London Audiences Research Articles

The Immanent Ethnography of Chris Marker, Reader of Proust

Before 1906, there were no dedicated venues for the exhibition of film in London. Five years later, cinemas had spread all over the city, and 200,000 people were attending a film show in the city every day. Many in these first cinema audiences were children. Significantly - indeed probably uniquely for the time - cinema was a mass entertainment deliberated aimed at, and priced within the range of, the young. Decades later, some of these children left memoirs (published or unpublished), or were interviewed by oral historians. This body of evidence on the experience of cinema-going before the First World War has been hitherto ignored by film historians. This essay examines this testimony from London audience members, which is constructed around the various stages of the act of going to the cinema. The testimony demonstrates that the experience and the enjoyment of the social space that the cinema provided were at least as important as the entertainment projected on the screen. The early cinema demands greater recognition for its function as a social sphere, and particularly as a welcoming place for children.

‘Under control’?: Black Narcissus and the Imagining of India

Before 1906, there were no dedicated venues for the exhibition of film in London. Five years later, cinemas had spread all over the city, and 200,000 people were attending a film show in the city every day. Many in these first cinema audiences were children. Significantly - indeed probably uniquely for the time - cinema was a mass entertainment deliberated aimed at, and priced within the range of, the young. Decades later, some of these children left memoirs (published or unpublished), or were interviewed by oral historians. This body of evidence on the experience of cinema-going before the First World War has been hitherto ignored by film historians. This essay examines this testimony from London audience members, which is constructed around the various stages of the act of going to the cinema. The testimony demonstrates that the experience and the enjoyment of the social space that the cinema provided were at least as important as the entertainment projected on the screen. The early cinema demands greater recognition for its function as a social sphere, and particularly as a welcoming place for children.

An Historical Linguistic Description of Sir Thomas Malory's Dialect

Late Middle English sound changes may have shaped Malory's northeastern Warwickshire dialect and that of his upper-class London audience.

In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. By Aleks Sierz. London: Faber & Faber, 2000; pp. 274. $17 paper.

One of the more original developments in contemporary theatre at the end of the twentieth century was the reactionary mode of playwriting to emerge from Britain’s younger generation. London and Edinburgh audiences, particularly, saw some of the most groundbreaking and influential movements in British theatre to be produced since John Osborne’s provocative debut of Look Back in Anger in 1956. In In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today, Aleks Sierz contemplates the theatrical debuts of many young writers and the artistic contributions by directors, designers, and actors involved in each of their often scandalous new works. The brazen portrayals of violence including rape, murder, and incest as well as drug abuse, homosexuality, and the ruthless use of language made for a controversial new mode of writing. The young playwrights who brought these appallingly poetic stories to the stage were simultaneously reacting to the post-Thatcher, postconsumer, cultural climate of the 1980s and locating the theatre as an uncensored medium for which to write. The plays form an aggressive, provocative, sometimes obscene, and usually highly entertaining corpus that Sierz situates as one of the most influential theatre movements of the late twentieth century.

Reflecting the audience: London theatregoing, 1840-1880

This work begins to fill a large gap in theatre studies: the lack of any comprehensive study of 19th-century British theatre audiences. In an attempt to bring some order to the enormous amount of available primary material, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow focus on London from 1840, immediately prior to the deregulation of that city's theatres, to 1880, when the Metropolitan Board of Works assumed responsibility for their licensing. In a further attempt to manage their material, they concentrate chapter by chapter on seven representative theatres from four areas: the Surrey Theatre and the Royal Victoria to the south, the Whitechapel Pavilion and the Britannia Theatre to the east, Sadler's Wells and the Queen's (later the Prince of Wales) to the north, and Drury Lane to the west. Davis and Emeljanow thoroughly examine the composition of these theatres' audiences, their behaviour and their attendance patterns by looking at topography, social demography, police reports, playbills, autobiographies and diaries, newspaper accounts, economic and social factors as seen in census return, maps and transportation data, and the managerial policies of each theatre. In addition to assimilating an incredible amount of information efficiently, coherently and entertainingly, the authors explode the myths created by such powerful contemporary commentators as Charles Dickens to show that Victorian theatre audiences were extremely diverse and that London audiences were far more mobile socially and physically than previous accounts have implied.

