The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage 9783030238278, 9783030238285

Citation preview

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage Edited by Jan Sewell · Clare Smout

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage

Jan Sewell · Clare Smout Editors

The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage

Editors Jan Sewell The Open University Milton Keynes, UK

Clare Smout University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-23827-8 ISBN 978-3-030-23828-5  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Carolyne as Ariel, in the San Vittore Globe Theatre production of Le Tempeste, after William Shakespeare, directed by Donatella Massimilla, costume by Susan Marshall, Piccolo Teatro di Milano. Photograph © Marica Moretti This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

It has become a commonplace that women began performing on stage after the Restoration in 1660. This is, of course, an Anglo-centric view of the theatre and one that foregrounds a particular type of performance—that of the professional English playhouses. Nevertheless, it is a dominant narrative. If you type ‘first professional actresses’ into Google, you get a series of articles about Margaret Hughes, widely considered to have been ‘the first professional actress on the English stage’. I must admit that until I began talking to Jan Sewell about this book, I hadn’t thought a great deal about whether women had performed in other contexts before this time, either in England or elsewhere. I vaguely knew that actresses from visiting European troupes had appeared on the English stage earlier in the 1600s and that they had been booed off the stage, but I wasn’t aware as to when they had been permitted on the stages of France, Spain and Italy. I certainly wasn’t aware of a tradition dating back as far as Ancient Greece and Rome, and I hadn’t thought in any detail about amateur, religious or private performances, or about performances elsewhere in the world. This volume has the potential to change this often narrow focus and to illuminate an under-examined history of women performing in a range of places and settings. It is an impressive undertaking, offering a broad view that encompasses accounts of women performers in Europe, America, Japan, Russia, India and Africa. By taking a wide definition of ‘the stage’, it is able to explore a plethora of styles and performance venues. As a former actress, now an academic, one of the most welcome things for me about this much needed and significant contribution to the history v

vi      Foreword

of the theatre is the way in which it brings scholars and theatre practitioners together, drawing a variety of narratives, some rarely written about, into dialogue with one another. Here, we have a treasure trove of stories about some fascinating groups and individuals—some famous, some infamous and some uncelebrated. We have historical accounts and tales from the horse’s mouth. This is a timely volume, coming into being as the campaign group ERA (Equal Representation for Actresses) points out the gender imbalance on our stages, argues that actresses are undervalued and calls for 50:50 representation by 2020; as the first-ever company of women of colour perform in a Shakespeare play at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre; and as Loughborough University announces the first major study of its kind into gender inequality in the theatre. At a time when women on stage are demanding equal recognition, this volume recognises and celebrates them in all their infinite variety. Including chapters on performers of a range of ages, experiences, racial backgrounds, physicalities and sexualities, this volume acknowledges the varied and significant contribution of women to the stages of the world. Stratford-upon-Avon, UK October 2018

Abigail Rokison-Woodall

Preface

As with many of the most interesting, rewarding things in life, the genesis of this volume was almost completely accidental. While working as an Associate Editor on the RSC’s Complete Works of Shakespeare, I found myself becoming increasingly irritated by the convention of putting the women’s roles at the bottom of cast lists and did my best to remedy this whenever possible. I started to wonder about the origins of the practice though and decided to write a slim volume: The Cultural History of Cast Lists, subtitled Dramatis Personae Non Gratae. I checked out the dramatis personae of hundreds of individual plays, starting with ancient Greek and Roman play texts—as it happens, when cast lists were included in these early texts, they used what seems a more logical system of ‘cast in order of appearance’. I decided that in order to get to the bottom of the problem, I needed to consult a history of women on stage that went right back to the beginnings of drama, only to discover that no such volume existed. There are any number of excellent books on individual actresses, as well as important collections and theoretical analyses of later performers and their work but even such estimable volumes as the Cambridge Companion to the Actress (2007), edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes, starts its account with the appearance of professional actresses on the London stage in 1660 and hence was unable to answer my question. I mentioned this in passing to my editor at the time at Palgrave, Ben Doyle, who, with a real editor’s eye, instantly spotted what he termed ‘a gap in the market’. This volume is an optimistic, but inevitably inadequate, attempt to fill this gap. We did our best to attract contributors from as many different countries and areas of research as possible, with limited success in some cases—China, vii

viii      Preface

with its long and distinguished tradition of performance, is a notable and regrettable absence from this volume. Many other cultures are represented minimally by a single essay—the collection includes only one chapter from the whole continent of Africa, for example. As editors, we were caught up in the dilemma of an ambitious desire to cover as much material as possible against the practical limits of time and space of any book, however generously proportioned. We should perhaps make it clear though that it was never our intention to exclude men from the pool of contributors; the absence of male contributors is a sad reflection of the fact that what have become known as ‘actress studies’ are still seen as an academic niche area. This project has been nearly five years in the making, and I would like to take this opportunity of offering my appreciation and gratitude to the many friends and colleagues who made this ambitious volume possible, in particular my co-editor, Clare Smout, who encouraged me from the start and who has worked so diligently over the last three years to make the book the best it could possibly be, and my original co-editor Abigail Rokison-Woodall, who had to step down but was instrumental in the initial planning and organisation and has kindly written the Foreword to this volume; both Abigail and Clare have backgrounds in theatre as well as academia and were enthusiastic promoters of the importance of including practitioners as well as scholars among the contributors. We would also like to thank our wonderfully supportive editors at Palgrave, Vicky Peters and Vicky Bates, and most especially our thirty-six brilliant authors whose participation was an act of amazing faith and who have delivered such an extraordinary, eclectic collection of essays which we hope readers will find fascinating and engaging and enjoy reading. Stratford-upon-Avon, UK November 2018

Jan Sewell

Contents

1

General Introduction 1 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout

Part I  Ancient Greece and Rome 2

Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction 9 Anne Duncan

3

The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome 21 Anne Duncan

4

Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality 51 Clare L. E. Foster

Part II  Medieval and Early Modern Europe 5

Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives 85 Sue Niebrzydowski

ix

x      Contents

6

The First Italian Actresses, Isabella Andreini and the Commedia dell’Arte 107 Margaret Rose

7

Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens: Female Agency and Subjectivity in Early Modern English Court Drama 127 Catherine Clifford

8

Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers 151 M. A. Katritzky

Part III  Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England 9

Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740 181 Jane Milling

10 Eighteenth-Century English Actresses: From Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication 205 Laura J. Rosenthal 11 Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture 229 Laura Engel Part IV  Nineteenth-Century America, Europe and Japan 12 Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination 251 Pam Cobrin 13 Death and the Working Woman: Actresses, Illness, and Labour from Rachel to Bernhardt 281 Roberta Barker 14 Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star 305 Lezlie C. Cross

Contents     xi

15 Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity 329 Makiko Yamanashi Part V Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century Greece, England, Russia and America 16 Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage: Personal and Political Rivalries from Paraskevopoulou and Veroni to Kotopouli, Kyveli and Papadaki 357 Xenia Georgopoulou 17 British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations 377 Maggie B. Gale 18 Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky’s System and the Moscow Art Theatre 397 Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman 19 Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era: Anita Bush, Abbie Mitchell, Rose McClendon, Mercedes Gilbert, Venzella Jones 425 Cheryl Black Part VI  Late Twentieth-Century America and England 20 ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance: Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Carolee Schneemann 455 Dorothy Chansky 21 Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre and Performance Practice Across Four Decades 487 Anna Furse 22 Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage 507 Sue Parrish

xii      Contents

23 Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account 521 Bernardine Evaristo 24 Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994) 531 Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly 25 Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation, February 2018: Gender and Disability 557 Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout Part VII  The Twenty-First Century—Around the Globe 26 Women on the Classical Kerala Stage: The Kutiyattam and Kathakali Traditions 585 Diane Daugherty 27 Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women in Post-Apartheid South African Performance 617 Amy Jephta 28 Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Their Negotiation of Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century 633 Mary Luckhurst 29 Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: Lazarus Theatre Company’s Staging of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam 655 Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer 30 Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, Milan 679 Susan Marshall 31 Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare 701 Anna Kamaralli

Contents     xiii

32 Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality on the Twenty-First Century British Stage 729 Jami Rogers 33 Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition: Young Women in a Changing World 755 Tracy Irish 34 Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate 775 Emma Frankland Index 807

Notes on Contributors

Roberta Barker is Associate Professor of Theatre at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and the author of Early Modern Tragedy, Gender and Performance, 1984–2000: The Destined Livery. Her work on early modern and modern drama in performance has appeared in such journals as Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Bulletin, Modern Drama, Early Theatre, Literature Compass, the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, as well as in a number of edited collections. Her current book project, Symptoms of the Self: Tuberculosis and the Making of the Modern Stage, is under contract with the University of Iowa’s series ‘Studies in Theatre History and Culture’. Cheryl Black  is Chancellor’s Professor and Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Missouri. She is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and an Executive Board Member of the International Susan Glaspell Society. She is the author of The Women of Provincetown, 1915–1922 and co-editor of Experiments in Democracy: Interracial and Multicultural Exchanges in American Theatre, 1912–1945 and Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1990s. She has contributed essays to Theatre Survey, Theatre History Studies, New England Theatre Journal, the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Theatre Annual, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and a number of edited collections. Jo Broadwood  was a co-founder of Women and Theatre, Birmingham, in the 1980s. Since then, she has worked as a facilitator and designer of interventions supporting social change and conflict transformation; this work has included senior roles in the youth sector and as a local government adviser, xv

xvi      Notes on Contributors

addressing prejudice and building greater cohesion in local areas across the UK. She is currently CEO of the Cohesion and Integration Network, a newly-launched charity which works via a network of members and supporters to create a more integrated and less divided UK society. She has co-authored numerous publications on conflict and social change. Dorothy Chansky  is Professor of Theatre at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama in American Theatre (2015) and Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (2004). She is the 2017–2019 President of the American Theatre and Drama Society and was Editor of Theatre Annual from 2010 to 2016. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance and Theatre Survey. Catherine Clifford  is Assistant Professor of English at Graceland University, where she teaches courses on ‘British’ literatures, Shakespeare, and Gender and Sexuality studies. Her Christopher Marlowe chronology was published in Christopher Marlowe in Context (2013), and her chapter on Shakespeare and Fletcher’s All is True and Whitehall Palace in Performances at Court in Shakespeare’s Era (2019). She is co-founder of Summer Shakespeare at Graceland, a Shakespeare festival and repertory training programme in Lamoni, Iowa. Pam Cobrin  is Senior Lecturer at Barnard College. Her scholarship examines American Theatre History with a focus on the intersection between identity, performance and nation-building. Her published work includes Taking Place: From Winning the Vote to Directing on Broadway, Women and the New York Stage, 1880–1927, and she has guest-edited issues of Women and Performance, A Journal of Feminist Theory on ‘Domestic Disturbances’ and ‘Ageing’ and her extended essay ‘Women and Broadway: The Early Years, 1845–1939’ appeared in The Encyclopedia of Broadway and American Culture (2010). She has also published in The Drama Review, American Theatre Magazine and Theatre Insight and serves on the board of Women and Performance. Janice Connolly is a founder member and Artistic Director of Women & Theatre (womenandtheatre.co.uk). In 2018, she was awarded a BEM for Services to Community Theatre. Her freelance acting career includes TV roles in Coronation Street and Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights, stage parts in Tartuffe and Anita & Me (Birmingham REP), A Taste of Honey (New Vic Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent) and pantomimes with Lily Savage at Manchester

Notes on Contributors     xvii

Opera House and Bristol Theatre Royal. Her stand-up comedy creation ‘Mrs Barbara Nice’—ordinary housewife extraordinaire—is a Comedy Circuit Headliner, Edinburgh Festival veteran and star of her own Radio 2 sitcom. Lezlie C. Cross is Assistant Professor at the University of Portland. Her published articles and book reviews appear in Theatre History Studies, Theatre Annual, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Journal of American Drama and Theatre and Theatre Survey as well as the book projects Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom and Performing Objects and Theatrical Things. She is also a professional dramaturg who works at regional theatres across America and as Associate Artistic Director of the Nevada Conservatory Theatre. Diane Daugherty is Professor Emeritus of Herkimer College, State University of New York, earned her Ph.D. in New York University’s Department of Performance Studies and served as President of the Association for Asian Performance (AAP/ATHE) and as Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal. She is the recipient of two Fulbright research grants and one from the American Institute of Indian Studies. Her work on aspects of Indian performance has appeared in numerous journals and collections. In 2016, she was named a Founder of the Field of Asian Studies by Asian Theatre Journal. Anne Duncan is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author of Performance and Identity in the Classical World (2006) and articles on Greek and Roman performance issues. She is currently at work on two projects: a monograph called Command Performance: Tyranny and Theater in the Ancient World and a textbook on Roman spectacle. Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University where she specialises in eighteenth-century British literature and theatre. She is the author of Women, Performance and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs (2014), and Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011), and co-editor of Stage Mothers: Women, Work and the Theater 1660–1830 (2016). She is currently co-curating an exhibition with Amelia Rauser on ‘Artful Nature: Fashion and the Theater 1770–1830’, at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale. Bernardine Evaristo  is the author of nine books of fiction and verse fiction that explore aspects of the African diaspora: past, present, real and imagined. Her numerous other writings include short stories, essays, poetry, literary

xviii      Notes on Contributors

criticism, writing for the stage and BBC radio. In 2019 she was joint winner (with Margaret Atwood) of the Man Booker Prize for her novel, Girl, Woman, Other. A literary critic, editor and activist, she has also founded several literature inclusion projects. She has judged and won many awards for her writing. She is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and its Vice Chair, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the English Association and Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London. She was appointed an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours’ List in 2009. Clare L. E. Foster  writes, directs and teaches theatre and film. Educated at Cambridge, Harvard, and UCLA film school, she was a film-maker based in Los Angeles and is currently a British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge. She recently founded the ‘Re-’ Interdisciplinary Network (http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/ re-interdisciplinary-network). Her interdisciplinary Cambridge Ph.D. about British performance traditions of Greek plays won the Hare Prize. Recent work includes ‘Recognition Capital’ (forthcoming); ‘Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama’ in Oscar Wilde and the Classics (2018); and ‘Afterword: Repetition as Recognition’ in On Repetition: Writing, Performance, Art (2016). Emma Frankland is an award-winning performance and theatre artist working in the UK and internationally. She studied at the University of Hull and at Central School of Speech & Drama. Her work focuses on honesty, action and a playfully destructive DIY aesthetic, often using materials with different transformative properties—such as water, clay, earth, salt and ink—to create strong visual imagery which is messy, intense and celebratory. Recent work has focused on the ‘None of Us is Yet a Robot’ project, published as None of Us is Yet a Robot—Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition (2019). Anna Furse was an award-winning theatre director and writer before becoming a full-time academic. As Professor of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, she co-directs the Centre of the Body. Her academic research has delved into eating disorders, (sub)fertility and reproduction, anatomy, hysterias and the medical gaze. She is a frequent international conference speaker and workshop leader, whose publications include book chapters, plays and an edited anthology Theatre in Pieces: Poetics, Politics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration. Her texts on hysteria, Performance Nerves, are due to be published in 2019.

Notes on Contributors     xix

Maggie B. Gale  is Chair in Drama at the University of Manchester. Recent publications include, as co-editor with Kate Dorney, Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (2018) and Stage Women, 1900–1950: Female Theatre Workers and Professional Practice (2019). Other co-edited volumes include the Routledge Drama Anthology: Modernism to Contemporary Performance (2nd edition 2016); Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880–1930 (2012); and The Cambridge Companion to the Actress (2007). Her most recent book, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1939: Citizenship, Surveillance and the Body (2019), was funded by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship. Xenia Georgopoulou  is Assistant Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, where she teaches Shakespeare and European drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her publications include Issues of Gender in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Ζητήματα ϕύλου στο θέατρο του Σαίξπηρ και της Αναγέννησης) and The Body as Text in Shakespeare’s Plays: The Fashioning of the Sexes. Her work deals with Shakespearean and Renaissance drama with a particular interest in issues of gender and otherness, as well as Shakespearean adaptations and references in modern popular culture. Maria Ignatieva is Professor in the Department of Theatre at the Ohio State University-Lima (USA). Before moving to the USA, she taught the history of drama and contemporary Russian drama and theatre at the Moscow Art Theatre School-Studio. Publications include Stanislavsky and Female Actors and chapters in anthologies of and companions to Anton Chekhov, Кonstantin Stanislavsky and Mikhail Chekhov. She has published over forty essays and reviews in Russian and English in Theatre History Studies, Slavic and East European Performances, and Stanislavsky. Tracy Irish  is an experienced teacher who has worked with a wide range of schools and theatre companies in the UK and internationally. She works regularly as a practitioner with the Royal Shakespeare Company and as a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick. Her research interests focus on the value of theatre in the development of cultural intelligence in an increasingly intercultural world. Her practice employs theatre-based approaches, combined with complex texts, to develop communication skills and social cognition in young people. Amy Jephta is from Cape Town and works variously as a film-maker, playwright, screenwriter and director. A former lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Drama Department, she now serves as chairperson for

xx      Notes on Contributors

global NPO Women Playwrights International (WPI). Along with Yvette Hutchison, she is a founder of the African Women Playwrights Network and the co-editor of Contemporary Plays by African Women (2019). Anna Kamaralli is author of Shakespeare and the Shrew: Performing the Defiant Female Voice and editor of Much Ado about Nothing for Arden Shakespeare Performance Editions. She is a director, dramaturg, drama educator, theatre critic and specialist in the performance and teaching of Shakespeare. M. A. Katritzky is Barbara Wilkes Research Fellow in Theatre Studies in the English Department at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK, a former Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Herzog August Library and The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and is currently serving as Visiting Professor at the University of Trier (DFG Forschergruppe 2539). Books include: Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter; Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks; The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records; and, co-authored with colleagues in The Open University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (English), The Handbook to Literary Research. Mary Luckhurst is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Head of the School of Arts at Bristol University. She has been awarded a number of distinguished professorial fellowships, including the universities of CUNY, Melbourne, Sydney and Oxford. Her many books include Caryl Churchill (2015), Playing the Real: Interviews with Actors (2010), Theatre and Human Rights (2015) and Theatre and Ghosts (2014). She is currently working on a book on contemporary actresses and celebrity. Susan Marshall  is a British costume designer and design historian based in Italy. She lectures on ‘20th Century Fashion’ at Milan Polytechnic in the Fashion Institute of Technology (New York) Department and is currently undertaking a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, exploring the pivotal role of scenographic costume in performance. She has worked with Donatella Massimilla and the actors of the San Vittore Globe Theatre since the summer of 2015, creating a ‘dressing up box’ with costume elements that can be mixed and matched in different ways in the tradition of travelling theatre. After many years’ experience working in universities, schools and small theatre companies, she has developed a creative and poetic approach to designing on a limited budget.

Notes on Contributors     xxi

Jane Milling is Associate Professor at the University of Exeter, UK. Her interest in popular and participatory involvement in making theatre and its role in political and civic life has led to articles on Restoration popular performers and women dramatists, including an edition of Susanna Centlivre’s Basset Table (2009). Her recent work in the modern period looks at the twentieth-century amateur theatre movement, with Nicholson and Holdsworth, The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre (2018). Sue Niebrzydowski is Reader in Medieval English Literature at Bangor University. She has published widely across genres and authors from the thirteenth to the late fifteenth century; the focus of her research is medieval women’s writing. Her monograph, Bonoure and Buxum: A Study of Wives in Medieval Literature (2006), and her edited collection Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages (2011) examine women’s interaction with literature of the later Middle Ages. She is co-editor of the Yearbook of English Studies: Early English Drama (2013). Sue Parrish  has been Artistic Director of Sphinx Theatre Company since 1990. The company was founded in 1973 as the Women’s Theatre Group. She is a co-founder of the Women’s Playhouse Trust formed in 1980. She is a long-term feminist campaigner, associated with organisations such as the Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators. She gained a B.A. (Hons) in English Literature from University College London and is an Associate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Sara Reimers gained her Ph.D. in ‘Shakespeare, Gender and Casting’ from the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she subsequently worked as a Senior Teaching Fellow. She is also a director and dramaturg working on the London fringe and regularly collaborates with Lazarus Theatre Company. Jami Rogers  trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA) and holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the Shakespeare Institute, the University of Birmingham. Previously, she worked for PBS and at WGBH-TV/Boston on PBS’s television series Masterpiece Theatre. She created the British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database as part of the AHRC-funded Multicultural Shakespeare project at the University of Warwick. She is currently an Honorary Fellow at the University of Warwick and sits on the boards of both The Act for Change Project and The Diversity School. Her monograph British Black and Asian Shakespeareans, 1966–2018: Integrating Shakespeare will be published in 2020.

xxii      Notes on Contributors

Margaret Rose is Associate Professor at the University of Milan, where she teaches British Theatre Studies and Performance. She has published in the areas of contemporary British Theatre, Theatre Translation Studies and Shakespeare rewritings. She is co-editor of Shakespeare, Forever Young (2017) and Shakespeare, our Personal Trainer (2018). She is also a dramatist whose recent plays explore Shakespeare and the natural world in garden and villa settings: Shakespeare in a Herb Garden (2015), Shakespeare and Harlequin, Ltd. (2016), A Walk in Shakespeare’s Garden (2017). Laura J. Rosenthal  is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2006) and Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern Drama: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (1996). She is editor of Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (2008) and co-editor of Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (2011) and of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (2002). She is editor of the Journal Restoration and is currently completing a book project, Ways of the World: Theater and Cosmopolitanism in the Restoration and Beyond. Elizabeth Schafer is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has written performance histories of The Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsor. She has published extensively on the work of women theatre directors; the early history of the Royal Ballet; Australian theatre; and the life and work of Lilian Baylis. She edited The City Wit for Richard Brome online and is editing The City Wit and The Northern Lass for the edition of complete Brome. In 2013, she ran ‘The Mariam Project’ to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. For 2016, to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s, death, she developed a ‘new’ play by Shakespeare entitled Margaret of Anjou. Most recently she has written Theatre & Christianity for Palgrave Macmillan’s Theatre &… series. Jenny Sealey  has been Artistic Director of Graeae, the UK’s leading disabled-led theatre company, since 1997. She has pioneered a new theatrical language and aesthetics of artistic access experimenting with bilingual BSL and English, prerecorded BSL, creative captioning, and in ear/live audio description methods. She has directed a wealth of extant and new plays on a diversity of stages and sites. She works nationally and internationally to share and continue to innovate the accessible ethos within performance and use this to form a global cohort of D/deaf and disabled artists to challenge and change the perception of possibility and drive the cultural shift for an equal playing field.

Notes on Contributors     xxiii

Jan Sewell teaches Humanities at the Open University. She was Associate Editor of The RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare (2007) and the individual editions of Shakespeare’s plays for the RSC for which she also wrote stage histories (2008–2012); she co-edited William Shakespeare and Others: Collaborative Plays (2013) and The Plays of Shakespeare’s Company (forthcoming). She is currently working on a cultural history of cast lists—Dramatis Personae non Gratae. Clare Smout is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham. She also teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern Writing at Staffordshire University and for the University of Cambridge’s Institute of Continuing Education. Her current research focuses on sibling relationships in Early Modern drama. Academic publications include journal articles and theatre reviews, plus a chapter on Mariah Gale for the Routledge Companion to Actors’ Theatre. As a director and dramaturg specialising in new writing, she worked for the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Harrogate Theatre, Eastern Angles, OTTC and many other new writing groups. She recently adapted and directed King Lear for performance by primary students in Hong Kong. Rose Whyman is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. Her current research is into actor training and Russian theatre history and publications include The Stanislavsky System of Acting; Legacy and Influence in Modern Performance (2008); Anton Chekhov (2010); and Stanislavski: The Basics (2013). She is currently working on a book entitled Performance in Revolutionary Russia: The Art and Science of Biomechanics and also an article focusing on the Russian and Soviet actress, Serafima Birman. Polly Wright  was a founder member of the feminist company Women and Theatre and lectured at Birmingham University for 13 years. She has written and presented on the use of the arts in health and education including an international webinar for the Royal Society of Public Health in 2017. She set up the Hearth Centre (www.thehearthcentre.org.uk) in 2003 and was shortlisted for a MIND media mental health award for her play Revolving Door on suicide prevention. She has written ten plays which have been performed professionally and has published six short stories. Makiko Yamanashi  teaches at the University of Trier and is affiliated to the Research Centre for International Japanese Studies at Hosei University. Her English publications include a monograph, A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop (2012), and articles in The Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre (2016) and A History of Japanese Theatre (2016).

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 11.3 Fig. 13.1

Greek vase painting of Athena viewing herself viewing a drama inside her temple (aedes ). Apulian kalyx-krater, 360–350 B.C. Taranto no. 52.665. LLMC II. https://books. openedition.org/pulg/185#illustrations 59 Roman wall painting of Thetis looking at herself reflected in the shield of Achilles, in the characteristic ‘hand-on-chin’ pose of the questioning observer. House of the Triclinium, Pompeii: ca. 75–100 CE (© National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy/Azoor Photo Collection/Alamy Stock Photo) 65 Barbara van Beck (Urslerin), the Bavarian harpsichordist, c.1650 (©Wellcome Collection/3001072) 157 Frances Abington as Miss Prue in William Congreve’s Love for Love, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1777 (©Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection) 208 Polly Peachum pleads with her father in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (first performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728), by William Hogarth, 1731 (©Tate Britain) 215 ‘An Actress at Her Toilet, or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’, by John Collet, June 24, 1779 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 230 ‘A Bit of Flattery’, by Charles Williams, 1807 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 236 ‘The Marriage of Cupid & Psyche’, by James Gillray, May 3, 1797 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University) 242 Mlle Rachel (Élisabeth Rachel Félix) on her deathbed, after a drawing by Frédérique O’Connell (©Alamy Photos) 289 xxv

xxvi      List of Figures

Fig. 13.2 Lillie Langtry (l.) and Sarah Bernhardt (r.), 1887 (©Alamy Photos) 296 Fig. 14.1 Ada Rehan as Katherine in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, 1887 (Photograph by O. Almquist. ©Alamy Photos) 316 Fig. 15.1 Postcard of Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu (1886–1944), actress, magician and founder of her own troupe, undated (©Postcard Museum, Japan) 344 Fig. 19.1 Rose McClendon as Serena in the Theatre Guild production of DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, 1927 (©Alamy Photos) 437 Fig. 20.1 Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus, 1975. Five gelatin silver prints, oil crayon. Each 8″ x 10″ (20.3 cm x 2.54 cm). Detail: photograph #2 of 5. (Collection of the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago. ©Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin) 462 Fig. 20.2 Karen Finley in The Theory of Total Blame, 1989 (Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams. ©Dona Ann McAdams) 471 Fig. 20.3 Carolee Schneemann in Interior Scroll, 1975 (Photograph by Anthony McCall. ©Carolee Schneemann) 474 Fig. 21.1 Anna Furse in Anna Furse Performs an Anatomy Act: A Show and Tell, 2016 (Photograph by Nina Klaff. ©Anna Furse) 488 Fig. 22.1 The Sphinx Test, created by Rosalind Philips, Helen Barnett and Sue Parrish (Design by Ifan Bates. ©Sphinx Theatre Company) 516 Fig. 24.1 Founder Members of Women and Theatre, Birmingham, c.1985: Sue Learwood, Janice Connolly, Polly Wright, Jo Broadwood (from l. to r.) (Photographer unknown. ©Women and Theatre, Birmingham) 534 Fig. 26.1 Kalamandalam Girija (c.) with Sajith Vijayan (l.), and Hari Menon (r.) in Trivandrum, 2015 (Photograph by Sreeraj T. ©Sreeraj T) 588 Fig. 26.2 Geetha Varma as Virabhadra, 1988 (Photograph by Diane Daugherty. ©Diane Daugherty) 609 Fig. 29.1 Celine Abrahams as Mariam in the Lazarus Theatre Company production of The Tragedy of Mariam, by Elizabeth Cary, directed by Gavin Harrington-Odedra, 2013 (Photograph by Scott Rylander. ©Lazarus Theatre Company) 666 Fig. 30.1 Carolyne as Ariel, in the San Vittore Globe Theatre production of Le Tempeste, after William Shakespeare, directed by Donatella Massimilla, costume by Susan Marshall, Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Photograph by Marica Moretti. ©Marica Moretti) 681

List of Figures     xxvii

Fig. 31.1 Shauntelle Benjamin as Rosalind in the Siren Theatre production of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, directed by Kate Gaul, 2011 (Photograph by Alex Vaughn. ©Siren Theatre) 715 Fig. 32.1 Martina Laird as Junius Brutus (l.) and Jackie Morrison as Sicinius Velutus (r.) in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by Angus Jackson, 2017 (Photograph by Helen Maybank. ©RSC) 743 Fig. 34.1 Emma Frankland in Rituals for Change, Festival Mix Brasil, Sao Paolo, 2017 (Photograph by Dani Villar. ©Emma Frankland) 793

List of Tables

Table 29.1 Gender Ratios across Lazarus Theatre Company’s 34 Productions 2007–2016. Compiled by Sara Reimers 660 Table 32.1 Casting of ‘male’ Shakespearean leads in major UK productions, 2016 and 2017. Compiled by Jami Rogers 749

xxix

1 General Introduction Jan Sewell and Clare Smout

This volume chronicles and celebrates the courage, determination and achievements, despite the multiple obstacles put in their way, of women on stage across the ages and around the globe. Our intention is not to provide a comprehensive history of the topic—such an ambition would be doomed from the start—but rather to provide testimony to the work of women performers at different times and in different spaces and places—a kaleidoscope or collage, a series of snapshots of women performers and their work. Our hope is that not only will the individual chapters prove of interest in themselves but their juxtapositions will prove illuminating and fruitful. We are proud to be bringing together both academics and practitioners— distinguished scholars plus younger colleagues already producing cutting-edge research at the start of their journeys, experienced practitioners looking back on their careers and the new generation looking ahead to the future. Aristotle argues in the Poetics (4) that mimesis (μίμησις), meaning mimicry, representation or play-acting, is an instinct that comes naturally to human beings from childhood and, furthermore, that it is this ability that enables us to develop and begin to learn about the world. Although he was

Jan Sewell (*)  The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK Clare Smout  University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_1

1

2     Jan Sewell and Clare Smout

writing at a time when the stage was seen as a male preserve, Aristotle here uses the word anthropos (ἄνθρωπος), signifying ‘human-being’, rather than the gender-specific alternative aner (ἄνηρ). It is the contention of this book that mimesis does indeed come as naturally to women as to men and that, despite cultural and social convention, and any number of prohibitions and exhortations to the contrary, women have contrived to exercise their talents and perform in the greatest possible variety of places and contexts at all times. There are, of course, many books already available on the subject of women on stage, notably Rosamond Gilder’s ambitious but now dated 1931 study Enter the Actress, which covers ancient Greece to the eighteenth century, and Sandra Richards’ more recent and more specific The Rise of the English Actress (1993), as well as books on individual periods such as Julia Swindells and David Taylor’s excellent Oxford Handbook to Georgian Theatre (2014). From the late 1960s onwards, feminist theatre scholars have produced important collections such as Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre (1988), as well as theoretical analyses such as Elaine Aston’s exploration of the feminist concept of ‘women hidden from history’ in An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995, 35). In The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance (1998), Lizbeth Goodman and Jane de Gay explore what Katherine Cockin (1998, 21) calls the ‘dynamics of history-making and -forgetting’. Tracy C. Davis’s seminal study, Actresses as Working Women (1991), examines the place of women working in a profession dominated by men, while others have reclaimed the lost histories of women performers such as the work of the Actresses’ Franchise League, founded in 1908, or the Pioneer Players, formed in 1911; there have also been numerous biographies of distinguished individual performers. Most recently, the excellent 2007 Cambridge Companion to the Actress, edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes, provides stimulating investigations into actresses in Europe and North America from 1660 onwards, while the 2005 collection of essays edited by Peter Parolin and Pamela Allen Brown Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, investigates the period immediately before that, challenging us to reconsider our traditional assumptions about the extent of female performance in England before 1660. None of these authors, however, have been ambitious or crazy enough to attempt the chronological and geographical scope of the present v­olume, which stretches from ancient Greece to present-day Australasia via the United States, Soviet Russia, Europe, India, South Africa and Japan. While we would have loved to make it even more wide-ranging (China, with its distinguished performance history is a regrettable absence), it proved an

1  General Introduction     3

over-ambitious aspiration to find authors across six continents i­nterested in contributing chapters in English to a book to be printed only in Anglophone countries. In addition, there are inevitably more chapters chronicling the ‘modern’ era—the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries—thanks in part to the increasing variety and sophistication of technology and the infinitely greater quantity and quality of archive material for researchers to work with, but in part also to the fact that these centuries saw opportunities for women around the world expanding personally, professionally, politically and legally. The book’s chronological organisation was chosen for simplicity and ease of access; it also has the advantage of bringing together parallel or contrasting experiences in different parts of the world (as in Parts V and VII, discussing the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, respectively) or of focusing tightly on a set of specific interactions (as in Part VI, which includes interlocking chapters on the feminist movement in late twentiethcentury British Theatre). Chronology, however, in this context is not an exact science: there are connections and overlaps between the Japanese and Greek chapters despite the section break that divides them, while several of the practitioners of the late twentieth century are still famously active today. Furthermore, the volume’s organisational structure was never intended to invite a teleological interpretation of women’s progress in the performing arts, what Maggie Gale and Viv Gardner (2004, 5) have called ‘a “rise” from absence to presence, from mute to “motormouth”, from prostitute to artist’. Although it is possible to chart an increasingly high profile for women performers around the world and across the centuries—a movement in from the margins towards centre-stage—this movement takes place at different speeds and at different times in different places and it is often a matter of one step forward and two steps back. For instance, despite the welcome fact that female practitioners are now frequently to be found holding prestigious positions in the academic world, respected for their insights, knowledge and technical skills, nevertheless social media responses to women in the public eye show that in the wider world they are still frequently regarded with hostility and contempt, even in the so-called progressive West; female performers’ continued lack of parity with men in terms of power and remuneration—not to mention the #MeToo movement—indicates that progress is perhaps slower and more superficial than many hoped. The chapters that follow are immensely varied in focus, content and location; yet reading contributions from different periods across the globe reveals certain recurrent patterns. Religion of all kinds is a frequent factor in the early stages of drama in many societies, both positively in terms of giving women initial opportunities to perform through involvement in ritual celebrations

4     Jan Sewell and Clare Smout

(often in a single-sex context) and negatively in providing moral justifications for subsequently excluding them from drama as it became more mainstream, public and secular in content. Women performers at different times and in very different places found themselves facing similar problems, not least the ever-underlying assumption that female performers were almost certainly ‘women of easy virtue’, if not actual prostitutes. Frequently they were excluded from the ‘legitimate’ drama entirely; at other times they were included only to provide glamour or sex-appeal. What is notable is the way that so many found (and continue to find) similar solutions to these problems, despite the widely differing socio-historical, religious and political contexts in which they worked. Apart from a few high-profile moments of rivalry, there seems to be a solid pattern of co-operation and support between female performers and a tradition of mentoring younger colleagues. The life of an actor is almost always a struggle; that of a female performer even more so. Repeatedly the women that survived in this profession have been multi-skilled, not only in terms of the range of their artistic talents and expertise, but also in combining organisational and managerial skills. Many have written their own material, frequently in the form of one-woman shows, and many have been entrepreneurs, establishing and running their own companies. Often, however, the strategies women adopted meant operating at the margins, frequently in spheres scarcely recognised as ‘stages’ by male critics, so that, having been excluded from the major roles and major theatres, they were often rendered further invisible by being excluded from criticism and the historical record. Increasingly twenty-first-century scholarship and criticism is attempting to restore this imbalance, redefining what is meant by ‘stage’ and performance. This volume has excluded women working ‘on stage’ in the worlds of ballet, opera and most other musical contexts, but we have tried to extend the definition of ‘on stage’ in other ways to include such areas as Elizabeth I’s participation in tiltyard ceremonies and Anna of Denmark’s involvement in court masques, the performance art practised by 1960s–1990s America and twentyfirst-century trans actors, even the wall paintings of ancient Rome. It is not only the concepts of ‘history’ and ‘stage’ which are challenged by this volume; the definition of ‘women’ itself raises questions. Chapter 4, on ancient Rome, queries the post-Christian concept of gender as binary, arguing that gender was seen by Greeks and Romans as a spectrum, while the closing chapter analyses the contribution made by trans women to the world’s drama, their fight for equality with cis women and their demand for personal acknowledgement and authentic representation on stage. Finally, terminology: ‘actor or actress?’—a common dilemma. We have generally opted for ‘women performers’, but left individual contributors

1  General Introduction     5

free to make their own individual decisions. However one describes them, though, we wish to pay tribute to these centuries of talented and determined women and their achievements. In line with that, we have chosen to include all the performers discussed here in the index, regardless of whether they are simply a name on a Roman tombstone, a semi-anonymous ‘sister to Anita Bush’ whose first name is lost, or a prison inmate known here by her forename only, with the intention that the index stands as a comprehensive record of all the female performers considered in the volume. It is our hope that one of the chief outcomes of this book will be to inspire others to undertake further research and advance this rich, rewarding field in future studies.

Bibliography Aston, Elaine. 1995. An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre. London: Routledge. Aston, Elaine. 1999. Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook. London: Routledge. Brown, Pamela Allen., and Peter Parolin, eds. 2005. Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1988. Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1990. Feminism and Theatre. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Case, Sue-Ellen, ed. 1996. Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance. London: Routledge. Cockin, Katharine. 1998. ‘Introduction to Part One’. In The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance, edited by Lizbeth Goodman with Jane de Gay, 19–24. Davis, Tracy C. 1991. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. London: Routledge. Gale, Maggie B., and John Stokes, eds. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Actress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gale, Maggie B., and Viv Gardner, eds. 2004. Auto/Biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilder, Rosamond. 1931. Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theatre. London: Harrap. Goodman, Lizbeth. 1993. Contemporary Feminist Theatre: To Each Her Own. London: Routledge. Goodman, Lizbeth, with Jane de Gay, eds. 1998. The Routledge Reader in Gender and Performance. London: Routledge. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance and the EighteenthCentury British Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Richards, Sandra. 1993. The Rise of the English Actress. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Swindells, Julia, and David Taylor, eds. 2014. The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I Ancient Greece and Rome

Introduction It has been traditionally held that performance in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds was an all-male preserve. The chapters in this part challenge us to think about this both more carefully and more radically. Anne Duncan’s first chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the performance cultures of the Greek and Roman worlds, pointing out that despite their absence centre stage, female performers ‘lurk around the edges’ (below, 9) throughout. This occurs initially in the context of religious rituals, and the seventh-century BCE provides significant evidence of Greek lyric poetry written for public performance by choruses of unmarried women. In the later Roman tradition, women were prominent in the populist low-brow genre of mime. Unlike its modern namesake, this was a spoken (and sung) genre, distinguished from more highbrow Roman drama by the absence of masks and by the participation of female performers (mimae ) who were frequently the main attraction. Duncan’s second chapter looks in more detail at these mimae and the plays in which they performed. She uses surviving fragments of play-texts, inscriptions on tombstones and contemporary references in letters, literary and scientific works and histories (including Procopius’ salacious biography of mima-turned-empress Theodora) to build up a picture of the nature of their roles, the type of lives they led, their position in society and their astounding popularity. Duncan closes by drawing attention to the wider range of female entertainers in the period, including singers, dancers, musicians and female gladiators.

8     Part I: Ancient Greece and Rome

Clare Foster focuses on the Latin term ludus and its cognates (referring to play, playfulness, games, tricks, jokes and giving rise to the concepts of allusion and illusion) to challenge our very definitions of theatre, performance and gender. She argues for a wider and more flexible interpretation of ‘theatre’ that embraces both poetry and art, suggesting that the wall paintings which decorated the homes of the rich across the Roman Empire functioned as a framing device or stage in which they presented characters and narrative. Alongside this, Foster argues that gender too offered opportunities for game-playing, that binary definitions of gender are a post-Christian construct and that gender in the Greek and Roman world was fluid, inclusive and ambiguous, with Dionysus, god of theatre, epitomising this ambiguity.

2 Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction Anne Duncan

The performance cultures of ancient Greece and Rome differed markedly from each other; in fact, the performance cultures of different city-states within ancient Greece differed markedly from each other and changed across time. Yet some overall observations may be drawn, before plunging into the details and the differences. Drama—even ‘highbrow’, difficult, literate drama—was a popular art form. There was a hierarchy of prestige for theatrical genres, with tragedy at the top, and actors tended to specialize in a particular genre, with corresponding effects on their own prestige. Theatrical performance was, by and large, a man’s occupation. Certain social stigmas and habits of thought conspired to keep women off the stage and (arguably) out of the theatre even as spectators. And yet, critics of theatre consistently complained that it was an effeminate art form, one which threatened to effeminize both the men who performed in it and the (male) spectators who watched it. Supposedly all-male performance cultures were thus haunted by the feminine. Women lurk around the edges of Greek theatrical practice, and female characters dominate its most famous plays; in Rome, women made their way into theatrical performance and, towards the end of the Roman Empire, one actress made her way from the stage to become Empress.

Anne Duncan (*)  Department of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_2

9

10     Anne Duncan

This chapter provides an overview of the performance culture of ancient Greece and the roles played by women around the edges of that culture, before turning to the history of theatre in Rome where women, performing as mimae, captured the popular imagination. These mimae will then prove the central subject of the following chapter.

Performance Culture in Greece Greek poetry was composed to be sung aloud; indeed, Greek poetry predates the Greek alphabet and Greek writing. During the Archaic Age (c.800–500 BCE), the first period of Greek history for which we have extant literature, there were two genres of poetry: epic and lyric. Epic poetry, the poetry of Homer and Hesiod, was originally composed orally and performed using a mixture of memorization and improvisation. Epic poetry recounted lengthy stories from mythology, such as the Trojan War tales of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey or Hesiod’s Theogony, or it was didactic, such as Hesiod’s Works and Days. It used a specific poetic metre: the dactylic hexameter. Lyric poetry was composed by a poet and performed aloud to an audience to the accompaniment of a lyre, using a number of different poetic metres. It tended to be shorter than epic poetry. There were two kinds of lyric poetry: solo lyric, composed and performed by the poet alone, usually in his or her own voice, and choral lyric, composed by the poet but sung by a chorus. Performances of lyric poetry often took place in the context of a religious festival in honour of a particular god; sometimes, they took place at the court of a king or in the household of an aristocrat. Archaic Greek lyric poetry featured both female voices and at least one female poet. For example, the seventh-century BCE male lyric poet Alcman wrote ‘maiden songs’, choral lyric poems for choruses of unmarried girls to perform, two of which have survived in fragmentary form. In one (Alcman, fr.1), the chorus leader sings about two girls, Hagesichora and Aigido, who apparently played a significant role in the chorus and perhaps in the accompanying religious ritual; in the other (Alcman, fr.2), a girl named Astymeloisa is mentioned. We hear of other choral poetry composed for choruses of unmarried girls in the Archaic Age (Calame 2001; Stehle 1997). The one female poet we know of from Archaic Greece was Sappho, who lived and composed her lyric poetry in the seventh century BCE on the island of Lesbos. Most of her surviving work is solo rather than choral lyric poetry: poetry intended to be performed aloud in public by one voice, notionally the poet’s. What is remarkable and still mysterious about

2  Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction     11

Sappho’s poetry is that her poetic voice is emphatically, clearly female, and that she writes about desiring other women (see e.g. Winkler 1990). Even if she performed her poetry only for small aristocratic audiences (she herself was an aristocrat), rather than at public religious festivals, how did such a patriarchal culture produce and tolerate so anomalous a being as a female lyric poet? Scholars have wrestled for centuries trying to account for Sappho, who was highly praised throughout antiquity for her poetry even as she was singled out, and often ridiculed, for her sex (Parker 1993). The recent publication of fragments of several ‘new’ Sappho poems (Obbink 2014; West 2005) has done nothing to clarify her anomalous position as a female poet. The Archaic Age thus fostered a poetic genre that allowed women to perform choral poetry in public, singing as women about women, and it allowed one woman, at least, to compose (and, presumably, to perform) poetry in her own poetic voice. This is surprising, since the impression we have of women’s lives and gender norms from this time period is quite conservative. Perhaps more surprising in the contrary direction is the silencing of women’s voices that occurred during the next historical period, the Classical Period (c.500–323 BCE), as drama developed in the newly democratic citystate of Athens. Around the turn of the fifth century, the city of Athens instituted an annual festival in honour of Dionysus, the Great (or City) Dionysia, at which the three genres of drama (tragedy, comedy, and satyr play) were performed in a competition lasting three to five days. The poets and actors were all male. The Dionysia also featured competitive performances of choral poetry (dithyrambs ) by choruses of men and by choruses of boys—but none by women or girls. The elimination of women’s contributions as poets and singers may be indicative of a cultural difference between Athens and Sparta (Alcman’s home) or Athens and Lesbos (Sappho’s home) or of a possible shift in attitudes towards women performing in public that took place at the end of the Archaic Age, or of some other factor so far unidentified. Greek drama is commonly believed to have developed from choral lyric poetry: the choral singers became the chorus of the play. Our earliest ancient account of the development of drama comes from Aristotle’s Poetics, which, despite being a series of lecture notes written down approximately 150 years after drama was first performed regularly in Athens, is still our best source for the origins of dramatic performance. In Aristotle’s account (Poetics 1449a8–18), drama began when the chorus leader stepped in front of the chorus to sing different, individual lines of poetry, to which the chorus then responded; the chorus leader was thus the first actor. Aeschylus, Aristotle says, had the idea to create a second actor; thus, dialogue was born. Sophocles invented the third actor (Slater 1990).

12     Anne Duncan

Yet the chorus was not abandoned. Drama’s origins in choral poetry would explain why all forms of Greek drama included choruses who sang and danced for the audience, and why, on the other hand, these choruses do not seem to advance the plot or even to interact very much with the characters in the story. In fact, the chorus of a play typically stood and danced in the orchestra or ‘dancing space’, the roughly semi-circular floor between the raised stage and the tiered seats for spectators. The chorus was part of the drama and yet apart from it, the visible and audible historical kernel of the art form and arguably its clearest link to the worship of the gods, who were the frequent subjects of choral poetry’s praises. For unclear reasons, Greek tragedy never developed more than three speaking roles onstage at any time (comedy and satyr plays were not as strict). For somewhat clearer reasons, Greek drama never employed women to sing in a chorus or perform as actors. Classical Athens, like the Archaic Greek societies that preceded it, had a rigid dichotomy of traditional gender roles and very strict limitations on what was considered respectable behaviour by women (Pomeroy 1995; Dover 1973). Female seclusion in ‘women’s quarters’ within the home was the ideal, if not achievable in practice for lower-income families who depended on women’s work outside the home (Lysias 1.9). Women wore veils when they did go out in public and were supposed to be accompanied by a male guardian (Llewellyn-Jones 2003). To the frustration of later historians, Athenian men went so far as to avoid naming respectable women in public and in writing whenever possible; thus, we do not know the name of Pericles’ first wife, for example, as she is always referred to as ‘Pericles’ wife’ or ‘Kallias’ mother’ in our sources (Plutarch, Pericles 24; Gould 1980). (On Athenian expectations for women’s behaviour more generally, Dover 1973 and Pomeroy 1995 are good starting points.) Conversely, and precisely illustrating this mindset, we do know the name of Pericles’ long-time concubine Aspasia, because she was not considered to be a respectable woman. All this meant that there was a strong social prejudice against respectable women appearing in public in Classical Athens. Women performing in public seem to have been almost inconceivable. Thus, Greek drama, despite its connections to Archaic choral lyric, used male actors to play female roles. Acting was at first an amateur activity, as was participation in dramatic and dithyrambic choruses. However, the Great Dionysia was both a multiday religious ritual in honour of Dionysus and a multi-day civic festival designed to glorify the city of Athens, and the dramatic and musical portions of the festival were structured as a competition: dithyrambic choruses competed with each other for one first prize; tragic playwrights for another,

2  Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction     13

each playwright producing three tragedies and one satyr play; while comic playwrights competed for a third. A combination of 10 judges drawn at random from the populace and the assembled audience members voted on the choruses and plays in a process that is still murky to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 57–101). Each first prize was partly intangible (the winning playwright’s name and play titles were inscribed on a victory list and the winning producer could erect a monument in his own honour) and partly tangible (the winners were also given jars of valuable olive oil). In 449 BCE, the rules were changed to create an award for ‘best actor in a tragedy’ in addition to ‘best play’, which meant that for the first time, judging panels could vote for an actor’s performance as superlative even if it was in a play considered to be less than the best. This is commonly regarded as the beginning of the professionalization of acting in ancient Athens and, indeed, the ancient world generally (Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 93–94). By the fourth century BCE, as dramatic performance spread across the Greek-speaking world (including South Italy), some actors became international celebrities and were entrusted by their respective city-states with diplomatic missions, due to their popularity and their speaking abilities. Other actors, notably comic actors, were not as well-respected. Interestingly, there is some evidence that at least one fourth-century tragic actor became known as a specialist in playing lead female roles; how this affected his social status is unclear (Duncan 2005). So men played women on the Greek stage and to audiences that were at least notionally male (Roselli 2011, 158–94). The choruses of maidens from the Archaic Age were replaced by choruses of female characters (as in Aeschylus’ Suppliant Maidens, or Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, or Euripides’ Trojan Women, or Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen), played and sung by men performing women’s roles. And yet Classical Greek drama was filled with striking, powerful, dominant female roles: Clytemnestra, in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon; Antigone, in Sophocles’ Antigone; Medea, in Euripides’ Medea; Lysistrata, in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In an influential article, Zeitlin (1996) has argued that the exclusion of women from the Classical Greek stage was a means to allow men performing and watching female roles to experience secretly feelings and sensations that Athenian gender ideology had declared off-limits to them. The only area of Athenian civic life in which it was considered acceptable for women to participate was religious observance. Women were expected, even encouraged, to participate in making offerings to the gods at temples, in certain rituals (especially funerals), and in religious processions (funeral processions, wedding processions, processions to and from

14     Anne Duncan

temples for religious observances). (The clichéd ‘meet cute’ story that begins many New Comedy plots of the fourth century BCE, including Menander’s The Grouch, The Woman from Samos, and The Arbitration, is that the boy fell in love with the girl at first sight when he glimpsed her in a religious procession or performing religious observances.) Certain religious rituals required the participation of women or focused entirely on women, such as the Thesmophoria, a festival in honour of the goddess Demeter celebrated by married women, and the Arkteia, a festival in honour of the goddess Artemis celebrated by unmarried girls at the shrine of Artemis at Brauron, near Athens (Burkert 1985, 151, 242–46). It is in this context that we might briefly look at the only quasi-theatrical role open to a woman in Classical Athens: the role of Dionysus’ wife during the Anthesteria festival. Every year, the Athenian democracy appointed an Archon Basileus, who was in charge of most religious observances for the state for the year. His title evoked the pre-democratic era of aristocratic and even royal rule in Athens, as basileus was the ancient word for ‘king’. One of the annual religious rituals over which the Archon Basileus presided was the Anthesteria. The Anthesteria festival was a three-day-long festival in honour of Dionysus in the spring, when the new wine was opened and drunk, worshippers wore masks, and the spirits of the dead were appeased (Robertson 1993; Burkert 1985, 237–42; Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 1–25). (Masks were often worn in Dionysiac rituals, which may at least partly explain why Greek drama, which was connected to Dionysiac festivals in its inception, employed masks.) Every year, the Archon Basileus’s wife, the Basilinna (‘queen’), celebrated her ‘marriage’ with the god Dionysus during a portion of the Anthesteria festival. The evidence for this ritual is particularly thin: we do not know when exactly this ritual took place during the festival, nor who (or what) played the role of Dionysus in the sacred marriage, nor whether the sacred marriage between the Basilinna and the god Dionysus was enacted physically (Robertson 1993; Pickard-Cambridge 1968, 11–12). Some scholars have speculated that the sacred marriage took place between the Basilinna and a statue of Dionysus, or between the Basilinna and the Basileus, who was wearing a mask of Dionysus (Maurizio 2001, 31; Burkert 1985, 109). One prominent scholar of ancient Greek religion (Burkert 1985, 109) has suggested that the marriage between the Basilinna and the god was a ‘mythical reflection’ of the union of Ariadne and Dionysus after Ariadne fled from her homeland of Crete with Theseus of Athens—only to be subsequently abandoned by Theseus. It seems clear that some degree of role-playing was involved in this ritual, as someone (or something) played the role of Dionysus, perhaps wearing

2  Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction     15

a mask, and the Basilinna, at the very least, went through a pageant of a marriage ceremony that was understood not to be legally binding (she had a husband already, after all), and at most, played the role of ‘Dionysus’ wife’ in a ritual consummation of the marriage. Although the marriage was celebrated in some sort of space away from public eyes (our sources say it was conducted in the Boukoleion, the ‘bull’s stable’ near the Prytaneion in the marketplace), there were spectators for this wedding as well, or perhaps we could think of them as a chorus: fourteen priestesses (gerairai ), chosen by the Archon Basileus and sworn to secrecy by the Basilinna, attended the Basilinna during the sacred marriage. It is perhaps surprising that such a ritual took place in Classical Athens, which otherwise placed a high premium on women’s sexual modesty. It is evidence of the importance of women’s roles in religion, especially in religious practices aimed at insuring the continuity of the state. It may be evidence that women were allowed to play slightly theatricalised roles in the context of religion. It does not seem to be evidence of any weakening of the strictures against women performing in public; the aura of secrecy and the hiddenness of the ritual suggest quite the opposite. For evidence of women performing in public, we need to turn to the Romans.

Performance Culture in Rome Greek drama had been performed in Southern Italy, which was nicknamed Magna Graecia, ‘Greater Greece’, for some time before the first dramas were performed in Latin for a Roman audience in 240 BCE. The Romans liked to tell themselves that they imported and adapted drama from the Greeks. It was not entirely true; at least one dramatic genre performed in ancient Rome, the Atellan farce, was an indigenous Italian dramatic form (Manuwald 2010, 1–2; Csapo and Slater 1995, 207; Beacham 1991, 2–9). But this misstatement reveals something important about Roman ideology: they saw themselves as different from the Greeks in essential ways, even as they acknowledged their indebtedness to Greek culture; they enjoyed drama, but were ambivalent about it. As in Greece, dramatic performance in the Roman world was at first tied to annual state-sponsored religious festivals. Unlike in Greece, however, these festivals could be in honour of any god, not just Dionysus (or Bacchus, as the Romans called him); they could also be in honour of the Roman people themselves. Some of the more important festivals, which they called ludi (‘games’), included the Ludi Romani (Roman Games), Ludi Plebeii (People’s

16     Anne Duncan

Games), Ludi Megalenses (Games of the Great Mother), Ludi Apollinares (Games of Apollo), and the Ludi Florales (Games of Flora). Some games (ludi scaenici ) would involve dramatic performances, while others (ludi circenses ) would involve chariot racing or other blood sports (Csapo and Slater 1995, 207–8). Politicians in charge of organizing the annual games (aediles ) began to use them as a means of self-promotion during the Republican era (c.500–31 BCE), when elections were keenly contested. This led to a sort of arms race of public entertainment, as rival politicians sought to give the public the most lavish games yet, in order to secure votes. The contest to secure votes spilled over into sponsoring ‘extraordinary’ ludi as well, games sponsored by a prominent family as part of a celebration of the family’s benefits to the Roman people after certain sorts of major one-off events: funerals of important citizens, temple dedications by important citizens, military victories led by important citizens. Plays were produced as part of both public and ‘extraordinary’ ludi in Rome. The Romans of the Republican era adopted many, but not all, of the Greeks’ dramatic genres and conventions. Greek tragedy and New Comedy were the models (and sometimes source materials) for Roman tragedy and comedy. Tragedy was called fabula crepidata (‘stories wearing Greek tragic shoes’), and continued to enjoy a higher prestige than comedy. Comedy was composed in two styles: fabula palliata (‘stories wearing Greek women’s robes’, i.e. set in Greece) and fabula togata (‘stories wearing the toga’, i.e. influenced by Greek New Comedy but set in Rome). The satyr play had withered shortly after the fifth century, and the Romans did not attempt to revive it. In addition to these genres were: the Atellan farce, which featured stock characters in comic sketches; the fabula praetexta (‘stories wearing the toga praetexta ’, the magistrate’s official toga), which were plays about Roman history; mime, which tended to be broad, popular comic routines and sketches; and pantomime (‘all-mime’), a sort of wordless interpretive dance of mythological stories (Manuwald 2010, 2–6; Beacham 1991, 5–13, 17–18). All of these dramatic genres (with the exception of mime, possibly pantomime, and certain sorts of side acts involving singing and dancing) were performed by all-male acting troupes, just as had been the case in Greece. These male actors, however, were not usually Roman citizens practising a profession that could bring them respect and prizes, as had been the case in Greece; rather, acting was a highly stigmatized profession in ancient Rome and most of the actors who performed onstage were slaves, many of them Greek slaves. This shift in the way actors were regarded is indicative of the deep ambivalence the Romans felt about their enjoyment of drama.

2  Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction     17

Actors were automatically assigned to a legal status category in Roman society called infamis, which means ‘without honour’ (literally ‘unspeakable’). Infamis persons could not give testimony in court, hold public office, marry Roman citizens, or leave wills, and they were subject to physical punishment, in direct contrast with theoretically inviolable citizens. (As an example of the treatment of infamis actors, there was a Republican-era law that allowed magistrates to beat actors for any reason, whether onstage or off; Suetonius (Augustus 45) says that Augustus narrowed the scope of this law to allow magistrates to beat actors only during the games and in the theatre.) Other occupations automatically assigned to this status category included prostitutes, pimps, gladiators, and gladiator-trainers (Edwards 1997). Infamis persons were essentially regarded as half a step up from slaves, who had no legal rights whatsoever. Since many actors in the Roman world were slaves, this status category simply served to reinforce the societal disapproval at their occupation. It also had the effect of insuring that acting was a family business, since infamis persons could not ‘marry up’ by marrying Roman citizens; their children with non-citizens were also limited in their choices of occupations, and many became actors as well (French 1998, 298–99). Roman society was divided into precise, legal, and economic status categories that were recalibrated every ten years or so when the censor took the census and ascertained citizens’ net worth; this created a society that was relentlessly focused on policing status distinctions. The Roman prejudice against actors and acting seems to have been rooted in class-based snobbery about the proper use and display of one’s body. As Edwards (1997, 67) has noted, the common thread running through the list of infamis occupations is that they all involved making a living from making one’s own or another person’s body available for public display or enjoyment. There were laws in ancient Rome that forbade members of the elite from performing on the stage or marrying a stage performer; the penalty for any member of the elite who did so was loss of elite status and all that that implied (loss of estate, family, and elected office), as the elite individual would automatically be reclassified as infamis (Edwards 1997; Gardner 1986, 245). One anecdote illuminates this prejudice succinctly. When the Roman equestrian Decimus Laberius wrote unflattering mimes about Julius Caesar, Caesar ‘invited’ (i.e. compelled) Laberius to perform in one of his own mimes, which automatically degraded his status from equestrian, the lowest tier of the elite, to infamis. This status degradation was Laberius’ punishment for criticizing Caesar, of course. Caesar then ‘magnanimously’

18     Anne Duncan

restored Laberius’ equestrian status after the performance, to illustrate his famous clementia (Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.7.1–5; Panayotakis 2010, 13). Roman actresses were subject to both Roman class and gender prejudices. As discussed in the next chapter, mime actresses (mimae ) were regularly denigrated as prostitutes because they performed in public; in the calculus of Roman gender and class hierarchies, this automatically disqualified them from respectability. Yet mimae mingled regularly with men at the highest ranks of Roman society. They and their genre were treated as marginal in the writings of elite men: raunchy, lowbrow, ‘subliterary’, crude. Yet mime became the most popular theatrical genre in the Imperial Period of Roman history (c.31 BCE–476 CE), far surpassing traditional tragedy and comedy; it was drawing huge crowds in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries CE, after the Western Empire had fallen. And at the centre of those crowds was the scandalous body of the mima, singing, dancing, and speaking on stage.

Bibliography Primary Texts Aeschylus. 2009. Aeschylus, I: Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bound. Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aeschylus. 2009. Aeschylus, II: Agamemnon, Libation-Bearers, Eumenides. Edited and translated by Alan H. Sommerstein. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alcman. 1991. Poetarum Melicorum Graecorum Fragmenta, Volume I; Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, edited by Malcolm Davies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristophanes. 2000. Aristophanes: Birds, Lysistrata, Women at the Thesmophoria. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristophanes. 2002. Aristophanes: Frogs, Assemblywomen, Wealth. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1995. Poetics. In Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Euripides. 1994. Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Euripides. 1999. Euripides, Volume IV: Trojan Women, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Ion. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2  Female Performers in the Greco-Roman World: An Introduction     19

Lysias. 1930. Lysias. Edited and translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Macrobius. 2011. Macrobius: Saturnalia, Volume I, Books 1–2. Edited and translated by Robert A. Kaster. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Menander. 1979. Menander, Volume I. Edited and translated by W. G. Arnott. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Menander. 2000. Menander, Volume III. Edited and translated by W. G. Arnott. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch. 1916. Plutarch: Lives, Volume III: Pericles and Fabius Maximus; Nicias and Crassus. Edited and translated by Bernadotte, Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sophocles.1994. Sophocles, Volume II: Antigone, Women of Trachis, Philoctetes, Oedipus at Colonus. Edited and translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Suetonius.1914. Suetonius: Volume I. Edited and translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Secondary Texts Beacham, Richard C. 1991. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burkert, Walter. 1985. Greek Religion. Translated by John Raffan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Calame, Claude. 2001. Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Role, and Social Functions. New and Revised Edition. Translated by Derek Collins and Janice Orion. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Csapo, Eric, and William J. Slater, eds. 1995. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dover, K. J. 1973. ‘Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behaviour’. Arethusa 6: 59–73. Duncan, Anne. 2005. ‘Gendered Interpretations: Two Fourth-Century Performances of Sophocles’ Electra ’. Helios 32, no. 1: 55–79. Edwards, Catharine. 1997. ‘Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome’. In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallet and Marilyn B. Skinner, 66–95. Princeton: Princeton University Press. French, Dorothea R. 1998. ‘Maintaining Boundaries: The Status of Actresses in Early Christian Society’. Vigiliae Christianae 52, no. 3: 293–318. Gardner, Jane F. 1986. Women in Roman Law and Society. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Gould, John. 1980. ‘Law, Custom, and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens’. Journal of Hellenic Studies 100: 38–59.

20     Anne Duncan

Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. 2003. Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Women of Ancient Greece. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Manuwald, Gesine. 2010. Roman Drama: A Reader. London: Duckworth. Maurizio, Lisa. 2001. ‘Performance, Hysteria, and Democratic Identities in the Anthesteria’. Helios 28, no. 1: 29–41. Obbink, D. 2014. ‘Two New Poems by Sappho’. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 189: 32–49. Panayotakis, Costas, ed. 2010. Decimus Laberius: The Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, Holt. 1993. ‘Sappho Schoolmistress’. Transactions of the American Philological Association 123: 309–51. Pickard-Cambridge, Sir Arthur. 1968. The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd edition. Revised by John Gould and D. M. Lewis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pomeroy, Sarah B. 1995. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, 2nd edition. New York: Schocken Books. Robertson, Noel. 1993. ‘Athens’ Festival of the New Wine’. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 95: 197–250. Roselli, David Kawalko. 2011. Theater of the People: Spectators and Society in Ancient Athens. Austin: University of Texas Press. Slater, Niall. 1990. ‘The Idea of the Actor’. In Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 385–96. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stehle, Eva. 1997. Performance and Gender in Ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press. West, Martin L. 2005. ‘The New Sappho’. ZPE 151: 1–9. Winkler, John J. 1990. ‘Double Consciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics’. In Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, edited by John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin, 162–87. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zeitlin, Froma I. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3 The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome Anne Duncan

The ‘serious’ genres of Roman drama, the genres for which literary scripts have survived, such as the fabula palliata of Plautus and Terence or the tragedies of Seneca, were written and performed by men. They have attracted the most attention from theatre scholars, understandably, for they offer the richest fields of evidence to work with. Women seem to lurk only around the edges of Roman theatrical performance, in the genre called mime (a spoken/sung genre not to be confused with its modern silent counterpart) and in vague ancient references to ‘dancing girls’ and ‘female musicians’. Because so little has survived in the way of mime scripts, and so much of mime was improvised rather than scripted in any case, it is easy to underestimate how popular this genre was and thus to underestimate the influence of women on the Roman stage. Because of problems of terminology, which may suggest problems of conceptual categorization for the Romans themselves, it is also easy to miss the presence of women in other performance genres, from pantomime, which was a sort of wordless interpretive dance, to singing and dancing in a chorus (Starks 2008, 115–18; Lada-Richards 2007, 29–33). Moreover, because of our own conceptual categorization of what constitutes ‘theatre’, it is easy to overlook women who performed in public in other

Anne Duncan (*)  Department of Classics and Religious Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_3

21

22     Anne Duncan

kinds of spectacular entertainment, such as gladiatorial combat. If we can grapple thoughtfully with these problems, however, we can see that women occupied a significant place in Roman theatrical performance.

History of Mime as a Genre Greek mime was brought to Southern Italy (nicknamed Magna Graecia, or ‘Greater Greece’) at some point in the Republican period of Roman history (c.500–31 BCE). There, it seems to have blended with indigenous Italian dramatic forms to create the genre we hear about in our literary sources (Panayotakis 2010, 16–32; Csapo and Slater 1995, 369–78; Beacham 1991, 129–39). Greek mime also had a long history in Hellenized Egypt, and the Romans continued to associate mime with Egypt as well as with Greece (Panayotakis 2010, 4–5; Csapo and Slater 1995, 370). From its very beginnings, mime was a heterogeneous genre, spanning the range of theatrical performance from fully-scripted plays with numerous actors, ­song-and-dance routines and special effects to improvised ‘street theatre’ scenarios featuring stock situations, to slapstick physical comedy, to acrobatic or erotic dance routines. Some varieties of mime have left no written traces at all and can only be identified by their representations in art (Dunbabin 2004). Mime was performed for large crowds—in theatres, in marketplaces— and in small private gatherings, such as at elite dinner parties. Most, but not all, mime seems to have had a comic orientation; most, but not all, mime seems to have been viewed as lowbrow, vulgar, crude and often raunchy (Panayotakis 2010, 7–16; Csapo and Slater 1995, 370–72). What set mime apart from all other Roman theatrical genres was twofold: mime actors performed without masks and mime employed female as well as male performers (Panayotakis 2010, 5). These two exceptional qualities were probably related; the lack of mask made it clear that mime actresses were actually women, not men playing female roles. As noted in the previous chapter of this volume, most Roman dramatic genres were performed as part of public ludi (‘games’) presented at annual religious festivals or other important public ceremonies. By 173 BCE, the annual festival of the goddess Flora, the Ludi Florales or Floralia, was officially given over mostly to mime performance (Ovid, Fasti V 327–28; Pliny, Natural History 18.69.286; Tsitsiridis 2011, 213; Wiseman 1999, 196; Fantham 1989, 155). An anecdote from Valerius Maximus (2.10.8) affirms the connection between mime, specifically mime actresses, and the Floralia.

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     23

Cato the Younger, who was serving as censor during the late Republican period, attended the Floralia but discovered that the rest of the audience would prefer it if his inhibiting presence were not there: eodem ludos Florales, quos Messius aedilis faciebat, spectante populus ut mimae nudarentur postulare erubuit. quod cum ex Favonio amicissimo sibi una sedente cognosset, discessit e theatro, ne praesentia sua spectaculi consuetudine impediret. In the same place the people were watching the Floralia, which Messius was producing as aedile, but they blushed to demand that the mime actresses strip. When [Cato] learned this from his good friend Favonius, who was sitting with him, he left the theatre so that his presence would not prevent the customary show.

This anecdote has often been cited as evidence that mime actresses usually performed striptease routines (Panayotakis 2010, 7; Wiseman 1999, 197; Barton 1993, 169 n.111; Beacham 1991, 129), although Webb (2008, 100–1) has noted that this anecdote, along with the story of Theodora’s routine with the geese in Procopius’ Secret History (see below) constitute our only specific mentions of stripping or nudity as a regular part of mime performance. What the anecdote does demonstrate is the popularity of mime by the second century BCE, well before its heyday in the imperial period (c.31 BCE–476 CE) and the prominence of mime actresses in the genre. Mime grew in popularity as the Roman Republic became an Empire. At some point in the earlier Empire, mime eclipsed traditional comedy in terms of popularity, although comedy continued to be written and performed. Mime was popular throughout the Roman Empire and both literary and archaeological evidence indicate that mime actors travelled the length of the Roman Empire to perform. Some of our clearest evidence for the popularity of mime comes from Christian writers of the Eastern Roman Empire in late antiquity who opposed the immorality of the mime but struggled with its popularity among their congregations (Leyerle 2001, 13–41; Barnes 1996, 176–77).

Mime Plots Mime had a reputation for raunchiness, both due to the sheer audacity of putting women onstage and due to some of its most popular plots, such as the ‘adultery mime’. The adultery mime was a plot with infinite variations,

24     Anne Duncan

but its basic beats were simple. It required only three characters: a wife, a husband and a lover. Webb (2008) has summarized the plot succinctly: ‘A clever young wife and her lover are surprised by her slow-witted husband’. Various hilarious situations ensue as the wife attempts to conceal the lover’s presence from her husband. Sometimes the lovers get away with their affair; sometimes the lovers are found out and punished. We know that the adultery mime was tremendously popular for centuries across the Greco-Roman world, no doubt due to its universal interest and relative cheapness to stage (only three actors and minimal props were required). Discussion of the adultery mime has tended to overshadow discussion of other known mime plots, however—possibly because it is alluded to in literary sources like Apuleius: Golden Ass 9.5–7, possibly because its simplicity feeds into older scholarly notions of the wholly improvisational nature of mime, and possibly because it generated so much moral outrage in some quarters in antiquity (Panayotakis 2010, 10–11; Webb 2008, 105–12; Reynolds 1946). There is an unreliable anecdote from a late ancient biography of the Emperor Elagabalus (Historia Augusta 25.4) that Elagabalus required mime actors to perform the adultery mime for him in private performances and actually have sex, rather than simulate it (Webb 2008, 107; Reynolds 1946, 79). Regardless of whether this anecdote is factually accurate, it represents what ancient critics of the mime, both pagan and Christian, feared: that actors representing lawless or immoral behaviour such as fornication outside of marriage would lead to actors (and spectators) actually committing lawless or immoral behaviour. Before Christianity became an influential force in the Roman Empire, there were ancient writers who criticized mime actresses for sexual impropriety with elite men; these writers often assumed that all mime actresses were also prostitutes. During the early Empire, Christian writers fulminated against the theatre in general and mime in particular as a tempting distraction from more wholesome pursuits, such as listening to sermons (Leyerle 2001, 24–28). After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Christian Emperors struggled to reconcile the theological writers’ denouncements of mime with popular expectations that the show would go on (Barnes 1996, 176–77 and passim; French 1998, 304–7). And the show did go on: in the sixth century CE, long after the official Christianization of the Roman Empire, the Empress Theodora, wife of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, was a former mime actress. As mentioned, the adultery mime was only one of a number of popular mime plots, though one that has garnered a great deal of attention. Many other mime plots were centred on exciting crisis moments, such as trials, shipwrecks and murderous intrigues. One important strand of mime

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     25

performance seems to have involved ridicule of public figures and ideas; thus, there were mimes travestying mythological scenes, Christian rituals and popular literature, as well as mimes mocking politicians and philosophical schools. A curiously durable mime plot in the Roman world was the ‘Laureolus mime’, which recounted the capture and bloody public execution of the notorious bandit leader Laureolus (Panayotakis 2010, 10–11; Webb 2008, 107–8, 121, 134; Coleman 1990, 64–65). Webb (2008) notes that three of the most popular mime plots—the adultery mime, the ‘travesty of Christian ritual mime’ and the Laureolus mime—featured ultimately frustrated attempts at insubordination: ‘All these plots are characterized by the failed attempts of subordinates – wives, unmarried men, outlaws – to outwit the people who hold power and authority over them’. These socially subordinate characters use improvisation, their wits and whatever resources happen to be available to get the upper hand temporarily, but permanent reversal of status is always out of reach. This theme of insubordination, she notes, mirrors the status of mime itself in the Roman world, always at the bottom of the prestige hierarchy for dramatic entertainment, but always drawing crowds (Webb 2008, 131).

Mime Scripts The few mime scripts that have survived antiquity serve as tiny windows onto a huge world. A precious piece of papyrus from second-century CE Roman Egypt (P.Oxy.413) contains parts of two different mime scripts, one on the front and a different one on the back, both with prominent roles for actresses (Andreassi 2001; Tsitsiridis 2011). Some fragments of mime scripts written during the first century BCE by the Roman Decimus Laberius have also survived (Panayotakis 2010). It used to be thought that mime was mostly or entirely improvised. This assumption was based partly on the lack of surviving scripts (except those by Laberius, who was dismissed as an elite amateur dabbling in theatrical composition rather than a theatre professional) and partly on the fact that mime was often performed outside theatres, even in marketplaces and on street corners. Circular assumptions about any genre that employed women being by definition ‘vulgar’ and therefore ‘subliterary’ also came into play. Some mime was undoubtedly improvised, and even scripted mime (like most drama) probably admitted some actors’ improvisations. This assumption about the improvisational nature of mime has been challenged recently, as more attention has been turned to the fragmentary remains of mime scripts.

26     Anne Duncan

These scripts reveal that some mimes, at least, were elaborate productions that must have required careful rehearsal and coordination of dialogue, music and effects, more similar to traditional comedies than have been previously realized (Tsitsiridis 2011; Panayotakis 2010, 1–16). The Egyptian papyrus with fragments of two different mime scripts provides a glimpse of the sorts of mimes that were performed in the Roman Empire. On the front side of the papyrus is part of a mime script that scholars have dubbed the ‘Charition mime’; on the back side is part of a mime script that has been dubbed the ‘jealous mistress mime’. Both are written in Koine Greek, the ‘common Greek’ of the Hellenistic and Roman eras of Greek history. Each is worth discussing in some detail. The Charition mime is set in India. It concerns a Greek woman, Charition, who is being held captive by the wicked king of India. What has survived is the escape scene, in which Charition has taken sanctuary in the temple of an Indian goddess and her brother has arrived on a ship with other Greeks, including a fool, in order to rescue her. The ship’s captain gets drunk, however, and her brother is captured, while the temple is surrounded by Indians. The fool farts so loudly that the noise and stench scatter the besiegers to a nearby river, enabling the brother to escape and rejoin his sister. The Amazon-like wives and daughters of the Indians return from a hunt and surround the temple and the fool farts again to disperse them. (These farts are clearly indicated in the stage directions.) The brother and sister argue over whether she should steal the temple offerings, with the sister saying it is not right to do so. The Indians reappear after bathing in the river and the brother orders the fool to give them unmixed wine. The fool gets drunk along with the king and the chorus of Indian women, who speak in invented ‘Indian’. They all dance, and the Indian king sings a solo (in perfect Greek). Then, the king and the chorus all pass out. Charition comes back out of the temple. Her brother orders the Greeks to set sail and all the Greeks escape (even the captain, who is still drunk). During their escape, Charition prays to the Indian goddess to save them from their pursuers. The plot is reminiscent of Euripides’ Helen and Iphigenia Among the Taurians, in that it concerns a Greek woman being held captive by a wicked foreign king who escapes with a party of rescuing Greeks by sea. The drunk scene recalls the Cyclops episode in Homer’s Odyssey and Euripides’ satyr play treatment of the Cyclops episode, Cyclops. Judging by the number of characters and other textual cues, the mime was a fairly elaborate production with a chorus of ‘Indian’ women and an ‘Indian’ king speaking an invented, nonsensical ‘Indian’ language, as well as music, sound effects (including the two farts from the fool) and many props. There are stage directions and

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     27

musical notations on the papyrus, which makes it likely to have been a script belonging to one of the performers, perhaps the archimima (lead mime actress) (Tsitsiridis 2011, 187–89, 198–206; Webb 2008, 108, 110–11, 129; Panayotakis 2006, 129; Andreassi 2001, 88–158). The ‘jealous mistress mime’, on the back of the papyrus, concerns a woman (played by the archimima, presumably) who desires her male slave and seeks revenge when he rebuffs her advances because he is in love with a female fellow slave. It is slightly more difficult to reconstruct the plot of this mime, because the papyrus contains only the lines of the mistress until the end of the page, when it gives the lines of all the characters except the mistress. There are no musical notations or stage directions, as on the Charition mime on the verso, but there are markings which might indicate that this, too, was a working script. Some scholars have argued that it was most likely the script used by the archimima, while other scholars have speculated that only the archimima ’s lines are given because the rest of the mime was heavily improvised (Tsitsiridis 2011, 191–212). Tsitsiridis’ summary of the plot is as follows: the jealous mistress is in love with her slave Aesopus, but he is in love with Apollonia, another slave in the household. The mistress orders a trusted slave to have the lovers taken into the forest, bound to trees and killed. Apollonia is discovered inside the house, and the mistress orders her slaves to find Aesopus and bring him back dead. When he is brought back, apparently but not actually dead, the mistress laments over his supposedly dead body; her slave Malacus comforts her and possibly becomes aroused, an assumption based on his (joke) name, since Μαλακός means ‘soft, effeminate, wanton’ (Tsitsiridis 2011, 190). The mistress tells Malacus that she has decided to poison first her elderly husband and then the entire household and to sell the property. When she sees the (supposed) dead body of Apollonia, she asks the parasite (a stock character who flatters the master in exchange for free meals) to summon her husband and prepares to poison the old man, but Spinther, a loyal slave, switches the poisoned wine with regular wine. When the parasite drinks what the mistress thinks is the poisoned wine, she panics and has him carried inside so that she can find out what happens to him before her husband does. The household slaves are all in on the plan to fool the mistress and Malacus, so when they come back onstage, the parasite tells her that her husband is dead, and she rejoices that her plan has worked; the slaves bring the (supposedly) dead body of the husband onstage, and someone (it is unclear who) mourns him, but the old master unexpectedly rises up and beats Malacus. When the master sees the (supposedly) dead bodies of Aesopus and Apollonia, the other slaves reassure him that they are not

28     Anne Duncan

really dead either, and presumably at some point they revive too (Tsitsiridis 2011, 189–97; see also Webb 2008, 109–12, 135; Panayotakis 2006, 129; Andreassi 2001, 88–158). The plot is one variant on the adultery mime, but it is also reminiscent of many literary accounts of slave-owning women who feel unrequited passion for their slaves (and usually come to a bad end), such as Herodas’s Mimiamb 5, the Life of Aesop and Book 10 of Apuleius’ Golden Ass. The complicated plot involving attempted murder and people who feign death evokes the almost soap-operatic plots of several Greek novels, including the Ephesian Tale of Xenophon and the Aethiopian Story of Heliodorus (Tsitsiridis 2011, 206–9). Both of these mimes feature leading female characters: as Webb (2008, 109) notes about the ‘jealous mistress’ mime, ‘There is plenty of action in the form of entrances, exits, and sudden revelations, but the main focus is on the character, emotions, and thoughts of the woman herself ’. Charition is a sympathetic heroine who displays morally sanctioned behaviour, such as refusing to despoil a temple. The jealous mistress, on the other hand, is more of a starring villain along the lines of Phaedra, Medea or Clytemnestra in tragedy. Unlike in tragedy, however, the jealous mistress uses obscene language to describe her sexuality. Two fragmentary lines of the jealous mistress mime are ‘… him so that he can fuck me’ ([αὐ]τὸν ἵνα με βινήσηι) and ‘my cunt seemed too dry for a man who grew up effeminate’ (ὁ ἐμός σοι κύσθ(ος) σκληρότερ(ος) ἐϕάνη τῶι γυναικε(ίωι) γέν(ει) συντεθραμμ(ένωι)) (Webb 2008, 109 and n.71). Other mime scripts employed obscene language as well, as we will see in the fragments of Laberius’ mimes in a moment. In addition to having lead female characters, the Charition mime calls for a chorus of Indian women who sing, possibly dance, and act, while the ‘jealous mistress’ mime calls for the role of Apollonia, the slave Aesopus’ love interest (although it is unclear whether she has any speaking lines). Taken together, the evidence from this one piece of papyrus from Roman Egypt tells us a great deal about the status of women on stage in the second century CE: they could have starring roles as either heroines or villains; they might sing and dance as well as act; they might play characters whose sexuality was front and centre; and some mime plays might feature many women onstage at once. Other fragments of mime scripts and titles of known mimes give us more glimpses of a flourishing theatrical genre and of the central role that female performers played in it. The titles of many of Decimus Laberius’ mimes, for example, written for performance in Rome in the first century BCE, suggest that they featured female lead roles or that women were at least highly

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     29

important to the story: The Maiden, The Seamstress, The Weavers, The Sisters, The Woman of Cythera, The Etruscan Woman, The Alexandrian Woman, Anna Perenna (Panayotakis 2006, 125–26; Panayotakis 2010). The plural titles may suggest that there were female choruses or dancers involved in the productions. The extant fragments of some of these plays suggest plots focused on relationships and female sexuality; one fragment of The Seamstress (Belonistria ), for example, states ‘our mistress is passionately in love with her stepson’ (‘domina nostra privignum suum / amat efflictim’) (Panayotakis 2010, 142–46). This quotation, again, evokes the adultery mime. Many other mimes by Laberius seem to have employed female characters and plots concerning female sexuality as well, whether they have titles suggesting male leads, such as The Fireman (Centonarius ), The Colourer (Colorator ) and The Salt-Dealer (Salinator ), or gender-neutral titles, such as The Festival at the Crossroads (Compitalia ) and Lake Avernus (Lacus Avernus ). Some fragments from these plays have explicit language about sex with women. For example, a female character in The Fireman asks, ‘Why do you mount so / high up? Did you want to tear my pussy?’ (‘quare tam arduum / ascendas, an concupisti eudium scindere?’) (Panayotakis 2010, 179–84). A male character in The Colourer relates, ‘and so, when I was roasted over slow embers, / as soon as I came to be under the woman’s teeth, she bit me twice, three times’ (‘itaque leni pruna coctus / simul sub dentes mulieris veni, bis, ter memordit’) (Panayotakis 2010, 195–202). Someone in Lake Avernus urges, ‘Pound the whore in heat along with the fucked-out old faggot’ (‘scinde una exoleto patienti catulientem lupam’) (Panayotakis 2010, 274–88). In fact, one reason we have as many fragments of Laberius’ mimes as we do is that later ancient grammarians were interested in his use of vulgar ‘street’ language and in his neologisms, both of which seem to have often been used in his mimes in scenes dealing with women’s sexuality, and thus they quoted lines from his mimes in their grammatical treatises (Aulus Gellius 11.15.1, 16.7; Panayotakis 2006, 126; 2010, 58). Laberius’ Anna Perenna may have concerned a story from Roman mythology about the goddess Anna Perenna, whose annual festival day was March 15 (the Ides of March, as it happens). The single fragment that remains of this play is ‘give me a kiss on the lips’ (conlabella osculum ) (Panayotakis 2010, 25–26). Based on this fragment and on a passage about the goddess and her festival in Ovid’s poem on the Roman calendar (Fasti 3.523–696, 697–710), Wiseman (1998, 60–74) has argued that the plot of Laberius’ mime was a comic story about the god Mars asking the newly minted goddess Anna to arrange an erotic rendezvous for him with the goddess Minerva, unbeknownst to his consort, the goddess Venus; Anna promised

30     Anne Duncan

Minerva to Mars, but when he lifted the veil of the goddess at the meeting, it was the elderly Anna underneath the veil, who laughed at him, as did Venus. Wiseman further argues that the festival of Anna Perenna involved young men picnicking with mime actresses outside the city walls of Rome, lying under makeshift tents, drinking and making love, then returning to the city singing ‘songs from the theatre’, i.e. the mime. Wiseman’s reconstruction of Laberius’ mime Anna Perenna is speculative, but draws together many Roman cultural associations between mime, festival days, female sexuality and performance. Mime scripts give us a rare glimpse into female theatrical roles that were played by women. Given that mime made use of improvisation, it is tempting to assume that mime actresses may have had a hand in writing or developing some of these scripts. However, we should be cautious about looking for ‘women’s voices’ in mime scripts because, at least from the fragments that remain, roles for women seem to fall into two basic categories: respectable matrons or stereotypically drunk, aggressive whores (Panayotakis 2006, 124–25; 2010, 6–7).

