David Francis Taylor
Discoveries and Recoveries in
the Laboratory of Georgian Theatre
For a four-month period in 2010 David Francis Taylor worked as a research consultant with
the Theatre Royal at Bury St Edmunds, the only working Regency playhouse in Britain.
In this article Taylor reflects upon the experiences and insights he acquired over the course
of this collaboration. In particular, he indicates how the theatre’s restaging of the neglected
repertory of the long eighteenth century within the Georgian space of performance can
aid theatre historians in understanding the intricate dynamics of the period’s theatre
architecture and, crucially, the position and agency of its spectatorships. David Francis
Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His book Theatres of
Opposition, which concerns the theatricality of politics in the career of the playwrightparliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan, will be published next year by Oxford University
Press. He has published articles in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic
Review, and the Keats-Shelley Review, and is currently co-editing, with Julia Swindells,
the Oxford Handbook to the Georgian Playhouse.
FOR THE THEATRE HISTORIAN the Theatre
Royal, Bury St Edmunds, is of singular
importance on two counts. Firstly, it is the
only working Regency playhouse in Britain
and, following an ambitious and costly
restoration project, it has recently been
returned to the state in which, in 1819, it first
entertained a playgoing public. Secondly,
and in powerful symbiosis with this recuperation of the Georgian place of performance,
the Theatre Royal maintains a rigorous commitment to the staging and rehabilitation of
the neglected and much denigrated repertory of the long eighteenth century.
For a four-month period in 2010, during
which the theatre presented four rehearsed
readings of Georgian plays and mounted a
full production of John O’Keeffe’s comic
opera The Poor Soldier (1783), I worked with
the theatre as a research consultant.1 This
article represents my attempt to reflect upon
and unpack the experiences and insights that
I, as a scholar of eighteenth-century drama,
had acquired over the course of this collaboration. Its aims are threefold: to introduce to
the wider community of theatre practitioners
and researchers the pioneering programme
at the Theatre Royal; to probe the negotiations between the historical and the con-
temporary, the playtext and the playhouse,
that shape and define this programme,
which does not operate within a museological or pedagogical framework, but within
the commercially fraught and locally
oriented parameters of regional theatre; and,
finally, to broach, once more, the question of
a meaningful and reciprocal relationship between theatre practice and theatre history. In
particular, the concluding section of this
article points to the ways in which the
Theatre Royal’s restaging of the plays of the
period excavates the dynamics of theatre
space and spectatorial agency that were so
crucial to the Georgian dramaturgy of the
‘aside’, yet which remain marginalized by
prevailing scholarly trends.
William Wilkins’s Playhouse:
from Regency to ‘Restoration’
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the theatrical season at Bury St
Edmunds was decidedly short. The Norwich
Comedians, the small company of actors
who serviced the East Anglian provincial circuit that connected the theatres at Yarmouth,
Ipswich, Cambridge, Bury, Colchester, and
Kings Lynn, played in the town only during
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the month or so of its Great Fair, from early
October to mid-November. From 1780 onwards, the Market Cross, designed by Robert
Adam, functioned as both the theatre and
town hall, but by 1819 this venue was illsuited to the demands of contemporary
dramatic practice and technology, and a new,
purpose-built playhouse was designed by
William Wilkins, leading proponent of
architectural neoclassicism, author of The
Antiquities of Magna Graecia (1807) and
Atheniensia (1816), and subsequent architect
of the National Gallery.
Having inherited from his father proprietorship of the Norwich circuit, Wilkins
had theatre in the blood. His new playhouse,
which could accommodate an audience of
780, offered a distillation of Georgian theatre
design at its most advanced. Opening its
doors on 11 October 1819, the theatre’s
maiden audience was treated to performances of George Colman’s popular comedy
John Bull; or, An Englishman’s Fireside (1807)
and Thomas Morton’s farce A Roland for an
Oliver (1819). ‘The interior of the House is
very elegant,’ lauded the Bury and Norwich
Post, ‘its form nearly circular, with two tiers
of boxes and a stage 18 yards in width. The
proscenium is in very good taste, and all the
scenery greatly advanced in execution.’ 2
In 1843 the Norwich Comedians were
disbanded – an index of the radical shifts in
the economic and demographic orientation
of the region precipitated by the arrival of
the railway in 1840. The playhouse’s fortunes
were thereafter increasingly perilous, though
it did stage the world premiere of Brandon
Thomas’s phenomenally successful farce
Charley’s Aunt in 1892. It closed in 1903, and
before opening again in 1906 underwent a
significant redesign by Bertie Crewe. Yet in
1925, unable to compete with the town’s two
new cinemas, the theatre shut its doors for a
second time, and for forty years it was used
by the local Greene King brewery as a barrel
store (the theatre faces its imposing art deco
brewhouse, and the pungent aroma of hops
continues to welcome playgoers, even on
occasions suffusing the auditorium itself).
Finally, following a local campaign to
raise the funds required for much-needed
restoration work – carried out by the architect Ernest Scott, with Iain Mackintosh acting
as specialist consultant – the theatre reopened
in 1965. In 1975, Greene King, who still
owned the freehold, gifted the theatre to the
National Trust on a 999-year lease, and it
remains the only playhouse in the Trust’s
possession.
At this point in its history, the Theatre
Royal was something of an architectural
palimpsest. The restoration of the mid-1960s
left untouched a number of anachronisms
introduced by Crewe’s 1906 redesign, most
notably the height of the forestage; the
absence of the stage boxes which bound the
lower tier of boxes to the outer pilasters of
the proscenium arch; and the velour, cinemastyle seating in the pit, which also featured a
central gangway installed in 1965. In 1988, at
the invitation of the National Trust, Axel
Burrough of Levitt Bernstein architects undertook a study of the theatre which sought
both to uncover the details and guiding
principles of Wilkins’s original design, and
also to assess the possibility of returning the
theatre to its 1819 state.
Decoding ‘Ad Quadratum’ Geometry
Burrough’s conclusions, published in an
article entitled ‘Theatre of Proportion’, were
revelatory: Wilkins, he discovered, had employed a complex ad quadratum geometry in
his organization of the layout of the building.3 With this hidden geometric formula
decoded, the dimensions and positions of
each section of the playhouse as it was
originally conceived could be extrapolated
with considerable precision. More importantly – indeed, as will be discussed later, the
crucial aspect in the theatre’s spatial dynamics – Burrough revealed that the forestage
sat in the very centre of the building, the
point at which the symmetrical spaces of the
auditorium and scenic stage met and
overlapped.