A Question of Identity: translating and directing Slawomir Mrozek's The Turkey

This article describes the experience of translating into English and subsequently directing Mrozek's The Turkey. But it is equally concerned with the placing, by themselves and/or by the host country, of the Polish community in Britain. From her experience as the child of Polish immigrants, the author describes the hopes and disappointments of her attempts to stage Mrozek's play to an English-speaking audience in London, reflecting on the sometimes conflicting roles of translator and director.

'Poor Senseless Bess, Clothed in her Rags and Folly': Early Modern Women, Madness, and Song in Seventeenth-Century England

'Poor Senseless Bess, Clothed in her Rags and Folly': Early Modern Women, Madness, and Song in Seventeenth-Century England' Dolly MacKinnon INTRODUCTION Much has been written on the state of early modem women's lives. Much has been written about 'madness', and much has been written about English music. But rarely are these three elements considered together. This article discusses the intersection of these three areas in the social context of seventeenth-century London, by focusing on a song by Henry Purcell (1659-1695) entitled 'Bess of Bedlam', and also known as 'From silent shades', published in 1683. 'Bess' was thefirstmad song composed by Purcell, and was not written for a specific I Henry Purcell, 'Bess of Bedlam', Choice Ayres, Songs, and Dialogues Books and V (London: Stainer & Bell, 1989), facsimile vol. 4, pp. 45-47. This article is based on a paper presented at the Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modem Studies Conference (February 2000), and I am grateful to the participants for their questions, comments, and suggestions. Many thanks also to Professor Patricia Crawford and Associate Professor Chris Wortham, as well as the anonymous readers. 2 Facsimile edition of John Playford's Choice Ayres, Songs, and Dialogues Books III, IV, and V (London: Stainer & Bell, 1989), vol. 4, pp. 45^17. 120 Dolly MacKinnon theatre work, as was the case with his later commissioned songs. M y aim is to show h o w this particular song, as well as the ballad/poem 'Mad Maudlin' from which it drew its inspiration, reflects contemporary societal attitudes, which readily linked w o m e n and madness. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, it is possible to place Purcell's 'Bess' back into the complex world from whence she came, and rediscover what audiences made of the visual and sonic elements of such a work as this. The social and experiential attractions for early modem London audiences in witnessing a performance of this work were coloured by contemporary assumptions about lunatics and the law, medical as well as magical diagnoses and cures, and the physical and mental inferiority of women, which contributed to their lustfulness, and inevitably made them more prone to lascivious manifestations of madness. Rebecca Crow-Lister observed in her study of female mad songs in seventeenth-century English drama that 'far more mad songs were composed for female roles than for male roles' in Restoration London. The question then arises as to why, as well as what predisposed London's audiences to portrayals of mad w o m e n in song? The answers lie in a combination of contributing factors: the increasing secularisation of madness and the rise of medical diagnosis and treatment of madness; the proliferation in popular culture of medical perceptions that women, when they did suffer mental illness, were more likely to experience 3 Timothy Roberts, 'The Restoration Mad Song', C D notes for Mad Songs: Purcell, Eccles, Blow (L'Oiseau-Lyre, CD, 1993), p. 8, states that '"Bess of Bedlam" is cle not a theatre song, since the sections sung by Bess alternate with passages ofnarration', Roberts adds that 'Tom D'Urfey planned to introduce parts of the song in his comedy A Fool's Preferment (1688), but in the event had Purcell compose a series of new mad songs.' 4 'Mad Maudlin' appeared in Wit and Drollery. Jovial Poems. Corrected andAmende with New Additions (London, 1682), pp. 147—49. While the anonymous seventeenthcentury ballad 'Mad Maudlin' published in Thomas D'Urfey's Wit and Mirth; or Pil to Purge Melancholy (London, 1719-20), iv, has commonly been connected with the mad song genre, due to their great similarities, I consider the popular verse 'Mad Maudlin' published in 1682 as the probable inspiration for the lyric content of Purcell's 'Bess of Bedlam'. 5 Rebecca Crow-Lister, '"Wild thro' the woods I'le fly": Female Mad Songs in Seventeenth-Century English Drama' (unpublished PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 1997), p. 5. Early Modern Women, Madness, and Song in 17th-Century England 121 more violent bouts, and that these bouts may involve a sexual manifestation; th representation of m a d w o m e n from 1660 onwards by female actors...