Historical Mime Actresses Accounts of particular mimae in our literary sources provide different views of the historical women who performed in this genre. The speeches and letters of Cicero, a contemporary of Laberius, refer to specific historical actresses in several different contexts, usually in a tone of moralizing disapproval. Historians, biographers and scientific writers like Plutarch (Greek, second century CE), Pliny the Younger (Roman, first-second century CE) and Josephus (from Roman Judaea, first century CE) also refer to specific historical actresses. Poets like Horace (Roman, first century BCE), Juvenal (Roman, first-second century CE) and Martial (from Roman Spain, first century CE) make references in their poetry to historical actresses, again, usually in a tone of moralizing disapproval. Literary authors like Apuleius (from Roman North Africa, second century CE) describe stage performances involving actresses and female dancers which are fictional, but most likely based on contemporary theatrical practice. Famously (or infamously) Procopius’ Secret History purports to be a tell-all memoir about the shocking crimes committed by the sixth-century CE Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian and his wife, the Empress Theodora; in it, Procopius goes into lurid detail about Theodora’s previous career as a mime actress and (alleged) prostitute. There are biographies of saints from

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     31

late antiquity that describe actresses converting to Christianity and living the rest of their lives disguised as male Christians. John of Ephesus’ Lives of Eastern Saints describes a man and woman who are secretly holy people in a spiritual (i.e. chaste) marriage disguised by day as mimes (Webb 2008, 54, 145; French 1998, 317–18). All these sources present challenges of interpretation, including authorial bias, poetic licence and questionable historical accuracy, but all are incredibly valuable evidence for the ongoing activity of women in Roman theatrical practice. Speaking of challenges of interpretation, it is important to note that many mime actresses used stage names. On the one hand, these stage names give us additional information about the culture of mime performance. For example, many mime actresses’ stage names evoke relevant deities, such as Cytheris (‘girl from Cythera’, a cult title of Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, who was supposedly born on the island of Cythera) or Dionysia (named for Dionysus, the god of theatre). Others evoke the stage, such as Thymele (‘Stage’) (Martial, Epigrams 1.4.5; Juvenal 1.30–36, 6.66, 8.197; Panayotakis 2006, 134) or Emphasis (‘Appearance’) (CIL i2 1359; Garton 1964). Still others suggest some characteristic about the mima herself, such as Helladia (‘Greek girl’). On the other hand, stage names create yet another barrier to learning about the lives of real, historical women who performed in ancient Rome. In fact, stage names may have been adopted by mimae in order to provide a slight distancing from their roles. There were several famous mime actresses in the last few decades of the Roman Republic, and we hear about most of them because of their alleged relationships with leading politicians during this tumultuous period. Our sources for these women are biographies of their lovers, or political speeches about their lovers, and these sources tend to be hostile to the women, who are depicted as shameless whores and symbols of the decadence of the age. Yet if we read between the lines, we can learn a great deal about the performance culture of the late Republic and about the prominent role that mime actresses played in it, as well as the very clear connections between the d­ emimonde of mime and the elite world of politics. One of the most famous Roman mime actresses was Volumnia Cytheris. Her stage name was Cytheris. Cicero says that her full name was Volumnia Cytheris, which has been taken to indicate that she was the slave or freedwoman of Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus, a wealthy equestrian (Cicero, Philippics 2.58; Panayotakis 2006, 133). She was connected romantically with the politician Mark Antony. Most of our information about her comes from Plutarch’s Life of Antony and from the letters of Cicero, which are consistently derogatory about both Antony (one of Cicero’s

32     Anne Duncan

bitterest political enemies) and Cytheris. For example, Cicero writes to a friend (Letters to Friends 9.26-1–2) that he attended a dinner party given by Publius Volumnius Eutrapelus in 46 BCE and was shocked to find that Volumnia Cytheris, a mima (mime actress), was also a guest. In other letters (Letters to Atticus 10.10.5, 10.16.5, 15.22; Philippics 20, 2.58, 2.61–62, 2.69, 2.77; Webb 2008, 3; Panayotakis 2006, 132–34; Wiseman 1998, 71), Cicero complains that Cytheris had the audacity to travel around Rome in an ornate litter with a huge entourage. In these letters, he calls her a mimula (a ‘little mime actress’) and Antony Cytherius (‘Mr. Cytheris’) as ways to denigrate each of them. Plutarch, writing centuries after Cicero, repeats the story about Cytheris’ litter (Antony 9.7–8), adding that Antony gave his actress girlfriend a litter and entourage that was equally as magnificent as the one he provided to his own mother—a clear sign, to Plutarch, of Antony’s misplaced priorities and values (McGinn 1998). Cytheris may have been romantically involved with the poet Cornelius Gallus as well. There are late ancient sources that claim that she was the inspiration for the character of Lycoris in Gallus’ love poetry, to whom he addressed many of his poems, and even that she may have performed some of Virgil’s Eclogues as mimes, since they refer to a Lycoris (Höschele 2013, 48–54; Panayotakis 2008, 191–94; Panayotakis 2010, 133; Traina 2001). If we discount Cicero’s clear distaste for uppity theatrical performers and the garbled suggestions of late grammarians, what we are left with is a clear sense that Cytheris moved in elite circles, despite her status as infamis, a term meaning ‘without honour’ (literally ‘unspeakable’) applied to the social category that embraced both actresses and prostitutes [for a fuller account of the implications of this status, see p. 17, above, in Chapter 2]. She attended dinner parties where she mingled with ‘respectable’ people and consorted with powerful, famous men. She may have been famous for her wit as well (Cicero, Letters to Atticus 10.16.5). Tertia was another mime actress whom we know about through Cicero’s invective. She was from Sicily, the daughter of a mime actor named Isidorus, who was himself from Rhodes. She became the girlfriend of Gaius Verres, the provincial governor of Sicily from 73 to 70 BCE. Cicero made his early reputation as a forensic orator by successfully prosecuting Verres for massive corruption during his time as governor in a pair of blistering speeches known as the Verrine Orations, delivered in 70 BCE. In one of these speeches (Second Oration Against Verres 5.31), Cicero brings up Verres’ shameless public relationship with Tertia, claiming that Verres neglected his official duties in favour of openly conducting a relationship with Tertia and

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     33

that Verres offended the elite women in his social circle by forcing them to share public space with Tertia: huc Tertia illa perducta per dolum atque insidias ab Rhodio tibicine maximas in istius castris effecisse dicitur turbas, cum indigne pateretur uxor Cleomenis Syracusani, nobilis mulier, itemque uxor Aeschrionis, honesto loco nata, in conventum suum mimi Isidori filiam venisse. That Tertia, having been led on by a trick and by the greatest plots away from her Rhodian flute-player, is said to have created a great disturbance in that camp, as the wife of Cleomenes the Syracusan, a woman of noble birth, and the wife of Aeschrio, born to high rank, endured it with outrage that the daughter of Isidorus the mime had come into their company.

It is possible that Cicero exaggerated, distorted or even invented details of this account to scandalize his audience further; what matters is that his allegations against Verres’ conduct with Tertia revolve around conducting their relationship openly and thrusting her into a social position far above that which Cicero believes her entitled to (Cicero, Second Oration Against Verres 3.78, 5.40; Panayotakis 2006, 134; Wiseman 1998, 71; Garton 1964, 239). Verres’ crimes were against the social hierarchy. Cicero was capable of being complimentary towards mime actresses when they were in what he believed to be their rightful place—performing for the public. In a letter from 54 BCE, he wrote to his friend Atticus (4.15.6) about his recent attendance at a series of theatrical performances: ‘Now you ask about Arbuscula; she had a great success’ (‘quaeris nunc de Arbuscula; valde placuit’). Arbuscula, whose stage name means ‘sapling’ or ‘shrub’ (perhaps a reference to her having short stature), was another famous mime actress of the late Republican period and, like Cytheris, she may have been known as a wit. Horace comments in one of his poems (Satires 1.10.76–77) that ‘it is enough for me to please an equestrian, just as the bold / Arbuscula said, having been hissed by the despicable crowd’ (‘nam satis est equitem mihi plaudere, ut audax, / contemptis aliis, explosa Arbuscula dixit’). Horace suggests that his goal in writing poetry is to please his patron, the equestrian Maecenas, rather than the general public, just as ‘the bold Arbuscula’ quipped that she aimed to please the wealthier theatregoers in her performance when she was being booed by the general public (Panayotakis 2006, 132). ‘Bold’ (audax ) is a loaded word to apply to a woman, as it connotes shamelessness, specifically the shamelessness of a prostitute; a respectable woman would never be described as ‘bold’. Thus, Horace is being ­self-deprecating by comparing himself to a mime actress (whom he implies

34     Anne Duncan

is a prostitute as well), but also bold in appealing directly to his patron. His supposedly self-deprecating comparison reveals the connections mime actresses had with the governing elite. Origo was a contemporary of Volumnia Cytheris and Arbuscula. Her stage name means ‘source, origin’. In the same poem in which he compares himself to Arbuscula (Satires 1.2.55–59), Horace criticizes men who justify their tawdry affairs with prostitutes by saying they do not have affairs with respectable married women, ‘as Marsaeus did once, that lover of Origo, / who gave his patrimony, his seat, and his household gods to a mima ’ (‘ut quondam Marsaeus, amator Originis ille, / qui patrium mimae donat fundumque laremque’). Horace suggests that Marsaeus’ feeble self-justification deliberately ignored the fact that it was more scandalous to associate with actresses than with members of his own social class (Panayotakis 2006, 134). If Horace’s assertion that Marsaeus gave Origo his ancestral estate contains any truth, and is not simply poetic invention, it is another piece of evidence that the world of the moneyed elite and the world of infamis theatre performers were not nearly as walled off from each other in reality as in ideology. Furthermore, if it is true that Marsaeus gave Origo his estate, he would not be the only member of the Roman elite from this time to give a mime actress a significant parcel of desirable land, at least according to Cicero. In his series of speeches denouncing Antony known as the Philippics, written in 44–43 BCE in the immediate aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination, Cicero alleged that Antony settled numerous actors and actresses on estates in Campania, south of Rome (Philippics 2.67, 2.101, 8.26, 10.22, 13.24; Panayotakis 2006, 134). This may have been simple character assassination on Cicero’s part; in Philippic 13.24, he accuses Antony of having wasted his young manhood ‘burying your mind and your chin in the laps of actresses’ (‘cum in gremiis mimarum mentum mentemque deponeres’), playing on Roman class snobbery and fears of elite young men squandering their inheritance and potential. (This insult also plays on Roman disgust with cunnilingus, which was seen as supremely degrading for men to perform (Parker 1997)). It may be, however, that Cicero was using Antony’s real relationships with actors and actresses to impugn his character and that part of Antony’s real relationship with at least some actors and actresses involved giving them extremely generous gifts. He was known to be liberal (or profligate, as moralizing sources would say) with money and gifts (Plutarch, Antony 4.4, 21.2, 28.2–7, 36.2, 56.3–5, 58.5, 67.6). Elite men continued to have extramarital relationships with mime actresses in the imperial period of Roman history, and while the social

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     35

stigma around acting persisted in Roman culture, occasionally an actress could be singled out for praise instead of for reproach—again, as long as she knew her place. Such was the case with Quintilia, the mime actress who was a renowned beauty during the reign of Caligula. She was romantically connected to a senior senator named Pompedius. Pompedius’ political rival Timidius claimed that Pompedius ‘had used indecent reproaches against him’ (ὡς λοιδορίᾳ χρησάμενον, Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19.33) and urged Caligula to have Quintilia tortured to prove it. It was both legal and customary to obtain forensic evidence from slaves about their masters under torture, although it is unclear from our sources whether Quintilia was a slave. Quintilia was tortured brutally, but never gave incriminating evidence against Pompedius. In one version of the story, Quintilia deliberately stepped on the foot of a friendly witness during her torture, which he took to be a signal from her that she intended to endure the torture without revealing anything. When she was brought, mangled, into Caligula’s presence, he so pitied her suffering that he acquitted her and Pompedius and gave her 800,000 sesterces for her trouble (Wiseman 1998, 71). Both of our sources for this story about Quintilia, Josephus (Jewish Antiquities 19.32–6) and Suetonius (Gaius 16.4), praise her for her fortitude, but neither suggests that it was outrageous to have her tortured in the first place; the prejudice against theatre personnel as infamis was still strong, and their bodies still subject to state-sponsored violence. Mime only increased in popularity as the centuries went on and mime actresses continued to entertain and scandalize the public. Even as the Roman Empire decriminalized, then embraced, then officially converted to Christianity, mime continued to draw huge crowds. The Empress Theodora, who ruled the Eastern Roman Empire in the sixth century CE with her husband, the Emperor Justinian, had a career as a mime actress before she met Justinian. Most of what we know about Theodora’s mime career comes from an unreliable but compulsively readable tell-all memoir called The Secret History by Procopius, who served as an advisor to Justinian’s chief general Belisarius. In The Secret History, Procopius claims that he was never able to reveal the truth of Justinian and Theodora’s wickedness in his official history of the regime for fear of retaliation and has written this memoir as a correction of the official record for posterity. Scholars take Procopius’ accusations with several large grains of salt, and yet it is generally accepted that he did not entirely fabricate his account (Potter 2015, 25–26, 39–40). Procopius says that Theodora was the daughter of a man who worked as a bear-wrangler for one of the chariot racing teams that raced and put on other sorts of spectacles in the Hippodrome in Constantinople

36     Anne Duncan

(Secret History 9.1–3). Chariot racing and acting were both infamis professions, and the laws that made them infamis also stigmatized the children of these performers, which meant in practice that these were family businesses, because children growing up in these families had little to no legal access to other careers (Potter 2015, 9–10). When she was a child, Procopius alleges, Theodora began to work as a prostitute. When she entered her teens, Theodora began to perform as a mime actress. Procopius claims that one of Theodora’s regular mime routines involved geese: she would appear dressed only in a bra and underpants, lie down in front of the audience and allow attendants to scatter barley on her crotch, which the geese would then peck off of her body (Secret History 9.20–23). Procopius is clearly trying to scandalize his readers, which should make us somewhat suspicious about accepting this claim at face value (Potter 2015, 27; Webb 2008, 5–6). However, there is other possible evidence for mime routines involving actresses engaging in erotic behaviour with animals; West (2010) discusses a third-century CE papyrus fragment from Egypt that, he argues, comes from a mime routine involving a mime actress having sex (real or simulated) with a donkey (real or represented by an actor, a prop or the power of suggestion). Thus, it is possible Procopius has not entirely invented Theodora’s routine with the geese. More obviously fictional is Procopius’ claim that Theodora had demonic familiars (Secret History 12.28; Webb 2008, 4–6). Theodora’s career as member of the elite is no less intriguing than her earlier career as an actress. In a way, her story is reminiscent of the late Republican-era actresses like Volumnia Cytheris, Tertia or Origo, who were the sexual partners of powerful elite men like Antony, Gallus, Verres or Marsaeus. Yet Theodora left the acting profession when she became the concubine of a wealthy politician, Hecebolus, who was a provincial governor (Secret History 9.27; Potter 2015, 45–49). After that relationship ended, she became the concubine of the Emperor Justinian himself, and unlike his Republican predecessors, he decided to marry his actress girlfriend, permanently changing her status, rather than keeping her legally distinct from him. In order for Justinian to marry Theodora, he had to pass a law nullifying the long-standing law against members of the elite marrying persons who were infamis. Justinian passed this law sometime in 521–22 CE and married Theodora in 524 (Potter 2015, 39; French 1998, 315). The fact that Justinian was willing to risk so much political capital by marrying Theodora might suggest that the old prejudices equating mime actresses with whores and theatre personnel in general with slaves were not felt as keenly, but the fact that he had to change the law to do so and the sheer existence of the Secret History suggest that the old prejudices were in full effect. There is some

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     37

evidence that after she became Empress, Theodora established a sort of halfway house or women’s shelter for women leaving the acting profession; that the need for this sort of residence existed at all is due to laws passed after the Empire became Christian that stigmatized women even after they ceased working as actresses (Potter 2015, 28, 47–48, 180–82). Some late Christian sources describe mime actresses whose stories sound literally unbelievable, such as Pelagia. Pelagia was supposedly a famous mime actress and prostitute in fifth-century Antioch. One day, she was riding about the city on a donkey, dressed in sumptuous bejewelled clothes and attended by slaves wearing golden collars, when she passed by the church where the Bishop of Antioch was preaching. She heard his words, repented of her life and converted to Christianity—and spent the rest of her life dressed as a man, living in a cell as a holy hermit called Pelagius. After her death, people were amazed to learn her real gender and her former occupation. Her life story is presented as a miracle, and it conforms to standard outlines of other miraculous conversion stories, as well as to stereotypes about mime actresses being whores in need of redemption. Indeed, some scholars believe Pelagia to be a fictional creation of Christian propagandists (Webb 2008, 210–14; French 1998, 310–12), although other scholars believe her to have been a historical person whose story was most probably embellished (Starks 2008, 121; Lada-Richards 2007, 30). Even the textual tradition for Pelagia’s story is vexed, as it appears in a text about an otherwise unknown Bishop Nonnos by ‘James the Deacon’, ‘Jacob’ or ‘Jacob the Deacon’ (Potter 2015, 46, 233 n.11; Webb 2008, 273 n.46; French 1998, 310). To summarize so far: literary texts tell us a great deal about elite and popular attitudes toward mime and mime actresses, and some of them tell us possibly historically accurate details about particular mime actresses. While the majority of mimae were assumed to be prostitutes, the most successful, popular mime actresses were seen as glamorous seductresses and there was a great deal of anxiety around their associations with elite men.

Female Performers in Inscriptions Inscriptions and other material artefacts provide valuable information about mime actresses as well. Most of our inscriptional evidence about female performers in the Roman world consists of epitaphs from tombstones. Epitaphs are an important corrective for the evidence from literary sources, discussed above, because they present information about actresses that literary sources

38     Anne Duncan

often leave out (age, family of origin, place of death), and they present themselves as speaking in the deceased’s voice. It is not the case, of course, that every epitaph was composed by the deceased ahead of her death; many epitaphs make clear who commissioned the marker (often a parent) and thus the inscription. Nevertheless, epitaphs provide a counterweight for the slut-shaming invective of Cicero or Procopius, for example, or the poetic vagueness of Horace, or the propagandistic agenda of the Christian conversion accounts. Epitaphs are also helpful in providing a fuller picture of dramatic activity in the ancient world than literary sources alone would give us, since literary authors tend to discuss only the most famous actresses of their day, while the accidents of inscriptional preservation are more random; we have epitaphs of famous, successful actresses, and epitaphs of girls as young as twelve who were just starting their careers. Eucharis, whose stage name means ‘charming, gracious’, was just beginning her career as a mime actress when she died in her 14th year sometime during the middle of the first century BCE. Her epitaph is one of the longer surviving ones for a mime actor and is written in iambic senarii, a metre associated with Roman comedy (CIL 6.10096; Papini 2017, 260–62): Eucharis Liciniae docta erodita omnes artes virgo vixit an XIIII heus oculo errante quei aspicis leti domus morare gressum et titulum nostrum perlege amor parentis quem dedit natae suae ubei se reliquiae conlocarent corporis heic viridis aetas cum floreret artibus crescent et aevo gloriam conscenderet properavit hora tristis fatalis mea et denegavit ultra veitae spiritum docta erodita paene musarum manu quae modo nobilium ludos decoravi choro et Graeca in scaenica prima populo apparui en hoc in tumulo cinerem nostri corporis infistae parcae deposierunt carmine stadium patronae cura amor laudes decus silent ambusto corpore et leto tacent reliqui fletum nata genitori meo et antecessi genita post leti diem bis hic septeni mecum natales dies tenebris tenentur ditis aeterna domu rogo ut discedens terram mihi dicas levem

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     39

Eucharis Liciniae Educated and trained in all the arts; a girl who lived 14 years You there, as you look upon the house of death with a wandering eye, slow your step and carefully read our inscription which a father’s love gave to his daughter where the remains of her body are buried. Just as my young life was blossoming and my skills were growing and in time was ascending to glory, the mournful ordained hour rushed upon me and denied me any further breath of life. I was educated and trained almost as if by the hand of the Muses. I adorned the games of the nobles in a chorus, and I first appeared before the people in a Greek play. But now in this tomb the hostile Fates have placed the ashes of my body along with a poem. Devotion to a female patron, effort, love, praise, beauty are silenced by my burned body and stilled by my death. A daughter, I left behind weeping for my father, and I preceded him in the day of my death, although born after him. Now my fourteenth birthday is observed here in the shadows, in the ageless house of Death. I ask that upon departing you tell the earth to lie lightly upon me.

Some of the information in the epitaph is utterly conventional, such as the opening and closing addresses to the reader. Much of it, however, is specific to the deceased, and important for our purposes: Eucharis was ‘educated and trained’, she danced, she appeared before festivals of nobles, and she performed in a Greek play for common people. Starks (2008 120, 128 n.56) has used the reference to appearing ‘in a chorus’ (choro ) to argue that Eucharis was a pantomime actress, rather than a mime actress, since pantomime was a form of wordless interpretive dance set to music. Most scholars, however, remain convinced that pantomime excluded women. We will revisit this issue below. Ecloga’s epitaph (CIL 6.10110) is short but evocative: Eclogae regis Iubae mimae quae v[ixit] a[nnos] XVIII

40     Anne Duncan

Ecloga mime actress of King Juba who lived 18 years

‘King Juba’ is Juba II of Mauretania who ruled from 25 BCE to 23 CE, which dates this tombstone and Ecloga’s brief life to the late first century BCE or early first century CE. Ecloga seems to have been a mima in a mime troupe owned (if they were slaves) or hired (if they were free) by Juba. Her stage name evokes the genre of short lyric poetry that Virgil made famous with his Eclogues, and there are some late sources which claim that Virgil’s Eclogues were performed onstage, but no clear connection between this Ecloga and Virgil has been established (Höschele 2013, 40; Panayotakis 2006, 134). Her short career at the court of a client king of Rome in North Africa suggests that the popularity of mime was already spreading throughout the Roman world by the turn of the millennium. Bassilla, who died in the third century CE, seems to have embodied the multi-national, multifarious genre of mime. Her name evokes the Greek word βασίλισσα (or βασίλιννα), ‘queen’. Her epitaph (IG 14.2342), which was written in Homeric-style Greek and commissioned by her fellow (male) mime Herakleides, describes her as having been famous ‘in many towns and cities’ (πολλοῖς δήμοισι … πολλαῖς δὲ πόλεσσι) for ‘mimes, then in choruses’ (ἐν μείμοις, εἶτα χοροῖσι). Bassilla was buried in Aquileia (far n ­ orth-east Italy), after a career spent travelling the Roman world. Bassilla’s epitaph demonstrates the blurriness of genre boundaries around mime: Starks (2008, 121 n.38) argues that the epitaph’s use of the term choroisi, ‘dances’ or ‘songs’ (literally ‘choruses’), indicates that she was fundamentally more of a pantomime rather than a mime, while Webb (2002, 289) argues that she performed in both mime and pantomime, either concurrently or sequentially (‘in mimes, then (‘eita ’) in dances/songs’). Prauscello (2004) argues that the next line ‘she died often onstage, but not in that way’ (πολλάκις ἐν θυμέλαις, ἀλλ’ οὐχ οὕτω δὲ θανούσῃ)—a topos in epitaphs for stage performers—suggests that she frequently played death scenes on stage. This does not rule out mime or pantomime as her principal genre (if, indeed, she had one principal genre). Perhaps it is best to summarize her career as a versatile one. In addition to epitaphs, other sorts of inscriptions record civic activity by associations of female performers. Fountoulakis (2000) discusses two Sicilian inscriptions from the first century BCE that were set up by the ‘Association of Artists of Merry Aphrodite’ (τῆς συνόδου τῶν περὶ τὴν

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     41

ἱλαρὰν Ἀϕροδίτην) as decrees of proxenia (mutually beneficial diplomatic and business relations) with Roman benefactors. He argues that the adjective hilara in the association’s title, a common epithet referring to ‘cheerful’ or ‘merry’ Aphrodite, indicates that this was a guild of mimes and pantomimes who performed erotic skits. Along with many other scholars, he argues that the drive to join together in guilds which we see among the ­lower-status performers, such as mimes and pantomimes, was a response to the increased respect and perks accorded to tragic and comic actors belonging to the original actors’ union, the Artists of Dionysus, which was formed by the early third century BCE (Traina 2001, 90). Thus, these inscriptions suggest an organized group of mime actors in Sicily who were trying to formalize and elevate their status, while at the same time not shying away from what distinguished their performances, which happened under the aegis of Aphrodite rather than Dionysus.

Pantomimes and Other Female Stage Performers In addition to performing in mime, women performed in other sorts of staged events in the Roman world. They performed as solo pantomime dancers. They performed in the choruses of mime performances, which in this context we might think of as being backing singers and/or dancers. They performed as musicians. Sometimes they performed in more than one role, or moved from one genre to another over the course of their careers. Because of the expansiveness of the genre of mime, and because the terminology for these different roles varied from region to region and over time, many of these female performers are often lumped in with mimae by scholars. We have already seen this in the case of Bassilla above, who performed in mimes and in choruses. Space does not permit an exhaustive catalogue of all these terms, or the women associated with them; a few observations on some of the varieties of performers will have to suffice. Three female performers are called saltatrices ‘(female) dancers’, in their epitaphs. All three epitaphs are in Latin and date to the imperial era of Roman history (Starks 2008, 117). Terentia died when she was 22 (CIL 6.10144); Thyas died when she was 14 (CIL 8.12925); Julia Nemesis died when she was 9 (CIL 6.10143). We also hear of a saltatrix in our literary sources: Dionysia was active from perhaps 76–62 BCE as a gesticularia and satatricula, terms that suggest a focus on her dancing but leave unclear whether she should be considered more of a mime or a pantomime

42     Anne Duncan

(Starks 2008, 117–18; Panayotakis 2006, 130 n.19; Wiseman 1998, 71). What is clear is that she was renowned for her fluid gestures: Hortensius, a famous orator of the first century BCE, acquired the nickname ‘Dionysia’ because the extent to which he used hand gestures to emphasize his speeches reminded his opponents of stage actors, and because he wore fancy clothes that his enemies perceived to be effeminate (Aulus Gellius, Athenian Nights 1.5; Graf 1991, 48; Csapo and Slater 1995, 285). Dionysia herself was apparently quite successful; in a speech on behalf of the comic actor Roscius in a lawsuit over recompense for a deceased slave, Cicero (In Defence of Roscius the Comedian 23) makes the argument that Roscius could have easily earned 300,000 sesterces for his own acting, given that the mima Dionysia made 200,000 sesterces. This argument taps into Roman prejudices about both male superiority and the relative prestige of traditional drama over mime to make its point, but it reveals incidentally that Dionysia made a great deal of money. Her name was a stage name, of course, a reference to Dionysus, the Greek god of theatre as well as wine. We know also of three female performers called emboliaria ‘(female) performers of embolia ’. Embolia were entr’acte performances, often musical. Pliny (Natural History 7.158) mentions Galeria Copiola as an emboliaria who was brought out of retirement when she was approximately 100 years old to perform onstage in 9 CE at games in honour of Augustus (Starks 2008, 120, 123–24; Panayotakis 2006, 134; Webb 2002, 286–87). Sophe Theorobathylliana is named in an inscription on a bone tablet found in Rome as ‘chief emboliaria ’ (arbitrix imboliarum ) (CIL 6.10128). Her stage name was Sophe, ‘Wise’, but Theorobathylliana does not seem to be a stage name or a standard family name; it is probably some sort of name which indicated membership in a professional group of performers connected to someone named Theoros, Bathyllus (the name of a famous early pantomime dancer) or some combination of these two names. It is completely unclear whether this was a name Sophe took for herself, had applied to her by her employer or owner or was given as a nickname by a fan (Starks 2008, 125– 27). We know of another emboliaria from her epitaph, which reads (CIL 6.10127; Papini 2017, 262–63): Phoebe Vocontia emboliaria artis omnium erodita hunc fatus suus pressit vixit annis XII

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     43

Phoebe Vocontia Performer of embolia Trained in all the arts Her own fate weighed her down She lived 12 years

The name Phoebe evokes Phoebus Apollo, god of music and poetry. Phoebe’s young age suggests the possibility that young apprentice mimes, as it were, began with smaller parts such as embolia before ‘graduating’ to speaking roles (Starks 2008, 128–30). In addition to ‘dancers’ and ‘performers of embolia ’, some women were described explicitly as pantomimes, despite the fact that pantomime was notionally an all-male genre of performance. An ancient commentator on the Roman poet Juvenal notes that pantomimes could be female (Juvenal, Satires 2.162; Leyerle 2001, 23). Starks (2008 118–22, 138–45) discusses two epitaphs at length that he argues are epitaphs of female pantomimes. One is for a pantomime named Hellas (‘Greece’), which he argues was a woman’s name. The other (broken) epitaph is for a woman whom scholars agree must have been a pantomime, based on the lines ‘I danced the roles of kind goddesses, I loved song, / and I was deservedly well-known for my facial expressions which spoke’ (divas placidas saltavi, carmen amavi, / atque ad vocales vultus fui cognita digne ). Yet even this identification of a woman with the genre of pantomime is slightly confounded by the lack of the term pantomima and by the mention that the performer ‘loved song’, since pantomimes did not sing (but their accompanists could). An ivory comb from the fifth or sixth century CE, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris, has a carving below the teeth of the comb that depicts three figures: a seated male musician on the left, a female pantomime dancer standing in the middle and a female chorus member standing on the right. (The middle figure has been identified as a pantomime dancer rather than a mima because her mouth is closed, suggesting the conventional iconography of the pantomime mask, which had no mouth-hole.) Above and below this tableau, the comb is inscribed in Greek letters, and gives the stage name of the pantomime dancer as Helladia (probably ‘girl from Hellas’, i.e. Greece). It is possible that the comb was a gift to Helladia from a fan. It is also possible, although not definite by any means, that this Helladia is the same Helladia described as a famous pantomime in several epigrams from the sixth century; in an intriguing and rare bit of cross-gender casting, she apparently danced the role of Hector (Webb 2008, 42, 48, 62–63, 146, and figure 1; Starks 2008, 112).

44     Anne Duncan

Female Gladiators Although they were far fewer in number than their male counterparts, women fought in the arena as gladiators (McCullough 2008, 207–8; Brunet 2004, 165–66; Ewigleben 2000, 125–27). Gladiatorial combat was a theatricalized sport, with distinctive armour, weapons and helmets for the combatants that enabled spectators to identify them immediately as distinct fighting types or, as we might say, stock characters. Gladiatorial combat took place as part of games (ludi circenses, games involving blood sport). Like actors, gladiators used stage names. Like actors, gladiators performed to musical accompaniment. Like actors, gladiators held infamis status in Roman society (Duncan 2006, 203–14; Barton 1993, 26). This is not to say that gladiatorial combat was staged, or fake, of course; it was terrifyingly real. But contrary to popular impression, not every bout was to the death: bouts that were to be fought to the death were specifically advertised as sine missione, ‘without surrender’, while funeral inscriptions of gladiators record wins, losses and ties (Kyle 1998, 83, 86). This meant that fighters could develop fan bases—again, like actors. If we are willing to think of the gladiator as a kind of public performer, entertaining audiences at games, then female gladiators constitute another genre, so to speak, of female performance in the Roman world. Female gladiators were mostly exhibited by emperors as part of especially lavish arena spectacles, such as Titus’ 100 days of games to dedicate the Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum) in 80 CE. The novel presence of female gladiators at these games seems to have signalled lavish spending by the imperial sponsor (McCullough 2008, 202–5). Interestingly, most of our literary sources for female gladiators seem to take them seriously as fighters; the only sources that express negative reactions to female gladiators are those which describe the forced participation of elite women in gladiatorial combat by ‘bad’ emperors, as part of the standard Roman elite prejudice against the upper classes participating in any kind of performance (McCullough 2008, 204–6, 208–9; Brunet 2004, 152, 154–56, 161, 163–64, 166–70). The scant evidence for female gladiators includes suggestion that some of them may have fought in costume as Amazons. A marble relief from Halicarnassus depicts two female gladiators who have fought to a draw; one of them has the stage name Amazonia (Brunet 2004, 147–48, 156, 166). While taking them seriously as fighters, it seems the Roman audience also took female gladiators to be performers.

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     45

Conclusion Women performed in mime, pantomime and other kinds of ­song-and-dance entertainments from at least the middle of the Republican period through the sixth century CE. Like other actors, mimae were often slaves; unlike other actors, mimae were subject to relentlessly sexualized attention. They seem to have frequently played characters who conformed to Roman stereotypes about women as drunks, adulteresses and deceivers. They were assumed to be whores. And yet they enjoyed tremendous popularity, sometimes earned significant sums of money and mingled with members of the elite. We do not have any texts that we can definitively declare to be authored by mimae, but the inscriptions they or their associates set up emphasize their training and skill, their participation in civic and domestic life. This, combined with their use of stage names, suggests the possibility that mimae sought to create a bit of distance between their public personae and their selves. Despised and desired, ridiculed and applauded, female performers only seem marginal to Roman theatre history from the perspective of surviving play scripts; seen through the eyes of their admirers and enemies alike, they stole the show.

Bibliography Primary Texts Note: All translations above are by the author

Classical Texts Apuleius. 1989. Apuleius: Metamorphoses Vol. II, Books 7–11. Edited and translated by J. Arthur Hanson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Apuleius. 1996. Apuleius: Metamorphoses Vol. I, Books 1–6. Edited and translated by J. Arthur Hanson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aulus Gellius. 1927. Aulus Gellius: Attic Nights, Volume I: Books 1–5. Edited and translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Aulus Gellius. 1927. Aulus Gellius: Attic Nights, Volume II: Books 6–13. Edited and translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

46     Anne Duncan

Cicero. 1928. Cicero: The Verrine Orations, vol. 2. Edited and translated by L. H. G. Greenwood. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cicero. 1999. Cicero: Letters to Atticus, vol. I. Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cicero. 2009. Cicero: Philippics 7–14. Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey, revised by John T. Ramsey and Gesine Manuwald. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Historia Augusta Vol. II. 1924. Edited and translated by David Magie. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Horace. 1929. Horace: Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica. Edited and translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Josephus. 1926. Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books XVIII–XX. Edited and translated by Louis H Feldman. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Juvenal. 2004. Juvenal and Persius. Edited and translated by Susanna Morton Braund. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Laberius, Decimus. 2010. Decimus Laberius: The Fragments. Edited and translated by Costas Panayotakis. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martial. 1993. Martial: Epigrams, Vol. 1: Spectacles, Books 1–5. Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ovid. 1931. Ovid: Fasti. Edited and translated by James G, Frazer, revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pliny. 1950. Pliny: Natural History, Volume V: Books 17–19. Edited and translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch. 1920. Plutarch: Lives Vol. IX: Demetrius and Antony, Pyrrhus and Gaius Marius. Edited and translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Procopius. 1935. Procopius Vol. VI: The Anecdota or Secret History. Edited and translated by H. B. Dewing. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Suetonius. 1914. Suetonius, vol. I. Edited and translated by J. C. Rolfe. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valerius Maximus. 2000. Valerius Maximus I. Edited and translated by D. R. Shackleton Bailey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     47

Classical Inscriptions Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (=CIL) 6.10096 CIL 6.10110 CIL 6.10127 CIL 6.10128 Inscriptiones Graecae (=IG ) 14.2342 Manganaro, G. 1963. ‘Nuove Ricerche di Epigrafi Siceliota’. Siculorum Gymnasium 16: 51–64; see Fountoulakis 2000.

Classical Papyri Oxyrhynchus Papyri (=P.Oxy.) 413; see Andreassi 2001.

Secondary Texts Andreassi, Mario. 2001. Mimi Greci in Egitto: Charition e Moicheutria. Bari: Palomar. Barnes, T. D. 1996. ‘Christians and the Theater’. In Roman Theater and Society: E. Togo Salmon Papers I, edited by William J. Slater, 161–80. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Barton, Carlin. 1993. The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Beacham, Richard C. 1991. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brunet, Stephen. 2004. ‘Female and Dwarf Gladiators’. Mouseion Series III 4, no. 2: 145–70. Coleman, K. M. 1990. ‘Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments’. Journal of Roman Studies 80: 44–73. Csapo, Eric, and William Slater, eds. 1995. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dunbabin, Katherine. 2004. ‘Problems in the Iconography of Roman Mime’. In Le Statut de l’Acteur dans l’Antiquité grecque et romain, edited by C. Hugoniot, F. Hurlet, and S. Milanezi, 161–81. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais. Duncan, Anne. 2006. Performance and Identity in the Classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ewigleben, Cornelia. 2000. ‘“What These Women Love Is the Sword”: The Performers and Their Audiences’. In Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome, edited by Eckhart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben, English version edited by Ralph Jackson, 125–39. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

48     Anne Duncan

Fantham, R. Elaine. 1989. ‘Mime: The Missing Link in Roman Literary History’. Classical World 82, no. 3: 153–63. Fountoulakis, Andreas. 2000. ‘The Artists of Aphrodite’. L’Antiquité Classique 69: 133–47. French, Dorothea R. 1998. ‘Maintaining Boundaries: The Status of Actresses in Early Christian Society’. Vigiliae Christianae 52, no. 3: 293–318. Garton, Charles. 1964. ‘A Republican Mime-Actress?’ Classical Review new series 14, no. 3: 238–39. Graf, Fritz. 1991. ‘Gestures and Conventions: The Gestures of Roman Actors and Orators’. In A Cultural History of Gesture, edited by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, 36–58. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Höschele, Regina. 2013. ‘From Ecloga the Mime to Vergil’s Eclogues as Mimes: Ein Gedankenspiel ’. Vergilius 59: 37–60. Kyle, Donald G. 1998. Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome. London and New York: Routledge. Lada-Richards, Ismene. 2007. Silent Eloquence: Lucian and Pantomime Dancing. London: Duckworth. Leyerle, Blake. 2001. Theatrical Shows and Ascetic Lives: John Chrysostom’s Attack on Spiritual Marriage. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. McCullough, Anna. 2008. ‘Female Gladiators in Imperial Rome: Literary Context and Historical Fact’. Classical World 101, no. 2: 197–209. McGinn, Thomas A. J. 1998. ‘Feminae Probrosae and the Litter’. Classical Journal 93, no. 3: 241–50. Panayotakis, Costas. 2006. ‘Women in the Greco-Roman Mime of the Roman Republic and the Early Empire’. Ordia Prima 5: 121–38. Panayotakis, Costas. 2008. ‘Virgil on the Popular Stage’. In New Directions in Ancient Pantomime, edited by Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles, 185–97. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Panayotakis, Costas. 2010. Decimus Laberius: The Fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Papini, Alessandro. 2017. ‘The Graphemic Oscillation in Latin Epigraphy: Some Preliminary Sociolinguistic Remarks’. Graeco-Latina Brunensia 22, no. 2: 255–67. Parker, Holt N. 1997. ‘The Teratogenic Grid’. In Roman Sexualities, edited by Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, 47–65. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Potter, David. 2015. Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prauscello, Lucia. 2004. ‘Rehearsing Her Own Death: A Note on Bassilla’s Epitaph’. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 147: 56–58. Reynolds, R. W. 1946. ‘The Adultery Mime’. Classical Quarterly 40, no. 3: 77–84.

3  The Roman Mimae: Female Performers in Ancient Rome     49

Starks, John H., Jr. 2008. ‘Pantomime Actresses in Latin Inscriptions’. In New Directions in Ancient Pantomime, edited by Edith Hall and Rosie Wyles, 110–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Traina, G. 2001. ‘Lycoris the Mime’. In Roman Women, edited by A. Fraschetti, translated by L. Lappin, 82–99. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tsitsiridis, Stavros. 2011. ‘Greek Mime in the Roman Empire (P.Oxy. 413: Charition and Moicheutria )’. Logeion 1: 184–232. Webb, Ruth. 2002. ‘Female Entertainers in Late Antiquity’. In Greek and Roman Actors: Aspects of an Ancient Profession, edited by Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, 282–303. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webb, Ruth. 2008. Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. West, M. L. 2010. ‘The Way of a Maid with a Moke: P.Oxy. 4762’. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 175: 33–40. Wiseman, T. P. 1998. Roman Drama and Roman History. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Wiseman, T. P. 1999. ‘The Games of Flora’. In The Art of Ancient Spectacle, edited by Bettina Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon, 195–203. New Haven and London: National Gallery of Art, Washington; Distributed by Yale University Press.

4 Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality Clare L. E. Foster

This chapter explores the performance culture of ancient Rome via the ­cognates of the Latin word ‘ludus ’. It offers some parallels between the ­il-lusionistic games of Roman wall painting, the de-lusions of Roman comedy, and Ovid’s al-lusive poetry to suggest a characteristic self-referentiality (or metatheatricality) which belongs to all Roman culture, but is especially in evidence during the transition from Republic to Empire (c.50s BCE– 50s CE). Attention is especially directed to the constructedness of ideas of ‘Rome/Roman’ and ‘woman/man’ in the context of the cultural interventions of the first Emperor of Rome, Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE) who legislated to control both male and female behaviour, and the political potentials of all kinds of theatrical practices—plays, games, sport, poetry, public entertainment, public festivals and public building (see, for example, Zanker 1990; Kellum 1997, 158–73; Galinsky 2005, 1–10; Clarke 2005, 264–78; Joshel 2007, 475–77). These—along with art, sex and reading/writing— were all associated with the cognates of the Latin word ludus (ludi, ludere ). Thomas Habinek (2005, 177–82) has suggested the word ‘play’ as the characteristic mode of all Roman cultural and literary practices, and as an English gloss for the root lud- in first century BCE and CE Rome; Eleanor Leach (2004, 114) prefers the term ‘theatricality’: ‘[there is] a deep-rooted affinity between theatricality and Roman culture’. What follows explores

Clare L. E. Foster (*)  University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_4

51

52     Clare L. E. Foster

the extent to which to frame or stage a ‘woman’—especially during this period of social upheaval and overt social engineering—was an opportunity to play with meaning, definition and interpretation itself. It builds on scholarship in Classics which has increasingly noticed that representations of, or allusions to, theatre and performance once seen as simply ‘evidence’ of historical performance practices are themselves participants in a wider playful, performative and public historical phenomenon (e.g. Taplin 2007 on vase painting; Elsner and Meyer 2014 on rhetoric, Uhlig and Hunter 2017 on lyric poetry; Platt and Squire 2017 on the visual arts). Theatre and performance studies have similarly moved beyond theatre historiographies based on a narrow modern idea of theatre as textual performance (Foster 2015b, 2018; Postlewait 2009) to embrace ideas of theatre as a metaphor for all public activity, and performance as a ‘kind of thinking in its own right’ (Cull 2014; for a recent Anglophone example, see, e.g., the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network: http://www.crassh.cam. ac.uk/programmes/performance-network). This chapter explores the extent to which, for those living under ancient Roman rule at the beginning of the empire, ideas of ‘theatre’ meant not only a playful way of seeing, but self-conscious engagement with the politics of culture itself. Questions of theatre and gender in all periods can be seen as fundamentally linked through the idea of performance. This is not to impose a modern term back onto antiquity (the terms ‘gender’ and ‘performance’ both gained prominence in English in the 1970s: Shepherd 2016, viii–x). On the contrary, it is to suggest that classical cultures themselves prompt the need for such ideas, and for greater awareness of the historical and cultural specificity of our own current categories and concepts. Whatever is meant by ‘stage’ or ‘woman’, both are concerned with the behaviour of bodies in public, with collective social mores, and with society’s idea of itself. Both also involve the politics of representation: who represents what, when and for whom—and whether to reassuring or question-raising ends. The need for a concept like ‘performance’ arises in concert with a need to interrogate a traditional, i.e. social, boundary of which gender is a prima facie example, as Judith Butler and others have pointed out (Shepherd 2016, 184–90, quoting Butler 1988, 519–20). In Performance and Identity in the Ancient World Anne Duncan says: [T]heater makes the socialization process of a given society apparent and transparent. A society pressures its members to conform to norms of gender, class, age, and status, but makes its pressures seem to be the workings of a natural and inevitable development … [theatre] shows actors reproducing those norms through conscious study. (Duncan 2006, 10, my emphasis)

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     53

She quotes Karen Bassi (1998, 41) who builds on Judith Butler’s theory of gender as performance to conclude that: [T]heater is precisely the place where the political regulations and disciplinary practices that produce an ostensibly coherent gender are effectively placed in view.

Roman culture in the first centuries BCE and CE, in its characteristic self-referentiality, approached art and culture as an intermedial and social practice—i.e. less as a collection of autonomous objects and events, than as sets of tensions, relations and reciprocities which the repetition of objects and events put in play. Ovid’s ludic poetry (which styles himself as an actor and imagines the whole of Rome as a stage) suggests a fundamental link between theatre and gender as part of its satire of Augustan propaganda. Roman wall painting, too, in its characteristic games with the viewer about ‘getting’ the joke, and its fundamental association with Roman theatrical sets, or scaenae frontes (see, e.g., Beacham 1991, 154–98; Leach 2004, 114; Meyer 2014, 418–45) also plays frequent games about visually framing and staging gender—e.g. its interest in hermaphrodites. To some extent, an interest in playing with gender on all kinds of stages is to be expected in a pre-Christian classical antiquity where male and female were not binary mutually defining concepts, but fluid available semiotic resources, with various possibilities of being both and neither. Participation in maleness and femaleness was a matter of degree, and not tied to anatomy (Gleason 1990, 389–425). Modern Western culture has no equivalent for the ephebe, young Greek youths who were idolised as the conventional object of the mature man’s desire (Dover 1989); nor for the sexually ambiguous hermaphrodite; nor for the visually pervasive pleasures of androgyny; and little practical use for the eunuch (at least since the ending in the eighteenth century of the creation of castrati, male singers whose testicles were removed to stop their high voices from breaking [Tougher 2002]), let alone for Dionysus—familiar as the classical god of theatre, but less well known for being both male and female (Mac Góráin 2017). For a Roman brought up on Greek culture, and for all those trained in classical mythology, gender was a live issue, a multivalent space. Identity could be located on a scale from man to woman (for an introduction to the now vast bibliography on the differences between ancient and modern views of gender, see, for example, Foxhall [2013], Holmes [2013], and Orrells [2014] who update earlier discussions, such as Golden and Toohey [2003]; Halperin et al. [1990]). Ovid takes full advantage of this legacy in his cheekily anti-Augustan Amores and Ars Amatoria, and like Roman

54     Clare L. E. Foster

painting, and various other forms of Roman performance at the time, puts women, sex and gender roles centre stage as a way to mock Augustus’ claim (Habinek and Schiesaro 1997, 23–43) that he—and Rome—were related to Venus, through descent from the Trojan Aeneas (cf. his commissioning Virgil to write the Aeneid ). The wordplay of the ROMA|AMOR palindromic graffito found in Pompeii is a ludic version of Barbara Kellum’s observation that ‘The interrelatedness of gender and power is key to an understanding of the monuments of Augustan Rome’ (Kellum 1997, 158). Playing with gender belongs to a long tradition of classical myths, stories and performances that reversed and mixed male and female roles. At the same time as he wrote the Amores and Ars Amatoria as a way to mock Augustus’ identity-forming moral legislation, Ovid also wrote the Heroides, wittily retelling famous mythological stories from the woman’s point of view. The women write complaining letters to the ‘heroes’ who have variously abused or upset them—Penelope to Odysseus, for example, or Briseis to Achilles—the pleasure lying in the contrast between the seriousness of the women’s situations, the cautionary religious or moral messages embedded in the myths themselves, and the ribald way these are played with. Ovid claimed this was tantamount to inventing a whole new literary genre: retelling the favourite stories of Greco-Roman mythology from the point of view of the women, and as women writers (Ars 3, 346). That Ovid was proud of seeing what today might be described as the inherent ‘sexism’ of GrecoRoman mythology is significant; for this was not necessarily a straightforward or universally recognised observation to make in the way it has been in later periods (Habinek 1997, 31). Romans, as they sought to carve their own identity in relation to Greek culture, engaged philosophically, metaphorically, literarily and ironically with the idea of the opposition of male and female in the same way they did with the polarity of master and slave (Fitzgerald 2000, 9–12). The spatial, embodied and literary ludic practices of first century BCE and CE Rome understood gender precisely as ‘staged’, as a collusive and contested social construction (Henderson 1989). It is not surprising that, if we make an effort to see Rome through Roman eyes (Elsner 2007) its theatre and arts become a place to play with what it means to be a man or a woman—or something in between. To some extent, such game-playing might be expected, as all patriarchal systems sustain themselves by constantly representing difference between men and women; and once any set of representations exist as a collectively recognisable tradition, their conventions can be played with, and exposed. Pantheistic Greek and Roman mythology, with its idea of gender as a fluid

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     55

concept, and gods like Athena, Mercury, Apollo and especially Dionysus, arguably arises in order to problematise boundaries and definition. Certainly, warning stories about being too rigid abound (this is the particular lesson drawn out in Euripides’ characterisation of Hippolytus in Hippolytus, and of King Pentheus in the Bacchae, for example, both of whom the plays suggest brought their fates upon themselves through defiant single-mindedness). Hindu polytheism (e.g. the epic Mahābhārata) offers an interesting cross-cultural comparand. The stock in trade of both classical and South Asian mythology is the double, the liminal and the ironic—the existential status of both/and that belongs essentially to all impersonation, and thus to all theatre. In contrast, Norse mythology, say Beowulf, and the Christian Bible, present patriarchal narratives that do not question gender roles but perform and prescribe them. The Greeks and Romans lived instead with Dionysus: god of illusion, theatre, impersonation, of being ‘outside of yourself ’ (ecstasis ), who supervises the boundary between life and death and who—as both female and male—is portrayed in Roman painting with the feminine conventions of white-painted (not brown) skin and round facial features. ‘The fundamental quality of Dionysus’, according to Charles Segal (1984, 196), ‘is his dissolution and confusion of basic polarities’. Add to this the ancient understanding that images are characteristically associated with the ability to be read in more than one way at once (as what follows will argue), and that by portraying a respectable woman in public you paradoxically render her not-respectable (Edwards 1993, 98; Olsen 2006, 182) and it is possible to see how even the most basic representation of ‘women’ is inherently dramatic.

A Different Kind of Theatre Regardless of the punning potential between ‘Venus ’, the august foundational goddess of Rome and venus meaning sexual intercourse (there are no capitals in Latin manuscripts) at a time when Augustus was attempting to legislatively control female behaviour, there is no doubt that Roman painting, Roman comedy, and Ovid’s ludic poetry all play remarkably similar games with their audiences. This commonality in part reflects the pre-eminently social conditions of art in a pre-print society that did not have modern culture’s imagined reference points of fixed (yet infinitely reproducible) objects, and mass education to guarantee their familiarity. Art in antiquity was by definition socially (manually) reproduced, its sharing therefore understood as performing social identity (see, for example, Dupont 1997, 44–69 on recitatio, the practice of

56     Clare L. E. Foster

gathering to hear literature read aloud). Dependent on capacities to recognise, art put audiences, and their assumed knowledge, centre stage. Self-reference or metatheatricality (lud- or ‘play’) is the other side of the coin of this emphatic acknowledgement of audience presence. Scholars have long noted that spectacle and theatre are pervasive self-reflexive metaphors in Roman literature and art (Newby 2016, 27; for context, Bergmann and Kondoleon 1999, esp. Parker, 163–70, and making sense of the arena, Fagan 2011, 147–55). Theatrical metaphors in Ovid’s works specifically are discussed by, for example, Hinds (1998), Hardie (2002), Henderson (2002), Feldherr (2010). Roman comedy typically reminds the audience they are attending a theatrical performance, and comments on itself as theatre. Its metatheatrical character is famously well read by Shakespeare—not only in his Plautine mashup The Menaechmi Brothers/Comedy of Errors but also in comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It. Shakespeare also draws heavily on Ovid who saw himself as converting the wit of Roman comedy into literary texts (Barchiesi 2006, 99–100—Ovid also wrote at least one play: Quintilian praises a Medea, which has not survived: Institutio Oratoria 10, 1. 98). When Ovid styles himself as an ‘actor’ playing games with his readers’ credulity, and about the ‘real’ Ovid versus the literary persona, he follows in the tradition of Plautus and Terence, whose surviving scripts are arguably about acting and disguise. In Plautus’ Amphitryo, in the prologue, Mercury says he can only entertainingly trick (deluditur, l. 1005) the audience (spectatores ) if they pay close attention, then announces he’s going offstage to do a better of job of making himself up as a ‘drunk’ should look. The person speaking is at one and the same time both actor and character, with the added joke that a ‘god’ shouldn’t need to change costume to disguise themselves. Classical deities, already famous impersonators in mythology, had spawned gods-in-disguise jokes on stage since comedy’s origins in fifth-century Athens (e.g. Dionysus (female–male) dressed in a Heracles (hyper-male) costume in Aristophanes’ Frogs, 405 BCE). But Plautine jokes about the theatrical sets are strictly Roman: ‘Didn’t I tell you to clean the spiders’ webs off those columns?’ (Asinaria, 425)

Or ‘Look at the porch in front of this house–get a load of those posts, how solidly made, how thick!’ (Mostellaria, 418–19).

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     57

Vitruvius, writing at a time when the fashion for Roman wall painting was at a peak (c.30s BCE) said that it was theatre sets on walls: skenographia (De Architectura 7, 11. For Vitruvius see Nichols 2017). He said it was a truly Roman (i.e. not Greek) invention, derived from Roman theatre, and expressed his disappointment that tastes had moved recently towards fantastical and unreal mere echoes of the characteristic tripartite division of the scaenae frons. This is the three horizontal tiers, usually with columns, and three doorways or entrances of the typical Roman theatre set, which on Roman walls, as Vitruvius laments, had become mere framed spaces for panel pictures. Almost all Roman walls show some visual trace of this symmetrical horizontal and vertical tripartite division, a pattern that inevitably directs attention to the particular choice of topic inside the framed spaces (the wall paintings in the tablinum or reception room of the House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto are a good example—like most Roman wall paintings, they are now easily found on the internet under the house name). This framing function drew attention to the single picture as a ‘work of art’, and was of crucial importance in the move from wall painting’s decorative function to its status as game-playing cultural messenger. But together with this formal evocation of theatre sets, within the set-piece doorways or picture frames (the Latin word aediculum means both) were also ‘scenes’ from well-known dramatic or theatrical stories (Bergmann and Kondoleon 1999, 209–11; Newby 2016, 194) and a plethora of symbols and accoutrements of theatre and religious festivals (both are ludi in Latin) such as masks, garlands, tripods, stage steps and other Dionysiac elements, both figurative and decorative. In English, these might be called theatrical allusions to theatre, playful references to plays, il-lusionistic games about illusion— are all ludus in Latin. Three-dimensional masks, for example, are often portrayed as hanging from a flat-painted two-dimensional border (e.g. Fannius Synistor, Boscoreale, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; similarly, in the House of Augustus, flat vertical painted borders are wittily given slender 3-D supports: Iacopi 2008). In one painting a mask sits on top of a set of stage steps, a kind of visual abbreviation that wittily alludes to this convention of al-luding to ‘theatre’ (Borriello 2010, 69). Broken garlands, pouring water, translucent glass and music are used to self-reflexively allude to illusion. In the House of the Cryptoporticus, for example, a female caryatid is painted as if listening to music, head tilted towards a framed and wall-hung ‘painting’ of processing musicians glimpsed inside partly opened shutters mimicking a window: a two-dimensional image representing a three-dimensional statue representing a living person able to hear a painting of a musical

58     Clare L. E. Foster

performance—combining multiple senses of ‘play’. In other words, what we see on Roman walls is not illusionism per se, a mere attempt to make two dimensions look like three, as in trompe l’oeil; it is allusion to illusion of as many kinds as possible at once. It is not painting of theatre, but painting as theatre. As Meyer (2014, 433–38) notes: [Even the] Gardens of Livia contain scattered theatrical masks. These remind us that we face a spectacle and not a mere representation of reality. Roman painting is a mode of fiction, which is a substitute for theatre … No more theatre in these frescoes: they are theatre in their own right.

The intense and detailed nature of the rapidly evolving fashion for wall painting in Pompeii itself speaks to its audience-driven nature, to capacities to recognise, or ‘get’ the al-lusion, il-lusion or joke (lusus ). August Mau’s goal in proposing his four Pompeian styles (see Lorenz 2015, 252–67) in the 1890s was the reassurance and accomplishment of chronology; but his overview also incidentally demonstrated that these paintings all allude to each other—in other words, that when we look at this body of material we are in the presence of an emphatically self-conscious tradition, in which meaning is made via a play with existing expectations (Beard and Henderson 2001, 105; Brilliant 2005). The participation of the audience in the work, in what Michael Fried has described as a ‘theatrical’ relationship (Fried 1980, 7–107, discussed in Davis and Postlewait 2003, 20) is foregrounded as constitutive of the work. This occurs in the context of a wider culture in which literature is also understood as characteristically allusive (argued by classical scholars from Hinds 1998 to Frangoulidis et al. 2013); as foregrounding audience knowledge (Taplin 2001; Wiseman 2015); and as dealing in recognisable and identifying types (the original meaning of ‘character’ in Greek was imprint or brand, such as to mark pottery). As Caroline Vout (2012, 141) notes in her analysis of depictions of Medea, ‘reading’ the subjects of the set-piece paintings—which have a citational and metonymic character—is the name of the game: ‘the act of painting itself [is] an irresistible challenge that demands that the patron and/or viewer complete the narrative’. Certainly, as Beard and Henderson have said, what stands out about Roman painting is the games it plays with the viewer—the extent to which a painting like the megalographic frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries, for example, draws attention to the act of viewing (Beard and Henderson 2001, 23–53). The idea was to ‘read’ the images in the widest sense (Johnson and Parker 2011). The very act of framing, as Jaś Elsner and Michel Meyer (2014, 2) points out, ‘direct[s] our attention to

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     59

the question of how we construct our roles as audiences’. The Latin word aediculum, ‘frame’, as in a picture frame, and ‘stage’, as in a space demarcated for display, is based on the word for temple, ‘aedes ’—literally, a ‘little temple’. The aediculum was originally the three dimensional ‘shrine’ that housed the lares, or household gods, on display at the entry to a Roman house, then came to denote any type of frame, doorway, porch or platform. Temples were the earliest ancient stages for public performance, with the steps sometimes used for seating or the platform for a stage: temple interiors and exteriors were key public display spaces for art (Fig. 4.1). English does not have vocabulary that sees framing and staging as one and the same gesture, i.e. as publicly presenting something. But this is the action performed by Roman wall painting. The audiences for Roman painting were already centre stage from the conditions of wall painting as a spatially located experience. A viewer had to go to the house—be invited—to see it. It was not freely available to all, nor all the time; in modern terms, it was a form of site-specific promenade performance. A viewer cannot walk around a wall painting or back away from it beyond the confines of the room: every wall painting is conceived in relation to a fixed audience perspective, to that extent. The ancient spectator is never left un-oriented. The best example

Fig. 4.1  Greek vase painting of Athena viewing herself viewing a drama inside her temple (aedes ). Apulian kalyx-krater, 360–350 B.C. Taranto no. 52.665. LLMC II. https://books.openedition.org/pulg/185#illustrations

60     Clare L. E. Foster

of this is a painting—in a long, narrow, windowless room, accessed by a single door at one end—of a lifesize (painted) young woman entering via a (painted) door at the other end, looking straight at you, as if startled—a mirror of your own entry to the windowless space, caught in a moment of entry and first sight (Leach 2004, 107, from the Insula Occidentalis). This is a woman coming on stage—in the process, asking what is a stage, and who are you? Bettina Bergmann’s The Roman House as Memory Theatre (1994) called attention to the physical experience of looking at Roman frescoes; Shelley Hales in The Roman House and Social Identity (2003) and Paul Zanker in The Roman House as Theatre of the Joys of Life (2008) emphasise the centrality of the embodied and implied viewer and of viewing wall painting as, above all, a social game. As Hérica Valladares (2014, 191) points out, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria 11.2.20) shows he thinks of domestic wall painting in this way when he advises a pupil to memorize the structure of an argument by mentally placing each of its parts in a sequence of interior spaces: The first thought is placed, as it were, in the vestibulum, the second, let us say in the atrium. The others should be arranged in due order around the impluvium and entrusted not only to cubicula and exhedrae, but even to statues and the like.

Valladares (2014, 191) comments: ‘the images [in wall painting] contained in each room are semantic building blocks designed to activate the viewer’s powers of recollection and analysis, leading to an overall interpretation of these sequences of signs’. But in understanding the special relationship of Roman wall painting to theatricality, also key is the fact that Roman theatre (unlike Greek) had always been a phenomenon of public beneficence. Ludi (plural) was the word for both public holidays (when everyone stopped work and gathered together) and the entertainments that typically took place on those occasions: Ludi scaenici (modern ‘plays’ or ‘drama’), ludi gladiatorum (the arena, as well as the gladiatorial schools where the various shows were rehearsed and developed), ludi circenses (races, especially chariot-races—anything that needed to do laps)—even board games, socially played in leisure time, are also ludi (modern games like Ludo are still a race and modern chess a fight). In a typical self-reflexive pun, the squares on one Roman board game (ludus ) spell out—‘Parthia and Britain have been conquered: time for Romans to play’: ‘LUDITE ROMANI ’ (Beard 2015, 460). Fifty per cent of Roman senators would

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     61

have sponsored some kind of ludi at some point in their careers. Ludi scaenici—i.e. performances that have a scaenae frons—were the gift of Roman magistrates on festival days. As Leach (2004, 100–1) puts it: ‘theatre was always an instrument of status assertion … [an] intermixture of political significance with religious occasion’. What today is called variously theatre, drama or plays, the Romans further differentiated into, for example, ludi Romani, ludi Apollinares, ludi Togatae (which were more ‘Roman’) and ludi Palliatae (more ‘Greek’). The Roman historian Livy (VII. 2, I-3) mythologizes the origins of ludi scaenici in a plague in 364 BCE, in Etruria (Italy), when to propitiate the gods ‘histriones ’ performed dancing and dumb shows which developed into physical c­ ontests and then impersonated drama (the term histrio comes from the Etruscan word ister, meaning actor). Livy probably wanted to suggest that Plautus was the culmination of a pre-existing Italian tradition, rather than the beginning of a Roman practice of copying Greek models such as Menander and his Hellenistic ‘New Comedy’. In Livy’s cultural context, it should be remembered, the distinction between comedy and tragedy was less important than in modern periods whose attitudes have been shaped by reading Aristotle’s Poetics on tragedy (Foster 2015a, 224–57; his section on comedy did not survive). Until the invention of what we now think of as ‘tragedy’, tragedy and comedy are typically represented together, as two halves of a whole: ludi scaenici—or games with stage sets. Funeral games were given as another origin of ludi scaenici, as well as of ludi gladiatores. Whenever and wherever ‘plays’ were performed, they would likely be grouped together with circus, acrobats, singers and dancers. To put on ludi of all kinds—ludi scaenici, ludi gladiatorum and ludi circenses—was a principle duty of a consul. By the first century BCE, there were some 200 holiday days or ludi in the Roman calendar, and as the Republic slid into factions led by powerful men, the competition to outdo each other reached absurd heights. In 52 BCE, the ambitious senator Curio built two semi-circular wooden theatres for dramatic plays back to back, which rotated to become one large arena for races and combat in the afternoon, as spectators held onto their seats (Pliny Natural History 35.103)— neatly combining several senses of ludi in a single tour de force gesture. He may have been trying to outdo Scaurus, who six years earlier had built a three-storey scaenae frons that was faced with real marble, glass mosaic and gilded wood, with 360 marble columns, 3000 bronze statues, embroidered tapestries, painted scenes—and cost 30 million sesterces (Beacham 1991, 67–68, 164).

62     Clare L. E. Foster

These attempts to impress show that the marvel of the construction of the scaenae frons itself had become the event, rather than the show put on in front of it. The fact that Roman theatres until this decade had been temporary structures—taken down after the ludi were held—sustained this location of the event in the act of framing or staging itself, rather than in the thing staged. This shift also means the competitively decorative scaenae frons in Roman houses might have come to be seen as the symbol of all public theatre—and by extension, of collectivity, or ‘Rome’. Such symbolism was understood by Roman audiences: it was the symbolic potential of the Colosseum which largely motivated the emperor Vespasian to build it (Hopkins and Beard 2005, 36). If your walls were performing ludi, they were likely also performing a certain ‘us’—a ‘Rome’. ‘Taking the actor’s part was considered unworthy of dignitas ’, says Leach (2004, 109), ‘but sponsoring pageantry the opposite’. After his wooden theatre was dismantled, Scaurus, understandably, brought the notoriously expensive columns from his temporary scaenae frons inside his house. All Roman wall painting brings theatre inside in this way. The audience is the point.

A Different Kind of Gender For Caroline Vout (2012, 139), the ‘gender politics’ of Roman wall painting is inseparable from wall painting’s commentary on Augustan politics more widely. She explores how representations of Medea can be seen as alluding to the alienating effects of empire, and its creation of a ‘them-and-us scenario’, or in the words of Bob Cowan (2010, 48, quoted in Vout 2012, 139), ‘a means of thinking about how Rome uses the other—woman, foreigner, witch—as a (problematic) tool in its own advancement’. The same can be said of Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria, works which overtly stage women to comment on Augustus’ attempt to stage a new Rome. In the Amores he plays with his putative addressee, his vocatives slipping between reader and lover and conflating the seductions of sex and poetry (both are lusus in Latin—the product of playing, tricking, seducing, acting). In its sequel, the Ars Amatoria, Ovid expands this focus on audience to refer explicitly to his readers, plural. He figures his audience as the whole of Rome, anyone and everyone (‘Siquis … populo’ Ars I, l) as well as the fan club created by the Amores (‘mea turba ’: Ars 3, 811). The anonymous collective addressed by the Ars Amatoria in its opening line is a landmark in the history of Western literature, perhaps the first time that a work ever addressed a notional ‘public’,

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     63

rather than a muse, individual patron, lover, god or personified object (Llewellyn Morgan 2000, 115). Questions of audience and their gender are a key theme of the Ars across its 4 books. The whole of Book 1 is a tour-de-force tour of Rome as one vast stage, with emphatically mixed audiences in various public performance spaces: theatre, circus, arena and triumph. Ovid stresses the physical mixing of men and women in the crowd—touching knees, rubbing shoulders, whispering and fornicating, a term taken from the arched masonry supports (fornices ) associated with public buildings such as the Theatre of Pompey, where casual sex in public might occur (Ars 1.67)—and at the same time, he keeps attention focused on the question of who is reading/hearing this now, and specifically, whether they are women or men (Holzberg 2006, 40–53). In the first few proemic lines of Book 1 Ovid quips: ‘if you are a respectable married woman [literally, “wearing a long toga all the way down to your toes”] don’t read beyond this point. Stop and back away’ (Ars Amatoria 1, 31–34). This is both a twist on the ancient literary trope of asking hostile deities to keep away from the effort of composition and a send-up of Augustus’ moral legislation which attempted to separate out respectable Roman women (matronae ) by regulating clothing and behaviour in public (e.g. the Leges Juliae de adulteris coercendis of 17/18 BCE: Hardie 2000, 132). In Book 3, after spending two books telling guys the secrets of how to seduce girls (lud-, iocum—origin of the English ‘joke’) Ovid now says he’ll tell the girls the tricks they need to get and keep the guys, rendering both secrets patent. Then, being self-reflexive about his growing literary oeuvre, he tells the girls to go to all the same places he just told the guys they might find them. In case the reader makes the mistake of taking this declaration of intended gendered audience literally, rather than literarily, Ovid adds the vocative ‘viri’ (‘for all you men out there’) a few lines later (Ars 3, 5–6), implying both men and women are expected to be reading/hearing this together: another way of ‘mixing’ the audience. As with the multiple levels of the games played by wall painting, Ovid synthesises theatrical metaphor, theatrical relationship to audience, and references to actual ludi (drama, circus, arena, triumph) to satirise not Rome, or theatre, or even gender roles, but the constructedness itself of these public phenomena. By populating every space with women—and men flirting with them—he develops a powerful critique of Augustus’ would-be revival of Rome’s public myths, legends, buildings and entertainments. The crowning example of this is Ovid’s description of Rome’s theatre, which Ovid says is the best place of all to find a girl to love/seduce (aka ‘trick, play games with’: ‘illic invenies quod ames, quod ludere possis ’: Ars 1, 97) where the

64     Clare L. E. Foster

height of fashionable Roman womanhood (‘cultissima femina ’) swarm like ants (an epic Homeric simile) to famous plays (‘ad celebres … ludos ’) in all their luxury ‘to see and be seen’ (‘spectatus … spectentur ’, l. 99)—precisely the public ostentation Augustus was out to control—‘just like the shows (aka ‘tricks’), Romulus, you put on for everyone in the old days’ (‘Primus … Romule … ludos ’ l. 101). This is the Roman foundation myth—the so-called Rape of the Sabine Women (see, for example, see Labate 2007, 193–215) when members of the neighbouring tribe (Sabines) were lured to an entertainment only to be carried off as wives for the female-deficient early Romans. Revelling in the incongruity between past and present, Ovid imagines the guys picking out the girls they like the look of before the signal to grab them is given, in exactly the kind of behaviour the rest of the Ars tells its artful lovers to avoid. It is a literal rendering of the idea that the audience are actors—are the show. Ovid mocks his rival Virgil’s compliance in seriously re-peddling this myth, and performs the complicity at the heart of the theatrical relationship—the condition of being played with as an audience—by contrasting it ironically with the least complicit of all situations: women taken sexually by force. By comparing the sophisticated theatre today with the supposedly simple open-air theatre of rustic Roman legend, Ovid comments on the staged nature of Augustus’ mythopoeic ‘selling’ of Rome to his public, who, the joking parallel implies, should not be so gullible. At the same time, Ovid self-reflexively performs the idea of the ‘Rome’ and Romanness he would counter-propose: to be cultus not rusticus (as in the bucolic ‘good old days’ Augustus would have Romans admire); to be full of ars, i.e. able to appreciate the many games being played (lud- ) on multiple levels at once (Ars 1.242 or 3.126–7). By constantly playing with and reversing perspective, Ovid ironises and questions the very nature not just of this instance of ‘writing’, but of all myths and stories, and the fact they necessarily take a point of view—as he does also in his Heroides, taking the female perspective on favourite mythic stories. Figure 4.2 retells the Iliad from the point of view of the mother of its hero. Here, Thetis is being shown the famous shield made by Hephaistos for her son Achilles, the shield that will mean his return to battle and therefore his prophesied death. In this image, the artist depicts not the scenes on the shield that it famously takes an entire book of the Iliad to describe, but a reflection of Thetis seeing herself. She is seated in the hand-to-chin pose of the viewer or reader, a recurrent motif across Roman wall painting: ‘What do I make of this?’ ‘How should I read it?’ The same hand-to-chin pose is repeated in paintings of Penelope receiving Odysseus as

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     65

Fig. 4.2  Roman wall painting of Thetis looking at herself reflected in the shield of Achilles, in the characteristic ‘hand-on-chin’ pose of the questioning observer. House of the Triclinium, Pompeii: ca. 75–100 CE (© National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy/Azoor Photo Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

a beggar, the moment before he is recognised; of Calchas as Iphigenia is carried off, worrying about the impact of his prophecy that the Greeks will only be able to sail to Troy if she is sacrificed; of the seated woman looking uncertain about the events going on around her (contemplating her own coming marriage?) in the Villa of the Mysteries frieze; of Medea contemplating the killing of her children, in the House of Jason—all images about the most famous events in Greco-Roman myth and literature, but portrayed via the moment of krisis, or judgement, on which they depend. The selection of these critical moments plays explicitly with the audience’s assumed knowledge. We know the story; we know more than Penelope does,

66     Clare L. E. Foster

than Thetis does. Such asymmetrical relations of knowing belong essentially to theatre. In one painting of Medea and her children, a child looks straight at us, as if underscoring it is our knowledge that is centre stage. Playing with set pieces from Greek myths, Roman painting tends not to show the moment of action but the moment of critical decision, when right reading is crucial—both by the characters, and by us, the audience. Thetis’ hand-tochin pose is a self-conscious reference to the act of viewing/reading itself.

Ludus: The Link Between Theatre and Gender Self-conscious reference to the act of viewing/reading gender is what painted and sculpted images of hermaphrodites perform. A hermaphrodite could be a male, or a female, depending on the angle it is viewed from—i.e. depending on the audience. It can be read in opposite ways, as the exiled Ovid argues is true of all forms of art and literature, defending himself against the claim his ludic works were harmful. As Bruce Gibson (1999, 25–26, see also Boyle 2003, 15) says in the Tristia Ovid shows that the meaning is up to the reader (Tristia II, 278–89, 370–71): ‘the reader is the one who picks i.e. constructs the truth’ (legere–the word means ‘read’, ‘judge’ and ‘choose’). Or as Mercury says to the audience in the prologue to Plautus’ Amphitryo, after assuming the play is a tragedy because such an important god— Jupiter—is in it: ‘You were expecting a comedy, not a tragedy? OK, watch: I’ll turn it from a tragedy into a comedy without changing a line’ (‘isdem versibus ’: Plautus Amphitryo, 52–55). This is the ludic message—the morethan-one-thing-at-once, depends-on-your-perspective message—of the hermaphrodite: in sculpture, performed by viewing the work from more than one angle; in painting, figured by using clothing to show the act of revealing. In many instances Pan—a figure of hypermasculine sexuality—does the unveiling, shocked to find a penis where one was not expected. In the so-called ‘De-lusion of Silenus’ a hermaphrodite reveals his/her own erect penis, an attendant with all the accoutrements of Dionysus standing nearby (Von Stackelberg 2014, 395–426). Paintings of hermaphrodites play with and depend on the conventions of representing the female versus the male—for women, white skin, breasts, round faces and large curved hips; for men, brown skin, and darker, straighter, harder edges. A favourite panel subject is young Achilles being discovered in Skyros: Thetis had concealed him dressed as a girl in an attempt to fool the Greeks looking for him because of the prophecy that he would die if he went to Troy, but Odysseus uncovered Achilles’

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     67

identity by starting a fight, tricking him into revealing his knowledge of weapons. Achilles is often painted with the white skin of a woman and a round face, emphasised by the contrasting dark brown of Odysseus’ arm across his. Dionysus, too, is often given the typically female soft round facial features and white colouring. In the House of Epidius Sabinus, a particularly ‘female’ rendering of Dionysus has white flesh, breasts, hips— and an erect penis. This cues us to reading hermaphrodites not as women who turn out to be men, but rather as raising the question of gender, and the extent to which it depends (or rather, doesn’t) on the genitals. Gleason (1990, 390–91) says the Greeks and Romans’ idea of ‘masculine and feminine “types” [did] not necessarily correspond to the anatomical sex of person in question’. They had a ‘complementary view of gender’ within which masculinity was ‘an achieved state’. This view of gender difference as the condition of lacking the other gender is suggested by the myth Plato offers to explain the origins of love: that men and women were originally two halves of a whole creature, with the vagina and penis the places where the halves were ripped apart (Plato’s Symposium 189–93: he puts this story into the mouth of the comic playwright Aristophanes). Ovid’s aetiological account of how Hermaphroditus came to be is such a story of gender-combining (Metamorphoses 4, 285ff.): Aphrodite and Hermes’ handsome son inspired such a passion in the nymph Salmacis that she grabbed hold of him while they were bathing, prayed to the gods to never have to let go, and their bodies were fused into a single double-gendered being. It was one of the functions of the Greek god Dionysus to embody this participation, the state of being at once both male and female. There could be—indeed, might ideally be expected to be, if we choose to read the fates of Euripides’ Pentheus and Hippolytus in this way—a co-presence of masculine and feminine qualities in the same individual (Gleason 1990, 391–92). The idea of such blending is part of one of the founding texts of ancient culture, The Odyssey, whose crafty/tricky storytelling hero Odysseus redefines the overly masculine heroism of The Iliad to forge a new kind of heroism more appropriate for his survival narrative, one that privileges female-associated virtues of subtle intelligence, inventiveness and trickery—so much so that Samuel Butler argued its author must have been a ‘young woman … headstrong and unmarried’ (Butler 1892; discussed by Whitmarsh 2002). Odysseus is identified by his skill in storytelling, which in the ancient Greek, via its metaphoric vocabulary of weaving and spinning (as in the English ‘spinning a yarn’) is associated emblematically with respectable women such as Penelope and her literal weaving trick. Bard-Odysseus’ propensity to

68     Clare L. E. Foster

embellish, invent, disguise and lie, which is also the whole poem’s trick on us, in a kind of overall challenge to credulity, is itself redolent of the inscrutable interiority of the engendering female. The text emphasises the wellmatched equality of Odysseus and Penelope in their linguistically mirrored ability to trick, deceive and weave stories. The idea of two binary genders as mutually defining opposites (if a characteristic isn’t one, it must by definition be the other) is a post-Christian phenomenon (Larson 2012). [For further discussion on gender as non-binary, see Emma Frankland’s exploration of approaches to gender identity in Chapter 34.] Antiquity imagined gender as a spectrum, rather than alternatives. The blurry middle was a site of great focus and interest. Female characteristics could be desirable in a pubescent male, but undesirable in an older one in authority; androgyny could be useful in a goddess or a hetaira/meretrix (prostitute), but dangerous in a wife or mother, especially one in power. As Simon Goldhill (1991, 159) put it in his review of the edited volume Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient World (Halperin et al. 1990) ‘“sexuality” as a “central and centralised” category is a modern notion whose importation into the ancient world cannot but lead to distortions and misunderstanding’. The key either/or distinction in antiquity was less between masculinity and femininity than between penetrator vs the penetrated, active and passive, lover or loved. Much of Greek drama and Roman art is about the way in which biology maps unevenly onto these relations. Women do the penetrating, men are penetrated; Clytemnestra is more a ‘man’ for her innate strength and skill than the weak-willed man who has that role and title; a soft-focus pretty girl is unveiled as Achilles, the most ruthless warrior. These are ironies to be enjoyed (Foster 2015a, 233). It is later ages and their singularly male orientation that would make Achilles a role model for masculinity and Clytemnestra simply a ‘bad wife’ (Hall 2005, 56–73). Christianity, one of many Roman religions, crucially laid the foundations for biology-based heredity, anchored to a new notion of sexual sanctity that is still a cornerstone of Christian marriage in the twenty-first century. Before Christianity, adoption was a common way of ensuring a suitable heir (most Roman emperors after Augustus used this method of succession, for example) and the idea of family was correspondingly flexible. Female virginity was less economically crucial, and civic involvement in female roles was a matter of how bodies were used instrumentally, rather than a question of personal morality or merit. Neither morality nor the law meant the same thing as they did after the idea of sin was introduced—for example in Athenian ‘law’, if a father prostituted his own son, the law freed the son from the obligation to look after the father in his old age. In such

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     69

contexts—before religion became dualistic, offering the terrifying either/or of heaven and hell—the stakes in being, and controlling definitions of male and female were very different. The range of degrees of participation in characteristics identified with each gender could be interesting: a game. The wider context of the theatricality of Roman culture as a whole suggests these depictions of hermaphrodites can be seen as parodying the very idea of ‘either/or’. As Judith Butler (1990, 136, 138) writes, at another time in human history when there was a pervasive interest in visual codes of gender representation, gender identity is ‘a personal/cultural history of received meanings, subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations… and which [jointly] construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self, or parody the mechanism of that construction ’ (my emphasis). She goes on to explain the modern pleasures of watching a drag performance: ‘In the place of the law of heterosexual coherence, we see sex and gender denaturalized by means of a performance which avows their distinctness and dramatizes the cultural mechanism of their fabricated unity’ (Butler 1990, 137–38). Carlos Picón, curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, said in connection with the 2016 display of the Louvre’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite sculpture in the exhibition ‘Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World’ (https://www.metmuseum. org/exhibitions/listings/2016/pergamon) that Roman attitudes to gender have more in common with the current trans movement than with previous modern eras: ‘They had it formulated pretty clear all the way back then’. Or as Daniel McDermond put it in The New York Times (June 24, 2016): ‘In its latest form, [the hermaphrodite] still embodies a notion of beauty and ­transgression that signals a kind of cosmopolitanism, just as it did in the ­second century’.