It would take almost twenty years for the
powerful insights of Burrough’s study to be
realized; supported by a large grant from the
Heritage Lottery Fund, restoration work
finally commenced in 2005, costing £5.5
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The restored auditorium of the Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds. This photograph offers a sense of the proximity
between the forestage and the audience. The frieze and ceiling were painted by the scenic artists Kit and Meg
Surrey. Photo © Dennis Gilbert.
million. As the project’s lead architect,
Burrough’s brief was to sustain a delicate
equilibrium between fidelity to Wilkins’s
design and the demands of modern convenience and safety regulations.4 On the one
hand, the solecisms introduced in 1906 and
1965 have been corrected, the traditional
means of ascending into the pit via a set of
steps has been reinstated, and the interior
decorative scheme carried out, as it had been
originally, by a scene painter, bringing impressive cohesion, energy, and theatricality
to the space of the proscenium and auditorium through its deployment of a vibrant
palette and trompe l’oeil reliefs. On the other
hand, where the 1819 theatre had just three
earth closets and was heated by a single
stove located at the rear of the pit, provision
has now been made for fire escapes, disabled
access, modern toilet facilities, and airconditioning; instead of the backless benches
that frequenters of the Georgian pit would
have endured, the bench-like seats in the
restored pit are modestly cushioned and
provide back-support; state of the art lighting and communications systems have been
installed; and a new foyer and restaurant-bar
now stand on the site of what was a garden
adjacent to the theatre.5
Moreover, the Theatre Royal’s reopening
in September 2007 – with a production of
Douglas Jerrold’s nautical melodrama BlackEyed Susan (1829), directed by the theatre’s
artistic director, Colin Blumenau – marked
the recuperation not only of Wilkins’s grand
neoclassical playhouse but of the kinds of
drama that had originally been performed
there. Blumenau arrived at Bury in 1996,
and, while he quickly re-established a commitment to self-produced shows, he readily
confesses that the building’s Georgian
history initially meant little to him: ‘Like
everybody else . . . I knew nothing about the
period. Certainly, apart from Sheridan and
Goldsmith, I knew of no one.’6
Rediscovering a Regency Repertory
However, as Blumenau and his team began
to put together an application to the HLF
(Heritage Lottery Fund) for the theatre’s
restoration, its singular genealogy took on
increasing valence; the process of rationalizing the playhouse’s return to its Regency
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condition necessarily involved consideration
of the enormous and almost entirely forgotten body of dramas for the performance of
which it had been specifically designed.
Recognizing that the repertory of the
period had been unjustly ‘vilified’ by practitioners and critics, Blumenau embarked
upon a programme of reviving the dramas
that would have been popular with the
theatre’s first patrons. Importantly, with a
series of rehearsed readings of Georgian
plays beginning in 2004, the inception of this
programme was very much conterminous
with restoration work on the building. As
Blumenau asserts, ‘restoring the repertoire
became inextricably linked with the restoration of the building’.7 This connection goes
beyond the symbolic: both projects have
been approached through the same mediation of historicization and contemporization,
while, more fundamentally, the work produced by the theatre harnesses the symbiotic
relations between performance and performance space, play and playhouse.
The restored theatre building, as we will
see, functions to naturalize the dramatic
registers of the Georgian repertory. In the
following section, which traces the process of
‘restoring’ eighteenth-century drama to the
twenty-first-century stage, I will explore these
complex interconnections in detail. Before
doing so, however, it is important to emphasize the precise operational context in which
the Theatre Royal’s programme is situated.
Blumenau has frequently articulated his
belief that Bury strives ‘to do for Georgian
theatre, what the Globe has done for Elizabethan’.8 Such a parallel, and the ambition it
encapsulates, is not without foundation: both
Shakespeare’s Globe and the Theatre Royal
undertake to stage plays of a particular
period of English drama within their contemporaneous performance space; both run
established series of rehearsed readings that
explore rarely performed pieces (‘Read not
Dead’ in the Globe’s case); both commodify
an ‘historical’ experience of playgoing;9 and
both are actively concerned with the educational possibilities of their work.
Beneath such confluences, however, lie a
number of fundamental disparities between
the resources, imperatives, and cultural
geography of the two theatres. At the risk of
stating the obvious, the Globe is a reconstruction and, crucially, relocation, of a lost
Elizabethan playhouse. It exists to perform
the works of Shakespeare, and its current
position on London’s South Bank places it on
a cultural axis that includes Tate Modern, the
Royal Festival Hall, National Theatre, and
National Film Theatre. That is, it successfully
functions, in its structure and repertoire, as a
monument to the forces of cultural canonicity, cultural tourism, and nationhood.
In contrast, the Theatre Royal is a restored
Regency playhouse located in a Suffolk
market town with a population of approximately 35,000;10 it does not maintain a
resident company of actors, and its in-house
productions are only part of an eclectic programme of touring theatre, stand-up acts,
and, occasionally, amateur dramatics; finally,
and most crucially, it is committed to performing works from a period of theatre
history which, beyond a small community of
scholars, receives scant attention.
My purpose in pointing up these radical
differences is not, by any means, to denigrate
the aspirations or achievements of the Theatre
Royal, but rather to foreground the cultural
revisionism of a repertory that operates, like
the circuit managed by Wilkins in 1819,
within considerable demographic and financial constraints (a revisionism which any
comparison with the Globe risks occluding).
It is to the problems and potentialities
involved in this process of performing in,
and seeking to refashion, the margins of the
theatrical canon that I now wish to turn.
Mediating Theatrical Pasts and Presents
For Samuel Johnson, ‘to restore’ meant: ‘To
retrieve, to bring back from degeneration,
declension, or ruin to its former state.’ 11 Such
a definition – in particular its essential difference from that related verb, ‘to reconstruct’ – neatly distils the imperatives that
inform the Theatre Royal’s programme of
Georgian revivals entitled ‘Restoring the
Repertoire’. In terms of professional performance, this programme operates on two,
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closely related levels: first, as a monthly
series of script-in-hand stagings which serve
as a performative testing ground for dramas
spanning both the period and its genres; and,
second, drawing from those plays which
have shown potential in rehearsed reading
two full-scale productions each year which
customarily run for between a week and a
fortnight.