“Thoughts that Flash like Lightning”: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London

During the 1790s, political speech in London's public spaces and commercial sites of leisure came under intense governmental surveillance. Fearing revolutionary infection from across the channel in France, the Pitt ministry sent spies into popular organizations such as the London Corresponding Society and turned more attention to other sites as well, including coffeehouses, taverns, debating-club rooms, and the street. Recently, historians too have explored the ways in which radicals manipulated the ludic vocabularies of urban sociability to critique the regime, protest persecution, and argue for reform. In this article I address a site that figured prominently as a place for radical speech in the 1790s: the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Although it was a site whose content was strictly regulated by the state through the office of the Examiner of Plays, the royal theater was, like other eighteenth-century theaters, a place where performances multiplied: viewers watched the play, but in the well-lit and noisy pit, boxes, and galleries, they watched other viewers intently. All were engaged in a complex process of performance, reception, and counterperformance. Indeed, as scholars have shown, theater audiences in late Georgian London were highly skilled at appropriating a theatrical grammar by which to demand their perceived rights as English subjects. Such strategies revealed the potency of theatrical representation in a society where, as Gillian Russell notes, “performance, display and spectatorship were essential components of the social mechanism.”

A Historical Perspective on Copenhagen

Copenhagen, a thought-provoking drama by Michael Frayn that has played to sold-out audiences in London, has now opened in New York with much well-deserved attention. Despite the sparse set, the three-person cast, and the technical nature of the subject matter, this play appears to speak on some level to almost everyone. (See PHYSICS TODAY, May, page 51.)

The Graphic Society and Photography, 1839: Priority and Precedence

The introduction of photography to scientific audiences in London during the early months of 1839 is well documented. Its announcement through the pages of the British press has been widely studied. The meetings of the Royal Institution and Royal Society in January 1839 at which William Henry Fox Talbot described and showed examples of his work are deeply embedded within the history of the medium.1 What has not been understood is whether London's fine arts community had similar access to those first photographs and what its reactions might have been. As a matter of professional interest, artists would have taken a close interest in photography, if not as a medium for their own use, then for the potential threat it posed to their livelihood. But did artists congregate in the same ways as scientists attending the Royal Institution and Royal Society? Or were they too disparate a group and too jealous of each other to hold meetings and assemblies? We know that François Arago in Paris sought Paul Delaroche's opinions of photography on behalf of the French government, but where did artists in London first see photographs, and how did they respond?2 This article sets out to answer some of these issues through the records and reports of the Graphic Society, whose monthly meetings during those critical months of early 1839 were attended by a broad cross-section of London's fine arts community (see Appendix 1).3

97/04445 Coal for development: the World Bank's clean coal initiative: Jechovtek, K. Energy World, February 1997, 246, 12–15

The World Bank's Karl Jechoutek delivered the 1996 Coal Science Lecture to a London audience last October. Mr Jechoutek stresses the pressing need for clean coal technologies to to reach developing countries, particularly India and China, where increased use of coal in the next two decades will make them dominant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Through its Clean Coal Initiative, the World Bank intends to catalyse action throughout the coal-to-energy chain.

Librettist versus Composer: The Property Rights to Arne's Henry and Emma and Don Saverio

Little attention has ever been paid to a pair of mid-career flops by Thomas Augustine Arne. Henry and Emma died in one night in 1749; Don Saverio struggled through three nights amidst hisses in 1750. Roger Fiske points out in a brief discussion that the latter is of some historical significance: it was a pioneering attempt to mount an English form of opera buffa on the London stage. Ten years later, Arne's Thomas and Sally was to succeed in persuading London audiences to accept such conventions, but in 1750 the time was apparently not yet ripe. These obscure failures have not attracted much critical notice, because while librettos of both survive, only the overture to Henry and Emma and one song from Don Saverio are extant.

Heroic Song: A Proposal for a Revised History of English Theater and Opera, 1656- 1711