Conclusion Theatre in ancient Rome was not a thing, a transferable, repeatable object or event. Theatre was the act of reference to common knowledge, to the collectively recognisable. As such, it was public play—a ‘play’ which made it possible to bring into focus the cultural forces, or framing agencies, that condition ideas of both women and men. Barbara Kellum (1997, 158) makes this point: ‘Gender can be a useful category of analysis precisely because it tends to destabilize our understanding of the past’. Anne Duncan (2006, xx) adds that the idea of the individual with which ‘women’ or ‘men’

70     Clare L. E. Foster

are imagined today is a modern invention, not necessarily available to the imagination before the sixteenth century. Subjectivity in the ancient world was ‘fluid, fragmented, constructed and contingent’. This fluidity is how the Greeks and Romans saw actors. They were unbounded or boundary-crossers: outside the system, like fools at court. They were hard to read, or interpret, and provoked anxiety about the relationship between appearance and reality, with immense, direct power to draw attention to, and subvert, the social codes on which consensus and cooperation depend. An open attitude to what ‘theatre’ might have meant to an ancient Roman promises to expand productively the inevitably limited frames with which some think about theatre and performance today, as reified practices rooted in occasion (‘going to a play’). Similarly, an open attitude to what gender might have meant to an ancient Roman might contextualize apparently normative attitudes towards sexual identity as historically specific to post-classical periods characterised by dualistic and prescriptive religions and their ideologically driven divide-and-rule mechanisms. A feminist agenda to correct the male-associated grand narratives of history by populating them with females instead, or countering with an alternative female version, can perpetuate the framing agencies that sustain the distinction in the first place. Roman ludism subverts by directing attention to who or what controls the terms of the debate—defines the oppositions— in the first place. Historians will never be able to factually determine whether and in what proportion embodied males and females were actually in the audiences for the fifty-year or so heyday of Athenian dramatic festival competition entries. We know women were present in the audience for other festivals and for the later reperformances of Athenian dramas across the Greek-speaking world—the performances whose popularity Aristotle attempts to explain and which are arguably when ‘Greek drama’ truly begins, rather than on the occasion of the city of Athens showing off on its annual sports-day (Foster 2015a). But what we can say, based on a preponderance of evidence, and by ‘reading’ it critically, is that a concern about gender roles—about the need for balance, the complex and mixed nature of power—dominates the surviving texts of Greek drama (Hall 2010). Who went when to Aeschylus’ Oresteia (458 BC, Athens) is unknowable; but that a mythic and foundational contest between ‘the male’ and ‘the female’ was that city’s crowning public topic, and the first tragedy ever to be reperformed at civic expense, by special request to the Archon, in 456 BC—is a fact. Women on stage were an urgent problem, and one that this particular patriarchal society thought should be collectively aired.

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     71

The corrective agenda of 1980s classical scholarship about ‘women in antiquity’, in its desire to ‘put women back in the picture’ understood the paradox it faced, that it risked—by offering the alternative ‘female’ perspective—supporting a naturalised transhistorical view of men and women as mutually defining binary opposites. We might take a cue from Roman ‘theatricality’ to notice how this either/or approach to gender is culturally specific, and to look for other cultural contexts when the collective mechanisms that would create such either/or categories have been robustly played with, exposed, problematised and subverted. For sexism will exist wherever there is sex: it is who performs sexism to whom, and how to make this performance visible, that matters.

Bibliography Primary texts Aristophanes. 2002. Aristophanes Volume 4: Frogs, Assemblywomen, Wealth. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Henderson. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: London: Harvard University Press. Aristotle. 1995. ‘Poetics’. In Aristotle: Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell et al. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Euripides. 1999. Euripides, Volume 4: Trojan Women, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Ion. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2014. Euripides: Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Euripides. 2014. Euripides: Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Homer. 1995. The Odyssey. Translated by A. T. Murray, revised by George E. Dimock. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Homer. 1999. Iliad. Translated by A. T. Murray. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Livy. 2018. Livy: Books 38–40. The History of Rome. Edited and translated by J. C. Yardley. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

72     Clare L. E. Foster

Menander. 1996–1997. Menander: Plays 2 Volumes. Edited and translated by W. G. Arnott. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ovid. 1984. Ovid: Metamorphoses. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ovid. 2014. Ovid: Heroides, Amores. Translated by Grant Showerman, Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ovid. 2014. Ovid: Tristia. Ex Ponto. Translated by A. L. Wheeler, Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Plato. 2014. Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Plautus. 2011. Plautus Plays, 2 vols. Translated by Wolfgang de Melo. Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Pliny. 1942–1950. Natural History, 2 vols. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Quintilian. 1958. Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols. Translated by H. E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press: William Heinemann. Virgil. 1999–2000. Virgil: Aeneid, 2 vols. Translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, Revised by G. P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Vitruvius. 1931–34. On Architecture (De Architectura ), 2 vols. Edited from the Harleian Manuscript 2767 and Translated into English by Frank Granger. London: Heinemann.

Secondary Texts Barchiesi, Alessandro. 2006. ‘Women on Top: Livia and Andromache’. In The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, edited by Roy Gibson, Steven Green, and Alison Sharrock, 96–120. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bartsch, Shadi. 1994. Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bassi, Karen. 1998. Acting Like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Beacham, Richard C. 1991. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. London: Routledge. Beard, Mary. 2007. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press.

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     73

Beard, Mary. 2015. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. London: Profile Books. Beard, M., and Henderson, J. 2001. Classical Art: From Greece to Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bergmann, Bettina. 1994. ‘The Roman House as Memory Theater: The House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii’. The Art Bulletin 76, no. 2 (June 1): 225–56. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00043079.1994.10786585. Bergmann, Bettina Ann, and Christine Kondoleon, eds. 1999. The Art of Ancient Spectacle. Studies in the History of Art (Washington, DC) 56. Washington: New Haven and London: National Gallery of Art; Distributed by Yale University Press. Borriello, Maria Rosaria. 2010. Histrionica: teatri, maschere e spettacoli nel mondo antico. Milano: Skira. https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/48868802. Boyle, A. J. 2003. Ovid and the Monuments. Bendigo, VC: Aureal. Brilliant, Richard. 2005. ‘Roman Copies: Degrees of Authenticity’. Notes in the History of Art 24, no. 2 (Winter): 19–27. https://doi.org/10.1086/ sou.24.2.23208110. Bruhn, Jørgen. 2016. The Intermediality of Narrative Literature: Medialities Matter. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://cam.ldls.org.uk/vdc_1000603485 19.0x000001. Butler, Judith. 1988. ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Theatre Journal 40, no. 4: 519–31. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge. Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network (CRASSH). 2013. http://www. crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network, http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/ events/24682. Cambridge University. 2013. ‘Acts of Creativity, Audiences and Us’. University of Cambridge, March 5, 2013. http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/acts-ofcreativity-audiences-and-us. Clarke, John R. 2005. ‘Augustan Domestic Interior: Propaganda or Fashion?’ In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus, edited by Karl Galinsky, 264–78. Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, David. 1994. Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csapo, Eric, and William J. Slater. 1995. The Context of Ancient Drama. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cull, Laura. 2014. ‘Performance Philosophy—Staging a New Field’. In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay, 15–38. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137462725_2. Davidson, James. 2006. ‘Making a Spectacle of Her(Self ): The Greek Courtesan and the Art of the Present’. In The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, edited by Martha Feldman and Bonnie Gordon, 29–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

74     Clare L. E. Foster

Davis, J. T. 1989. Fictus Adulter: Poet as Actor in the ‘Amores ’. Amsterdam: Gieben. Demetriou, Chrysanthi. 2010. ‘Crossing the Boundary of Dramatic Illusion in Terence: Courtesans in Terence and Donatus’ Criticism’. Rosetta 8, no. 5: 16–33. Dover, K. J. 1989. Greek Homosexuality: Updated and with a New Postscript. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duncan, Anne. 2006. Performance and Identity in the Classical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dupont, Florence. 1997. ‘Recitatio and the Reorganization of the Space of Public Discourse’. In The Roman Cultural Revolution, edited by Thomas Habinek and Allesandro Schiesaro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutton, Jaqueline. 2012. ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women: Ovid Ars Amatoria, Book I: 101–134’. M.A. Diss., University of Johannesburg. http://hdl.handle. net/10210/4422. Edwards, Catharine. 1993. The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Edwards, Catharine. 1997. ‘Unspeakable Professions: Public Performance and Prostitution in Ancient Rome’. In Roman Sexualities, edited by J. P. Hallett and B. M. Skinner, 66–95. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Elsner, Jas. 2007. Roman Eyes: Visuality & Subjectivity in Art & Text. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Elsner, Jas, and Michel Meyer, eds. 2014. Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fagan, Garrett G. 2011. The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faraone, Christopher A., and Laura K. McClure, eds. 2006. Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Feldherr, Andrew, 2010. Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Feldman, Martha, and Bonnie Gordon, eds. 2018. The Courtesan’s Arts: Crosscultural Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitzgerald, William. 2000. Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Clare. 2013. ‘Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network’. http:// www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/performance-network. Foster, Clare. 2015a. ‘Whose Theatre Is It Anyway?: Ancient Chorality versus Modern Drama’. In Anthropology, Theatre and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance, edited by A. Flynn and J. Tinius, 224–57. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Foster, Clare. 2015b. ‘A Very British Greek Play: Greek Plays in Greek in England, 1880–1921’. PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge. Foster, Clare. 2018. ‘Wilde and the Emergence of Literary Drama, 1880–1895’. In Oscar Wilde and Classical Antiquity, edited by Kathleen Riley, Alastair J. L. Blanshard, and Iarla Manny, 107–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     75

Foxhall, Lin. 2013. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frangoulidis, Stavros, Stephen J. Harrison, and Theodore D. Papanghelis, eds. 2013. Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations. Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes, 20. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Freudenburg, Kirk. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Fried, Michael. 1980. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Galinsky, Karl. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Gazda, Elaine K., ed. 2000. The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: Ancient Ritual, Modern Muse. Ann Arbor: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Geissler, Paul Wenzel. 2017. ‘Ethnography as Reenactment. Performing Temporality in an East African Place of Science’. https://www.academia. edu/35849300/Ethnography_as_Reenactment._Performing_Temporality_in_ an_East_African_Place_of_Science. Gibson, Bruce. 1999. ‘Ovid on Reading: Reading Ovid. Reception in Ovid Tristia II ’. The Journal of Roman Studies 89: 19–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/300732. Gibson, Roy K., Steven J. Green, and Alison Sharrock, eds. 2006. The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gleason, Maud. 1990. ‘The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-Fashioning in the Second Century CE’. In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Greek World, 389–415. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Golden, Mark, and Peter Toohey. 1997. Inventing Ancient Culture: Historicism, Periodization and the Ancient World. London: Psychology Press. Golden, Mark, and Peter Toohey. 2003. Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goldhill, Simon. 1991. ‘Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World’. The Classical Review 41, no. 1: 159–61. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gonçalves, Rodrigo Tadeu. 2015. Performative Plautus: Sophistics, Metatheater and Translation. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Góráin, Fiachra Mac. 2017. ‘Dionysus in Rome’. In A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology, edited by Vanda Sajko and Helena Hoyle, 323–36. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Habinek, Thomas. 2005. ‘Satire as Aristocratic Play’. In The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, edited by Kirk Freudenburg, 177–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521803594.011.

76     Clare L. E. Foster

Habinek, Thomas. 1997. ‘The Invention of Sexuality in the World-City of Rome’. In The Roman Cultural Revolution, edited by Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro, 23–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Habinek, Thomas N., and Alessandro Schiesaro. 1997. The Roman Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://trove.nla.gov.au/ version/19000120. Hales, Shelley. 2003. The Roman House and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, Edith. 2005. ‘Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra versus her Senecan Tradition’. In Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC–AD 2004, edited by Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, Pantelis Michelakis, and Edith Hall. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hall, Edith. 2010. Suffering Under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hallet, Judith P. 1997. Roman Sexualities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Halperin, David M., John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds. 1990. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Hanink, Johanna. 2014. Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardie, Philip. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Ovid. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawley, R., and B. Levick, eds. 1995. Women in Antiquity: New Assessments. London: Routledge. Henderson, John. 1989. ‘Satire Writes “Woman”: Gendersong’. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 35: 50–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0068673500005149. Henderson, John. 2002. ‘A Doo-dah-doo-dah-dey at the Races: Ovid, Amores 3.2 and the Personal Politics of the Circus Maximus’. Classical Antiquity 21: 41–66. Henderson, John. 2005. ‘The Turnaround: A Volume Retrospect on Roman Satire’. In The Cambridge Companion to Roman Satire, edited by Kirk Freudenburg, 309–18. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hinds, Stephen. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holmes, Brooke. 2013. Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holzberg, Niklas. 2006. ‘Staging the Reader Response: Ovid and His Contemporary Audience in Ars and Remedia’. In The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris’, edited by Roy Gibson, Stephen Green, and Alison Sharrock, 40–53. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hopkins, Keith, and Mary Beard. 2005. The Colosseum. London: Profile Books. Hunter, Richard L., and Anna Uhlig, eds. 2017. Imagining Reperformance in Ancient Culture: Studies in the Traditions of Drama and Lyric. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     77

Iacopi, Irene. 2008. The House of Augustus: Wall Paintings. Rome: Electa. Jansen, Laura, ed. 2014. The Roman Paratext: Frame, Texts, Readers. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, William A., and Holt N. Parker. 2011. Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joshel, Sandra R. 2007. ‘Women in Augustan Rome’. The Classical Review 57, no. 2: 475–77. Kellum, Barbara. 1997. ‘Concealing/Revealing: Gender and the Play of Meaning in the Monuments of Augustan Rome’. In The Roman Cultural Revolution, edited by Thomas Habinek and Alessandro Schiesaro, 158–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khan Academy. n.d. ‘Roman Wall Painting Styles’. Accessed July 13, 2018. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ancient-art-civilizations/roman/ wall-painting/a/roman-wall-painting-styles. Knox, Peter E., ed. 2009. A Companion to Ovid. Chichester, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Labate, Mario. 2007. ‘Erotic Aetiology: Romulus, Augustus, and the Rape of the Sabine Women’. In The Art of Love: Bimillennial Essays on Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and Remedia Amoris, edited by Roy Gibson, Stephen Green, and Alison Sharrock, 193–215. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larson, Jennifer. 2012. Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook. London: Bloomsbury. Leach, Eleanor Winsor. 2004 (2011-Paperback). The Social Life of Painting in Ancient Rome and on the Bay of Naples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ling, Roger. 1991. Roman Painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lorenz, Katharina. 2015. ‘Wall Painting’. In A Companion to Roman Art. WileyBlackwell: 252–67. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118886205.ch13. MacCormack, Carol P., and Marilyn Strathern. 1980. Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meineck, Peter, and Roger Kneebone. 2013. ‘Performance and Cognition’. CIPN Seminar Presented at the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Performance Network, CRASSH, October 21. http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25129. Meyer, Michel. 2014. ‘Coda’. In Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture, edited by Jas Elsner, 418–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi. org/10.1017/CBO9780511732317. Moore, Timothy J. 1998. The Theatre of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Austin: University of Texas Press. Morgan, Llewelyn. 2000. ‘Creativity Out of Chaos: Between the Death of Caesar and the Death of Virgil’. In Literature in the Roman World: New Perspectives, edited by Oliver Taplin, 75–118. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newby, Zarah. 2015. ‘Roman Art and Spectacle’. In A Companion to Roman Art, edited by Barbara E. Borg, 552–68. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

78     Clare L. E. Foster

Newby, Zarah. 2016. Greek Myths in Roman Art and Culture: Imagery, Values and Identity in Italy. Greek Culture in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nichols, Marden Fitzpatrick. 2017. Author and Audience in Vitruvius’ De Architectura. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olsen, Kelly. 2006. ‘Matrona and Whore: Clothing and Definition in Roman Antiquity’. In Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, edited by Christopher A. Faraone and Laura McClure, 186–203. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Orrells, Daniel. 2014. Sex: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Ancients and Moderns). London: I.B. Tauris. Papanghelis, Theodore D., Stephen J. Harrison, and Stavros Frangoulidis, eds. 2013. Generic Interfaces in Latin Literature: Encounters, Interactions and Transformations. Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes, 20. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Parker, Holt N. 1999. ‘The Observed of All Observers: Spectacle, Applause, and Cultural Poetics in the Roman Theater Audience’. In The Art of Ancient Spectacle, edited by Christine Kondoleon and Bettina Bergmann, 163–79. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Distributed by Yale University Press. Platt, Verity Jane, and Michael Squire, eds. 2017. The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History. New York: Cambridge University Press. Porter, James I., ed. 2006. Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Postlewait, Thomas. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Historiography. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico. 1963. Pittori di Pompei. Milan: Edizioni del Milione https://www.ebay.it/itm/Ragghianti-Pittori-di-Pompei-Edizioni-del-MilionePrima-edizione-1963-/173184084581. Rawson, Elizabeth. 1985. Intellectual Life in the Late Roman Republic. London: Duckworth. Reis, David M. 2011. ‘Readers and Reading Culture in the High Roman Empire: A Study of Elite Communities—By William A. Johnson’. Religious Studies Review 37, no. 3: 219–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1748-0922.2011.01538_4.x. Segal, Charles. 1984. ‘The Menace of Dionysus: Sex Roles and Reversals in Euripides’ Bacchae ’. In Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers, edited by John Peradotto and John Patrick Sullivan, 195–212. New York: SUNY Press. Segal, Charles. 1997. Dionysiac Poetics and Euripides. Bacchae. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Shepherd, Simon. 2016. The Cambridge Introduction to Performance Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Solga, Kim. 2016. Theatre & Feminism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. https://cam.ldls.org. uk/vdc_100030754559.0x000001.

4  Ludism, Gender-Play and Roman Theatricality     79

Spivey, Nigel Jonathan. 1997. ‘The World as a Stage: Art and Greek Drama’. In Greek Art, 277–312. London: Phaidon Press. Taplin, Oliver. 2001. Literature in the Roman World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taplin, Oliver. 2007. Pots & Plays: Interactions Between Tragedy and Greek VasePainting of the Fourth Century B.C. Los Angles: Getty Publications. Tougher, Shaun. ed. 2002. Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Treggiari, Susan. 2005. ‘Women in the Time of Augustus’. In The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Augustus, edited by Karl Galinsky, 130–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Valladares, Hérica. 2014. ‘Pictorial Paratexts: Floating Figures in Roman Wall Painting’. In The Roman Paratext, edited by Laura Jansen, 176–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139168786.010. Von Stackelberg, K. 2014. ‘Garden Hybrids: Hermaphrodite Images and Gendered Space in the Roman House’. Classical Antiquity, 33, 395–426. Vout, Caroline. 2012. ‘Unfinished Business: Re-Viewing Medea in Roman Painting’. Ramus 41, no. 1–2: 119–43. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0048671X0000028X. Whitmarsh, Tim. 2002. ‘What Samuel Butler Saw: Classics, Authorship and Cultural Authority in Late Victorian England’. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 48: 66–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068673500000833. Winkler, John J., David M. Halperin, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds. 1991. Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wiseman, T. P. 2015. The Roman Audience: Classical Literature as Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zajko, Vanda, and Helena Hoyle, eds. 2017. A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology. Wiley Blackwell Handbooks to Classical Reception. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Zanker, Paul. 1990. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/208159390.

Part II Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Introduction It is a wide chronological leap from ancient Greece and Rome to the European Middle Ages which are the subject of our next part. The lack of theatrical material or archival evidence available from the intervening years makes this gap in our volume currently inevitable, although painstaking and increasingly ingenious modern research methods are uncovering more evidence about the period all the time, in particular (with regard to England) via the extensive work of the Records in Early English Drama (REED) project. However, it is not only the lack of evidence that is responsible for this break in coverage. The spread of Christianity throughout Europe produced general condemnation of the theatre and performance of all sorts by Church Fathers such as Tertullian, Lactantius and St. John Chrysostom, leading to a break in the European tradition. Nevertheless, paradoxically the instinct to use the immediacy of drama to inform and celebrate meant that Christianity itself provided the setting and impetus for the re-emergence of drama in many parts of Europe in the medieval period. Similarly, while the Roman actors and mime artists who survived the fall of the empire were reduced to strolling players, jongleurs, tumblers and minstrels, this tradition too provided circumstances in which theatrical performance was able to reinvent and reinvigorate itself. In the following chapters, Sue Niebrzydowski discusses the (mainly religious) drama of the Middle Ages and the extent of women’s participation in this via a variety of creative and practical ways, while Margaret Rose examines the role of the earliest Italian actresses in the commedia dell’arte;

82     Part II: Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Catherine Clifford looks at the part played by the queens Elizabeth I, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria in the theatrical spectacles of the English court and M. A. Katritzky explores the street theatre of Europe through the eyes of the exiled English aristocrat, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, herself a playwright with a sharp analytical appreciation of performance. Niebrzydowski opens by discussing the early contribution of continental women playwrights such as Hrotsvit, Canoness of Gandersheim Abbey (c.935–975) and Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess of Rupertsberg (1098–1179) to the religious drama of the time. Unexpectedly, however, these works, written to be performed by the nuns of these convents, are morality plays rather than dramas drawing on Bible narratives or evolving from the standard Christian liturgy. Niebrzydowski suggests that similar works may well have been created in English abbeys at the time: as she points out below (100): ‘Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence’. Evidence does survive, however, of later liturgical performances in Britain, starting with a late thirteenth-century tradition at Barking Abbey of marking the Feast of Holy Innocents by a performance involving novices and children; further evidence from Barking Abbey, under the leadership of a later abbess, Katherine of Sutton, in the fourteenth century, details three linked liturgical dramas celebrating the Easter rite, including a Visitatio Sepulchri. Moving away from the convent setting, Niebrzydowski goes on to examine evidence for women’s more public involvement in all aspects of the civic sponsorship and production of the pageant cycles (mystery plays), morality plays, saints’ plays and civic events in England in the Middle Ages, involvement that ranged from loaning expensive garments as costumes, financing and organising pageants and even taking part in tableaux vivants, though evidence of more active participation in performance itself is still scanty and controversial. The first documented commercial drama in Europe originated in Italy in the early sixteenth century, with the development of the commedia dell’arte in which, as Margaret Rose’s chapter details, women came to participate as performers, writers and even troupe leaders. Rose explores the social and historical context of these early women performers, a number of whom travelled with their troupes throughout Europe and performed at royal courts, including that of Elizabeth I; she analyses the roles and varied talents necessary for female commedia actresses and provides an account of the life and work of the most well known and distinguished of these, Isabella Andreini. In recent years, historical scholarship has focused on the various royal courts of Renaissance Europe, discussing their innate theatricality and its

Part II: Medieval and Early Modern Europe     83

relationship to power. Catherine Clifford argues that, while Elizabeth I did not actively participate in court masques, her ceremonial role in the many tiltyard tournaments over which she presided, and which confirmed her sovereign status, was constant throughout her reign and inherently dramatic. These royal ‘performances’ were precursors to the active participation of her female successors, the Queens Consort, Anna of Denmark, wife of James I, who regularly danced in court masques and Charles I’s wife Henrietta Maria who went further by staging and performing in plays at court and was one of the first women performers to be called an ‘actress’ on any English stage. As Clifford comments below (144): ‘This was not a compliment’. Away from the courts of Europe, women were also performing in less prestigious venues as explored in M. A. Katritzky’s wide-ranging chapter. In one of her Sociable Letters, Margaret Cavendish described the range of street performers she had seen at a fair in Antwerp, devoting particular attention to two attractions—the ‘hirsute female harpsichord player’ (156) Barbara Urslerin and a commedia dell’arte troupe which included two women performers. Katritzky uses Cavendish’s account as a springboard to explore not just Cavendish’s own writing career and the attractions she lists here but also the context, including earlier performances by women and girls in religious productions on the continent, as well as the cultural background to the closure of the theatres in England in 1642, the circumstances of their reopening at the Restoration and the accession of actresses onto the public stage.

5 Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives Sue Niebrzydowski

In a period long before the construction of the purpose-built, commercial theatres for which Shakespeare wrote, a stage meant many things in terms of its location, construction and permanency. During the early summer Corpus Christi celebrations, York and Chester were transformed into a series of playing spaces for pageants dramatizing biblical narratives from Creation to Doomsday on purpose-built wagons (see Meredith 1979, 5–18; Marshall 1979, 49–55; Twycross 1978, vol. 2, 10–33; Mills 1985; Hill-Vasquez 2007, 35). The performance of the morality play, The Castle of Perseverance, as the manuscript diagram details, required a platea [playing-space], four scaffolds and a crenellated castle with a bed visible beneath. In parish churches, convents and cathedrals, chapels and the choir, sometimes infused with the odour of incense and lit by candles or daylight refracted through stained glass, were utilized as stages. The halls of the wealthy, more typically the place of politics and feasting, also offered a site for dramatic performance, as these houses could provide a dais or raised platform and multiple entrances and exits. Market squares and inn yards associated with both commerce and revelry also served as ‘pop-up’ playing places. Medieval drama was embedded within the community and performed within locations—city, church, manor hall, market square, inn-yard—to which the audience brought what Meg Twycross (2004, 379) has termed ‘a chain of associations’, forged from calling to mind related images, prayers, sermons and other plays watched. Sue Niebrzydowski (*)  Bangor University, Wales, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_5

85

86     Sue Niebrzydowski

Women were performers in some of these locations and audience members in all, watching plays in which gender and sexuality were frequently the subject matter for social and political ends. Some time ago Clifford Davidson (1984, 99) advised that what was taken as certainty among early scholars of medieval theatre, ‘that the medieval theater, like the professional stage of Shakespeare’s time, was entirely the province of the male actor, who presented plays written by male dramatists’, required re-examination. If elasticity is required to understand what a stage might be, even further flexibility is necessary to comprehend fully the ways in which women engaged with medieval theatre (from writing and commissioning plays, participating in the practicalities of staging, to performing and spectating).

Hrotsvit and Hildegard: Early Women Playwrights The earliest English female playwrights flourished in convents. Unlike their fictional descendant, the unfortunate Judith Shakespeare (in Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own), nuns’ talents were nurtured both by access to education and books, and the support of their sisters. English surviving evidence offers a snapshot of what was, in all likelihood, a European tradition of nuns composing and performing drama. The plays of Hrotsvit (c.935–c.975), a canoness of Gandersheim Abbey, and that of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Abbess of Rupertsberg, provide invaluable context for their English counterparts. Hrotsvit wrote six Latin plays in rhymed prose, because, as she tells us: I, the strong voice of Gandersheim, have not hesitated to imitate in my writings a poet whose works are so widely read, my object being to glorify, within the limits of my poor talent, the laudable chastity of Christian virgins in that self-same form of composition which has been used to describe the shameless acts of licentious women. (Wilson 1984, 31)

Hrotsvit’s six plays champion female chastity by repurposing the six comedies of Terence that Albrecht Classen (2010, 169) suggests may have been performed at Gandersheim but of whose performance history has left no trace. Hrotsvit’s plays Gallicanus, Dulcitius, Calimachus, Abraham, Paphnutius, and Sapientia are dramatized vitae or saints’ lives set in the period of Roman persecution of the early Christians. In these plays, women are the centre of the action and the drivers of the plot.

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     87

The narrative arc of Hrotsvit’s plays is consistent with that found in the hagiographies of the early Christian martyrs. The plots build towards a crisis initiated by some kind of male sexual threat and/or requirement that the heroine recant her Christianity (Classen 2010, 170). The heroine’s refusal to submit leads to her torture and deprivation. At the dénouement the heroine dies, assured of her reward and eternal life, having defended her virtue or undergone strict penance for its loss. Good triumphs over evil, Christianity over paganism, and female chastity wins the day. (For a detailed study of Hrotsvit’s portrayal of virginity in her plays, see Florence Newman 2004, 59–76.) In defending their right to chastity, the women in Hrotsvit’s plays refuse patriarchal possession and suppression, as did the playwright herself in her determined avowal of her God-given talent: ‘I have enough confidence to apply myself to writing, if God grants me the power, and that I need not fear the criticism of the learned whoever they may be’ (St. John 1923, xxix). Katharina M. Wilson (1984, 30) claims for Hrotsvit the distinction of being not only the first known dramatist of Christianity but also of writing ‘the first performable plays of the Middle Ages’. The manner of their performance and exact constitution of the audience has been much debated. Hrotsvit’s plays have been considered closet drama, read aloud by her fellow nuns and canonesses accompanied by ‘some gesture and movement […] for comprehension’ (Axton 1974, 27). Sister Mary Butler (1960, 51), however, envisages a fully staged performance taking place in Gandersheim’s cloister arcade, chapter hall or common room. Gandersheim may have experienced both kinds of performance, the mode depending on the occasion and audience for the plays’ staging. Scholars disagree as to whether such performances can be truly considered public performances: Katie Normington (2004, 48) considers that ‘private performances by nuns were not genuine public displays’ while Jane Stevenson (2005, 97) makes clear the mixed constituency of the sisters of Gandersheim and that canonesses were allowed to retain their servants and receive guests who, along with the sisters, may have watched and been both entertained and educated by the plays. Unfailingly didactic but never dull, as with all effective drama Hrotsvit’s plays provoke a variety of emotions. We laugh at Dulcitius who becomes blackened, literally and metaphorically, when he embraces pots and pans believing them to be the nubile bodies of Agape, Chionia and Irena after whom he lusts (Dulcitius, scene X). We experience horror at Calimachus’ determination to perform necrophilia on Drusiana’s corpse (Calimachus, scene VII), share Thais’ fear of hell-fire (Paphnutius, scene III) and the sorrow of the women helping Sapientia prepare her daughters for burial (Sapientia, scene VIII). Hrotsvit’s plays make for dynamic and performable

88     Sue Niebrzydowski

theatre. Gesture and facial expression animate the dialogue and prayers (as spoken by Constance in Gallicanus, scene V). Entrances and exits, disguise, costume and props enliven the action, most spectacularly in the case of the vat of boiling pitch into which Faith and Hope are thrown in Sapientia. Hrotsvit’s heroines find support from chaste men (as in Abraham and Paphnutius) but predominantly from like-minded women who guard their chastity for their faith and offer their younger sisters spiritual support and guidance. Hrotsvit’s plays celebrate the female chastity shared by the career virgins watching, the canonesses themselves, and Hrotsvit’s mentor, the Abbess Gerberga II (940–1001), and demonstrate also the salvific power of virginity to a wider audience of guests invited into the abbey. A century later, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the Abbess of Rupertsberg, composed the Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues ) (c.1155), a neumed or plainsong drama that Kent Kraft (1984, 117) credits as being ‘the earliest extant liturgical morality play’ (see Fassler 2014, 317–78 for a discussion of Hildegard’s music). The play has more in common with morality plays than liturgical drama, however, in that it is allegorical and, with the exception of the Soul and the Devil, its characters are personified Christian virtues. With a performance time of nearly an hour, the play dramatizes a psychomachia or battle waged between the Devil and the Virtues led by their queen, Humility, for Anima (the soul) who is tempted by the flesh and strays from the path of virtue. To secure victory over Anima, the Devil can only shout as he lacks the harmony of the divine, while, in deliberate contrast, the Virtues dance and sing until Anima returns, repentant. On her return, the Devil attacks Anima at which point the Virtues capture and bind him. The play closes with the Virtues singing of the power of Christ’s crucifixion to save souls from Satan, and instructing the audience to bend their knees before God. Anima’s fate remains undecided like that of every member of the audience, since the soul’s final destination was understood as dependent upon living a virtuous life and resisting further temptation. Evidence suggests that Ordo was staged, possibly originally for the dedication of the new convent in Rupertsburg (Tydeman 1984, 64; Potter 1986, 204, 208). Richard Axton (1974, 95) offers a blueprint for its staging, utilizing an altar and steps such as would have existed at Rupertsberg: [… ] the Virtues and their queen, Humility, are on a raised throne reached by steps. On the lower level is the Devil, who never reaches beyond the foot of the steps in his struggle to constrain the soul within the carnal world inhabited by the audience. After his defeat by the Virtues, he is bound with his own chains while Anima is led aloft, aided by the condescending Virtues.

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     89

The binding of the Devil, dancing of the Virtues, and the movement of Anima between the altar steps (the approach to Heaven) and the space at their foot (the earth), require the gesture and action that are the lifeblood of staged performance. Peter Dronke (1970, 170) notes how in her visionary work, Scivias (Know the Ways: an abbreviation of Scitote vias Domini [Know the Ways of the Lord] c.1151/1152), Hildegard provides inspiration for vibrant costumes for the Virtues: ‘Caritas has a dress the colour of the heavens, with a golden stole reaching to her feet; Fides, a scarlet dress, a token of martyrdom; Obedientia wears a hyacinth colour, and has silver fetters at her throat, hands and feet’. The chained Devil may have been masked to evoke his traditional representation in the plastic arts and, closer to home, the image of the Devil commissioned by Hildegard to accompany the Scivias. Nathaniel M. Campbell (2013, 1–68, figure 8) argues that Hildegard herself directed the iconography and composition of the images in the Rupertsberg manuscript of the Scivias. The Ordo Virtutum dramatizes for its audience— nuns and distinguished visitors alike—the daily struggle against sin in which all Christians, including those living within the walls of Rupertsberg, were engaged.

Katherine of Sutton and the Nuns of Barking Abbey The equivalent of Hrotsvit and Hildegard has yet to be discovered in convents of the British Isles. English nuns did participate in liturgical drama (sacred song combined with gesture, movement, and costume within the context of worship), the sine qua non of which is the Visitatio Sepulchri from Barking Abbey of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Ethelburga, a Benedictine house in Essex. Other convents may also have held such liturgical performances but texts are frustratingly rare because, as Stephanie Hollis (2013, 174) asserts, we may well have lost much English convent drama. Additionally, sufficient sisters and musical talent were required to develop the liturgy in this way. Michael Norton (2017, 8) advises caution in the description of these rites, advocating that ‘portray’, ‘perform’, ‘role’, ‘costume’ and ‘staging’, terms most commonly used by literary critics, should be replaced with ‘represent’, ‘celebrate’, ‘in the person of ’, ‘vestment’ and ‘movement’. This essay employs the terms that appear in the medieval documents in which these texts are recorded, and that indicate how the nuns described and understood their liturgical practice.

90     Sue Niebrzydowski

Conventual liturgical celebration was subject to contemporary criticism and later misinterpretation. In 1279 John Pecham, the newly appointed, reformist Archbishop of Canterbury visited Barking and then wrote to the abbess, Alice de Merton (1276–1291), demanding that small children not perform on the Feast of Holy Innocents (28 December), ‘lest the praise of God be turned into a mockery’ (Martin 1882–1884, 81–82). Early twentieth-century critics have considered this Barking performance a ‘mystery play’, suggesting an early analogue of the Massacre of the Innocents’ pageants of the cycle plays. Anne Bagnall Yardley (2006, 181–83) demonstrates conclusively that the children were participating in a liturgical rite, the details of which were recorded over a century later in the Barking Abbey Ordinale commissioned by Sibille Felton, Abbess of Barking (1394–1419), and presented in 1404 by her to the convent ‘et in librario eiusdem loci post mortem cuiscumque in perpetuum commemoraturum ordinauit’ [‘to be kept in the library for her use and that of her successors after her death’] (Tolhurst 1926, 13). The entry for De Sanctis Innocentibus describes how at vespers, novices—‘in stacione abbatisse posita’ [‘taking the role of the abbess’] and also the precentrix (the nun directing the choral service)—take over the singing of the antiphons and other parts of the liturgy for that feast day (Yardley 2006, 182). The youngest children were to say the Benedicamus at the close of vespers, evoking the children massacred by Herod’s soldiers (Yardley 2006, 182). The nuns absented themselves from this event that Yardley believes occasioned a ‘carnival-like atmosphere with crowds of townspeople attending’, including parents and mothers-to-be, who occupied the choir (Yardley 2006, 183). Concern about inappropriate observance of the divine office prompted Pecham to admonish Alice de Merton, and insist that the role of the children be limited, the nuns reclaim the singing, and that the choir be cleared of visitors (quoted and translated by Yardley 2006, 183). Pecham’s words were heeded. Later in Barking’s history, Abbess Katherine of Sutton (elected 1358– d. 1376) sought to invigorate the devotion of the nuns and congregation through the impact that drama might make on an individual. Her efforts are recorded in the Barking Abbey Ordinale: quam populorum concursis temporibus uenerabilis illis uidebatur deuocione frigessere et torpor humanus maxime accrescens, uenerabilis domina Domina Katerina de Suttone, tunc pastoralis cure gerens uicem desiderans dictum torporem penitus exstirpare et fidelium deuocionem ad tam celibem celebracionem magis excitare. (Tolhurst 1926, 107)

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     91

how the mass of people seemed to have grown cold in devotion in those days. As this human torpor greatly increased, the venerable Lady Dame Katherine of Sutton, who was then responsible for pastoral care, sought to extirpate it completely and to stimulate among the faithful more devotion. (Stevenson 2012, 245)

Katherine may have commissioned three liturgical dramas for Holy Week: the Depositio or Removal from the Cross and Entombment of Christ, the Descensus/Elevatio or Descent of Christ into Hell and his raising from the Tomb, and the Visitatio Sepulchri or Visitation at the Tomb. All quotations, Latin and English, are taken from Anne Bagnall Yardley and Jesse D. Mann’s edition, The Liturgical Dramas for Holy Week at Barking Abbey, Medieval Feminist Forum, Subsidia Series, Volume 3 (2014) in which the debate concerning Katherine’s authorship is set out (2014, 4). It was at Katherine’s instigation that the Descensus/Elevatio was moved from before Matins until after it, with the consequence that the Descensus/Elevatio ‘leads directly into the Visitatio Sepulchri rather than have the lengthy service of Matins between the two’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, 4). Whether Katherine composed or commissioned the Barking liturgical drama, she recognized the power of performance to convey spiritual instruction and stimulate devotion. The most recent editors of Barking’s dramas advise that, due to their reliance on the chants of the liturgy, ‘it is helpful to remember that in some sense these performances are small operas’ and further, that ‘there are seven chants in the Visitatio that appear to be unique to the Barking manuscript and may well represent the compositional activities of the nuns’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, 1, 4). The nuns’ creativity extended beyond the composition of the liturgy to its performance since sisters appeared alongside priests in what was an act of worship but nonetheless, theatrical. In the Depositio, the cantrix (the sister responsible for the musical life of the convent) leads the choir to join in with the priests’ singing of antiphons (for the role of the cantrix see Yardley 1987, 15–38). The nuns bear witness as the priests, who play Joseph and Nicodemus, remove the image of the crucified Christ from the high altar, wash its wounds with water and wine, and carry it to the tomb (the Easter sepulchre) where it is covered with linen and enclosed. The abbess provides the candle that is to burn before the Easter sepulchre until the Matins on Easter night when the image is returned to the altar in a candlelight procession. Having witnessed the entombment of Christ, in the Descensus/Elevatio the abbess and nuns, along with certain priests and clerics, represent the ‘souls of the holy fathers who,

92     Sue Niebrzydowski

living before Christ’s coming, descended into Hell’ and are enclosed in the chapel of St. Mary Magdalene (Yardley and Mann 2014, lines 50–51). The chapel’s door is shut to replicate the gates of Hell that are then burst open by Christ in the traditional iconography of Christ harrowing Hell and releasing the patriarchs and saints who had died before the time of Christ. (See the apocryphal Gesta Pilati or Gospel of Nicodemus; Holkham Bible Picture Book, Pickering 1971, 63:54.) The priest representing Christ strikes the chapel’s door with the cross that he carries, and it is opened. Singing an antiphon (a short chant sung as a refrain), the priest leads all of those within the chapel out through the choir to the now empty sepulchre, ‘the lady abbess, the prioress, and the entire convent follow them as if they were the patriarchs’, carrying a palm and candle (Yardley and Mann 2014, ll. 84–85). Translating the Latin priores as ‘patriarchs’, Yardley and Mann (2014, 7) advise that in the Descensus/Elevatio, the nuns have the opportunity to play the patriarchs and prophets as well as the disciples of Christ. These roles are part of the drama and offer nuns a chance to envision themselves as historical male figures. These opportunities complicate the common metaphor of nuns as the ‘brides of Christ’.

Interpreting the nuns’ bodies in the Barking Descensus/Elevatio is rather more complex than reading them as men. A medieval audience would have understood that, in addition to patriarchs, righteous women who had died before Christ’s Incarnation—Ruth, Esther, Rachel, Sarah and Eve, the foremother of the Virgin Mary—were also among those released in the ‘Harrowing of Hell’. As disciples, the nuns also represented Christ’s female followers, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, both of whom appear in the Visitatio Sepulchri that follows (see Luke 8:2–3). The nuns represented not only men but also the women whose role in Christian history was significant, and who received heavenly reward as a result. The Visitatio Sepulchri followed directly from the Descensus/Elevatio and in this section of the liturgy it is women who drive the action forward. In the Visitatio Sepulchri three nuns, pre-selected by the abbess (Tolhurst 1926, 103) sing the responses of Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Mary Salome, and are accompanied by two novices carrying candelabra. The Visitatio Sepulchri contains very specific detail concerning costume and emotive performance technique that required from the Marys what Dunbar Ogden (2001, 34) describes as an ‘array of gestures […] from daily life’. Having represented Hell in the Descensus/Elevatio, in the Visitatio Sepulchri the Mary Magdalene Chapel served as a ‘dressing room’ where the

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     93

three nuns removed their black habits to don ‘dazzling [white] surplices. The abbess [should also] have placed white veils over their heads’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 24). The three nuns say the Confiteor before their abbess, after which the nun representing Mary Magdalene leaves the chapel dedicated to her and, with the other two Marys, moves into the choir where the drama takes place. It is quite possible that the Barking sisters manufactured the white surplices and veils themselves, and that the cantrix both offered creative interpretation of the emotions required to inflect the sung verses and also directed the accompanying gesture and movement. A range of emotions and gestures are necessary to accompany the antiphons and responses. The Ordinale records how the verses, ‘Alas, how numerous are the lamentations that pound upon our private thoughts for our consoler of whom we wretched ones are deprived, whom the cruel Jewish people put to death’, required delivery in a ‘tearful and subdued voice’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 24). At the invitation of the angel (played by a cleric wearing a white stole), the three Marys enter the empty tomb and kiss the place where the image of Christ had been laid during the Depositio, at which point Mary Magdalene picks up the head shroud and takes it with her. It would be in keeping with the distress at finding Christ’s body missing for Mary Magdalene to simulate weeping at this point, and to cue in the second angel who asks, ‘Woman, why are thou weeping?’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 27). The women are required to deliver subsequent verses ‘plaintively’, and Mary Magdalene ‘sighs’ as the three women sing ‘To you I sigh’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 26). On seeing the risen Christ, Mary Magdalene prostrates herself at his feet, and the manner in which she sings her next verse ‘should communicate her delight to her companions in a joyful voice’ (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 28). Mary Magdalene is then joined by the other Marys and all three women kiss Christ’s feet (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 28). Yardley and Mann (2014, column 27, note 6) advocate caution in interpreting the description in the Ordinale of the figure who represents Christ, The Latin word ‘persona’ as used here may be a short-hand form of the expression ‘persona Christi’ (person of Christ). […] Although ‘persona’ is a feminine noun in Latin, it would be unwarranted to draw any conclusions from this point regarding the gender of the person playing the part of Christ in this drama.

Since the Ordinale makes clear that nuns represent the Marys, and clerics the angels and disciples, the lack of detail regarding Christ is puzzling.

94     Sue Niebrzydowski

Christ may well have been sung by a cleric and so usual was this practice that no comment was felt to be necessary. The absence of specificity presents, however, the tantalizing possibility that Christ’s responses may have been performed by another sister whose register was that of an alto. The drama concludes with Mary Magdalene bearing witness to the Resurrection by pointing to the empty tomb and displaying the head shroud to the priests, clerics, and nuns playing Christ’s disciples who, in turn, then kiss the shroud (Yardley and Mann 2014, column 29). The three Marys return to the Mary Magdalene chapel and resume their habits. Dressed once more like their sisters, the three nuns return to the choir carrying the candelabra and pray before the empty tomb, before returning to their place among their sisters. The Visitatio Sepulchri puts women centre stage, literally and doctrinally. It is to Mary Magdalene that Christ first reveals his Resurrection and he esteems Mary further by sending her to ‘my brethren’ to tell them that he has risen (John 20:17). Yardley and Mann (2014, 10 and column 30) propose that the use of ‘sacerdotes ’ at the close of the Visitatio Sepulchri to describe the three Marys suggests that these nuns were understood in some sense as priests performing sacerdotal functions in the rite. That may well be the case but the Barking drama also brought to life through the nuns’ bodies and words the crucial role played by women in the most important moment in Christian history. The Visitatio Sepulchri celebrated especially Mary Magdalene in whose chapel at Barking (probably added to the abbey’s existing structure in the thirteenth century) could be found not only the altar of the Resurrection but also the burial sites of the abbey’s own celebrated women: three former abbesses: Ethelburga, Hildlitha and Wulfhilda, and two former nuns, Tortith and Edith (Findlay 2006, 151). The Calendar in the Barking Ordinale records the reburial of three of the abbesses, citing September 23 as that of the ‘Translacio sancte Ethelburge, Hildelithe, Wifildis’ [translation [of the bodies] of holy Ethelburge, Hildelithe, Wifildis] (Tolhurst 1926, 9). The liturgical spectacle associated with Katherine of Sutton reminded the abbey priests, the local community, and the nuns of Barking Abbey annually at the most holy time of the Church year that these women continued to play a key role in the dissemination of the Gospel, and the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection.

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     95

Women and Mystery, Morality and Saints’ Plays Outside of the convent evidence of women’s association with the stage is just as elusive and challenging to interpret and had cemented the conviction that women did not perform in the great civic cycles, morality and saints plays of the period. The painstaking work of Records of Early English Drama has uncovered fascinating, if frustratingly fragmentary, evidence of women’s connections with drama. James Stokes (1993, 176–96) contends that in medieval Somerset secular women were involved in liturgical drama, guild drama, and itinerant performance. Stokes hypothesises a pre-existing, medieval tradition of women on the stage from examples that are predominantly seventeenth century, and of performances the majority of which are not plays. Citing a lost Chester Assumption pageant (discussed in detail below), Jeremy P. Goldberg (1995, 45—esp. n.84) argues for the likelihood that the wives or widows of guild members performed alongside the men ‘in truly amateur guild productions that […] were more normal in the later fourteenth or earlier fifteenth centuries’ but admits that the existence of such informal groups that predate the later formalized guilds is speculative. We are on firmer footing in asserting that medieval women sponsored drama, and in considering what this ‘sponsoring’ might encompass. In Chester, married women were responsible for The Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the play to which Goldberg makes reference. Although the play has disappeared without a trace, the Chester Assumption can be understood to have dramatized the apocryphal narrative of Mary’s bodily assumption to Heaven in similar fashion to the surviving Assumption pageants in N-Town and York. A seventeenth-century list of the Chester Guilds responsible for the provision and maintenance of each of the pageants mentions that the Assumption was associated with ‘þe Wyfus of þe town’ as early as 1499–1500 (London British Library MS Harley 2104; Clopper 1979, 23). The only version of Chester’s Pre-Reformation Banns (1539–1540) to have survived contains a longer reference to a play of ‘wyffys’: The wurshipfull wyffys of this towne ffynd of our Lady thassumpcion It to bryng forth they be bowne And meytene with all theyre might.

(B L MS Harley 2150; Holme and Mills 1998, 193; Clopper 1979, 37–38)

96     Sue Niebrzydowski

It is possible that ‘the wurshipfull wyffys’ were the wives and widows of the relatively small group of families, mostly merchants, such as the Blunds, Bellyetters, Hopes, Hattons, Ewloes, and Whitmores, who held the main civic offices in Chester throughout the later fourteenth and earlier fifteenth century (Lewis and Thacker 2003, 58–64). By the time the later Banns were recorded after the Reformation, all mention of this Marian play and the ‘wurshipfull wyffys’ of Chester had disappeared. If the Assumption is that which was produced at High Cross in 1489– 1490 for Sir George Stanley, and in 1498 at the Abbey Gate before Henry VII’s heir, Prince Arthur, then the wives and widows of Chester’s wealthy middle and upper classes were trusted to present the entertainment at important civic events. The Mayors’ Lists 5 and 10 that record events during the period when Rafe Davenport was Mayor of Chester, state that ‘the Asumption of our lady’ was played before Lord Strange at the ‘high Crosse’ and ‘Bridgestrete’, and Mayors Lists 3, 5 and 9, recording the later period in which Richard Goodman was Mayor, state that ‘the Assumpcion purification of our Ladie’ was played at the ‘Abbay gate & high crosse’ before Prince Arthur (Clopper 1979, 20–22). In 1498, the pageant may have been performed before the gates of St. Werburgh’s Abbey, on 15 August, the actual feast of the Assumption (Mills 1998, 86). Mary Wack (1999, 37) suggests that the Assumption sponsored by the Chester wives ‘afforded them and their work an important public identity and status within the community of guilds and crafts, even if they themselves were categorized as “wives” rather than a formal guild of work’. Catherine Sanok (2007, 160) considers it likely that the wives’ guild was a religious confraternity and possibly an all-woman sorority. We can speculate further that this confraternity was devoted either to Mary or her mother, St. Anne, both of whom were revered as wives and mothers and whose motherhood spoke to the dynastic interests of the merchant classes who took on civic roles in the city. Chester had a guild of St. Mary for a period in the fourteenth century and, in 1393, the guild of St. Anne was revived as a chantry foundation for the members of the civic élite (Lewis and Thacker 2003, 58–64). It is possible that the Assumption was commissioned at the behest of the wealthier wives in honour of one or other of these guilds and began its life as an independent play that was added later to Chester’s cycle (Mills 2010, 10). An association between St. Anne and Mary’s Assumption is recorded in the mid-fifteenth century in the Dean and Chapter Common Fund Accounts of Lincoln Cathedral, in which payment is recorded for an Assumption play for the Feast of St. Anne (Stokes 2009, 118, 129).

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     97

The 1539–1540 Banns indicate that the wives had a financial obligation towards the performance of the Assumption as it was their responsibility to ‘ffynd’ (found, provide for, endow) the play: to ‘bryng forth they be bowne / And meytene with all theyre might’. Denise Ryan (2001, 151) suggests that the wives took on the role of producers who were required ‘to furnish or supply, produce and preserve the play in good working order’. The maintenance of the play might have included a variety of responsibilities: commissioning and the periodic reviewing its text as required, payments for the upkeep of the wagon and any machinery associated with it (such as a device by which Mary could ascend to Heaven), props, and costume, all of which would have fallen to the wives. The Chester wives were not alone in providing for drama. At Wells Cathedral in 1470–1471, a communar’s (administrator’s) account records payment of seven pence to Christine Handon for ‘tinctura & factura dictorum indumentorum ’ [tinctures and robes] that Handon appears to have sourced for the ‘Three Marys play’ (Stokes 2009, 179). In Coventry in 1487 The Smiths’ Accounts record payment to ‘Maisturres Grymesby’ of xiid (twelve old pence or roughly a week’s wages see: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/#currency-result which may explain why the gown was loaned rather than given) ‘for lendyng off her geir is ffor pylatts wife’ (Ingram 1981, 69). The ‘geir’, a dress or robe, can be assumed to have been of suitable quality for Procula, wife of the prefect of Judea. In 1504 Agnes Burton, wife of Richard, of Taunton, bequeathed ‘vnto the said Sépulcre service there [of St. Mary Magdalene Church, Taunton] my rede damaske mantell & my mantell lined with silke that I was professed yn to thentent of Mary Magdaleyn play’ (Stokes 2009, 22). Agnes Burton may have acquired sufficient wealth to purchase these garments from the two fulling-mills that she held at Taunton and Landon, in Somerset (Langdon 2004, 222). Her will describes a gift of two cloaks, one of which Agnes wore when she took a vow of celibacy, that, after her death, were be worn by two of the Marys in the ‘Mary Magdaleyn play’. In 1521, in time of plague, a member of one of Catherine of Aragon’s households, Lady Margaret Grey Powis of Burton near Lincoln (d. 1525), loaned the Lincoln Guild of St. Anne responsible for staging the St. Anne’s Day pageants, a gown ‘ffor one of the maryes’ (either the Virgin Mary, Mary Cleophas or Mary Salome, Anne’s three daughters) (Stokes 2005, 33). The Guild appears to have maintained a Chapel to St. Anne at the Church of St. Andrew Wigford in Lincoln and, by the early sixteenth century, every able man and woman in Lincoln was required to be a brother or sister in St. Anne’s guild and pay 4d (four old pence—roughly two days’ wages) at

98     Sue Niebrzydowski

the least (Craig 1917, 612). The ‘cremysynge gown off velvet yat longith to the same gild’ may also have been donated by another female guild member since the 1518–1519 City Council Minute Book records that ‘euery man and woman within this Citie beyng able Schall be Broder & Syster in Scaynte anne gyld’ (Stokes 2005, 33). The Lincoln St. Anne pageant may refer to a lost cycle pageant similar to The Announcement to the Three Maries and The Appearance to Mary Magdalen in the N-Town plays, and the Taunton parish church and Wells Cathedral performance are those of a liturgical Visitatio Sepulchri (Spector 1991, Play 37). All three performances are indebted to women for costumes but outside of the convent was it boys and men rather than women who performed in the dresses and cloaks? Nicola Coldstream (2012, 175) argues that women played significant parts in the static, tableaux vivants of pageantry ‘as honorands, as makers and as performers’ in royal entries, citing the example of Margaret of Anjou’s entry into Coventry in 1456. The pageantry celebrated Margaret’s roles as wife of King Henry VI and mother of the young Prince Edward. The celebrations included a pageant of the cardinal virtues and another devoted to St. Margaret slaying the dragon. Coldstream (2012, 193) suggests that women took the parts of the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice) and St. Margaret. By the Middle Ages, there was certainly a long-standing tradition of Prudence being represented as female (Baker 1992, 241–56). Prudence welcomes Margaret as a queen and mother: Welcum you dame margarete quene crowned of this lande The blessyd babe þat ye haue born Prynce Edward is he Thurrowe whom pece & tranquilite shall take þis reme on hand We shall endowe both you & hym clerely to vnderstonde We shall preserue you personally & neuer fro you disseuer doute not princes most excellent we iiij shall do oure deuer. (Coventry Leet Book 1456; Ingram 1981, 31)

Prudence promises to serve the queen and preserve Margaret’s well-being and that of her three-year-old son, Edward of Westminster, heir to Henry VI. Margaret of Anjou witnessed the pageant of St. Margaret slaying the dragon at ‘the Cundit yn the Crossechepyng’ (the conduit created in 1426 for the benefit of all residents in the Cross Cheaping area: Harris 1907, 105, 189, 208; 1908, 4, 517) surrounded by an assembly of young girls (‘was arayed right well with as mony Virgyns as myght be þervppon’), in which her patron saint addressed the queen:

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     99

Most notabull princes of Wymen erthle Dame margaret þe chefe myrth of þis empyre ye be hertely welcum to þis cyte To the plesur of your highnes I wyll sette my desyre Bothe nature & gentilnes doth me require Seth we be both of one name to shewe you kyndnes Wherfore by my power ye shall ‘haue’ no distresse I shall pray to the prince þat is endeles To socour you with Solas of his high grace he wyll here my peticion this is [endle] doutles for I Wrought all my ‘lyf ’ þat his wyll wace Therfore lady when ye be yn any dredefull cace Calle on me boldly þer of I pray you and trist to me feythfully I woll do þat may pay you. (Coventry Leet Book 1456; Ingram 1981, 31, 34)

Queen Margaret is acknowledged as the greatest joy of the kingdom, and St. Margaret promises to pray to Christ for Margaret’s protection, and to protect the queen personally, coming to her assistance whenever called upon. In 1456, Henry VI was mentally incapacitated and rumoured not to be the prince’s father, necessitating the queen’s coming to the political fore while Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, made a competing claim to the throne (Lewis 2013, 229). A century later in Norwich in the Lord Mayor’s show of 1556 the four cardinal virtues were performed by ‘fower younge Maydes Richelie appareilled’ and who gave lengthy speeches (Galloway 1984, 245). Saints’ plays too may have presented women with an opportunity to act. The late-fifteenth-century East Anglian work, the Digby Mary Magdalene (the unique copy of which is preserved in Oxford Bodleian Library MS Digby 133), dramatizes the life of Mary Magdalene, the daughter of a wellto-do family who forgoes the life of concupiscence into which she has been tempted to become a desert contemplative (Coletti 2018, ‘Introduction’). Having atoned for her former sin, on her death Mary Magdalene joins the company of heavenly virgins. Theresa Coletti (2018, ‘Introduction’) notes the demands required to stage this play: The play is remarkably spectacular. It provides for frequent journeying of human and divine messengers, sudden appearances and disappearances of Jesus on earth and in heaven, a cloud that descends from on high to set a pagan temple on fire, and seven devils that ‘devoyde’ (line 691, s.d.) from Mary during the feast at the home of Simon the Pharisee. A floating ship crosses the playing space with saintly and regal cargo; Jesus orders visionary

100     Sue Niebrzydowski

appearances of Mary and attendant angels; the saint is elevated into the clouds for daily feedings with heavenly manna.

With a cast of over sixty, women are woven into the fabric of the Digby Magdalene, and at the centre of its spectacle: Mary Magdalene, her sister, Martha, the Queen of Marseilles, Mary Jacobe and Mary Salome (in the Visitatio Sepulchri tradition), and the allegorical Lechery, the one of the Seven Deadly sins frequently personified as female, and who is addressed in the Digby Mary Magdalene as ‘flowyr fayrest of femynyté’ (line 423). (For discussion of the cast size, numbers of players and performance time see Carter 2009, 402–19.) A play that explores the nexus of gender, sexuality and spirituality, Coletti (2018, ‘Introduction’) advises that ‘we should not entirely rule out the possibility of women performing on the Digby Magdalene ’s stage’. While evidence points to the association of women with the role of the cardinal virtues in tableaux vivants, and performing and enabling liturgical and parish drama, evidence is in disappointingly short supply regarding women’s performance in the civic Corpus Christi drama. A range of factors has been offered by way of explanation for women’s absence from the mystery plays: the male hierarchy responsible for the plays, the precedent of male choristers and clergy singing the treble parts, and women’s inaudibility in open-air spaces. (For a summary of these attitudes see Glynne Wickham, The Medieval Theatre, pp. 93–94. For arguments of exclusive male performance in the York cycle, see Meg Twycross, 1985, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, Medieval Theatre 5.2: 123–80, and Richard Rastall, 1985, ‘Female Roles in All-Male Casts’, Medieval Theatre 7.1: 25–51.) Jeremy P. Goldberg (1997, 141–63) and Gweno Williams et al. (2005, 45–70), however, have argued that women may have participated in the York pageants although Kimberly Fonzo (2013, 12) is more sceptical, reminding us that the vast majority of craft guild members and the characters in the York cycle are men. Absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. As Katie Normington (2004, 5) observes, ‘Though medieval women are silent within the production of the cycles, they are not absent’. By supplying costumes and props, commissioning, funding and maintaining pageants, women did make a significant contribution to the production of the Corpus Christi plays. We should not discount the possibility that those women who possessed the skills, talent and desire to perform in some way in their city’s Corpus Christi plays had opportunity to do. Like the majority of their male counterparts, their names may never have been made a matter of record or if they were, they have been lost over time.

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     101

During the Middle Ages, a stage was a protean concept, performance on which might take a variety of modes. Medieval drama brought to life the history of human salvation, dramatized the lives of saints, celebrated the entry of monarchs into their cities and provided valuable lessons in how to live virtuously in this life in preparation for the next. The evidence that survives of this ephemeral medium, frustratingly fragmentary as it is, persuades, nonetheless, that the medieval stage was not the sole preserve of men. Nuns and their secular sisters alike played an important role as commissioners, sponsors, prop and costume suppliers, and performers in the varieties of dramatic activity—convent, parish and city—that simultaneously entertained, educated and inspired devotion in the period before the Reformation.

Bibliography Axton, Richard. 1974. European Drama of the Early Middle Ages. London: Hutchinson University Library. Baker, Denise. 1992. ‘Chaucer and Moral Philosophy: The Virtuous Women of the Canterbury Tales’. Medium Aevum 60: 241–56. Butler, Sister Mary Marguerite. 1960. Hrotsvitha: The Theatricality of Her Plays. New York: Philosophical Library. Campbell, Nathaniel, M. 2013. ‘Imago expandit splendorem suum: Hildegard of Bingen’s Visio-Theological Designs in the Rupertsberg Scivias Manuscript’. Eikón/Imago 4, no. 2: 1–68. Carter, Susan. 2009. ‘The Digby Mary Magdalen: Constructing the Apostola Apostolorum’. Studies in Philology 106, no. 4: 402–19. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1983. ‘Re-Viewing Hrotsvit’. Theatre Journal 35, no. 4: 533–42. Classen, Albrecht. 2010. ‘Sex on the Stage (and in the Library) of an Early Medieval Convent: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim, A Tenth-Century Convent Playwright’s Successful Competition Against the Roman Poet Terence’. Orbis Litterarum 65, no. 3: 167–200. Clopper, Lawrence M. 1979. REED: Chester. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Coldstream, Nicola, 2012. ‘The Roles of Women in Late Medieval Civic Pageantry in England’. In Reassessing the Roles of Women as ‘Makers’ of Medieval Art and Architecture, edited by Therese Martin, 175–96. Leiden: Brill. Coletti, Theresa, ed. 2018. The Digby Mary Magdalene Play. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Craig, Hardin. 1917. ‘The Lincoln Cordwainers’ Pageant’. PMLA 32, no. 4: 605–15. Davidson, Clifford. 1984. ‘Women and the Medieval Stage’. Women’s Studies 11: 99–113.

102     Sue Niebrzydowski

Dronke, Peter. 1970. Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages: New Departures in Poetry 1100–1150. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fassler, Margot E. 2014. ‘Allegorical Architecture in Scivias: Hildegard’s Setting for the Ordo Virtutum’. Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 2: 317–78. Findlay, Alison. 2006. Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fonzo, Kimberly. 2013. ‘Procula’s Civic Body and Pilate’s Masculinity Crisis in the York Cycle’s “Christ Before Pilate 1: The Dream of Pilate’s Wife”’. Early Theatre 16, no. 2: 11–32. French, Katherine L. 1998. ‘Lights and Wives’ Stores: Women’s Parish Guilds in Late Medieval England’. The Sixteenth Century Journal 29, no. 2: 399–425. Galloway, David, ed. 1984. REED Norwich 1540–1642. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Glaeske, Keith. 1999. ‘Eve in Anglo-Saxon Retellings of the Harrowing of Hell’. Traditio 54: 81–101. Goldberg, Peter J. P. 1995. Women in England c. 1275–1525. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goldberg, Jeremy. 1997. ‘The Craft Guilds, the Corpus Christi Play and Civic Government’. In The Government of Medieval York: Essays in Commemoration of the 1396 Royal Charter, edited by Sarah Rees Jones, 141–63. York: University of York Press. Harris, Mary Dormer, ed. 1907–1908. The Coventry Leet Book or Mayor’s Register, Old Series, vols. 134 and 135. London: Early English Text Society. Hill-Vasquez, Heather. 2007. Sacred Players: The Politics of Response in the Middle English Religious Drama. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Historical Manuscripts Commission. 1895. ‘The Corporation of Lincoln: Registers, II (1511–42)’. In The Manuscripts of Lincoln, Bury St. Edmunds Etc. Fourteenth Report, Appendix; Part VIII, 24–37. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Hollis, Stephanie. 2013. ‘The Literary Culture of the Anglo-Saxon Royal Nunneries: Romsey and London, British Library, MS Lansdowne 436’. In Nuns Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, edited by Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, 169–84. Turnhout: Brepols. Ingram, R. W., ed. 1981. REED Coventry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Klausner, David N., ed. 2010. The Castle of Perseverance. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications. Kraft, Kent. 1984. ‘The German Visionary: Hildegard of Bingen’. In Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, 109–30. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Langdon, John. 2004. Mills in the Medieval Economy: England 1300–1540. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     103

Lewis, C. P., and A. T. Thacker, eds. 2003. ‘Later Medieval Chester 1230–1550: City Government and Politics, 1350–1550’. In A History of the County of Chester: Volume 5 Part 1, the City of Chester: General History and Topography, 58–64. London: Victoria County History. Lewis, Katherine J. 2013. Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England. London: Routledge. Marshall, John. 1979. ‘The Chester Pageant Carriage’. Medieval English Theatre 1, no. 2: 49–55. Meredith, Peter. 1979. ‘Development of the York Mercers’ Pageant Wagon’. Medieval English Theatre 1, no. 1: 15–18. Mills, David, ed. 1985. Staging the Chester Cycle. Leeds Texts and Monographs 9. Leeds: The University of Leeds Press. Mills, David. 1998. Recycling the Cycle: The City of Chester and Its Whitsun Plays, Volumes 4–5. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mills, David. 2010. ‘A Tale of Two Cities’. Medieval English Theatre 32: 3–11. Newman, Florence. 2004. ‘Violence and Virginity in Hrotsvit’s Dramas’. In Hrotsvit of Gandersheim: Contexts, Identities, Affinities, and Performances, edited by Phyllis R. Brown, Linda A. McMillin, and Katharine M. Wilson, 59–76. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Normington, Katie. 2004. Gender and Medieval Drama. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Normington, Katie. 2009. Medieval English Drama: Performance and Spectatorship. Cambridge: Polity Press. Norton, Michael. 2017. Liturgical Drama and the Reimagining of Medieval Theater. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan Publications. Ogden, Dunbar H. 2001. ‘Gesture and Characterisation in Liturgical Drama’. In Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art, edited by Clifford Davidson, 26–48. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications and Western Michigan University. Pecham, John. 1882–1884. Registrum epistolarum fratris Johannes Peckham archiepiscopi cantuarensis, vol. I, edited by Charles T. Martin. London: Longman. Pickering, F. P., ed. 1971. Holkham Bible Picture Book. Oxford: Oxford AngloNorman Text Society. Potter, Robert. 1986. ‘The “Ordo Virtutum”: Ancestor of the English Moralities?’ Comparative Drama 20, no. 3: 201–10. Rastall, Richard. 1985. ‘Female Roles in All-Male Casts’. Medieval Theatre 7, no. 1: 25–51. Ryan, Denise. 2001. ‘Women, Sponsorship and the Early Civic Stage: Chester’s Worshipful Wives and the Lost Assumption Play’. Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 40: 149–76. Sanok, Catherine. 2007. Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Spector, Stephen, ed. 1991. The N-Town Play, vol. I. Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series 11. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

104     Sue Niebrzydowski

St. John, Christopher Marie, ed. 1923. The Plays of Roswitha. London: Chatto & Windus. Stevenson, Jane. 2005. Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, & Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Jill. 2010. Performance, Cognitive Theory, and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stevenson, Jill. 2012. ‘Rhythmic Liturgy, Embodiment and Female Authority in Barking’s Easter Plays’. In Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, edited by Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell, 245–66. York: York Medieval Press. Stokes, James. 1993. ‘Women and Mimesis in Medieval and Renaissance Somerset (and Beyond)’. Comparative Drama 27, no. 2: 176–96. Stokes, James. 2005. ‘Women and Performance: Evidence of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire’. In Women and Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, 25–43. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stokes, James, ed. 2009. REED: Lincolnshire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tolhurst, J. B. L. 1926. The Ordinale and Customary of the Benedictine Nuns of Barking Abbey, Volume I Calendar and Temporale. London: Henry Bradshaw Society. Twycross, Meg. 1978. ‘“Places to Hear the Play”: Pageant Stations at York, 1398– 1572’. REED Newsletter 2: 10–33. Twycross, Meg. 1985. ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’. Medieval Theatre 5, no. 2: 123–80. Twycross, Meg. 2004. ‘Doomsday as Hypertext: Contexts of Doomsday in Fifteenth-Century Northern Manuscripts I: “The Bolton Hours”’. In Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom: Proceedings of the 2000 Harlaxton Symposium, edited by Nigel Morgan, 377–90. Donington: Shaun Tyas. Tydeman, William. 1984. The Theatre in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wack, Mary. 1999. ‘Women, Work, and Plays in a Medieval English Town’. In Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, 33–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wickham, Glynne. 1987. The Medieval Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Gweno, Alison Findlay, and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright. 2005. ‘Payments, Permits, and Punishments: Women Performers and the Politics of Place’. In Women Players in England, 1500–1600: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, 45–70. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

5  Women and Medieval Drama: Selected Sisters and Worshipful Wives     105

Wilson, Katharina M. 1984. ‘The Saxon Canoness: Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’. In Medieval Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, 30–46. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Yardley, Anne Bagnall. 1987. ‘“Ful wel she soong the service dyvyne”: The Cloistered Musician in the Middle Ages’. In Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950, edited by Jane M. Bowers and Judith Tick, 15–38. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Yardley, Anne Bagnall. 2006. Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yardley, Anne Bagnall, and Jesse D. Mann. 2014. ‘The Liturgical Dramas for Holy Week at Barking Abbey’. In Medieval Feminist Forum, Subsidia Series, Volume 3.

6 The First Italian Actresses, Isabella Andreini and the Commedia dell’Arte Margaret Rose

The life and work of those Italian women who trod the boards of theatres in the latter part of the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy have engendered considerable critical interest and research in recent decades both in Italy and abroad. Actresses such as Angelica Alberghini, Isabella Andreini, Vincenza Armani, Barbara Flaminia (‘Ortensia’), Diana Ponti, Vittoria Piissimi, Orsola Posmoni Cecchini and Virginia Ramponi, nearly all of whom were born in the second half of the sixteenth century, made a fundamental contribution to the development of professional theatre in Italy and other European countries. As early as the 1980s, Ferdinando Taviani (Taviani and Schino 1982, 339) argued that without these women commedia dell’arte would not be remembered today as a distinct form of theatre and an archetype of extempore dramatic performance. More recently Luciano Mariti (2002, 238) has put forward the view that these actresses were the most important phenomenon of Italian theatre, being also dancers, singers, musicians and improvisers of literary and poetic works who were often praised for their literary achievements. They even at times headed the troupes to which they belonged. Siro Ferrone (2014, 40) adds his voice to this very positive appraisal, claiming that the admittance of women onstage in Italy was the most significant innovation of European theatre in the sixteenth century and one of the decisive factors in the development of professional theatre. Margaret Rose (*)  University of Milan, Milan, Italy © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_6

107

108     Margaret Rose

As Mariti suggests, these Italian actresses were versatile figures, making the term ‘actress’ reductive for what they actually did. The kinds of plays and entertainments they performed were likewise extremely varied. Probably out of financial need as well as a desire to gain recognition in the public domain, they not only became part of commedia dell’arte troupes, whose repertoire was an eclectic mix of high and low culture, but they also performed roles in the erudite comedy, tragedy and pastoral plays widespread in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy among the cultivated upper classes. It is worth examining why these women enjoyed the opportunity to embark on a career in the professional theatre, when women in England would have to wait another century for this to happen. As Siro Ferrone (2014, 40–41) underlines, they were often educated women, whose background allowed them to bring a huge change to the repertoire of the exclusively male companies already working in Italy. With the admittance of these women, who were often accomplished singers, musicians and dancers as well as actresses, the troupes were able to create a more eclectic and sophisticated repertoire, very different from the previous tradition, featuring the comic and grotesque figures of the Zany and the Old Man (Ferrone 2010, 42). Moreover, the financial impact of including women in the troupes should not be underestimated. These first women performers oozed charisma and stage presence, undoubtedly increasing the number of wealthy patrons all over Italy willing to endorse and sponsor theatrical activities and therefore swelling the troupe’s coffers. It was presumably these advantages that encouraged the male troupe members to risk the wrath of the anti-theatricalists and churchmen who viciously attacked the women performers verbally and in print. The following comments by a Jesuit father, quoted by Taviani (1969, 88–89), about the inclusion of female members in a commedia dell’arte troupe are typical of the period: Men and women live promiscuously together. The men are dissolute youths, who day and night have love on their minds and learn love poetry by heart; the women are always, or nearly always, without morality. They live freely together and the women do not have a separate room or a separate bed. So the men watch them dressing and undressing, doing their hair; now in bed, now half naked and always talking among themselves about lascivious things. (…) The women are frequently prostitutes on the game; and onstage they often meet each other and the man undresses and then dresses the woman, so that she can play different parts, switching like lightning from one role to the other. During the show they talk about the love stories of the characters and these topics, seeing they are discussed by men and women, turn into flaming

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     109

darts; at the same time they hug and hold each others’ hands, they kiss and touch and decide on the time and place for a secret meeting (…) The women are often extraordinarily beautiful, with elegant mannerisms and clothes, ­eloquent, witty, fine dancers and singers, talented performers. And all this excites the spectators’ libido.

The background of these first women actresses remains unclear in many cases. As Marzia Pieri (1989, 196–97) suggests, the first actresses were probably cultivated middle-class women or courtesans, a thesis that is supported by Taviani and Schino (1982, 183–84) and Vianello (1999, 13–80). The courtesan class, as we shall see later, were well experienced in entertaining their clients, thanks to their considerable musical and literary talents and could have seamlessly embraced the acting profession. What unites these women is their enrolment in professional troupes, in cities like Venice, Mantua, Ferrara, Milan, Bologna and Florence. With their troupes, they also toured other European countries, including France, Spain and England, facing the same hardships as their male colleagues in what were hazardous journeys through a Europe frequently racked by religious disputes and by war (Andreini, 1625).

The First Women in Italian Theatre and Subsequent Developments The emergence of actresses in Italy did not follow a continuous, upward trajectory, with a progressive rise in status for the women involved. Instead, it involved a range of difficulties and setbacks caused by male prejudice and the antagonism of Catholic churchmen and presumably also by the inexperience of these first professional actresses in negotiating the power games of the patriarchal establishment. The difficulties encountered by the well-known actress Vittoria Piissimi (probably from Ferrara, precise dates unknown) are emblematic. When in 1580 Prince Vincenzo Gonzaga, a staunch patron of the theatre, decided to constitute the Uniti troupe, a new company, which would include fine actors belonging to diverse troupes, he chose as its director not Vittoria but an unidentified actress who had won his favour (Barasch 2001, 5). His decision indicates that Vittoria’s troupe, previously his favourite, had fallen out of favour. The actress’s sense of hopelessness at this change is revealed in a letter dated June 22, 1580, written by a court official in Mantua, Augusto Tissino, to the ducal secretary Marcello Donati:

110     Margaret Rose

After the departure of the most serene Prince (Vincenzo) I went to the Signora Vittoria to say good day, and found her in such deep depression that it almost made me cry … she says she does not know why the Prince wishes to dismember her company, not ever having neglected to serve him, either by day or night, or at any hour, and then to be rewarded like this, to have merited such an insult. (D’Ancona 1891, vol. 11, 475)

According to Tissino’s report, Vittoria claims she has served the Prince ‘day and night’, probably alluding to both an intimate and a professional relationship between the two of them. The actress’s dual role as lover and professional actor at the Gonzaga court provided her with no job security since her stability and earnings depended on the whims of her fickle patron, over which she had no control. While women were already performing in Italy prior to 1564, as Ferrone (2014, 265) notes, the first company statute to include a woman was signed in Rome on October 10 of that year. The document lists six men, followed by the name of one ‘Lucrezia of Siena’ at the end. The contract was signed at Lucrezia’s house and preceding her name is the Latin word ‘domina’, similar to the Italian title of respect ‘donna’, or more usually today ‘signora’. This title and the fact that her surname remains unstated prompted Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino to suggest she belonged to the class of cortigiana onesta or ‘honest courtesan’ (1982, 183–84, 334–37). La cortigiana onesta was generally well educated, with musical, literary and artistic skills. Sexual favours for wealthy clients and those from the upper classes or royalty were obligatory. In Venice, famous for its many courtesans, the authorities kept a ‘Catalogo de tutte le principal e onorate cortigiane di Venetia’ (A Catalogue of all the Principle and Honoured Courtesans in Venice ), where the courtesans’ names, addresses and fees were recorded. The life and accomplishments of one of the most celebrated courtesans, Veronica Franco (Venice, 1546– Venice, 1591), has been superbly documented by Margaret F. Rosenthal (1992). The courtesans were presumably important role models for some of the first actresses. However, regardless of Lucrezia’s background prior to the start of her acting career, the fact that she was registered as a regular member of a commedia dell’arte troupe, an association, with its own statute, regulations and obligations, similar to those of any other artisan guild, attests to the significant standing she and her fellow professionals achieved in the workplace. Three years later in June 1567, the ducal secretary at the Mantuan court, Luigi Rogna, reports the simultaneous visits, with two different troupes, of Vincenza Armani (Venice, 1530–Cremona, 1569) and Barbara Flaminia

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     111

(Rome, ante 1562—post 1584), stage name Ortensia. Having specified the productions and the venues for what were lavish festivities sponsored by Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, Rogna describes the fierce competition between the women and their respective companies. The first of these, Vincenza Armani, was already a respected actor and singer and later a role model for Isabella Andreini and Vittoria Piissimi; she was present as part of a company headed by Alberto Naselli of Ferrara (1543—ante 1585), stage name Zan Ganassa. On Vincenza’s early death in 1569, the celebrated actor Adriano Valerini (quoted in Taviani and Schino 1982, 132–40) praised her many talents, stating that she knew Latin, wrote poetry and was a versatile actress, performing in tragedy, pastoral and comedy. It was, however, Flaminia who caught the eye of one Baldassarre de’ Preti. In a letter to Cardinal Gonzaga, he praises her acting as well as her talent as a dancer and a tumbler and mentions that the company was headed jointly by Flaminia and a Pantalone figure (Ferrone 2014, 264; Barasch 2000, 17–21). De’ Preti goes on to note that the company presented a reworking of ‘Dido’s tragedy morphed into tragicomedy, which was excellent’ (D’Ancona 1891, vol. 11, 449). This indicates that Flaminia and her troupe produced what may have been a full-scale tragicomedy, drawing on classical sources (D’Ancona 1891, vol. 11, 449). Kathleen Lea (1934, 197) observes that this performance could have been either scripted or improvised. In a second letter dated July 6, 1567, Luigi Rogna alludes to the actress’s outstanding ability in performing tragic roles, and this time in a work by no less an author than Ludovico Ariosto: ‘Flaminia was much applauded for her cries of grief in her interpretation of a tragedy performed by her group, drawn from that story by Ariosto’ (Orlando furioso, canto XXXV11). The author flags up Flaminia’s lead role as a grief-stricken wife in what must have been an action-packed revenge tragedy, in which her character determined the tragic ending by poisoning herself and her second husband, after which they die on top of her first husband’s corpse (D’Ancona 1891, vol. 11, 451). In 1574, Flaminia moved to Spain, together with Alberto Naselli, who became her husband following what was evidently a transfer on her part to Naselli’s troupe; the two worked there successfully together until 1584. A detailed company record compiled by Stefanelo Botarga, a fellow troupe member, throws light on the company, which had nine members, among whom Flaminia was the only woman (Ojeda Calvo 2007, 142). Of the twenty-three surviving scenarios included in Botarga’s records, ten are comedies, one a tragedy and the rest tragicomedies and pastorals (Ojeda Calvo 2007, 143). Flaminia, as the only woman in the troupe, would therefore have had an opportunity to play a variety of roles, even if two of the

112     Margaret Rose

male actors also played the women’s parts. One of the scenarios, moreover, Principe tirreno (The Tyrant Prince, Ojeda Calvo, 2007, 569–73) is particularly significant since it proves that in Spain Flaminia sometimes performed parts of the repertoire she had presented in Mantua (Ojeda Calvo 2007, 144–45). The Tyrant Prince is actually a scenario, deriving from Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, canto XXXV11, the very same canto that Flaminia had reworked and performed before she left Italy. This Spanish scenario shows that Flaminia worked in the company as an actress (Ojeda Calvo 2007, 573), but also, I would add, as an artistic director and possibly as an adapter/dramaturg, to use modern terminology. Other female performers, however, did not always achieve the degree of recognition enjoyed by Vincenza Armani and Flaminia, especially when they toured abroad. A decade later, in 1576, a commedia dell’arte troupe headed by Drusiano Martinelli left Mantua for a European tour, taking in Flanders, France and England. His troupe had eleven members, three of them women, whose names are not, however, recorded in the company statute nor in the official records of a police interrogation for suspected spying. In the police record, following the men’s names, they are simply mentioned as ‘three women’, due presumably to the fact that women had no judicial status at the time (Ferrone 2006, 8–12). We can find a putative further trace of these three, when in 1578 the troupe reached London, where Privy Council records indicate that Drusiano Martinelli received permission for the company to play ‘in the Liberties’ (Dasent 1895, 144) between January and the first week of Lent. Furthermore, E. K. Chambers’ accounts for 1577/1578 provide evidence that the Revels Office ordered ‘a matress hoopes and boardes with tressells for the Italian tumblers’ (1923, vol. IV, 80). Sadly, no women are actually specified in the English records. The acrobats could have been of either sex, seeing that both men and women in the arte troupes were often accomplished acrobatic performers. In fact, a group of Italian women tumblers had visited London in 1574, scandalizing puritan lawyer and author, Thomas Norton, who inveighed against, ‘That unnecessarie and scarslie honeste resorts to plaies […] and especially the assemblies to the unchaste, shamelesse, and unnatural tomblings of the Italian woemen’ (quoted in Lea 1934, 354). There might be a possible further sighting of the women in Drusiano’s troupe, when the following year on St. Stephen’s Day, December 26, ‘An Inventyon or playe of Three Sisters of Mantua shewen at Richmond on St Stephen daie at night enacted by the earle of Warwick his servauntes’ took place (Ferrone 2006, 265–66). One cannot but imagine that the actresses, who had visited London the previous year, had left a positive impression,

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     113

prompting the Earl of Warwick to rework an Italian play, Le tre sorelle (The Three Sisters ) by the well-known Mantuan playwright, Leone De’ Sommi (Romei, 1982). As Siro Ferrone (2006, 42) suggests, Warwick may even have seen Drusiano’s actresses performing the play the previous year and then decided to translate it and have it performed in English. In Madrid, a decade later on November 10, 1587, specific reference is made to two women performers belonging to the Martinelli troupe. In the heat of fierce religious controversy about whether women should be allowed to continue performing in public, a Spanish commentator notes that Angelica Martinelli (Drusiano’s wife) and a certain Angela are respectable women. He validates his claim, by referring to their married status and to the fact they were none too young. He therefore advises they should be allowed to continue performing (Ferrone 2006, 270–71). By the late sixteenth century, despite the notable misogyny they encountered, the early actresses nevertheless occupied important positions within their respective troupes. In the last decade of the sixteenth century and at the end of her career, Diana Ponti (stage name Lavinia, dates uncertain) managed the Desiosi company. As a mark of her star status, this woman from Ferrara was invited to perform at several lavish royal celebrations. In 1589, she travelled to Florence with Tristano Martinelli and Pier Maria Cecchini, as part of the Accesi troupe, to entertain Duke Ferdinando de’ Medici and Cristina of Lorraine at their nuptial festivities. Furthermore in 1601 at a time when the success of Italian commedia players in Europe had reached its zenith, Diana toured to Lyon and Paris, where she was part of a stellar cast, featuring Tristano Martinelli, Pier Maria Cecchini, Orsola Posmoni, Silvio Fiorillo and Flaminio Scala, which was put together to celebrate the wedding of King Henri IV and Maria de’ Medici (Ferrone 2014, 254; Mamone 1988, 144 n.47). To have been involved in the entertainment for what many commentators defined as the wedding of the century confirms that Diana Ponti was indeed at the top of her league. Unfortunately, very little is known about the precise repertoire of the Italian troupe for the royal nuptials (Mamone 1988, 135) so that it is not possible to be specific about the details of Ponti’s involvement. The woman, however, whose life and career stands out from her peers, is without a doubt Isabella Andreini (see her entry in the AMAtI database, written by Julia Lomuto in 2004 and revised by Anna Maria Evangelista in 2012; Panella 1960, 704–5). During her brief, but extremely significant life—she died at forty-two, giving birth to her eighth child—Isabella (b. Padua, c.1562– 1604) seems to have successfully fashioned both her private and public lives. She is unique as the only sixteenth-century Italian actress whose legacy

114     Margaret Rose

includes two portraits and a commemorative medallion bearing her image (Ferrone 2014, figure 5). The engraving, dated 1604, where she is shown lavishly dressed and jewelled, underlines her high status and unblemished character. In the private domain, she is remembered as a respected wife and a mother, whose four daughters became nuns, while one son entered a monastery and another worked as a ducal guard. Only her eldest child, Giovan Battista Andreini, had a career in the theatre, playing the Lover role with the Gelosi troupe before forming a new company, the Fedeli. A fine playwright and poet in his own right (see editions by Rebaudengo 1994; Snyder 2009), in 1606 Giovan Battista also produced a collection of poetry dedicated to his mother, Il pianto d’Apollo. Rime funebri in morte d’Isabella Andreini. Professionally, Isabella was acclaimed for her acting (explored below) as well as her writing. It was thanks to the efforts of her husband, the celebrated actor-manager Francesco Andreini, that many of her works were published following his wife’s death. Isabella’s literary output includes a pastoral play, Mirtilla, her first published work, which appeared in 1588 (Andreini 1588; Doglio 1995). In the play, thanks to her first-hand experience as a performer, she reworked the pastoral genre, giving it a definite proto-feminist twist. Her version of the nymph Filli (Phyllis) does not fall into the satyr’s misogynist trap, but manages to turn the tables on him, so inverting the usual dynamics of pastoral literature. It was, however, for her poetry, published under the title of Rime (1601), that Isabella was particularly esteemed by male critics, coming second only to the celebrated Torquato Tasso in a poetry contest promoted by Cardinal Giorgio Cinthio Aldobrandini in Rome. Andreini also penned a collection of letters, Lettere di Isabella Andreini padovana comica gelosa (1607), which despite the title are, like her other writings, distinctly theatrical. Rather than ‘letters’, they might more appropriately be defined as dramatic monologues since they draw on the author’s experience of playing the Lover in commedia dell’arte troupes. In Letters, Isabella transforms the stage material into stylized compositions, exploring the many aspects of love, with allusions to Petrarchism and Neoplatonism. Interestingly, the volume features both male and female voices, reflecting the author’s ability to adopt an androgynous persona as she sometimes did in her stage roles; she was praised, for example, for her rendition of the eponymous Aminta in Tasso’s pastoral play, as well as playing male and female roles in the celebrated La pazzia d’Isabella, discussed below. By the mid-seventeenth century, Letters had been reprinted more than a dozen times, a sure sign of the volume’s popularity. Francesco Andreini also collected Isabella’s Contrasti, or dialogues, which, once again, were inspired by her commedia dell’arte repertoire. These were

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     115

published in 1620, under the title of Fragmenti di alcune scritture della Signora Isabella Andreini comica gelosa e academica intenta. Raccolti da Francesco Andreini comico geloso, detto il Capitan Spavento. E dati in luce da Flaminio Scala Comico. Nor does Isabella’s claim to fame end here. In 1601, she was invited to join Pavia’s literary academy, Accademia degli Intenti, where she was known by the name of Accesa, a rare honour for a woman in the period.