For both readings and productions the
material conditions of performance are in
certain respects carefully calibrated to replicate those of 1819: the forestage, the space in
front of the proscenium arch that served as
the primary acting area within the Georgian
playhouse, is installed (it is otherwise often
removed in order to satisfy the requirements
of touring shows); and the auditorium
remains illuminated, with its electric lights
dimmed to the level of the gas lamps that
would have been used in the late-Regency
period.
At first glance, then, there appear to be
correspondences between this approach to
revival and the kinds of performance reconstructions that have been carried out, and
documented, by the likes of Robert K. Sarlós,
who meticulously recreated a staging of
James Shirley’s court masque The Triumph of
Peace (1634) at the University of California,
Davis, in 1974. Sarlós’s reconstruction
involved experts from an array of disciplines
working to produce the original masque with
as much scenographic, choreographic, and
musical accuracy as was practically possible.
Determined to ‘integrate audiences into the
historic ambience’ of the piece, he even created
‘a near-authentic seventeenth-century banquet as a prelude to the performance’.12
Yet Blumenau and his team are not engaged in museum theatre. The programme at
Bury exists not within a matrix of embodied
scholarship but a regional theatrical context
in which archaeological dramaturgy is
neither desirable nor possible. Indeed, the
‘Restoring the Repertoire’ programme seeks
to ‘retrieve’ the Georgian repertory precisely
by undertaking to embrace, rather than
merely accommodate, the contemporaneity
of its spectators. Restoration here is deployed in its Johnsonian sense: it suggests
regeneration or rehabilitation (of an entire
marginalized corpus), not reconstruction (of a
discrete theatrical occasion).
To ‘bring back’ the popular dramas of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
thus involves, first and foremost, the restoration not of a historicized economy of
gesture or declamation but of a spectatorial
public for such plays. Blumenau thus seeks
to render the various, cross-fertilized genres
of Georgian drama ‘comprehensible and
accessible to a contemporary audience’:
If we were to dress people up in the right clothes
all the time and to get them to do the right
gestural acting all the time then people would
leave in droves. What’s important for me is that
the words that have been written can be heard
again and appreciated. . . . It’s so important to
make these things live now rather than preserve
them in aspic and do museum theatre. If you
stage historical reconstruction you won’t do the
repertoire any service. It will stay obscure.13
Such an approach is, of course, shaped by
financial necessity as much as by conscious
artistic choice. The theatre’s HLF grant ends
in autumn 2010, and even as it seeks new
sources of funding its programme operates
under an increasing pressure to realize
commercial sustainability through box-office
receipts. However, and as I have observed
repeatedly over the course of my own collaboration with the theatre, these budgetary
demands serve only to lend greater urgency
and dynamism to the project of building a
twenty-first-century audience for eighteenthcentury theatre.
Approaching Inchbald’s The Massacre
Blumenau’s production – the first professional performance – of Elizabeth Inchbald’s
1792 tragedy The Massacre in June 2009
offered the most overt demonstration of this
willingness to arrive at restoration through a
strategy of active contemporization.14 Inchbald’s play, which she suppressed on the
grounds that its political charge might
endanger her professional reputation if
performed or published, dramatizes the St
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 as a
means of interrogating the political violence
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and mob brutality of the September Massacres in Paris.
Blumenau’s production stridently emphasized the contemporary resonances of the
tragedy. He enlarged the text with interpolated passages from Inchbald’s source play,
Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Jean Hennuyer,
évêque de Lizieux (1772), partly as a means of
augmenting the gender politics implicit in
The Massacre; set the action in the present
day; and employed a multiracial ensemble,
casting the mob leader as an Ulsterman, the
family at the centre of the violence as Asian
and African, and the enlightened judge, who
ends the slaughter at the close of the play, as
a Muslim.
Such licence will always divide opinion
within both scholarly and theatrical communities, and at least one critic objected to
the manner in which ‘parallels with Bosnia
and Ruanda, Belfast and Baghdad are thrust
in our faces’.15 However, Blumenau’s aim
was precisely to restore the confrontational,
in-your-face politics of the piece and so render
Inchbald’s depiction of genocidal violence as
uncomfortably and heavy-handedly resonant
for modern audiences as it was for the likes
of William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft,
who both strongly advised the playwright
against printing it.
The production of The Massacre raises, in
especially stark terms, the manifold issues
that any endeavour to restore a work of
theatre, let alone an entire repertoire, must
necessarily countenance. The authentic performance of an historical text and the
authentic performance of its socio-political
message are, one might argue, mutually
exclusive ventures. Theatre historians have
become adept at deploying a syntax of loss
that articulates the ephemerality of the
occasions, conditions, and hermeneutics that
embody and shape past performance. I want
to avoid invoking such a taxonomy here
because it fails to engage with the imperatives underlying the staging of dramas such
as The Massacre at Bury. The Theatre Royal’s
programme is interested neither in investing
in the illusion that the theatrical past is
wholly retrievable or reproducible, nor in
lamenting the ultimate epistemological im-
possibility of recovering the historical
experience of theatregoing.
This is not to say that the theatre does not
reflect upon and problematize its own process.
Indeed, as will be clear, the rehearsal room
and the rehearsed readings both function as
laboratories in which actors, directors, and
audiences negotiate the different ways of
broaching Georgian drama. Rather, it is
crucial to understand that the theatre necessarily grounds its recovery of any Georgian
play upon two stable poles: the historical
authenticity of its performance space and the
contemporaneity of its audience.
Even before a performance of the ‘retrieved’ text is introduced into this dynamic,
the very presence of a modern spectator or
actor within the playhouse – that ‘most
haunted of human cultural structures’, to
borrow Marvin Carlson’s phrase – embodies
an interface between the theatrical past and
the theatrical present – a relay which is itself
a performative event.16 In this regard,
Blumenau speaks of the triangulation of
‘historical authenticity’, ‘modern expectations’, and ‘economic reality’ that the process
of restoring the repertoire must realize.
