participants were treated to live performances. Dance historian Moira Goff (The Garrick Club of London) demonstrated poses, Oskar Cox Jensen (King's College London) imitated Charles Dibdin the Elder's colloquial style of singing (not only during his paper but in humorous songs presented at the gala dinner) and Brianna Robertson-Kirkland (University of Glasgow) sang sweetly in the sentimental style in her brilliant paper on vocal pedagogy in London. Christina Fuhrmann (Ashland University) displayed Henry Bishop's attempt to sound more like Carl Maria von Weber through orchestral excerpts from Aladdin played with feeling on the piano. These performances all added considerably to the conference's efforts to bridge past and present through a combination of rigorous historical research and creativity.

The theme of overcoming divides – between past and present, the foreign and the familiar, and theatre and other arts – was common throughout the conference as presenters linked theatrical writings and events during the Regency era in London to theatre before and after the designated period and in several different locales. Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson (independent researchers based in Brentwood, Essex), who co-wrote and dynamically co-read their paper, mined drawings and reviews of productions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to show how a musical funeral procession for Juliet was inserted into productions of the play from the 1750s through to the Regency era. In so doing, they showed the pedigree of the chorus ‘Jetez des fleurs pour la vierge expirée’ in Hector Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, his 1839 symphonie dramatique. Eva Zöllner (Hamburg) spoke about the bridging of secular and sacred repertoires apparent in the nineteenth-century continuation of Lenten oratorio performances, showing how the tradition begun by Handel had changed along with popular tastes.

The panel ‘Cultural Translations: Italian Opera in Britain’ showcased three different facets of the strong historical link between Italian and British opera during the Regency. Brianna Robertson-Kirkland showed the pedagogical impact the Italian-born but London-based castrato and voice teacher Venanzio Rauzzini had on his students, who were taught to blend the agility and virtuosity of the Italian style with the more sentimental and simple manner favoured by the British, while Amalya Lehmann (University of California Berkeley) explored the interesting question of why Rossinian humour was less favoured in London than on the Continent. My own paper (Lily Kass, University of Pennsylvania) focused on Italian-language opera as a mediator between the warring cosmopolitan centres of Paris and London after the French Revolution.

The papers presented on dance demonstrated that there is much to be gleaned about the history of that discipline during the Regency era, even if there are scant sources dealing directly with the particulars of dance steps and techniques. Moira Goff outlined the connections between the dancing style of Regency ballet in London and the Romantic style that followed through an examination of programmes from the 1810, 1819 and 1829 seasons of dance at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and the King's Theatre, while Sarah McCleave (Queens University of Belfast) discussed historical documents outlining formal agreements between the King's Theatre and the Paris Opéra through which Parisian dancers were loaned to London, connecting the dancing styles and cultures of these two major cosmopolitan centres. Michael Burden (University of Oxford) presented an in-depth study of illustrations commenting on the elopement of the King's Theatre dancer Maria Mercandotti and the wealthy dandy Edward Hughes Balls Hughes, giving a taste of the potency of theatrical images as represented in print to those of us unable to attend the parallel sessions on the visual art of the period.

The papers given by Rachel Cowgill (University of Huddersfield) and Christina Fuhrmann, though nominally about specific theatres, actually demonstrated the extreme interconnectedness of the various theatres in London during the Regency era. Cowgill explored what she referred to as the ‘Pantheon redux’, or the Pantheon Theatre's second attempt to function as an opera house, between 1811 and 1812. She explored the rivalry between the Pantheon and the King's Theatre in these years, ending with the surprising revelation that the emergence of the King's Theatre as the victor of this struggle may have been due to city planning: John Nash's development of Regent Street marginalized the Pantheon's location and highlighted that of the King's Theatre. Christina Fuhrmann's excavation of the details surrounding a rivalry between Drury Lane's production of Henry Bishop's Aladdin and Covent Garden's production of Oberon showed the complex interactions between theatres within London and between musical styles from England and the Continent.

There were also papers that zoomed in on particular personages of the period and showed their impact not only on theatre and music, but also on social and civic life. Susan Valladares (University of Oxford) and David Kennerly (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities; now King's College London) eloquently spoke to the relationship between the two Charles Dibdins (father and son) and their respective politics. Kennerly's usage of the phrase ‘independent loyalism’ to describe the elder Dibdin's conscious choices mainly to support the standing government was particularly apt, and potentially useful for other scholars studying the actions of individuals in large and complex political contexts. Gavin Henderson (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) described the music-making practices of the Prince Regent himself, who was often depicted playing his cello, and who hired his own royal band. The paper explored the Prince's associations with such illustrious composers as J. C. Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and Rossini, while noting that Handel always remained the favourite composer of the royal family.

Celina Fox (London), who gave the keynote address, a definite highlight of the conference, asked us to take a step back from our case studies and look at London as a whole. Fox focused on the streets of London as a free theatre constantly offering performances, with the Prince of Wales ‘cast in the role of juvenile male lead’. In vividly describing public celebrations, whether organized by the government or erupting from the people themselves, Fox virtuosically painted a picture of a bustling city with music and drama boiling over from the theatres and onto the streets, with corners teeming with beggars, avenues filled with political protestors and parks bursting with fireworks. The address invited participants carefully to consider the context of their research subjects and to think about what these musicians or actors would have experienced in their daily lives, outside of traditional performance contexts. How do we understand the diverse collection of people, places and things that made up Regency London? How can we recreate it for ourselves in order to study it closely and reach valuable conclusions?

This takes us back to the lecture-performance by Wentz and Paixão. The performers’ tremendous efforts to convert a theoretical treatise into a historically informed performance eloquently highlighted the crux of historical scholarship: there is always a gap between documentation of the past and history itself, as it was lived, in its rich and mysterious detail. Wentz and Paixão demonstrated that we can shorten this gap through intensive archival research and close readings of texts. Such efforts are helped along by the great progress being made in the digital humanities, allowing for such valuable resources as online publisher Adam Matthew's newly released database Eighteenth-Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage <www.eighteenthcenturydrama.amdigital.co.uk>, also previewed at the conference. However, even when we have these documents at our fingertips or in high-quality images on our screens, it is only through a leap of faith – tentative theories, provisional hypotheses, an infusion of interpretation into focused practice – that we can hope fully to bridge the gap. Participants left the conference anticipating highly productive work ahead of them, stemming from unprecedented access to a wealth of important materials and, perhaps equally importantly, a new-found receptivity towards informed improvisation.