The Set Roles Played by Men and Women in the Commedia Dell’Arte Troupes The early Italian actresses were engaged in a variety of theatrical forms, recalling Polonius’ comic reference to the hybrid theatrical genres the strolling players visiting Elsinore were used to performing: ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral’ (Hamlet, 2.2.362). My discussion will, however, focus specifically on the commedia dell’arte repertoire, in which the early actresses generally played two designated roles. The commedia troupes boasted a number of what are often called ‘stock characters’, although the term itself has been called into question. As Richard Andrews (1993, 172) suggests, even if the Lovers, Servants and sometimes the Captain did not wear masks, it is preferable to think of these roles as ‘masks’: ‘All arte roles, whether facially masked or not, kept the same name, costume, language and other exterior characteristics, from one play or scenario to the next’. Troupes generally included a couple of Old Men (Pantaloon and Doctor), two Zanies, and two, or even three, sets of young Lovers. In addition, there was often a Servetta or Fantesca (both female servants), a Courtesan, a Sorcerer and a Captain. The main parts were characterized, linguistically and culturally, by different regional dialects; Pantaloon was invariably a wealthy Venetian merchant, who spoke Venetian; the Zany was a servant from Northern Italy and spoke Bergamask or Veneto-Lombard dialect; the Lovers, from Tuscany, spoke a Petrarchan form of Tuscan, which underscored their upper-class status and refined literary language. The characters were also distinguished by their costume and some of them, like Pantaloon, the Doctor and the Zany, by specific masks. Within this predominantly male company, the women performers would play the First and Second Female Lovers, the female Servant (although sometimes men, who had played the Servant roles in drag prior

116     Margaret Rose

to the arrival of women onstage, continued in this role) and the Courtesan. Isabella Andreini, Vittoria Piissimi, and Vincenza Armani, among others, were acclaimed in the role of First Lover. For many years, Isabella was a member of the Gelosi Troupe, which included Flaminio Scala (probably from Mantua, 1552–1624) and later her husband Francesco Andreini (from Pistoia, 1544–1624). In the early period of their respective careers, Francesco played opposite Isabella, art and real-life intertwining. The Servant, depending on the actress’s background and regional provenance, spoke dialect, thus infusing the action with colour and verve. Several avenues of research offer opportunities to discover more about the female roles in commedia dell’arte troupes. A study of surviving scenarii and a group of plays known as the commedie ridicole (scripted plays written in the early decades of the seventeenth century, featuring commedia dell’arte stock characters) can help us understand better the kinds of plot and stage action in which the actresses were involved. According to recent estimates (Testaverde 2007, xviii), there are around a thousand extant scenarios, classified under the names of the different collections, Locatelli, Corsini, Casa Marciano, Vatican, Adriano Correr, alluding to the place or the Palace where they were housed or the name of the collectors, such as the 103 scenarios belonging to Basilio Locatelli. However, the most well-known scenarios, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, are those published by actor-manager Flaminio Scala (Scala 1611; Marotti 1976) and translated into English by Henry F. Salerno (1989). Scenarios usually contain a cast list, a plot outline, an act-by-act synopsis, exits and entrances, but no dialogue, making the information they provide about the actual stage performances limited. While some of the female characters are feisty, independent women who— thanks to the illusion of theatre—manage to cross the gender boundaries in place at the time, others are victims of patriarchy as can be seen from the following examples. A study of scenarios and commedie ridicole led Kathleen Lea to foreground the women from the first category, who, as the author specifies, write their own letters and ‘woo vehemently’ (1934, 118). Angelica, for example, in L’Abbattimento di Zani (The Defeat of the Zany ) is determined to have Horatio by fraud when it is impossible to obtain what she wants honestly. In the absence of her husband, Aurelia attempts to intimidate her slave Leandro in Li due Trappolini (The Two Trappolini ). In L’amante ingrate (The Ungrateful Lover ), Clarice and Livia know their own minds, telling Pantaloon they intend having the men of their choice and under no circumstances are they prepared to wait. The two young women refuse to compromise, and in the end Pantaloon is obliged to agree to their choices of

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     117

husband. Livia also reduces the Lover, Lelisto, to tears when she cuffs him, using physical violence, a recurring trait in the scenarios, involving characters of both genders. However, in other scenarios, the female lovers are less proactive. In La schiava (The Slave ), for instance, Hortensia ends up a slave, bought and sold by different men. Only in the end is this beautiful young woman bought by Leandro, the man she loves and it is Leandro, not Hortensia, who boldly defends their relationship, telling Hortensia’s husband, the elderly Pantaloon, that his wife is still a virgin and has every right to a happy marriage. The second role traditionally assigned to women is similarly nuanced and evolved over time. A study of the sources shows the Serva or Servetta accompanying her mistress or taking and bringing messages as was customary in Roman comedy. However, the scenarios also portray the servant as ‘forthright and unafraid to stand her own ground for a just cause’, capable of breaching the societal role expected of a woman of her status (Goelle, quoted in Chaffee and Crick 2015, 92). In some instances, the servant’s role is amplified and the actress has her own solo scene. Furthermore, as Lea (1934, 120) suggests, in a travelling company, for reasons of budget and maybe equality with male colleagues, the actress who played the servant might also have doubled, performing the part of an Innkeeper’s Wife, a Nurse, a Procuress, or a Midwife. Over the decades, the Servant role became the female counterpart of the Zany and the reflection of her mistress in manner and mood. For example, in Li due finti zingari (The Two Disguised Gypsies ), while Isabella (as Lover) plans to elope with Flavio, Franceschina, her servant, concludes a brief intrigue with Burattino. The Servant might even take as her lover one of the Old Men, either the upper class Pantaloon or the Doctor, as in La fortunata Isabella (The Fortunate Isabella )—a move once again marking the servant’s rejection of the sanctioned subjugation which was commonplace in the period. Surviving iconography can also be useful in helping us to discover more about female roles in the commedia dell’arte troupes (Katritzky 2005, 109– 43; 2006). The Recueil Fossard, a collection of fifty-four engravings, is fundamental in this respect (Beijer and Duchartre 1981). In this collection, which most critics contend does not depict any actual performance but captures significant moments from different productions, several engravings feature the female Lover. Recent critics have paid attention to the semiotics of the engravings to explore gender differences (Buckley 2009, 251–310). In one engraving the female Lover is positioned between Pantaloon and Arlecchino, in a recurring threesome of the commedia dell’arte repertoire, with both men making advances to her, a situation which doubtless produced conflict

118     Margaret Rose

and laughter, seeing the difference in age and social class of the characters involved. In another engraving, Franchescina, the servant, and a lustful Arlecchino are shown in a comprising situation. The female Lover, due to her superior social class and background, is never depicted in this way. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators, some of whom were churchmen and anti-theatricalists, provide further evidence regarding women performers. In 1699, Andrea Perrucci, an author, amateur actor and a Jesuit, produced A Treatise on Acting from Memory and by Improvisation. In the treatise, the author outlines what was expected of the Lovers (of both sexes). They had to be young, graceful, handsomely dressed and well made up. They should study the art of rhetoric and the pure Tuscan pronunciation. They should also keep and study a commonplace book in which to collect material under such headings as Love, Jealousy, Friendship, Reconciliation and Leavetaking in their many shapes and forms (Perrucci 2008, 105). Other male commentators, who had seen the women in performance, voiced what were extreme opinions; they tended to be blisteringly depreciative or exaggeratedly flattering. Nevertheless, even when their reports are negative, they can still reveal a great deal about the aptitudes of the early actresses and the wide range of emotions they were able to express and consequently transmit to audience members. Pietro Gambacorta, a Jesuit priest (quoted in Taviani 1969, XC1 and C111, n.12), offers the following description of a performance he attended: A real woman came onstage, young beautiful and lasciviously dressed. This in itself represents the ruin of young people. Her blood boils, she is very young, her flesh is alive, her passions are burning and the devils are ready …What will it be like to hear this woman speak? And love? And with her lover? Will they discover gradually what the other is feeling? What will it be like to see the male adulterer asking for a kiss and receiving one? And what will it be like when the woman, pretending to be mad, comes on stage half undressed, with a few seethrough clothes on, in full view of the men and woman present?

In 1584 Tommaso Garzoni (1549–1589), friar, celebrated author and untiring analyst of the social scene, who saw Vittoria Piissimi on stage, presents an idealizing account of her and in so doing reveals important details about her acting, her person and her impact on the audience: The divine Vittoria who manages a metamorphosis of herself onstage, that beautiful sorceress of love who appeals to the hearts of thousands of lovers, with her words, that sweet siren, who casts a spell on the souls of her devoted

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     119

spectators. There is no doubt she deserves a place in a compendium of the arts, since her gestures are proportionate, her movements, harmonious and arranged, her stage business, graceful and accomplished, her words, sweet and friendly, her gestures, deceiving and consenting … and in all her person she shows perfect decorum, as is fitting of a perfect player. (Garzoni 1596, vol. 11, 1182–83)

The reference to Piissimi’s thousands of spellbound followers suggests that Vittoria, like Isabella Andreini, was one of the first women to attain celebrity status without being either royal or of noble lineage. Rosalind Kerr (2015) has drawn perceptive parallels between Isabella’s astute self-fashioning and a more recent example of the phenomenon, Lady Gaga. Foreign travellers also penned reports about these first women professionals, sometimes expressing their astonishment that there were actually women onstage rather than cross-dressed men. In 1601, Thomas Coryat attended a playhouse in Venice and, while he expresses his disgust at the actual building, costumes and music, he offers a more balanced view of the men and women performers than many of his English compatriots (such as Thomas Nashe in Pierce Pennilesse 1592, 27) and Italian male contemporaries. In his now celebrated travelogue, Coryat’s Crudities (1608, 386), Thomas Coryat recalls: ‘I was in one of their Play-houses, where I saw a comedie acted. The house is very beggarly and base in comparison of our stately Play-houses in England’. He goes on to describe the performers: Neither can their Actors compare with us for apparell, shewes, musicke. Here I observed certaine things that I never saw before. For I saw women acte, a thing I never saw before, and though I have heard it hath been sometimes used in London and they performed it with as good a grace, action, gesture, and whatsoever convenient for a Player, as ever I saw any masculine actor.

Coryat’s repetition of ‘a thing I never saw before’ signals his great surprise at finding women onstage, in an era when women were still absent from the London stage; at the same time, he confirms that the actresses were as talented as the men. Later in his travel account (1608, 409), Coryat offers a vivid picture of male and female mountebanks, who were acting on an outdoor trestle stage, pointing to the presence of women in another kind of entertainment. While the author focuses on the music and various sketches the mountebanks performed, including a number involving a poisonous snake, which amazingly did not sting the performer, and the sale of potions and ointments, he unfortunately does not elaborate on the skills of the women performers.

120     Margaret Rose

Acting Techniques: Improvisation Like their male colleagues, commedia dell’arte women learned acting techniques from other members of the troupe. Isabella Andreini, for example, who married at fourteen and went straight into the business, would presumably have learned how to act from Flaminio Scala and Vittoria Piissimi, with whom she shared the stage during her time with the Gelosi troupe. From one of her sonnets, it is clear that Isabella was a writer and actor who pondered the artificiality of both the literary and the dramatic process. In this poem, she cautions readers not to be taken in by the poet’s artful naturalism, which derives from her experience as a professional actress: If ever there is anyone who reads These my neglected poems, don’t believe In their feigned ardours; Loves imagined in their scenes I’ve handled with emotions false. (quoted in MacNeil and Cook 2005, 31)

A crucial asset for any commedia dell’arte actor was her or his ability to improvise. Ferdinando Taviani is one of many critics who link the phenomenon to literary models: ‘The glory of improvisation was not theatrical, but the glory of poetry and the academy that lived contemporaneously onstage’ (Taviani and Schino 1982, 337–39). In an essay investigating the improvisation skills of the women performers, Katherine McGill (1991, 66) provides evidence to show how in this area women actually surpassed their male colleagues, because, in her opinion, they were ‘close to the popular culture of orality’. For McGill, therefore, Taviani’s thesis which rests on Isabella Andreini’s literary background and scholarly erudition seems to overlook the fact that she also possessed and could exploit, ‘a cultural heritage as a woman’. Improvisation, however, had to go hand in hand with an adherence to the scenario. The players would improvise, while taking great care not to depart too far from the scenario plot (Oreglia 1968, 14). Improvisations might draw upon material contained in the zibaldone, or actor’s commonplace book, which performers compiled in order to have new material ready at a moment’s notice (Oreglia 1968, 12). As Robert Henke indicates (quoted in Chaffee and Crick 2015, 28), the arte actors performed literature— classical and contemporary, high- and low-brow, from the court and from the street, printed and in manuscripts, but always extracted, digested and reprocessed.

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     121

In what is the first systematic commentary on commedia dell’arte, The Fruits of Modern Comedy (1628), celebrated actor and troupe leader Pier Maria Cecchini underlines the difficulties for the commedia actor, acting the role of the lover in this particular instance, in blending the unscripted part of her or his performance with what had been memorized, but also the absolute necessity of doing so: Those who delight in acting the difficult role of the lover enrich their minds beforehand with a pleasant quantity of noble speeches, pertinent to the variety of subjects the stage requires. But I must caution that the words which follow on from what has been memorized should be so uniform with what has preceded them that the borrowing will seem more like a patrimony than a robbery. (Richards and Richards 1990, 126)

Significant for our appraisal of these early women entertainers is the confidence and sophisticated techniques that the arte players must have possessed in order to undertake what were often complex improvisations during which the best of them, as Cecchini intimates, seamlessly blended fixed forms and their own creative inventions. As discussed above, Isabella Andreini was critically acclaimed for her role as First Lover in the troupes she worked with, but, like other star performers, she had her own signature piece. La pazzia d’Isabella (Isabella’s Madness) doubtless gave her an opportunity to improvise according to the occasion and the specific audience. And it was this solo performance, a veritable tour de force, that repeatedly received accolades from critics and audience members alike (Molinari 1983, 565–73; MacNeil 1995, 198–99). In Isabella’s Madness, the actress played several distinct parts, including a distraught wife whose husband has betrayed her. It is fortunate for us that when she performed Isabella’s Madness at the Teatro degli Uffizi in Florence on May 13, 1589, at festivities for the wedding of Duke Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine, organized under the overall direction of the architect, engineer and stage designer Bernardo Buontalenti, the editor and printer Giuseppe Pavoni (1589, 30) recorded her performance in some detail: Isabella […] let herself go, a prey to grief and so overcome by passion and allowing herself to be overtaken by anger and rage, she was beside herself and like a madwoman ran here and there through the city, stopping now this person, now that one, speaking now in Spanish, now in Greek, now in Italian and many other languages, but all very irrationally. And among other things, she began talking in French and singing some little French songs which greatly

122     Margaret Rose

delighted the most Serene Bride. She then imitated all her troupe, including Pantalone, Doctor Gratiano, the Zany, Pedrolino, Francatrippe, Burattino, the Captain Cardone and the Servant, Franceschina, so authentically and with so much gibberish that it is impossible to describe in words this woman’s worth and virtue.

The commentator manages to capture not just what Isabella did, but also the rhythm of what must have been frantic dramatic action as this distraught figure tore around the stage, talking to different people. For this particular performance, Isabella no doubt deliberately introduced the French songs composed for the newly-wed Christine of Lorraine. However, as she sends up her fellow performers, she shows her talent as a mimic and her ability to play both male and female roles. The first part of this solo performance, moreover, stands in sharp contrast to the second, when, having drunk a magic potion, the actress comes back to her senses to analyse her emotions. At this point, the chronicler underscores her ‘elegant, learned style’ and ‘rational and learned intellect’, attributes which, as noted earlier, made her one of the few women in the period to gain admittance to a literary academy. In conclusion, Pavoni remarks that Isabella’s performance so pleased the audience that her name would never be forgotten: ‘As long as the world goes on, her fine eloquence and worth will be praised’ (quoted in MacNeil 1995, 198–99). Despite the fact that relatively little is known about the life and work of most of these early Italian actresses and bearing in mind the possibility that Isabella Andreini may have been an exception, nevertheless, judging by her example and given the period in which they lived, the achievements of these earliest Italian actresses were indeed remarkable and their importance for the development of the future of European theatre incalculable.

Bibliography Archive Databases AMAtI (Archivio multimediale attori italiani) AMAtI is a research database in Italian devoted to the lives and work of Italian actors from the origins to the present. It was developed from an original concept by Siro Ferrone and is operated by Florence University. Accessed June 19, 2018. http://amati.fupress.net/ Main.uri.

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     123

HERLA. Founded in 1999, the international HERLA project co-ordinates the identification, databasing and interpretation of archival documents from 1480 to 1630, relating to theatrical events and productions sponsored by the Gonzaga dynasty, Mantuan festival culture and commedia dell’arte. Accessed June 19, 2018. www.capitalespettacolo.it. Italian Women Writers Database. Database providing ‘information on and texts by both famous and previously neglected Italian women writers … from the 13th century up to those born in 1945’ operated by the University of Chicago. Accessed June 19, 2018. www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/IWW

Secondary Texts Andreini, Giovan Battista. 1606. Il pianto d’Apollo. Rime funebri in morte d’Isabella Andreini. Milan: Girolamo Bordone and Pietromartire Locarni. Andreini, Giovan Battista. 1625. La ferza. Ragionamento secondo contra l’accuse date alla Commedia e a professionisti di lei. Paris: Callemont. Andreini, Isabella. 1588. Mirtilla. Verona: Discepolo. Andreini, Isabella. 1601. Rime d’Isabella Andreini Padovana. Milano: Girolamo Bordone. Andreini, Isabella. 1607. Lettere d’Isabella Andreini padovana, comica gelosa. Venice: Marc’Antonio Zaltieri. Andreini, Isabella. 1627. Fragmenti di alcune scritture della signora Isabella Andreini comica Gelosa, & academica intenta. Raccolti da Francesco Andreini comico Geloso, detto il Capitan Spavento. E dati in luce da Flaminio Scala, comico. Venice: Gio Battista Combi. Andreini, Isabella. 1995. Mirtilla. Edited by Maria Luisa Doglio. Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi. Andreini, Isabella. 2002. Rime d’Isabella Andreini Padovana. Arizona: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Andreini, Isabella. 2005. Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini. Edited by Anne MacNeil and translated by James Wyatt Cook. Lantham, MA: The Scarecrow Press. Andrews, Richard. 1993. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andrews, Richard. 1999. ‘L’attore e la cantante fra il Cinquecento e il Seicento. La presenza femminile in palcoscenico’. In Teatro e Musica, Ecritures vocales et scèniques; acte du colloque international, 17–19 February 1998, edited by Margherita Orsino, 27–83. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Andrews, Richard. 2005. ‘Isabella Andreini and Others: Women on Stage in the Late Cinquecento’. In Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza, 316–33. London: Legenda.

124     Margaret Rose

Barasch, Frances K. 2000. ‘Italian Actresses in Shakespeare’s World: Flaminia and Vincenza’. Shakespeare Bulletin 17, no. 4: 17–21. Barasch, Frances K. 2001. ‘Italian Actresses in Shakespeare’s World: Vittoria and Isabella’. Shakespeare Bulletin 19, no. 3: 5–9. Beijer, Agne, and Pierre Duchartre, eds. 1981. Le Recueil Fossard. Paris: La Librairie Thèatrale. Buckley, Matthew S. 2009. Eloquent Actions: The Body and Meaning in Early Commedia dell’Arte. Theatre Survey 50, no. 2: 251–315. Burattelli, Claudia, Landolfi Domenica, and Anna Zinanni, eds. 1993. Comici dell’Arte: corrispondenze. Firenze: Le Lettere. Carandini, Silvia. 2002. ‘Donne in difesa della Commedia, Isabella Andreini, Demoiselle de Beaulieu e la legittimazione della scena in Francia nel primo “600”’. In Donne in difesa della commedia, Omaggio a Franca Angelini, edited by Beatrice Alfonsetti, Daniela Quarta, and Mirella Saulini, 81–92. Rome: Bulzoni. Cecchini, Pier Maria. 1628. Frutti delle moderne comedie et avisi a chi le recita. Padua: Guaresco Guareschi. Chaffee, Judith, and Olly Crick, eds. 2015. The Routledge Companion to Commedia dell’Arte. London and New York: Routledge. Chambers, E. K. 1923. The English Stage, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coryat, Thomas. 1608. Coryat’s Crudities. London: William Standby. D’Ancona, Alessandro. 1891. Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols. Turin: Ermanno Loescher. Dasent, John Roche, ed. 1895. Acts of the Privy Council of England, no. X [1577– 78]. London. Dersofi, Nancy. 1994. ‘Isabella Andreini (1562–1604)’. In Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, 18–25. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Ferrone, Siro. 2006. Arlecchino, vita e avventure di Tristano Martinelli attore. Bari: Laterza. Ferrone, Siro. 2010. Attori, mercanti, corsari. La Commedia dell’Arte in Europa, tra Cinque e Seicento. Turin: Einaudi. Ferrone, Siro. 2014. La Commedia dell’Arte. Attrici e attori italiani in Europa (XV1 -XVIII secolo). Turin: Einaudi. Fiocco, Achille. 1954. ‘Isabella Andreini’. In Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, vol. I, 555–58. Rome: Sansoni. Garzoni, Tommaso. 1595. La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo. Venice: Gio Battista Sommasco. Garzoni, Tommaso. 1996. La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo. Edited by Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina. Turin: Einaudi. Katritzky, M. A. 2005. ‘Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery’. In Women Players in England 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, 109–43. Farnham: Ashgate.

6  The First Italian Actresses, Andreini and Commedia dell’Arte     125

Katritzky, M. A. 2006. The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620. With Special Mention of the Visual Records. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kerr, Rosalind. 2006. ‘Isabella Andreini, Comica Gelosa 1562–1604: Petrarchism for the Theatre Public Theatre’. Quaderni d’Italianistica 27, no. 2: 71–92. Kerr, Rosalind. 2015. ‘The Fame Monster; Diva Worship from Isabella Andreini to Lady Gaga’. Italian Studies 70, no. 3: 402–15. Lea, Kathleen. 1934. Italian Popular Comedy. A Study of Commedia dell’Arte, 1560– 1630, with special reference to the English Stage, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacNeil, Anne. 1995. ‘The Divine Madness of Isabella Andreini’. Journal of the Royal Music Association 120: 195–215. MacNeil, Anne. 2003. Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacNeil, Anne, ed. 2005. Selected Poems of Isabella Andreini. Translated by James Wyatt Cook. Lantham, MA: The Scarecrow Press. Mamone, Sara. 1988. Firenze e Parigi, due capitali dello spettacolo per una regina, Maria de’ Medici. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana. Manfio, Carla. 2014. Una letterata in scena. Padua: il Poligrafo. Marotti, Ferruccio, and Giovanna Romei. 1991. La Commedia dell’Arte e la societá barocca. La professione del teatro. Rome: Bulzoni. Mariti, Luciano. 2002. Valore e coscienza del teatro in epoca barocca in, I capricci di Proteo. Percorsi e linguaggi del barocco. In Proceeding of an international conference, 419–455, October 23–26, Lecce. Salerno Editrice, Rome. McGill, Kathleen. 1991. ‘Women and Performance: The Development of Improvisation by the 16th Century Commedia dell’Arte’. Theatre Journal 43: 59–69. Molinari, Cesare. 1983. ‘L’altra faccia del 1589: Isabella Andreini e la sua “pazzia”’. Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell’Europa del Cinquecento 11: 565–73. Molinari, Cesare. 1985. La Commedia dell’Arte. Milan: Mondadori. Nashe, Thomas. 1592. Pierce Pennilesse His Supplication to the Divell. London: Richard Shones, reprinted 1969, Menston: Scholar Press. Ojeda Calvo, Maria del Valle. 2007. Stefanelo Botarga e Zan Ganassa. Scenari e zibaldoni di comici italiani nella Spagna del Cinquecento. Rome: Bulzoni. Oreglia, Giacomo. 1968. The Commedia dell’Arte. North Western Universities: Octagon. Panella, L. 1960. ‘Isabella Canali’. In Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 704–5. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana. Pavoni, Giuseppe. 1589. Diario descritto da Giuseppe Pavoni. Delle feste celebrate nelle solennissime nozze delli serenissimi sposi, il sig. Don Ferdinando Medici, & la sig. Donna Christina di Loreno Gran Duchi di Toscana. Bologna: Rossi. Perrucci, Andrea. 1699. Dell’arte rappresentativa, premeditata – e all’improvviso. Naples: Luigi di Micheli. Perrucci, Andrea. 2008. Dell’arte rappresentativa, premeditata – e all’improvviso. Bilingual edition. In A Treatise on Acting from Memory and by Improvisation,

126     Margaret Rose

translated and edited by Francesco Cotticelli, Anne Goodrich Heck, and Thomas F. Heck. New York: Scarecrow Press. Pieri, Marzia. 1989. La nascita del teatro moderno in Italia tra XV e XV1 secolo. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Ray, Meredith Kennedy. 1998. ‘La Castità Conquistata: The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama’. Romance Languages Annual 9: 312–21. Rebaudengo, Maurizio. 1994. Giovan Battista Andreini, tra poetica e drammaturgia. Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards, 1990. La Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History. Oxford: Blackwell for Shakespeare Head Press. Rosenthal, Margaret F. 1992. The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Salerno, Henry F. 1989. Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte: Flaminio Scala’s il Teatro delle favole rappresentative. New York: Limelight. Scala, Flaminio. 1611. Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, 2 vols. Venice: G. B. Pulciani. Scala, Flaminio. 1976. Il teatro delle favole rappresentative. Edited by Ferruccio Marotti. Milano: Polifilo. Shakespeare, William. 2006. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Series Three. London: Methuen. Snyder, Jon, ed. 2009. Giovan Battista Andreini, Love in the Mirror. Bilingual edition. Toronto: Iter. Sommi de’, Leone, 1982. Tre sorelle. Edited by Giovanna Romei. Milano: Il Polifilo. Tasso, Torquato. 1985. Aminta. Edited by Claudio Varese. Milano: Mursia. Taviani, Ferdinando. 1969. La fascinazione del teatro: la commedia dell’arte e la società Barocca. Rome: Bulzoni. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino. 1982. Il segreto della commedia dell’arte: la memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo. Florence: La Casa Usher. Tessari, Francesco. 1989. ‘Sotto il segno di Giano: La Commedia dell’Arte di Isabella e Francesco Andreini’. In The Commedia dell’Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo, edited by Christopher Cairns, 1–33. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. Testaverde, Anna Maria, ed. 2007. I canovacci della Commedia dell’Arte. Torino: Einaudi. Vianello, Daniele. 1999. ‘Tra inferno e paradiso: il limbo dei buffoni’. Biblioteca teatrale 49–51, 13–80.

7 Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens: Female Agency and Subjectivity in Early Modern English Court Drama Catherine Clifford

The English court is a fruitful area to interrogate for evidence of women in performance during the early modern period. Women in positions of power and influence were able to press at the boundaries of dramatic performance more effectively and with fewer consequences than those they ruled, primarily because of the privileges they enjoyed. The long-held assumption that an all-male stage dominated dramatic practice until the Restoration is now no longer orthodoxy in performance scholarship, and a movement has begun to reframe early modern drama with women’s experiences as performers and labourers in mind. Natasha Korda (2011, 13) takes up this challenge in her book Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage, arguing that the all-male stage paradigm ‘is only true if we confine our definition of the theater to the onstage activities of professional playing companies in London’. Indeed, women were always a vibrant part of theatrical production and performance and nowhere is that more evident than at the English court. This chapter pursues two main arguments centred on female agency in court performances. Firstly, it explores Elizabeth I’s reshaping of the role of queen through her positioning in dramatic and quasi-dramatic tournaments. Her immediate female predecessors, that is her father Henry VIII’s consorts and her sister Mary I, were sometimes grafted into court performances as objects of the action and were also sometimes called upon to intervene in Catherine Clifford (*)  Graceland University, Lamoni, IA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_7

127

128     Catherine Clifford

order for the entertainments to reach their conclusions. Elizabeth, however, often performed a more active role in tiltyard entertainments. Her engagement in these performances redefined the positioning of the queen in these entertainments and opened a space for later royal women to become agents and actors in court drama. The extent to which Elizabeth established norms for royal women in court drama, and how that impacted on her immediate successors in court performances, therefore forms my second line of inquiry. Both Anna of Denmark, wife to James I, and Henrietta Maria, wife to Charles I, scandalized the Stuart court with their roles in court entertainments, but in fact their performances were built upon and merely extended their Tudor predecessor’s legacy and the performance commonplaces she reshaped during her reign. Studies of queenship and dramatic performance in the early modern period tend to focus either on Elizabeth I or on the early Stuart queens consort, building on the assumption that Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria were primarily products of foreign courts and continental dramatic traditions, which they brought to often unsympathetic English audiences. Rupture rather than continuity usually characterizes the relationship between Tudors and Stuarts, especially in matters of dramatic representation. This chapter, however, is interested in potential links between the last Tudor queen and the first Stuart queens via the ways these women claimed agency as subjects, rather than objects, of drama. In short, Elizabeth I’s self-consciousness about her monarchical performance in court drama cleared a space for her successors to inhabit dramatic spaces as central performers, even actresses.

Elizabeth I’s Performative Queenship and Dramatic Participation in the Tiltyard When scholars imagine dramatic performances at the court of Elizabeth I, they often look to the evidence about plays and masques. Elizabeth saw hundreds of these types of entertainments during her lifetime. However, as she aged she found that plays were a cheaper form of entertainment for her Christmas revels seasons than the masques and pageants that she seems to have favoured early in her reign. Thus, a greater number of plays combined with only the occasional masque became the norm at court during the busy revels seasons (Dutton 2016, 22). This example of Elizabethan parsimony would prove a stark contrast to the costly and elaborate masques put on by

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     129

the Jacobean court every Christmas which took place in addition to the further increasing number of plays put on each season for the new royal family. Another striking difference between the two courts was that the first masque performed for the Jacobean court in 1603–1604 featured the new queen consort, Anna of Denmark, in a central dancing role which she rehearsed beforehand. Elizabeth I did not dance in masques. She was the one for whom masques were performed. Nor did she speak rehearsed lines in plays or dialogues, or feel comfortable occupying fictional roles that strayed from her public persona. However, Elizabeth did perform dramatic roles in other court entertainments. Nearly every year of her reign, Elizabeth held tournaments during which her noblemen competed against each other in martial exercises such as jousting, tilting, and fighting at barriers (Young 1987, 201–5). These tournaments were more than just military displays: they were political pageants which required participants to invest in neo-chivalric fantasy and role-playing. It was on this stage that Elizabeth was called upon to exercise her aptitude for dramatic performance. In this capacity, Elizabeth reshaped the court’s perception of royal female bodies on stage. In November 1565, seven years after her accession, Elizabeth I hosted a tournament at her tiltyard in Whitehall Palace to celebrate the wedding of Anne Russell, daughter to the wealthy Earl of Bedford, and Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick and elder brother to Elizabeth’s favourite Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Robert Dudley had orchestrated the match, and the occasion of the marriage was heralded as a celebration of the joining of two prominent Protestant families (Adams 2008). Two surviving contemporary accounts, by chronicler John Stow and by an anonymous writer whose manuscript is preserved in Thomas Hearne’s edition of the Collectanea of John Leland, describe a quasi-dramatic spectacle which more or less follows the commonplaces of Elizabethan tournaments at Whitehall. First, a messenger delivered the challenge to the Queen and the visiting Princess Cecilia of Sweden over supper at Bedford House, Russell’s family home, a month before the event. This initial challenge established the narrative device of the tournament: four ‘foreign’ knights, from an ambiguous ‘strang[e] [country]’, were challenging the best knights of England to martial contests in order to determine who was most worthy of ‘fame’. A version of the challenge, composed in ten or so lines of verse, was then posted on the gate at Whitehall as a signifier to the public of the forthcoming event. The tournament was held over three days, beginning on the afternoon of the wedding, and Elizabeth and Princess Cecilia presided over the activities from the Queen’s tiltyard gallery, a sumptuous viewing gallery constructed on the upper end of the Whitehall tiltyard. At the beginning of the tournament, after obtaining

130     Catherine Clifford

permission from the Queen to begin, competitors dressed in flamboyant costumes, some attended by men dressed as ‘Amazons’, paraded around the yard for the Queen and the probable thousands of spectators in attendance. After three days of competition, Leicester hosted a dinner at his house to close the festivities (Hearne 1770, 666–69; Stow 1566, sigs. 2C2v–2C3v; Wiggins 2012–, 1:430–1, #411). Requesting and obtaining Elizabeth’s permission for this was as much a part of the pageantry as the parade of competitors and the tilts themselves. The descriptions of the 1565 tournament make clear that Elizabeth’s authorization was both asked for and given publicly, first upon the issuing of the challenge and then before the competitors were allowed to compete in her tiltyard. The account in Hearne’s Collectanea emphasizes her consent as a central condition of the dramatic device: ‘then the Post came in and Kneeling down before her Majesty, declared that [four] Strangers, Knights, at the Marriage aforenamed, would hold [jousts], Turney, and [barriers] against all Comers, if it pleased her Majesty and the said Lady Cecilia to give the looking on’. Later, at the start of the tournament itself, the same messenger ‘rode to the Queen … to know the Queen’s Pleasure, whether she would license the said Strangers to come and do their Endeavor’ (Hearne 1770, 667). The post seeks the Queen’s permission and presence in both of these instances. More than just a chronology of events, these details point to the necessity of Elizabeth’s willingness to play along with the fictional device. In his request at the beginning of the tournament, the messenger asks specifically whether Elizabeth will ‘license the said Strangers’, who were of course English knights playing parts, to come into her tiltyard to ‘do their Endeavor’. Couched in a real request for permission to begin the tournament, the messenger uses the language of the narrative device: it’s the ‘Strangers’ who need licensing, not the knights acting the parts. In this, the messenger asks Elizabeth to join in the fiction and play a part, even if that part is basically a version of herself. In addition, the challenge is presented under the assumption that Elizabeth and Princess Cecilia will indeed ‘give the looking on’, but the writer’s inclusion of ‘if ’ in the previous clause leaves room for the Queen to assert agency by potentially refusing to do so and thus disallowing the event. She never did this, as far as the extant records can attest, but in so asking, the post seeks for her good-natured participation in the fictional world where ‘foreign’ challengers will fight England’s nobility in feats at arms. The stakes of the tournament were presented playfully: no actual foreign embassy was attempting to shame English knights through competition. The narrative of foreign knights challenging Elizabeth’s knights

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     131

at the tilt was a frequently used device which worked to harness nationalistic pride against foreign others. Tournaments were political pageants, and they thus required a monarch to embrace their fictions. The rituals of the Elizabethan tiltyard offer a useful entry point for examining the roles that Elizabeth played in dramatic or quasi-dramatic entertainments at court. Masques and plays sometimes included direct addresses to Elizabeth, but rarely did they seek verbal permission from her to continue or to maintain their fictions. Tournaments were microcosmic battles between foreign enemies and the English military. They reified England’s military might for crowds of spectators that are estimated to have reached into the thousands, thus offering Elizabeth a vital public platform (Von Bülow 1895, 258). On this stage, Elizabeth could perform her authority for her subjects, and the rituals of permission-seeking gave her opportunities to do so while giving her a part to play (Young 1987, 35). Furthermore, while her place in the second-storey tiltyard gallery might have cast her as a distant observer to the actions that the knights performed in the yard below, the location of the gallery on the short, upper end of the rectangular tiltyard instead made her a focal point for the spectating multitudes, comparable to the position she occupied on a dais in the great hall (Young 1987, 118–20). Coupled with the spatial logic of the Whitehall tiltyard, her intervention and participation in the fictions of the tournament, which were required for the successful execution of the entertainment, framed her as a centrepiece to the drama of the tournaments she hosted. Because she was a woman, it is especially significant that Elizabeth’s role in these chivalric fantasies hinged on her exercising authority, even if that authority was vested in the playful machinations of the tiltyard narratives themselves. Indeed, they were constructed around her agency in exercising that authority. Just like the writer of the anonymous 1565 account, Lupold von Wedel, a German tourist who witnessed a 1584 tournament celebrating Elizabeth I’s Accession Day, describes a ritual of permission-seeking and gives a fuller picture of Elizabeth’s role in tournaments as they expanded over the nearly twenty years after the Dudley wedding (quoted in Von Bülow 1895). In his account, Elizabeth’s action in taking her seat in her gallery marks the beginning of the event and only after she does so do the competitors enter the tiltyard. Von Wedel describes an expensive and elaborate pageant, with carts attired as chariots and horses as elephants. The challengers were accompanied by servants ‘clad in different colors’ and costumed like ‘savages’ or ‘Irishmen’ (Von Bülow 1895, 258), meant to identify them to spectators as ‘foreign’ would-be threats to the English nationalism such an event was reifying.

132     Catherine Clifford

Von Wedel then explains in detail the public permission-seeking ritual that ensued as each competitor approached the upper end of the tiltyard: [H]e stopped at the foot of the staircase leading to the queen’s room, while one of his servants in pompous attire of a special pattern mounted the steps and addressed the queen in well-composed verses or with a ludicrous speech making her and her ladies laugh. When the speech was ended he in the name of his lord offered to the queen a costly present, which was accepted and permission given to take part in the tournament. In fact, however, they make sure of the permission before preparing for the combat. (Von Bülow 1895, 259)

Here, the pages engage in an exchange with the Queen, presenting rehearsed speeches probably conceived around the tournament’s themes. Although the speeches for this event are not extant, Alan Young (1987, 147–48, 150) shows that the surviving speeches given at other Elizabethan tournaments were sometimes linked to the previously presented challenge or took the opportunity to interpret the costumes and pageant of the knight the speechgiver represented. Accession Day tournaments like the one Von Wedel attended offered knights an opportunity to praise Elizabeth on her regnal anniversary and to present themselves as her champions. The ‘well-composed verses or ludicrous speeches’ in Von Wedel’s description should be understood as speeches appropriate to the fictions of the tournament, but always offering the actual queen unmitigated praise. By 1584, tiltyard permission-seeking had evolved into an elaborate affair. Von Wedel describes a choreographed performance wherein all actors know what parts they are to play. For the watching crowds, pages approached Elizabeth to give their memorized speeches and to hopefully leave both the Queen and the crowd with a favourable impression of their masters. Elizabeth, framed for the spectators in the windows of her gallery, sat centre stage and performed her role as she was expected to. Although it was implicit that she would not actually halt a tournament or discourage it from occurring by rejecting one of these page’s gifts or speeches, would-be competitors were still obliged to seek verbal consent from her before they were allowed to continue. Janette Dillon (2010, 130) argues that tournaments were functionally ‘gated pursuits’ in that every spatial element ‘from the setting up of the enclosure of the tiltyard to the erection of the viewing scaffolds and the ceremonial of entry and exit to different zones of the tiltyard area’ suggests enclosure and policing of boundaries. Just as viewing stands around the tiltyard allowed spectators to glimpse inside the Palace of

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     133

Whitehall, they were only permitted to see what the Queen wanted them to see. The circumscription of performances and the bounding of spaces ‘affirmed the collective vision of the court that it wished to perform for itself and its spectators’ (Dillon 2010, 130). As the extant accounts of Elizabethan tournaments attest, Elizabeth always performed her demarcated role as predictably as the permission-seekers did theirs. After all, it was her stage. Underlying this reading of Elizabeth’s dramatic agency in tournament entertainments is the assumption that these events required their participants to be engaged in them as performers. Even so, they elude clear generic categorization. If the pageantry and ritualized behaviours of the tilt are dramatic per se, who is to say that every movement and ritual sustained by the court, including even religious ceremonies, are not also dramatic? Some tiltyard entertainments, like Philip Sidney’s The Four Foster-Children of Desire (1581) and Sir Henry Lee’s retirement tilt (1590) for which speeches and descriptions remain, for instance, are unequivocally dramatic, but it is unclear the extent to which every tournament included a scripted challenge to provide the tournament with a narrative. I argue, though, that fictive elements, including performative chivalry and pageantry, dominated the rituals of the tiltyard, thus linking tournaments and their participants to similar rituals in courtly entertainments, particularly masques. Just as Jacobean masques worked to dramatize the political machinations of James I, so too did Elizabethan tournaments serve to propagate English military might for a queen self-conscious about the fact that she could never lead troops into battle herself (Cole 1999, 155–63). In the introduction to British Drama, 1533–1642: A Catalogue, Martin Wiggins (2012, 1:xii) argues that some dramatic genres like masques and royal pageants work by ‘collapsing the distinction between the fictional and non-fictional world’. For the sake of cataloguing drama, Wiggins distinguishes between tournaments with narrative dramatic elements and tournaments that survive to us mainly as sporting events. Although pageantry was a part of the ritual of any martial exercise or tournament, a narrative dramatic framing device was not a requirement. Tilting and other martial displays thus could take place ‘without the dramatic entertainment’ (Wiggins 2012, 1:xiv). Pressing this notion of masques and royal entertainments as dramatic genres in which the bounds of the non-fiction world expanded to include the world of fiction, some tiltyard entertainments like the 1565 tournament should also be understood to have done the same, especially since they usually relied on commonplace chivalric fantasy and ritual to frame the actions of the sport as it was performed during this period. Elizabeth moved between these fictive and non-fictive worlds as both object

134     Catherine Clifford

and subject, knowing the gendered limits of her role in the fictions, but maintaining her authority. If the framing devices of tournaments habitually collapsed the fictive and real worlds, was Elizabeth an actor in advancing these dramatic narratives? Inasmuch as these moments are valuable within a larger discussion of female bodies in performance, Elizabeth performed an active role in the fictions of the tournament. She sanctioned its fantasy, and although she then assumed her gendered role as observer for the duration of the tournament—that is, she was excluded from what Dillon (2010, 130) calls ‘the male zone of combat’—her pleasure was central to the undertaking and the outcome. Structurally, the commonplace framing of the martial feats within the loose narrative of ‘strangers’ or ‘foreigners’ challenging English defenders to demonstrate their bravery only works if the defenders have something to defend as well, here the body politic personified in the physical body of the queen. The gender roles in the tiltyard were circumscribed. However, because Elizabeth was the sovereign, not a princess or queen consort, she was not a prize to be won by knights advancing a chivalric fantasy, even if the sports the knights competed in were essentially displays of male physical prowess requiring a female audience. Her decision not to marry reified her refusal to offer herself as a prize in the tiltyard. Elizabeth, instead, situated herself as the centrepiece of the tournaments she held, forcing the neo-chivalric narratives underlying those tournaments to form around her gendered expression of sovereignty rather than around her female body. Above all, tournaments were political pageants, aimed at displaying English military prowess in service to the monarch, and Elizabeth seemed to understand how her body might potentially complicate that message. Indeed, she seems to have understood her body in terms of its limitations, its non-maleness. At the very least, she apologized for it regularly. As Deanne Williams (2007, 238) bluntly puts it, ‘Elizabeth I didn’t like women much’. From her birth, her gender connoted disappointment and her queenship was defined against a patriarchal standard. Even before Elizabeth occupied the throne, her sister Mary I was fielding attacks on her gender. In 1558, the final year of Mary’s reign, the Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox published a pamphlet called The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which railed against female sovereigns in markedly gendered terms. Composed while in exile in Geneva under Mary’s rule, Knox (1558, sig. B2r) frames his argument in stark, unforgiving misogynist terms:

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     135

Nature … doth paint [women] forth to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of council and regiment. And these notable faults have men in all ages espied in that kind, for the which not only they have removed women from rule and authority, but also some have thought that men subject to the council or empire of their wives were unworthy of all public office.

Women holding positions of authority over men, but especially as rulers, he argued, were against God’s hierarchy and constituted ‘miserable bondage’ by men to ‘the monstriferous empire of women’ (sig. E2v). As he wrote this, Knox could not have known that Mary I was about to die, leaving the crown to another woman who happened to be Protestant. Feminine monstrosity notwithstanding, Knox soon tried to retract elements of his argument by appealing to Elizabeth and her councillors while nonetheless holding fast to the notion that her rule was a ‘deviation’ from God’s natural order (Dawson 2008). Helen Hackett (1995, 39) explains: ‘he would not oppose female rule, but only because it was to be endured as a divinely imposed penance from human sinfulness, like famine or plague’. Elizabeth, for her part, could not have found this convincing, even if, as Hackett (1995, 41) demonstrates, Elizabeth worked to present herself as the ‘exceptional woman’ who was fit for rule because she was ‘alone in her sex’ and not restrained by the perceived weakness of her female body. As the ‘Virgin Queen’, in other words, she presented her body as one that contained its passions. Knox’s views on female rulers were not anomalous, though, and they illuminate the context out of which Elizabeth emerged, one in which female physicality was perceived as a handicap. She was never immune to such arguments against her rule. In The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, Carole Levin (2013, 121, 124–25) argues that Elizabeth publicly cultivated an image of herself that simultaneously encompassed a male body politic and female physical body. Nowhere is this clearer than in the accounts of her oft-anthologized speech to the troops at Tilbury in August of 1588, where, adorned with a breastplate and helmet, she used her two bodies as a rhetorical device to rouse her troops. One contemporary account transcribes her words: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England, too’ (Marcus et al. 2000, 326). It is noteworthy that Knox’s adjectives about feminine physicality (e.g. ‘weak’, ‘feeble’) re-emerge here as her chosen descriptors. Even if these were not her exact words, the gist of her message seems to have hinged on the idea that it would be her kingly body going to war,

136     Catherine Clifford

despite the fact that her physical body could not (Levin 2013, 143–44). Like her performances in the tiltyard, Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury dances with the gendered boundaries long since established for military exploits, but ultimately maintains the status quo. In the tiltyard, she allowed knights to present her with gifts and flattering speeches, but her authority alone allowed the tournaments and their fictions to proceed. She participated as both the primary female audience for her knights’ performances of neo-chivalric masculinity and the kingly body politic they were representing. Elizabeth’s self-consciousness about her inability to go to war or to compete in the tiltyard seems to have had a significant impact on her performance of queenship. Mary Hill Cole (1999, 155–56) argues that through tournaments and a multitude of military pageants sponsored by the crown, Elizabeth ‘crafted for herself the military role of protector that her gender deprived her of on the battlefield’ even though she was only ever able to summon her ‘symbolic participation’ in real battles. More pointedly, Elizabeth was her ‘father’s daughter’, and liked to compare herself to him, even summoning his likeness by prominently displaying his portrait at Whitehall. Before the debilitating injury that sidelined him from the athletic exploits he so loved, Henry VIII took enormous pride in his physical capabilities and understood leading an army into battle as an important condition of kingship (Anglo 1969, 108–10). The cultural memory of his body competing at the tilt might have served to undermine Elizabeth’s static observation of the tiltyard if the Accession Day celebrations had not redefined royal tournaments as a unique celebration of her monarchy. When an annual Accession Day was established as a national day of celebration for her in the late 1560s, tournaments became important public demonstrations of the fact that, even though Elizabeth could not physically lead an army to war, her military was orderly and equipped should such an event arise (Young 1987, 36). These very public demonstrations associated her with military potency better than any speech she might have given. Cole (1999, 163) posits the idea that when Elizabeth progressed through her kingdom, stopping to inspect military fortifications and to observe ‘mock battles’, she was encouraging her subjects to conflate her ‘female status with the royal prerogative to defend the kingdom’. Similarly, tournaments positioned her body as a visible symbol of national strength as long as it was clear to the thousands of spectators in attendance that she was in control of the day. The loose narrative scaffolding of Elizabethan tournaments also allowed the Queen the opportunity to exercise control over her image in a way that plays, by virtue of having been scripted beforehand, could not. Historically,

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     137

whenever playwrights and writers of entertainments attempted to graft her into the dramatic actions of their productions, the results could be mixed. Ben Jonson learned this the hard way with his play Every Man Out of His Humour (1600). In the original ending, which Jonson amended for subsequent publications, Queen Elizabeth is personified onstage in a non-speaking role. When the malcontent Macilente encounters her at court, ‘the very wonder of her presence strikes him to the earth, dumb and astonished’ thus healing his discordant humours (sig. Q4v). Although it is not clear what was offensive enough about this representation that Jonson would be compelled to alter it, Helen Ostovich (1992, 318) proposes that it may have been a problem of tone: Macilente’s apparently earnest transformation is hard to accept in a play thus far steeped in comical satire. For Ostovich, Jonson’s attempt at flattery fell short because of its incongruity. Rather than flattering the Queen, in other words, Macilente’s transformation might have instead appeared ridiculous and his speech seen as a parody of similar attempts at praising Elizabeth. If the original ending indeed made it to court when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed it at Richmond Palace for the 1599– 1600 revels (Wiggins 2012–, 4:165, #1216), Elizabeth also might have objected to being embodied in the play, however flatteringly, without her consultation. As David Scott Kastan (1986, 462–63) has shown, Elizabeth maintained rigid control over her image and representations of her queenship. Jonson’s embodiment of her in his play undermined her ability to exercise dramatic agency as she could in the tiltyard. George Peele’s much earlier play The Arraignment of Paris, which was written and performed for the court at Whitehall in 1584, leans in to its Elizabeth-centric ending in a more convincing way, explicitly engaging the Queen’s performative positioning and calling upon her to be a willing participant in the action of the play’s final scene (Wiggins 2012–, 2:332–3, #751). However, like Jonson’s play, it ultimately undermines the authority and agency she claimed in tiltyard entertainments. The plot centres on the question of who should be the owner of a golden apple planted by Até for Juno, Pallas, and Venus to find. Até leaves it addressed to the ‘fairest’ and a disagreement ensues between the three goddesses (Peele 1584, sig. B3r). Paris, the next person they see, settles the dispute by giving it to Venus in exchange for the love of Helen, but finds himself in trouble with the other two goddesses, who take him before a ‘Council of the gods’ to impose justice (sig. D3r). Eventually, Venus is forced to relinquish the golden apple to Diana, whose bower was near the site where Até left the coveted object. Diana avoids awarding it to any of the three goddesses in favour of Eliza, Queen of ‘Elizium’, or Queen Elizabeth, whom all of the goddesses praise

138     Catherine Clifford

(sig. E3r). In the final moments of the play, Diana breaks the fourth wall to hand the apple ‘to the Queen’s own hands’ (sig. E4v). This final action by Diana, along with the speeches and songs praising Elizabeth, requires no verbal response from her; yet, in calling attention to her physical presence and in offering politically commonplace praises of her, Peele forces Elizabeth to move from spectator to object, even as the play recognizes that a royal spectator is never not an object of the gazes of other spectators (Orgel 1975, 9). Provocatively, the final scene turns the lens on her without asking for her permission. The Arraignment of Paris represents a useful counterpoint for unpacking Elizabeth’s performative presence in dramatic entertainments. Paige Martin Reynolds (2010, 264–65) links this final plot device to Elizabeth’s awareness of her image as a female sovereign and what might be understood as the double bind of judgement that characterized her image-making. Essentially, even though the play awards the golden apple to Elizabeth, the act calls attention to the ‘limits imposed on the female sovereign’s rule: rather than allowing her to pass judgement, it makes her subject to it’. She is implanted into the dramatic resolution of the play as a recipient of the judgement of Diana whether she likes it or not. Diana, the goddess of chastity, can also be read as an analogue for the Virgin Queen in that she found herself in a ‘thankless office’ of judgement (Peele 1584, sig. E2r). Although Peele’s play might be read as a clearer dramatic schema for Elizabeth to perform in than a dramatic or quasi-dramatic tournament, Peele’s element of surprise in turning the play towards Elizabeth in the final scene undermines the authority that Elizabeth claimed in the tiltyard, where she was a party to the dramatic and performative rituals and an actor in her own image-making. In the dramatic structure of the latter, she was granted the agency to perform her role as she chose. To her critics, Elizabeth’s body always marked her as a site for potential unruliness or lack of containment. These criticisms and the implicit lack of confidence in her that they underscore must in part account for Elizabeth’s conscious efforts to control her image, especially visual representations of herself. The fact that tournaments—displays of physical strength, military prowess, and the masculine chivalric ideal—would prove to be the defining events of her reign is a logical extension of her complicated relationship with her gender. Elizabeth’s stasis in the tiltyard gallery was not only a gendered image of containment and self-control, but also a subtle dramatic performance in its own right. It was her chosen stage on which she performed in fictions she could control. Her immediate successor claimed a more traditional court stage on which to dramatize her queenship, but she was not interested in subtlety.

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     139

Anna of Denmark’s Dancing Body During her first Christmas season in England in 1603–1604, Anna of Denmark, Queen Consort to James I, caused a stir by dancing in the Twelfth Night masque. Dudley Carleton, a witness to the revels, describes in a letter to his friend John Chamberlain the appearance of Anna and her ladies, all of whom were adorned as visiting goddesses to the court: Their attire was alike, loose mantles and petticoats, but of different colours, the stuffs embroidered satins and cloth of gold and silver, for which they were beholden to Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe. Their heads by their dressing did only distinguish the difference of the goddesses they did represent. Only Pallas had a trick by herself; for her clothes were not so much below the knee that we might see a woman had both feet and legs, which I never knew before. (quoted in Lee 1972, 55)

This much-cited account of Anna’s performance as Pallas in Samuel Daniel’s masque The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses immediately gives the impression that Carleton was keeping an eye on the gossip surrounding the performance: the costumes had indeed been plundered from ‘Queen Elizabeth’s wardrobe’ to furnish the masquers, a fact that was apparently common knowledge by the time of the performance. Lady Arabella Stuart (quoted in Steen 1994, 197) had written of their intention to use Elizabeth’s clothing on December 18, several weeks before the event: ‘my Lady of Suffolk and my Lady Walsingham have warrants to take of the late Queen’s best apparel out of the Tower at their discretion’. The enduring image of this description, though, is Carleton’s hemline-policing which he couches in performative ignorance about the female anatomy. Carleton’s attention on Anna’s body highlights the novelty of the tableau, and, as Wiggins (2012, 63) puts it, few ‘would have expected her to stand out by wearing a short skirt’. It was of course appropriate for the central character and performer to stand out from the other goddesses onstage, but Carleton’s particular discomfort with her visual presentation is underscored by his use of the word ‘trick’ which would seem to imply that she was somehow deceptive, even disreputable, in her presentation, a common cause of anxiety among anti-theatricalist writers of the day. His comment pejoratively suggests that Anna had gone beyond the boundaries of a noble performance and had crossed over into the realm of commercial playing, where ‘tricks’ were the realm of actors shilling for paying audiences. Her gown revealed her ‘feet and legs’, body parts that women, especially

140     Catherine Clifford

noblewomen, normally concealed. This reading of Carleton’s word choice is born out in his description of Anna and her ladies in Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness a year later: ‘their apparel [was] rich, but too light and courtesan like’ (Lee 1972, 68). His adjectives link the women’s dress with sexual promiscuity, another suggestion that Anna’s bodily performance was out of bounds. It would seem that Carleton’s impression of the new Queen of England is that she was too comfortable using her body as a focal point for the audience’s gaze. The spectre of a queen wearing a revealing costume was bolstered by the fact that Anna’s body was in motion when she masqued. Jacobean court masques contained dialogue and songs, but, in contrast to plays, they relied on spectacle: the costumes, dancing, scenery, and spatial configurations were arguably more essential to their success than the words the performers spoke or sang, and the more expensive the display, the better. As such, the bodies of masquers themselves were moving texts, forcing the gazes of spectators to follow them in their dancing and make meaning of the motions of their bodies. Clare McManus (2002, 98) reads the masquers’ dancing bodies against the ‘shifting staging conditions’ in which they danced and argues that The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, which was staged in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace, forced a different kind of relationship between dancer and spectator than later masques by Inigo Jones would. ‘Rather than being moved by the shifting scenery and presented to the audience’, as in Jones’s design for later masques like The Masque of Beauty, Vision had its masquers ‘[emerge] from the static scenery under their own power’ and give the ‘individual scenic items motion’ (McManus 2002, 104–6). Anna processed through the hall in a circular motion in Vision, asking for the spectators’ focus on her physical form as she moved. Vision required its performers, and especially Anna, to command the space, moving it rather than being moved by it. Her royal female body, costumed as Pallas and performing the dance’s choreographed motions for an audience, was thus a new kind of text for the English court to read, a ‘locus of action and meaning’ (Lewalski 1993, 30). Furthermore, for an audience unaccustomed to seeing women, much less queens, in motion during dramatic performance, the novelty of her female body performing a role onstage might be read as a provocation, the desired effect being discomfort. The dancing body was a trained and controlled body, circumscribed by the movements of the dance and requiring physical control not unlike that of a competitor in the tiltyard (Howard 1998, 24). Most of the attending English at the Jacobean court had only known the queenly performances of Elizabeth I, her stasis and her self-consciousness

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     141

about inhabiting a female body while wearing the crown. Unlike Elizabeth’s publicly virginal body, Anna’s body had given birth, thereby fulfilling the prescribed role of a queen consort. For her to dance publicly in gowns cut to reveal her non-virginal body represented a traversing of the gendered norms for women in positions of power, norms that Elizabeth had worked hard to establish. The threat of Anna of Denmark’s dancing body lay in its threat to patriarchal containment: not only did Anna dance in spaces where the previous queen had maintained her stasis, she also sexualized her performance, something queens consort typically avoided doing in public lest they sully their prescribed images as wives and mothers. The fact that it was Elizabeth I’s gown and that it had been altered for the occasion was, in Wiggins’s words, ‘what gave the gesture its peculiar effrontery’ (2012, 63). The costume Anna wore was a statement marking a new era of court performance by royal women: Queen Anna’s movement was replacing Queen Elizabeth’s stasis. Martin Butler (2008, 102) reads The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses as ‘mim[ing] the demise of the old dynasty and its recreation in a new, legitimating change by casting it into ceremonial form’. The masque certainly invoked Elizabethan signifiers, from the costumes the goddesses wore to the Tudor great hall in which it was performed. Indeed, part of the potential shock value of Anna’s performance was how overtly it relied on Elizabeth’s iconography. Her portrayal of the goddess Pallas, especially, has invited a litany of speculation about the intended meaning. Barbara Lewalski (1993, 31) argues that Pallas, ‘the virgin warrior and goddess of wisdom’, evoked Elizabeth, carrying ‘associations of female power and militant internationalism that were anathema to James’. Her appearance as Pallas, in other words, was a clear symbol of feminized power. According to Daniel’s epistle to the Countess of Bedford in his published account of the masque (Daniel 1604, sig. A5v), Anna herself ‘chose to represent’ Pallas. This is a striking detail given that Queen Elizabeth had also closely aligned herself with the goddess, famously dressing as Pallas to deliver her ‘heart and stomach of a king’ speech to the troops at Tilbury in 1588. The fact that Anna appeared as Pallas in Elizabeth’s gown only solidifies the association. The following year, when she performed in The Masque of Blackness while visibly pregnant and in ‘blackface’, Anna’s body would have served again to signify difference from the deceased monarch. While it is easy to read her early masquing career as a series of contrasts with her predecessor, McManus (2002, 108) contends that in Vision Anna and her ladies were the ‘inhabiting spirits of the now defunct Elizabethan courtly body’, just as they were performing as the spirits of twelve goddesses: ‘Female physicality was

142     Catherine Clifford

adopted and adapted as a means of reconstituting feminine power within the performance of the gendered body in the masquing hall’. The spirit of Elizabethan agency was manifest in these adaptations. Anna’s early masquing represented a radical political change, but it also expanded the boundaries of female-centred performance at court established by Elizabeth. Powerful and deliberate, Anna of Denmark’s performances in court masques during her first decade in England paint the picture of a person aware of her positioning both as queen consort in her husband’s court and as an autonomous female political body with a court of her own. This awareness aligned her more with her predecessor than has been emphasized. Her dancing female body may have scandalized Dudley Carleton and Vision may have been misunderstood by the public at large (Daniel 1604, sig. A4r), but a royal woman claiming agency through performance could hardly be understood as a new trend: Elizabeth I’s history of conscious self-representation through dramatic performance had been the norm for decades. One major difference between the two queens, though, was status: Elizabeth I faced contempt and condescension for her gender, but as a sovereign, she could not be disregarded. Anna’s status as Queen Consort, however, left her exposed to brazen disregard and accusations of frivolity by generations of critics, in obviously gendered affronts (Dunn-Hensley 2017, 3–4). Indeed, this disregard affected historical depictions of Anna until 1990, when Linda Levy Peck (1990, 68–74) positioned her as a political agent in her own right. Like Elizabeth I, Anna seems to have recognized the value in turning an audience’s gaze towards her, and she became an autonomous political agent, using Vision to help broker peace with the Spanish ambassador (Cano-Echevarría and Hutchings 2012, 227–29). Her debut masque in England, framed against the Great Hall of the Tudor Hampton Court, positioned her as a performer comfortable exploiting contrasts with her predecessor, but in positioning herself as a subject in the performance, Anna was more similar to Elizabeth I than different. As both a masquer and a patron of drama, Anna of Denmark expanded the acceptable boundaries of female dramatic performance for royal and elite women in England. Underlying anxieties about Anna’s sexualized dancing body show an intuitive awareness that by this behaviour, she, a foreign-born queen, was reinventing English queenship. As we will see with Henrietta Maria, anxieties about Anna’s dancing were easily couched in nationalistic fears of difference and foreignness. Paradoxically, bodies of queens consort, even foreign-born queens, were also framed as vessels for furthering the royal line: their bodies were potential sites both for subversion and for national unity. If Elizabeth’s virginity had helped to define her body when she performed her queenship

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     143

in public, Anna’s fecundity defined hers. As queen consort, her primary ­‘success’ was in producing an heir, so her body could be easily perceived as overstepping its bounds. Carleton’s discomfort with Anna’s visible legs and feet must be read as a reaction to the expectations of contained, even passive, maternity that she was expected to inhabit. A subjective female body moving onstage was a powerful symbol of agency, not passivity. Ultimately, the dancing in Jacobean court masques was a physical representation of the tension between harmony and discord, order and chaos. Skiles Howard (1998, 3) characterizes dancing in this period as a potentially ‘discursive practice that circulated and interrogated the bodily paradigms of the age’. Anna’s assertion of feminine agency in her dancing was countered by the presence of her husband, who sat in the most geometrically perfect seat in the hall while she danced, and, just as in Elizabeth’s presence in the tiltyard, the seated monarch was always the centre of the performance. Anna’s masquing career ceased in 1612, possibly in response to the sudden death of her son Prince Henry which devastated her irrevocably (Barroll 2001, 134; CSP Ven. 1864–1947, 12:521). The extensive renovations of her palace Somerset House were nearing completion around this time as well, offering her a London residence removed from the court traffic at Whitehall. With a new venue at which she could exercise her creative impulses away from the watchful eyes of her husband’s court, Anna’s dramatic activities shifted to patronage. She continued to attend the court’s revels, but she never performed in them again. Her dancing days had passed.

Henrietta Maria, Royal Actress It is relatively indisputable that Henrietta Maria, Queen Consort to Charles I, was the first royal actress in England. In their attempts to assert agency through dramatic performances, Elizabeth I engaged with the fictive fantasies that maintained her queenship, thereby performing another version of herself, and Anna of Denmark forced the eyes of the court to follow her moving body in choreographed dances during masques, but, more than once, Henrietta Maria donned the apparel of a scripted character and spoke lines as that character onstage. Indeed, one of the earliest examples of the term ‘actress’ being used to describe a woman onstage as a player can be found in a letter from Sir Benjamin Rudyerd dated December 18, 1625, in which he explicitly uses it to describe the queen’s forthcoming performance in the French pastoral play L’Artenice: ‘The demoiselles mean to present a

144     Catherine Clifford

French pastoral wherein the Queen is a principal actress’ (Bentley 1948– 1961, 4:548; Tomlinson 1992, 189–90). This was not a compliment. The teenage Henrietta Maria was French and Catholic and, as such, was already viewed by some as a potentially threatening influence on her new Protestant husband (Dunn-Hensley 2017, 144–45). That she would soon be breaking the commonplaces of the court stage by acting seemed a logical extension of the threat she posed. It was, after all, Anna of Denmark’s refusal to stay within the prescribed bounds for a queen consort that had so discomfited the English court two decades earlier. After Henrietta Maria’s performance in L’Artenice, John Chamberlain (1939, 2:639) quipped to Dudley Carleton, ‘I have known the time when this would have seemed a strange sight, to see a Queen act in a play but tempora mutantur et nos [times change and so do we]’. Chamberlain’s and Rudyerd’s pejorative descriptions of Henrietta Maria as an actress pinpoint the anxiety that queens, and by extension women, onstage exhumed in English audiences: namely, acting itself implies activity rather than passivity. Elizabeth I’s clever performances in the tiltyard gave the appearance of passivity—she was not performing martial feats in the tiltyard, after all—but allowed her to perform the action of consenting to the events themselves. By taking a principal speaking role in a scripted play, Henrietta Maria did not allow for the illusion of passivity. L’Artenice was a showcase for her acting. Henrietta Maria and her all-female French retinue performed the play in question, L’Artenice by Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan, on February 21, 1626, during the Queen’s first year in England before Charles I and a select audience. Controversially, many of the women donned beards and trousers for their parts in the romantic comedy, which, it should also be noted, was spoken entirely in French. Amerigo Salvetti, a Tuscan courtier present, praised Henrietta Maria’s ‘gestures and elocution’ as excelling above her companions, as did the Venetian ambassador who similarly described the Queen’s ‘remarkable acting’ (CSP Ven. 1913, 19:345–6; Orrell 1979, 10–11). The two Italians’ praises of Henrietta Maria’s performance offer contrasts to Chamberlain’s sardonic reaction, although all of the surviving accounts also mention the English court’s discomfort, with Salvetti explaining that it was ‘done at Denmark House as privately as possible, because it is no normal thing here to see the queen acting on a stage’ (Orrell 1979, 11). The fact that the Queen was ‘acting on a stage’ would not have been unusual for continental courts, but the action was indecorous enough in England that the performance had to be restricted to selected courtiers at the Queen’s palace of Denmark House rather than, for instance, a revels’ audience at the larger Whitehall Palace (Bentley 1948–1961, 4:549).

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     145

The location for the performance of L’Artenice was consequential, and not only because Whitehall had by this time come to be synonymous with patriarchal sovereign power. Elizabeth I utilized Whitehall as one of several principal palaces, but James I came to England with a family in tow, each of whom eventually required their own households. The Elizabethan principal palaces were thus divided among the members of the Jacobean royal family, with Whitehall remaining more or less the King’s primary residence, and Greenwich and Somerset House going to Anna of Denmark—it was renamed Denmark House in her honour. By 1626, then, Whitehall and Denmark House were understood to be the courts of the King and Queen, respectively. Anna’s transformation of Somerset House into Denmark House, a monument to her name and country of origin, marked the establishment of the Queen’s court as an alternative to the King’s, a matriarchal household with its own principal seat in London. At Denmark House, Anna created an artistic culture distinct from her husband’s, largely disentangled from Whitehall and the crown’s control, where she patronized several foreign-born artists, performers, and musicians (Barroll 2001, 39). At Anna’s death in 1619, the palace reverted to Charles I, who gifted it to his new wife. Henrietta Maria then re-established it as her court in much the same way her mother-in-law had and eventually the Works’ Office built a chapel at the palace so that the Queen could practise her Catholicism in line with the conditions of her marriage negotiation (Colvin 1963–1982, 4.2:263–4). In its affiliation with female-dominated households, foreignness, and Catholicism, Denmark House was thus a site associated with transgression, and for its inaugural event as Henrietta Maria’s palace, the new Queen chose the performance of L’Artenice (Thurley 2009, 45). Regardless of her intentions, with this performance Henrietta Maria began the process of defining the relationship between gender and drama in England and it was primarily her positioning as a queen consort with all of its paradoxes that gave her the capacity to do so. For Charles’s court, cross-dressed Frenchwomen speaking French onstage in a space largely associated with female agency constituted a discomfiting breach of national and patriarchal boundaries. The performance might be read as one in a series of perceived indignities that led to Charles expelling Henrietta Maria’s French retinue from England only four months later (Britland 2006, 35). The existential threat of women speaking onstage, though, centred upon the subjectivity of women, and, in particular, those women in positions of influence. Karen Britland (2006, 36–38) argues that Henrietta Maria’s performance in L’Artenice only a few months after her arrival in England marks an early

146     Catherine Clifford

attempt to ‘assert a cultural presence that would permit her to comment upon social and political events’. In exerting temporary ‘control over the constructions of both masculinity and femininity’ via the play’s cross-dressing and all-female cast, she was looking to ‘redefine’ women’s roles in her new home. In a broader context of distrust towards the new French queen and her entourage, the brazen disregard for theatrical conventions that L’Artenice demonstrates was an ‘expression of national difference’ inviting criticism. As such, it was an act of provocation, a ‘theatrical coup’, as Sophie Tomlinson (1992, 189) describes it, and Henrietta Maria was aware of the likely effect it would have on an audience anxious to criticize. In spite of Charles’s attempts to control the number of eyewitnesses to the performance, word spread fast about the Queen’s acting debut (Orrell 1979, 11). As Britland (2006, 45) notes, several of the extant critiques seized on the fact that she spoke on stage. It had been over a decade since audiences were asked to consider a queen as the subject of a dramatic performance and Anna of Denmark’s masquing had stopped just short of vocal declamation. Tomlinson (1992, 192) stresses that the ‘threat’ of the actress was in her challenge to a patriarchal order that demanded silence and subordination from women. The female body’s speaking presence onstage, she argues: reversed the order of things which placed ‘women’ on the side of absence and silence […] The threat of the actress in performance lay in the potential for presenting femininity as a vivid and mobile force: the spectacle of the woman-actor summoning up a spectre of the female subject. Henrietta Maria herself posed this threat in particularly acute form: both in terms of her theatrical flair, and her active engagement in Caroline politics – behavior which was perceived as at once upstaging her husband and as constituting a political ‘Popish’ threat.

An actress inhabits a body onstage and asks her audiences to consider her as a subject. Charles I’s queen, like his mother before her, represented exactly the type of insubordinate woman that could disrupt the patriarchal distribution of power. Henrietta Maria’s choice to inaugurate her court at Denmark House by acting in L’Artenice was a proclamation of agency and a claiming of space. L’Artenice was, as I have suggested, a watershed moment for women onstage in England in large part because a queen made it infamous. The previous November, some of the same female French attendants that would perform in L’Artenice with the Queen acted in a ‘[F]rench antique’ for the occasion of Charles’s birthday, but Henrietta Maria did not perform in it as

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     147

she would in February (Britland 2006, 32). Why did she choose to act in the later performance, but not the former? Her participation in the later performance suggests a desire on her part to assert herself through performance on her own terms, at her own palace, a need to claim agency through performance and thereby indicate to the English court and the King that she was not content to passively observe. By December, when she was known to have been rehearsing L’Artenice, she would have witnessed the English court during entertainments, including their reaction to the November performance. She would have understood by then that women players were not been permitted on the English stage. She chose to act anyway. It was only relatively recently that scholarship has begun to unpack the gendered assumptions that have dominated criticism about Henrietta Maria and her artistic contributions. Susan Dunn-Hensley (2017, 4) notes that such criticism tends to either dismiss, romanticize, or demonize her, and often unwittingly betrays a kinship to ‘Puritan attacks’ on her character. The most infamous of these Puritan assaults was launched by William Prynne (1633, sigs. Y2r, 6R3v), who describes ‘Women-Actors’ as ‘notorious whores’ who ‘have banished the modesty of their sex’ in his absurdly long polemic against playing, Histrio-Mastix. Although Prynne does not mention the Queen outright in his attack, its publication a few weeks before Henrietta Maria would perform in Sir Walter Montagu’s The Shepherd’s Paradise at Denmark House in 1633 was enough evidence of libel to warrant imprisonment (Tomlinson 2005, 13). In his rhetorical framing, actresses compromised their virtue when they performed onstage. His comparison of actresses to ‘whores’ implicates the actress’s body as the primary site for consumption. Onstage, it moves and speaks, and, in Prynne’s schema, has the power to deceive. That this attack on actresses could be taken as a specific assault on Henrietta Maria demonstrates the extent to which her acting had come to define her public image, and, by the same token, the slippery slope to infamy such an association could provoke. The obvious sexism of Prynne’s attacks on women who acted is something akin to casual dismissals of the dramatic outputs of both Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria: both types of attacks suggest that the women in question were immodest in their performances. Reframing Henrietta Maria’s performances in these plays through a lens of agency, however, restores to her some of what has been lost.

148     Catherine Clifford

Conclusion The sequence of three types of court entertainment genres examined above—dramatic tilts, masques, and plays—emphasizes the move from very large venues to smaller spaces, and it is noteworthy, given the size and scale of Elizabethan tiltyard entertainments, that Henrietta Maria’s speaking roles were only witnessed by a comparatively small group of courtiers: the bolder the breach of established performance boundaries by royal women, the smaller the audience. In court entertainments, all three queens were delimited not only by their genders but by their relationship to the crown, which is why the shift from queen-as-object to queen-as-subject of dramatic action was set in motion by Elizabeth I. If an ‘actress’ is defined by a woman speaking scripted lines as a character in performance, then neither Elizabeth I nor Anna of Denmark would be classified as such; however, their positioning in royal dramatic entertainments paved the way for the royal actress to emerge in Henrietta Maria. Elizabeth’s savvy fashioning of her public image in the tiltyard, although provocative in its own right, was characterized by subtle manipulation of commonplaces, rather than a series of outright provocations. Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, though, both faced greater scrutiny as foreign-born queens consort which is partly what makes their breaches of performance boundaries so compelling: as the most powerful women in England, they were uniquely situated to challenge patriarchal theatrical commonplaces which excluded women.