Actor-Musicians in The Poor Soldier
My own involvement in the Theatre Royal’s
production of John O’Keeffe’s comic opera
The Poor Soldier (1783) in June 2010 provided
an opportunity to observe at first hand this
negotiation in the rehearsal room and on the
stage. O’Keeffe’s play charts the fortunes of
Patrick, an Irish foot-soldier who returns to
his native village impoverished and
wounded after two years fighting for the
British in America to discover that his
sweetheart, Norah, is soon to be married to
an English officer.
For the theatre, it represented a conscious
shift in the generic focus of their programme.
The productions of Inchbald’s Animal Magnetism and Wives As They Were and Maids As
They Are in September 2008 and of Thomas
Holcroft’s He’s Much to Blame in September
2009 had broached a comedic paradigm
familiar to audiences principally through the
ever-popular work of Sheridan. In The Poor
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The perspective set, designed by Libby Watson, for the Theatre Royal’s 2009 production of Thomas Holcroft’s
He’s Much to Blame. From left to right: Paul Greenwood as Lord Vibrate, Tim Frances as Dr Gostermans, and
Maggie O’Brien as Lady Vibrate. Photo © Keith Mindham.
Soldier, Blumenau sought to introduce his
audience to, and to test the dynamics of, the
theatre space against a genre of musical
theatre immensely popular at the end of the
eighteenth century.
At the earliest stage, the principal problem faced by Blumenau and the production
team was the prohibitive cost of staging such
drama. The theatre does not have a resident
ensemble and engages actors as and when
needed. A comic opera, however, requires
both an acting company and an orchestra, a
number of performers far beyond that which
the theatre’s budget allows. Blumenau therefore auditioned specifically for a company of
eight actor-musicians. In performance, the
rear-stage area functioned as an orchestral
space; here, members of the ensemble pro-
vided musical accompaniment to the scenes
in which their roles did not feature.
With the sites of music and action already
interwoven, no attempt was made to reestablish a binary distinction between the
actor as musician and the actor as character.
The performers on the forestage regularly
acknowledged and interacted with the
orchestra; actors involved in duets used their
instruments as dramatic as much as musical
devices; and, more generally, musical instruments functioned as a means of characterization, with the aristocratic English officer
playing a double-bass, the young heroine a
flute, and the ponderous priest a bassoon.
Such multi-tasking compression was borne
of economic necessity, but brought an energy
and coherence to the piece that clearly
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appealed to spectators who might have been
alienated by a rigorously historical approach
to the opera.
But the production showed that the exigencies of historical authenticity and contemporary adaptation are not dichotomous. Even
as it modified the performative organization
of Georgian comic opera, it both restored,
with great fidelity, William Shield’s original
score, and also implicitly foregrounded the
importance of those actor-musicians – such
as Michael Kelly, who worked at Drury Lane
in the 1790s as an actor, tenor, and composer
– who were such vital members of theatre
companies at the end of the eighteenth
century.
Similar mediations were manifest in the
production’s scenographic design. For BlackEyed Susan, the theatre reproduced the perspective scenery that would have been used
in the Georgian period, with a sequence of
retractable flats staggered behind one another
on either sides of the stage. Subsequent
‘Restoring the Repertoire’ productions have
moved away from this museological approach to scenography, but have adapted and
contemporized perspective design rather
than abandoning it. As Blumenau insists, the
use of such a set remains fundamental to the
spatial dynamics of Wilkins’s playhouse:
The real difficulty with that space is that unless
you design it properly you’re working in the
wrong environment. . . . If you’re not using a
perspective set, then you’re tempted to use bits of
the stage which are unusable.17
In this way, Mia Flodquist, designer for The
Poor Soldier, created a bold, acutely perspectival room of three white walls on to which a
simple pastel-coloured mural of an idealized
bucolic landscape was painted. Flodquist’s
design sought to play across the tension
between the indoor (the drawing-room concert suggested by Blumenau’s placement of
the orchestra) and the outdoor (O’Keeffe’s
romanticized projection of rural Ireland).
However, as she asserts, the conceptual
imperative underlying this contemporary
scenic space was that it should ‘sit comfortably and harmoniously in the very world of
the theatre’s own space’.18 Scenography thus
serves as an especially tangible barometer of
the extent to which the particular spatial
qualities of the Regency playhouse act as a
historico-aesthetic filter for the performances
that take place within it. Wilkins’s space
necessarily works to orient the contemporary dramatic event towards the material
practices of Georgian theatre.
Negotiating the ‘Grammar of Nostalgia’
The demands of this space are also felt, in
more complex and encoded ways, on a
textual level – in the sentimental, comedic,
and melodramatic registers and conventions
of the dramas that were written with the
specific dynamics of playhouses such as
Wilkins’s in mind. Jacky Bratton and Gilli
Bush-Bailey have written of the challenge of
encouraging a class of undergraduates workshopping Jane Scott’s melodrama Camilla the
Amazon (1817) to think beyond ‘the familiar
ground of naturalism’ and to experiment
with modes of performance, in particular a
language of gesture, unfamiliar to them.19 In
the time I have spent in the rehearsal room
observing and working with groups of professional actors on pieces spanning the
generic spectrum of the period – from
Hannah Cowley’s comedy A Day in Turkey
(1791) to John Poole’s prototypical Shakespearean burlesque, Hamlet Travestie (1810) – I
have witnessed a similar process.
Contemporary actors are trained, first and
foremost, in naturalism. The grammar of
acting required to perform the Georgian
repertoire is no longer taught in drama
schools (though directors from the Theatre
Royal now run workshops on eighteenthcentury plays at RADA). Whether this neglect is a symptom or a cause of the period’s
marginalization from the canon of English
theatre is open to debate, but it does result in
rehearsals in which the disjunction between
the training of the company and the register
– or abrupt registral shifts – of the text is
almost palpable. The ‘modern expectations’
that Blumenau seeks to mediate are here
those of the actor rather than the spectator.
As Dominic Gerrard, who played the part of
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Sam O’Mahony Adams as Darby in the Theatre Royal’s 2010 production of John O’Keeffe’s The Poor Soldier, with
the actor-musicians behind. Photo © Keith Mindham.
Captain Fitzroy in The Poor Soldier put it, the
challenge is to avoid ‘defaulting to Chekhov’.