Heroic Song: A Proposal for a Revised History of English Theater and Opera, 1656–1711 James A. Winn (bio) Let me begin by describing the conventions of a theatrical genre. The plots are drawn from Renaissance epic and romance, with a preference for exotic settings. Struggles for sovereignty and successions to the throne loom large; allegorical applications to contemporary events are tempting. The hero is larger than life, and all the characters converse in a formal mode, much elevated above ordinary language. Passions are stylized: love expressed in metaphor rather than caress, anger in rant rather than swordplay. Rigid conventions of form, extending to the smallest details, greatly constrain any sense of spontaneity—even when the characters are supposed to be surprised, enraged, or struck dumb by love. Spectacular scenery and expensive stage machinery thrill the spectator with magical transformations, accompanied by mysterious music. Illusion is thematic: the hero confronts false prophecies, tempting visions, and uncertain identities. So extreme is the striving for elevation that the entire enterprise is susceptible to burlesque, as the playwrights acknowledge by occasional self-parodic gestures. These conventions describe the rhymed heroic dramas produced by Dryden and his contemporaries during the 1660s and 1670s, but they also apply, in every detail, to the Italian operas produced by Handel and others during the early decades of the eighteenth century. Genres so similar were probably connected, but because literary and musical scholars rarely read each other’s work, we have distorted theatrical history by separating drama and opera too sharply. I propose here an alternative [End Page 113] to both the standard view of English theatrical history, in which the rhymed heroic play is seen as a brief, failed attempt to import French literary conventions, and the standard view of European operatic history, in which the stubborn English resistance to opera suddenly yields to the unique genius of Handel. I shall argue for a more unified, less categorical account of the wide variety of dramatic forms in this period, stressing the importance of The Siege of Rhodes, mounted by Sir William Davenant in 1656 as a fully sung opera and regarded by Dryden as the original model for the rhymed heroic play, which owes some of its formality to its musical origins and retains a significant musical dimension. Although literary historians have tended to ignore them, musical scenes occur in most of the heroic plays, as Curtis Price, whose study of music in the Restoration theater has opened up many new vistas, pointed out in 1979: Nearly all of the 600 or so stage works performed during the period [1660–1700], whether quasi-operas or grim tragedies, required music. Many plays included several songs, at least some of them with choruses and followed by dances; in tragedies one often finds full-blown masques, and music frequently accompanies religious processions or rituals and intensifies and foreshadows tragic events. . . . In all types of plays, music is used for special effects, ranging from battle scenes to pantomimes. 1 Most other musicologists, focusing on the line of Italian baroque opera leading from Monteverdi to Handel, have neglected not only this considerable body of theater music but even the elaborate English semioperas of the later seventeenth century, which began to flourish just as the rhymed heroic plays waned, and which absorbed many of their most striking theatrical conventions. These semioperas, as Price has shown, were familiar to Aaron Hill, who wrote the scenario for Handel’s Rinaldo (1711) as a logical next step in the development of English musical theater. 2 Although Rinaldo was far more coherent musically than the various kinds of “opera” that preceded it, London audiences experienced Handel’s work as an improvement over earlier operas, not as something wholly different in kind. Even those of us eager to construct a more unified account of this fascinating history are hampered by the absence of crucial primary materials. We have none of the music—by Matthew Locke, Henry Lawes, Henry Cooke, George Hudson, and Edward Coleman—for Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, although we do possess other music by Lawes and Locke. If we could hear the lost music, we might be less susceptible to the conventional notion that The...

Breaking the Code: Toward a Reception Theory of Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century London

These words were spoken by Drury Lane performer Susanna Mountfort, in her cross-dressed role as Belvedera, the female officer of Charles Shadwell's 1713 army comedy, The Humours of the Army; or, The Female Officer.2 This moment serves as a synecdoche for a range of cultural instabilities which preoccupied eighteenth-century London audience members. The speaker in the passage emphasizes the slippage between the I of the female character who successfully assumes a male role in the play's narrative, and the I of the female performer who threatens to pass for male not only on stage, but perhaps in life as well, at least amongst the complicit or naive audience members before her. Elsewhere in this fascinating and peculiar work, two cross-dressed male actors play soldiers' wives, a euphemism for prostitute campfollowers. Whether their performance signifies as a parodic travesty of working-class female behavior, a satiric critique of the recently exposed urban mollies,3 or a sly wink

Acting Black: "Othello," "Othello" Burlesques, and the Performance of Blackness

In 1833, London audiences had opportunity to see, for first time in play's history, role of Othello played by a black actor. This actor was New Yorker Ira Aldridge, who in 1825 had left United States to pursue his career in Europe. Aldridge's Covent Garden Othello followed by five months wildly successful Edmund Kean-William Macready Othello, in which two tragedians alternated roles of Othello and lago. To pique renewed public interest in play so soon after such a theatrical event, Covent Garden management added a special emphasis to its advertisements for Aldridge's London debut: MR. ALDRIDGE, Known by appellation of AFRICAN ROSCIUS, is now further identified as A Native of Senegal. New roles have been added for engagement as well; he will also appear in the Tragedy of THE REVENGE as Moorish anti-hero Zanga, After which, musical Entertainment of The Padlock, with Aldridge in role of Mungo.1