Bibliography Adams, Simon. 2008. ‘Dudley [née Russell], Anne, Countess of Warwick’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, January 3, 2008. https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/69744. Anglo, Sydney. 1969. Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barroll, Leeds. 2001. Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bentley, G. E. 1948–1961. The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Britland, Karen. 2006. Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Martin. 2008. The Stuart Court Masque and Political Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

7  Elizabeth I and the Dancing Stuart Queens     149

Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 19 (CSP Ven. ). 1864–1947. Edited by Rawdon Brown, et al. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office. British History Online, 1913. Cano-Echevarría, Berta, and Mark Hutchings. 2012. ‘The Spanish Ambassador and Samuel Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses: A New Document [with text]’. English Literary Renaissance 42, no. 2: 223–57. Chamberlain, John. 1939. The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols. Edited by Norman Egbert McClure. Philadelphia: The American Philological Society. Cole, Mary Hill. 1999. The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Colvin, Howard, et al., eds. 1963–1982. The History of the King’s Works, 6 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Daniel, Samuel. 1604. The Vision of the 12 Goddesses. London: T.C., for Simon Waterson. Early English Books Online. Dawson, Jane E. A. 2008. ‘Knox, John’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online, January 3, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15781. Dillon, Janette. 2010. The Language of Space in Court Performance, 1400–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dunn-Hensley, Susan. 2017. Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria: Virgins, Witches, and Catholic Queens. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Dutton, Richard. 2016. Shakespeare, Court Dramatist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hackett, Helen. 1995. Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Hearne, Thomas, ed. 1770. Antiguarii de Rebus Britannicis Collectanea, vol. 1, part 2, by John Leland. London. Howard, Skiles. 1998. The Politics of Courtly Dancing in Early Modern England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Jonson, Ben. 1600. The Comical Satire of Every Man Out of His Humour. London: Nicholas Linge. Early English Books Online. Kastan, David Scott. 1986. ‘Proud Majesty Made a Subject: Shakespeare and the Spectacle of Rule’. Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Winter): 459–75. Knox, John. 1558. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Geneva: J. Poullain and A. Rebul. Early English Books Online. Korda, Natasha. 2011. Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lee, Maurice, Jr., ed. 1972. Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–1624: Jacobean Letters. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Levin, Carole. 2013. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power, 2nd edition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer. 1993. Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

150     Catherine Clifford

Marcus, Leah S., Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds. 2000. Elizabeth I: Collected Works. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. McManus, Clare. 2002. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619). Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Orgel, Stephen. 1975. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Orrell, John. 1979. ‘Amerigo Salvetti and the London Court Theatre, 1616–1640’. Theatre Survey 20, no. 1: 1–26. Ostovich, Helen. 1992. ‘“So Sudden and Strange a Cure”: A Rudimentary Masque in Every Man Out of His Humour ’. English Literary Renaissance 22, no. 3: 315–32. Peck, Linda Levy. 1990. Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Peele, George. 1584. The Araygnement of Paris. London: Early English Books Online. Prynne, William. 1633. Histrio-Mastix. London: Early English Books Online. Reynolds, Paige Martin. 2010. ‘George Peele and the Judgement of Elizabeth I’. Studies in English Literature 50, no. 2 (Spring): 263–79. Steen, Sarah Jayne, ed. 1994. The Letters of Lady Arabella Stuart. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stow, John. 1566. The Summarie of English Chronicles. London: Early English Books Online. Thurley, Simon, et al. 2009. Somerset House: The Palace of England’s Queens 1551– 1692. London: London Topographical Society. Tomlinson, Sophie. 1992. ‘She That Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture’. In The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, edited by Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, 189– 207. London: Routledge. Tomlinson, Sophie. 2005. Women on Stage in Stuart Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Von Bülow, Gottfried, ed. and trans. 1895. ‘Journey Through England and Scotland Made by Lupold von Wedel in the Years 1584 and 1585’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society New Series 9: 223–70. Wiggins, Martin. 2012. Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wiggins, Martin. 2012–. British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue, 10 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Deanne. 2007. ‘No Man’s Elizabeth: Frances A. Yates and the History of History’. In The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, edited by Dympna Callaghan, 238–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Young, Alan. 1987. Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments. London: Sheridan House.

8 Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers M. A. Katritzky

This chapter focuses on a description of performances on offer at an annual fair in mid-seventeenth-century Antwerp, by an articulate writer with a particular interest in drama and (though it is a term she herself never uses) actresses. Her account offers exceptionally rare eyewitness insights into the stage practice and audience reception of early modern stage actresses and female fairground performers from the female point of view during the 1650s, the decade in which professional actresses were first officially accepted in Flanders. Its author is the writer, poet, and political and natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish (Tomlinson 1998; Katritzky 2007, 1–19). Cavendish (c.1623–1673), born Margaret Lucas, met and married the Duke of Newcastle, then also exiled from Cromwell’s England, in Paris in 1645. In 1648, the couple moved to Antwerp and leased the magnificent city mansion of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens from his widow. They turned Rubens’s studio into a riding school and stayed until the 1660 Restoration allowed their permanent return to England (Cavendish 1667, 55, 63, 90). Cavendish was a prolific playwright. She published two volumes of plays under her own name (Cavendish 1662a, 1668), and seventeenth-century diarists indicate her substantial authorial involvement in plays published under her husband’s name, notably The Humorous Lovers (Cavendish 1677):

M. A. Katritzky (*)  The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_8

151

152     M. A. Katritzky

I w[ent] to see my Lady Dutchesse of Newcastles play […] W[ent] againe to ye Humres Lovers where ye Duke & Dutchesse of Newcastle & ye whole Cort of men were acted as shee writ it exactly. (Jeffrey Boys, March 29 and May 6, 1667: MS. Don. e. 251, sigs. B3, B5; see also Webb 2017a, b; Bowditch 2017.) At noon home to dinner, and thence with my wife’s knowledge and leave did by coach go see the silly play of my Lady Newcastle’s, called ‘The Humourous Lovers’; the most silly thing that ever come upon a stage. I was sick to see it, but yet would not but have seen it, that I might the better understand her […] was the other day at her own play, ‘The Humourous Lovers’; the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote, but yet she and her Lord mightily pleased with it; and she, at the end, made her respects to the players from her box, and did give them thanks. (Samuel Pepys, March 30 and April 11, 1667)

Her drama is characterized by a refreshing tendency to place the female voice centre stage, a striking engagement with gender, and lively exploration of what Tomlinson (1998, 274) valuably identifies as ‘performance as a metaphor of possibility for women’. On her plays, she herself comments (1666, 29): ‘I intended them for Playes; but the Wits of these present times condemned them as uncapable of being represented or acted, because they were not made up according to the Rules of Art; though I dare say, that the Descriptions are as good as any they have writ’. Although the strategically performative nature of her prefaces undermines any kind of straightforward autobiographical reading, the front matter of her first volume of plays offers a sense of her suffering from the prejudices of her time and unwillingness to compromise her creativity to accommodate those prejudices. Like her ‘Oration concerning Playes, and Players’ (1662b, 75–77), it encourages a sense that Cavendish did not primarily write her plays as closet drama, but, given more favourable circumstances, would have welcomed their performance (Solomon 2013, 56): there is no place, wayes or means, so edifying to Youth as publick Theatres, not only to be Spectators but Actors; for it learns them gracefull behaviours and demeanors, it puts Spirit and Life into them, it teaches them Wit, and makes their Speech both voluble and tenable, besides, it gives them Confidence, all which ought every man to have, that is of quality. But some will say if it would work such effects, why are not mercenary Players benefited so thereby? I answer, that they only Act for the lucre of Gain, and not for the grace of Behaviour, the sweetness of Speech, nor the increasing of Wit, so as they only Act as Parrots speak, by wrote, and not as Learning gives to Education; for

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     153

they making not a benefit of the wit, but only by the wit receive it; not neither into their consideration, understanding, nor delight, for they make it a work of labour, and not of delight, or pleasure, or honour; for they receive it into the memory, and no farther than for to deliver it out, as Servants or Factors to sell, and not keep it as purchasors to their own use. (Cavendish 1662a, ‘To the Readers’)

Tempting indeed to agree that ‘the prefaces to Cavendish’s plays and the conclusion of the Blazing World show her interest in managing, and perhaps even acting in, a kind of theatre that straddles the border between the space of the court and the professional theatre’ (Scott-Douglass 2000, 216). A major factor in Cavendish’s far from unqualified enthusiasm for female performance is her staunch early royalism. In Oxford from 1643, and then in Paris in 1645, she had been a maid-of-honour to the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria, daughter of Marie de’ Medici, wife of King Charles I, and mother of several young children, including two future kings of England, Charles II and James II. Cavendish’s most detailed reference to masquing draws on her experience of the court masques of Henrietta Maria, known for her preference for casting women [for further discussion of Henrietta Maria’s involvement with masques, see pp. 143–148 in Chapter 7, above, by Catherine Clifford]: a Masque […] is painted Scenes, to represent the Poets Heavens and Hells, their Gods and Devils, and Clouds, Sun, Moon, and Stars: besides, they represent Cities, Castles, Seas, Fishes, Rocks, Mountains, Beasts, Birds, and what pleaseth the Poet, Painter, and Surveyour. Then there are Actors, and Speeches spoke, and Musick; and then Lords or Ladies come down in a Scene, as from the Clouds; and after that, they begin to dance, and every one takes out according as they fancy. If a Man takes out a Woman, if she cannot dance, or will not dance, then she makes a Curchy [courtesy, or curtsey] to the King, or Queen, or chief Grandee, if there be any one; if not, to the upper end of the Room; then turn to the Man, and make another to him: then he leaves, or leads her to them she will take out; and she doth the like to him, and then goeth to her place again. And so the Men do the same, if they will not dance; and if they do dance, they do just so, when the Dance is ended; and all the chief of the Youth of the City come to see it, or to shew themselves, or all those that have youthfull Minds, and love Sights and fine Cloaths, then the Room is made as light with Candles, as if the Sun shined; and their glittering Bravery makes as glorious a Shew as his gilded Beams […] When the

154     M. A. Katritzky

Masquers were come down to dance, who were all Women, […] they took out the Men such as their Phancy pleased, and then they sate down; and then one of the chief of the Men chose out a Lady, and so began to dance in single Couples. (Cavendish 1656, 188–91)

Given the repressive impact on female performance of restrictions on religious plays in England during the century preceding 1660 (Stokes 2015, 22–23), the one respectable sphere in which pre-Restoration English actresses flourished was amateur performance by the elite, especially as staged at the courts of the European consorts of English royalty, notably Anna of Denmark and her Catholic daughter-in-law Henrietta Maria (McManus 2002, 20, 209–13). Even so, within weeks of Henrietta Maria’s all-female 1632 production of The Shepherd’s Paradise, the Puritan lawyer William Prynne published a weighty treatise condemning all cross-dressing, in ‘Masques and Stage-playes’ (1633, 214) alike, as ‘sinnefull, yea abominable’ (214), and branding ‘women-Actors’ (214), whether professional or amateur, as ‘evill, yea extremely vitious […] abominable […] intollerable’ (215–216), ‘plaistered pompous Iezebils ’ (217), even as ‘notorious whores’ (sig.Rrrrrr4r). This last comment he indexes under ‘Women-Actors ’, here asking: And dare then any Christian women be so more then whorishly impudent, as to act, to speake publikely on a Stage, (perchance in mans apparell, and cut haire, here proved sinfull and abominable) in the presence of sundry men and women? […] O let such presidents of impudency, of impiety be never heard of or suffred among Christians. (Prynne 1633, 214–17, sig.Rrrrrr4r)

Prynne’s unfortunately timed outburst, although far from untypical, was harshly punished. It was widely interpreted as directly attacking Henrietta Maria’s all-female amateur court performance. His ears cropped, the belligerent lawyer was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tower of London. Within a decade, in 1642, Puritan anti-theatricality, and the English Civil War between Oliver Cromwell’s anti-theatrical parliamentarian roundheads and King Charles I’s royalist cavaliers, outlawed professional acting. For over eighteen years, neither men nor women were permitted to perform on London’s public stages. In 1660, this Interregnum (during which Charles I was executed and England was under parliamentary and military rule) was ended by the Restoration of King Charles II to the monarchy. London’s theatres reopened only after the Restoration. From the start, women acted alongside men, taking with great acclaim the female roles traditionally played by boys (Howe 1992). This legitimization of actresses

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     155

was consolidated by a Royal Decree of 1662. It strengthened their status by outlawing the casting of men and boys in female roles, but could not prevent the routine perception of female performers as prostitutes. The diarist John Evelyn, for example, uses a reluctant visit of October 1666 to a London performance of Mustapha to air his personal reasons for ‘very seldom at any time, going to the publique Theaters ’. He has grave concerns about the moral impact of a theatre ‘abused, to an atheisticall liberty, fowle & undecent; Women now (& never ’til now) permitted to appeare & act, which inflaming severall young noble-men & gallants, became their whores’ (Evelyn 2006, 454). The motivation for introducing actresses, long accepted on private elite stages, onto the public London stage in 1660 was hardly a benign wish to address gender equality. Rather, it was a deeply political power statement, robustly replacing Puritan anti-theatricalism with royalist cultural values. Viewed in this light, the positive reception of the theatre and its professional actresses was seen an expression of solidarity with the newly reinstated monarchy and an acceptance of the victory of Crown over Church.

Barbara Urslerin Cavendish’s account of the Antwerp Fair, published in 1664 as the 195th of her Sociable Letters, integrates performative and commercial fairground activity from a gendered perspective and offers a rare opportunity to re-examine their implications for female performers. Using the literary vehicle of a letter to a friend, Cavendish (1664, 405) introduces what is in effect an account of her own experience of the commercial shows of Antwerp’s annual carnival fair, witnessed as a Royalist exile in Antwerp, with a brief overview of the attractions on offer: Madam, To tell you what Pastimes this City hath, they be several Sights and Shews, which are to be seen for Mony, for even Pastime is Bought; for at several times of the Year come hither Dancers on the Ropes, Tumblers, Juglers, Private Stage-Players, Mountebanks, Monsters, and several Beasts, as Dromedaries, Camels, Lions, Acting Baboons, and Apes, and many the like, which would be as Tedious to me to Relate as to See, for I would not take the pains to See them, unless some Few.

Early modern attractions of this type were staged by itinerant troupes. A few received long- or short-term engagements from courts, theatres or

156     M. A. Katritzky

other prestigious public or private sponsors, most depended on shortterm licences requested in advance from civic authorities and went with the money, touring from one trade or holiday fair or urban marketplace to another. Some charged spectators an entrance fee, most used free shows to promote medical activities. Having listed typical fairground shows as rope-dancing, acrobatics, juggling, acting, quackery, and the showing of physically exceptional humans and exotic animals, Cavendish focuses on two specific attractions in which female performers take centre stage: one a hirsute female harpsichord player, the other a mixed-gender commedia dell’arte troupe. Of the one-person show, she writes (1664, 405): amongst the rest there was a Woman brought to me, who was like a Shaggdog, not in Shape, but Hair, as Grown all over her Body, which Sight stay’d in my Memory, not for the Pleasantness, but Strangeness, as she troubled my Mind a Long time, but at last my Mind kick’d her Figure out, bidding it to be gone, as a Dog-like Creature.

This can only have been the Bavarian harpsichordist Barbara Urslerin (Katritzky 2007, 2–4; 2014a, b). Unlike Ursula Dyan, a forty-year-old black-bearded Danish woman seen in London by Pepys and his wife, on December 21, 1668, with whom Urslerin is sometimes erroneously identified, Urslerin’s face and body were completely covered with hair, a condition resulting from an exceptionally rare mutational form of hypertrichosis. The only sufferer of hypertrichosis born in seventeenth-century Europe known to have survived into adulthood, she was, unlike several earlier hypertrichosis sufferers, notably Pedro Gonzalez and his family (Katritzky 2014a, b, 473–476), afforded no noble protection. Her Bavarian parents showed her for money from earliest infanthood, and she continued to tour widely with her husband-manager, the impresario Johann Michael van Beck (and their son, who did not inherit his mother’s hypertrichosis). Competing for a living with other physically exceptional humans touring European fairgrounds, Urslerin successfully attracted numerous spectators, including many prominent medical professionals who examined, interviewed and described her. Her activities are recorded in far more detail than any other pre-modern hypertrichosis case, and significant further documentation is still being identified, as, for example, a painting which was virtually unknown to specialists before it entered the collections of the Wellcome Trust in late 2017 (see Fig. 8.1). Ein erschröckliche /vnd doch warhafftige Newe Zeitung / von einer erschröcklichen Mißgeburt, noting an unidentified newborn, provides

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     157

Fig. 8.1  Barbara van Beck (Urslerin), the Bavarian harpsichordist, c.1650 (©Wellcome Collection/3001072)

Urslerin’s birth and birth date. This illustrated single-leaf broadsheet by Christoph Kraus was published in Kempten in 1629, to be sung in public by itinerant German fairground news-singers and sold as a souvenir of their performance. Explicitly linking the depicted baby’s appearance to the Wild Man tradition, it describes it as ‘a very frightening misbirth’, born to unnamed parents in the village of Mursellers near Kempten, Bavaria on February 16, 1629 (Katritzky 2014a, 128; b, 479). Perhaps the earliest eyewitness medical commentary of Urslerin is the report of an unnamed, bearded, three-year-old girl with all-over body hair, in a published medical case study of the Jewish physician Zacutus Lusitanus (1575–1642). It suggests that by 1632 the three-year-old girl was a lucrative public attraction, professionally managed by itinerant show-people (Lusitanus 1637, 504). In the 42nd of 200 published medical case histories, on ‘A hairy and bearded girl’, Thomas Bartholin, who repeatedly

158     M. A. Katritzky

examined Urslerin, reports that as a six-year-old child in Copenhagen and subsequently in Belgium she was still being shown around Europe by her parents (1654, 62). Elie Brackenhoffer examined her in Paris in 1646 and Hieronymus Welsch visited her in Rome a year later and in Milan in 1648. By the time Bartholin’s medical student Georg Seger viewed her in 1655, ‘Barbara […] daughter of Balthasar Ursler’ was giving her age as twenty-two years. He notes that in addition to blond, soft, curly hair all over her face and body, she had a thick beard reaching down to her belt, and was married but childless (Seger 1693, 246). In 1656, the French physician Peter Borel (1656, 15) describes Urslerin’s beard as long and white, likening it to that of a venerable old man of eighty. Learned physicians and scientists continued to flock to Urslerin’s public exhibitions. They were challenged and intrigued by the ways in which medical and lay perceptions of her hair blurred multiple boundaries: between young and old; immature, mature and post-fertile; male and female; groomed, law-abiding, civilized citizens and unkempt natural, free Wild Men; familiar and foreign; even between the hunter and the hunted; the human, the bestial and the supernatural. Evelyn saw ‘the hairy Maid’ in London as a child, and again some two decades later, on September 15, 1657, when he thought her ‘exactly like an Island [Iceland] Dog’ (2006, 347). While earlier humans with this condition often evoked comparison with demons or Wild Men, Barbara Urslerin was systematically compared to a dog. For some of her spectators, the multi-linguality and harpsichord playing she demonstrated during her shows were appreciated more as proof of her humanity than as skills in their own right. In the absence of any records of Urslerin’s own writings, Cavendish’s female perspective is particularly valuable. She, too, perceives Urslerin as ‘Dog-like’, but despite its brevity, her account evokes a disturbing depth of personal reaction quite absent from those of the male scientists. Evidence of the profound and lasting impact of Urslerin on Cavendish’s imagination may, perhaps, be identified in some of the groups of liminal humanoids encountered by the heroine of the Empress-ruled Blazing World, while journeying to its suggestively named capital city, Paradise. Reminiscent of Pliny’s fantastical ‘marvellous races of the East’, they include hairy and furry creatures such as satyrs, apemen, and ‘strange Creatures, in shape like Bears, onely they went upright as men’. In what modern critics widely read as a satirical comment on the male scientists of London’s Royal Society, these last ‘the Bear-men’, were appointed by the Empress as ‘her Experimental Philosophers’ (Cavendish 1666, 15).

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     159

A Mixed-Gender Commedia dell’Arte Troupe The second Antwerp fairground attraction described in Cavendish’s letter is an itinerant commedia dell’arte troupe (Katritzky 2007, 8–16). [For further discussion of the commedia dell’arte tradition, see Chapter 6, above, by Margaret Rose.] Its four core members are two sisters and their husbands, respectively the troupe’s leader and his stage fool. Initially, Cavendish’s account barely hints at the presence of actresses. Instead, she follows a discussion of the Italian troupe’s medical activities with a literary flourish often linked to the stage fools of the commedia dell’arte, an allusion to satirical explorations of folly. This brief digression, again addressed directly to her fictional correspondent, overtly situates her account within the venerable Sebastian Brant-inspired European literary genre of ‘Narrenliteratur’, or folly literature: and though I am of so Dull and Lazy a Nature, as seldom to take the Pains to See Unusual Objects, yet here coming an Italian Mountebank, who had with him several persons to Dance, and Act upon the open Stage, also one which did Act the part of a Fool, and that all to draw a Company of People together, to hear him tell the Virtues, or rather Lies of his Drugs, Cures, and Skill, and to Intice, or Perswade them to Buy, and to be Cozened and Deceived, both in Words, Drugs, and Mony; I saw this Fool Act his Part so Well, that many of the People bought more Drugs for the Fool’s sake, than for the Apocryphal Physician’s, which was the Mountebank; indeed, Madam, a Fool’s Part, as it is the Pleasantest, so it is the most Difficult to Act, I say, to Act it Well, for it doth require more Ingenuity and Wit than any other Part Acted on the Stage, for though the World is full of Fools, yet there are not many Feigned Fools, for most men endeavour to seem Wiser than they are, but Feigned Fools endeavour to seem Foolisher than they are; But where there is one Feigned Fool in the World, there are a thousand Feigned Wise men, and where there is one Professed Mountebank, or Jugler, there are thousands that are so, but will not be Known, or Thought to be so. (Cavendish 1664, 405–6)

Female performers endured harsh criticism for publicly adopting the unseemly bodily contortions and postures often required by their roles, and for engaging in the vigorous theatrical promotion of medical products and services, often through overt use of their female charms, required by the commercial activity of many itinerant troupes. Far from obscuring or condemning the contribution of actresses, Cavendish continues with a positive consideration of the troupe’s performative practice, focusing particularly on its actresses:

160     M. A. Katritzky

Upon this Profess’d Mountebank’s Stage, there were two Handsom Women Actors, both Sisters, the one of them was the Mountebank’s, th’other the Fool’s Wife, and as the Saying is, that Fools have Fortune, his Wife was far the Handsomer, and better Actor, and Danced better than th’ other; indeed she was the Best Female Actor that ever I saw. (Cavendish 1664, 406–7)

It is perhaps no coincidence that professional actresses established themselves during the course of the sixteenth century, when the combined efforts of the judiciary and clergy systematically undermined the lengthy tradition of women’s religious theatrical practice in the amateur sphere, with what James Stokes (2005, 28) identifies as ‘a relentless official assault on traditional culture – especially its performative elements [… and] on women as unfettered participants in that culture’. The routine playing of female or cross-gendered dramatic roles by professional actresses (rather than by boy players or male actors), spread only gradually through early modern Europe. It was transported northwards from France, Italy and the Mediterranean regions by late sixteenth-century itinerant acting troupes, especially those of the Italian commedia dell’arte. Professional mixed-gender acting was accepted in some parts of Northern Europe only in the seventeenth century. It was officially sanctioned in Flemish playhouses only in the mid-1650s. As noted above, London’s public theatres banned actresses before 1660 and were themselves shut down altogether from 1642. The term ‘actress’ excludes a wealth of early modern female performance activities (Brown and Parolin 2005, 1) and is imprecisely applicable in the transnational context. In seventeenth-century England, female acting by itinerants and on public stages were sharply differentiated from elite amateur performance; in the Low Countries, the perceived distinction was between female elite and itinerant acting on the one hand, and professional women acting on public stages on the other (van Elk 2017, 35). Undeniably, before the mid-seventeenth century, male performers dominated amateur and professional stages in England and the Low Countries. However, both English and Flemish audiences had been diverted by female performers since medieval times. Mostly, such women were amateurs, or travelling professionals involved in non-dramatic spectacle, such as dance, acrobatics or the showing of animals, employed by small itinerant troupes that trod a thin line between performing, peddling and begging. Women contributed in many capacities to religious performances long before the Italian commedia dell’arte created the first female stars. Apart from the demands of childbearing and domestic duties, issues of stamina and strength of voice, and religiously motivated resistance to female

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     161

participation, the most crucial block to casting women in stage parts is education. Many girls could not read; they were rarely taught Latin or rhetoric, and, outside the convent system, suffered systematic exclusion from the rigorous church-sponsored musical training available to gifted boys of whatever social class. Cavendish’s play, The Convent of Pleasure, recognizes the European medieval religious stage as a significant training ground for professional female performers. It situates the all-female community of the convent as a precious sanctuary for female autonomy and cultural ­self-expression in a patriarchal society ruled by ‘Men, who make the Female sex their slaves’ (Cavendish 1668, 7). The plays of medieval European convents, where amateur all-female acting had a venerable tradition, often demonstrated surprisingly free early use of the vernacular, perhaps intended to facilitate the participation of women. Fourteenth-century examples include versions of the Visitatio sepulchri from Prague’s St. George Convent, and the Ludus paschalis of Origny-Sainte-Benoite, where, already in the thirteenth century, some nuns took performative roles in Easter ceremonies, and another represented God (Katritzky 2007, 27). Tertiaries, novices, nuns, canonesses or abbesses are thought to have played the three Marys or other female roles in convents all over northern and southern Europe. While there are no recorded performances of Hrotsvit of Gandersheim’s Terence-inspired late tenth-century passions of the saints, Hildegard of Bingen may have participated in a twelfth-century mixed-gender staging of Ordo Virtutum at her convent, and Katherine of Sutton, Abbess of Barking, certainly produced as well as wrote a Visitatio and other Latin dramatic ceremonies, for performance by mixed-gender casts at the Easter services of her convent during the period 1363–1376. [For further discussion of female writing and performance in medieval religious contexts in England and mainland Europe, see Chapter 5, above, by Sue Niebrzydowski.] Women were widely forbidden from speaking inside medieval churches, but by the thirteenth century some were being cast in non-speaking roles of religious dramatic ceremonies, as when a girl from Beauvais played the Virgin Mary in the town’s Epiphany festival. The young unmarried women of Deventer were rewarded for contributing, in an unspecified capacity, to a fourteenth-century municipal production and the married townswomen of Chester regularly participated in late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century productions of the city’s Assumption of the Virgin. By the late fifteenth century, the wives of members of the confraternity responsible for staging the Lucerne Passion could enrol without additional charge; whether as players is unclear, although a sixteenth-century Swiss production of Judith featured actresses. In 1468 (or 1486), the eighteen-yearold daughter of a local furrier (or glazier) named Dediet was applauded for her

162     M. A. Katritzky

resounding success in the demanding 2300-line title role of the Metz Mystère de Sainte Catherine, immediately following which she retired from the stage to marry a noble mercenary soldier, Henri de Latour. By the late fifteenth century, Italian convents routinely fostered a flourishing theatrical tradition, staging sacre rappresentazioni sometimes written by women, often focusing on female saints, and increasingly acted solely by the convents’ own novices and schoolgirls. The Spanish sixteenth-century religious stage was particularly liberal in casting actresses. Their private lives were the source of much scandalous gossip, and their success attracted powerful Church and civic opposition. Elsewhere, women are only exceptionally systematically cast in the majority of female roles of a religious production outside convent plays. The suggested contributing factors include the ravages of two plague years (François Thévenot’s 1509 Le Mystère des Trois Doms at Romans and perhaps also the 1510 Chateaudun-sur-Loire Passion) and the Bolzano church’s outstanding indoor acoustics (Vigil Raber’s 1514 Bozen Passion). Waudru de le Nerle played the young Mary in the 1501 Mons Passion, Anna Bechimerin acted Mary in a 1519 Basle school production of an Epiphany play, and an adult woman, Françoise Buatier, played the Virgin in the 1535 Grenoble Passion. Less is known about the girl in the title role of the Nancy St. Barbe staged for the Duke of Burgundy in 1506, or the four or five girls cast in the outdoor 1547 Valenciennes Passion. In June 1546, Felix Platter watched a cast, including the daughters of Sebastian Lepusculus, act Heinrich Pantaleon’s production of Zacheus inside Basle’s Augustine Monastery and also saw Margareta Merian (1525–1570) star in an outdoor production of Susanna, staged on the Basle Fishmarket by its playwright, her future husband Ulrich Koch (Platter 1976, 83–84). On April 6, 1578, the widowed former schoolmistress Barbara Frölichin directed a play, perhaps acted by schoolgirls, in the Council Chamber of the town hall of South Tirolean Sterzing (now Vipiteno, Italy). In a letter of December 15, 1582 to the devoutly Protestant Magdalena Behaim (1555–1642), her husband, a Nuremberg cloth merchant then in Lucca on business, notes his enthusiasm for mixed-gender commedia dell’arte performances, loyally adding ‘but they are not to be compared with your plays in St Martha and the monastery’ (Paumgartner and Behaim 1895, 9–10). This brief comment alerts us to a whole sphere of northern religious theatrical practice, in which women such as Behaim evidently played a full role, of which we know very little. In 1520, a professional French troupe including two women played before the Duke of Buckingham at Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire (Greenfield 1996, 35), and by 1545 Marie Ferré, wife of a street performer, was contracted, almost certainly with her husband, to join the French

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     163

acting troupe of Antoine de l’Esperonnière (Scott 1998, 153). In the Low Countries, as early as 1471, Maria van der Hoeven became Mathieu Cricke’s domestic partner and the fourth actor of his previously all-male itinerant troupe. Cricke details his side of their story in a pardon letter of October 1475 addressed to Charles the Bold. Claiming to have rescued Maria from a life of destitution as a prostitute in Bruges, he defends himself and four male accomplices against the charge of abducting and raping her in Diest near Louvain in June 1475, after she left his troupe to elope with an infatuated married spectator, Jan van Musene (Arnade and Prevenier 2015, 173–220). Clearly, long before the late sixteenth century, a few exceptional women were establishing careers as professional actresses. However, the Italian commedia dell’arte troupes are rightly credited with pioneering the promotion of professional actresses as celebrity performers, and the systematic introduction of women onto the professional stages of Europe. At its simplest, the commedia dell’arte is a type of improvised drama based around pairs of young lovers, old masters and servants (Katritzky 2006). Essentially, these are the same stock characters as those of amateur Renaissance comedy, itself based closely on classical Roman comedy. However, the commedia dell’arte greatly develops two key parts, that of the zanni (masked servant or stage fool), and even more that of the inamorata, or romantic stage heroine, played not by men or boys but by actresses, some of whom became internationally fêted stars. Nevertheless, the international successes of a few exceptional troupes and stars did not win the Italian troupes universal acceptance across Europe. Even within Italy, leading companies and their actresses were welcomed into some regions and banned from others. English writers generally marginalized professional female performers as mountebanks’ assistants or vagrant beggars and routinely treated women associated with itinerant performers with mocking contempt regardless of whether they performed, degrading them by labelling them, or associating them with, prostitutes. Italian women who crossed the Channel to perform scandalized the London preacher Thomas Norton (MS.Add 32,379, fol.41v), who in 1574 inveighed against ‘that unnecessarie and scarslie honeste resorts to plaies […] and especiallie the assemblies to the unchaste, shamelesse and unnaturall tomblinges of the Italion Woemen’. Thomas Nashe (1592, sig.F4r) dismissed the celebrated Italian actresses as ‘whores and common Curtizens’ and reduced their plays to the antics of a ‘Pantaloun, a Whore, and a Zanie’. Before the introduction of actresses, female roles in the fully scripted plays of the professional English and Flemish stages, as for Italian amateur drama, were played by boys and men. Plays written for these male-only casts generally held to the convention

164     M. A. Katritzky

that wives and romantic heroines should appear as little as possible during a performance, with much of their action related at second hand by maids and servants. For this reason, all-male acting was dominated by men playing men. If female characters appeared at all, they tended to hover in the background, preferably framed by a window or door of their own domestic interior. Despite Church opposition, the Italian commedia dell’arte actresses turned the same doors and windows that had marked boundaries for their cross-dressing male colleagues into stepping stones onto centre stage. By the late sixteenth century, key scenes involving the prima donna were increasingly conducted in full view of the audience. When played by a woman, the romantic heroine became an essential onstage presence.

Cross-Dressing Actresses Theatrical cross-dressing, whether in Italy, the rest of Europe or England, attracted virulent anti-theatrical polemic, particularly against actresses. Already in 692 AD, when the Quinisextine Council (reformulating Deuteronomy 22.5: ‘The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment’) pronounced that ‘Nullus vir deinceps muliebri veste induatur, vel mulier veste viro conveniente’, cross-dressing of any type was regarded as a severe manifestation of the sin of wearing costume inappropriate to one’s position in life (Chambers 1903, II, 302). Despite the protestations of actors such as Thomas Heywood (1612, sig.C3), the flouting of biblical authority (and specifically the 5th verse of Deuteronomy Chapter 22), was widely regarded as ‘a very impudent and common abuse in playes’, and a particular reason for condemning ‘the Theaters, which so many Baudes, Varlets and Harlots both then and now did haunt’ (Green 1615, 16, 33). In her account of the Antwerp troupe, Cavendish’s consideration of the Italian actress’s use of cross-dressing does not allude to such Puritanical anti-theatrical debate, or the bitter controversies this raised concerning performing women or theatrical cross-dressing. Rather, she praises female performance in the following terms: and for Acting a Man’s Part, she did it so Naturally as if she had been of that Sex, and yet she was of a Neat, Slender Shape; but being in her Dublet and Breeches, and a Sword hanging by her side, one would have believed she never had worn a Petticoat, and had been more used to Handle a Sword than a Distaff; and when she Danced in a Masculine Habit, she would Caper Higher, and Oftener than any of the Men, although they were great Masters in the

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     165

Art of Dancing, and when she Danced after the Fashion of her own Sex, she Danced Justly, Evenly, Smoothly, and Gracefully. (Cavendish 1664, 407)

For great early modern actresses such as Isabella Andreini, cross-dressing is much more than a slick trick of the trade. It was their strategy of choice, for escaping the restrictions of theatrical plots that followed the conventions of all-male acting, where the presence of men or boys playing women was generally limited to a minimum. Italian actresses pioneered creative ways of exploiting secondary disguise to transgress the multiple social taboo of actresses on public stages representing respectable women appearing in public. To facilitate their escape from the prescribed domestic spaces of female roles and more fully explore and realize their potential as performers, actresses created and starred in a wide range of disguises, drawn from the spheres of gender, race, nationality, age, mental competence, professional calling and social class. Actresses embraced cross-dressed roles as diverse as beggars, pilgrims and male and female slaves; pageboys, soldiers and of course courtesans and prostitutes, as creative passports to new dramatic territory—in terms of performance modes as well as theatrical space—traditionally monopolized by men. Gypsies and madwomen, in particular, became signature roles of several of the greatest early modern actresses (Katritzky 2006, 247) and profoundly influenced female British stage roles such as Shakespeare’s Ophelia. [For further discussion of Andreini, including her much-acclaimed role in The Madness of Isabella, see Chapter 6, above, by Margaret Rose.] Cross-class dressing had a long tradition in European brothels. The perceived connection affected audience perception of gorgeously costumed and bejewelled stage actresses. Sumptuary regulations were drawn up with the intention of maintaining the principle that each citizen’s outward appearance, dress and accessories should precisely reflect their origins, gender and role in society. Stage costume in general and theatrical cross-dressing in particular ran the risk of being interpreted as making a deliberate mockery of sumptuary laws, and, by extension, of subverting the order of society decreed by Church and State. In many regions of Europe, the defence of sumptuary regulations was closely associated with uncompromising church opposition to public theatrical activity of all forms (Katritzky 2007, 245–46). Female stage costume shocked contemporaries not just by being titillating, but by its potential for subverting the very fabric of early modern society, not least by providing ambitious actresses with a passport to starring roles in public spaces previously reserved exclusively for men. William Prynne was one of many who identified performers as dangerous rivals to preachers and their cross-dressing as a powerful catalyst for the breakdown of male-constructed, Church-sanctioned, gender codes and social order, alleging that:

166     M. A. Katritzky

The end why God ordained apparell at the first, was […] to distinguish one Sex, one Nation, one dignity, office, calling, profession from another. Now a mans attyring himselfe in womans array, as it serves for neither of these good ends for which garments were at first ordained; which proves it a meere abuse: so it perverts one principall use of garments, to difference men from women; by confounding, interchanging, transforming these two sexes for the present, as long as the Play or part doth last. (Prynne 1633, 207)

Prynne deploys every rhetorical device at his command to undermine the staging of plays, accusing actors of ‘selfe-pollution [… and …] that unnaturall Sodomiticall sinne of uncleanesse ’ (208), and labelling actresses ‘notorious impudent, prostituted Strumpets ’ (214). Behind the learned and pious façade of Prynne’s devastating denunciation of performing women, he taps into deep social anxieties. His attacks on theatres and their actresses criticize ‘our depraued times [… when …] many who visit the Church scarce once a weeke, frequent the Play-house once a day’ (4), an age experiencing an erosion of respect for the ‘certaine signes given both to a man and woman; to him verily of command and principality; to her truly of subiection ’ (195), when ‘mens ordinary wearing of womens garments […] transformes the male in outward appearance into the more ignoble female sex ’ (208). English Restoration actresses enthusiastically embraced the challenges of cross-dressing. They brokered the delicate transition of all-male acting’s double cross-dressed roles, from its original triple layering to something variously viewed by modern specialists as either more or less complex gender representation: the arrival of actresses in male roles formerly played by boy actors playing women disguised as men. Under the guise of solidly royalist sentiments, Thomas Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding, in which all roles were played by actresses, denigrated women, indulged abusive male entitlement, and pushed the boundaries against Church and Parliament (Katritzky 2007, 259–60). Reactions to it demonstrate the novelty and shock value of an all-female casting strategy in the professional arena, even three decades after Henrietta Maria’s all-female The Shepherd’s Paradise. Samuel Pepys’s diary entry of October 11, 1664 rated it ‘an obscene loose play […] that is acted by nothing but women’. According to a German spectator, The Parson’s Wedding was: acted by women, some of whom, wearing men’s clothes, performed the male roles so well that His Majesty let all the money be given to them alone. The clergy have not approved this comedy. Quite to the contrary, they have been

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     167

greatly angered by its considerable Aretine terminology, and that it features a preacher (albeit in Presbyterian clothes) as a cuckold, and that it features so much material of a type borrowed from brothels. (Bepler 1988, 212; present author’s translation from the original German)

Professional actresses were condemned for crossing the boundaries that confined respectable women to their domestic spaces, by wearing cross-gender, cross-class and exotic or erotic costumes that enabled their stage characters to invade previously male-only social spaces. In The Convent of Pleasure, Cavendish inverts this dynamic with a knowing nod to the cross-dressed boy players of the time of Shakespeare, Jonson, Lyly and Fletcher, and perhaps also to Henrietta Maria, who in 1642, as a self-styled ‘She-majesty generalissima’, had led the royalist ‘Queen’s army’ to Oxford to meet her husband King Charles I (Battigelli 1998, 18–19). Cavendish subverts the socially imposed dominance of men over women—even the concept of binary gender—by introducing a character, ‘The Princess’, revealed as a male Prince only at the end of her play. Her Prince(ss) successfully penetrates the convent’s exclusively female space to win the friendship, and then the love, of the unsuspecting Lady Happy. Citing the precedence of crossdressed nuns preparing to act male parts in the play-within-a-play they are about to watch, which portrays the married state as a curse for women, the Prince(ss) successfully gains Lady Happy’s permission to cross-dress into male costume: Prin:  I desire you would be my Mistress, and I your Servant; and upon this agreement of Friendship I desire you will grant me one Request. L. Happy:  Any thing that is in my power to grant. Prin: Why then, I observing in your several Recreations, some of your Ladies do accoustre Themselves in Masculine-Habits, and act Lovers-parts; I desire you will give me leave to be sometimes so accoustred and act the part of your loving Servant. L. Happy:  I shall never desire to have any other loving Servant then your Self. Prin: Nor I any other loving Mistress then Your-Self. L. Happy: More innocent Lovers never can there be, Then my most Princely Lover, that’s a She. (Cavendish 1668, 22–23)

In a final blurring of gender boundaries, Cavendish leaves open the question of whether the Prince(ss) should be played by a cross-dressed actor or by an actress, by listing the role as ‘The Princess’, under the female roles in ‘The Actors Names’ at the end of her play (Tomlinson 2005, 182).

168     M. A. Katritzky

‘That Pastime Which I Took in Seeing Them Act’ The Flemish alignment of itinerant acting with elite performances, rather than, as in England, with professional stage players, is key to squaring Cavendish’s praise of the Italian actresses in Antwerp with a disdain for professional acting repeatedly expressed in her writings, as when a character in The Apocriphal Ladies states that ‘most Stage-Players are Curtizans’, or in another play, Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet, which stoutly defends the right of aristocratic women to write for and perform on elite amateur stages (Cavendish 1662a, 126–27, 641). Scene 12 of her play The Female Academy (1662a, 671) expands on the notion that ‘the Italian and French Players act more Romantical than Natural, which is feign’d and constrain’d’. Despite Cavendish’s reservations concerning the professional stage and Italian acting style, her minimal knowledge of the Italian language, and her suspicions regarding the quality of the dialogue, the fairground actresses afforded her such enjoyment that she returned daily to watch them. The English traveller Fynes Moryson (MS.CCC94, 304) complained of English players at a Frankfurt Fair of the 1590s that they were merely ‘pronowncing peeces and and [sic ] Patches of English playes, which my selfe and some English men there present could not heare without great wearysomenes’. Similarly, Cavendish’s pleasure at the Antwerp troupe’s non-verbal prowess is qualified by her suspicions regarding their dialogue and literary sources: wherefore in this Woman, and the Fool her Husband, I took such Delight, to see them Act upon the Stage, as I caused a Room to be hired in the next House to the Stage, and went every day to See them, not to Hear what they said, for I did not Understand their Language, & their Actions did much delight my Sight, for I believe they were better than their Wit, which, as I suppose, were but some Stale, Bald Jests, and Broken Pieces, or Senseless Speeches, taken out of some Romances, or such like Foolish Books. (Cavendish 1664, 407)

In order to overcome the restrictions inhibiting those of her class and gender from joining spectators at public stages, Cavendish hired a nearby room. She does not clarify whether this was as a venue for private paid performances, or to watch the troupe from a window; however, the latter was sometimes pre-arranged by the troupes themselves, as a viewing option for elite spectators. The Italian troupe’s dismissal from Antwerp was almost certainly a routine municipal response to a supplication requesting an extension to the previously agreed departure date on their licence. Strictly enforced

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     169

regulations meant that early modern itinerants could no more perform or sell at will than modern street traders. Troupe-leaders, especially those ambitious to be regarded as contenders in the fierce competition for regular concessions at the larger trade fairs, generally played by the rules. They supplicated in advance for licences, were well aware that payment of the obligatory trading tax was the main reason most civic authorities tolerated their activities at all, and respected censorship regulations (Katritzky 2007, 12–14). Cavendish’s discussion of the circumstances of the Italian troupe’s departure refocuses on their medical activities, highlighting their commercial success, and perceptively touching on the extreme tensions between itinerant and sedentary healthcare professionals: But after they had been in this City some Short time (for so it seem’d to me) to my great Grief, the Magistrate Commanded them out of the Town, for fear of the Plague, which was then in the City, although some said, the Physicians through Envy to the Mountebank, Bribed them out; the truth is, they had Reason, for the Mountebank was then so much in Request, as most of the People made him their Doctor, and Jaen Potage (for so the Fool was named) was their Apothecary. (Cavendish 1664, 407–8)

Only the most successful Italian troupes earned their main income directly by performing and toured independently of peddlers or health practitioners. Throughout the early modern period, itinerant performing troupes routinely used theatrical methods to promote the sale of medical products and services (Katritzky 2007, 221–29). Cavendish evidently saw one of the many smaller Italian troupes whose performers complemented their stage skills with commercial interests of a medical nature, using free public shows to attract customers. This intersection of the performing and healthcare industries provided a way onto the stage for aspiring actresses excluded from official theatres. The health care and performing practice of early modern itinerant troupes—often the same troupes—are traditionally examined within the context of two separate sub-disciplines, the histories of medicine and the theatre, with different academic agendas and few points of contact. The vast majority of female performers remain hidden between the lines of archival records prepared by and for men, not least because such troupes were traditionally run as family businesses, and official paperwork was often streamlined by noting the name of just one family member. This has contributed to obscuring the significant and complex role of women in the early modern history of performing and medical itinerants in historical documentation, where actresses are often hidden under the mantle of anonymity or

170     M. A. Katritzky

behind the name of a male relative or colleague. As a major economic threat, performing mountebank troupes were subjected to a relentless and increasingly coordinated three-pronged attack from the medical establishment, sedentary musicians and performers, and the Church. Increasingly sophisticated rhetoric was deployed to differentiate their performances from respectable dramatic options, and they were savaged for featuring actors cross-dressed in female roles if they staged all-male performances, and for employing prostitutes if their troupes included actresses. If Cavendish’s account is exceptional, the operational methods of the acts it describes are not. Both Cavendishes draw repeatedly on the mountebank theme; William, for example, in an unpublished essay ‘Of Docter Emprick alias Mountebank’ which accusingly addresses the mountebank: ‘Your art is Unserteyne, what then is your Skill? / Tis to Gett Moneye; for your Medicins kill’ (MS Pw V 25, fol. 142; see also Begley 2016, 118); Margaret in prefaces: ‘yet will I not deceive the World, nor trouble my Conscience by being a Mountebanck in learning, but rather prove naturally wise then artificially foolish’ (Cavendish 1666: ‘To the Reader’). Her engagement with the theme dates back to her earliest publications: Mountebank Buffoones, who have gotten Priviledges of freedome, to put off their bald Jeasts at an easie rate, selling upon the Stage of Mirth, taking laughter for pay from the poore ignorant vulgar. These Fellows take upon themselves the name of Doctors of Wit, professing their skill, whereby they doe much harme, by reason their Drugs are naught, and their skil little, by which many times they kill, instead of curing; for they doe apply their poysonous iests on unprepared Bodies, and give their Medicines in unseasonable time; besides their Medicines, being most commonly bitter, gives a dislike to the Tast; and being not taken in fit time, bring the disease of suspicions, and being wrong applyed, cause death to a good fame. (Cavendish 1653, 210) Fortune is a Mountebank, cozening and cheating Mankind, acting upon the Stage of the World; where Prosperity plaies the part of a Fool to allure the Multitude, inticeing them to buy her Druggs of Follies and Vanities; or Antidotes of Experience, against her poysons of Miseries; which Poysons are many times so strong, that they kill having no remedy; but she cares not so her Ware be sold, whether they live or dye. (Cavendish 1655, 98)

Possibly, she had already seen the Antwerp mountebanks before 1653. Cavendish’s troupe fits the profile of the type of smaller Italian troupes so often depicted in the Venetian genre scenes of friendship albums (Katritzky 1998, Figure 2, plates 2, 4, 5, 7). Their performers were belittled as buffoons (buffoni ) by the Italian establishment, and by their grander performing

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     171

colleagues the comici or elite actors of the commedia dell’arte. Regarding the identity of the troupe’s fool, the English actor Thomas Sackville created the role of John Posset (which also became known as Jan Bouset, Jean Potage, Schambitasche, or Hans Supp) in Wolfenbüttel in the 1590s, and his stage name proved popular with later actors. Possible candidates for Cavendish’s Italian ‘Jaen’ Potage are the Johann Potage who fobbed off local surgeons, enraged by his brisk trade in medicines and treatments from his public stage and consulting rooms at the Haymarket’s Blue Hand Inn, during his May 1649 visit to Cologne, by saying he was a ‘medicus’ not a surgeon, or the Jean Potage recorded in Stockholm on August 10, 1647 (Dahlberg 1992, 121–22). Cavendish’s letter ends with a virtuoso literary flight of fancy. Though purely imaginative, it illuminates the troupe’s activities and audience reception, strongly suggesting, for example, that their performances made her laugh: But they being gone, I was troubled for the Loss of that Pastime which I took in Seeing them Act; wherefore to please me, my Fancy set up a Stage in my Brain, and then brought out some Incorporeal Drugs for Incorporeal Diseases, to be Bought by Incorporeal People, and the Incorporeal Thoughts were the several Actors, and my Wit play’d the Jack Fool, which Pleased me so much, as to make me Laugh Loud at the Actions in my Mind, whereas otherwise I seldom Laugh Heartily, as the Phrase is; but after my Thoughts had Acted, Danced, and Played the Fool, some several times of Contemplating, my Philosophical and Physical Opinions, which are as the Doctors of, and in the Mind, went to the Judgement, Reason, Discretion, Consideration, and the like, as to the Magistrates, and told them, it was very Unprofitable to let such Idle Company be in the Mind, which Robbed the multitude of Thoughts, of Time and Treasure; whereupon the Magistrates of the Mind Commanded the Fancy-Stage to be taken down, & the Thought-Actors to go out, and would not Suffer them to Cheat, or Fool any Longer; And so leaving my Mind Free of such Strangers, I rest, Madam Your faithful Fr[iend] and S[ervant]. (Cavendish 1664, 408)

Taken as a whole, Cavendish’s Sociable Letters are a compelling example of a hybrid literary genre, drawing on correspondence, fiction, autobiography, journalism, rhetoric, even drama. Indeed, as she explains in her preface: the Reason why I have set them forth in the Form of Letters, and not of Playes, is, first, that I have put forth Twenty Playes already, which number I thought to be Sufficient, next, I saw that Variety of Forms did Please the

172     M. A. Katritzky

Readers best, and that lastly they would be more taken with the Brevity of Letters, than the Formality of Scenes, and whole Playes, whose Parts and Plots cannot be Understood till the whole Play be Read over, whereas a Short Letter will give a Full Satisfaction of what they Read. (Cavendish 1664, C2v)

Despite its essentially fictional character, Letter 195 offers valuable insights into early modern actresses and their reception, both within a mixed-gender itinerant troupe and as female performers of one-person shows. Specifically, this exceptional female account of female spectacle indicates Margaret Cavendish’s respectively broadly negative and positive responses to the performances of Barbara Urslerin and the actresses of an Italian mountebank troupe. More generally, it represents a valuable contrasting perspective within the overwhelmingly male-authored surviving documentation.

Bibliography Archival Documents London, British Library, MS. Add 32, 379. Nottingham University Library, MS. Pw V 25, ff. 142. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Don. e. 251. Oxford, Corpus Christi College, MS. CCC94.

Publications Anon. 1629. Ein erschröckliche / vnd doch warhafftige Newe Zeitung / von einer erschröcklichen Mißgeburt. Kempten: Christoph Kraus. Arnade, Peter J., and Walter Prevenier. 2015. Honor, Vengeance and Social Trouble: Pardon Letters in the Burgundian Low Countries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bartholin, Thomas. 1654. Historiarum Anatomicarum Rariorum, Centuria I et II. Amsterdam: Petri Hauboldt. Battigelli, Anna. 1998. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Begley, Justin. 2016. ‘Margaret Cavendish, the Last Natural Philosopher’. PhD Diss., University of Oxford. Bepler, Jill. 1988. Ferdinand Albrecht, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1636–1687): A Traveller and His Travelogue. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Borel, Peter. 1656. Historiarum et Observationum Medicophysicarum, centuriæ IV. Paris: J. Billaine.

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     173

Bowditch, Claire. 2017. Twitter: Claire Bowditch@thefairjilt, August 19 and 20, 2017. Brown, Pamela Allen, and Peter Parolin, eds. 2005. Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cavendish, Margaret. 1653. Poems, and Fancies. London: J. Martin, and J. Allestrye. Cavendish, Margaret. 1655. The Worlds Olio. London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye. Cavendish, Margaret. 1656. Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life. London: J. Martin and J. Allestrye. Cavendish, Margaret. 1662a. Plays Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle. London: John Martyn, James Allestry and Tho. Dicas. Cavendish, Margaret. 1662b. Orations of Divers Sorts Accommodated to Divers Places. London: n.p. Cavendish, Margaret. 1664. CCXI Sociable Letters. London: William Wilson. Cavendish, Margaret. 1666. Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy to Which Is Added the Description of a New Blazing World. London: A. Maxwell. Cavendish, Margaret. 1667. The Life of the Thrice Noble, High and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe, Duke, Marquess and Earl of Newcastle […] Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, His Wife. London: A Maxwell. Cavendish, Margaret. 1668. Plays, Never Before Printed: Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princesse, the Duchess of Newcastle. London: A. Maxwell. Cavendish, William. 1677. The Humorous Lovers: A Comedy. Acted by His Royal Highnes’s Servants. London: H. Herringman. Chambers, E. K. 1903. The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dahlberg, Gunilla. 1992. Komediantteatern i 1600-talets Stockholm. Stockholm: Kommitten för Stockholmsforskning. Evelyn, John. 2006. The Diary of John Evelyn. Edited by E. S. de Beer. London: Everyman. G[reen], I[ohn]. 1615. A Refvtation of the Apology for Actors, Diuided into Three Briefe Treatises. Wherein Is Confuted and Opposed All the Chiefe Groundes and Arguments Alleaged in Defence of Playes […]. London: Thomas Langley. Greenfield, Peter. 1996. ‘Festive Drama at Christmas in Aristocratic Households’. In Festive Drama. Papers from the Sixth Triennial Colloquium of the International Society for the Study of Medieval Theatre, Lancaster, 13–19 July, 1989, edited by Meg Twycross, 34–40. Cambridge: Brewer. Heywood, Thomas. 1612. An Apology for Actors. Containing Three Briefe Treatises, 1. Their Antiquity, 2. Their Ancient Dignity, 3. The True Vse of Their Quality. London: Nicholas Okes. Howe, Elizabeth. 1992. The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

174     M. A. Katritzky

Katritzky, M. A. 1998. ‘Was Commedia dell’Arte Performed by Mountebanks? Album Amicorum Illustrations and Thomas Platter’s Description of 1598’. Theatre Research International 23, no. 2: 104–25. Katritzky, M. A. 2006. The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the Visual Records. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Katritzky, M. A. 2007. Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks. Aldershot: Ashgate. Katritzky, M. A. 2014a. ‘Literary Anthropologies and Pedro González, the “Wild Man” of Tenerife’. In Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire, edited by John Slater, José Pardo-Tomás, and Maríaluz López-Terrada, 107–28. Farnham: Ashgate. Katritzky, M. A. 2014b. ‘“A Wonderfull Monster Borne in Germany”: Hairy Girls in Medieval and Early Modern German Book, Court and Performance Culture’. German Life and Letters 67, no. 4: 467–80. Lusitanus, Zacutus. 1637. Praxis medica admiranda. Lyon: Ioannes-Antonius Huguetan. McManus, Clare. 2002. Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court (1590–1619). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Nashe, Thomas. 1592. Pierce Penilesse, His Svpplicaton to the Diuell. London: I. B[usbie]. Paumgartner, Balthasar, and Magdalena Behaim. 1895. Briefwechsel Balthasar Paumgartners des Jüngeren mit seiner Gattin Magdalena, geb. Behaim (1582– 1598). Edited by Georg Steinhausen. Tübingen: Litterarischer Verein, Stuttgart. Pepys, Samuel. n.d. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Edited by Phil Guyford from the Project Gutenberg Online Edition. Accessed July 7, 2018. https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/. Platter, Felix. 1976. Felix Platter Tagebuch (Lebensbeschreibung) 1536–1567. Edited by Valentin Lötscher. Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe. Prynne, William. 1633. Histrio-Mastix. The Players Scovrge, or, Actors Tragædie […] Wherein It Is Largely Evidenced […] That Popular Stage-Playes (the Very Pompes of the Divell […]) Are Sinfull, Heathenish, Lewde, Ungodly Spectacles and Most Pernicious Corruptions […]. London: Michael Sparke. Scott, Virginia. 1998. ‘La Virtu et la Volupté: Models for the Actress in Early Modern Italy and France’. Theatre Research International 23: 152–58. Scott-Douglass, Amy. 2000. ‘Prefacing the Poetess: Gender and Textual Presentation in Seventeenth-Century England’. PhD Diss., University of Oklahoma. Seger, Georg. 1693. Miscellanea curiosa sive ephemeridum medico-physicarum Germanicarum Academiæ. Nuremberg: Wolfgang Mauritius Endteri. Solomon, Diana. 2013. ‘Laugh or Forever Hold Your Peace: Comic Crowd Control in Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Prologues and Epilogues’. In Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice, edited by Peter Dickinson et al., 55–64. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press.

8  Margaret Cavendish’s Female Fairground Performers     175

Stokes, James. 2005. ‘Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire’. In Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage, edited by Pamela Allen Brown and Peter Parolin, 25–43. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stokes, James. 2015. ‘The Ongoing Exploration of Women and Performance in Early Modern England: Evidence, Issues and Questions’. Shakespeare Bulletin 33, no. 1: 9–31. Tomlinson, Sophie. 1998. ‘“My Brain the Stage”: Margaret Cavendish and the Fantasy of Female Performance’. In Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama, Criticism, History and Performance 1594–1998, edited by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 272–92. London: Routledge. Tomlinson, Sophie. 2005. Women on Stage in Stuart Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Elk, Martine. 2017. ‘“Before She Ends Up in a Brothel”: Public Femininity and the First Actresses in England and the Low Countries’. Early Modern Low Countries 1: 30–50. Webb, Mike. 2017a. ‘Diary of Jefferay (Jeffrey) Boys of Betteshanger, Kent, and Grey’s Inn, London’. Accessed July 8, 2018. http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/ scwmss/wmss/online/1500-1900/boys-jefferay/boys-jefferay.html. Webb, Mike. 2017b. ‘Dancing All Night with Aphra Behn: A Recently Acquired Diary of Jeffrey Boys of Betteshanger, 1667’. Accessed July 9, 2018. https:// blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/archivesandmanuscripts/2017/10/12/dancing-allnight-with-aphra-behn-a-recently-acquired-diary-of-jeffrey-boys-of-betteshanger-1667/.

Part III Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England

Introduction ‘This is not the Women’s Age, let ’em think what they will’ declares Lady Woodville in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) and yet in some ways, late seventeenth-century to early eighteenth-century England was exactly that; indeed, Helen Brooks (2014, 565) has suggested that this might well be called ‘the age of the actress’. The theatres had been closed in England in 1642 and remained so until the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when King Charles II issued warrants to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant allowing them to set up theatrical companies, the King’s Company and the Duke of York’s Company, respectively. When the theatres re-opened, the apron stages of the outdoor Elizabethan and early Stuart amphitheatres with their fast-paced, unlocalized acting spaces were swiftly superseded by indoor theatres with proscenium arches, footlights and sliding scenery. There was a new emphasis on spectacular elements of the drama with perspective scenery and the type of special effects only previously seen in court masques. Before 1642, it was considered immoral for a woman to appear on stage in England and female roles had been played by boys and young men, although visiting troupes of continental performers including women had been seen in England for a century or more. Many exiled royalists had spent the Interregnum in Spain, France and Italy and were accustomed to seeing women perform on public stages, but it was pragmatic financial decisions every bit as much as moral considerations that were instrumental in the emergence of women onto the English public stage.

178     Part III: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England

Jane Milling’s chapter provides a comprehensive overview from the introduction of the first actresses in 1660 to the middle of the eighteenth century, examining the pivotal role of the actress in the developing theatre culture and dramatic repertoire of the period and the varied ways in which scholarly and critical thought has engaged with this phenomenon. Attention has often been focused on a growing celebrity culture in which actresses’ public and private lives were conflated with their dramatic roles, a phenomenon discussed in more detail in the subsequent chapter by Laura Rosenthal. Certain actresses were able to capitalize on this, made spectacular liaisons and even married into the aristocracy. The arrival of women on stage led, on the one hand, to an emphasis on the authenticity of real women embodying women’s roles and, on the other, to an enhanced awareness of the constructedness of all performance. Milling examines the working lives and practices of some of the many women performers engaged at all levels in a burgeoning theatrical business from the stars of the elite London patent theatres, to those performing in fairground booths or building a career out of performing minor roles such as lady’s maids, to the strolling players eking out a living in provincial tours at a time before these offered the financial rewards they later delivered. Milling (below, 201) ends by stressing the democratic significance of the theatre of this time and emphasising that ‘the labour of the less-well-known yet multiskilled performers, at home on booth stage and in patent houses, had an artistry equally as important [as that of the celebrity actresses of the time] in establishing accessible entertainment’ for all. Cultural struggles over social change and newly created class and gender categories were played out in the drama of the period. Laura Rosenthal’s chapter explores the way in which the naïve rustic girls of Restoration and post-Restoration comedy, such as William Wycherley’s Margery Pinchwife, William Congreve’s Miss Prue and John Gay’s Polly Peachum, can be read as emblematic of the career of the actress and her emergence onto the Restoration stage—learning to act a part became a prerequisite for success in this new sophisticated urban society. Rosenthal focuses on the careers of successful actresses such as Frances Abington, Betty Boutell and Lavinia Beswick and the extent to which they were identified with the roles they played. Focusing on the roles and lives of actresses, nevertheless, allows Rosenthal to make a broader political point about sociocultural change, loss of innocence, the rise of capitalism and increase in social, moral corruption and how women (and men) in the period learned to make their way in this new world. She closes her chapter with detailed analysis of Congreve’s Way of the World, as a case study of innocence and sophistication in a

Part III: Restoration and Eighteenth-Century England     179

cosmopolitan context at the very moment the seventeenth century turned into the eighteenth. By the period covered in Laura Engel’s chapter, the mid-eighteenth century to early nineteenth century, actresses were a long-established phenomenon and their status had risen accordingly; they were in fact ‘everywhere’ with their portraits adorning every available surface in the late eighteenth century. Actresses had arrived socially and celebrity culture had taken off— but with success came commodification. Actresses, images and things proliferated; by deconstructing these images, Engel reveals the labour involved for the contemporary actress in pursuit of theatrical and social success, her relation to contemporary material culture and the use of mirrors as conveyors of truth. Actresses such as Eliza Farren, Anne Damer and Dorothy Jordan figured in often cruel satirical cartoons and lubricious caricatures that suggest the social anxiety the figure of the actress inspired and the paradoxical nature of her success in ways that still resonate today.

Bibliography Brooks, Helen. 2014. ‘Theorizing the Woman Performer’. In The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, edited by J. Swindells and D. Francis Taylor, 551–567. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9 Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740 Jane Milling

The appearance of women performers in the patent-holding London theatres in 1660 was remarked upon at the time as a welcome innovation; ‘upon our stages we have women actors, as beyond seas’, wrote Andrew Newport to his uncle Sir Richard Leveson in the country on December 15, 1660 (Howe 1992, 19). As Newport’s news indicated, women were somewhat late to the English commercial stage. In France, women had been an accepted part of touring provincial troupes since the 1540s. Some of these troupes and actresses had played in the capital in the Hôtel de Bourgogne, the legitimate commercial playhouse of Paris, since the 1620s. However, during the seventeenth century, the multiple wars of succession in which the French were engaged made touring difficult financially and physically for French regional troupes and limited the opportunities for companies from abroad to visit. It was these circumstances, rather than religious prohibition or moral commentary on women, that reduced the opportunities for women to perform during the period (Gethner and Gough 2016, 219). In Spain, women’s involvement in theatre as managers, performers and authors had been well established in both the purpose-built corrales and court theatrical performances, as well as in the network of commercial provincial theatres since at least the 1570s. Spanish actresses were vocal in defending their right to perform when attempts were made to exclude them from stages by the Council of Castile in 1587, but the new legislation required them to Jane Milling (*)  Department of Drama, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_9

181

182     Jane Milling

be married or under a father’s guardianship, amplifying the existing reality that many touring troupes were predominantly family affairs (Walthaus and Corporaal 2008, 4; Sanz Ayán 2015, 116). In the Italian context, women had long been part of popular performance and had appeared with the more formal touring commedia troupes since the 1560s. [For further discussion of commedia actresses in general and Andreini in particular, see Chapter 6, above, by Margaret Rose.] Exporting their mode of comic, tragic and pastoral exuberance, Italian actresses had had an enormous influence across Europe particularly on the Spanish and French stages, where they were favoured by royal audiences: an ‘all-star troupe … the prime donne were Diana Ponti and Angelica Alberghini’ performed for the 1600–1601 wedding of Henri IV to the Florentine Marie de Médicis (Brown 2016, 260). The Gelosi commedia troupe’s entertainment for the French court in 1603–1604 was the final triumph of Isabella Andreini, herself a celebrated European phenomenon, applauded for her performance of tragic heroines as much as for her witty, learned comic roles. Such divas were a key part of the spectacular success of this Italian export. The commedia troupes had made it to England: Drusiano Martinelli’s Italian commedia company with actresses had entertained Elizabeth I and played a season in the City of London in 1578 (Brown 2016, 257). The appearance of actresses in foreign troupes did not always go down well in England: in November 1629, a troupe including French actresses was ‘hissed booed and pippin-pelted from the stage’ at the Blackfriars Theatre (Howe 1992, 22). There was also a homegrown English tradition of aristocratic women’s patronage and performance in courtly entertainments. The elite status of these non-professional performers meant that they engaged in limited forms of performance; nevertheless, because of their authorised appearance in courtly spectacle Sophie Tomlinson (2015, 67) argues that ‘the actress or theatrical woman was a generative figure in early Stuart drama’. The influence of a mixed-gender European theatrical culture on the exiled Charles II and royalist aristocracy has frequently been given as the impetus for women’s access to the London stage at the Restoration (Styan 1996; Wilson 1958). Yet, as seen above, women had been performing and travelling with troupes across Europe and had made visits to London for over a century prior to the Restoration. Aristocratic familiarity with courtly spectacles at home or with European conventions through grand tours or ambassadorial appointments had not been enough to alter the guild-like structures of English theatre management and practice that inhibited women’s access to the legitimate London stage, as Shapiro (1999) argues.

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     183

Rather than being due to royal or noble pressure, the arrival of the first actresses undoubtedly owed a debt to the commercially successful practices of gender-mixed European troupes, which early Restoration managers William Davenant, Thomas Killigrew, Michael Mohun and George Jolly had seen first-hand; indeed, Jolly had ‘had the distinction of introducing female players to Frankfurt’ in September 1655 (Howe 1992, 23). These European modes influenced the organisation and practices of post-Restoration theatre companies. Actresses were not specifically identified in the first theatrical patents, as Deborah Payne (2001, 73) points out, and the fact that that they were in ‘the revised royal patents issued to Davenant and Killigrew on 15 January 1662 … suggests strongly that the request for actresses originated within the theatre companies, not the government’. It is with these pragmatic practices of theatre managers and the broader commercial structures of performance in England that this chapter will concern itself. During the early years of this innovation, there were only limited opportunities for women on English stages, but as the eighteenth century progressed many more spaces and contexts developed in which women might perform, and the repertoire and cultural role of theatre itself shifted, in part through the offices of the newly emergent actresses. Our histories have tended to concentrate on the celebrated leading actresses. However, by examining the many women at work playing minor roles, labouring on the burgeoning regional theatre circuits or enlivening the popular booth and fair stages of their day, we can gain a richer picture of the significance of the actresses’ arrival and the extent of their impact on English theatrical culture.

Histories of the English Actress Much of our interest in Restoration actresses of the period still centres on the scopic power exercised over female bodies on stage and on the sexualisation of the female performer. [For further discussion of this, see Chapter 11, below, by Laura Engel.] The late arrival of the English actress has been attributed to moral anxiety about the corrupting force of public women upon audiences and thus to an enduring Protestant suspicion of the stage itself and its deceptions (Payne 2001, 70; van Elk 2017, 30). Drawing on the satiric disciplining of actresses as ‘public’ women in pamphlets, didactic and popular writing, many of our histories of the actress continue to concentrate on the conflation of the ‘private’ life and the ‘public’ representation of the women performers in much the same way that eager biographers of the era did (Pullen 2005). This despite the wise counsel of Deborah Payne, who reminds us that the scopic nature of the stage itself altered the way in

184     Jane Milling

which both men’s and women’s bodies were ‘viewed’ within the perspectivised scene, and Kristina Straub’s thought-provoking studies of male actors’ sexual identity and homosocial desire on stage (Payne 1995; Straub 1992). Anxiety about the objectification and sexualisation of the actress has become a primary lens in our histories, not least because this objectification remains a conundrum in feminist analysis of women’s performance and representation in our contemporary moment. In 1660, women were part of a commercial overhaul of the aesthetic offerings of the new theatre managers. The critic and dramatist John Dennis (1658–1734) reflected on the scopic shift effected by the indoor theatre playing spaces that had ‘altered all at once the whole Face of the stage by introducing scenes and women;—which added probability to the Dramatick Action and made everything look more naturally’ (cited in Green 1993, 143). With the arrival of women’s bodies in women’s parts, the English actress has been read as enacting a naturalisation of gender and gendered roles. The ontology of the woman performer might create the stage as a new venue for representing femininity, collapsing the divide between public and private ‘selves’ and reading the actress as a more authentic embodiment of female characters, yet, the simple rendering of gendered roles as naturalised is continually refuted by the complexity of performance itself, with its morethan-doubled perception of actor and role. Elin Diamond (1997) even suggests that this challenge to naturalised gender categories can be read in the dramatic writing of the period. She argues for a proto-feminist resistance in the gestic writing of Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1676) that ‘makes strange’ the terms of femininity and draws an audience’s attention to the constructed nature of gender. She suggests that Behn used the stage to offer the potential for a radical theatrical revision of gendered roles. One woman from the period who made explicit and self-knowing use of the sensational possibilities of conflating a private life and public knowledge was Mary Moders, or Carleton, the self-styled ‘German Princess’. Arraigned in October 1663 for a bigamous marriage to a tavern keeper’s son, John Carleton, who claimed she had posed as a foreign aristocrat returning from the continent, Moders was the subject of many ballads and pamphlets, some posited as autobiographical works in her own defence. In April 1663, Samuel and Elizabeth Pepys went to see The German Princess ‘acted, by the woman herself; but never was anything so well done in earnest, worse performed in jest upon the stage: … abating the drollery of him that acts her husband’ (van Lennep et al. 1965, 77). This autobiographical performance may well have been the play printed as T. P.’s A Witty Combat: Or, The Female Victor (1663), though Milhous and Hume (1983, 38) are doubtful.

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     185

A Witty Combat tells a straightforward version of Moders’ story alleging that she was duped by Carleton, a narrative that Moders had already successfully performed in court to win an acquittal. In A Witty Combat, Moders holds the stage with frequent soliloquies, avoiding a lascivious, hypocritical parson, winning the respect of servants, drawers, watermen and the cellar-man who offer comic interludes. Surrounded by the plotting Carleton household with their ‘greyness of subtlety’ and ‘busie purpose’ (1663 D), Moders’ deportment, generosity, wit and repeated rejection of the sobriquet ‘your Ladyship’ paint her in many ways as the least deceptive figure, ‘let their pretence / Be what it will’ (E4v). Certainly, she appears more convincingly genteel than the aristocratic demeanour poorly adopted by her husband-to-be, John Carleton. Moders’ rejection of intrusive questioning on her social status and breeding—‘All bold Inquisitors ought thus to be / Deluded with some shew of certainty’ (D)—calls into question the representational economy of social status as offering no certainty, but only shows. The play celebrates her acquittal, painting two gentlemen who grumble at her release in the mode of witch-hunters. Moders’ final address to the audience as an epilogue, in propria persona, brings the audience into the here-and-now of the theatrical performance: The World’s a Cheat, and we that move in it In our degrees do exercise our Wit, And better ’tis to get a glorious name, However got, than live by common Fame. (F2v)

This conclusion recognises the fine separation of heroic celebrity from the reputational damage of ‘common Fame’. Whether A Witty Combat was the play Pepys saw or not, he was not impressed when he saw Moders performing as herself and a poetic commentator likewise damned the ‘dull German Princes [sic ]’ (Milhous and Hume 1983, 17). It was the professional comic actors that surrounded Moders that Pepys thought diverting. Despite engaging in the doubled celebrity personae of actress and rogue that Cheryl Wanko eloquently demonstrated formed the basis of the printed biographical form itself in this era (Wanko 2003; Chalmers 1992), Mary Moders could not generate the charismatic allure that the professional actresses of the day like Elizabeth Barry, Nell Gwynn, Mary Knepp or Jane Rogers could produce, that sent audience members like Pepys into raptures or paroxysms. The idea of celebrity has become another popular structure through which to think of Restoration and early-eighteenth-century actresses. This

186     Jane Milling

approach remains concerned with correlating private and public selves, but rather than seeing the actress as powerless within a scopic economy, the idea of celebrity attractively suggests that she had agency in her public visibility. Indeed, as Felicity Nussbaum argues in Rival Queens (2010, 21), celebrity offers a way of understanding the particular gains to be made from representing a private self: Brilliant actresses such as Oldfield, Clive, Woffington, and Abington prefigured a modern subjectivity, a commoditized version of the self that they offered to consumers as an effect of an interiority that encapsulated and ascribed a certain value to be exchanged in the theatrical marketplace … bolstered by the circulation of celebrity news and gossip.

Nussbaum does also concede, however, that this interiority effect and the representation of subjectivity were ‘not transparent but rather provisional, multitiered, and situational’. What social character stood for was a matter of intense debate in this era, strongly correlated to a wish that manners or behaviour might reflect virtue or inner worth. Performance, with its alluring rogues and the acknowledged gulf between a character’s rhetoric and a speaking performer, offered an inherent challenge to the legibility of social behaviour as the display of inner virtue. The Societies for the Reformation of Manners and much of the ­anti-theatrical prejudice of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, centred on this nexus of performance and interiority, outward behaviour and inner worth. Beth Kowaleski Wallace (2000, 474) notes Addison and Steele’s journalism linked ‘aristocratic display… and performance to the inauthentic self, whilst decorum, modesty, restraint, and – above all – the absence of performative behaviours … mark an authentic, normative and valued bourgeois subject’. Paradoxically, both Addison and Steele employ the theatre to illustrate such non-performative behaviours in the fables of their own theatrical writing. Rather than an ‘interiority effect’, Dror Wahrman (2004) has argued that the idea of an actually existing interiority and thus of the individual as a coherent agent in civic terms, underpinned the political development of the late eighteenth-century democratic state. Long before the arrival of the actress, as Cynthia Lowenthal (2003, 138) reminds us, the stage had troubled easy assumptions about exteriors and interiors since most actors were of the middling or lower sort ‘passing’ as their social superiors. Deborah Payne (2001, 75) considers that with one or two key exceptions—Nell Gwynn is perhaps the most well known— most London stage actresses ‘came from the middling ranks’ given the requirements for literacy and experience of their social betters. Celebrity

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     187

actresses were able to parse their professional success into social behaviour that allowed them the possibility of marriage or partnerships with the elite. Aphra Behn’s dedication of The Feign’d Curtezans (1679) to ‘Mrs Ellen Guin’ was mocked by Samuel Johnson in The Lives of the English Poets (1779) as demonstrating the corrupt, excessive flattery that characterised systems of patronage. But perhaps Behn’s dedication is fulsome expressly to establish Gwynn’s equivalence with those of noble breeding and the monarch: ‘so well you bear the honours you were born for; with a greatness so unaffected, an affability so easie, an Humor so soft, so far from Pride and Vanity … well knowing with the noble Poet; ’tis better far to merit Titles then to wear ’em’ (n.p). Multiple studies of individual celebrity actresses of the era—all leading players in companies—are now available to us, in a field Engel has dubbed ‘actress studies’, and Brooks (2014, 565) suggests that we rebalance our histories and recast the age of Garrick as ‘the age of the actress’ (Moody and Luckhurst 2005; Roach 2007; Nussbaum 2010; Engel 2011; Hamilton 2013; Brooks 2015; Fawcett 2016). As Brooks (2015, 96) suggests, by the mid eighteenth century celebrity actresses such as Dora Jordan and Sarah Siddons were using autobiographical displays to rewrite ‘bourgeois notions of femininity’ and were developing the cultural cachet of performing ‘sincerity’ and a concomitant idea of immersion in role that has persisted in the rhetoric of acting practice into the modern era. While the appearance of women might contribute to a representation of the gendered role of femininity as interior, authentic and sincere, there was another discourse around femininity equally predicated on the bodies of women, one expressed as excess. This is the idea of celebrity that Julia Fawcett (2016, 6) posits, suggesting some celebrity performers, notably Charlotte Charke from this period, developed an autobiographical over-expressivity that challenged gender norms and ‘met the public’s ­ demand to stare while paralyzing that public’s power to interpret’, presenting ‘the illusion of interiority only to expose it as an illusion’. Sophie Tomlinson coins this tendency as the baroque, developed particularly in the women characters of Renaissance tragedy intended to be played by boy actors. This baroque performance mode was full of ‘heightened artifice, quirky dissonance, and the “power … to move the affections”’ (Tomlinson 2015, 68). Such notions of excessive emotionality and sensitive suffering had long been markers of femininity and with the possibilities of real women’s bodies on the Restoration stage, baroque over-expressivity and the excessive emotionality contributed, as Jean I. Marsden (2006) has argued, to the development

188     Jane Milling

of a new dramaturgy of women-centred tragedy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The arrival of actresses in the armoury of English stage performance had an impact on the development of the English dramatic repertoire over the period in a number of different modes. As Marsden argues, the possibilities offered by the actress inaugurated transitions in genre; the rise of ‘sentimental comedy’ like that of ‘she-tragedy’ has been attributed to their presence onstage. At a more local scale, particular actresses, especially those leading players of a company, had an effect on individual dramatists who credit them as muses or note that they wrote specifically for an actress’s prevailing style of performance. Thomas Southerne admits his cross-dressed rakish heroine, Lucia, disguised as Sir Anthony Love: Or, The Rambling Lady (1691), was written for Susannah Mountfort’s talents, ‘as I made every Line for her, she has mended every Word for me; and by a Gaiety and Air, particular to her Action, turn’d everything into the Genius of the Character’ (A2). A surprising shift in dramatic norms, Lucia is not just a swaggering rake—‘I am for Universal Empire, and wou’d not be stinted to one Province; I wou’d be fear’d, as well as lov’d’ (B)—who eventually capitulates to marriage. Southerne has her retain her lover Valentine by marrying him to another and blackmailing her old flame Sir Gentle Golding out of an annual settlement of £500 a year. Mountfort’s performance helped make palatable and attractive Southerne’s complex satire on old libertine mores. In a similar way, Pamela Allen Brown (2016, 254) argues that women’s involvement in the commedia dell’arte in Italy led to the development of new kinds of roles in towering female heroines and to generic renovation: the more active, ‘elegant and attractive’ inamorata replaced the passive female virgo figures of all-male troupes. Such innovations from French, Spanish and Italian repertoires were translated and adapted into the English repertory over the period. What these interconnections between theatre companies, genres, repertoires and entertainment structures suggest is that there was a powerful undercurrent of transnational commercial theatrical practice that influenced and fed the context in which the English actress operated. As Katritzky has argued elsewhere (2007) and in this volume (Chapter 8), continental touring troupes and homegrown women were already present in performance across England in popular performance at fairgrounds, on booth and mountebank stages, as entertainers, ropedancers, musicians and other roles. As the theatre industry of the post-Restoration era cranked up, these kinds of performances were integrated into the offerings of the main stages through jigs, dances, music and entr’acte entertainments and afterpieces and were enshrined in the harlequinades of John Rich’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     189

troupe after 1717 (Joncus and Barlow 2011). Indeed, John O’Brien (2004) makes a convincing case for the role of the popular patchwork English pantomime form as central to the emerging definition of theatre as a cultural category and the modern theatre institution itself. The concentration on individual celebrated performers has allowed us to see actresses as standing in for debates about femininity or theories of individuality and interiority in the period. There is much to learn from turning our attention to those ‘civilian’ performers who did not achieve celebrity—a wider number of women performers working across popular performance as well as main stages and beyond London. Over the Restoration and eighteenth century, theatre’s cultural role as a site of ‘national imaginings’ became increasingly significant. In enacting ‘the gulfs between the public and the private, men and women, slaves and freemen, or “the people” and the rabble, … [it] also inevitably created spaces for participation, engagement and contestation by those outside of the privileged halves of these oppositions’ (Wilson 1995, 85). Turning our attention to popular and non-metropolitan women performers is not a turn to the marginal, but rather to an acknowledgement of the political valence of a popular mushrooming of theatrical culture across England. By considering the actresses’ work not just in terms of the literary qualities of dramatic character in the main-piece, but in the context of the full performance environment of an afternoon or evening’s entertainment, we can gain a richer understanding of the pragmatic practices of women performers in the development of an England-wide theatre industry and of the cultural work of the English stage.

Working in the Company One of the notable things about the British theatrical structure, unlike its Spanish or Italian counterparts, was that the relationship between actors within a company was not predicated on familial ties, at least in London theatres. In 1660, some actresses, in an echo of the apprenticeship structures of the pre-Commonwealth stage, were housed with managers Davenant or Betterton, who claimed additional shares in the company for the women’s support (van Lennep et al. 1965, lviii). But a salaried contract structure was quickly established for most actors, actresses, dancers and musicians, and training seems to have been outsourced to a variety of ‘nurseries’ for younger aspirants on the city periphery, supplying perhaps more regularly the touring provincial companies run by John Coysh and John Perin than the London patent stages (van Lennep et al. 1965, xxxviii).

