Wedekind at the Music Hall

Abstract

In the valedictory issue of the first Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981). we included a fascinating glimpse of a highly unlikely convergence – between Lenin and the London Hippodrome, where the Russian revolutionary leader found music hall an intriguing phenomenon, exemplifying ‘the anarchy of production under capitalism’. The author of that article, Laurence Senelick, now introduces the experiences of a contemporary of Lenin's who, though a dramatist himself, at first appears almost as unlikely a visitor to the ‘Old Mo’, the Middlesex Music Hall in late-Victorian London – the German playwright Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and the Lulu trilogy. Long before those plays brought him notoriety, Wedekind visited London, and recorded his views of music hall in his journal. Laurence Senelick, an Advisory Editor of NTQ, teaches in the Drama Department at Tufts University, and has published widely, mainly in the fields of Russian theatre and popular entertainment.