From Bankside to the West End: a Comparative View of London Audiences

The received wisdom regarding the composition of the audience for Shakespeare's theatre has shifted in accordance with the social assumptions of the times – from Alfred Harbage's assertion of a popular, homogeneous audience, evolved for the egalitarian 'forties, to Ann Jennalie Cook's argument for a ‘privileged’ audience, put forward in the elitist 'eighties. While Andrew Gurr's Playgoing in Shakespeare's London corrects the worst excesses of both views, it remains dependent upon a great deal of inference from inadequate documentation, often directed to other purposes, and sometimes upon necessary guesswork, however rooted in common-sense. Caroline Gardiner teaches and researches in the Department of Arts Policy and Management at City University, whence have emerged the most detailed attempts to ‘profile’ the theatregoing populace of contemporary London: and here she suggests that some of the approaches and even the findings of modern audience researchers may shed new light on the controversy. Sometimes the results are surprising – and include the possibility that, relative to the pool of population available, theatre is now actually a more popular activity than in Shakespeare's London. However, she concludes that, overall, the percentage attending the theatre has remained remarkably constant, and constantly low.

An American Cowboy on the English Fringe: Sam Shepard's London Audience

"Rile 'em Cowboy," "Metaphors, Mad Dogs and Old Time Cowboys," "Renaissance Man Rides Out of the West" — these are just a few titles of British articles on the plays of Sam Shepard. The image of Shepard as cowboy has been part of U.S. popular culture for so long now that more people know the Stetson-topped, Lucchese–shod aging coverboy than know the work of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Twenty years ago when this image was still new, Shepard packed up wife, child, and stereotype and moved to London, entering the ranks of literati expatriates. Like all expatriates, he took his homeland with him. As he told the editors of Theatre Quarterly after he had been living in London for a few years, "it wasn't until I came to England that I found out what it means to be an American. Nothing really makes sense when you're there, but the more distant you are from it, the more the implications of what you grew up with start to emerge.” This new-found national identity is reflected in the plays he wrote while in London, but what is equally important is that he also found a new audience.

An American Cowboy on the English Fringe: Sam Shepard's London Audience

An American Cowboy on the English Fringe: Sam Shepard's London Audience

Giovanni Francesco Crosa and the First Italian Comic Operas in London, Brussels and Amsterdam, 1748–50

In the autumn of 1748 the opera audience in London was introduced to a newly arrived troupe of Italian singers, an eccentric impresario and an operatic genre previously unknown in England. The buffo company, led by ‘Doctor’ Giovanni Francesco Crosa, would entertain the King's Theatre public for the first time with full-length Italian comic operas. In May 1750, after two tumultuous seasons which saw the gradual dissolution of the troupe and financial disaster for the management, Crosa fled the country, never to return. The King's Theatre closed its doors, to reopen only in the autumn of 1753 with a programme devoted exclusively to serious opera. It was not until 1766, when Piccini's La buona figliuola conquered the London opera stage, that Italian comic opera found real success at the King's.

The Trickster-Figure in Jacobean City Comedy

Well, how should a man live now, that ha's no living; hum? why are there not a million of men in the world, that onely sojourne upon their braine, and make their wittes their Mercers; and I but one amongst that Million and cannot thrive upon't; any Trick out of the compasse of Lawe now, would come happily to me.1 Thomas Middleton's Witgood, a wastrel who determines to revenge himself upon his miserly uncle by tricking him into marrying an impoverished courtesan, is a familiar figure in the drama of Elizabethan and Stuart London. This ubiquitous trickster focuses our attention upon a paradox that was becoming increasingly disturbing to London audiences. The emergence of capitalism and the slow transition from an agrarian to a market economy tended to idealize individual ambition. Yet, for many, traditional notions of degree and status continued to engender profound anxiety over ostentatious displays of wealth or unprecedented social mobility. At the heart of this paradox is the tension between the individual and his or her community, between the promised benefits of ambition and the destructive potential of greed. Although created for a variety of dramatic purposes, the tricksters of Jacobean city comedies give us valuable insights into the issues this paradox was raising. Most importantly, a comparison of their stories suggests that their boundless energies were titillating and exciting, but also extremely disturbing. Just how