190     Jane Milling

Women performers in the early Restoration do not often seem to have had familial connections that eased their path to the stage or determined which company they joined; the exception is those companies engaged on regular regional touring circuits, where by the early eighteenth century around half of the women were married or had family connections within a company (Martin 2008, 262). However, family-style relationships established by long acquaintance within companies did grow up. In December 1694, manager Thomas Skipwith complained bitterly in the ‘Reply of the Patentees’ that, despite a recent pay rise, Elizabeth Bowman was leaving the United Company to follow Betterton, ‘onely because Mr Betterton whom she calls father desired her soe to doe’ (cited in Roberts 2010, 160). The actors’ revolt in 1694, when Betterton, Barry, Bracegirdle and others struck out from Rich and Skipwith’s patent-holding United Company to form a separate shareholding company, was a relatively rare phenomenon in the period. The English theatre industry was predicated on contractually coherent companies which permitted women without existing family connections to the theatre to join, but the ability of individual actresses to move between companies was severely restricted by the terms of the theatre patents until the early eighteenth century. The two established theatre companies from 1662 onwards had fewer women on their rosters than men, and fewer female roles were written in most plays of the early period. However, as Helen Brooks (2015, 23) demonstrates, the leading women performers like Elizabeth Barry might earn respectable salaries placing them as equals alongside their male counterparts. The idea of performers remaining within a theatre company, as policed by the Lord Chamberlain, served the commercial interests of the two patent holders and limited the negotiating power of performers, though seasonal renegotiations by leading players were attempted as the multiple petitions to, and rulings from, the Lord Chamberlain’s office show. Being within a company meant complying with the limitations of the repertoire of that company and had implications for the range of roles an actress might ‘own’ and thus on her earnings. The battle for roles and repertoire was a popular theatrical trope and could be mobilised to generate audience interest in the actresses. Nussbaum (2010) traces the long theatrical history of Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens (1677) which takes advantage of this metatheatrical principle of rivalry in its fable. It was not only in tragedy that this trope of rivalry occurred. Berta Joncus (2011, 48) traces a direct genealogy between Lee’s play and Handel’s Alessandro, staged May 5, 1726, which was ‘designed to “contrast and compare” the skills of Cuzzoni, the presiding prima donna, with those of

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     191

Faustina’. Elite audience members were mobilised to support the sopranos, ‘opposing camps were led by the Countess of Pembroke (patronizing Cuzzoni) and the Countess of Burlington (patronizing Faustina)’ (Joncus 2011, 49). John Gay’s parody The Beggar’s Opera (1728) owes a direct debt in construction to this operatic battle and to the notion of female rivalry. The roles of Lucy and Polly are framed as rivals not only for the love of Macheath, but also stylistically in the very form of their musicality including ‘a warring duet (“Why how now, Madam Flirt?” set to the tune “Goodmorrow, Gossip Joan”)’ (Joncus 2011, 34). While Gay also lampoons this pseudo-operatic rivalry, the ‘Polly wars’ between Kitty Clive and Susannah Cibber, played out on stage and in the press in 1736, demonstrate that this trope of rivalry recurred as an iconic form in dramatic literature, biography and metatheatrical performances and had an enduring power in the cultural imaginary of the stage actress. Yet because The Beggar’s Opera was performed so many times and by so many actresses, the intensity of this rivalry was diffused across the nation. Perhaps the most extraordinary rendition of the contest was performed by Mrs. Elrington who, on discovering that the actress playing Lucy to her Polly was still drunk asleep at curtain up, was obliged to play both roles in a bravura and potentially very confusing version for the audience of Tiverton, as Charlotte Charke recounts (1755, 198).

More Than Minor Players Alongside the repertoire’s tragic heroines or comic leads, there were many smaller parts for women performers to fill. Those incidental roles listed by function at the bottom of the dramatis personae were probably hireling parts and the women are rarely named, although over the course of the late seventeenth century the hirelings or young company developed a summer season to support themselves (Burling 2000, 30–41). The next tier of actresses might find regular employment through a season in minor speaking roles as small tradeswomen, cast mistresses or ladies’ maids to the leading gentry figures of the comedies and fewer roles as personal servants in the tragedies. Of course, comedies with their presentation of multiple households and the bustle of town life tended to be written with more minor characters to flesh out that world. The arrival of actresses to fill these roles nurtured the growth of maids and female servant figures in the repertoire, initially drawing on models translated and adapted from the established mixed-gendered European repertoire. Indeed, Susan Martin (2008, 275) suggests that while leading actresses developed lines in comedy or tragedy, minor actresses had

192     Jane Milling

a different relation to genre, tending to be ‘cast according to type, e.g. confidante, the lady in waiting, rather than genre’. Female servant roles moved increasingly centre stage in part because of the availability of multi-talented actresses such as Margaret Sanders or Kitty Clive, who then rose to prominence in such parts. The minor actresses remained on company rosters for extended periods, but their employment was disproportionately impacted during temporary mergers of the theatre duopoly. With the growth of minor theatre venues in London in the early years of the eighteenth century, there were more opportunities for women to join the profession and to play a range of roles beyond the patent stages and the patent house repertoires. In the early eighteenth century, Elizabeth Sapsford (fl. 1705–1710), though only fleetingly named in the piecemeal theatrical records of those complicated years of shifting theatrical monopoly and the challenge of opera, gives us an insight into the potential that a broader view of theatrical landscape might offer. She is first recorded on April 23, 1705 in the Drury Lane company, originating the servant role Jenny in Steele’s The Tender Husband. Jenny’s only real stage time comes in Act Three, assisting the talkative Mrs. Clerimont at her toilet. Mrs. Clerimont’s desire for elegant French servants provokes huffy thanks from Jenny for ‘believing so well of the Maid Servants in England’ (1705, 28). Yet Mrs. Cross as Mrs. Clerimont persists in painting a picture of the embodied distinction in service produced by nationality, ‘Indeed Jenny I could wish thou wer’t really French; for thou are plain English in spite of Example – Your arms do but hang on, and you move perfectly upon Joints. Not with a Swim of the whole Person’ (29). When Mrs. Clerimont complains on her last visit, ‘There was a profound silence for I believe the third part of a minute’, Jenny marvels ‘And your Ladyship there’. Mrs. Clerimont concedes, ‘They infected me with their Dullness’ (30). Jenny’s role is primarily a knowing commentary on her mistress’s foibles, delivering messages and confidences in the later plotting. Later in July, Sapsford had the tiny role of a Lady in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Loyal Subject got up at short notice in its ‘Original Simplicity’ against an adaptation at the Queen’s Haymarket. Although Sapsford is only a bit player in this season, she is listed as a named company member in the players’ petition to Lord Chamberlain Kent, to prevent the combination of the two acting companies into one. The reduction in employment for leading and minor actresses, to the ‘utter Ruine to them and their Numerous Families’ that the petition bewails may well account for Sapsford’s later invisibility (Hume and Milhous 2001, 234). The following season on April 8, 1706 she originated Lucy, Melinda’s maid in Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer. Lucy is a much larger role as the intriguing maid. She banters with

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     193

her mistress Melinda, who desperately wishes to make her a confidante, but worries ‘You’re a Servant, and a Secret would make you Saucy’ (1706, 40). Lucy proposes that ‘you had better raise me to a degree above a Servant. You know my Family, and that 500 Pounds would set me on the Foot of a Gentlewoman, and make me worthy the Confidence of any Lady in the Land; besides Madam it will extremely encourage me in the great Design that I now have in Hand’ (45). Lucy’s plot, to elope masked with Brazen in Melinda’s stead, is ultimately undone, but the role offered Sapsford far more stage time as the saucy servant. Sapsford then disappears from cast and company records, but she cannot have left acting altogether, for in 1710, William Pinkethman employs her in his summer Greenwich Company, drawn from both houses, in ten roles. She takes over the role of Melinda in The Recruiting Officer and plays leading roles such as Miranda in Centlivre’s The Busy Body (Mrs. Cross originated the part in April that year, but fell out with the managers; Mrs. Santlow took up the role at Drury Lane the following season), and Berinthia in The Relapse (which had been Anne Oldfield’s role, and then went to Frances Maria Knight) which she takes as her benefit play on September 20, near the end of the company’s run and just before Pinkethman’s benefit. The subscription season at Greenwich offered Sapsford roles and responsibilities that seem not to have been hers on the London main stages. To acquire this many roles for one summer season must have taken considerable labour, yet we cannot know where it led her. Another route that minor actresses might undertake was to offer their skills and expertise across a number of performance fronts. Jane Lucas (fl. 1693–1707) was a minor actress with the Drury Lane company, playing servants and commoners. Being a minor player, however, did not mean that she felt she was powerless within the company hierarchy. She caused a brief flurry early in her time when in July 1697 she brought a suit for assault against Colley Cibber. He was imprisoned in the Gate-house, from where he wrote to the Lord Chamberlain Earl Sunderland, complaining that Mrs. Lucas had had him arrested without leave from his Lordship—a ruse often used by players when remembering that they were His Majesty’s servants might offer protection from prosecution. It seems as if this case was resolved: it never came to the sessions, and Mrs. Lucas played on with the same company. She had one or two roles as ladies of quality fallen on hard times— she originated the small part of well-born Lucy Weldon adventuring for a husband in Surinam in Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), and she played Mrs. ap Shinken, ‘A Welsh Runt’ in Thomas Baker’s Hampstead Heath (1706),

194     Jane Milling

reduced to living with a city relative, Deputy Driver, who thinks ‘that frisking wife of mine’ Arabella (Mrs. Oldfield) is getting town airs (4). Lucas shone in bustling servant roles originating Parley in Farquhar’s sequel Sir Harry Wildair (1701), the bold Edging who opens Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1704) by challenging her mistress, ‘Poor Creature – don’t you think I am my Master’s Mistress for nothing’ (2), and the ever resourceful Alpiew to the gambling Lady Reveller in Centlivre’s The Basset Table (1705). The paucity of recorded acting roles and their minor significance as servants might imply she was an unimportant member of the company. Yet, she is well-enough known to appear as herself in the rehearsal play, The Female Wits (performed 1696; printed 1704). Lucas plays herself greeting ‘Madam Maggot, the Poetess’ (13) to a full dress rehearsal of the ludicrous play before disappearing to drink coffee backstage. Mrs. Wellfed, a playwright, wants to see Mrs. Lucas’ new dance and summons her, ‘She is lean enough without drinking Coffee’ (17). When the grandee patron Praiseall will not be denied a dance, Mrs. Lucas cheerfully responds ‘I don’t intend you shall; I love to Dance, as well as you do to see me.’ Kathryn Lowerre has identified the dance that Praiseall references and Lucas performs, as her signature song, By Moonlight on the Green. This gives us some sense of Lucas’s performance style. In it, a young woman exhausts her suitor with her ‘dancing’: Oh how she trypt it, Skypt it, leapt it, Whiskt it, friskt it, Whirld it, twirled it, Swimming, Springing, Starting; So quick the tune to Nick, With a heave, and a toss, and Jerk at Parting. (cited Lowerre 2016, 167)

Indeed, it was as a comic dancer and singer that Lucas was valuable to the company, with songs like ‘Lord, what’s come to my mother’ (1701), as well as more romantic duets. She seems to have been able to command benefit performances: in 1702, her benefit falls late in the season on August 18, so she chooses Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, a doubly significant reference since the fair was about to take place but plays had been banned as part of it for the last three years. Her flexibility in performance skills—today such a combination is called the ‘triple threat’—helps us to remember that theatre-making during the era always involved a complex blend of performance elements. While minor actresses might not attract cultural cachet and cultural capital as exponents of the ‘Art’ of acting, they were popular, wellknown and successful members of the performance companies.

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     195

The porous relationship between popular, unlicensed and patent stages in London offered a route to that potentially most lucrative realm, shareholding, with its promise of increased financial security and access to managerial power, and the one area where even leading actresses like Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, Anne Oldfield and Susannah Cibber were thwarted in their aspirations. Barry and Bracegirdle may have been shareholders for a period in the breakaway Actors’ Company in 1695 (Milhous and Hume 1988, 267). Anne Oldfield was approached to become a shareholder in the Drury Lane company in 1711 but was pipped by Thomas Doggett, and Susannah Cibber’s aim to share with Garrick in the 1740s was rejected (Brooks 2015, 31). However, some actresses did achieve a form of management: Mrs. Betterton drew a salary for training the younger performers and Elizabeth Barry’s role in the breakaway company of 1695 included shouldering responsibility for finding new plays (Milhous 1979, 112). There were more opportunities for actress-managers beyond the patent houses. Elizabeth Leigh, an actress in the King’s Company, may be the same Elizabeth Leigh who worked with her mother Mrs. Anne Mynns to manage a touring company and booth at Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs. Leigh had had a run-in with playwright Elkannah Settle over his non-completion on a contract to finish a play for which she had ‘designed the Subject and story of a Tragedy or Stage Play, and […] composed and reduced part of the Story into writing’ (Hotson 1928, 275). For Kewes (1998, 141), this failed collaboration was a marker of a growing sense over the period about the need to acknowledge collaborative authorship. Matters appear to have been resolved, for Elkannah Settle ‘received an annual salary from Mrs Mynns and her daughter Mrs Leigh, for writing Drolls for Bartholomew and Southwark Fair’ (Rosenfeld 1960, 20). The easy and regular exchange of performers and materials across fairground booth stages and main stages continued through the early eighteenth century. Hannah Lee, possibly a sister of Elizabeth, inherited this highly successful touring company and booth business and petitioned Parliament in 1735 against Barnard’s Playhouse Bill, which proposed a radical restriction on playing places. Lee defends the cultural value of her commodious booth stages, ‘her and her late Mother’s Companies have always been Nurseries for the greatest Performers that ever acted on the British Stage, particularly the celebrated Mr Powell and Mr Booth, as well as great Numbers of the present Actors at the Theatres of Drury Lane and Covent Garden’ (Rosenfeld 1960, 96). Anne Wohlcke (2014, 159) notes that Hannah Lee was also specifically targeted by the 1735 London Alderman’s order against ‘nuisance’ booths. Our histories have tended to separate the main stage drama from

196     Jane Milling

that of popular stages, echoing the sense of condescension from the poetic and literary community of the day and the anxieties of local authorities about accessible performance addressed to large gatherings of non-elite audiences. Hannah Lee’s eloquent defence of her booth stages claims an intimate and productive relationship for actors and actresses between the two cultural realms. While the Playhouse Bill did not come to pass, the 1737 Licensing Act, which aimed at having a direct impact on this popular theatrical material, did. Actress, author and entrepreneur Charlotte Charke, who had found her familial connections to her brother-manager Theophilus Cibber a mixed blessing, set up a puppet theatre ‘over the Tennis-Court in James Street, which is licensed … the only one in this Kingdom’ (cited in Baruth 1998, 32). Charke had been a leading actress in the politically active work of Henry Fielding at the Little Theatre Haymarket, in his metatheatrical farces that hit at both the theatrical tyranny of the patent house management and Robert Walpole’s tyranny as leading minister of the controlling court party in parliament. Charke’s development of the puppet show was no less politically charged, and the performances she staged there both drew attention to the partisan politics of the cultural upheaval of the Licensing Act and parodied the monopolising instincts of the managers of the patent companies.

Women Playing in the Regions The rise of regularised companies on regional touring circuits offered a wider range of actresses greater opportunities for performance across the nation than the London patent houses could do. Although there were usually, as with the London companies, fewer requirements for actresses than actors on the circuits and in strolling companies, many women were able to make some kind of a living from performing. The inconveniences of strolling were well conveyed by picaresque memoirs, but in the provinces, roles ‘owned’ by London stars became available for regional actresses. As a member of the putative Duchess of Portsmouth’s players, Mrs. Coysh played roles that were not available to her in London, including Adriana in The Comedy of Errors (1671–1672) and The Indian Emperor (1674). We only have any record of her playing in the patent King’s Company for 1674–1675. Sybil Rosenfeld (1970, 5) distinguishes three kinds of regional playing: regular licensed circuit companies headquartered in a leading city, smaller troupes of ‘strollers’ serving small towns, and the summer vacation

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     197

companies who travelled out from London theatres. The distinction between the kinds of companies is not always plain, in part because the narratives of strolling life published in the later decades of the eighteenth century as the regional performance industry grew, emphasise the difficulties and discomforts of the trade, homogenising a more complex picture of cultural activity outside London. These narratives tend to pit the comforts, audience sophistication and acting prowess of London patent companies against the tawdry conditions, naïve audiences and unprofessional or inadequate acting of all country strollers. Thomas Mozeen in Young Scarron (1752), one of the earliest novelised narratives of strolling, has the unfortunate Will Loveplay complain bitterly about being forced to tour in the vacation to make up his salary. Dripping with condescension, Will counterpoints the London actor to the country one, pitting the natural genius of the metropolitan figure against the stroller’s hard-won labour: The Principals of the Theatres in London were generally made Actors by their own Genius: To prove this true, many have left better Professions, where they had great Prospects of Success, for the Stage, drawn to it merely by Inclination. On the contrary, the Strolling-Companies are commonly a Set of undutiful Prentices, idle Artificers, and Boys run mad with reading what they don’t understand … notwithstanding, some of these, after long Practice, and great Hardships in the Country, get into the Theatres, and prove useful (tho’ not excellent) Performers: For they all bring home a Whine of their Education and ’tis as easy to know a Country-Actor from a Town one, as ’tis a French from an English Man. (63)

Perhaps because of the long stints of travelling, often walking between performances, and the need for company members to perform all the backstage activities of mounting the show, as well as performing on the stage, the labour of theatre-making is more explicit in the stroller’s life and the art of acting less prominent. Mozeen’s memoir seems to draw a categorical distinction between metropolitan and country personnel, but in fact there was much more interchange between the realms. Summer playing in the regions did not begin as the result of a centripetal cultural force of London companies diffusing their illustrious genius outwards to the provinces. As William Burling (2000) argues, it was a commercial mechanism for removing the young actors or hirelings from the licensed company’s books in the summer lull and allowing them to try out new roles. These early young groups did not venture far. A more significant kind of summer touring extracted the stars of the London patent houses in

198     Jane Milling

their well-known roles to key fashionable resorts, often those within a day’s ride of London—to the spa at Bath, after Queen Anne started taking the waters there in 1702, to Richmond, to Greenwich or to Windsor following the royal household and fashionable aristocracy. The Drury Lane company decamped to Bath in 1703, following the gentry, where the regional stage offered some new opportunities for actresses. Anne Oldfield took on the role of Leonora in Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice from Susanna Verbruggen who was too ill to travel, playing opposite Colley Cibber. Cibber (1740, 176) considered her Bath season a turning point in Oldfield’s career, after a lacklustre word rehearsal (‘I seem’d careless … she mutter’d out her Words in a sort of mifty manner at my low Opinion of her’) was transformed into a performance triumph, ‘so forward, and sudden a Step into Nature, I had never seen; what made her Performance more valuable was, that I knew all proceeded from her own Understanding, untaught and unassisted by any one more experience’d Actor’. In 1728, Gay’s Beggar’s Opera was staged at Bath to packed houses and was taken on for private performances in noble houses. Gay himself ‘hath taken so much pains to instruct them’ that the company ‘not only gain’d a great deal of Money, but an universal Reputation’ (cited in Rosenfeld 1970, 174–75). The relationships between regional theatre circuits and the London stages were predominantly formulated as a hierarchy of playing places. Before the formal establishment of licensed provincial buildings, regional playing spaces tended to be either fairly solid booth stages or ‘put to use’ venues such as barns or the upper room in a public house, where the social mixing that accompanied such interim theatres allowed for less maintenance of social distinction amongst country audiences. This was quite different from the development of civic distinction and taste demonstrated by those buildings erected as provincial Theatre Royals from the late 1760s, which were established ‘as sites of urban citizenship and polite sociability’ and a ‘civic prophylactic’ against the spread of Methodism, as Jane Moody (2007, 24) observes. These permanent civic theatre buildings were built in the chief town in the district that had been the headquarters of regular county touring circuits of earlier provincial playing (Rosenfeld 1970, 2). Actresses clearly felt a significant distinction in cultural cachet between these different spaces, despite the noble patron who notionally sheltered the regional touring companies from prosecution. Yet these established regional playing troupes could offer a distinctive kind of repertoire. Susanna Carrol, later Centlivre, presents her Love at a Venture (1706) at Bath in Martin Power’s company, known as the Duke of Grafton’s, and writes a prologue apologising for ‘strolling with her Brat a hundred Miles’ to the baths. Carrol may well have been acting with Power’s

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     199

company, because her biography has her in a breeches role as Alexander the Great before the Royal household in Windsor that year (Rosenfeld 1970, 45). There was of course another kind of strolling, one closer to the accusations of vagabondage and vagrancy that haunted the unlicensed players at the mercy of local magistrates. These strollers were part of regular annual circuits, but visited much smaller settlements. Even the adventurous Charlotte Charke (1755, 187) snarls ‘I think going a Strolling is engaging in a little, dirty kind of War in which I have been obliged to fight so many battles … I am not only sick, but heartily ashamed of it, as I have had nine Years Experience of its being a very contemptible Life’. Alongside the inconveniences of ad hoc playing places, Charke’s Narrative is scathing about rustic audiences, whose rowdy enthusiasm or sleepy indifference suggests that they have neither acquired the mores of theatre-going nor been disciplined within the etiquette of a patron’s household behaviour. More than that, she finds it very difficult to make a living from the really small-scale tour—the nadir of Charke’s touring life is her engagement at Cullompton near Tiverton, where despite three performances a week the audience ‘never amounted to more than Twenty Shillings at the fullest House’ (Charke 1755, 199) and after charges and maintenance for the hungry players including herself, Mrs. Brown her companion and her daughter, there is little to show for their labour. Gender plays a role in these picaresque strolling narratives—Charke and Mrs. Brown walk the forty miles from Wiltshire to their next engagement in Hampshire, but ‘as there are no Houses over that long solitary Walk allowed to receive Travellers’, they are forced to walk twenty miles out of their way through all the villages (Charke 1755, 261; Baruth 1998, 44). In the theatrical depiction of strolling, the moral threat to young women is symbolically represented. John Breval’s comic afterpiece The Strolers (1723) draws on the dramaturgical structure of Brome’s Jovial Crew, in which the young girls of a gentry household run away to perform as beggars and follow their inclinations in love. In The Strolers, the play within a play, staged at the local inn, facilitates the Justice’s daughter’s elopement with the leading man. Cast in a non-speaking role in the play, Fidelia bolts. Yet over the century, regional playing came to represent a space of surprising freedom and cultural and economic power for actresses. Perhaps the ultimate exemplar of an actress who enjoyed the provincial circuits as a space of creative freedom was Sarah Siddons. Jane Moody demonstrated that Siddons’ early tours with Roger and Sarah Kemble’s company in the provinces forged the reputation which led Garrick to stalk her at Worcester and

200     Jane Milling

Liverpool in July 1775. Siddons had crafted a very wide range of roles on provincial stages including playing Hamlet, and Bate confirmed to Garrick that Siddons had acquired ‘no strolling habits, w[hich] have so often been the tone of many a theatrical genius’ and she was elevated to Drury Lane in December 1775 (cited in Moody 2007, 26). As Helen Brooks’ work shows, by the end of the eighteenth century leading actresses toured regularly and extensively. Dora Jordan’s letters from regular summer tours to Dublin, York, Edinburgh, Exeter, Bath and Worcester were explicit about the financial value of touring: ‘I have it in my power to make more money in four months, than I should in as many years, were I to again engage in London’ (cited in Brooks 2015, 35). Brooks notes that Jordan used the financial inducements of provincial engagements to argue for a better settlement at Drury Lane. The idea that the provincial theatres might be considered as a cultural sector in counterpoint to the London stage was one that had developed over the century. Jacky Bratton points out that by the end of the eighteenth century theatre memorialists like James Boaden construed provincial touring as traditional dependency on provincial elites, as opposed to the modernised free trade of the London theatres where a performer ‘took his talent, as everything else is taken, to an open market, where the demand for the supply would always produce its exact value’ (cited in Bratton 2003, 122). Bratton links this emergent idea of the cultural marketplace, with a diverse audience as the drama’s patrons, as part of a Radical agenda that counterpointed the modernity of free trade against aristocratic patronage. Kathleen Wilson (1995) has shown that many provincial newspapers, regional Radical Wilkite groups and provincial theatres too came to be seen as sites of opposition politics: opposed to aristocratic privilege, debauchery and corruption, and she suggests that by the end of the eighteenth century the provinces were seen as the forge of a manly, patriotic vigour, somewhere that women too might participate with equally manly vigour. The rising significance of theatre as a cultural force across England by the middle of the eighteenth century was underpinned by commercial interests and the legwork of all those strollers, whose ‘little, dirty kind of War’ eventually won cultural approval for the theatre. By examining the working lives of the range of actresses, not just those celebrated in their day or most obvious in our histories, we can chart the exchange and integration of popular and provincial stages into the complex cultural landscape. The arrival of the actress had prompted generic innovation, made possible the seamless absorption of an adapted European repertoire and encouraged kinds of dramatic writing specifically for actresses, both celebrated and minor figures.

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     201

The few actresses who were enabled to mix with their social betters and earn large sums have tended to become our exemplars of aesthetic achievement in the art of acting. Yet the labour of the less-well-known yet multi-skilled performers, at home on booth stages and in patent houses, had an artistry equally as important in establishing accessible entertainment that was part of the claim made for the democratic value of the theatrical institution itself and the emerging revaluation of theatrical culture across England.

Bibliography Anon. [‘F. M.’]. 1704. The Female Wits. London: William Turner, William Davis, Bernard Lintott and Thomas Brown. Anon. [‘T. P.’]. 1663. A Witty Combat: Or, The Female Victor as It Was Acted by Persons of Quality in Whitson-Week with Great Applause. London: Thomas Roberts. Baker, Thomas. 1706. Hampstead Heath. London: Bernard Lintott. Baruth, Philip. 1998. ‘Who Is Charlotte Charke?’. In Introducing Charlotte Charke, edited by Philip Baruth, 9–64. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bratton, Jacky. 2003. New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, Helen. 2014. ‘Theorizing the Woman Performer’. In The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832, edited by Julia Swindells and David Francis Taylor, 551–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brooks, Helen. 2015. Actresses, Gender and the Eighteenth-Century Stage. London: Palgrave. Brown, Pamela Allen. 2016. ‘The Travelling Diva and Generic Innovation’. Renaissance Drama 44, no. 2: 249–67. Burling, William J. 2000. Summer Theatre in London 1661–1820 and the Rise of the Haymarket Theatre. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Chalmers, Hero. 1992. ‘“The Person I Am, or What They Made Me to Be”: The Construction of the Feminine Subject in the Autobiographies of Mary Carleton.’ In Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, edited by Diane Purkiss and Clare Brant, 163–92. London: Routledge. Charke, Charlotte. 1755. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke. London: W. Reeve and E. Cook. Cibber, Colley. 1705. The Careless Husband. London: W. Davis. Cibber, Colley. 1740. An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber. London: Printed by John Watts. Diamond, Elin. 1997. Unmaking Mimesis. Abingdon: Routledge. Dennis, John. 1943. ‘The Causes of the Decay and Defects of Dramatick Poetry, and of the Degeneracy of the Publick Taste (1725)’. In The Critical Works of

202     Jane Milling

John Dennis, edited by Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols., vol. 2, 275–99. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Engel, Laura. 2011. Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actress and Strategies for Image Making. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Farquhar, George. 1706. The Recruiting Officer. London: Bernard Lintott. Fawcett, Julia H. 2016. Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy 1696– 1801. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Gethner, Perry, and Melinda Gough. 2016. ‘The Advent of Women Players and Playwrights in Early Modern France’. Renaissance Drama 44, no. 2: 217–32. Green, Susan. 1993. ‘Semiotic Modalities of Female Bodies in Aphra Behn’s The Dutch Lover  ’. In Rereading Aphra Behn, edited by Heidi Hutner, 121–50. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hamilton, Kate. 2013. ‘The Famous Mrs Barry: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity’. Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 42: 291–320. Hotson, Leslie. 1928. The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Howe, Elizabeth. 1992. The First English Actresses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, Robert D., and Judith Milhous. 2001. The London Stage 1660–1800: A New Version of Part 2, 1700–1729. Accessed June 1, 2018. http://www.personal.psu. edu/hb1/London%20Stage%202001/lond1705.pdf. Joncus, Berta. 2011. ‘“In Wit Superior, as in Fighting”: Kitty Clive and the Conquest of a Rival Queen’. Huntington Library Quarterly 74, no. 1: 23–42. Joncus, Berta, and Jeremy Barlow, eds. 2011. The Stage’s Glory: John Rich (1692– 1761). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Katritzky, M. A. 2007. Women, Medicine and Theatre 1500–1750: Literary Mountebanks and Performing Quacks. Abingdon: Routledge. Kewes, Pauline. 1998. Authorship and Appropriation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowenthal, Cynthia. 2003. Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Lowerre, Kathryn. 2016. Music and Musicians on the London Stage, 1695–1705, 2nd edition. Abingdon: Routledge. Marsden, Jean I. 2006. Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality and the English Stage 1660– 1720. Cornell: Cornell University Press. Martin, Susan M. 2008. ‘Actresses on the London Stage: A Prosopographical Study’. PhD Diss., Pennsylvania State University. Milhous, Judith. 1979. Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields 1695–1708. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume. 1983. ‘Attribution Problems in English Drama, 1660–1700’. Harvard Library Bulletin 31: 5–39. Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume. 1988. ‘New Documents About the London Theatre 1685–1711’. Harvard Library Bulletin 36, no. 3: 248–74.

9  Women Performers on English Stages 1660–1740     203

Moody, Jane. 2007. ‘Dictating to the Empire: Performance and Theatrical Geography in Eighteenth Century Britain’. In The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre 1730–1830, edited by Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn, 21–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moody, Jane, and Mary Luckhurst, eds. 2005. Theatre and Celebrity in Britain 1660–2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Mozeen, Thomas. 1752. Young Scarron. London: T. Tyre and W. Reeve. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the EighteenthCentury British Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. O’Brien, John. 2004. Harlequin Britain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Payne, Deborah. 1995. ‘Rarefied Object or Emergent Professional? Retheorizing the Restoration Actress’. In Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theater, edited by J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne, 13–38. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Payne Fisk, Deborah. 2001. ‘The Restoration Actress’. In A Companion to Restoration Drama, edited by Susan J. Owen, 69–91. Oxford: Blackwell. Pullen, Kirsten. 2005. Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roach, Joseph. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Roberts, David. 2010. Thomas Betterton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenfeld, Sybil. 1960. Theatre of the London Fairs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenfeld, Sybil. 1970. Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660–1765. New York: Octagon Books. Sanz Ayán, Carmen. 2015. ‘More Than Faded Beauties: Women Theatre Managers of Early Modern Spain’. Early Modern Women 10: 114–21. Shapiro, Michael. 1999. ‘The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensiveness?’. In Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, edited by Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, 177–217. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Southerne, Thomas. 1691. Sir Anthony Love: Or, The Rambling Lady. London: Joseph Fox and Abel Roper. Steele, Richard. 1705. The Tender Husband. London: Jacob Tonson. Straub, Kristina. 1992. Sexual Suspects. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Styan, J. L. 1996. The English Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomlinson, Sophie 2015. ‘The Actress and Baroque Aesthetic Effects’. Shakespeare Bulletin 33, no. 1: 67–82. van Elk, Martine. 2017. ‘“Before She Ends Up in a Brothel”: Public Femininity and the First Actresses in England and the Low Countries’. Early Modern Low Countries 1: 30–50. Van Lennep, William, Emmet Avery, and Arthur Scouten, eds. 1965. The London Stage 1660–1800: Part 1: 1660–1700. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

204     Jane Milling

Wahrman, Dror. 2004. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wallace, Beth Kowaleski. 2000. ‘Reading the Surfaces of Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband ’. Studies in English Literature 40, no. 3: 473–48. Walthaus, Rina, and Marguérite Corporaal. 2008. ‘Introduction’. In Heroines of the Golden Stage: Women and Drama in Spain and England, 1500–1700, edited by Rina Walthaus and Marguérite Corporaal, 1–14. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger. Wanko, Cheryl. 2003. Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth Century Britain. Lubbock: Texas Technical University Press. Wilson, John Harold. 1958. All the King’s Ladies: Actresses of the Restoration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilson, Kathleen. 1995. ‘Citizenship, Empire and Modernity in the English Provinces 1720–1790’. Eighteenth Century Studies 29, no. 1: 69–96. Wohlcke, Anne. 2014. The Perpetual Fair: Gender, Disorder and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

10 Eighteenth-Century English Actresses: From Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication Laura J. Rosenthal

Early in Frances Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina, a novel about a girl from the country learning to navigate London, the eponymous heroine attends a revival of William Congreve’s 1695 comedy Love for Love and concludes that: tho’ it is fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope I shall never see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate, – to use the softest word I can, – that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of countenance. (2002, 78)

The notorious seduction scene in Act 2 between the naïve Miss Prue and the urbane Tattle distresses Evelina, who is further disturbed by the foppish Lovel’s hint at a parallel between Miss Prue’s predicament as a country girl in the city and her own situation (Evans 2011, 161–62). In the same decade that Evelina watched Love for Love, non-fictional audiences could have seen the opening of several different plays that recycled the comedy of the rustic girl facing urbanity: Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773), in which the sophisticated heroine performs the role of a country girl; Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777), in which Sir Peter Teazle marries a country girl who ends up embracing city life; and Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), in which the heroine masters

Laura J. Rosenthal (*)  Department of English, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_10

205

206     Laura J. Rosenthal

dual performances of, alternately, a stunningly naïve country bumpkin and a cosmopolitan demi-rep. All of these plays point to a widespread fascination with the process of cosmopolitanisation, and they do this through the figure of the rustic girl and the actresses who played her. In this essay, I will suggest that this popular stage narrative of the country girl learning city ways highlights the physical presence of the actress herself in that, starting in the Restoration, this journey became not only a popular trope in comedy, but the implied story of the actress herself. Audiences in the eighteenth century applauded women’s performances and actresses, as Felicity Nussbaum (2010, 1–30) has recently shown, became admired celebrities. The novelty of the actress, however, had not entirely worn off. Before the Interregnum, female roles on the public stage had been played by young men. Parliament officially closed the theatres from 1642 to 1660. In 1656, however, William Davenant obtained permission to stage the operatic play The Siege of Rhodes in which one Mrs. Coleman performed the role of Ianthe. Later in 1660, when Charles II reopened the theatres, Margaret Hughes played the role of Desdemona in a production of Othello for the King’s Company (Howe 1992, 19). King Charles II, who had spent time during his exile in countries that welcomed professional actresses on stage, decreed that women should play women’s roles in England as well. Yet the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy after the Interregnum marked a significant change in theatrical practice in which women playing women’s parts became the norm rather than the exception. This change, associated with the restored monarch’s cosmopolitanism, associated actresses themselves with narratives of transformation from provincial limits to urban sophistication. Congreve’s popular version of this story in Love for Love echoes, as we will see, William Wycherley’s notorious 1675 comedy about a rustic who must learn city ways in The Country Wife. It has become a critical commonplace recently to read femininity as a performance, but playwrights from the Restoration and throughout the eighteenth century understood this with great immediacy: Congreve found scandalous comedy in the strategic social performances of women; Cowley and Goldsmith exploit the assumption of femininity as a performance through comic reversals in which a sophisticated lady finds it advantageous to act the part of a rustic. But it was in the Restoration—the period to which Congreve looks back with his Miss Prue—that performance of femininity on stage first became the specific task of women. This change left a lasting mark; in Burney’s novel and in eighteenth-century theatre culture, I will suggest, the novelty of the actress became intertwined with, even iconic for, cosmopolitanisation: moving

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     207

from country to city; from naiveté to sophistication; from the local to the global. In different ways, Congreve, Burney, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and Cowley all look back to the Restoration; all of these writers tell stories about women consciously moving between the poles of rusticity and sophistication. In the Restoration and eighteenth century, these performances echoed the stillfresh moment of the invention of the professional actress. In tracing the ways in which these theatrical narratives evoke the presumed story of the actress, I will begin with Congreve’s revival of Wycherley’s country wife figure in Love for Love (1695), then turn to her reincarnation in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) and its sequel Polly (published 1729, first performed posthumously in 1777), and end with a return to Congreve—this time to his Way of the World (1700). Congreve’s Love for Love remained popular through the entire eighteenth century: audiences were attracted by the comically naïve Miss Prue and the actresses who played her. In Evelina, the foppish Lovel celebrates Miss Prue as ‘the first character in this piece’ (2002, 81). Burney exposes Lovel’s undeveloped literary-critical abilities with this remark, and yet as much as the sophisticated Angelica comes closer to the feminine ideal, Miss Prue became for many the play’s primary attraction. When Evelina ‘saw’ Love for Love, the role would have been played by the star actress Frances Abington, who became identified with the part: when Joshua Reynolds painted Abington, he captured her as Miss Prue, looking naïve, curious, and desiring (see Fig. 10.1). This painting, as James Evans (2011, 162–64) argues, merges the actress with the role. Reynolds suggests, according to Martin Postle, ‘that like Miss Prue, Miss Abington is a woman with an appetite for sensual pleasure, and that her success in the role was allied with her own personality’ (quoted in Evans 2011, 164). Part of the well-known mythology around Abington was her rise to stardom from humble origins as the daughter of a cobbler (Evans 2011, 163). Thus, the inside joke goes, the character of Miss Prue, who comically learns the ways of urban sophistication, parallels the life of the actress who portrayed her: both actress and character transform in public from rustic girlhood to urban cosmopolitanism. This pairing echoes Congreve’s inspiration for Miss Prue in Margery Pinchwife, created on stage by Elizabeth Boutell, one of the first actresses of the Restoration, who fascinated audiences with her (performance of ) raw sensuality. The character of Miss Prue thus revives a Restoration stage ‘type’: the naïve country girl with desires she does not yet realise will be considered dangerous. Her comic naiveté, however, also highlights the novelty of the

208     Laura J. Rosenthal

Fig. 10.1  Frances Abington as Miss Prue in William Congreve’s Love for Love, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1777 (©Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection)

female performer: the actress, new to the stage, and the theatricalised rustic girl, new to the city, publicly undergo a process of cosmopolitanisation. Miss Prue, with her rustic naiveté and enthusiasm for male attention, merited repetition on stage throughout the century and appears as a meaningful figure in Burney’s novel; she and other such characters helped the figure of the actress appear persistently novel. Congreve’s Miss Prue revisits the Restoration reinvention of theatre by echoing Wycherley’s Margery Pinchwife from The Country Wife. When Tattle tries to seduce Miss Prue, he explains the difference between country manners and London manners, which, as The Country Wife had earlier made clear, means learning how to lie—or, we might say, learning to perform. Tattle explains to Miss Prue that she must, like a London lady, pretend not to like him:

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     209

Miss Prue: Why, must I tell a Lie then? Tattle: Yes, if you would be well-bred. All well-bred Persons Lie—Besides, you are a Woman, you must never speak what you think: Your words must contradict your thoughts; but your Actions may contradict your words. So, when I ask you, if you can Love me, you must say no, but you must Love me too—If I tell you you are Handsome, you must deny it, and say I flatter you—But you must think your self more Charming than I speak you:—And like me, for the Beauty which I say you have, as much as if I had it my self—If I ask you to Kiss me, you must be angry, but you must not refuse me. If I ask you for more, you must be more angry,— but more complying; and as soon as ever I make you say you’l cry out, you must be sure to hold your Tongue. Miss Prue: Lord, I swear this is pure,—I like it better than our old fashion’d Country way of speaking ones mind;—and must not you lie too? Tattle: Hum—Yes—But you must believe I speak Truth. Miss Prue: O Gemini! well, I always had a great mind to tell Lies— but they frighted me, and said it was a sin. (Love for Love, 2.11.25–47)

In this comic epitome of the subplot, Tattle identifies performance as the condition of urban femininity. Similarly in The Country Wife, the fate of many of the characters depends on Margery learning to lie like a London lady. At the end of this play, Margery must join the choir of sophisticated ladies and refrain from defending Horner’s sexual prowess to keep up the myth of his impotence and thus of their virtue. In both plays, country girls say what they feel and describe what they see, but city women strategically reshape themselves and filter information for public presentation. Margery receives her first lesson in London refinement at the theatre: Alithea: But how did you like the play? Mrs. Pinchwife: Indeed I was a-weary of the play, but I like hugeously the actors! They were the goodliest, properest men, sister. Alithea: Oh, but you must not like the actors, sister. (2.1.19–23)

In this early scene, Alithea tries to train Margery not to blurt out her feelings. But Margery’s fascination with these attractive actors sparks her curiosity and desire: she pines for more of London, more theatre, and more male eye candy. When she finally persuades Mr. Pinchwife to take her to the New Exchange for more London ‘sights’, she heads to a book vendor and his stack of plays, attempting to purchase Tarugo’s  Wiles by Thomas St. Serfe—a sign of her poor taste and a nod to that play’s central trickster figure, who Horner resembles—and Sir Robert Stapylton’s The Slighted Maid (3.2.144).

210     Laura J. Rosenthal

In the latter play, as savvy theatre fans would remember, the eponymous heroine spends the play dressed as her own brother; when Margery buys the plays, she is wearing her brother’s suit at the request of Mr. Pinchwife to shield her from gazing males—a strategy that backfires. It is the theatre itself that initially expands Margery’s desires and ultimately, for better or worse, her horizons. While the London ladies in the play have settled comfortably into a double life of exterior virtue and secret pleasure, Margery’s story comically explores the process of coming to an appreciation of both theatre and theatricality. Many of Margery’s funniest lines come from her initially unfiltered observations before she has learned the art of performance. Even Mr. Pinchwife admits that if she freely declares her attractions to the actors, she cannot be plotting. She later expects Horner to marry her; every day, she reports, she sees women in London leaving their husbands and choosing new ones. Margery eventually acquires acting skills. When her husband demands that she write a letter rejecting Horner, she wonders ‘Can one have no shift?’; then, ‘Ah, a London woman would have had a hundred presently’ (4.2.145). Trying out this urban performance style, Margery writes a second letter when Mr. Pinchwife briefly leaves the room and then handily switches them. Switching letters proves good practice for switching herself: with the help of the servant Lucy, she dresses as Alithea and in this disguise gets delivered by her husband into Horner’s arms. The climax of the play hangs on Margery’s willingness to bear (false) witness to Horner’s impotence. As we saw in the Miss Prue/Frances Abington pairing, metatheatrical self-consciousness about the actress shapes Margery’s role throughout the play. Margery’s arrival at the New Exchange in her brother’s suit theatricalises the novelty of the actress, looping back to a time in living memory when female roles would have been played by boys. Thus, her transvestism conjures not just the boy actor, but the girl actor as well—and one girl actor in particular. Elizabeth Boutell, who created the role of Margery and for whom the part may have been written, played more transvestite roles than any other actress of her time (Pullen 2005, 46). In Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), Boutell spent the entire performance in breeches in the part of Fidelia. I cannot agree with Pullen, however, that Margery’s cross-dressing in The Country Wife was ‘gratuitous’, for it highlights the embodied presence of the actress and this major change in Restoration theatricality inspired by the monarch’s travels abroad. Margery’s appearance dressed in her brother’s suit reminded audiences of the recent practice of men playing all of the female roles and thus the novelty of women performing; it offers a metatheatrical moment proposing a parallel between the character learning

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     211

the art of performance and the women in the early Restoration who took the opportunity to do the same. As a woman rumoured to be both petulant and a whore (although most likely, as Pullen [2005, 42–45] argues, actually neither—Boutell enjoyed a successful career and a financially advantageous marriage) and one who specialised in cross-dressing roles, Betty Boutell is the quintessential early actress, the woman who had to learn theatricality from scratch, and whose boyish presence embodied one crucial aspect of the Restoration stage. Thus, while an actress on the eighteenth-century stages served as kinetic memory of the Restoration moment in which her profession began, Margery Pinchwife, as created by Betty Boutell, retained a distinctive connection to this originary moment. The innocence-to-experience narrative embodied by both Boutell and Margery appears repeatedly, as we will see, on the eighteenth-century stage, transporting audiences briefly back to the originating moment of a new kind of theatre marked by the female body. The performance of Congreve’s Miss Prue embeds a finely layered past that bears with it the weight of its original context. In the eighteenth century, audiences had not yet forgotten that actresses performed in part as a result of the exiled monarch’s European sojourn and the childhood influences of his French Catholic mother, Henrietta Maria, who loved theatre and had shocked many by not merely dancing in court masques but also organising and performing in plays at court. [For further discussion of Henrietta Maria’s involvement with performance, see pp. 143–147 above, in Chapter 7, by Catherine Clifford.] Thus, when Congreve presents Miss Prue, the country girl who must learn to lie, he reincarnates not just Margery Pinchwife, but the quintessential Restoration performances of Betty Boutell and the revived Restoration theatre with its central innovation of the female performer. In watching Frances Abington in the role of Miss Prue, Evelina blushes not just at the predicament of a rustic girl’s high potential for error, but also at the urban challenge of learning to behave in ways contrary to impulse. The scene at the theatre, disconcertingly, reminds Burney’s readers that there are women who do this for a living. Evelina blushes, we might say, at the Restoration’s cosmopolitan vision that embraced the actress. The actress thus bears with her the problem of Restoration cosmopolitanism itself: its corrupting influence, to be sure, but also its risky pleasures, its brutal injustices, and its relentless fascination with the ways of the world. Burney’s fascination with the hazards of female performance is well documented and appears even more powerfully in her later novel, The Wanderer (1814). Just as Betty Boutell created the role of Margery Pinchwife and became indelibly linked to her, so Lavinia Beswick created Polly Peachum, who

212     Laura J. Rosenthal

conjured the ghosts of Margery and Miss Prue. Beswick’s anonymous biographer (1728, 1, 41–42) attributes the extraordinary success of The Beggar’s Opera in large part to this talented performer. Rarely has a role been so conflated with a performer. This biography capitalises on the success of The Beggar’s Opera, making this conflation obvious in its title: The Life of Lavinia Beswick, alias Fenton, alias Polly Peachum. Throughout, this biography refers to the subject as simply ‘Polly Peachum’. As Cheryl Wanko (2003, 76) observes, this narrative, like so many of the early biographies of these first actresses, emphasises the heroine’s erotic adventures rather than fine points of performance. To be sure, actress biographies clearly exploit the sexuality of their subject; they are, however, also narratives of sophistication, in both the eighteenth-century sense of adulteration and the more modern sense of a welcome complexity. Like so many similar biographies, The Life of Lavinia Beswick begins with the heroine’s loss of virginity and sexual escapades, as if these are necessary steps to prepare for a career on stage. Perhaps the most memorable conflation of sexual and theatrical initiation is the oft-repeated story of Elizabeth Barry, who failed miserably at her first dramatic attempts. According to The History of the English Stage (Betterton 1741, 15–22), the Earl of Rochester whisked her away to his estate on a bet that he could return her as an accomplished performer. Whatever went on while alone with the earl (the History remains discreet on this point), Barry returned with a newfound ability to move audiences deeply, well on her way to becoming the greatest tragedienne of the Restoration. She returned, in other words, more sophisticated. Biographies of male actors generally do not link artistic accomplishment to sexual experience. This difference evidences the sexual exploitation of the actress and the double standard in general, but there is something more. Actor biographies tell stories of triumphs and of limits, but actress biographies narrate Margery-esque experiences of personal transformation from rustic simplicity to urban sophistication. (This argument is consistent with Felicity Nussbaum’s recent insight (2010, 63–64) about the actress as an individual—that is, as creating a persona with interiority and depth at a time when flatter forms of characterisation dominated.) Like Margery, Lavinia Beswick, according to contemporary legend, embraced city life. Spurning a lucrative offer that would have required sequestration in the country, Beswick reputedly penned the following poetic rejection of a suitor and his estate: Vain Fop, to court me to a rural Life, Let him reserve that Usage for a Wife. A Mistress, sure, may claim more Liberty,

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     213

Unbound by Nature, and by Law she’s free. Monster! thy Country Cottage I disdain, In London let me live, and let me reign; The Seat of Pleasure, where we, unconfin’d Delight the Body, and improve the Mind. To Park we range, where Youth and Beauty shines, There we Intrigue and manage brave Designs. Give me a Play, a Ball, or Masquerade, And let who will enjoy your lonesome Shade, Lavinia, for more noble Ends was made. (quoted in Life of Lavinia Beswick 1728, 28)

This celebration of urban life, legend has it, opened the door to a new career: the poem happened to fall into the hands of a certain nobleman who, convinced the author had ‘Wit and Spirit’ (Life of Lavinia Beswick 1728, 29), determined to find her an opportunity to perform on stage. The poem connects ‘delight[ing] the body’ to theatrical ambition; its additional claim of the heroine ‘improv[ing] the mind’, however, indicates another important feature of the actress’s transformation. Margery Pinchwife, as we saw, becomes worldly in a way that encompasses, but is not limited to, sexual knowledge: she learns about the theatre; about ways in which cross-dressing can offer new possibilities for freedom; about how people can say one thing and mean another. Another brief account of Beswick offers a different, but equally revealing, story. The author of the broadside The Whole Life of Polly Peachum (1730?), again conflating performer and character, claims that Beswick, whose family fell on hard times, sold fruit in the street. A certain actor noticed her and invited her into the theatre to sell oranges. Once habituated to the theatre, she soon tried out her own voice and spoke some lines, winning notice and employment. Offering an entirely different narrative of Beswick’s early career, this author transforms her into a reincarnated Nell Gwynn. If the legend of orange-vending was not enough to make this connection, the author marvels poetically at Beswick’s supposed price: One hundred Guineas for a night’s Debauch Outdoes Don John or Earl of Roch.

An eighteenth-century biography of Nell Gwynn reported that she lost her virginity to the Earl of Rochester after catching his attention in the theatre where she was selling oranges (Life of Nell Gwinn, 1760, 7). Other actresses as well lived in the shadow of Nell Gwynn: the career of Ann

214     Laura J. Rosenthal

Catley according to her biographer, ‘when compared with that of the celebrated Nell Gwynn, exhibits many incidents of strong similitude’ (Ambross 1789, 52). If Betty Boutell’s fame faded with history, Nell Gwynn haunted the actress biography throughout the eighteenth century, less because of her talent (which must have been considerable, but was also rivalled by Boutell, Barry, Bracegirdle, and others) or even because of her scandalous reputation (again, rivalled by many others), but for her direct association with Charles II and thus the Restoration itself and the moment of the invention of the professional actress as part of the cosmopolitan Stuart court. Just as gossip about Lavinia Beswick in the eighteenth century compares her to Nell Gwynn and thus takes readers back to the glamorous Restoration court, so Polly Peachum’s story within The Beggar’s Opera and later in Polly also offers a Margery-esque narrative of female sophistication reminiscent of Restoration comedy. Eighteenth-century audiences could not get enough of The Beggar’s Opera; in particular, they could not get enough of Polly Peachum herself. An audience favourite in the eighteenth century, the character of Polly has proven perplexing to modern criticism (Petzold 2012, 245). She seems absurdly out of the place in the criminal underworld into which she was born. Further, if we believe in Polly’s deservedness, can we truly want to see her paired with Macheath? William Hogarth’s painting of a scene from the play (see Fig. 10.2) places Polly slightly off centre, but so luminous in white that the figure draws the spectator’s gaze. Within the painting, many pairs of eyes fix on Polly, who kneels before her father, handkerchief ready to dry her tears. Lucy also pleads, but has her back turned. While Macheath’s character echoes the Dorimants, Horners, and Willmores of the Restoration, Polly evokes the Restoration country wife in her comic naiveté. Polly’s guileless belief in Macheath’s love, in contrast to the machinations of the wily whores and the cynical Lucy, constitutes her central comic absurdity, but also her undiminished appeal to audiences. She remains, comically and improbably, unsophisticated. The performance of the country girl in The Beggar’s Opera is, like everything else in the play, cleverly askew; it is invigorated by the spectre of Restoration theatre as Polly is by that of the Restoration actress. Erin Mackie (2009, 26) has objected to the way that audiences and critics tend to forgive and even admire theatrical criminals like Macheath, who makes his living with a pistol in his hand. Historical highwaymen, she points out, brutalised their victims. Yet this affection for Macheath, evident in the play and clearly felt by audiences, I want to suggest, emerges less from his highwayman status per se, than out of the nostalgia this character produces for Restoration theatre, askew through its depiction of a criminal

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     215

Fig. 10.2  Polly Peachum pleads with her father in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (first performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728), by William Hogarth, 1731 (©Tate Britain)

underworld rather than elite society. Macheath, like the Stuart brothers but unlike their father, escapes execution and instead enjoys the attentions of the innocent Polly and a bevy of other ladies as well. Like Charles II, Macheath has babies with his mistresses, but not with his declared wife. But while Macheath offers a powerful model of masculine swagger and libertine exuberance, Polly anchors the play. Polly, like Margery, engrossed attention as the naïve outsider unable fully to understand the actions of the other characters. Polly/Lavinia Beswick attracted the largest fan base, which might seem odd given the blandness and simplicity of the character. But the play would make no sense without her. Her astonishing naiveté, rendered particularly comic by her having grown up in a family of crime, throws the corruption of the other characters into high relief. Thus, her parents can express shock at her simplicity in assuming that she will survive on ‘the industry of her husband’ and characterise her as putting on airs when she declares her desire to marry for love. Polly thus naively observes a corrupt social world, but the corrupt social world of the play is already inverted as a criminal underground, which itself satirically resembles the world of respectability. Polly’s naïve assumptions, however, do not mean that she lacks desire, which is the other scandalous aspect of the rustic girl that makes Evelina

216     Laura J. Rosenthal

blush and that Margery and Miss Prue express so unequivocally. Polly, after all, has fallen in love with a notorious highwayman, a Restoration-style rake oozing with sexual potency. Peachum and his wife play the role of traditional blocking figures, although with a dark twist. The genius of this play, then, lies partly in its extreme exaggeration of the Restoration comedy of manners: Polly, like Margery, fails to recognise sexual transgression. But while Margery does not understand that London women who live with men other than their husbands violate propriety, or that Horner also sleeps with other married ladies, Polly does not see that Macheath spends his money on whores, has married several other women, and uses Lucy strategically in the same way that he uses Polly herself. Gay’s Tory loyalties are well known; further, he clearly, as J. Douglas Canfield (1995, 320) and Clement Hawes (2005, 97) have in different ways argued, attacks emergent capitalism. Gay’s attack on capitalism, and in particular its tendency to reduce human bodies to a cash equivalent does not, however, mean that he advocates a Macheathean Stuart alternative. Macheath’s pardon, after all, mocks not only operatic style, but also the system of justice that would forgive him and restore him to his power and pleasures as a Grand Turk. The figure of Macheath in particular troubled some eighteenth-century critics of the play. To take one example: in the anonymous 1728 Thievery A-la-mode: Or, the Fatal Encouragement a young man who had recently suffered a financial setback attends a production of The Beggar’s Opera with his friends. The house is packed; one friend boasts that he had seen the play 40 times but Millefont (the young man) finds the play ‘too low to afford any Pleasure to an elegant Taste’ (12). The next day, however, he sees in a picture shop ‘Prints of Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum hanging in the Window with those of the first Quality of both Sexes in the Kingdom’ (13). At an evening gathering, he notices that every lady present has a fan or snuffbox with a picture of ‘the agreeable Highwayman and his two Doxies’ (13). Worn down by these ubiquitous representations of Macheath and Polly in high society, the young man sets up ‘for Captain Macheath’s Profession’ (16) to solve his financial troubles. After a good run (including robbery of the friend who had originally invited him to the play), he dies of a wound received in one of his adventures. In this story, the patriarchal image of the fashionable polygamous icon, etched into boxes that hold a refined version of one quintessential new-world commodity produced on slave plantations, persuades the young man to follow suit, even if the play itself disgusted him. The admiration for Macheath by the elite, linked to celebrity, luxury, and new-world profits, and not the plot of the play itself, persuades the young man to follow in his footsteps. Millefont

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     217

does not find the prospect of fencing stolen pocket watches particularly tempting; instead, elite glamour, libertinism, and luxury, underwritten by new-world goods, draw him into the criminal world. Popular culture in the eighteenth century, then, connected Macheath to the insatiability of an imperious and imperialising elite, ghosted by the libertine Stuarts. Macheath’s additional function as a political surrogate for Robert Walpole, regarded as the first British Prime Minister, supports this point as well, while it suggests Gay’s opposition to Whig power. The Restoration also haunts the character of Polly, as we have seen. This particular stage tradition of the urbanisation of country wives and rustic girls can be read as a metaphor for the nation coming upon the global scene in an historical moment associated with theatricality itself. Thus, when the theatre-mad, rustic girl Miss Kitty Sprightly in Isaac Jackman’s 1777 All the World’s a Stage extracts a promise from Sir Gilbert Pumpkin (whose ward she is) to put on a play, she chooses The Beggar’s Opera, with the role of Polly reserved for herself (Jackman 1777, 10). For Kitty, Polly embodies theatricality and, like the Miss Prue/Evelina pairing, expresses her own position as a naïve girl about to become more sophisticated. Charles Stanley, an officer in the army and nephew of Sir Gilbert, plays the role of Macheath to gain the opportunity to court Miss Kitty. (Can it really be a coincidence that Jackman names him Charles?) Sir Gilbert tries to stop the play, partly because ‘a red coat may spoil my project of marrying her myself ’ (11), acknowledging the unstoppable appeal of this young man, especially as Macheath. Sir Gilbert warns Charles about Kitty: ‘she’s always imagining herself to be either Helen, Cleopatra, Polly Peachum, or some other female of antiquity, that made a noise in the world’ (11). Like another theatrical red coat—Captain Clerimont in Richard Steele’s The Tender Husband (1705)— Charles wins Kitty by indulging her fantasies. In Steele’s Tender Husband, Biddy Tipkin has read too many romances, fancies herself a heroine (she demands to be called Parthenessa), and only responds to courtship in the style of romance heroines: in Jackman’s updated theatrical version, the girl imagines herself as Polly Peachum. Like Miss Prue and Margery, Kitty blurts out scandalous information without any sense of its impropriety. Her vocabulary is a bit rustic: she wants to allow the servants to have their ‘belly full of playing’ (17), the same phrase that Margery uses to describe her own enthusiasm for London (she has not yet had her ‘bellyfull of sights’ (3.2.154)). When Sir Gilbert allows Charles to lead Kitty out, he declares: ‘Fear not my government’; to which Kitty responds: ‘That’s what the black man says in the play’ (18), declaring, in an aside, her great pleasure at his impersonation of Othello. All the World’s a Stage, then, presents parallels

218     Laura J. Rosenthal

between three love plots: Charles and Kitty; Macheath and Polly; Othello and Desdemona—with the first pair a farcical version of the other two romances between an innocent girl and a darkly compelling man. Gay’s sequel Polly, as we will see, literally turns Macheath black, but this exchange suggests that audiences may already have been making this connection in The Beggar’s Opera. The play hints at the rustic heroine’s attraction to dark men when she expresses her great pleasure in acting out scenes from Othello with the servant Cymon. Kitty proudly reports that she told Cymon ‘to go into the barn, and get by heart the speech, where the blackamoor smothers his wife, and I had not been in bed ten minutes, when he came into the room, and repeated every word of it’ (23). This intimacy with a servant in ‘blackface’ shocks Charles, but Kitty continues blithely: Cymon looked ‘charmingly frightful’. ‘He laid down the candle, and came up to the bed-side, and said—“one kiss and then”’ (23). ‘What then?’ Charles nervously asks. Kitty, in her Margery/Miss Prue-esque naiveté, takes his question as an unfortunate admission that he doesn’t remember the end of the play. A black mark on her cheek left by Cymon/Othello’s kiss betrays her impropriety. But just as Mr. Pinchwife concludes that Margery would only express her appreciation of the male players out of ignorance, so Charles concludes that Kitty exposes only her simplicity. Jackman adjusts the romance-mad girl from Steele into the theatre-mad Kitty: play-acting, like romance, both stereotyped and empowered women. All the World’s a Stage, as the title suggests, blurs on-stage and off-stage performances, but it does so by invoking the figure of Polly, ghosted by Miss Prue and Margery. When Charles and Kitty announce their stolen marriage at the in-house performance of The Beggar’s Opera, confusion ensues when audience members accuse the performers of starting at the end of the play rather than the beginning. Like Kitty, Polly Peachum in The Beggar’s Opera marries but does not necessarily become sophisticated. Gay, however, was not finished with her, and he gives her a chance to learn the ways of the world in the sequel. In spite of eager anticipation for this performance, it never took place: two weeks before its opening, the Lord Chamberlain, acting on behalf of Sir Robert Walpole, banned Polly. The Duchess of Queensbury responded by encouraging Gay to publish it, defying the King who had, according to Lord Hervey, ‘forbid [Polly’s ] being recited’. The King banished the Duchess from court for her defiance (Nokes 1995, 464). Polly thus attracted attention without hitting the boards until 1777 (in a version rewritten by George Coleman) by becoming a public scandal and a political cause (Nokes, 433–44). As a figure in a printed text rather than a performance, the eponymous Polly may lose

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     219

her immediate connection to a particular actress. Nevertheless, the character was written for performance and in some ways evokes the Restoration invention of the actress even more than does The Beggar’s Opera. In The Beggar’s Opera, as argued, Polly comically retains a degree of ­innocence in the midst of a corrupt world. In Polly, she encounters a different kind of corruption and experiences a new level of worldliness as she leaves London to travel across the Atlantic in pursuit of Macheath. But in spite of her unprotected exposure to an even more dangerous world, Polly still does not become sophisticated. In fact, Gay’s determination to retain Polly’s innocence makes for a disconcerting ending: Cawwawkee, a noble Indian prince, proposes marriage to Polly, and while she clearly admires him, she still needs time to mourn for Macheath, who has been hanged. She criticises her own attraction to the prince as evidence of social climbing: ‘Frail is ambition, how weak the foundation! / Riches have wings as inconstant as wind’ (3.15.50–51). Cawwawkee parallels Polly as a virtuous figure encountering a corrupt world: like Polly, he finds European dishonour puzzling. The comic tension between the degraded London commercial landscape and Polly’s romantic optimism in The Beggar’s Opera shifts in the sequel to the search for the possibility of virtue anywhere in the world. In Polly, Gay moves from one Restoration theatre narrative, the comedy of the rustic heroine facing urbanity, to another, marriage across a racial divide. By joining these in sequence, Gay links the pleasures of the European metropolis to violence across the Atlantic. Elizabeth Dillon (2014, 124–30) has argued that in Polly, Gay retreats from his earlier satire of capitalism. Through the play’s repetition of Restoration theatre and theatricality, however, we can see that instead Gay turns his attention in the sequel from one style of ­capitalism to another: from Peachum-style urban corruption to Macheathstyle violent conquest for profit. Polly provides a counter-narrative to the supposedly whorish Betty Boutell. She is a Margery whose male disguise succeeds, an Elizabeth Barry who declined the invitation to Rochester’s estate. Finally, we return to Congreve to consider briefly his currently bestknown play. The Way of the World, which points to cosmopolitan knowledge in its title, is also a play about generations and therefore a play about historical haunting and historical change. Lady Wishfort, insufficiently schooled in or tolerant of the ways of the world, keeps a copy of Collier’s infamous attack on Restoration drama in her closet; she recommends it as reading for Mrs. Marwood (Congreve 2011, 3.5.22). At the moment when all of the nefarious scheming in The Way of the World comes to a crisis and Mr. Fainall threatens to reveal her daughter’s illicit sexual activity, Lady Wishfort

220     Laura J. Rosenthal

looks at Mrs. Fainall with horror and demands: ‘Have you not been sophisticated?’ (5.4.24–25). Sophistication, of course, has come to suggest a positive sense of complexity and nuance; in this meaning, it is a crucial aspect of Restoration cosmopolitanism. Here, however, Lady Wishfort invokes its earlier meaning: of being contaminated or polluted. It is the combinations of meanings in this single word that suggest the significance of the rustic girls from Margery Pinchwife to Miss Prue to Evelina: to enter into the ways of the world becomes both necessary and dangerous, both refining and ­contaminating. Indeed, this danger and necessity of sophistication form a crucial point of interest in The Way of the World. Congreve’s engagement with Restoration cosmopolitanism explains some of the seemingly frivolous aspects of the plot. Both Witwouds, for example, with their Restoration-style charactonyms, present doomed cosmopolitan ambitions as the object of derisive humour. Sir Willful Witwoud has come to town ‘to Equip himself for Travel’ (1.5.10); he is about to undertake a Grand Tour, but at the ridiculous age of forty, a prospect that Mirabell and Fainall turn into a comic figure for the international balance of trade: Fainall: No matter for that; ’tis for the honour of England, that all Europe should know we have blockheads of all ages. Mirabell: I wonder there is not an act of parliament to save the credit of the nation, and prohibit the exportation of fools. Fainall: By no means, ’tis better as ’tis; ’tis better to trade with a little loss than to be quite eaten up with being overstocked. (1.5.12–18)

Willful, like Lady Wishfort, peaked in an earlier era. The impending visit of this gentleman horrifies his half-brother Witwoud, who despises Willful’s country manners and lives in fear that he will expose some familial lack of urban polish. Witwoud’s friend Petulant is also comically hyper-sensitive about his urbanity: he takes such care of his reputation that, to create an illusion of popularity, he pays people to call for him at coffee houses. Sir Willful later outs his foppish cousin by mentioning that Witwoud had originally come to London as an attorney’s clerk, barely escaping an apprenticeship to a feltmaker. Sir Willful himself plans to learn ‘a spice of your French’ (3.15.103): Mrs. Marwood: No doubt you will return very much improved. Witwoud: Yes, refined, like a Dutch skipper from a whale-fishing. (3.15.107–8) While both Witwouds strive for cosmopolitanism, Lady Wishfort remains baffled by how the ways of the world have changed since her coquettish

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     221

youth in the Restoration. As much as the play treats Lady Wishfort as an object of ridicule, it nevertheless reserves sympathy for her vulnerability. Sir Willful’s public drinking and Lady Wishfort’s surreptitious indulgences in ratafia—a weakness not shared by the younger characters—link them both to the dated debauchery of the court of Charles II. Lady Wishfort’s vulnerability lies in her sexual passion: ‘When I did not see him,’ she confesses, ‘I could have bribed a villain to his assassination; but his appearance rakes the embers which have so long lain smothered in my breast’ (5.10.44–46). Yet, Lady Wishfort remains a comically diminished version of the tragic queens of the Restoration stage most likely to express such sentiments. Her world is constricted and prejudicial rather than expansive. When Willful shows up drunk, she declares him a Turk or a Saracen. Lady Wishfort similarly labels Mr. Fainall as foreign when he reveals his brutal plot: ‘This is most inhumanly savage,’ she remarks, ‘exceeding the barbarity of a Muscovite husband’ (5.6.24–25). The more worldly Mr. Fainall runs with her suggestion: ‘I learned it from his Czarish majesty’s retinue, in a winter evening’s conference over brandy and pepper, amongst other secrets of matrimony and policy, as they are at present practised in the Northern hemisphere’ (5.6.26–28). This provincialism on Lady Wishfort’s part extends to the education of her daughter. In her shock at learning of her daughter’s adultery, Lady Wishfort insists that she had gone to comic lengths to keep her daughter from becoming sophisticated: I promise you, her education has been unexceptionable. I may say it; for I chiefly made it my own care to initiate her very infancy in the rudiments of virtue, and to impress upon her tender years a young odium and aversion to the very sight of men. – Ay, friend, she would ha’ shrieked if she had but seen a man, till she was in her teens. As I’m a person ’tis true. – She was never suffered to play with a male child, though but in coats; nay, her very babies were of the feminine gender. – Oh, she never looked a man in the face but her own father, or the chaplain, and him we made a shift to put upon her for a woman, by the help of his long garments and his sleek face, till she was going in her fifteen. […] I warrant you, or she would never have borne to have been catechised by him; and have heard his long lectures against singing and dancing, and such debaucheries, and going to filthy plays, and profane music meetings, where the lewd trebles squeak nothing but bawdy, and the bases roar blasphemy. Oh, she would have swooned at the sight or name of an obscene play-book – and can I think after all this, that my daughter can be naught? What, a whore? And thought it excommunication to set her foot within the door of a play-house. O my dear friend, I can’t believe it, no, no. As she says, let him prove it, let him prove it. (5.5.2–28)

222     Laura J. Rosenthal

The theatre would have provided an alternative schooling in the ways of the world, but Lady Wishfort kept all such entertainment away from the future Mrs. Fainall, who grows up to make, by her own admission, exceptionally bad choices. Her greatest of these was Mirabell. The relationship in this play between Mrs. Fainall and Mirabell has remained a persistent problem for criticism (Kraft 1989, 26). Had Mirabell been out to capture a fortune like any respectable hero of a Restoration comedy, he could have simply married Mrs. Fainall, with whom he had been carrying on an affair before the play begins. Had he been unscrupulous, he could at any time have taken possession of her money, as it had for a while belonged to him legally. Mrs. Fainall, although she seems to love him, nevertheless helps to advance his cause with Millamant. The persistent sense in the play that Mrs. Fainall is somehow not good enough for Mirabell cannot be explained by any difference in her fortune or social status. Nor can it be explained by the fact that she is not a virgin: while this might be a barrier in another genre, rich widows make excellent mates in Restoration comedy. Rather, it is explained here: Mrs. Fainall, in spite of Lady Wishfort’s accusation, is insufficiently sophisticated. Lady Wishfort has kept her from the world in general and the theatre in particular, a cosmopolitan institution providing glimpses into parts of the world inaccessible through the experiences of most members of the audience. Lady Wishfort’s bookshelf further reveals the limits of her daughter’s education: ‘Quarles and Prynne, and the Short View of the Stage, with Bunyan’s works’ (3.5.21–23). Prynne and Collier both launched diatribes against the immorality of English theatre in the seventeenth century; John Bunyan and Francis Quarles offer Christian parables. Although in some ways Mirabell exploits this ignorance, this man of the world tries to school his lover in the ways of the world: Mrs. Fainall: While I only hated my husband, I could bear to see him; but since I have despised him, he’s too offensive. Mirabell: Oh, you should hate with prudence. Mrs. Fainall: Yes, for I have loved with indiscretion. Mirabell: You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover. (2.4.5–8)

Like her mother, Mrs. Fainall suffers from an excess of passion and has not learned to control her feeling and actions; she must be guided by Mirabell. If Mrs. Fainall ultimately proves too provincial for Mirabell, Millamant risks being too cosmopolitan. Mirabell describes her as a ship in ‘full sail’ (2.5.1). He worries about her capacity to transform herself through foreign

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     223

commodities, as he makes clear in one of his demands in their marriage negotiation: Item, I Article that you continue to like your own Face, as long as I shall. And while it passes current with me, that you endeavour not to new Coin it. To which end, together with all Vizards for the day, I prohibit all Masks for the night, made of Oiled skins and I know not what – Hog’s-bones, Hare’s-gall, Pig Water, and the Marrow of a roasted Cat. In short, I forbid all Commerce with the Gentlewoman in what-d’ye-call-it Court. Item, I shut my doors against all Bawds with Baskets, and Penny-worths of Muslin, China, Fans, Atlases, &c. (4.5.88–98)

In the last item, Mirabell forbids her to purchase ‘Atlases ’, defined by the OED as ‘silk-satin manufactured in the East’ though the word also refers to maps of the world. Both meanings suggest Mirabell’s efforts to reign in Millamant’s cosmopolitan impulses. Everything the bawds have in their baskets, in Mirabell’s scenario, comes from the East. (Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, we recall, made the folding fan as fashionable in England as it had been in Portugal through Asian trade routes.) Mirabell, however, concedes to his bride the right to other global imports and, crucially, to the tea table itself: ‘to the Dominion of the Tea-Table I submit – but with proviso that you exceed not in your Province, but restrain yourself to native and simple Tea-Table drinks, as Tea, Chocolate and Coffee’ (4.5.105–9). Stronger drink he will not allow. Mrs. Fainall, with her limited education and limited ambitions, cannot compete with this ship in full sail, this empress of the tea table. If a limited education ultimately damages Mrs. Fainall and Millamant threatens to sail too far away, Lady Wishfort, at the play’s heart, misses the boat entirely. Her misperceptions, however, find comedy in the performance of femininity and call attention back once again to the Restoration origin of the actress. At fifty-five in 1700, she would have been fifteen in 1660— just the right age to be taken to London in search of a husband—and seems in painfully comic ways to be stuck in that moment. Perhaps this is why the text of The Way of the World is so precise about her age. She has become unmoored in the post-revolutionary world of 1700, stuck in Restoration absolutism. She thinks of herself as a young girl who can attract the rakish attentions of Mirabell and the marriage proposal of ‘Sir Rowland’, who will help her reconstitute a patriarchal family. The new world of contractual machinations baffles her, and she cannot protect herself or her daughter from Mr. Fainall. She does not recognise the deviousness of Mrs. Marwood. Like the suitors in Steele’s Tender Husband and Jackman’s All the World’s

224     Laura J. Rosenthal

a Stage, Mirabell manipulates Lady Wishfort by playing along with her own delusions: he disguises his own servant as the imaginary Sir Rowland, who will propose marriage to her. Mirabell, then, in this ineffective and ill-devised plan, will step in with great leverage when the deception is ­ revealed and ‘rescue’ her. The ladies in Steele and Jackman become vulnerable to this kind of manipulation through their excessive literary and theatrical absorption. Lady Wishfort, by contrast, becomes vulnerable through her anti-theatricality, her old-fashioned political absolutism, and her inability to come to terms with the Glorious Revolution. But in spite of her enthusiasm for Jeremy Collier, Lady Wishfort, more than any other character in this play, reminds the audiences of the centrality of the actress. Most of the characters at some point play within the play: Mirabell pretends to desire Lady Wishfort; both Mirabell and Millamant try to act as if they do not love each other; Mrs. Marwood pretends to be loyal to Lady Wishfort; Waitwell plays the role of Sir Rowland; Mr. Fainall feigns all. Lady Wishfort, however, is the only character who visibly prepares for her performances, practising her self-presentation in front of the mirror. Performed by Elinor Leigh, the daughter of one actor (Dixon) and the wife to another (Anthony Leigh), Lady Wishfort both performs and is performed by an aging actress who had her start in the reign of Charles II (Highfill, Burnim, and Langhans 1984, 9: 226–228). She looks at herself in the ­mirror with the critical eye of an actress: Let me see the Glass—Cracks, say’st thou? Why I am arrantly flea’d—I look like an old peel’d Wall. Thou must repair me Foible, before Sir Rowland comes … (3.5.71–73)

As Sir Rowland approaches, she considers the posture and gestures with which she will greet him, blocking out her movements with great comic effect: Well, and how shall I receive him? In what figure shall I give his Heart the first Impression? There is a great deal in the first Impression. Shall I sit?—No I won’t sit—I’ll walk—aye I’ll walk from the door upon his entrance; and then turn full upon him—No, that will be too sudden. I’ll lie—aye, I’ll lie down—I’ll receive him in my little dressing Room, there’s a Couch—Yes, yes, I’ll give the first Impression on a Couch—I won’t lie neither but loll and lean upon one Elbow; with one Foot a little dangling off, Jogging in a thoughtful way—Yes—and then as soon as he appears, start, ay, start and be surpriz’d, and rise: to meet him in a pretty disorder—Yes—O, nothing is more alluring

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     225

than a Levee from a Couch in some Confusion.—It shews the Foot to advantage, and furnishes with Blushes, and re-composing Airs beyond Comparison. (4.1.14–28)

With an aging diva at its vulnerable centre, The Way of the World plays the Restoration invention of the actress for comedy. The play declares, on the one hand, the end of the Restoration, as Lady Wishfort’s social and political perspective has become comically dysfunctional and misaligned with a new generation that rejects such a strange combination of theatricality and anti-theatricality. On the other hand, Lady Wishfort nevertheless persists. Millamant succeeds her not because she rejects Restoration cosmopolitan values, but because she masters them so much more skilfully, especially in comparison with her theatre-deprived cousin. Whether toying with fops or demanding empire over the tea table, Millamant reveals herself as a highly skilled performer who, in a pinch, proves herself willing to sacrifice marital happiness to rescue her aunt. While Lady Wishfort, Mrs. Fainall, and Mrs. Marwood all reveal their comic and tragic lack of sophistication, Millamant emerges relatively unscathed due to her superior understanding of the ways of the world.

Bibliography Ambross, E. 1789. The Life and Memoirs of the Late Miss Ann Catley, the Celebrated Actress. London: Bird. Anon. 1728. The Life of Lavinia Beswick, Alias Fenton, Alias Polly Peachum: Containing, Her Birth and Education. London: Moore. Anon. 1728. Thievery A-la-mode: Or the Fatal Encouragement. London: Roberts. Anon. 1730. The Whole Life of Polly Peachum; Containing an Account of Her Birth, … Shewing How She Jumpt from an Orange Girl to an Actress on the Stage, and from That to Be a Lady of Fortune: To Which Is Added, a List of Her Admires [sic ], … Written by One of Her Companions. London. Anon. 1760. Life of Nell Gwinn. London: n.p. Betterton, Thomas. 1741. The History of the English Stage, from the Restauration to the Present Time. Including the Lives, Characters and Amours, of the Most Eminent Actors and Actresses. With Instructions for Public Speaking; Wherein the Action and Utterance of the Bar, Stage, and Pulpit Are Distinctly Considered. By Mr. Thomas Betterton. Adorned with Cuts. London: printed for E. Curll, at Pope’s-Head in Rose-Street, Covent-Garden. Brown, Pamela Allen, and Peter Parolin, eds. 2005. Women Players in England, 1500–1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Burlington: Ashgate.

226     Laura J. Rosenthal

Burney, Frances. 2001. The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties. Edited by Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack, and Peter Sabor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burney, Fanny [sic ]. 2002. Evelina: Or, the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World. Edited by Edward Bloom. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canfield, J. Douglas. 1995. ‘The Critique of Capitalism and the Retreat into Art in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and Fielding’s Author’s Farce ’. In Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, edited by James E. Gill, 320–34. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Congreve, William. 2011. The Works of William Congreve. Edited by D. F McKenzie and C. Y. Ferdinand. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. 2014. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Evans, James E. 2011. ‘Evelina, the Rustic Girls of Congreve and Abington, and Surrogation in the 1770s’. The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 52, no. 2: 157–71. Gay, John. 1983. Dramatic Works, vol. 2. Edited by John Fuller. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hawes, Clement. 2005. The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Highfill, Philip H., Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. 1984. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800; Vol. 9. 16 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Howe, Elizabeth. 1992. The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackman, Isaac. 1777. All the World’s a Stage. London. Kraft, Elizabeth. 1989. ‘Why Didn’t Mirabell Marry the Widow Languish?’. Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 13, no. 1: 26–34. Mackie, Erin Skye. 2009. Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nokes, David. 1995. John Gay: A Profession of Friendship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the EighteenthCentury British Theatre. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Accessed March 26, 2018. https://www.oed.com/. Petzold, Jochen. 2012. ‘Polly Peachum, a “Model of Virtue”? Questions of Morality in John Gay’s Polly ’. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3: 343–57. Pullen, Kirsten. 2005. Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stapylton, Robert. 1663. The Slighted Maid. London: Printed for Thomas Dring. Steele, Richard. 1705. The Tender Husband. London: Printed for Jacob Tonson.

10  English Actresses: Rustic Simplicity to Urban Sophistication     227

St. Serfe, Thomas. 1668. Tarugo’s Wiles: Or, the Coffee-House. London: Printed for Henry Herringman. Wanko, Cheryl. 2003. Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press. Wycherley, William. 1996. Love in a Wood; the Gentleman Dancing-Master; the Country Wife; the Plain Dealer. Edited by Peter Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11 Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture Laura Engel

A print by John Collet entitled ‘An Actress at Her Toilet, or Miss Brazen Just Breecht’ (June 24, 1779, Walpole Library Image 04442) depicts an actress in her underwear (a white chemise and spotted pantaloons) standing in a dressing room surrounded by a variety of things: cosmetics, bottles, a vest, a sword, boots, manuscript pages from a play, flowers, a washing bowl, gloves, and a decorative screen (see Fig. 11.1). In this image, the artist has captured a ‘private’ moment of undressing where the female performer behind the scenes is peeling off layers of costume that reveal the outline of her actual body. The composition of the print foregrounds the actress’s disrobed ­figure as the central signifier. The surrounding clutter of objects tells the story of her professional occupation as well as her vanity. She gazes at herself in the mirror and a small aping creature, the monkey, satirically mimics her practice of acting, connecting the actress’s labour to the organic practices of a domesticated wild animal. The dog at her feet represents perhaps her adoring fans. Yet, despite the negative implications of the actress as immersed in the chaos of her possessions and preoccupied with her own image, the artist has depicted her as owning luxury objects and with a servant in a setting that echoes a well-decorated domestic space. The print establishes, then, that by the late eighteenth-century actresses had risen in class status enough to be depicted in relation to material culture—to objects necessary to their performances and also essential to their everyday lives. Laura Engel (*)  Department of English, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_11

229

230     Laura Engel

Fig. 11.1  ‘An Actress at Her Toilet, or, Miss Brazen Just Breecht’, by John Collet, June 24, 1779 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

Actresses’ images were everywhere in Georgian and Regency culture; they appeared across visual media in portraits, miniatures, prints, caricatures, periodical illustrations, sculpture, and porcelain. The proliferation of materials representing actresses in various formats signalled the public’s interest in women on stage and celebrity culture in general. As Joseph Roach (2007, 55) has eloquently argued, objects associated with actresses promoted their popularity, while at the same time actors and actresses were becoming kinds of commodities themselves. As Robyn Asleson (2003, 1) explains: The leading female performers of the London stage acquired unprecedented conspicuousness in the public eye during the period between 1776 and 1812.

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     231

Not only did they appear regularly in the theaters, but they also became pervasive presences beyond the stage. In addition to shaping the character of contemporary dramatic performance, actresses led trends in fashion and deportment and fuelled a new culture of celebrity.

For female celebrities in particular, the blurred distinction between actresses and things and actresses as things foregrounds a central paradox for women on stage that still persists: i.e. the ways in which the visibility of the female figure and the cultural politics of female embodiment often mask the professionalism, labour, and skill of female performers. Caricatures and prints of well-known actresses from 1780 to 1830 are particularly attuned to anxieties surrounding the relationship of actresses to sartorial items such as costumes, accessories, jewellery, miniatures, and cosmetics. Actresses are also depicted in relation to various items of visual technology and scientific inquiry such as telescopes, spyglasses, magic lanterns, and mirrors. Satiric prints often feature actresses transformed into things (chamber pots, church bells, windmills) as well as presenting a wild array of representations of their bodies as morphed objects (rotund, skeletal, broken in half, naked). The relationship of representations of actresses to material objects, then, is not only about tracing the development of celebrity and fandom in the late eighteenth century, but also about interrogating the relationship between femininity, visibility, embodiment, and agency surrounding women in the theatre and by extension women in the public sphere. How do actresses, their lives, performances, productions, and craft, materialize in things? Although an actress’s medium is her own body, she relies on specific aids (costumes, props, playtexts, set pieces) to produce her work. Often actresses in the late eighteenth century were in charge of curating and assembling the ‘things’ that helped them to imagine, construct, and enact their roles and—as many scholars have demonstrated—this process took place both on- and offstage (Nussbaum 2010; Engel 2011; Brooks 2015; McPherson 2017). When considering the relationship between actresses and things, we need to take into account how we might understand actresses’ work as a kind of material labour, while at the same time acknowledging the ways in which the impact of their professional performances can be seen through the production and dissemination of objects emblazoned with their images. Just as Chloe Wigston Smith (2016, 166) cautions that the study of women’s work should not conflate women with the objects that they made, similarly an examination of actresses and their relationship to material culture needs to interrogate the myriad ways in which actresses become conflated with things—often to mask anxieties about the power of their labour

232     Laura Engel

and worth in the public sphere. Most self-fashioning for actresses relied on the specific curating of material objects, consequently the theatre scholar’s practice of amassing a variety of archival items (prints, caricatures, paintings, letters, account books) provides forms of evidence for the power of particular female performers (Perry 2008; Nussbaum 2010; Engel 2011; Pascoe 2013; Brooks 2015; McPherson 2017). Thus, the study of material culture is vital to ways in which we understand actresses in terms of their embodied experience both on- and offstage, their methods of self-promotion, their impact on audiences, and their afterlives.