However, it is this very process by which
actors grapple with the difference of the
Georgian dramatic text that engenders a
sense of experimentation and excitement
within the rehearsal room. Of course, the
extent to and ease with which individual
performers succeed in digesting this register
differs markedly. It is thrilling to see those
actors who have repeatedly worked with the
Theatre Royal approach potentially problematic scenes and characters with both
confidence and considerable knowledge of
Georgian drama, casually and intelligently
drawing parallels between the piece in
rehearsal and plays, by the likes of Inchbald
or George Colman the Younger, that many
academics working in the period have
neither read nor heard of.
Again, it is important to reiterate that this
process is one of restoration, not reconstruction. No attempt is made to drill actors
in the art of Georgian chironomia or declam-
ation. Yet the theatre does attach real value
to, and ensures that all its actors acquire a
working knowledge of, the theatrical and
socio-political contexts of the dramas they
stage. Part of my role, in addition to advising
the company on textual meaning and variation, was to bring such contextual information into the rehearsal process.
For both Blumenau and Abigail Anderson,
assistant director at Bury, it is important that
they and their company are aware of the
cultural forces and ideologies that surround
and striate a particular play; for example, in
A Day in Turkey, a play which cites both Mary
Wollstonecraft and Edmund Burke, and also
features a Parisian émigré, the evolving
British reaction to the French Revolution; or,
in Elizabeth Inchbald’s All on a Summer’s Day
(1787), the contemporary definition and
understanding of the term ‘sentiment’, a
word which repeatedly punctuates that play.
In rehearsals of The Poor Soldier I advised
the ensemble on the etiquette of duelling, the
correct way to take snuff, and the facts of the
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particular battle (Cowan’s Ford) in which the
play’s protagonist has fought. More interestingly, the cast were provided with handouts
produced by the theatre’s heritage manager,
Helga Brandt, which included pictures and
short biographies of the Covent Garden company who had originally staged O’Keeffe’s
play in November 1783, as well as information concerning the stage Irishman in the
eighteenth century and British Francophobia
during the period of the War of Independence (the character of the French valet,
Bagatelle, carries much of the farce in the
opera).
The walls of the rehearsal space were also
covered with a range of colour images of
English officers and French fops that gave a
flavour of the codes of dress and deportment
in operation in the period. It is, of course,
almost impossible to gauge the extent to
which this accretion of contextual detail
percolated through the rehearsal process and
informed the company’s engagement with
the registers of the play. At the very least, as
my conversations with the actors testified, it
helped the ensemble to position, even legitimate, their performances, historically and
aesthetically. At most, particularly in the
development of Bagatelle (played by Tarek
Merchant), it seemed more directly to shape,
though not over-rigorously to historicize, a
particular suite of gestures and expressions.
The Dialogue with the Audience
The most acute and habitual of the challenges presented by Georgian drama to the
modern actor is not, however, the need to
understand or on some level embody its
context, but rather, as Bratton and BushBailey also observe, the manner in which its
texts compel performers to establish and
maintain a direct dialogue with the audience.20 Even once the rehearsal process has
succeeded in denaturalizing naturalism, the
actors’ reflexes of interaction often continue
to be inflected by the force of an invisible
(and anachronistic) fourth wall.
Blumenau and Anderson counter this impulse by insistently encouraging actors to
direct the significant majority of their speech
and action towards the audience rather than
one another. ‘I tell my actors that the audience is another character in every scene,’
Blumenau states, ‘so that if you’re in a scene
with two people you’re actually in a scene
with three people.’21 This model captures the
dynamics of interplay that are structurally
crucial to Georgian theatre, a mode of
performance that requires more than the
actor speaking at the spectator and in which
the rhythms and meanings of drama are
determined through a process of sharing. This
approach can appear awkwardly stylized in
the rehearsal room, but once actors move
into the theatre, the intimacy of its space,
particularly the proximity of the forestage –
at the structural centre of the building – to
the lit auditorium and stage boxes, actively
encourages the centrifugal acting style already
encoded within the playtext.
Once more, then, what emerges is the
powerful symbiosis between the restoration
of the building and the recuperation of the
repertoire. The architecture of the playhouse
works to calibrate performances historically:
just as it pushes scenography towards the
perspectival, so it encourages, if not induces,
the open relays between performer and
spectator upon which plays such as The Poor
Soldier manifestly depend.
It is to the two interconnected insights that
stem from such a discovery that I now wish
to point the theatre historian’s attention:
first, the manner in which Wilkins’s Regency
theatre functions as a vehicle through which
the affective and political mechanics of
Georgian drama are rendered far more
legible; second, and more importantly, the
position and agency of the spectatorship that
such a mechanics licenses and necessitates.
The Critical Engagement
The critical response to the ‘Restoring the
Repertoire’ programme in both the local and
national presses has been overwhelmingly
positive. Reviews have repeatedly pivoted
upon the splendour of the restored playhouse. Superlatives such as ‘gorgeous’,
(Evening Standard), ‘stunning’ (The Stage),
and ‘enchanting’ (Sunday Times) proliferate,
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and are often coupled with the epithets ‘gem’
or ‘jewel’ – words which are loaded with the
values and anxieties of heritage culture.22
However, so cogent are these articulations
of the architectural beauty of the theatre that
many reviews embody a critical slippage
between the aesthetics of the place of performance and that of the performance itself.
In rare cases, such a slippage almost wholly
subsumes the politics of the play to the
historical canvas of Wilkins’s playhouse.
‘More than half of the pleasure of seeing He’s
Much To Blame, a 1798 comedy by Thomas
Holcroft, is the venue,’ wrote a reviewer for
the Daily Mail in 2009 (in a piece tellingly
entitled, ‘By George, it’s an elegant gem’).23
More commonly, however, critics’ appreciation for the rarity of the theatre building
facilitates rather than inhibits engagement
with the cultural and political values of the
dramas they are watching. Indeed, if the
recurrent observations offered in the press
reviews confirm the achievements of the
theatre’s restoration, then they also serve as
an index of the extent to which the ‘Restoring
the Repertoire’ programme has succeeded in
eliciting the politics of the Georgian play.
Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph noted
that Black-Eyed Susan evinced ‘a spirited
sense of reforming zeal . . . which reflects
Jerrold’s lifelong opposition to capital
punishment’; 24 David Henshall of the East
Anglian Daily Times wrote that Wives As They
Were and Maids As They Are showed Inchbald
to be ‘a feminist long before the word was
coined’; 25 while Michael Billington, one of
the theatre’s most vociferous supporters,
asserted of the same production in the
Guardian:
Inchbald may not be the theatre’s Mary Wollstonecraft; but she shows women chafing against
their chains and disproves the myth that stage
comedy died a death between Sheridan and
Wilde. 26
Billington’s point is a crucial one. In staging
the plays of forgotten – and female – playwrights of the eighteenth century, the
Theatre Royal has both rehabilitated the
social and political investments of the
period’s popular drama, and, in doing so,
exposed the elisions and false teleology that
constitute the theatrical canon.
This retrieval is, of course, testament to
Blumenau’s directorial commitment to exploring the politics of class, race, and gender in
the period (even penning, for The Poor Soldier,
an occasional prologue which reminded
audiences that there are ‘revenant militia
still’). Yet the spatial dynamics of the theatre
are once more a powerful force here, for a
reviewer’s recognition of the ideological
negotiations of a revived play is almost
always prefaced by an awareness of his or
her proximity to, and consequent interaction
with, the physical performance. ‘Sitting in
the back of a dress-circle box in William
Wilkins’s 1819 playhouse,’ wrote Billington,
‘I felt in intimate contact with the stage.’27
The logic of such a critical response
suggests a causal connection between the
architectural organization of the theatre’s
space, the position of the spectator in relation
to the actor and action, and the legibility of a
performed politics. As Blumenau told me,
performing in this space is
about acknowledging the complicit nature of the
audience, trying at all times to get them involved,
so that they understand the dilemmas of the characters not just emotionally but also socially and
politically. 28
Restoring the Dramaturgy of the Aside
It is this complex theatrical, and political,
dynamic – what I now want to call the
dramaturgy of the aside – that I have observed and experienced at Bury, and from
which I believe scholars of eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century drama can learn.
Over the last twenty years, a number of
theatre historians and literary critics working
with the period have challenged the prevailing box/pit/gallery paradigm of spectatorship and interrogated the Georgian
audience in ways which elicit the mobility of
its composition, self-representations, and
political engagements.
Betsy Bolton, for instance, has contended
that critical perceptions of the audience are
part of a genealogy of misrepresentation
originating in the prologues, epilogues, and
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theatrical commentaries of the period which
offered ‘stylized portraits’ of the playgoers
and successfully reified the social divisions
within the auditorium;29 Ellen Donkin has
argued for scholarly recognition of the
eighteenth century’s ‘shouting audiences’
and of the powerful ‘reception loop’ which
bound performers and spectators;30 while
Julia Swindells has asserted the way in
which the Georgian theatre functioned as a
site of intra-social encounter and dialogue,
with the repeated exchanges that occur both
within the auditorium and between the
auditorium and the stage traversing the
categories of class and gender.31
The work of the Theatre Royal corroborates
this revised understanding of the Georgian
dramatic performance as a space (architectural and ideological) in which spectatorial
agency was conferred, negotiated, and exercised. It highlights, with the startling physical clarity that only a live event can offer, the
reductionism of those studies of Georgian or
‘Romantic’ theatre which continue to read
drama in ways which tacitly assume its
audiences to have been some kind of cultural
tabula rasa, passively assimilating stable
ideology from a stable text. In recovering the
plays of the period for the stage, it has also
recuperated the dramaturgy of the aside that
I believe to have been fundamental to the
way in which Georgian performance, especially its transmission of politics, operated.
By ‘aside’ I mean more than that supposed structurally discrete moment at which
dramatic action is suspended and a character
steps out of a play to speak directly to
spectators alone. Indeed, my collaboration
with the Theatre Royal has convinced me
that to conceive of the aside in Georgian
drama as an interruption or disruption is to
supplant the fluid realities of performance
with the fixed apparatus of typography – the
convention of the [aside]. As I asserted earlier,
the effective staging of a Georgian play
within a Georgian playhouse compels actors
to share the large majority of their speech and
action directly with the audience. That is, in
performance, the dialogic orientation of this
period of drama is nearly always ‘aside’ –
away from the fellow actor(s) and towards
the spectators seated in the illuminated
auditorium.
Lines which a text classifies as asides are,
in performance, no more or less than specifically heightened moments within this
continuum of communication at which it
should be clear to an audience that what is
being spoken cannot or should not be heard
by those onstage; the ‘aside’ proper denotes
exclusion (of other actors) not inclusion (of
audience), for the self-conscious relays between character/actor and the community of
spectators take place as a dramatic constant
rather than a dramatic instant. The aside is
the idiom of eighteenth-century performance.
As we have seen in the extent to which the
Theatre Royal’s approach to acting and
scenography are inflected by the spatial
dynamics of the theatre space – and reinforcing Alan Wood’s notion of the playhouse as
‘the physical plant for the drama’ – William
Wilkins’s theatre functions as a purposebuilt amplifier for this dramaturgy of the
aside.32 The forestage, at the very centre of
the building, is not a liminal space: it is less a
projection into than an integrated component
of the auditorium, with the horseshoe of the
box rows (beginning with the stage boxes)
establishing a single physical circuit that
encompasses the spaces of the box, pit, and
stage. This was Axel Burrough’s discovery.
Spatial Dynamics and Audience Response
Smaller and more enclosed than structures
such as the Globe, the intimacy and
illumination of this space requires the spectator, from every seated position within the
playhouse, to confront the bodies of other
spectators and the performers alike. Equally,
it compels the performer to acknowledge
and negotiate the material presence of a
public to a far greater degree than later
models of theatre. Whenever I have stood on
the forestage, I have been struck by the optics
of the lit auditorium, which presses towards
the actor to such a degree that the backs of
the dress boxes seem within touching distance. The architectural organization of the
theatre collapses the space between the actor
and audience, so that rendering the interplay
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between the two becomes not merely possible but unavoidable.
As theatre historians and critics we must
thus begin with the playhouse not the play.
For once we understand that the Georgian
playhouse functions not as an unequivocal
map of the hegemonic order but as an
architectural engine for the creation and
channelling of affective and political relays
between players and spectators, the crucial
importance of the audience members as
agents in the drama – as an additional character in every scene, to employ Blumenau’s
analogy – becomes clear.