Eighteenth-Century Women and Material Culture Studies Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan’s groundbreaking essay collection, Women and Material Culture 1660–1830 (2007), sets the stage for important investigations of women’s relationship to the production and consumption of objects in the long eighteenth century. The four sections of the study, ‘Dress and Adornment’, ‘Women and Sculpture’, ‘The Material Culture of Empire’, and ‘Women and Books’, highlight several threads of interdisciplinary inquiry that provide innovative ways to connect material culture to modes of female identity. According to Batchelor and Kaplan (2007, 1–2), scholars of material culture are concerned with ‘interactions between subjects and objects and the meanings these interactions generate’. ‘Material artefacts,’ they remind us (1) ‘not only shape bodies and perceptions, but allow their possessors to establish their place in society’. Actresses are specifically implicated in this mode of exchange. Onstage their interactions with objects produce meaning both within the world of the play and in relation to the audience in the theatre. Offstage actresses’ relationship to objects (particularly those related to dress, display, and image-making) define the parameters of celebrity and engender the mechanisms of fan culture. In her recent essay on feminist practice and material culture studies, Smith (2016, 166) advocates a ‘poetics of women’s work’. She describes this innovative hermeneutic strategy as: one less visceral perhaps than Robinson Crusoe’s shipwreck, but still palpable and present across a range of eighteenth-century genres. Bringing together gender and material culture allows us to make visible women’s business, creativity, and imagination and to reconsider references, small and grand, to the crafts that they manufactured in daily life.

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     233

Although an actress’s work is not the same thing as the labour of a seamstress, sculptress, painter, or milliner, her ‘craft’ can be seen as a material product that is reflected in material matter, particularly in portraits, prints, and caricatures. It is in fact the predominance of actresses’ ‘visibility’ that paradoxically celebrates their presence and disguises their labour, imagination, and power. Portraits and caricatures of actresses reinforce their role as cultural icons of fashion and as catalysts for the production and consumption of goods and accessories associated with their images. Heather McPherson (2003, 172) argues that in the late eighteenth-century art world portraiture and caricature were inextricably linked genres with distinct ties to the theatre: The theater, like caricature, appealed to a broad, heterogeneous public and both were frequently maligned by moralists for their nefarious influence. As the century advanced concerns about the commercialization and effeminacy of culture and the decline in public taste were widely voiced. As the disputes about taste and cultural politics intensified, the visual and performing arts figured prominently in caricatures and were vigorously debated in the press.

Caricatures of actresses reflect prevailing notions about female performers and women on display as potential threats to proper notions of behaviour, dress, sexuality, taste, and status. The celebrated actress Eliza Farren provides a specific case study for examining how one actress’s image made its way across a variety of media from formal portraiture to prints to porcelain figurines. Eliza Farren’s Cinderella story, her rise from humble origins to be the wife of Lord Derby, captured the public’s imagination and provided excellent material for caricatures that targeted archetypal narratives about actresses and their potential to disrupt existing class and gendered hierarchies as well as their allure as dangerously sexualized beings. Other representations of Farren, in particular Thomas Lawrence’s famous full-length portrait of her now in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and a sculpture bust by the late eighteenth-century artist, Anne Damer, represent Farren as a timeless classical goddess and a fashionable muse, reframing the actress’s image as significant, lasting, and legitimate. Farren and Damer both took part in creating and performing in a private theatrical at Richmond House in 1788. Farren directed the performance; Damer performed one of the lead roles, and her artwork (including the bust of Farren) appeared prominently on stage as part of the set (Gross 2014, 107). The relationship between Farren and Damer and their tangible

234     Laura Engel

and intangible creative labour stages a new form of connection between actresses and material culture. The juxtaposition of actresses’ performances with Damer’s artwork inspired by actresses and placed around the stage highlights women’s roles as creators of tangible and intangible things. Damer’s strategic set pieces have the potential to refocus the audience’s gaze from the live bodies of the performers to the static representations of them and back again. From the outset, the practice of private theatricals (or performing plays at the homes of the rich and fashionable using professional actors and ‘real’ people) reimagines the relationship between interior and exterior places and spaces. As Jane Austen famously underscores in the episode of the failed private theatricals in Mansfield Park (1814), performing requires shape-shifting, morphing, and a potential transgression of the boundaries of proper codes of behaviour. Damer’s onstage objects, however, perform subversively as a reminder that actresses’ images will outlast them long after the performance is over. Actresses’ visual presence across genres and formats can potentially provide traces of their lost performances. I am not arguing that there is a oneto-one correspondence between what actresses did on stage and how they were portrayed in print, but I do want to suggest that there are potentially important links between the embodied actions of actresses and subsequent representations of them. In certain cases with more famous actresses, we can glean a sense of their absent-presence through reading multiple images of them across materials. In a larger schema, prints and caricatures represent broader concerns about the actress as a figure with the power to manipulate, overwhelm, and morph into other bodies (mostly male) through her relationship with objects. The association of actresses with objects also echoes late eighteenth-century enlightenment speculations about permeable boundaries between bodies and between the animate and inanimate, the organic and artificial, the real and the constructed. When we turn our attention to Anne Damer, an artist and actress who made things, however, a different paradigm emerges, one in which the female artisan/performer is selfconsciously curating a stage full of ‘things’ that represent the power of actresses and their lasting legacy. Decorating her stage with two and threedimensional portraits of well-known actresses, and juxtaposing these images with the dynamics of live performances, Damer creates a performance piece that merges the immediacy of the theatre with the experience of going to an art gallery.

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     235

Actresses, Masks, and Mirrors Acting and masquerade continued to thrive as a central preoccupation in the late eighteenth century. Rowlandson’s well-known image ‘Dressing for a Masquerade’ (1790, British Museum Collection On-line, 1938, 0613.8; https://www.rct.uk/collection/810382/dressing-for-a-masquerade) depicts a crowded room full of women preparing for a costume ball in various stages of undress surrounded by mirrors. Demonic-looking servants and a small panting dog form a circle around the central figure/actress of the image who stands in a dramatic pose on a pedestal staring at herself in a looking glass. She holds a mask in her outstretched hand, suggesting that she is either preparing to be in disguise or in the process of rehearsing a scene of unmasking—an archetypal episode in many popular eighteenth-century plays. The mirrors in the composition highlight the juxtaposition between what is real or authentic and what is not. The alluring sexualized ladies preparing for the party are supported by a cast of unattractive, witch-like labourers who help to transform them into costumed characters. The contrast between the figures emphasizes the message of the satire that the pleasures of masquerade can lead to unwanted consequences. As Terry Robinson (2015, 31) has expertly shown, mirrors in the Georgian theatre represent a cultural obsession with looking and being looked at. Mirrors and optical objects have an even more specific role in visual representations of actresses because these objects underscore the idea that images are always distorted and artificial, thus reinforcing the damaging notion that there is nothing authentic about the actress or her craft. Her only value is as an object to be looked at. The caricature ‘A Bit of Flattery’ (1807, Walpole Library Image 13854) depicts a man gesturing at a portrait of a large woman in classical dress holding a goblet and with an eagle at her feet, iconography that appears in representations of the goddess Hebe, cup-bearer to the gods (see Fig. 11.2). The woman in the portrait is depicted again as co-observer, standing next to the gentleman and looking demurely at a small parasol that she holds in her hand. The caption reads: A famous hand Madam!!! your Eyes indeed are featured there, but where is the sparkling moisture, the shining fluid in which they swim? the Picture indeed has your dimples, but where’s the swarm of killing Cupids that should ambush there? the lips too are figured out, but where’s the dew, the pouting ripeness that tempts the taste in the original; your breasts too!! What paint Heaven!!! Presumptuous Man!

236     Laura Engel

Fig. 11.2  ‘A Bit of Flattery’, by Charles Williams, 1807 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

To which the woman replies ‘Oh Mr. O Flanogan [sic ]. You Flatter me’. This caption, an excerpt from George Farquhar’s 1707 Beaux’ Stratagem (Act 4, Scene 2, 1994, 630–31), occurs when the rakish Archer attempts to flatter and seduce the cynical Mrs. Sullen with his rapturous analysis of her portrait. Here, Farquhar seems to acknowledge and satirize the frequent lascivious comparisons between live female performers and visual representations of them. Although this portrait may not be of an actress, the image has a striking resemblance to a painting by Thomas Northcote of the actress Mary Wells also as the goddess Hebe, completed two years earlier, in 1805 (Engel 2011, 99; http://artgalleryofontario.tumblr.com/post/13499683081/mrs-wells-ashebe-1805-thomas-james-northcote). The painting represents Wells, who was then an aging actress with a questionable reputation, as the beautiful, youthful goddess, holding a cup with a majestic eagle by her side. Her sheer costume exposes the hint of her bosom. She confronts the viewer with her steady gaze, creating an erotic effect. In the caricature, the woman’s breasts are enormous and cannot be contained by her classical garb. Unlike the Northcote painting, this Hebe sits awkwardly on a chair with her legs open

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     237

(the bird’s wing is nestled right near her crotch) while pouring something for the bird to drink. The caricature makes fun of the late eighteenth-century artistic practice of flattering one’s subject by idealizing their image on canvas. The artist also emphasizes the connection between the material object of the picture and the ‘mirror image’ of the actual live body of the subject of the portrait. This dynamic—the relationship between the embodied presence of the performer with the object depicting that representation—forms the basis of what propels celebrity fan culture: that is the belief that owning a picture of your favourite actresses means that you own a part of the actress herself. The cartoon helps the viewer to see how the portrait could have been taken ‘from life’ but also underscores the ridiculousness of the practice of ‘flattery’ on such an unflattering body. If this print refers to the Northcote portrait or to other paintings like it, the joke is that the subject was unworthy of painting in the first place and artists should be lampooned for thinking that anyone is fooled by pictures of women that portray them as more beautiful than they actually are. In a larger sense, the category of ‘actress’ here is also analogous to any woman in the public sphere whose image is circulating as a commodity. By emphasizing the worthless nature of the woman as thing, the artist suggests that viewers are being taken in by deceptive aesthetic practices. As Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (2007, 1) point out, actresses have always been associated historically with the idea of deception and manipulation. Destabilizing the link between actresses and things also undermines actresses’ potential to market themselves as desirable commodities— something that is essential to their professional success. In satiric images of actresses, mirrors as ‘reflections’ also highlight the blurred line between actresses’ aspirations and their actual position in society. A print of Eliza Farren by James Gillray entitled ‘Contemplations on a Coronet’ (1797, British Museum Collection On-line, J,3.112; https://www. britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=46813001&objectId=1478888&partId=1) depicts the actress sitting at her dressing table contemplating a dummy head with a crown on a pedestal in front of an elaborate mirror. I quote the British museum catalogue description at length in order to emphasize the wealth of specific visual detail and information about Farren contained in this particular print: At her feet is an open book: ‘Tabby’s Farewell to the Green Room’; near it is a torn paper: ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. How Lov’d how valued once avails thee not To whom Related or by whom Begot.’…

238     Laura Engel

A ‘Genealogical Chart of British Nobility’ hangs from the dressing-table; the tree issues from the recumbent figure of ‘Willm Conqr’; on it lies a small-tooth comb beside which is an insect. Behind Miss Farren are the closed curtains of an ornate bed, whose valance is decorated with the cap of Libertas and the words ‘Vive la Egalite’. On the wall hangs a ‘Map of the Road from Strolling Lane to Derbyshire Peak’; the places, from S. to N., are: ‘Strolling Lane’, ‘Beggary Corner’, ‘Servility Place’, ‘Old Drury Common’, ‘Affectation Lane’, ‘Insolence Green’, ‘Fool-Catching Alley’, ‘Derbyshire Peak viz Devils Ar.’ A jewel-box, bottles, &c, are on the dressing-table, some inscribed: ‘Bloom de Ninon’, ‘For Bad Teeth’, ‘Cosmetick’, ‘For the Breath’. … After the title: ‘A Coronet! O, bless my sweet little heart! - ah, it must be mine, now there’s nobody left to hinder! - and then - hey, for my Lady Nimminney-pimmenney!…O, Gemmini! - no more Straw-Beds in Barns; - no more scowling Managers! & Curtsying to a dirty Public! - but a Coronet upon my Coach; Dashing at the Opera! - shining at the Court! - O dear! dear! what I shall come to!’ (British Museum Collection On-line, J,3.112)

Published in March 1797, this print anticipates Farren’s impending marriage to Lord Derby, which occurred in May of the same year. Depicting her as a gaunt, skeletal figure, Gillray refers to her image in Thomas Lawrence’s famous portrait of her displayed at the Royal Academy in 1790. In that painting, she appears waif-like and delicately ephemeral, shimmering in a white satin gown, with a fox fur mantle and muff. Farren did not like the picture, complaining to Lawrence that she thought she looked too thin. Amelia Rauser and Carolyn Day (2016, 464) suggest in a recent article on Thomas Lawrence and what they call ‘consumptive chic’ that Farren’s body type in this image reflects a larger preoccupation with fashionably ill bodies. [For a detailed analysis of the interplay between actresses and ‘consumptive chic’ in the nineteenth century, see Chapter 13, by Roberta Barker.] In the caricature, signifiers of her past and future that centre on her embodied experience surround Farren. Objects that are connected to self-fashioning and grooming (cosmetics, potions for teeth and breath, combs, jewellery, a pad for ‘inflating the figure’) along with w ­ ritten texts and materials that foreground her life in the theatre including ‘Map of the Road from Strolling Lane to Derbyshire Peak’ highlight her impending ascent from the role of a struggling actress to the part of an aspiring aristocrat. The reflection of the fake head in the mirror reinforces the disparaging sentiment that Farren’s performative charms have transformed an English noble into nothing more than a false body part (an empty symbolic sign). In another context, however, a search for ‘actress’ and ‘mirror’ in the British Museum image catalogue produces several prints of late eighteenthcentury actresses from theatrical periodicals such as The Monthly Mirror and

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     239

The Dramatic Mirror. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to fully investigate the significance of images of actresses in periodicals, I want to put forward a few suggestions regarding images of actresses in relation to mirrors in the popular press. The idea of a mirror as a conveyer of truth or as an object that could reflect nature has a long history that dates back to classical mythology. The classical figures of comedy and tragedy are always presented in duplicate as kinds of mirror images of one another. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s wellknown painting of Garrick between comedy and tragedy and his iconic portrait of Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse present an argument for the legitimacy of theatrical performers through classical motifs (McPherson 2017, 159–60). The association of mirrors with the theatre translates into periodical titles, a practice that highlights the relationship between the news and everyday life. Elsewhere, I have argued that oval portraits of actresses, princesses, and queens in late eighteenth-century periodicals could have operated as ‘magazine miniatures’, tangible objects that could be cut out and used as decorations or saved, traded, and discarded (Engel 2018, 458–73). Looking at images of actresses in the Monthly Mirror and the Dramatic Mirror creates a mini-mirror or reflection of a past history of female celebrity that is now mostly forgotten. Portraits of Miss Tyrer (1806), Mrs. Powell (1807), and Mrs. Sharp (1808) provide a contemporary glimpse of Regency fashion, stage dress, and accessories. The portrait of Sarah Tyrer (later Mrs. Liston) aged 25 presents her looking like a young teenager (Monthly Mirror, 1806, British Museum Collection On-line, Ee,5.115). She is dressed simply in a muslin gown with no jewellery or accessories. The actress Jane Powell is depicted in the Dramatic Mirror (1807, British Museum Collection On-line, Y,6.260) as Matilda in Tobin’s The Curfew wearing a crown and a lace-edged mantilla, with a matching jewelled brooch fastening her gown. In an illustration for the Monthly Mirror (1808, British Museum Collection On-line, 1943, 0410.2424), the actress Arabella Sharp appears in everyday fashionable dress, wearing an elegant empire waist gown with pearls, hoop earrings, and a ‘brooch at the breast’. Access to the material representations of these actresses, who were well known in their time, connects us to a ‘mirror’ of past performances and decorative objects.

Body Morphing: Actresses as Grotesque Things Satiric prints that represent actresses’ bodies as obscene objects reflect cultural anxieties about the power of actresses as physically threatening, embodied, sexualized beings. Dora Jordan, a popular comedic actress and the

240     Laura Engel

mistress of the Duke of Clarence, is mercilessly portrayed in several cartoons as a chamber pot or ‘jordan’. The actress, novelist and playwright, Mary Robinson, also known for her scandalous liaison with the Prince of Wales, appears as a miniature windmill on a pedestal and a half-naked figure with her breast exposed. In the caricature ‘Under Hoop & Bell’ (Boyne and Walker, 1787, British Museum Collection On-line, 1868,0808.5612), the actress Mary Wells is depicted as a large bell with the words ‘The World or the Fashionable Advertiser’ running across the bottom. She dangles a hanging string that is easily accessible to her lover, the playwright and journalist, Edward Topham, who is pictured underneath her sucking on the bell’s chime. Wells holds a muff in her hand emblazoned with a miniature portrait of Topham. As I have discussed elsewhere, the print highlights the relationship between John Bell, the printer of Topham’s newspaper The World, a periodical that Wells helped to produce while using it to promote her career, and the production and consumption of Wells’s body (2015, 16–18). The image foregrounds Wells’s erotic presence by intimating that Topham is literally and figuratively ringing her bell. In addition to pictures of actresses as obscene or transgressive objects, actresses’ bodies are often represented as large and unseemly. A well-known caricature by Thomas Rowlandson entitled ‘Rehearsing in the Greenroom’ (c.1789, British Museum Collection On-line, 1938,0613.8) portrays Sarah Siddons, the most famous and revered actress of the late eighteenth century, striking a histrionic pose backstage with a heckling journalist and another man copying her gestures standing behind her. Her arms outstretched in an exaggerated theatrical pose appear too large for her frame. They are masculine and ungainly. Siddons’s histrionic pose is echoed in James Gillray’s ‘Dido, in Despair!’ (1801, British Museum Collection On-line, 1868,0808.6927) featuring an enormous Emma Hamilton, actress and mistress of Nelson and wife of Lord Hamilton, emerging theatrically from a curtained bed. She is surrounded by objects—cosmetics and boxes on a dressing table, antiquities and sculptures strewn about on the floor. In this print, Gillray imagines Hamilton as Dido to Nelson’s Aeneas, the tragic lovers in Virgil’s epic the Aeneid. Nelson and Hamilton had embarked on a notorious affair and Hamilton had just given birth to Nelson’s child. Gillray’s reference to theatrical gesture here ties Hamilton’s excesses (her sexual exploits, betrayals, and performances) to known postures of tragic expression. The things in the image reinforce the nature of Hamilton’s transgressions and their sordid history. The opposite of the fleshiness and excessive qualities of the actress is the actress as a brittle, breakable, and vulnerable entity. Satiric prints of Eliza

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     241

Farren emphasize her status as a tangible object. In a print entitled ‘A Peep Behind the Curtain at the Widow Belmour’ (1790, Walpole Library Image 07017) by James Sayers, Farren is depicted naked behind a curtain with a leering fan gazing down at her. Her pose echoes classical sculptures of Venus de Milo. The caption reads: ‘Why won’t you let Miss Farren dress her parts? Were I of Drury’s property the Sovereign, I’d give the lovely maid a choice of covering’. In the caricature ‘Beatrice Fishing for a Coronet’ published by William Holland in 1790 (British Museum Collection On-line, 1868,0808.5906), Farren visits a fortune teller. She is dressed in fashionable garb holding a very large fur muff and surrounded by objects of scientific inquiry and visual technology including a globe, telescope, magic lantern, compass, and hourglass. She implores: ‘The woman at the Green Rails in Store Street gives me no hopes of a coronet, I wish to know your opinion, venerable Sage’ (British Museum Collection On-line, 1868,0808.5906). The print aligns ‘future predicting objects’ with a satiric view of Farren’s relationship with an aristocrat, suggesting that the fashionable trappings of material culture have nothing to do with the inevitability of Farren’s seduction of Lord Derby. Another print by James Gillray (see Fig. 11.3), entitled ‘The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche’ (1797, Walpole Library Image 8959), features a skeletal, ghostly Farren walking beside a short fat image of Lord Derby surrounded by naked putti. A cherub behind her holds up a crown (very similar to the one in ‘Contemplations of a Coronet’) but he is unable to reach her head as it towers above him. The variety of representations of Farren’s body as a malleable object reflects prevailing notions about actresses as available commodities. In Farren’s case, in particular, her connection to Lord Derby, her social climbing, her status as a fashion icon and her slender beauty, provided much fuel for clever caricaturists.

Eliza Farren and Anne Damer: Making the Most of Things In 1790, Henry Siddons, the feckless husband of the famous actress, Sarah Siddons, wrote an unpleasant verse about Eliza Farren and Anne Damer: Her little stock of private fame Will fall a wreck to public Clamour, If Farren leagues with one whose Name Comes near – Aye very near—to Damn her. (Highfill et al. 1991, 5:172)

242     Laura Engel

Fig. 11.3  ‘The Marriage of Cupid & Psyche’, by James Gillray, May 3, 1797 (Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)

Although Anne Damer had been linked to other women, particularly her dear friend Mary Berry (Elfenbein 2001, 2), her connection to Farren seemed particularly threatening. The Richmond House theatricals, that Farren directed and Damer performed in, were reviewed by all the London papers and attended by aristocrats and royalty (Rosenfeld 1978, 38). For their first performance of Arthur Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him, Damer played the virtuous heroine Lady Lovemore who desperately tries to keep her libertine husband from betraying her. The first scene in Lady Lovemore’s drawing room featured prominently displayed portraits of ‘Mrs. Damer’s friends’ the Duchess of Richmond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Duncannon, Lady Elizabeth Foster, and Sarah Siddons (Rosenfeld 1978, 40; Tuite 2015, 586) by contemporary artists John Downman, Francesco Bartolozzi, Caroline Watson, and others. In addition to these pictures, there is a portrait of Farren sitting on a chair facing the audience, suggesting perhaps that the painting had just been purchased (Rosenfeld 1978, 40). Damer’s most recent biographer Jonathan Gross (2014, 107) elaborates:

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     243

In the plays which Anne Damer performed, John Downman provided portraits including his half length pastel of Elizabeth Farren, now at the National Portrait Gallery. This Farren portrait was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1788 with colored engravings by Collyer. Anne displayed her own art work as well, with a bust of Elizabeth Farren as Thalia placed prominently on the Richmond House set.

Farren’s conspicuous presence on stage in the theatricals as an art object or set piece highlights the relationship between actresses, celebrity, and material culture in innovative ways reinforcing the idea that Farren’s after-image exists not only in the moment of performance but can be seen, possessed, owned, exchanged and displayed long after the play has ended. Damer’s bust of Farren as Thalia, the muse of comedy, must have operated as a focal point for audience members, acting as a reminder of the play’s celebrity director, as well as of the presence of beauty and grandeur surrounding the performance itself. In addition to including her sculptures as set pieces on the stage, Damer also adorned herself as a kind of lavishly ornamented object. Her sumptuous costumes and dazzling jewels reaffirmed her status as an aristocratic woman as well as her creative agency as a designer and maker of gorgeous things (Gross 2014, 112). As Clara Tuite (2015, 586) has argued, Damer’s rococo theatricalized display of things reflects her own heightened awareness of the nuances of the theatre as a medium that reveals as much as it conceals. The circulation of things, bodies, and images blurs the already tenuous line between the players and the audience as well as the theatricality of the scene and the heightened illusion of everyday life. Damer’s artwork on stage operates in part as a corrective to the objectified gaze aimed particularly at women in the public sphere by providing an alternative trajectory of female artists and admiration that potentially highlights objects in performance as subversive and disruptive forms of presence. At the end of an article arguing for the significance of ‘actress studies’ as a distinct field I recently wrote, ‘Studying actresses will always remind us of the things we cannot know and see, forcing us to keep in mind the relationship between embodied presence and imagined representation’ (Engel 2016, 759). In reminding readers of what we cannot know and see, I wanted to challenge traditional methods of academic analysis that privilege certainty and tangibility over other kinds of evidence that might be gleaned from intangible or ephemeral forms of information—the kind of ‘texts’ that often inform scholars of theatre history and the history of actresses in particular. In the present chapter, I have attempted to refocus my analysis on what we can see—that is—the abundance of visual material created, conjured,

244     Laura Engel

adapted, fashioned, and invented in relationship to late eighteenth-century actresses. Seeing actresses through things and in relation to things can allow us to touch the past in ways that echo and inform the present.

Bibliography Asleson, Robyn. 2003. The Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812. New Haven: Yale University Press. Austen, Jane. 1814. Mansfield Park. London: Thomas Egerton. Batchelor, Jennie, and Cora Kaplan. 2007. Women and Material Culture, 1660– 1830. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brooks, Helen. 2015. Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Davis, Jim. 2015. Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Day, Carolyn, and Amelia Rauser. 2016. ‘Thomas Laurence’s Consumptive Chic: Reinterpreting Lady Manners’s Hectic Flush in 1794’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 4: 455–74. Elfenbein, Andrew. 2001. ‘Lesbian Aestheticism on the Eighteenth-Century Stage’. Eighteenth-Century Life 25, no. 1: 1–16. Engel, Laura. 2011. Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Engel, Laura, 2014. ‘The Secret Life of Archives: Sally Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the Material of Memory’. ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830 4, no. 1: 1–17. Engel, Laura. 2015. Austen, Actresses and Accessories: Much Ado About Muffs. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Engel, Laura. 2016. ‘Stage Beauties: Actresses and Celebrity Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century’. Literature Compass 13: 749–61. Engel, Laura. 2018. ‘Magazine Miniatures: Portraits of Actresses, Princesses, and Queens in Late Eighteenth-Century Periodicals’. In Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell, 458–73. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Farquhar, George. 1994. ‘The Beaux Stratagem’. In Restoration Plays, edited by Robert G. Lawrence, 571–656. Everyman. London: J. M. Dent. Gale, Maggie B., and John Stokes (eds.). 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Actress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gross, Jonathan David. 2014. The Life of Anne Damer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Highfill, Phillip H., Jr., Kalmin A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans. 1991. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

11  Late Eighteenth-Century English Actresses and Material Culture     245

McPherson, Heather. 2003. ‘Painting, Politics and the Stage in the Age of Caricature’. In The Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776– 1812, edited by Robyn Asleson, 171–194. New Haven: Yale University Press. McPherson, Heather. 2015. ‘Tragic Pallor and Siddons’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, no. 4: 479–502. McPherson, Heather. 2017. Art and Celebrity in the Age of Reynolds and Siddons. State College: Penn State University Press. Murphy, Arthur. 1817. The Way to Keep Him. London: C. Cooke. Nussbaum, Felicity. 2010. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the EighteenthCentury British Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pascoe, Judith. 2013. The Sarah Siddons Audio Files: Romanticism and the Lost Voice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Perry, Gill. 2008. Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre 1768–1820. New Haven: Yale University Press. Roach, Joseph. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Robinson, Terry F. 2015. ‘“The Glass of Fashion and the Mould of Form”: The Histrionic Mirror and Georgian Era Performance’. Eighteenth-Century Life 39, no. 2: 30–55. Rosenfeld, Sybil. 1978. Temples of Thespis: Some Private Theatres and Theatricals in England and Wales, 1700–1820. London: The Society for Theatre Research. Smith, Chloe Wigston. 2013. Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Chloe Wigston. 2016. ‘Gender and the Material Turn’. In Women’s Writing, 1660–1830: Feminisms and Futures, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Gillian Dow, 159–78. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuite, Clara. 2015. ‘Comedy, Too Fatal Emblem: Anne Damer and Occult Theatricality’. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27, no. 3–4: 557–96.

Artworks Referenced Anon. 1790. ‘Beatrice Fishing for a Coronet’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1868,0808.5906. Anon. 1806. ‘Portrait of Miss Tyrer’. Monthly Mirror. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number Ee,5.115. Anon. 1807. ‘A Bit of Flattery’. Walpole Library Image 13854. Anon. 1807. ‘Portrait of Mrs Powell’. Dramatic Mirror. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number Y,6.260. Anon. 1807. ‘Portrait of Mrs Sharp’. Monthly Mirror. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1943,0410.2424. Boyne and Walker. 1787. ‘Under Hoop & Bell’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1868,0808.5612.

246     Laura Engel

Collet, John. 1779. ‘An Actress at Her Toilet, or Miss Brazen Just Breecht’. Walpole Library Image 04442. Damer, Anne. c.1788. ‘Bust of Eliza Farren as Thalia (Muse of Comedy)’. National Portrait Gallery 4469. Gillray, James. 1797. ‘Contemplations on a Coronet’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number J,3.112. Gillray, James. 1797. ‘The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1851,0901.864. Gillray, James. 1801. ‘Dido, in Despair!’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1868,0808.6927. Northcote, Thomas. 1805. ‘Mrs Wells as “Hebe”’. Art Gallery of Toronto. Reynolds, Joshua. ‘Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse’. Dulwich Art Gallery. Rowlandson, Thomas. c.1789. ‘Rehearsing in the Greenroom’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1938,0613.8. Rowlandson, Thomas. 1790. ‘Dressing for a Masquerade’. British Museum Collection On-line. Catalogue number 1938,0613.8. Sayers, James. 1790 ‘A Peep Behind the Curtain at the Widow Belmour’. Walpole Library Image 07017.

Part IV Nineteenth-Century America, Europe and Japan

Introduction The focus of chapters so far has been Europe and the European tradition; the current part goes farther afield, crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Sea of Japan via Paris. Despite the distances travelled, the nineteenth-century world is a noticeably smaller place with performers traversing continents and with cross-cultural exchange around the globe. Each of the following chapters examines a society in the process of transformation, of nation-building in the face of fast-approaching modernity driven by political and technological change, with the theatre and women playing major roles in re-defining culture and society. Pam Cobrin’s chapter explores the way the recently independent United States forged a nation out of its disparate mix of social and ethnic groups; theatre is a key site in the construction of cultural stereotypes. Cobrin examines how American womanhood came to be defined through the theatrical types they saw represented on stage and focuses on three of these: the roles of ‘The Indian Maiden’, ‘The Tragic Mulatta’ and ‘The Comic Spinster’ played out against a white middle-class ideal of Christian piety, domesticity and motherhood. Women writers and performers appropriated and undermined these stereotypes; Charlotte Barnes, for example, imagines a feminist version of Pocahontas, the prototypical Indian Maiden. In the years before the Civil War, the role of the Tragic Mulatta became a key figure in antislavery drama—a victim of white supremacy but with the potential to become a forward-looking agent of social change. The Comic Spinster, on

248     Part IV: Nineteenth-Century America, Europe and Japan

the other hand, is white, financially independent and single; her very existence a threat to patriarchal power, she is mercilessly exposed on stage by savage characterisation as pathetic, undesirable and pathological, in a miso­ gynist stereotype of womanhood unfortunately commonplace across centuries and cultures (see, for example, Laura Rosenthal’s discussion of the elderly Lady Wishfort in Congreve’s Way of the World in Chapter 10). Robert Barker examines the significance of pulmonary tuberculosis (consumption) in the lives of the celebrated nineteenth-century French actresses Mlle Rachel (Élisabeth Rachel Félix), Sarah Bernhardt and Jeanne Ludwig. Typically a disease of the desperate over-worked poor, tuberculosis nevertheless took on a kind of glamorous mystique (‘consumptive chic’) in high society, reinforced by high-profile demi-mondaine theatrical roles like Marguerite Gautier in Dumas’ world-wide hit, La dame aux camélias, and Violetta in Verdi’s operatic adaptation, La Traviata. Barker argues here (285) that ‘consumption became a performative trope through which the nineteenthcentury stage could articulate a new, Romantic conception of domestic bourgeois heroism’. The real sufferings of leading actresses from this disease helped to give life to the trope but also emphasised the heroism of their own struggle; Barker sees them, not as victims or ‘sinners’, but, as they saw themselves: professional working women, ‘determined to maintain agency, dignity, and control over their own labour, even as that labour destroys them’ (282). Ada Rehan was one of the most successful and internationally celebrated actresses of her day, the leading lady of Augustin Daly’s New Yorkbased company and fêted throughout Europe and America. She scored her most notable triumphs in the comedies of Shakespeare and was the definitive Katherine of her age in The Taming of the Shrew. Since then, however, Rehan’s star has waned, unlike the reputations of her contemporaries, Ellen Terry, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Lezlie Cross investigates the reasons behind this celebrity vanishing act, concluding that it was due in part to conventional privileging of tragedy over comedy, combined with the dramatic revolution in acting styles which meant that the much-praised exuberance of Rehan’s youthful performances came to be seen as artificial and stagey as the century passed. More significantly for Rehan’s theatrical legacy, contemporary critics were divided as to whether she was merely a puppet in the hands of a Svengali-like maestro, Augustin Daly; a charming woman repeatedly playing herself; or a truly gifted actress. Makiko Yamanashi charts the emergence of professional women performers onto the public stage in late nineteenth-century Japan and their contribution to the redefinition of what it meant to be a ‘modern woman’ in early twentieth-century Japanese culture and society. Yamanashi demonstrates

Part IV: Nineteenth-Century America, Europe and Japan     249

how the establishment of educational institutions for women offered unique opportunities for female performance and led to the development of the new genre of all-girl Japanese Revue, still thriving today. She shows how the introduction of Western ideas and theatrical models helped create the shortlived but highly influential genre of Asakusa Opera. She also examines the challenge to the traditional theatrical genres of Kabuki and Kengeki (Samurai drama) with the establishment of female equivalents, Onna Kabuki, Onna Kengeki, and Musume-gidayū, subverting conventional gender expectations and stereotypes. Yamanashi traces the careers at home and abroad of the most important performers in these fields, such as Kawakami Sadayakko, Mori Ritsuko, Matsui Sumako, Miura Tamaki, Hanako and Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu, showing how the success of these performers in America, London and Paris helped raise their profile in Japan itself. Despite cultural prejudice and social hostility, through hard work, talent and determination, these newly-emerged joyū (professional actresses) achieved fame, fortune and international celebrity. More importantly, they helped promote new ideas and models of womanhood which transformed the position of women in Japanese society.

12 Performing the Nation State: Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre and the American Cultural Imagination Pam Cobrin

I value my beauty at fifty dollars a year, as that is about the sum it costs me for keeping it in repair year by year. (Miss Spindle, William Henry Smith, The Drunkard, 1844, 9) Thou’st ta’en me from the path of savage error, Blood-stain’d and rude, where rove my countrymen, And taught me heavenly truths … (Pocahontas, James Nelson Barker, The Indian Princess, 1808, 52)

Within a year of the premiere of James Nelson Barker’s play, The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage, on a Philadelphia stage in April 1808, another re-telling of the Pocahontas legend, titled ‘A Sketch of the Life of Pocahontas’, was reprinted in various national newspapers. The sketch had originally appeared in the [Boston] Monthly Anthology (February 1804, 170– 74). In this published account, Pocahontas is described as having ‘the colours and charms of Eve, at the age of fifteen when nature acts with all her powers’. Many circulating images of Pocahontas rescuing John Smith show a half-nude, light-skinned (compared to the pictured Native American brethren) young woman throwing herself on the body of Smith, saving him from execution.

Pam Cobrin (*)  Barnard College, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_12

251

252     Pam Cobrin

What connects these renderings—along with those in various books, magazines, newspapers and plays—is that Pocahontas is portrayed as a nationally specific symbol of American values: she is both heroic, saving John Smith, and subservient. Love makes her submissive to her English husband, John Rolfe, as she pursues the American promise of domestic tranquillity; she is virginal while sexually desirable and desiring, with a young reproductively ripe body. Her pureness emerges from her Native American identity—she is portrayed as simple and sexually available but uneducated in white Western systems of knowledge—and yet her desire to be converted to Christianity creates the opportunity for her to become a knowledgeable Christian woman. Perhaps most significantly, she is not white. And yet, she is also not not-white. She is always described as both a product of, and yet an anomaly to, her ‘savage’ race. Her Native Americanness is described in terms of her proximity to whiteness in descriptions, such as her being ‘the colour of Eve’, and physically/visually, in the stage version she is played by a white actress, listed as ‘Mrs. Wilmot’. Pocahontas, as a heroic non-white female, nevertheless, paradoxically supports the systems of power embedded in American culture that depend on the supremacy of whiteness and the dominance of patriarchal power. Such a twist is not surprising considering that it was white men who authored the national cultural narrative, which was woven into all aspects of American life. Much like her theatrical cousin, the ‘Tragic Mulatta’, a woman who appears white but is actually mixed-race, Pocahontas is a female character whose race veered outside of, and yet not too far outside of, whiteness. These characters provided permissible sexual access to female bodies while still privileging the sacredness of purity and morality as contained within the white female body. At the other end of the theatrical spectrum, in the temperance melodrama The Drunkard, or, The Fallen Saved (1844), the sexually repugnant spinster Miss Spindle provides comic relief as the antithesis to the ingénue, Mary. Whereas Mary is beautiful but humble, Miss Spindle proclaims herself beautiful when she is not. Whereas Mary is young, Miss Spindle is ‘old’ but tries to act as if she is still young, which serves to comically highlight the undesirable nature of a woman past her reproductive viability. Whereas Mary is romantically pursued resulting in marriage, Miss Spindle romantically pursues with no return interest. And, perhaps most significantly, whereas Mary is fertile, as proven by her marriage and subsequent motherhood, Miss Spindle is forever childless, as illustrated by her never-married status and her advanced age. Mary’s sexual purity makes her desirable;

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     253

Miss Spindle’s everlasting sexual purity of spinsterhood makes her pathetic. And, yet, paradoxically, while Mary serves as the ideal, she is also the most vulnerable and least autonomous of the two. Whereas Mary has no money and is dependent on her husband—who is not dependable—and is fooled by false friends who take advantage of her poverty and innocence, Miss Spindle has money, is not dependent on a man to take care of her, and is not susceptible to false friends or schemes to take advantage of her innocence. This is because Miss Spindle, after a life of financial and personal autonomy, is not innocent, except in the arena of love. But rather than admire her autonomy, the audience is meant to laugh at her gender abnormalities connected to her self-sufficiency and choice-less choice to remain single. Across the nineteenth century, theatrical representations of women stitched together culturally normative expectations of sexuality and gender, defining female citizenship as existing in relationship to women’s dependence on male desire and racial/racist hierarchies. Since social standards were largely decided by those in positions of power and those in positions of power were predominantly white and male, including those controlling the theatre industry, the images of womanhood were created in large part by white men. Thus, female identity was constructed and refracted through the white male—heteronormative—gaze. However, the bodily presence of women on stage and the counter-narratives to white male-authored visions of female gender norms complicated simplistic definitions of American womanhood. White heteronormative desirable women served as both the ideal and the norm with all other female identities represented as inherently deficient. In this essay, I explore staged representations of female identity through the lens of three different female character types as defined against ‘pure white womanhood’: the ‘Indian Maiden’, a female Native American character created and popularized at the beginning of the nineteenth century in ‘Indian Dramas’; the ‘Tragic Mulatta’, an African-American female ­character made popular in anti-slavery literary fiction and eventually on stage; and the older white female character, the ‘Comic Spinster’, who came to prominence in mid-nineteenth-century melodrama. While these three loci are not exhaustive of the raced, sexed and gendered representations of women’s identities on the nineteenth-century stage, in particular of non-white women and/or non-middle to upper-class women and/or non-young women, they provide a useful lens through which to consider how womanhood and female citizenship were reflected—and constructed—on the American stage.

254     Pam Cobrin

Native American Heroines and the Sexualized American Other At the beginning of the nineteenth century, motherhood, morality and piety became defining factors of the dominant discourse regarding American womanhood, a discourse limited to white middle- and upper-class women. As Ruth Bloch (2016, 119) explains in American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815: The evangelical image of the moral mother triumphed in part because it presented a compelling synthesis of the old and the new. In certain respects, it constituted an updated version of the older feminine ideal of help-meet, with its downplaying of female intellect and its emphasis on domestic usefulness and Christian virtue.

At the same time, anthropologists took the Native American as a ‘privileged object of ethnological scrutiny and knowledge’ (Bieder 1996, 165); in 1797, Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton in his book New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America claimed, ‘that not only had Indians declined from an ancient civilization to a rude state over a long period of time but also that it was impossible for them to advance toward civilization as Americans defined it without the help of whites’ (Bieder 1996, 165). These factors circulated at a time when the ‘Indian Question’ occupied the American political apparatus, with national attitudes towards Native Americanness continually changing depending on specific presidencies along with mainstream ideals of masculinity and femininity, which, while not static, relied on whiteness and maleness as the central organizing foundation. These coalescing ideologies converged on stage at the beginning of the nineteenth century in the ‘Indian Play’ and in particular in the character of the ‘Indian Maiden’. The popularity of the ‘Indian Play’, with its Native American heroes, may seem an odd turn during a time when Native Americans were so brutalized by whites in America. And yet the Indian Play was so popular that by 1828 actor Edwin Forrest offered a prize of five hundred dollars for an original ‘Tragedy in five acts, of which the hero or principal character shall be an aboriginal of this country’, as a heroic vehicle for himself (Moody 1966, 88). Metamora, the resulting and most successful Indian Play was, as Sarah Chinn (2017, 164) explains,

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     255

a sort of petri dish for conventions of representing indigenous masculinity on stage: the Native American man as homologue to nature; the shift from Native nobility to indigenous rage; and the inevitable descent from rage into individual death and group annihilation.

While many of the Indian Plays extolled rugged American masculinity through the bodies of Native American male characters, they also contained a particular image of American womanhood through Native American female characters. The Indian Maiden was the counterpart to American melodrama’s white heroine, but with some marked differences. The Indian Maiden, according to Maria Staton (2014, 6), could be reduced to a few key attributes, most notably that she was ‘friendly towards the whites to the point of adoration; she smoothly slid into Christianity; overall, she testified to a possible reconciliation between the two races through domestication and submission of the Indians’. The Indian Maiden is thus figured as morally superior and religiously devout, features usually attributed to nineteenth-century white womanhood. Indian Maidens actually revealed an excess of these qualities, which were represented as naturally present, although possibly dormant, and acquired through contact with Christian white culture. Ladies’ magazines such as Godey’s Ladybook and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine proliferated stories about Indian Maidens’ likeness to white women. While the Indian Maiden’s morality might surpass her white counterparts, her sexual availability sharply differentiated her from white stage heroines. The stage highlighted ingrained beliefs about Native American female sexuality. Priscilla Sears (1982, 37) notes, ‘Indian women have been described in exotic terms since Columbus noted in his journal that they were “naked, well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces, well-formed and very comely”’. Images showed them often in states of ‘natural’ undress, in the act of protecting, supplicating, or just ‘being’ in a naive state of childlike nudity with a post-pubescent woman’s body. Playwrights sexualized the American Indian stage character in three ways: by making the Indian Maiden sexually naive and thus unaware of the immorality of desire or the ways in which she may provoke desire in others; by having staged opportunities for female characters to display a ‘sexually innocent heathenness’ through provocative dances and/or revealing costumes on stage; and by creating a stage opposite to the Indian Maiden, the sexually wanton Indian female character. Such displays allowed male viewers to assert sexual ownership over images of Native American women through their gaze and, consequently, to control gender norms for all women either through

256     Pam Cobrin

the eventual marriage between Indian Maidens and white men, showing the dominance of white male influence; through their religious conversion to Christianity, which privileged euro-centric whiteness and maleness since Christianity is traditionally a male-dominated religion; or by killing Indian Maidens whose story-lines did not include marrying white men, leaving a future without white husbands impossible. Following the Indian Maidens’ Christian conversion, these female characters were described as ‘modest’, which heightened images of their immodest pre-conversion state. The actresses themselves, who were white, presented a superimposed image of the character’s non-white body on the actress’s white body, providing imaginary sexual access to both white and Native American female bodies while privileging whiteness. Whereas the value of the white melodramatic heroine was her virginity, the Indian woman’s stage value was in her sexual accessibility. In Tan-Gó-Ru-A, Weerahoochewee (described in the script as ‘An Indian Pow Wow’) berates ‘Indian Chief ’ Tangorua for sacrificing his tribe’s power position with their white neighbours in trade for Miriam, the Mayor’s daughter: ‘to yield up the greatest project ever formed for the sake of one poor, pale-faced girl, when he might buy dark-eyed maidens enough to fill his wigwam—the daughters of great chiefs—for a few bundles of skins’ (Moorehead 1856, 189), thus emphasizing the easy availability of beautiful Indian Maidens and their relatively low economic value. If the Indian Maiden did not marry a white man, she would, nevertheless, show her devotion to whiteness by protecting white women from Indian masculine violence and, by inference, Indian masculine sexual violence. In Tecumseh (1844), just before Jessie, the young white woman, is to be taken by a group of Indians, she screams in fear that they might discover her male disguise: ‘Mercy! I dare not speak my sex, for a worse fate might then await me!’ (Jones 1844, 48). Melindah, the Indian Maiden, saves Jessie, protecting her by taking on the role of the male hero and providing her safe passage. Melindah eventually sacrifices her own life for Jessie, shouting ‘Thou shalt be free!’ (Jones 1844, 96). Likewise, in Oolaita, or, The Indian Heroine (1821), the white Eumelia is first threatened sexually by the nameless ‘1st Indian’: ‘As for you (to Eumelia) whose looks bespeak the weaker sex, but yet whose cunning seldom knows a limit, my pleasure and my will was framed for you’ (Deffebach 1821, 13). Oolaita, the daughter of the King of the Sioux Nation, rushes to Eumelia’s defence, screaming:

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     257

Stay, stay, that murderous weapon in its course, lest death and infamy await you all. (Rushes upon 1st Indian—seizes him—tears the dagger from him and casts disdainful look upon him.) What; murder beauty, innocence and truth? What kill thus fiendlike a defenseless woman, and bring disgrace upon the Sioux nation? Away, be gone or fear the power of Machiwaita’s daughter. (Deffebach 1821, 13)

In a scene reminiscent of Pocahontas’s rescue of John Smith, Oolaita takes on the attributes of a protector, but unlike Pocahontas, she also acts as a female warrior, physically battling with the 1st Indian and claiming her power as ‘Machiwaita’s Daughter’. In Tan-Gó-Ru-A, Kazuka sacrifices herself for the young white woman, Miriam, when Miriam is offered in marriage by her father to an Indian in order to ensure peace. While Indian Maidens could be saved in the Christian marriage bed with a white man, the opposite was true when a white maiden was under threat of having sexual contact with an Indian man. Tangorua acknowledges this when he describes his love for a white woman: ‘I knew that my love would destroy her’ (Moorehead 1856, 129). Male Indian sexual desire towards a white woman is shown to be destructive, proving the dominance of the male in a sexual relationship and the necessity of white values to temper ‘primitive’ urges—white males save Indian Maidens whereas Indian males destroy white females; the women are the receivers of sexual/cultural knowledge, not the givers. Like her Indian Maiden sister, Melindah, Kazuka comes to the aid of Miriam when her life is threatened, yelling, ‘But my sister Miriam is dearer to me than my own life … Instead of putting her to the torture, I am ready if such a price must be paid, to bear it myself for her deliverance’ (Moorehead 1856, 187). Each instance shows the Indian Maiden’s goal to support and protect white womanhood because of its beauty and superiority—Kazuka says ‘Ah! Could I but be changed to a white maiden’ (Moorehead 1856, 91)—and it shows in turn white womanhood’s need for protection. Authorship of Catherine Brown, The Converted Cherokee: A Missionary Drama Founded on Fact (1819), is attributed to ‘A Lady’, and while one cannot assume the identity or gender of the mysterious author, it seems more than coincidence that the play’s authorship implies a woman and the play itself explicitly promotes white womanhood more than most Indian Maiden plays. The female teacher at the missionary school, for example, advises young Native American females, ‘Now girls, do act like women, and see everything the white women do, and try to act just like them’ (1819, 168). White Christian women, according to the play, provide a model of morality,

258     Pam Cobrin

humility and religious devotion. Catherine’s conversion reveals to her ‘that my life has been sinful’, referring specifically to her past emphasis on physical beauty and adornment, which left her as an object to be looked at (1819, 80). A significant part of Catherine Brown ’s power as popular entertainment was its proximity to real events: the play’s story was based on the life of an actual Cherokee woman named Catherine Brown and her conversion and education at Brainard Mission School in 1817. Thus, the play could claim to be ‘authentic’ in both its storytelling and the lessons of the story, providing the stage’s fictional premise of storytelling with the authority of a ‘true story’ supporting its moral lessons. The titular character’s real-life counterpart, however, complicated a smooth telling of Brown’s Christian conversion and her rejection of Cherokee/Indian culture (Moulder 2010). Mary Amanda Moulder’s dissertation explains how Brown’s real life, letters and actions complicate ­missionary-written accounts of Brown’s conversion. I would argue that the same holds true for the play version; for however much Brown claims full allegiance to her white sisters’ ways in the play, the playwright is ‘stuck’ with the fact that Catherine Brown left the missionary school with her parents when they came for her. The real Catherine Brown’s familial ties ran deeper than her Christian conversion. The plot narrative, in order to incorporate the events of Catherine Brown’s life, showcases the value of Indian female assimilation and white supremacy, while at the same time accounting for actual events, embedding a counter-narrative that threatens to, if not undermine, at least complicate the message with internal contradictions. Brown the woman haunts Brown the character in her white storyteller’s narrative. Of all of the Indian Maidens though, Pocahontas retains the strongest imprint on the American cultural imagination. Pocahontas marked the first Indian Maiden appearance on stage in 1808 and set the precedent for all the other stage Indian Maidens who followed her. As Dan Blumlo (2017, 129) points out, ‘The Pocahontas and John Smith legend was the first “Indian Princess” rescue narrative to enter the American creation story during the nineteenth century, and therefore, influenced the other rescue narratives’. Commercial images of a half-dressed Pocahontas preceded and coincided with the staged versions of her story. Pocahontas was always already known and seen by the audience before her first stage entrance and thus preconceived ideas and images were projected onto the actresses who played the part. Of the many renditions of the Pocahontas story, three major stage productions stand out: The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage by James Nelson Barker (1808), Pocahontas: Or, The Settlers of Virginia, A National Drama,

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     259

in Three Acts, by George Washington Parke Custis (1830) and The Forest Princess, or Two Centuries Ago by Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes (first performed in London, 1844, American premiere, 1848). These three versions represent national norms across three different decades from three different playwrights telling the same story. Both Barker and Custis present Pocahontas as an uneducated vessel waiting to be filled by white education and a white masculine presence. In Barker’s version (1808, 18), Pocahontas’s dependence on John Smith’s wisdom is explicit in their exchanges: Pocahontas: Where sleeps the sun then? Smith: The sun never sleeps. When you see him sink beyond the mountains, he goes to give light to other countries, where darkness flies before him, as it does here, when you behold him rise in the east: thus he chases Night for ever round the world… Pocahontas: My brother, will you teach the red men?

In Custis’s version, Pocahontas is first introduced as already converted and educated by the whites, before meeting Rolfe, ignoring the actual timeline of Pocahontas’s life. Pocahontas explains upon her first appearance: ‘Since the light of the Christian doctrine has shone on my before benighted soul, I have learn’d that mercy is one of the attributes of divinity I now adore’ (Custis 1830, 11). The audience is thus provided with her pre-conversion (‘my before benighted soul’) and post-conversion state, all encapsulated in her first appearance onstage. Both Barker and Custis include extraneous scenes designed solely to have women on stage dancing for the male viewers. Rebecca Jaroff (2006, 492) explains that Custis: makes every effort to paint the Indians as uncivilized yet enticing. To that end, he includes a rather prurient account from The Proceedings [written by John Smith’s fellow colonists in 1612 describing Smith’s leadership in the Jamestown settlement] in which Indian women entertained Captain Smith by dancing naked. Of course, custom forbid anything short of fully clothed dancers performing in a similar dance in Custis’s version; still the sight of Indian maidens, including Pocahontas, dancing seductively for the white men clearly constitutes them as objects of forbidden desire.

The most intriguing staging of the Pocahontas story, however, comes from Charlotte Barnes in The Forest Princess or, Two Centuries Ago. This is the only female-authored version and is the most recent of the three. Jaroff

260     Pam Cobrin

(2006, 483) convincingly argues that Barnes’s version, while supporting the general Pocahontas myth, is ‘diametrically opposed to the earlier version’. Barnes saw her mother perform in Custis’s version and created a play that Jaroff (2006, 483) argues, ‘depicts Pocahontas as an adept politician who strives for racial gender equality, rather than a loyal supporter of colonial domination who severs all ties with her own people’. Barnes incorporated elements of resistance to the patriarchal systems embedded in both American culture and theatre. The Forest Princess imagines a more feminist vision of Pocahontas. Additionally, it paints a less appealing image of white men—Barnes includes the kidnapping of Pocahontas by whites and, as Jaroff (2006, 490) notes, the ‘uneducated figures are not Indians, but unskilled white laborers who provide a striking and humorous contrast to the royal princess’. Pocahontas occupies the liminal space between the fiction of the stage and the reality of historical events. Like Catherine Brown, The Converted Cherokee, the Pocahontas plays are based on their historical protagonist’s actual life. The myths surrounding her story create blurry lines between a national narrative, of which Pocahontas is a necessary part, and the life events of the historical Pocahontas. Charlotte Barnes’s job as a playwright, actress and woman in a male-dominated society was to occupy that liminal space and construct female images for the stage, a job usually reserved for men. As a female playwright, her play provided a counter-narrative, constructing a more feminist image of Pocahontas and, practically, providing a more substantive leading role for Barnes herself, especially when compared to the version her mother had played. Powerful counter-narratives to the stage Indian Maiden came from performative spaces outside of the theatre that both relied on and resisted characterizations forwarded by theatre productions. Figures such as Native American activist Sarah Winnemucca, who was in the public eye from 1864 to 1891, drew upon the ‘Indian Princess’ myth to create a read­able and popular medium for white audiences to ‘hear’ her messages of resistance to anti-Indian government policies. Carolyn Sorisio (2011, 2) explains how Winnemucca’s ability to shape public opinion relied on controlling her public image in the newspapers, which allowed her to be seen as an Indian Princess instead of someone playing a role for the media. For example, Sorisio (2011, 3) relays newspaper reports of a political speech she gave at the Hotel Winthrop: ‘Yet the critical stories we hear most about Winnemuccca’s lecture in the Hotel Winthrop that May evening and in general emphasize not her media savvy but rather her performance as an Indian princess’.

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     261

Sorisio (2011, 4) further claims that despite the focus on Winnemucca’s conformity or non-conformity to the Indian Princess ideal, Winnemucca’s ‘shifting personas allowed her to destabilize the roles cast upon American Indian women, challenge representations of herself and American Indians generally, and keep herself and her causes in the public’s eye’. Likewise, the writer and campaigner, Susette La Flesche, lectured and advocated for American Indians, even testifying before a special committee of the US Senate, all the while called ‘Indian Maiden’ by the press (Sorisio 2011, 6). Such examples show the complexity of the ripples flowing into and out of the theatre, creating visual and embodied representations that then circulate and can be altered, refined and transmitted in a complicated network of messages that both support and resist the dominant national narrative around gendered and raced identity and citizenship.

The Tragic Mulatta and African-American Femininity There is a significant body of rich scholarly work examining the nineteenth-century literary character of the ‘Tragic Mulatta’. My interest in this character is not to shed new light but rather to put this character in relationship with the Indian Maiden and the Comic Spinster within the context of the national narrative and complicating counter-narrative of white womanhood. The Tragic Mulatta, as Eve Raimon (2004, 7) defines her in The Tragic Mulatta Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth Century AntiSlavery Fiction, is ‘an educated light-skinned heroine whose white benefactor and paramour (sometimes also the young woman’s father) dies, leaving her to the auction block and/or the sexual designs of a malevolent creditor’. Specifically, the relevant racial designations included ‘Octoroon’ (a woman one-eighth black by descent), ‘Quadroon’ (a woman one-quarter black by descent) and ‘Mulatta’ (a woman one-half black descent, but also used more generally to describe a woman of mixed heritage). While Raimon focuses primarily on literary fiction, staged incarnations of the Tragic Mulatta amplified certain features of the character. For example, by having white actresses play those roles with little to no make-up, the visual aesthetic decreased the distance between the character’s identity and whiteness—or what Judith Williams (2001, 26) calls ‘metaphoric blackface’—while other white actors playing African American characters ‘blackened up’ to darken all exposed skin. The most popular nineteenth-century

262     Pam Cobrin

plays with Tragic Mulattas included George Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (first published in 1852), William Wells Brown’s The Escape; or A Leap for Freedom (1858), and Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859). The Tragic Mulatta was a central figure in anti-slavery literature. Her character tried to embody the cult of true womanhood but was prevented, not by nature, but by the cruelty of slavery. White women were meant to identify with her desire for domesticity and empathetically fear for her ability to create a moral familial structure and maintain her personal virtue within a system that valued her only as sexual currency. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852, 447), author of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the source material for Aiken’s play, made a specific plea to white mothers: ‘I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate the child of her bosom’. Of course, Stowe’s definition of which mothers should be pitied is limited to light-skinned characters, at least according to the plotline in her novel. Like the Indian Princess, the Tragic Mulatta provoked admiration for her moral fortitude. Audiences are meant to root for Uncle Tom’s Cabin ’s Eliza and The Escape ’s Melinda as they escape sexual servitude to white masters while fleeing to Canada to reunite with their African American husbands. Audiences are meant to cheer for Uncle Tom ’s Cabin ’s Cassy and Emmeline when we find they have disappeared at the end of the play, assuming they have run off together so that the older Cassy can protect the younger Emmeline from the years of sexual abuse Cassy has already suffered. And the audience is meant to mourn the death of Zoe while we simultaneously admire her for killing herself to avoid a future of sexual servitude to Jacob M’Closky in The Octoroon. As Raimon (2004, 12) points out, ‘A liminal figure like the mulatta, therefore, is well situated to reveal writers’—and therefore the culture’s—conflicted visions of national and racial exclusion and belonging’. This conflicted and often contradictory-seeming narrative thus gives us a character who is both resistant to easy racial categorization in a time when racial identity was crucial to one’s freedom and citizenship, and who actively resists the legally condoned sexual abuse and violence embedded in slavery in favour of her personal safety and the safety of her family, a core component of the cult of true womanhood. Raimon highlights the need for a more complicated reading of the Tragic Mulatta that recognizes how these plays support a system of white supremacy while resisting elements that maintain the system’s framework. Playwrights employ the character as an agent of social change as much as an emblem of victimization: ‘For all their positional differences, they share a political sensibility and a literary

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     263

vision that are forward looking—even utopian, for some—in their emphasis on contemplating the viability of an interracial republic’ (Raimon 2004, 7). The Tragic Mulatta was more visible in literary fiction of the mid-­ nineteenth century than in the theatre, beginning with Lydia Maria Child’s The Quadroons (1842), which is often credited with introducing the archetype of the Tragic Mulatta, along with Richard Hildreth’s The Slave; or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836). And while the name ‘Tragic Mulatta’ ­suggests a less-than-optimal outcome for the character, that is not always the case. As Eric Gardner (2007, 188) asserts, contrary to literary criticism’s limited view of the character type: there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of the tragic mulatta—one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment.

Gardner’s description of literary fiction and his reading of the mixed-race heroine as more empowered and complicated than the oft-assumed ‘solely tragic’ Tragic Mulatta can be applied to plays as well. Amongst the three plays listed above, four of the five Tragic Mulatta characters escape; three of the four escape sexual abuse, and one takes revenge on her sexually abusive master. All three plays follow similar plotlines. Each play and playwright claims that the fiction of the plot is ‘based on a true story’. The discrepancies, however, in the plots and characters are telling in terms of how the narratives and counter-narratives function. It is particularly useful to compare William Wells Brown’s play, written by a former slave, to the plays written by Aiken and Boucicault, both white men. Aiken’s play re-tells Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its abolitionist mission and Stowe’s claims of directly witnessing the events portrayed. Boucicault based his play on Captain Mayne Reid’s romance The Quadroon; or, A Lover’s Adventures in Louisiana (1856); Boucicault also wanted to write a starring role for his wife, Agnes Robertson. Joseph Roach (1992, 176) claims Boucicault’s ‘truth’ extends to ‘Boucicault’s own residence in New Orleans, at the height of the spectacular slave auctions in the mid-1850s’. Both Aiken and Boucicault’s plays were staged often and were extremely popular. Brown, on the other hand, read his play aloud in abolitionist meetings, and it was not staged in his lifetime. As a former slave, he claimed in his preface that, ‘Many of the incidents were drawn from my own experience of eighteen years at the South’ (1858, 3).

264     Pam Cobrin

All three plays share certain plot devices: all black characters other than the Tragic Mulatta and Mulatto speak in a cartoonish ‘slave dialect’ while the light-skinned characters speak in fluent prose. The audience’s sympathy and recognition of the hardships experienced by female light-skinned characters do not extend to other female black characters, at least not with the same care and detail. And each of the Tragic Mulatta characters is threatened by current, future or past sexual and/or familial violence. The white female characters in each play are particularly noteworthy, especially the matriarchs or female equivalents. In both Aiken and Boucicault’s plays, the matriarch is loving, kind and protective, although ineffectual in providing any kind of meaningful protection. In Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mrs. Shelby is never seen, but Eliza, describes her: ‘mistress—she’s always good. I heard her plead and be for us’ (1852, 10) even though Mrs. Shelby cannot stop the planned sale of Eliza’s son. And in The Octoroon, Zoe describes ‘our mother [Mrs. Peyton], she who from infancy treated me with such fondness, she … who had most reason to spurn me’ (Boucicault 1859, 467) pointing to Mrs. Peyton’s love for Zoe, who is both a slave and the child of her husband and another slave. Salem Scudder, the overseer, explains to the newcomer George, ‘Don’t you know that she is the natural daughter of the judge, your uncle, and that old lady thar [sic ] just adored anything her husband cared for; and this girl, that another woman would a hated she loves as if she’d been her own child’ (Boucicault 1859, 454). In both plays, however, these sympathetic older white women are impotent when it comes to wielding power; their Christian morality is toothless when it concerns anything that veers outside of the insular domestic sphere, whose boundaries are defined by the men around her. For example, Zoe’s protectress, Mrs. Peyton, widowed and penniless, is unable to prevent Zoe’s sale to M’Closky, leaving Zoe with only one viable means of escape: suicide. Similarly, Mrs. Shelby’s love and protection of Eliza do not protect Eliza’s motherhood when her son is sold. Consequently, once Eliza escapes the Shelby home as a runaway to protect her maternal sphere of influence (since no one else will), she becomes a target for slave traders who will sell her as a sexual commodity. Brown inverts the moral white matriarch’s qualities, providing a very different and damning depiction of white women’s participation in the horrors of slavery, in particular for the female slaves. Mrs. Gaines, the play’s matriarch, acts on her jealousy of her husband’s sexual pursuit of Melinda, a slave. The domestic sphere, painted as a moral temple in Aiken and Boucicault’s plays, becomes a sphere of unchecked white female power wielded to p ­ rotect the individual woman in charge to the detriment of others. Mrs. Gaines’

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     265

interests do not extend beyond her own advancement—her name itself a reflection of her materialistic ambitions—albeit within the limitations of her gender, and her morality does not extend beyond her own needs. Her first line, speaking about her position as wife to the town doctor, encapsulates her world view which values material accumulation over concern for others: ‘Yes, I would be glad to see it more sickly here, so that your business might prosper … We must hope for the best. We must trust in the Lord. Providence may possibly send some disease amongst us for our benefit’ (Brown 1858, 5). Brown, in creating a matriarch as culpable as the sexually sadistic patriarchs, criticizes ideals of white femininity, the cult of true womanhood, and religion as bastions of civic morality. Instead, Mrs. Gaines uses religion to justify her abusive and unethical existence. Whereas in The Octoroon Mrs. Peyton loves Zoe because her husband loved Zoe, Mrs. Gaines hates Melinda because of Mr. Gaines’s sexual interest in her, regardless of Melinda’s rejection of him. When Mrs. Gaines finds Melinda imprisoned in a cottage by her husband, and Melinda implores, ‘God knows that I was brought here against my will, and I beg that you will take me away’, Mrs. Gaines responds, ‘Yes, Melinda, I will see that you are taken away, but it shall be after a fashion that you won’t like. I know that your master loves you, and I intend to put a stop to it. Here, drink the contents of this vial, —drink it!’ (Brown 1858, 35). Instead of showing any kind of Christian charity or mercy that supposedly defined the ‘cult of true womanhood’ Mrs. Gaines resorts to violence by trying to use her position as ‘Mistress’ to kill. While white women may not be the financial or power brokers in the same way as white men, Brown depicts white women as the co-dependent participants in a system that promotes brutality and undermines any claims on the morality or Christianity that white women claimed as their naturally endowed sphere of influence within the cult of domesticity. The Tragic Mulattas of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Escape use similar forms of resistance within the context of specific oppressive conditions, but the differences between them also speak to what Raimon (2004, 34) calls ‘the multifarious culture work the emblem performed’. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Aiken 1852, 78), Cassy expresses her hatred of Legree directly to him and even adds an implicit threat that reveals the dynamic between the two: I’d rather, ten thousand times, live in the dirtiest hole at the quarters, than be under your hoof! … Simon Legree, take care! (Legree lets go his hold) You’re afraid of me, Simon, and you’ve reason to be; for I’ve got the Devil in me!

266     Pam Cobrin

While this confrontation goes further than what we see from Boucicault’s characters, what defines Cassy is that her strength comes from her continued years of sexual abuse by numerous men. She is, in the context of the play, already ‘ruined’. And thus, at the end of her usefulness as a sexual object, she finds the power that comes from her character having nothing left to lose In Brown’s play, on the other hand, Melinda delivers a similar speech about the almost supernatural powers of a sexually abused woman, but she gives this speech as a warning before the sexual abuse occurs: Sir, let me warn you that if you compass my ruin, a woman’s bitterest curse will be laid upon your head with all the crushing, withering weight that my soul can impart to it; a curse that shall cling to you throughout the remainder of your wretched life; a curse that shall haunt you like a specter in your dreams by night, and attend upon you by day; a curse, too, that shall embody itself in the ghastly form of the woman whose chastity you will have outraged. (1858, 33)

Brown extends Melinda’s resistance and shows how she must also protect herself from white women. When Mrs. Gaines tries to kill Melinda, first by demanding that she drink poison and then by threatening her with a dagger, Melinda fights her and eventually ‘sweeps off Mrs. Gaines’ cap, combs and curls’, thus claiming her own womanhood by literally unmasking Mrs. Gaines’s and exposing her false womanliness (1858, 35). Counter-narratives to the Tragic Mulatta existed within and beyond the theatre, the most notable contemporaneous example being Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) which, as Heidi Hanrahan (2005, 599) shows, served to ‘[r]eject the benevolent yet hierarchical models of white female abolitionist rhetoric’. Like Brown, Jacobs could claim the authenticity of her own slave narrative. Unlike Brown, Jacobs could also claim the authenticity of her own Tragic Mulatta narrative. Jacobs was able to authenticate the sexual abuse and brutality of slavery in all of its gendered facets, however, she could also provide a counter-narrative to the racist hierarchies that functioned in much of literary fiction and drama about the Tragic Mulatta. Jacobs’ recounting of her sexual vulnerability and the brutality of whites overlaps directly with the prototypical Tragic Mulatta story. Jacobs (1861, 27), however, allows the reader to hear the language of her master’s rape attempt: He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against mean tyranny. But where could I turn for protection?

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     267

No matter whether the slave girls be black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.

Significantly, Jacobs undermines the Tragic Mulatta assertion that only light-skinned slave women bore the brunt of sexual abuse. Jacobs recast the threat of rape as that of gender and race, not gender and the appearance of/ proximity to whiteness, while upholding the corresponding message about the brutality of slavery. Jacobs (1861, 27), like Brown, undermines the image of Christian white womanhood as an intervening influence: ‘The mistress, who ought to protect the helpless victim, has no feelings towards her but those of jealousy and rage’. And by doing do so, Jacobs supports the credibility of that aspect of Brown’s play as a reflection of reality. Additionally, Jacobs herself refuses to conform to submissive aspects of the Tragic Mulatta as victim and/or casualty. Like Eliza, Cassy, Emmeline and Melinda—and unlike Zoe—Jacobs chooses life and not death. But beyond that choice, she refuses the hierarchical racist structures that underlie Tragic Mulatta narratives. Hanrahan (2005, 611) notes that Jacobs ‘turns her back entirely on a system that exalts female purity yet prevents black women from attaining it’. Instead of falling into a romantic relationship or a non-consensual sexual relationship with a white man, Jacobs tells of her decision to deliberately engage sexually with a white man who might help secure her freedom, thus leveraging sexuality as a commodity that she can use and control instead of it being exclusively used and controlled by others. The Tragic Mulatta trope justified a racially hierarchical system of human categorization while resisting certain facets that such a system breeds. Because the Tragic Mulatta was such a popular figure in the literary and dramatic world, the varying distinctions between versions and the credibility of these versions intersected in the public sphere, complicating simplistic or singular popular culture readings of black womanhood within the system of slavery.

The Comic Spinster In William Henry Smith’s (1844) Temperance play, The Drunkard, when Miss Spindle confesses to Lawyer Cribbs (1844, 15):

268     Pam Cobrin

Oh sir, why will you cause me to narrow up my feelings; my bleeding heart, by the recital of my afflictions. I have ‘let concealment like a’ caterpillar on a button-wood feed on my cambric cheek –and—[aside] I can’t remember the rest of it.

The audience is supposed to laugh. Miss Spindle’s performance is comic because her quote is something that would be spoken by a desirable young maiden, and Miss Spindle is anything but; she is instead the picture of white bourgeois spinsterhood. She performs a young maiden in distress, but she cannot even remember the lines—her attempt to be desirable is an always already failed performance. Regardless of the words her character speaks to linguistically construct the nineteenth-century ideal of ‘true womanhood’, she is, as Bruce A. McConachie (1992, 182) calls her character, ‘the ­grotesque inversion of sentimental domesticity’. To punctuate this point, the playwright makes every feature of Miss Spindle directly oppose those of The Drunkard ’s heroine, Mary; other than their shared whiteness, Mary and Miss Spindle are negative copies of each other—one an idealized vision of gender construction and one a grotesque parody of those qualities. Unlike the Indian Maiden and Tragic Mulatta, the Comic Spinster is white. But her age, reproductive (non)viability and refusal/inability to submit to male control relegate her to the margins. She serves as an object lesson to enforce gender norms within the patriarchal framework of white supremacy. On the surface, the audience laughs at an older woman assuming sexual currency in a market that does not value older women. Miss Spindle is well beyond the pre-motherhood, post-pubescent youth that characterizes nineteenth-century heroines—she is past childbearing age, and we assume that as a younger woman, she was rejected from the marriage and domestic economy (because, contemporaneous common sense would dictate, what woman would not voluntarily participate if given the option?). In context, it is clear why the playwright paints her as both comic and pathetic. But Miss Spindle raises deeper questions that ask us to read past her obvious comic value in the play: what purpose does such a character serve within the theatrical and cultural arena in mid-nineteenth-century America? What need does this character satisfy and/or what cultural anxiety does the character both express and, through that expression, pacify? By looking at three older, female, sexually comic characters, referred to here as the Comic Spinster—Miss Spindle from William H. Smith’s The Drunkard (1844), Prudence from Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion (1845), and Dame Barbara

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     269

from Charles Barras’s The Black Crook (1866)—it is clear that beneath the derisive laughter evoked at these characters’ expense, lurks nervous laughter from a patriarchal system’s anxiety about female sexuality. Of the three characters listed, Miss Spindle and Prudence are cut from the same cloth, and, in fact, each showed up on the stage for the first time only a year apart (1844 and 1845 respectively). Prudence, like Miss Spindle, is a never-married older woman who sees herself as a marriageable prospect for the older widowed farmer Mr. Trueman, who, not surprisingly, has no interest in any such prospect. This comes to a (comic) head in Act 5, after Prudence’s numerous attempts to win over Trueman. When, at the end of the play, in true melodramatic fashion, the misunderstandings between couples resolve into promises of betrothal, Prudence announces: ‘All of the single folks are getting married!’ Trueman responds, ‘No they are not. You and I are single folks, and we’re not likely to get married’, putting an end to Prudence’s façade of romantic intrigue in a comic punchline (Mowat 1845, 55). Dame Barbara, on the other hand, theatrically born close to two decades later, is (we assume from her references to a long dead ‘Charles’) a widow; even though she has had (brief ) marital experience, she has no biological children, making her more sexually experienced but, unlike the other two characters, not at risk of losing her virginal status if she finds a mate. She is still, however, deficient, as she is an older woman without the one productive accomplishment nineteenth-century American culture demands from women: children. Putting herself back on the dating market, at an age when older women were supposed to disappear sexually on stage, creates a context in which she is a clownish mimicry of young female sexuality. In The Black Crook, the playwright uses the soubrette role of Carline, through asides, to lead the audience through each instance of mockery of the spinster’s absurd imitation of youthful sexuality: Dame Barbara: … if I know anything about dress, I flatter myself that my appearance would do honor to any occasion. (Displays herself ) Carline: (Aside to Rosetta ) Mercy on us, was there ever such a fright! Why she looks for all the world like a great horned owl dressed up in the cast-off finery of a peacock. Ha, ha, ha, Did you ever? Observe me tickle the old buzzard … I declare, Dame, you’re looking gorgeous—so young and girlish too. Indeed, if I were ’Mina… I wouldn’t care to have you in the way when his lordship, the Count, arrives. Dame Barbara: And why not, pray? Carline:  Because I should consider you a dangerous rival. (Barras 1866, 8)

270     Pam Cobrin

Dame Barbara’s greatest sin is not her age-inappropriate clothing choice, but rather her age and gender-inappropriate desire to ‘display herself ’. An ageing woman’s demand to be visible—her desire to be a ‘peacock’ rather than the wizened ‘great horned owl’ she really is—begs the question of how that visibility could influence its surroundings; in this way, she is imbued with political agency. The audience, however, is led away from the possibility of Dame Barbara’s agency and towards identification with the young and ‘gender appropriate’ Carline, who invites them to laugh with her at Dame Barbara, further delegitimizing Dame Barbara as a credible authority and verifying the value of young (white) female sexuality. At the end of The Black Crook, Dame Barbara marries the older steward, Von Puffengruntz (who, as his name should make clear, is no great catch). In what amounts to an epilogue to the play, months later in the story, Dame Barbara complains that her husband, ‘hasn’t drawn a sober breath since the day after we were married, now more than three months ago’ (Barras 1866, 59). Marriage is thus an empty vessel without the scaffolding of motherhood and consequent domestic commitment. It is worth noting that her husband’s drinking started ‘the day after we were married’ highlighting the failures in the marriage bed, which for older women offers sexual but not procreative opportunity. Dame Barbara’s coupling is a mockery of marriage (as evidenced from its almost immediate disintegration), much as Dame Barbara is a mockery of ‘true womanhood’. These characters’ foibles are not, however, mere comic relief; they actually showcase social ideals of female sexuality and gender normativity by comically inverting those ideals. The audience laughs at the older female characters’ clumsy attempts to find a male romantic and sexual partner, their need to look young when that is no longer possible, and their inability to reflect on the reality of their social context. The humour is embedded in the disjuncture between the familiar features of female identity and those features contained within a biologically unsuitable vessel. Dorothy Holland (2002, 25) notes that the costume and acting choices for Dame Barbara ‘demonstrate … Sandra Bem’s observation that those who violate their prescribed gender-polarized script are problematic, unnatural, immoral and pathological’. By inviting the audience to mock these women, laughter creates a safe boundary for a dangerous hypothesis: that female sexuality might exist independent of the biological imperative to reproduce and thus, independent of imminent sequester to the domestic sphere. Bem’s argument that there is something ‘pathological’ about these characters is reflected in mid-nineteenth-century medicine’s attempts to

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     271

scientifically prove that women’s biological make-up necessitated a ­limited role for them in the social sphere. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s research (1978, 213) shows that: between 1840 and 1890, physicians, reflecting a growing physiological sophistication generally, and, more specifically, increasingly circumstantial knowledge of the female reproductive system were able to present a far more elaborate explanation of women’s peculiar femininity—and hence a rationale for her role as wife and mother. A woman became a prisoner […] of her reproductive functions.

Much of the medical documentation of this period claimed the act of menstruating created a volatility that could only be quieted by sexual and social male dominance and by childbearing. From the time a woman reached puberty, her entire existence was directed towards motherhood and domesticity: doctors theorized that women only had a limited amount of energy, and if it was not directed towards making her body biologically ready for motherhood, both she and her future children would suffer. Menstruation supposedly created weakness in women’s bodies; Smith-Rosenberg (1978, 214) documents doctors’ advice that, a girl should not engage in any absorbing project [during puberty]. Indeed, physicians routinely used this energy theory to sanction attacks upon any behavior they considered unfeminine; education, factory work, religious or charitable activities, virtually any interests outside of the home during puberty.

Motherhood (and consequently, marriage) thus became a medical necessity for women to overcome the dangers of an unstable female anatomical system susceptible to monthly explosions of both bodily fluids and psychic passions. Smith-Rosenberg, writing with Rosenberg in an earlier study, quotes one physician from 1870 who claimed that ‘It was as if the Almighty, creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around’ (Smith-Rosenberg and Rosenberg, 1973, 335). The authors explain that: Weaker in body, confined by menstruation and pregnancy, she was both physically and economically dependent upon the stronger more forceful male, to whom she necessarily looked up to with admiration and desire.

Thus, both childbirth and marriage were medically indicated, not simply socially normative. And although women’s health (and that of their children)

272     Pam Cobrin

deteriorated with multiple births, not having children and not being married was seen as far more medically dire. In various medical studies, doctors from the 1850s through the 1880s wrote about the physical dangers to ‘the maiden lady’, who was fated, Smith-Rosenberg (1978, 223) notes, to a greater incidence of both physical and emotional disease than her married sisters and to a shorter life span. Her nervous system was placed under constant pressure, and her unfulfilled reproductive organs—especially at menopause—were prone to cancer and other degenerative ills.

The Comic Spinster, thus, does not only inappropriately desire a sexual partner, inviting the audience’s mockery, she is suffering from an unfulfilled biological imperative that creates in her a palpable desperation to find a mate. This desperation, however, only heightens the opportunity to mock her. In Fashion (Mowatt 1845, 25), for example, Prudence tags along behind Mr. Trueman, in what might today be called stalking, while his response makes clear her social invisibility: Prudence: [Walks after him turning when he turns—after a pause ] Don’t mind me, Mr. Trueman! Trueman: Mind you? Oh no, don’t be afraid—I wasn’t minding you. Nobody seems to mind you much! [continues walking ].

Similarly, Miss Spindle tells William, ‘I have a trembling affection, and then, a warm, yet modest flame’. William responds, ‘Trembling affection, warm flame, why, the old girl’s got the fever and ague!’ perhaps not so jokingly referring to her sexual appetite as a bodily illness. William later tells her, ‘Don’t be in a passion, Miss Spindle, it’s bad for your complaint [referring to her sickly symptoms]’ (Smith 1844, 10). Both William’s description of symptoms and his suggestions for remedy (warming her feet, blankets, tea) align closely with the symptoms and remedy for the medical diagnosis of ‘Hysteric Passion’, as documented in H. B. Skinner, M. D.’s 1849 book The Female’s Medical Guide. One of the causes of Hysteric Passion, according to Dr. Skinner (and significant to our older female characters), is when the menses stops, which, he claims, suffocates the womb (Skinner 1849, 99). Female sexuality and female ageing were thus conflated and medicalized to substantiate the need for female subservience to a patriarchal system of marriage in which women legally turned over their domestic labour, their property, and, at times, their citizenship and their children’s citizenship to a more physically and psychically stable male mate. Of course, all of this

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     273

documentation and support for women’s limited social role came at a time of women’s rising participation in religious and temperance work, abolition work, and the emergence of suffrage work, and at the same time, some women were making the active choice not to marry in order to pursue more charitable avenues and/or for lack of a mate who fulfilled romantic ideals. This created a social counter-narrative to the dominant medical narrative, one filled with non-compliant women who were not (necessarily) diseased, immoral or unfulfilled. Of course, none of the older female sexually comic characters engaged in any noble, charitable or even remotely political pursuits. Each character proved through comic failure the necessity of women’s roles existing at the intersection of biological and social predestination; women’s moral character was judged on how seamlessly they could weave the two together. Indeed, the act of mothering itself loses its moral value when divorced from the processes of biological procreation. Dame Barbara, for example, has a foster child, Amina, yet acts in directly non-maternal ways that serve her own economic and social interests and work contrary to Amina’s. Dame Barbara denies Amina’s desire to marry Rodolphe because he cannot pay Dame Barbara ‘one hundred silver crowns’, a price she raises when she finds out her foster daughter can be sold for more: ‘That was before I knew her value, but now that I do know it and others know it too, I’ve changed my mind’ (Barras 1866, 6). Thus, the play suggests that the biological experience of childbearing creates maternal qualities; without biological childbearing, these women are left psychically bereft and morally under-developed, which sets them off course for the rest of their existence. Dame Barbara simply provides yet one more piece of evidence that motherhood and womanhood are tied to a woman’s biological experience of giving birth. Further, these characters have all reached an age where childbearing was no longer an option biologically, meaning that they had lost their chance to play a meaningful role in society; in this context, their desire to be visible and especially to be valued sexually is even more grotesque and laughable. The need for menopausal woman to disappear was reflected in the construction of the nineteenth-century stage mother who serves, in part, as a foil to the inappropriate visibility of the sexually comic female character. As Jeffrey Richards (1997, xxxi) notes, ‘Often—strangely often—mothers have no presence at all. Absent mother motif makes up one of the curiosities of the early stage. If mother is mentioned, she is spoken of as dead. Even mothers who do appear on stage frequently have no real presence’. This absence reflects medical beliefs about older women’s proper social role or non-role

274     Pam Cobrin

(in addition to the reality of women’s shorter life span due to complications of childbirth). Doctor Walter Taylor (1871, 192) wrote: we insist that every woman who hopes for a healthy old age ought to commence her prudent cares as early as the 40th year or sooner… she should cease to endeavor to appear young when she is no longer so, and withdraw from the excitement and fatigues of the gay world even in the midst of her legitimate successes, to enter upon that more tranquil era of her existence now at hand… most American mothers, can find at hand enough to do for their own families… to absorb all of their energies.