Of course, Wilkins’s theatre cannot stand
for all Georgian theatres. There is a radical
difference between the dimensions of the
Theatre Royal, Bury, and those of the rebuilt
patent theatres in London of 1790s (the
Drury Lane of 1794, for instance, housed
3,600 spectators), which are widely regarded
as having engendered new, spectacular
modes of drama. Yet Wilkins’s playhouse
reminds us that we must be careful not to
regard the metropolitan as a synecdoche of
the national.33 It serves as a model through
which we can revise our understanding of
the ways in which the intimate theatre spaces
of pre-1790s London, and of the provincial
circuit throughout the Georgian period,
conditioned performances and positioned
spectators. I cannot believe that an attempt to
‘Restore the Repertoire’ of the long eighteenth century could have been achieved at
many Victorian or twentieth-century theatres.
The plays of Jerrold, Inchbald, Holcroft, and
O’Keeffe have succeeded on the Bury stage
precisely because its space makes sense of
their dramatic structures and devices.
During the four months of my work with
the theatre, the clearest demonstration of the
playhouse’s capacity to decode the unfamiliar registers of Georgian drama and to
rehabilitate the dramaturgy of the aside was
provided by a rehearsed reading of The
Forced Marriage. This melodrama traces the
fortunes of a Russian countess who is forced
to wed a plain-speaking sledge driver and
exiled to Siberia when the enraged Tsar
discovers her planned betrothal to his son
and heir.
As I discovered, the play performed
under this title at the Surrey Theatre in 1842
was in fact a blatant plagiarism of a piece
staged at the Haymarket eight years earlier.34
More to the point, its two acts were punctuated by abrupt inversions in register and
characterization, all of which made it difficult to read. To my surprise, however, the
script-in-hand performance of the play, as
directed by Lynn Gardner, engaged the audience both affectively and politically.
Each rehearsed reading at Bury concludes
with a discussion in which the ensemble and
the audience share their opinions of the play
and collectively assess its potential to succeed as a fully staged revival – a critical
dialogue that establishes such events as a
laboratory for Georgian drama. The comments generated by the discussion that
followed The Forced Marriage testified to the
audience’s genuine emotional investment in
the characters and their situation, and the
vast majority believed that the play would
work as a full production.
The spatial dynamics of the theatre had
positioned actor and spectator along precisely the affective axis required to make the
melodrama accessible and entertaining. Moreover, during the feedback session several
audience members entered into a debate
concerning the play’s socio-political agenda,
with one spectator drawing particular attention to a line in which Ivan Daniloff, the
protagonist, exclaims:
Money given by the rich to the poor often costs
the poor man too dear. He can’t afford to accept it.
For the little gold they heedlessly throw you, they
expect to have a right to do what they like with
you – to command! 35
Such sentiments, the spectator argued,
suggested that a radical, ‘Marxian’ critique
of class underlay the melodrama. Obviously,
these insights were at least partly facilitated
by the conditions of the rehearsed reading,
which audiences at Bury now attend in the
knowing, interrogative role of arbiters. However, I would argue that just as the dramaturgy of the aside involved spectators in
ways which decode the play’s aesthetic
alterity, so had it also augmented the legi241
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bility, and negotiability, of the drama’s
politics. Within the space of the playhouse,
the aside idiom of the melodrama worked to
enfranchise playgoers.
Of course, any attempt to extrapolate
historical information about spectatorial
behaviour in the Georgian period from the
reactions of a middle-class, middle-aged,
twenty-first-century audience would be ill
founded. Like Blumenau, I am acutely aware
of the disparity between the horizon of
expectations that would have shaped the
experiences and judgements of an audience
in 1819 and that which informs the theatregoers of 2011. Nonetheless, just as the theatre
building necessarily shapes and orients
towards the Georgian the performances of
modern professional actors, so I believe it
inflects the responses of modern spectators
in ways that disclose – through a glass
darkly – something about the nature of their
eighteenth-century counterparts.
For the dramaturgy of the aside traced in
performances at the Theatre Royal depends
upon the agency of an audience, and indeed
insistently requires spectators to recognize, if
also regulate, their own power. I have witnessed audiences hiss at villains, applaud
lovers, and, without prompting, complete
lines for actors (‘Alas poor Yorick’, as spoken
in Hamlet Travestie). Is it possible that the
combined dynamics of space and repertory
work to counter the disciplining of the
modern passive audience – to denaturalize
their codes of behaviour as much as those of
the ensemble? 36
Admittedly, the theatre encourages spectatorial participation: ‘Please don’t feel shy
about being part of the show. After all, that’s
why we leave the lights on!’, as Blumenau
put it in a programme note to The Poor
Soldier.37 However, Bury’s audience do not
attend the theatre ‘specifically so that they
can assist at the spectacle’ (as Dennis
Kennedy has characterized visitors to the
Globe).38 Their responses are not ritualized
or pantomimic, but irregular, timid, and
spontaneous, like those of a child consciously testing the authority of a parent for the
first time. They are, I would argue, symptomatic of the position and agency which the
spectator necessarily acquires through the
aside idiom of the performed Georgian text
and the intimacy of the Georgian performance space.
Once we consider how these relays
between actor and spectator would have
operated in 1819 – in an auditorium neither
darkened nor silent and which could hold
more than twice its present number – the
presence and mobilization of the eighteenthcentury audience becomes forcefully apparent. The Theatre Royal’s project of restoring
the Georgian repertoire highlights the need
for theatre historians to revisit and restore to
studies of the period both these enfranchised
spectators and their enfranchising architectures of performance.
Notes and References
1. My position, which spanned the months of April
to July 2010, was funded by Anglia Ruskin University.
Its remit was principally to aid the Theatre Royal’s
programme in a research capacity and to strengthen
links between the Theatre Royal and the universities of
Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin. My thanks go to Julia
Swindells and John Gardner of Anglia Ruskin for giving
me the opportunity to work on the project and for overseeing my collaborative efforts, and to Colin Blumenau,
Abigail Anderson, Helga Brandt, and Sharron Stowe of
the Theatre Royal for their enthusiasm and kindness.
2. Bury and Norwich Post, 13 Oct. 1819.
3. Axel Burrough, ‘Theatre of Proportion’, Architectural Review, CLXXXIV (Sept. 1988), p. 75–81 (p. 77).
4. For a more detailed description of the restoration’s objectives and concessions, see Axel Burrough’s
essay, ‘Reconciling Restoration and Modernization’, on
the theatre’s website: <http://secure.theatreroyal.org/
PEO/site/revisit/index.php?nav=reconciling>.
5. The level of comfort afforded by the seating in the
restored theatre, and in the pit especially, remains a
source of considerable local contention, with many longstanding patrons unhappy at what they perceive to be a
regression of comfort brought about by the restoration.
6. Colin Blumenau, interview with the present
author, Cambridge, 21 May 2010.
7. Ibid.
8. Colin Blumenau, ‘Marching on with The Poor
Soldier’, in the unpaginated programme for The Poor
Soldier, Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds, 2010.
Blumenau made the same assertion to Michael Billington in 2007, though, perhaps tellingly, he spoke of ‘what
the Globe has done for Shakespeare’ (emphasis mine). See
Michael Billington, ‘Stage Right’, Guardian, 4 Sept. 2007
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2007/sep/04/
theatre.westend>.
9. In June 2010 I collaborated with Helga Brandt, the
theatre’s heritage manager, to create an ‘Experience the
Georgian Theatre’ week. This featured a daily programme of technical talks about the machinery and sets
originally used in the playhouse and also live interpre-
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tation scenes based upon William Charles Macready’s
four-day engagement at Bury in 1828.
10. Fortuitously, in Elizabeth Inchbald, who was
born just outside Bury St Edmunds, the theatre has
found a figure in whom the concerns of the ‘Restoring
the Repertoire’ programme and the need to function as
part of a local community and economy can be united.
In addition to producing three of her plays, and staging
rehearsed readings of a further four, the theatre commissioned a new work about Inchbald. The Celebrated
Mrs Inchbald, written and performed by Katie Bonna,
played in repertoire with Blumenau’s production of
Thomas Holcroft’s He’s Much to Blame in September
2009.
11. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English
Language, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1755–6),
vol. 2.
12. Robert K. Sarlós, ‘Performance Reconstruction:
the Vital Link Between Past and Future’, in Interpreting
the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of
Performance, ed. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A.
McConachie (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1989), p.
198–229 (p. 208). See also Robert K. Sarlós, ‘Valenciennes
and Banqueting Hall: Theatre Research in Three and
Four Dimensions’, Theatre Survey, XXII, No. 2 (1981), p.
161–70.
13. Blumenau, interview, op. cit.
14. Owing to its unusual status as a ‘premiere’ of a
two-hundred-year-old play, the production of Inchbald’s The Massacre garnered considerable media attention, including articles in a number of national papers,
and a piece for BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.
15. Anne Morley-Priestman, The Massacre review,
What’s On Stage, 24 June 2009 <www.whatsonstage.
com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8831245801381>.
16. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: the Theatre as
Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2001), p. 2.
17. Blumenau, interview, op. cit.
18. Interview by Emma Martin with Mia Flodquist,
printed in the programme for The Poor Soldier.
19. Jacky Bratton and Gilli Bush-Bailey, ‘The Management of Laughter: Jane Scott’s Camilla the Amazon in
1998’, in Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama,
Performance, and Society, 1790–1840, ed. Catherine
Burroughs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), p. 178–204 (p. 196).
20. Bratton and Bush-Bailey, p. 202.
21. Blumenau, interview, op. cit.
22. Reviews of Black Eyed Susan: Fiona Mountford,
Evening Standard, 12 Sept. 2007 <www.thisislondon.co.
uk/theatre/review-23411885-regency-revivals-shouldbe-rationed.do>; Hugh Homan, The Stage, 13 Sept. 2007
<www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/18221/
black-eyed-susan>; and John Peter, Sunday Times, 16
Sept. 2007 <http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/
tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article244157.
ece>.
23. Anonymous review of He’s Much to Blame, Daily
Mail, 10 Sept. 2009 <www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/
reviews/article-1212621/Hes-Much-To-Blame-By Georgeelegant-gem.html#ixzz0tMzSAop4>.
24. Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 17 Sept. 2007
<www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/366796
6/Black-Eyed-Susan-Regency-jewel-is-back-inbusiness.
html>.
25. David Henshall, East Anglian Daily Times, 12
Sept. 2008 <http://www.eadt.co.uk/entertainment/
maids_and_wives_are_lovely_stuff_1_190327>.
26. Michael Billington, Guardian, 13 Sept. 2008
<www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/sep/13/theatre>.
27. Michael Billington, Black Eyed Susan review,
Guardian, 12 Sept. 2007 <www.guardian.co.uk/stage/
2007/sep/12/theatre3>.
28. Blumenau, interview, op. cit.
29. Betsy Bolton, Women, Nationalism, and the
Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780–1800
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 13–14.
30. Ellen Donkin, ‘Mrs Siddons Looks Back on
Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth-Century
British Theater’, in Critical Theory and Performance,
Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach, ed. (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 276–90 (p. 279).
31. Julia Swindells, Glorious Causes: the Grand Theatre
of Political Change 1789 to 1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 152.
32. Alan Wood, ‘Theatre Reconstruction: Tentative
Steps towards a Methodology’, Theatre Survey, XII, No. 1
(1971), p. 46–57 (p. 46).
33. See Jane Moody, ‘Dictating to the Empire:
Performance and Theatrical Geography in EighteenthCentury Britain’, in The Cambridge Companion to British
Theatre, 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.
21–41.
34. The Forced Marriage was first performed at the
Surrey Theatre in December 1842, and was published as
No. 701 of Dick’s Standard Plays in 1886. This ascribed
authorship of the play to ‘Mrs T. P. Cooke’, wife of the
actor Thomas Potter Cooke. However, the text of the play
is almost word for word the same as that of Elizabeth
Planché’s The Sledge Driver, which was staged at the
Haymarket in June 1834 and published later that year.
35. ‘Mrs T. P. Cooke’, The Forced Marriage; or, The
Return from Siberia (London: Dick, [1886]), p. 6.
36. See Baz Kershaw, ‘Oh for Unruly Audiences! Or,
Dramatic Participation in Twentieth-Century Theatre’,
Modern Drama, XLIV, No. 2 (2001), p. 133–54.
37. Blumenau, ‘Marching on with The Poor Soldier’.
38. Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle:
Audiences in Modernity and Postmodernity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 114.
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