And gynaecologist Edward Tilt (1870, 272) wrote that ‘sexual desire in a menopausal woman was a sign of “morbid irritation” or “uterine disease” needing medical treatment’. Thus, off-stage, menopausal women had two primary roles in life according to medical doctrine: (1) To dedicate herself to helping her grown children and allow her identity to be subsumed into the invisible role of ‘helper’ and (2) To not desire sex. Comic Spinsters break both of those edicts, not the least through their insistence on social and sexual visibility. Comic Spinsters thus possessed all of the qualities that marked female abnormality: they were not married and they had no children. They were not dependent on a male partner (regardless of how much they wanted one). They were all financially independent. What is particularly interesting with these characters is the playwrights’ choice to have them searching for mates and having them try to establish sexual visibility. We certainly have other spinster characters in nineteenth-century drama and literature: Ophelia from Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, whose choice to stay unmarried is marked by asexuality (clearly, Ophelia is comic for other reasons). But Miss Spindle, Prudence and Dame Barbara are laughed at specifically for their sexuality. So much of the medical and political documentation from the mid-nineteenth century relies on biological evidence pertaining to female sexuality as the reason for limiting women to the domestic sphere within the financial and political dominance of their husbands. Thus, these characters present the possibility of female sexuality that is not strictly controlled by a male dominating force. They are mocked and discredited, but their very presence speaks to the anxiety of a need to discredit them. The Comic Spinster presents a number of claims contrary to the dominant narrative that would, if not subjected to mockery, induce anxiety in those invested in the dominant patriarchal culture. For example, Miss Spindle claims,

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     275

We can have red cheeks at seventy, and, thanks to the dentist, good teeth at any time of life. Woman was made for love. They suppose that my heart is unsusceptible of the tender passion. But the heart can be regulated by money, too. I buy all of the affecting novels, and all of the terrible romances, and read them till my heart has become soft as maiden wax. (Smith 1844, 8)

In her claim, she releases herself from biological imperatives and attaches female sexuality to self-determination. Miss Spindle, in her narrative, controls her body, her looks and her ability to be desired. Miss Spindle controls her desire by reading novels and training her mind and body for sexual fulfilment not connected to reproduction. Those possibilities are what the playwright mocks and what audiences’ laughter is meant to discredit. But even the supposition of such an idea speaks to the slightly faltering foundation of the medical ‘evidence’ for the necessity of women’s role in the patriarchal structure. The very presence of Miss Spindle, Prudence and Dame Barbara is proof that the nineteenth-century patriarchal ideology, substantiated through medical and political doctrine, was not as irrefutable as it claimed. Perhaps the most revealing performance of the Comic Spinster came from the actor Neil Burgess, who played Miss Abby in The County Fair as well as the title character in The Widow Bedott (for which no text survives—the play was based on Alice B. Neal’s The Widow Bedott Papers ). These plays employed a surrogate body that allowed the audience to both privilege white masculinity by having a male body on stage literally controlling female representation while giving the audience a safe distance from which to access the female body (in this case to degrade and dismiss the older woman’s body), which is not far removed from white actresses playing the Indian Maiden and the Tragic Mulatta. Geraldine Maschio (1985, 57) summarizes Burgess’s performance: Because the dame’s stage image depicted the stereotype rather than the ­reality of these women’s lives, it allowed the men in the audience to diffuse their ­feelings towards such women and to discharge any sense of responsibility for their fate.

Conclusion Maschio’s summary (above) could summarize the position of any of the character types examined in this essay. The nineteenth century served to reflect and write women into an American cultural narrative that supported

276     Pam Cobrin

systems of white patriarchal authority. All women on stage were constructed and measured against the idealized standard of the white, fertile, heteronormative heroine, who, although idealized, was always vulnerable and in need of (white, heteronormative) male protection. The very nature of performance, however, resisted stasis and each performance necessarily bore the mark of the various stakeholders—playwright, actor, technician, audience, political and social environment. Every performance projected a myriad of messages—often contradictory—about gender, nation and identity. We do well not to forget the oft-repeated wisdom of Peggy Phelan (1993, 2): ‘representation follows two laws: it always conveys more than it intends; and it is never totalizing’. The dynamic relationship between the narratives and counter-narratives contained within each of the character types examined here—the Indian Maiden, the Tragic Mulatta and the Comic Spinster—are continually complicated by the multivocal nature of theatre and performance with messages that can never be fully embodied by any one ideology, but rather express the complexity of both the time period and the complexity of theatre and performance as a medium for communication.

Bibliography Aiken, George L. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. N.P. (Reprinted 1853, 1858. New York: Samuel French). Anon. (‘A Lady’). 1819. Catherine Brown, the Converted Cherokee a Missionary Drama, Founded on Fact. New-Haven, CT: S. Converse. Barker, James Nelson. 1808. The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage an Operatic Melo-Drame Philadelphia: Printed by T. & G. Palmer, for G. E. Blake. Barnard, Charles, and Neil Burgess. c.1922. The County Fair: A Comedy in Four Acts. New York: Samuel French. Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford. 1844. The Forest Princess, or, Two Centuries Ago an Historical Play in Three Parts. Philadelphia: E. H. Butler. Barras, Charles M. 1866. The Black Crook an Original Magical and Spectacular Drama in Four Acts. Philadelphia: Barclay. Barton, Benjamin Smith. 2010. New Views of the Origins of the Tribes and Nations of America (1797). Philadelphia: Printed for the author by John Bioran; reprinted for Kessinger Legacy Reprints. Bem, Sandra. 1993. Lenses of Gender: Transforming the Debate on Gender Inequity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bieder, Robert. 1996. ‘The Representations of Indian Bodies in Nineteenth Century American Anthropology’. American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 2: 165–79. Bird, S. Elizabeth. 1996. Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     277

Bloch, Ruth H. 2016. ‘American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815’. Feminist Studies 4, no. 2: 100–26. Blumlo, Dan. 2017. ‘Pocahontas, Uleleh, and Hononegah: The Archetype of the American Indian Princess’. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 110, no. 2: 129. Boucicault, Dion. 1859. The Octoroon: Or, Life in Louisiana. A Play, in Five Acts. New York: Printed not published. Brooks, Daphne. 2007. ‘Fraudulent Bodies/Fraudulent Methodologies’. Legacy 24, no. 2: 306–14. Brown, William Wells. 1858. The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom: A Drama, in Five Acts. Boston: R. F. Wallcut; J. B. Yerrinton and Son, Printers. Child, Lydia Maria. 1842. ‘The Quadroons’. The Liberty Bell, edited by Friends of Freedom, 114–141. Boston: Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair. Chinn, Sarah E. 2017. Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage. New York: Oxford University Press. Clemmons, Linda. 1995. ‘“Nature Was Her Lady’s Book”: Ladies Magazines, American Indians, and Gender, 1820–1859’. American Periodicals 5: 40–58. Custis, George Washington Parke. 1830. Pocahontas. Philadelphia: Alexander. Deffebach, Lewis. 1821. Oolaita, or, The Indian Heroine. Philadelphia: Printed for L. Deffebach. Gardner, Eric. 2007. ‘Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino’s Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and Louise Heaven’s in Bonds’. Legacy 24, no. 2: 187–206. Hanrahan, Heidi. 2005. ‘Harriet Jacob’s “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: A Retelling of Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons”’. New England Quarterly 78, no. 4: 599–616. Holland, Dorothy. 2002. ‘The Old Buzzard: Figuring Gender in the Black Crook’. Theatre Symposium 10: 20–32. Hutton, Laurence. 1891. Curiosities of the American Stage. New York: Harper & Brothers. Jacobs, Harriet A. 1861. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Boston: Published for the author. Jaroff, Rebecca. 2006. ‘Opposing Forces: (Re)Playing Pocahontas and the Politics of Indian Removal on the Antebellum Stage’. Comparative Drama 40, no. 4: 483–504. Jones, George. 1844. Tecumseh and the Prophet of the West. London: Longman, Brown Harper Brothers. Manganelli, Kimberly Snyder. 2012. Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse. The American Literatures Initiative. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Maschio, Geraldine. 1985. ‘Neil Burgess: Female Impersonation and the Image of the Victorian Matron’. Studies in Popular Culture 8, no. 2: 52–59. McConachie, Bruce A. 1992. Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870, 1st edition. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

278     Pam Cobrin

Monthly Anthology. 1804. ‘A Sketch of a Life of Pocahontas’. February. Moody, Richard. 1966. Dramas from the American Theatre. Cleveland: Cleveland World Publishing. Moorehead, Henry Clay. 1856. Tan-Gó-Ru-A. Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson. Moulder, Mary Amanda. 2010. ‘“They Ought to Mind What a Woman Says”: Early Cherokee Women’s Rhetorical Education’. Doctor of Philosophy Doctoral Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin. Mowatt, Anna Cora Ogden. 1845. Fashion, or, Life in New York: A Comedy in Five Acts. New York: Samuel French. Nelligan, Murray. 1950. ‘American Nationalism on Stage: The Plays of George Washington Custis (1781–1857)’. The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 58, no. 3: 299–324. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Raimon, Eve Allegra. 2004. The Tragic Mulatta Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Reid, Mayne. 1856. The Quadroon, or, A Lover’s Adventures in Louisiana. New York: R. M. De Witt. Richards, Jeffrey H. 1997. Early American Drama. Penguin Classics. New York: Penguin Books. Roach, Joseph R. 1992. ‘Slave Spectacles and Tragic Octoroons: A Cultural Genealogy of Antebellum Performance’. Theatre Survey 33, no. 2: 167–87. Sears, Priscilla. 1982. A Pillar of Fire to Follow: American Indian Dramas, 1808–1859. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press. Skinner, H. B. 1849. The Female Medical Guide and Married Woman’s Advisor. Boston: Skinner’s Publication Rooms. Smith, W. H. 1844. The Drunkard, or, The Fallen Saved. Boston: E. P. Williams. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1978. ‘Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Jacksonian America’. American Journal of Sociology 84: 12–247. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, and Charles Rosenberg. 1973. ‘The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Women and Her Role in Nineteenth Century America’. The Journal of American History 60, no. 2: 332–56. Sorisio, Carolyn. 2011. ‘Playing the Indian Princess?: Sarah Winnemucca’s Newspaper Career and Performance of American Indian Identities’. Studies in American Indian Literatures 23, no. 1: 1–37. Staton, Maria. 2014. ‘The American Indian Maiden on the American Stage, 1800– 1850’. Humanities Directory 2, no. 1: 3–13. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. 1852. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly. London: H. G. Bohn. Taylor, Walter. 1871. A Physician’s Counsels to Woman. Springfield: W. J. Holland & Co.

12  Female Representation in Nineteenth-Century American Theatre     279

Tilt, E. J. 1870. ‘On Uterine Pathology at the Change of Life and After the Menopause’. British Medical Journal 2, no. 5: 435–36. Vicinus, Martha. 1981. ‘“Helpless and Unfriended”: Nineteenth Century Domestic Melodrama’. New Literary History 13, no. 1: 127–43. Williams, Judith. 2001. ‘Uncle Tom’s Woman’. African-American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry Justin Elam and David Krasner, 19–39. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

13 Death and the Working Woman: Actresses, Illness, and Labour from Rachel to Bernhardt Roberta Barker

Prologue: ‘You Are Killing Yourself’ In one of the most frequently performed scenes in the history of Western drama, Marguerite Gautier, a popular courtesan of the Parisian demimonde, throws a supper party for a group of friends. The scene plays a pivotal role in Alexandre Dumas fils’s much-loved play La dame aux camélias, for it both marks the beginning of the fateful affair between the worldly ‘fallen woman’, Marguerite, and the innocent young bourgeois, Armand, and also definitively introduces the heroine’s consumptive illness, which will kill her at the end of the play. During the years between La dame ’s première in Paris in 1852 and its eventual slow fading from popularity in the early twentieth century, it would have been difficult to find a habitual theatregoer of European descent in Europe, Great Britain, or the Americas who had never seen this scene played. For many of them—the shop girls, the machinists, the seamstresses and shipping clerks on their days off in the cheap seats of theatres in New York, Montréal, Buenos Aires, San Juan, London, Paris, Oslo, or Moscow—the scene depicted a lifestyle they would never know. Marguerite pours champagne, dances the fashionable polka, and resists the advances of the hyper-rich Baron de Varville. Everything is going well— until something happens with which those working-class audience members would have been very familiar. Her tubercular cough intervenes. Roberta Barker (*)  Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_13

281

282     Roberta Barker

Marguerite’s guests are concerned, but she brushes it off. ‘It’s nothing,’ she declares: ‘Go over to the other side of the room and light a cigarette; I’ll be with you in a moment’ (Dumas 1855, 28). Of all her guests, only Armand remains behind. ‘You are killing yourself,’ he cries; ‘I wish I were your friend, your relation, to keep you from hurting yourself like this’ (Dumas 1855, 29). Marguerite laughs: ‘Ah! you’re very kind … see how much the others worry about me’ (Dumas 1855, 29). Armand tells her that he wants to take her away from her debauched life and ‘look after her like a brother’ (Dumas 1855, 30). ‘Give me your hand and let’s go back to the dining room,’ she responds (Dumas 1855, 32). Despite her inconvenient illness and Armand’s inconvenient passion, she needs to return to her job. ‘You are too young and too sensitive to live in our world,’ she tells Armand (Dumas 1855, 32); if he sees her as a fragile creature, she sees him in much the same light. She sees herself, by contrast, as a working woman. Dumas’s portrayal of the tubercular heroine as a professional—and, indeed, the notion of disease as a phenomenon that can tell us something about the position of the professional woman—links La dame aux camélias to the lived experiences of the real women who played in this and other famous dramas of suffering on the nineteenth-century stage. In the most common reading of La dame aux camélias, Marguerite’s transcendent love for Armand, which leads her to jettison her scandalous lifestyle and eventually to sacrifice herself to preserve his family’s honour, redeems her with a little help from her fatal sickness, which ensures that she pays for her sins with her life. Many critics have read Marguerite’s tuberculosis as a metaphor for sexually transmitted disease, caused by high living and amorous excess (see, for example, Matlock 1994, 110; Lintz 2005, 300; Eltis 2013, 103). But if we consider Dumas’s representation of his heroine alongside contemporary witnesses’ accounts of the lives and careers of real performers who suffered from tuberculosis, we may glimpse a rather more complex story. Far from sinners punished by the very bodies with which they sinned, these women appear to their fans, their intimates, and even their critics as figures determined to maintain agency, dignity, and control over their own labour, even as that labour destroys them. If the spectator’s pleasure in this spectacle sometimes appears sadistic, it also stands as a testament to the nineteenth-century European and North American audience’s admiration for the fierce will, dedication, and perseverance that marked the careers of its greatest leading ladies.

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     283

Act 1: A Disease of Labour The disease suffered by the fictional Marguerite Gautier also informed the experience of many of these real-life performers. Pulmonary tuberculosis, also known as phthisis or consumption, was one of the greatest global killers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for about one in five deaths in England in the century’s opening decades (Byrne 2011, 12) and as many as one in four deaths in France in its closing years (Barnes 1995, 4). According to the World Health Organization (2018), it remains one of the ten most common causes of death worldwide. Its victims suffer from chest pains, fever, night sweats, the wasting that caused it to be dubbed ‘consumption’, and—the disease’s quintessential symptom—a persistent cough, often producing sputum or blood. Even in the early and mid-nineteenth century, before Robert Koch’s 1882 identification of the communicable tubercle bacillus, consumption was already the object of public health campaigns that identified it as a disease of the overworked and overcrowded labouring poor (see Barnes 1995; Bates 1992; Bynum 2012; Feldberg 1995). In his Recherches sur la phthisie pulmonaire (Research on Pulmonary Phthisis ), J. J. Alamir-Carcenac (1842, 77) declared that consumptive patients must ‘avoid difficult exercises and abandon harmful or fatiguing professions’. As Alexandre Fourcault (1844, 199) remarked in Hygiène des personnes prédisposées aux maladies chroniques et spécialement à la phtisie pulmonaire (On the Hygiene of Those Predisposed to Chronic Maladies, and Especially to Pulmonary Phthisis ), however, this was easier said than done when it came to the poor: ‘Condemned to perpetual work, without respite, fifteen to eighteen hours of the day; […] almost always locked away in narrow, damp, dark rooms, how can they escape from infirmities?’ While it appeared in such tomes as a labourer’s plague and a menace to public health, consumption was also one of the most glamorized diseases of the age: the fashionable malady of brilliant, sensitive, and spiritual members of the middle and upper classes (see Bewell 1999; Byrne 2011; Lawlor 2006; Porter 1994). As Susan Sontag (1978, 19–20) argued in her groundbreaking study Illness as Metaphor, tuberculosis gained cultural cachet as an ailment that ‘dissolved the gross body, etherealized the personality, expanded consciousness’. In his Memoirs, Alexandre Dumas père (1863–1884, 4.78) recalled that in the Paris of the 1820s ‘the fashion was for lung disease; everyone was consumptive, especially poets; it was in good taste to spit blood after every somewhat lively emotion, and to die before

284     Roberta Barker

reaching thirty’. How can we possibly bring these divergent images of TB— as the curse of the struggling poor and the etherealizing ailment of the noble rich—together? The nodal point between them, I argue, is the concept of labour. Within the vitalist paradigms that affected much European and American medical thought from the early to mid-nineteenth centuries, excessive work— whether it be physical, mental, or emotional—was understood as eating up the nerve force or vital energy upon which a healthy body depended. In his influential Traité de l’ausculation médiate (Treatise on Mediate Ausculation ), Réné Laënnec (1819, 114), the inventor of the stethoscope and France’s leading expert on pulmonary disease, blamed ‘excessive labours’ for abridging the life of his friend, the great doctor Gaspard-Laurent Bayle, by eating away at his vital forces. As late as the 1860s, Thomas Inman (1861, 497) offered a physics-based explanation for this process in his essay The Nature of Inflammation, declaring that ‘under ordinary circumstances our food keeps up [a] combustible supply for the body, and that fire and its food being duly balanced, the heat is continually kept up; but if the combustion is increased in intensity […] it follows that the fire threatens to go out early’. The exhausted labourer, the brilliant artist whose mind was always struggling to create, and the emotionally sensitive man or woman whose heightened feelings gnawed away at their energies were all liable to fall victim to consumption. As Clark Lawlor (2006, 176) notes, received medical wisdom saw women as being at particular risk, since they ‘were thought to have less energy than men in the first place and, in combination with their internal reproductive “machine” (womb), were more likely to be consumed by all the competing demands on their nervous systems’. As for women who earned their living in ways that demanded physical, creative, and emotional labour, such as actresses—well, they were triply likely to become tubercular (de Faramond 2016). The question, then, arises: How did this perceived relationship between the actress’s labour and a predisposition to consumption affect the reception and representation of women on the nineteenth-century stage? Tracy C. Davis, our foremost historian of nineteenth-century actresses as working women (Davis 1991), offers a conceptual framework through which to consider this question when she proposes the notion of ‘repertoire’ as a ‘theorised description of nineteenth-century performance practice’ (Davis 2009, 7). Davis (2009, 8) defines repertoires as:

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     285

multiple circulating recombinative discourses of intelligibility that create a means by which audiences are habituated to understand one or more kinds or combinations of performative tropes and then recognise and interpret others that are unfamiliar, so that the new may be incorporated into repertoire.

As I have argued elsewhere (Barker 2014, 75; 2017, 628), thanks to its associations with self-sacrificing labour and intense sensibility, consumption became a performative trope through which the nineteenth-century stage could articulate a new, Romantic conception of domestic bourgeois heroism. This new nobility was based not upon aristocratic birth or exceptional action, but upon a profound and passionate inner life. As nineteenthcentury audiences—first in France, the birthplace of the consumptive protagonist (Barker 2017, 626), and then beyond—became habituated to associating consumption with such heroism, the disease became one means by which they could recognize greatness in (and impute greatness to) theatrical figures both real and imaginary. Among these figures were working women such as actresses and courtesans, whose livelihoods depended on intense physical and emotional labour but also required them to dissimulate the exhausting effects of that labour in order to satisfy an expectant public. The trope of the heroic consumptive working woman thus entered the nineteenth-century repertoire. The case studies that follow, drawn from the French theatre and works inspired by it, strive to unpack some of the implications of this trope for the history of women on stage.

Act 2: ‘What Hurts Becomes Immediately Embodied’: Rachel’s Work Apart from Marguerite Gautier, the most celebrated consumptive working woman in nineteenth-century theatre history was surely the great tragedienne Élisabeth Rachel Félix (1821–1858), best known by her stage name, Mlle Rachel. One of the world’s most famous actresses at the peak of her career, Rachel came from an impoverished working-class background: her parents were Jewish peddlers who sold second-hand clothes and other goods, and she herself earned money as a child by busking in the streets. When she moved to Paris as a teenager with the ambition of becoming an actress, she rapidly became known for her tremendous work ethic. She made her professional acting debut aged only sixteen and was a celebrated

286     Roberta Barker

leading lady in both Paris and London by the time she was twenty. She also became famous for her personal freedoms; she was involved in public and unapologetic affairs with a number of highly visible men, members of the Bonaparte family among them. She bore two children out of wedlock and repeatedly refused offers of marriage; ‘I will have renters, but not owners,’ she is said to have declared (Brownstein 1993, 151). Although she was physically frail, she worked incessantly, taking on numerous roles a year. Her performances were renowned for their passion and physical engagement. The English critic G. H. Lewes (1875, 24) memorably recalled how her ‘thin, nervous frame vibrated with emotion’ while her ‘face, which would have been common, had it not been aflame with genius, was capable of intense expression’. Lewes’s French contemporary Théophile Gautier (1859, 71) similarly described how ‘all the unhealthy passion of the times in which we live agitates her frail, anxious, nervous limbs, which draw from the energy of the will that strength which the ancients drew from the energy of the body’. In such descriptions, Rachel’s physical delicacy, her force of character, and her fierce commitment to her art all work together to inform the actress’s thrilling—if potentially self-destructive— labour. Among many famous tributes to Rachel, none evokes the effect of her combined physical, affective, and creative work more vividly than the fictionalized one offered by Charlotte Brontë in her 1853 novel Villette. Here, Brontë, who had herself seen Rachel act in 1851 (Stokes 2005, 54), portrays her heroine Lucy Snowe’s experience of watching ‘Vashti’ onstage (the name, drawn from the Hebrew Bible, is clearly intended to evoke that of Europe’s most famous Jewish actress). Lucy is both fascinated and horrified: ‘It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation. It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral’ (Brontë 1853, 2.189). Striving to explain her reaction to the actress, Lucy returns again and again to Vashti’s strange combination of power and vulnerability, fragility and strength. As in Gautier’s description of Rachel, so here the actress’s beauty and power appear inseparable from an ‘unhealthy passion’ that kills even as it creates: [Vashti] could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos— hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing—half lava, half glow. […] What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame. (Brontë 1853, 2.188)

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     287

For Lucy, the transcendent power of Vashti’s acting seems to depend on the fierce, unrelenting labour by which she battles physical and emotional pain. ‘Suffering had struck that stage empress,’ Brontë writes (1853, 2.189– 90), ‘and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor, in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance’. In one of the novel’s most fascinating locutions, Lucy declares that for Vashti ‘what hurts becomes immediately embodied’, as though pain were the animating force of the actress’s actions (Brontë 1853, 2.190). So physically frail that she appears ‘[s]carcely a substance herself ’, Vashti greets her own sufferings not with the resignation of a womanly angel in the house, but with the wild resistance of an animal: Before calamity she is a tigress; she rends her woes, shivers them in convulsed abhorrence. Pain, for her, has no result in good; tears water no harvest of wisdom; on sickness, on death itself, she looks with the eye of a rebel. Wicked, perhaps, she is, but also she is strong; and her strength has conquered Beauty, has overcome Grace, and bound both at her side, captives peerlessly fair, and docile as fair. (Brontë 1853, 2.190–1)

Though ‘wasted’, ‘hollow’, and ‘half-consumed’, Vashti rebels against her own sickness and mortality, and from the combat creates a horror that is more sublime than conventional beauty. In her refusal to submit to weakness, she becomes unimaginably strong—and if ‘wicked’, in Lucy’s judgement, she is also undeniably heroic. ‘Place now Cleopatra, or any other slug, before her as an obstacle,’ declares Lucy, ‘and see her cut through the pulpy mass as the scimitar of Saladin clove the down cushion’ (Brontë 1853, 2.191). In such descriptions, we are given a version of Rachel who embodies in her own person the same tragic heroism she portrays onstage. Summing up Rachel’s career in just these terms, Rachel Brownstein (1993, 9) writes that ‘as she threw herself into her roles she seemed to consume herself in performance, to act out her own doom’, concluding that the spectacle of Rachel’s suffering ‘thrilled sensation-seekers’. This vision of Rachel as a working woman both consumed and nourished by her own fierce creative labour can also be found in less sensational, more intimate portraits than Brontë’s. In Jules Chéry’s memoir Mademoiselle Rachel en Amérique (Mlle Rachel in America ), for example, a member of the actress’s own company recounts the story of Rachel’s final tour. During her onerous 1855–1856 sojourn in America, her health broke down completely.

288     Roberta Barker

When doctors instructed her to rest, she responded with characteristic defiance: ‘Ah! yes, all right! I cough a little […], but I feel fine, and I didn’t come here to relax’ (Chéry 2008, 78). Soon, however, she was diagnosed definitively with consumption. Chéry (2008, 85) describes how his beloved leading lady fought tooth and nail against her own failing body in order to continue performing: ‘She wanted to play, despite it all. She behaved with a sort of superstitious stubbornness, as if her will simply had to surmount or block some great and mysterious power; but she exhausted herself visibly in the process’. Describing Rachel’s final performance in Scribe and Legouvé’s play Adrienne Lecouvreur—one of her signature roles, that of a great but doomed actress—Chéry (2008, 102) tells how he performed beside her, watching her barely able to stand, barely able to speak, coughing at every word, holding her breath to stifle the cough, clutching my arm in order not to fall, and, despite her weakness, despite her suffering, finding once more, with indomitable energy, the courage to work through to the very end of her role and, like the taper that is about to be extinguished, to cast one last flash of light upon that terrible scene of Adrienne’s death.

By this point, Rachel’s labour—physical and technical (she has to be able to stand, to breathe, to get the voice out), as well as emotional and creative—is clearly hastening her demise. Nevertheless, the spectacle is not a purely pathetic one. In Chéry’s account as in Brontë’s, Rachel’s rage against the dying of the light actually feeds her sublime emotional effects. ‘She spoke in accents of such sorrow and truth,’ writes Chéry (2008, 103), ‘that the whole theatre shivered with admiration for the actress, without realizing that her own heart was bleeding and that the regrets of Adrienne at leaving life in the midst of her youth and her success were also the regrets of Mlle Rachel’. The actress’s labour appears here not only as her destruction, but also as her triumph. Small wonder, then, that the artist who created a popular etching of Rachel on her deathbed in 1858 drew her pale and emaciated with illness, but also crowned with the deathless laurel of the great artist (see Fig. 13.1). Her career became a kind of standard for other nineteenth-century actresses to follow, positing the female performer as a priestess burning on the pyre of her own passion while still finding the ‘strength’ to light those who would come after her.

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     289

Fig. 13.1  Mlle Rachel (Élisabeth Rachel Félix) on her deathbed, after a drawing by Frédérique O’Connell (©Alamy Photos)

Act 3: A Condiment for the People’s Palate In the same decade as Rachel’s final illness and death, her legend was foreshadowed and bolstered by the huge success of La dame aux camélias. Rumour reported, in fact, that Rachel was Dumas fils’s first choice to ­create the role of Marguerite Gautier, but that she, ‘wrapped up in tragedy, cared little for moderns’ and declined the role (Lyonnet 1930, 79). If so, p ­ erhaps she also balked at the notion of playing a character based so openly upon the chic, short-lived courtesan Marie Duplessis (1824–1847; born Alphonsine Plessis), a celebrated leader of the Parisian demi-monde who had often attended Rachel’s own performances and with whom Rachel had shared at least one lover, the Duc de Guiche (Weis 2015, 110). Nevertheless, as Brownstein remarks (1993, 48), in death Rachel’s image began more and more to approximate that of the lady of the camellias. Audiences perceived both the actress and the courtesan as performers destroyed by their own restless energy and consumed by the marketplaces—theatrical or sensual—in which they lived by the pleasures of others.

290     Roberta Barker

The precise nature of those pleasures, and the role of the working woman’s suffering in furthering or hindering them, is an ambiguous and troubling question. In La dame aux camélias, Marguerite responds to Armand’s plea that she look after herself by retorting, But if I looked after myself, I would die, my dear boy. The feverish life I lead is what keeps me going. And in any case, taking care of oneself is all very well for respectable women, who have families and friends; but as for us, as soon as we can no longer serve anyone’s pleasure or vanity, we are abandoned, and long nights follow long days. (Dumas 1855, 30)

The courtesan, like the actress, lives by the very hectic drive that consumes her vital force. The façade of endless energy, effortless grace, and perfect self-possession is crucial to her survival. To live, she must kill herself—and she must hide the fact that she is doing it, for her clients’ pleasure depends upon their ignorance of their idol’s suffering. Still, Armand, Marguerite’s true love, is drawn to her partly by his perception of her true physical and emotional pain. The play’s dramaturgy ensures that the audience, too, is privy to that pain thanks to Marguerite’s moments of soliloquy. It sees her cry, ‘Ah! How pale I am!’ when she finds herself alone after her fit of coughing, though she has just told her guests that ‘it is nothing’ (Dumas 1855, 28–29). It listens to her moan, ‘I will never have the courage’ when she realizes she must part with Armand (Dumas 1855, 72), even though she manages to convince him that she no longer cares for him. Her spectators understand that Marguerite is truly ill, truly suffering, and truly loves Armand. The more she claims that ‘it is nothing’, the more the audience is encouraged to take pleasure in its ability to glimpse the true agony behind the insouciant mask. The same uncomfortable sense that the working woman’s suffering, valiantly resisted but still palpable, constitutes a source of pleasure for her audience also marks Charlotte Brontë’s response to Rachel. Lucy Snowe describes Vashti’s performance as a kind of blood sport, analogous to a bullfight or a gladiatorial duel: Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public—a milder condiment for a people’s palate—than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised. (Brontë 1853, 2.189)

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     291

It is the actress, not the classical heroine she plays, whom Lucy sees as ‘torn by seven devils’; the audience ogles her personal struggle, her own moral and physical pain. Lucy is clearly disturbed not only by this spectacle of torment, but also by the popular ‘palate’ that treats it as a spicy ‘condiment’ for a bland evening. Still, the vision of Vashti’s agony—and of her greatness, from which it appears inseparable—thrills Lucy to the core: The strong magnetism of genius drew my heart out of its wonted orbit; the sunflower turned from the south to a fierce light, not solar—a rushing, red, cometary light—hot on vision and to sensation. I had seen acting before, but never anything like this: never anything which astonished Hope and hushed Desire; which outstripped Impulse and paled Conception; which, instead of merely irritating imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the same time fevering the nerves because it was not done, disclosed power like a deep, swollen winter river, thundering in cataract, and bearing the soul, like a leaf, on the steep and steely sweep of its descent. (Brontë 1853, 2.192)

The almost orgasmic satisfaction Lucy takes in Vashti’s mastery is inextricably tied to her sense of its foundation in the actress’s self-destruction. Vashti’s is ‘a rushing, red, cometary light’, heating the spectator even as it falls from the sky. Her power, ‘like a deep, swollen winter river’, bears the spectator’s soul along, but only because it is engaged in such a precipitous descent. Lucy’s exhilaration is thus implicated (as she herself appears to realize) in a kind of cruelty that seeks the alleviation of her own discomfort in the consciousness of another’s. Without the pain that drives the labour of the woman before her, that labour would ‘merely irritat[e] imagination with the thought of what might be done, at the same time fevering the nerves because it was not done’. Thanks to the productive agony of ‘Vashti torn by seven devils’, Lucy’s own irritable and passionate organism is for once assuaged. The same equivalence between the female performer’s lived experience of suffering and the audience’s pleasure in her work comes into sharp relief near the end of Ivan Turgenev’s 1859 novel On the Eve, when the young Russian heroine, Elena, and her Bulgarian revolutionary husband, Insarov, visit Venice. Stalled in La Serenissima by Insarov’s consumptive illness on their way to join the struggle for Bulgaria’s freedom, they divert themselves by going to see ‘an opera of Verdi’s, which though, honestly speaking, rather vulgar, has already succeeded in making the round of all the European theatres’ (Turgenev 1895, 378). The moment bears witness to the pan-European triumph of La dame aux camélias and its mythology of the working woman’s agony, for the opera in question is La Traviata, Verdi’s adaptation

292     Roberta Barker

of Dumas fils’s play. At first, the singer who plays Violetta (Verdi’s version of Marguerite) seems hardly up to the task. She is ‘a young, and not very pretty, black-eyed girl with an unequal and already overstrained voice’, wearing a tight blue satin dress and a gaudy red net in her hair; after all, writes Turgenev (1895, 378), ‘how could she, the daughter of some Bergamese shepherd, know how Parisian dames aux camélias dress!’ Even so, this awkward girl begins to enchant Elena and Insarov with the ‘truth and artless sincerity [of ] her acting’: ‘They hardly clap that poor girl at all,’ said Elena, ‘but I like her a thousand times better than some conceited second-rate celebrity who would grimace and attitudinize all the while for effect. This girl seems as though it were all in earnest; look, she pays no attention to the public’. Insarov bent over the edge of the box, and looked attentively at Violetta. ‘Yes,’ he commented, ‘she is in earnest; she’s on the brink of the grave herself ’. (Turgenev 1895, 379–80)

Insarov should know; at this moment, he is only twenty-four hours away from his own death from consumption complicated by an aneurysm. The passage in which Turgenev describes the reactions of the dying revolutionary and his anxious wife to the Bergamese girl’s Violetta can help us better to understand the nineteenth-century audience’s apparent pleasure in watching real actresses or fictional heroines (or in this case, both) struggle against disease onstage. Turgenev (1895, 381) recounts how, as the evening goes on, Violetta’s acting became steadily better, and freer. She had thrown aside everything subsidiary, everything superfluous, and found herself; a rare, a lofty delight for an artist! She had suddenly crossed the limit, which it is impossible to define, beyond which is the abiding place of beauty. The audience was thrilled and astonished.

Here, the author implies that the experience of suffering and the will to surmount it not only allow the performer to engage ‘in earnest’ with the doomed character she portrays, but also encourage her to cast away all unnecessary affectations in order to freely express herself. For mid-nineteenth century European aesthetics, so deeply shaped by Romantic and liberal valorisations of the individual, this was one of the highest goals an artist could attain. The ailing singer epitomizes what Emmanuel Lévinas (1991, 120) would later describe in political terms as the ‘pathos of liberalism’: a pathos

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     293

that promotes ‘a person inasmuch as [s]he represents nothing further, that is, is precisely a self ’. At the same time, this baring of her own body and soul allows the Bergamese girl’s experience directly to touch those of her spectators: The duet began, the best thing in the opera, in which the composer has succeeded in expressing all the pathos of the senseless waste of youth, the final struggle of despairing, helpless love. Caught up and carried along by the general sympathy, with tears of artistic delight and real suffering in her eyes, the singer let herself be borne along on the wave of passion within her; her face was transfigured, and in the presence of the threatening signs of fast approaching death, the words: ‘Lascia mi vivero [sic]—morir si giovane ’ (‘let me live—to die so young!’) burst from her in such a tempest of prayer rising to heaven, that the whole theatre shook with frenzied applause and cries of delight. (Turgenev 1895, 381)

The singer’s ‘real suffering’, spontaneous and unaffected, moves her audience—just as Vashti’s suffering and passion had moved Lucy Snowe—to its own ‘frenzied’ state of passion. At this climax, Turgenev adds (1895, 382), ‘Elena felt cold all over. Softly her hand sought Insarov’s, found it, and clasped it tightly. He responded to its pressure, but she did not look at him, nor he at her’. The character’s—and perhaps the singer’s—struggle against death touches a deep cord in them; even as they admire its beauty, they recognize and are chilled by its truth. In an age when up to one-quarter of the European population was dying of tuberculosis, Elena’s and Insarov’s strong personal reactions to the sight of onstage consumptive suffering are surely representative of wider reception phenomena. When Charlotte Brontë saw Rachel in 1851 and later penned Lucy Snowe’s reaction to Vashti, for example, the memories of her sisters Emily’s and Anne’s deaths from consumption (in 1848 and 1849, respectively) must have been vivid in her mind. Lucy’s representation of Vashti ‘locked in struggle, rigid in resistance’ to her own pain powerfully recalls the description of Emily Brontë’s last days in Elizabeth Gaskell’s (1892, 65 and 67) Life of Charlotte Brontë: ‘She made no complaint; she would not endure questioning; she rejected sympathy and help. […] She would suffer no one to assist her. Any effort to do so aroused the old stern spirit’. Given Gaskell’s claim that her account of Emily’s death is based upon Charlotte’s own reminiscences, the echoes of Emily in Vashti may reflect Brontë’s part in both descriptions, showcasing her imagination’s recurrent need to portray the suffering woman’s resistance to her own doom.

294     Roberta Barker

For the first spectators of La dame aux camélias, too, its portrayal of the heroine’s struggle with affliction struck personal chords. The great French critic Jules Janin (1852, 1) begins his review of the play’s first production by reminding his readers of the heroine’s real-life model, Marie Duplessis. He recalls the courtesan as the quintessential ailing working woman: One recognized her by the elegance of her figure, the brightness of her eyes, the pallor of her face! […] And she had another distinction, the lady of the camellias: she let herself be known by a dry, feverish little cough, the forerunner of certain death—especially in the profession of love, which is surely of all professions the poorest and the most painful.

When Janin praises the actress Eugénie Doche’s depiction of Marguerite’s illness and death, he does so with the agonies of the original ‘lady of the camellias’ firmly in mind. An anonymous reviewer of the same production (La Presse, February 10, 1852) brings the point even closer to home, remarking that ‘[e]ven if for those of us who, alas! can judge of its truthfulness, the spectacle was very painful, we can still recommend the death scene. [… Doche] has a heartbreaking grace, a sorrowful charm that both delights and hurts you’. For these—and, surely, many other—audience members, the sight of the woman who performed valiantly even though she was ‘on the brink of the grave herself ’ was able to ‘delight and hurt’ partially because it spoke to their own deepest memories, hopes, and fears.

Act 4: Sarah Bernhardt, or, the Consumptive Actress as Star By the second half of the nineteenth century, the image of the consumptive actress as a suffering but steadfast working woman had gained considerable traction within the repertoire. For Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), the greatest international acting star of the age, it was the source of vital cultural, affective, and even economic capital. The illegitimate daughter of a Jewish courtesan, Bernhardt faced an uphill battle—as Rachel had done before her—to become the queen of the Parisian stage. But gain the summit she did, with help from her own brilliant gifts and a little aid from her rumoured predisposition toward consumption. When Bernhardt appeared in Rachel’s great part of Phèdre, J. Brander Matthews (1880, 96) described the effect in terms that explicitly celebrated her Vashti-like triumph over physical frailty:

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     295

It is a hard and trying part; doubly hard for so feeble an organization, debilitated by constant sickness. Dominating her weak body by sheer force of will, although she may spit blood and faint after each act, as she has done again and again, she never gives in.

As Gerda Taranow (1972, 35) remarks, Bernhardt faced constant comparisons with Rachel’s ‘ominous histrionic ghost’, especially in parts like Phèdre that had become synonymous with the dead divinity. By embracing another role closely associated with Rachel in the cultural imagination, that of the frail but strong-willed consumptive, the younger actress was able to claim common heroic ground with her great predecessor. At this point, however, the similarities between the two women’s relationships to their own ill-health cease. Although the poet Alfred de Musset described her as early as 1839 as having the ‘feverish’ cheeks and ‘brilliant’ eyes of the archetypal consumptive (de Musset 1882, 13), Rachel spent much of her career vehemently denying that she suffered from tubercular disease (Brownstein 1993, 16). Bernhardt, by contrast, actively promoted an image of herself as a frail creature half in love with easeful death. Commercial photos, snapped up in shops, showed her sleeping in her own coffin. She herself reports in her memoirs that while nursing her sister Régina, who died of tuberculosis while still in her teens, she ‘found it quite natural to sleep every night in this little bed of white satin which was to be my last couch’ (Bernhardt 1907, 258). Where Rachel had seen her consumptive tendencies as inimical to her success as an actress, Bernhardt used hers as part of a masterful public relations strategy. Her visual self-fashioning, too, reflected what historian Carolyn Day (2017, 81) has dubbed ‘consumptive chic’. As Bernhardt herself (1925, 149) admitted in The Art of the Theatre, ‘my first title to advertisement was my extraordinary slimness and my fragile health’. Her friend and rival, the English actress Ellen Terry (1908, 217), painted her as an icon of delicate, spiritual beauty: ‘As transparent as an azalea, only more so; like a cloud, only not so thick. […] She was hollow-eyed, thin, almost consumptive looking. Her body was not the prison of her soul, but its shadow’. In 1887, this persona shaped her appearance in a series of photographs in which she posed alongside the English actress and society beauty, Lillie Langtry (see Fig. 13.2). The vision of the tall and statuesque Langtry, her voluptuous figure showcased by high fashions of the day, gazing admiringly down on ‘the divine Sarah’ tells its own story. Bernhardt stares mysteriously but confidently out of the photograph; her slender form is swathed in a fur coat, her eyes

296     Roberta Barker

Fig. 13.2  Lillie Langtry (l.) and Sarah Bernhardt (r.), 1887 (©Alamy Photos)

rimmed with kohl as if to echo the dark shadows around the eyes of a tubercular patient. This, her gaze—like Langtry’s gaze at her—seems to say, is what a real actress looks like. Unlike Rachel, Bernhardt showed tremendous resistance to any tubercular infection she may in fact have suffered; she lived to be almost eighty, acting until the end. Even so, her close association with the disease melded with and helped to trumpet her talent and work ethic, affirming the validity and nobility of her labour. In The Art of the Theatre, Bernhardt (1925, 149–50) rejects any notion that she exploited her consumptive aura for profit, asking, ‘Was it really for advertising purposes that I was so slender, so thin, and so weak, that I spent six months in bed, racked with illness?’ Instead, she constructs her work as an act of willing self-immolation. She describes the actor’s

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     297

task of identifying emotionally and physically with her parts as ‘a crushing burden’ and ‘a weariness likely to break the strongest’, yet affirms that ‘when at length the audience crowns the play with its approval, we experience the infinite enjoyment of the martyr at the extremity of his suffering’ (Bernhardt 1925, 105, 96, 197–98). For Bernhardt, as for many others in her time, simultaneously to struggle against and to embrace the agony born of one’s own genius had become the hallmark of the great actress’s labour.

Act 5: Jeanne Ludwig, or, the Apotheosis of an Actress Within this cultural context, the image of the gallantly suffering actress became a trope that could bathe even resolutely comic performers in tragic grandeur. In his 1902 Profils de théâtre, the critic, playwright, and administrator of the Comédie-Française Jules Claretie memorialized Jeanne Ludwig (1867–1898), famous for her playful and flirtatious performances in eighteenth-century and modern comedies. In her early years, Ludwig had been a popular actress but not necessarily one who was taken very seriously. Writing in the journal Le Relais in 1892, Gabriel Mourey described her as a ‘Parisienne to her fingernails’, with a ‘subtle coquetry’ and a gourmande’s taste for sugary treats—not exactly a successor to the divine Sarah or the titanic Rachel. All this began to change when Ludwig, stricken with tuberculosis, had to leave the stage on orders from her doctors. The journal L’Instantané (June 15, 1897) reported the joy of the audience at the return of their favourite when she reappeared, ‘more valiant than ever’, as Musette in Théodore Barrière and Henry Murger’s La vie de bohème. Ironically, she was playing the gay and flirtatious foil to the play’s tubercular working girl heroine, Mimì. It soon became clear that Ludwig’s apparent recovery was illusory and her casting painfully ironic. ‘Never’, writes Claretie (1904, 204–5), will that image be erased from our memory: poor Musette, trying to laugh; laughing, by sheer force of will, between two fits of coughing; and stifling it, that cursed cough, so that Mimì could cough at her ease and play her invalid’s role. Ah! This reversal of everything there was of unreality in the poet’s sorrowful dream, how poignant a spectacle it made and what a double agony it presented over those few evenings: the false cough of the beloved actress mingling with the true cough, the heartrending cough of the sick woman! I don’t believe there can ever have been a crueller contrast in all the disappointing, eternally fascinating life of the theatre.

298     Roberta Barker

In this terrible scene, the pathos of the fictional heroine’s represented suffering is superseded by the pressing truth of the working actress’s struggle against the physical imperatives of her disease. For Claretie, however, Ludwig’s cough—irrepressible and all too real—does not simply expose the fakery of Mimì’s performed symptoms. It also reminds the audience of the reality of their referent: the genuine agony of the tubercular patient. In 1897, fifteen years after Robert Koch’s identification of mycobacterium tuberculosis, one might have expected that real agony to have been utterly demystified by the new understanding of TB as a communicable infection. As numerous scholars have noted, however, the sentimental mythology of consumption’s ennobling effects proved ‘surprisingly resilient’ (Conti 2009, 78), persisting in both medicine and literature ‘long after the sociomedical understanding arose’ (Barnes 1995, 51). Forty years after the death of Rachel, Claretie’s celebration of Ludwig’s determination to perform despite her illness suggests that the old Romantic image of the dying actress struggling valiantly to conceal her suffering still reflects—and even shapes—contemporary lived reality. If it underlines the constructed and ‘disappointing’ nature of theatrical narratives of the consumptive working woman, Claretie’s response to Ludwig’s performance also hints at the sources of this trope’s remarkable persistence within the repertoire. Claretie was not the only observer to find poignancy, cruelty, and a strange truthfulness in Jeanne Ludwig’s appearance as Musette. Jules Huret (1901, 407), too, would later remember what pity seized me, at the first performance, at the moment of Mimì’s death… It wasn’t Marie Leconte [who played Mimì] I looked at in that moment; it was Jeanne Ludwig. I knew that she was condemned to die very soon; and I really suffered, like the witness of an unjust and cruel act of torture, as I watched the genuine invalid watching and taking part in the twists and turns of this simulacrum of death: the dress rehearsal for her own!

In the midst of the ‘simulacrum of death’ offered by La vie de bohème, the most interesting spectacle for Huret is the real-life one of Ludwig’s impending doom. Faced with the scene of such suffering, Huret constructs himself as a witness to torture. Though pained by what he sees, he is also in some sense a reprehensible voyeur, fascinated and even entertained by the agony of a charming young woman.

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     299

At the same time, Huret represents this torment as in some sense beneficial to its victim. It offers her a ‘dress rehearsal’ for her own extinction: an opportunity to learn how best to play death. This spectacle, which appeared ‘poignant’ to Claretie, evokes ‘pity’ in Huret; both terms smack of the dark satisfactions of Aristotelian tragic poetics, which work to purge the emotions of those who watch. In the presence of Ludwig’s real agony, Mimì’s simulated pain is exposed as a less than adequate surrogate; still, it offers a model of brave suffering that the comic actress gamely follows, ascending at the last to the heights of tragic grandeur. When Ludwig was a student, Claretie (1899, 363) reports, Ludovic Halévy had remarked that she would be scintillating as his flirtatious Parisienne heroine Froufrou, but that unfortunately ‘she would not know how to die’. In the end, however, she proved Halévy wrong: ‘She could play tragedy, poor laughing Ludwig, and she played it au naturel !’ (Claretie 1904, 206). In this representational context, we can better understand why Claretie’s account of Ludwig’s final appearances at the Comédie-Française offers such a compendium of the tropes associated with the real and fictional consumptive heroines of the nineteenth-century stage repertoire. He depicts Ludwig as struggling, like Rachel in America, to conceal her suffering in order to continue with her work. She lies about her health so that she can go on playing Musette, a role she describes as ‘my Hamlet’ (Claretie 1899, 359); Claretie writes that ‘her comrades have told me about one gloomy evening when the poor child, to stem the dreaded hemorrhage, had to put bits of ice to her feverish lips, between two speeches, shielded by her fan’ (Claretie 1904, 206). Spitting blood behind her elegant prop while the audience laughs, Ludwig is irresistibly reminiscent of Marguerite Gautier shutting herself away from her party guests to hide her fits of coughing. It was, remarks Claretie (1904, 205), ‘an example of devotion and courage of which few more robust than she would have been capable’. With such rhetoric, he places the comic Ludwig in the Vashti-esque line of great tragic actresses ‘locked in struggle’ with their own frailties (Brontë 1853, 190). ‘Every time Mlle Ludwig played Musette’, Claretie writes (1904, 205), ‘she gave to the public a bit of her life. A peal of laughter cost her a week of existence. What did it matter? As long as she could still act and hold herself upright, she didn’t care a bit’. He adds that when he visited the sick actress at home, he found her ‘lying in her white bed, very pale and melancholy’, looking like ‘the dame aux camélias in the last act’ (Claretie 1904, 206). Living, Ludwig had been merely a charming Parisienne. Dying, she joined a mythic communion of saints.

300     Roberta Barker

Epilogue: Acts of Representation/Acts of Will Of course, these representations of the life and death of Jeanne Ludwig give us no sense of her own perspectives on her illness or her art. They were created by men much older than herself, for whom she embodied the transience and fragility of youth and beauty. ‘She played the passerby ’, wrote the novelist and critic Alexandre Hepp (1898–1899, 922) on the day of her funeral—but then, he added, ‘we all play that same role’. Ludwig’s ambitions, her talent, her tastes, and her physical pain are swallowed by the powerful trope of the beautiful young artist dying in the prime of life. It is easy, and possibly just, to dismiss such images as examples of Elisabeth Bronfen’s (1992, 13) argument that signification in nineteenth-century European culture tends obsessively to occur over the woman’s dead body. This charge of exploiting feminine suffering and death in order to express abstract ideas or to create a prurient form of pleasure has also been laid against La dame aux camélias. Dumas fils’s 1848 novel, on which he based his play, is remarkable for its disturbingly clinical portrayal of tubercular symptoms: Marguerite coughs blood; gasps for breath; burns and sweats with fever; and spends her final days writhing in bed, unable to speak or sit up (Dumas 1852, 357–63). The Marguerite of his drama, by contrast, is able to stand, move about, and deliver long farewell speeches before she dies (Dumas 1855, 102–5). Small wonder, then, that most modern critics have accused Dumas of romanticizing Marguerite’s illness and death for the pleasure of the theatrical audience (Eltis 2013, 103; Hutcheon and Hutcheon 1996, 46). What such critiques tend to ignore, however, is La dame aux camélias ’s own, highly self-reflexive attitude to the notion that the business of pleasure depends upon the concealment and beautification of feminine sickness and suffering. In scenes like Marguerite’s first confrontation with the solicitous Armand, indeed, it suggests that the concealment and beautification of sickness and suffering form a key part of the working woman’s art. Jules Janin (1852, 1) understood this point well; in his review of Dumas’s play, he identifies dissimulation in the face of pain as the essence of the courtesan’s job: Dying, to drag oneself to the ball to eclipse one’s rivals,–and, full of fever, to attend those long parties at which you must be the pleasure and the joy,–to smile at this one, and at that one, and to lie to both, and to deceive them all in a block; with neither rest nor truce, without a moment to oneself, and without a second of calm. Actress in a feverish play who can only leave the theatre in order to die!

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     301

The courtesan, in this vision, is a working woman in the same sense as the great actress. No matter what she herself feels, the show must go on. In this context, it is possible to glimpse in Marguerite’s theatrical deathbed scene something more than simply an act of sanitization for the stage. It finds her still performing, and by performing she retains something of her old professional identity. The Marguerite of the novel dies in unmitigated agony, with only one maid to support her; the Marguerite of the stage dies surrounded by old friends and clients, all of whom need some kind of comfort. So, in her accustomed style, she pretends that ‘it is nothing’. She tells her friend Gaston, who has stayed up all night nursing her, that she feels ‘well’ (Dumas 1855, 95); she says the same thing to Prudence, her cadging milliner, who comes to borrow money (Dumas 1855, 99). When Armand arrives, she tries to hide her gravest symptoms from him; when he is frightened by her weakness, she reassures him: ‘Look, I am smiling, I am strong, see? It’s just the astonishment of being alive again that makes me breathless’ (Dumas 1855, 103). At the last, in a final flash of the optimism that doctors dubbed spes phthisica (‘the hope of the consumptive’), she is pulled into her own fiction: Ah! How strange. (She rises.) […] I am not suffering any more. It feels as though life is returning to me…I feel better than I ever have before…I am going to live! … Ah! How well I feel! (She sits down and seems to fall asleep. ) (Dumas 1855, 105)

The theatrical Marguerite dies as she has lived: still sculpting her own image, still disavowing her own pain. To the very end, she is a working woman. Premised as it is upon the commodification and spectacularization of a woman’s physical and emotional agony, this labour clearly cannot be seen as purely positive in feminist terms. It unquestionably plays into the fetishization of dead and dying women critiqued by authors like Bronfen. Nevertheless, in each of the case studies I have outlined here, from Marguerite Gautier and Turgenev’s Bergamese Violetta on to Rachel and thence to Bernhardt and Ludwig, the working women we meet are living, breathing, resistant, and—at least to an extent—empowered, even in the face of their own vulnerability and mortality. Cultural and medical constructions of tuberculosis as a disease of the overworked and the emotionally intense allowed its symptoms to function as a signifier of these women’s labour. It signified their work’s awful cost, to be sure, but also emphasized its dignity, courage, and cultural stature. In most cases, these women—many of whom came from oppressed classes, religions, or ethnic groups; espoused

302     Roberta Barker

denigrated professions; or lived lives that openly opposed dominant sexual moralities—had to struggle long and hard for the recognition of their agency, will, and vision. If they did so at the cost of their own bodies, those bodies also worked to articulate, onstage and in the view of thousands, the bravery and determination of the effort. In response, they were celebrated by audience members both male and female. Not just sexualized objects or cautionary tales, these performers are heroes as well as victims within the long, ongoing narrative of women’s work.

Bibliography Note: All translations above from the French are by the author, unless otherwise specified. Alamir-Carcenac, J. J. 1842. Recherches sur la phthisie pulmonaire. Paris: Mme. de Lacombe. Barker, Roberta. 2014. ‘The Gallant Invalid: The Stage Consumptive and the Making of a Canadian Myth’. Theatre Research in Canada 35, no. 1: 69–88. Barker, Roberta. 2017. ‘Consumption and the Stage: A Late-Blooming Fashion’. Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4: 621–35. Barnes, David S. 1995. The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in NineteenthCentury France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Barrière, Théodore, and Henry Murger. 1873. La vie de bohème. In Chefs-d’oeuvre du théâtre moderne, Tome 2. Paris: Michel Lévy. Bates, Barbara. 1992. Bargaining for Life: A Social History of Tuberculosis, 1876– 1938. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernhardt, Sarah. 1907. My Double Life: Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt. London: William Heinemann. Bernhardt, Sarah. 1925. The Art of the Theatre. Translated by H. J. Stenning. New York: The Dial Press. Bewell, Alan. 1999. Romanticism and Colonial Disease. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1992. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brontë, Charlotte (Currer Bell). 1853. Villette, 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. Brownstein, Rachel. 1993. Tragic Muse: Rachel of the Comédie-Française. New York: A. A. Knopf. Bynum, Helen. 2012. Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byrne, Katherine. 2011. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

13  Death and the Working Woman: From Rachel to Bernhardt     303

Chéry, Jules. 2008. Mademoiselle Rachel en Amérique (1855–1856). Edited by Anne Martin-Fugier. Paris: Mercure de France. Claretie, Jules. 1899. La vie à Paris. Paris: V. Havard. Claretie, Jules. 1904. Profils de théâtre. Paris: E. Fasquelle. Conti, Meredith. 2009. ‘“I Am Not Suffering Any More…”: Tragic Potential in the Nineteenth-Century Consumptive Myth’. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 24, no. 1: 59–82. Davis, Tracy C. 1991. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. New York: Routledge. Davis, Tracy C. 2009. ‘Nineteenth-Century Repertoire’. Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 36, no. 2: 6–28. Day, Carolyn. 2017. Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease. London: Bloomsbury. De Faramond, Julie. 2016. ‘Être actrice et mourir phthisique: Une malédiction de l’époque romantique’. Épistémocritique.org. Last Modified May 13, 2016. http://epistemocritique.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Faramond.pdf. Dumas, Aléxandre, fils. 1852. La dame aux camélias, roman. 3rd edition. Paris: Michel Lévy. Dumas, Aléxandre, fils. 1855. La dame aux camélias, pièce en cinq actes. Paris: Michel Lévy. Dumas, Alexandre, père. 1863–1884. Mes mémoires, 10 vols. Paris: Michel Lévy. Eltis, Sos. 2013. Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldberg, Georgina D. 1995. Disease and Class: Tuberculosis and the Shaping of Modern North American Society. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Fourcault, Alexandre. 1844. Hygiène des personnes prédisposées aux maladies chroniques et spécialement à la phthisie pulmonaire. Paris: B. Dusillon. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1892. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. New York: D. Appleton. Gautier, Théophile. 1859. Histoire de l’art dramatique en France depuis vingt-cinq ans, 4e série. Paris: Édition Hetzel. Hepp, Alexandre. 1898–1899. Les quotidiennes. Paris: E. Flammarion. Huret, Jules. 1901. Loges et coulisses. Paris: La revue blanche. Hutcheon, Linda, and Michael Hutcheon. 1996. Opera: Desire, Disease, Death. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Inman, Thomas. 1861. Foundation for a New Theory and Practice of Medicine, 2nd edition. London: John Churchill. Janin, Jules. 1852. ‘Théâtre du Vaudeville: La dame aux camélias, drame en cinq actes, par M. Alexandre Dumas, fils de son père’. Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, February 9. Laënnec, Réné-Théophile-Hyacinthe. 1819. Traité de l’ausculation médiate et des maladies des poumons et du coeur, Tome 2. Paris: J. A. Brosson and J. S. Chaudé. La Presse. 1852. ‘Théâtres’. La Presse, February 10.

304     Roberta Barker

Lawlor, Clark. 2006. Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1991. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Lewes, George Henry. 1875. On Actors and the Art of Acting. London: Smith, Elder. L’Instantané. 1897. ‘Jeanne Ludwig’. L’Instantané, June 15. Lintz, Bernadette C. 2005. ‘Concocting La Dame aux camélias: Blood, Tears, and Other Fluids’. Nineteenth-Century French Studies 33, no. 3–4: 287–307. Lyonnet, Henry. 1930. La dame aux camélias d’Alexandre Dumas, fils. Paris: Edgar Malfère. Matlock, Jann. 1994. Scenes of Seduction: Prostitution, Hysteria, and Reading Difference in Nineteenth-Century France. New York: Columbia University Press. Matthews, J. Brander. 1880. The Theatres of Paris. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mourey, Gabriel. 1892. ‘Mlle Ludwig’. Le Relais, August 21. Musset, Alfred de. 1882. ‘Un souper chez Mlle. Rachel’. In Oeuvres Posthumes. Paris: G. Charpentier. Porter, Roy. 1994. ‘Consumption: Disease of the Consumer Society?’ In Consumption and the World of Goods, edited by John Brewer and Roy Porter, 58–81. London: Routledge. Scribe, Eugène, and Ernest Legouvé. 1849. Adrienne Lecouvreur, comédie-drame en 5 actes. Paris: Librairie Théâtrale. Sontag, Susan. 1978. Illness as Metaphor. London: Allen Lane. Stokes, John. 2005. The French Actress and Her English Audience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taranow, Gerda. 1972. Sarah Bernhardt: The Art Within the Legend. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Terry, Ellen. 1908. The Story of My Life. London: Hutchinson. World Health Organization. 2018. ‘Tuberculosis’. Last Modified February 16, 2018. http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tuberculosis. Turgenev, Ivan. 1895. On the Eve. Translated by Constance Garnett. London: William Heinemann. Weis, René. 2015. The Real Traviata: The Song of Marie Duplessis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14 Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star Lezlie C. Cross

As the leading actress of Augustin Daly’s theatre company, Ada Rehan (1857–1916) was the most popular and influential American actress of the late nineteenth century. Through her performances in New York, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Berlin, and Paris and in tours of the United States, Britain, and various European capitals, she charmed audiences and critics on both sides of the Atlantic with her beauty and vivacity, her archly playful physicality, her naturally winsome style of speaking, her spontaneous girlish grace, and her essential womanliness. An obituary (‘Ada Rehan, Famous Comedy Star, Dead’ [1916]) described her presence on the stage: The predominant characteristic of her acting was buoyant glee, which rippled over a depth of warm, sensuous feeling, and an animated, affluent and incessant variety of spirited, flexible, cumulative movement. It possessed many other attributes, for the actress could be stately, forcible, satirical, violent, arch, flippant and demure; but its special allurement was a blending of sweetness and joy.

Her contagious spirit, the humour with which she approached her parts, and the sparkle she brought to the stage endeared her to international audiences. Rehan became such a major star that women began to ‘imitate her

Lezlie C. Cross (*)  University of Portland, Portland, OR, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_14

305

306     Lezlie C. Cross

tone of voice, her accent, her mode of walking, her carriage, and everything about her, even to her mode of dressing her hair’ (‘Imitating the Actresses’, Milwaukee Sentinel, January 18, 1889). The standard fare at Daly’s Theatre on Broadway in New York was modern comedy, which Daly adapted for American audiences from German and French originals. Rehan routinely took the leading role in these frivolous, light comedies; they were her stock in trade. But, once a year Daly would present a revival of ‘old plays’, including the works of Shakespeare, and Rehan would have the opportunity to exhibit her talents in more substantial fare. Soon she became better known for her Shakespearean offerings than the modern comedy in which she excelled. Over her twenty-year collaboration with Daly, Rehan played Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Princess of France in Love’s Labour’s Lost, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night, and, her signature role, Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew. These roles—the last three in particular—quickly became the characterisations for which she was most widely praised, the roles that made her reputation as an actress of the highest calibre. Reviewers across Europe and America commended her for her approach to Shakespearean performance in particular. The reviewer for The Dramatic Mirror (‘Ada Rehan’, January 4, 1896) enthused that ‘Miss Rehan speaks the lines of Shakespeare with full significance of their human meaning as well as of their exquisite literary quality. In these parts she is not simply beautiful and majestic, she is human and true’, concluding that ‘Miss Rehan’s supremacy in Shakespearean comedy is to day [sic ] unquestioned’. Similarly, William Davenport Adams asserted that Rehan, in her performances of ‘Katherine and Rosalind, has placed herself in the front rank of her profession, not only in America and in England, but all over the world’ (1891, 175). After seeing her as Katherine, the drama critic for the Pall Mall Gazette (June 28, 1893) concluded that ‘Ada Rehan was not merely a charming actress, not merely a clever actress, but a great actress’. Isadora Duncan, a member of Daly’s company for two seasons, averred that Rehan ‘was one of the supremely great actresses of the world’ (1988, 33). Rehan’s acting so charmed Oscar Wilde that he wrote several roles with the actress in mind. In September 1891, the playwright wrote to Daly requesting that he allow Rehan to consider taking on a role in Lady Windermere’s Fan, writing, ‘I would sooner see her play the part of Mrs. Erlynne than any English-speaking actress we have, or French actress for that matter’ (2000, 489). Upon her death in 1916, the critic for the London Times (quoted in

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     307

New York Times, ‘British Praise Ada Rehan’, January 10, 1916) mournfully observed: ‘You feel that something of Shakespeare’s secret died with Ada Rehan’. Rehan was also celebrated for her great versatility, as she shone in everything from her aforementioned Shakespearean roles to eighteenth-century comedies of manners to contemporary comedy and farce. William Davenport Adams (1891, 176) noted that ‘[t]he keynote of Miss Rehan’s art-work in the past is Variety. She has essayed all sorts of parts, and, if report be true, has succeeded in all’. In the Metropolitan Magazine Adelaide Louise Samsom (‘Ada Rehan and her Rôles’, August 1897, 49) marvelled at ‘Miss Rehan’s versatility, her talent which stamps with originality each of the one hundred and fifty characters she has essayed during the past twenty years’, averring that it was ‘this very versatility of sustained excellence in so wide a range of rôles that the essence of Miss Rehan’s fame exists’. In contemporary reviews of her performances, her acting is favourably compared with that of the great European actresses of the period: Ellen Terry, from England (1847–1928), Sarah Bernhardt, from France (1844– 1923) and Eleonora Duse, from Italy (1858–1924). The dramatic critic of the London Sunday Times (June 3, 1888) believed that ‘We have only one English actress who can stand in the same plane with her [Rehan], and that is Ellen Terry’. William Winter (1898, 13), drama critic of the New York Tribune, characterised the age as ‘the period of Ellen Terry, and Ada Rehan, and Sarah Bernhardt’. George Bernard Shaw enthused that Rehan’s ‘treatment of Shakespearean verse is delightful after the mechanical intoning of Sarah Bernhardt’ (1932, 181) and that she ‘would charm everybody as Mirandolina as effectually as Duse does’ (1909, 326). Ellen Terry herself (1909, 319) saw a clear comparison between Rehan and Duse, as she observed that Rehan ‘has a touch of dignity, of nobility, of beauty, rather like Eleonora Duse’s’. In 1895, audiences in London had the opportunity to compare all four as Rehan and Bernhardt (at separate times) played at Daly’s Theatre in Covent Garden, Terry at the Lyceum Theatre, and Duse at Drury Lane Theatre. In that year, the Dramatic Chronicle (quoted in Hendricks-Wenck 1988, 1) put Rehan in the company of her contemporaries: France has her Sarah Bernhardt, Italy her Eleonora Duse, England her Ellen Terry and America Ada Rehan, and in their respective countries, as well as the wide world over, they are recognized as the greatest actresses of this generation, each different in her way, and all combining the high attributes that go to make perfect actresses.

308     Lezlie C. Cross

Thus, the late nineteenth century featured four great international actresses: Terry, Bernhardt, Duse, and Rehan. Yet, today, Rehan has disappeared from this litany. Witness the 1988 volume Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time. The three European actresses continue to be enshrined for their contributions to the art of theatre, but Rehan has gone missing. This chapter seeks to uncover why Rehan has disappeared from the ranks of the great actresses of the late nineteenth century. It will consider her repertory, her acting style, her reception by the critics, and the narratives of her development as an actress with the aim of uncovering why this ‘paragon in acting’ (‘Mr. Daly’s Gorgeous Revival of the “Taming of the Shrew”’, New York Herald, January 19, 1887), ‘the supreme embodiment for all time […] of Katherine, Shakespeare’s Shrew’ (Izard 1915, 203), and ‘the most versatile actress of Shakespeare’s comedy heroines that has ever lived’ (‘Ada Rehan’, Dramatic Mirror, January 4, 1896) has disappeared from the record.

The Mask of Comedy Perhaps the reason Rehan is no longer well-known is because of her comedic, rather than tragic repertory. Through her long career, Ada Rehan played hundreds of roles in a wide variety of plays, ranging from Daly’s Americanised adaptations of French and German works, to Shakespeare, to eighteenth-century comedies by playwrights such as Vanbrugh and Wycherley, to French farces, to the works of new authors such as Pinero, Sardou, and Tennyson. In her younger years, she appeared in tragedies alongside actors such as Edwin Booth and John McCullough. However, from 1879 onwards, she primarily appeared in comedies with Daly’s company; the roles for which she was praised, while varied, were always in the comic vein. One English reviewer (‘Miss Ada Rehan’, [1891]) observed that ‘[h]er style is different from that of all other actresses: there is something so winning in her personality, and she has such a variety of expressive and characteristic graces in her style as to give special distinction to a comedy character’. The Illustrated American (1891) recognised that ‘[s]he is better in high comedy […] and low farce than any woman we have on our stage’. The first printing of William Winter’s biography of the actress was entitled Daughter of Comedy. In choosing this title, Winter implied that Rehan was the progeny of Thalia, the muse of comedy, and therefore a divinely inspired comedienne. Perhaps due to the pervasive influence of Aristotle, who famously espoused the idea that tragedy was a superior art form to comedy, even to

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     309

this day many audience members believe that it takes more skill to perform in tragedies than in comedies. Comic actors are rarely given the same respect and accolades as their tragic counterparts. An article in the Boston Advertiser (quoted in Public Opinion, January 7, 1893, 329) articulated how this belief was held as truth during Rehan’s lifetime: ‘the best tragedy calls for a grandeur of action and a height of passion that but few actors can fitly portray. In that sense, indeed, tragedy is the highest form of acting’. While many critics, including Bernard Shaw, urged Rehan to consider taking on tragic roles, others doubted that a tragic repertory was within the actress’s powers. The English journal Black and White (September 5, 1891, 330) reported that many of Rehan’s ‘most enthusiastic critics, while they are loudest in their applause of her exquisite creations in comedy, have suggested that the mask of tragedy is not a mask for her to wear’. The critics’ fears in regard to Rehan’s dramatic abilities were put to the test in 1898 when, in a rare break from comedic roles, she attempted the role of Roxanne in Daly’s adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. The responses were divided. A few critics praised her performance, focusing on her transition from girlishness at the beginning of the play to rich womanhood at the end. The critic for the Boston Herald (November 1, 1898) praised her subtlety of tone, as he saw her ability to play both the comedy of the piece as well as the emotional scenes. However, the majority of critics disparaged her for making the character overly girlish in an attempt to mask her own age, maintaining that she did not have the ability to rise to the tragic emotional challenge of the final act. The Boston Daily Advertiser (quoted in Hendricks-Wenck 1988, 288) criticised her acting at the end, observing that ‘[i]n the moments of high stress and anguish Miss Rehan was not equal to the demands made upon her, and though never absurd, was very seldom powerful’. The review of the production in the periodical The Bookman (1898, 198) quoted a Mr. Zangwill who believed that the piece could prove a popular success ‘when Miss Rehan learns to rise to the passion of the graver moments’. Actor Joseph Jefferson knew the challenges for the comedic actor attempting to maintain star power in the nineteenth-century theatre. He commented in his Autobiography (1897, 220) that ‘[t]he repertory that naturally falls to a tragic actor gives him an immeasurable advantage over a comedian’ because ‘comedies, with but few exceptions, have been constructed with the view of displaying a group of actors’ rather than focusing on a single star. Rehan, as a member of Daly’s acting ensemble, was clear evidence of the truth of his observation. She was an exceptional actor in the midst of a highly competent company, not the sole light in the firmament like many of her contemporaries.

310     Lezlie C. Cross

Furthermore—unlike Rehan—Terry, Bernhardt, and Duse were all celebrated for their tragic roles. While Terry performed a mixed repertory as a member of Irving’s Lyceum company she had the opportunity to take on major Shakespearean tragic roles including Ophelia, Desdemona, Queen Katherine in Henry VIII, and Lady Macbeth. Bernhardt was famous for her assumption of Hamlet, the most demanding tragic role in the Shakespearean canon, as well as heart-breaking roles in La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas and La Tosca by Victorien Sardou. Duse took on modern tragic characters such as Thérèse Raquin and the leading roles in Henrik Ibsen’s plays, including Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House, Rosmersholm, and John Gabriel Borkman.

The Advent of Realism As reflected in the shift from the melodramatic titles of Bernhardt’s repertory to the realistic dramas of Duse’s repertory, the late nineteenth century was a time of rapid change for the theatre, especially in acting styles. For the first decades of the century, the American stage was dominated by exaggerated, bombastic acting followed by a more natural, idealised, romantic style. William Winter (1893, 2), the theatre critic of the New York Tribune, described this shift as ‘a change from elaborate artifice to the studied simplicity of nature’. Following the advent of Ibsenesque realism with A Doll’s House and the ‘door slam heard around the world’ in 1879, the idealised theatrical naturalism that had gained acceptance in Europe and the United States in the first part of the century slowly began to feel stilted, old-fashioned, and stagey. Ada Rehan was performing right in the eye of this storm. Rehan was a product of Augustin Daly’s directorial management and actor training. She had only been acting for six years when the theatrical manager ‘discovered’ her and began to develop her talent. She quickly became the most notable product of the ‘Daly school’ of actor training through rehearsal and production. Dora Knowlton Ranous, a member of Daly’s company during the 1878–1879 season, enthused that Daly was ‘a wonderful teacher of acting; I believe he could teach a broomstick to act; he shows everyone just how to move, to speak, to look; he seems to know instinctively just how everything should go to get the best effect’ (1910, 30). Daly was known at the time, and continues to be infamous for, his tight control of his acting company. As the Milwaukee Sentinel explained (‘Daly on the Seas’, May 23, 1886), Daly ‘is mercilessly exact, directing every movement, every emphasis; and the scenes must be gone over and over again

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     311

until he is satisfied that not only are the lines exactly as they should be written, but that the actor is going to speak them as directed’. As the star of his repertory company, Rehan’s style of acting was directly related to Daly’s directorial style. Daly coached his actors in what was considered a modern, colloquial, naturalistic style designed to appeal to his upper-middle-class audiences. As his brother Joseph (1917, 395) recalled, ‘The Daly players were expressly trained to be natural in speech, manner, and action in old comedy’, including Shakespeare, ‘and it is safe to say that under that instruction they came nearer to a reproduction of the play as Shakespeare staged it than by affecting an artificial method’. It was the manager’s goal to populate the stage with characters that were familiar to his audiences—the types of American they might encounter in their own drawing rooms. Early in her career, Rehan’s ‘type’ was the young society woman, filled with buoyant good spirits and occasional bouts of petulance. But, as she aged, she moved on to other ‘American types’ until, according to the Dramatic Times (‘Daly’s Company of Comedians’, Vol. 9, No. 2, March 27, 1886), ‘Miss Rehan has acquainted us with every model of womanhood so agreeably that she has filled her own sex with envy and the other with admiration’. Throughout all of her performances, Rehan approached the roles with the modern, naturalistic, American technique which Daly emphasised in his theatre. This was equally true of her Shakespearean roles as of the drawing-room comedies that were standard fare at Daly’s. In 1886, Rehan undertook her first Shakespearean role, Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The reviewer for Life (quoted in Hendricks-Wenck 1988, 130) commented that her performance was ‘more suggestive of a modern drawing-room than Shakespeare’s rural lasses were intended to be’. This was a frequent comment with regard to her portrayal of Shakespeare’s women, accompanying both praise and censure. British critic Clement Scott enthused that Shakespeare ‘as played by Ada Rehan and her companions, went with the glow and excitement, and beat and pulse of modern comedy’ (1986, 420). But his countryman and colleague William Archer (1896, 252) complained that in A Midsummer Night’s Dream Rehan was prone to ‘a sudden lapse into schoolgirl Americanism’ in her performance of Helena. In agreement, the reviewer for the London Star (June 28, 1893) groused that the Daly company ‘have apparently got the notion that the great thing with Shakespeare is to reel off his lines rapidly, in the tone of modern conversation; they, doubtless, think that is the more “natural” method’. Similarly, American critic John Rankin Towse (quoted in Odell 1940, Vol. 14, 222) commented: ‘Miss Rehan’s Rosalind in As You Like It is arch,

312     Lezlie C. Cross

sprightly, pleasing […] But it is Shakespearean only in spots, and the effort to be arch does not allow it to be very poetic’. The American drama critic Norman Hapgood (1901, 160) observed that in her performance of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, her delivery of the lines ‘was more modern, less exquisitely adapted to the spirit of the play’ than Ellen Terry’s delivery ‘but still noble and powerful’. The critic for the New York Herald (‘Old Comedy Reclothed’, January 25, 1891) summed it up when he observed that ‘They have one way of playing comedy at Daly’s and only one. Whether the piece be Sheridan’s or Shakespeare’s or Schön[a]than’s or Jerome’s, the actors are always good, bright, middle-class Americans’. Rehan’s naturalness on the stage led some commentators to wonder if she was indeed portraying a character in the naturalistic style or if she was simply performing variations upon herself. Philadelphia-based critic L. Clarke Davis wrestled with this distinction in his 1886 article ‘Art for All: Ada Rehan’. On the one hand, he acknowledged Rehan fused ‘Nature’ with the study and labour required of a successful actress. He admitted that he could think of ‘no other actress to whom acting comes so spontaneously; of no other who puts herself, her own intellectual and emotional individuality, so entirely into a character’. Even with that said, he still could not determine ‘whether Miss Rehan acts at all, either off or on the stage, or does only that which it is obvious a person of her thought and feeling would inevitably do under such circumstances as she is under, or begot by such environments as those by which she is begot when she is either in or out of the theatre’. For Davis, Rehan’s naturalistic approach to the characters was so real that he could not determine if he was seeing the character truthfully portrayed, or simply the actress herself. But as the turn of the century approached, her acting began to be seen as artificial, mechanical, and full of prearranged histrionic tricks. William Archer (1896, 239) observed of her performance of Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona that she was ‘coming more and more to abound in her own sense, or, in other words, is lapsing into a sort of peculiar and seductive staginess’. At the turn of the century, a Washington-based critic lamented that her acting style had not changed since the 1880s. He still found her using ‘[t]he artifices of stage management: the posture of characters best calculated to evoke laughter, or tears, or tensity [sic ]; the use of the voice; the creation of what stage managers call “situation:” the use of all those gestures which are at once interpreted by the audience as expressive of anger or hesitation or whatnot’ (‘Miss Rehan’s Art’ [1900]). He hoped that ‘Miss Rehan will some day realise that this generation is viewing her acting as it is today and not as it was when she and Mr. Daly were the arbiters of American theatrical

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     313

art’. For many audiences, the actress was not nimble enough to keep up with changing theatrical styles. She remained fixedly the same actress in the same repertory as she was in the 1880s, but audiences had grown to expect a different level of realism in stage performances. By the time of her retirement from the stage in 1905, Rehan had become an exponent of a hopelessly old-fashioned theatrical style, a relic during her own lifetime.

A Critical Divide Rehan’s disappearance might also be attributed to the truly divergent reactions to her performances by critics, even earlier in her career. As pointed out in The Illustrated American (‘Our Gallery of Players’, August 22, 1891), ‘The fact that there are Rehanites and anti-Rehanites proves that the actress is no ordinary mummer’. These conflicting reports of Rehan’s powers as an actor did nothing to prevent audiences’ enjoyment of her work at the time, but they muddy the historical record. Was she an actress of the finest mettle, a passably good actress, or was she simply a beautiful, charming woman who, in whichever role she undertook, merely played herself? The contrasting reception of her acting by critics can be seen in the collected reviews of her opening performance as Katherine in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew at Daly’s Theatre on January 18, 1887. In their morning papers on January 19 and through the following week, New Yorkers could read a wide variety of interpretations of Ada Rehan in the role of the ‘shrew’ and varying judgements on her quality as an actor. For some critics, this role exhibited Rehan’s versatility and her growth as an actor. The Court Journal (January 25, 1887) felt that she essayed the ‘trying part with strength yet graceful ease throughout and gave, if it were needed, an added proof of her great versatility’. For the critic at the New York Times (‘Mr. Daly’s Great Triumph’, January 19, 1887), this role ‘demonstrated the constantly increasing skill of this fine actress and her keen insight’. However, others perceived that Katherine was a character built in exactly the same mould as those in which Rehan had previously excelled. The review in the New York News Letter (January 22, 1887) observed that: Her forte in the plays at this house has been to defy Mr. Drew in the society squabbles which have turned the subject of many plays in which they have appeared. As Katherine she is, therefore, in her element […] her feminine fury used for the termagant is very much kin to that she has shown before when she has stormed, pouted, wept and been subjected in one of Mr. Daly’s own plays.

314     Lezlie C. Cross

The reviewer for the New York Sun (January 19, 1887) agreed: ‘Miss Rehan’s customary expressions of feminine fury’ as shown in Daly’s comedies ‘were accepted as precisely right for Katherine ’. And the reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle (January 23, 1887) pointed out that ‘Miss Rehan, as the shrew, is still Miss Rehan, whose business in life is to pout in Paris dresses and amuse people by an assumption of extravagant concern over infinitesimal miseries’. Even the ornate ‘language of Shakespeare’ could not make that critic forget that Ada Rehan was nothing more than ‘a Nineteenth Century young woman masquerading before us’. Rehan had certain vocal and physical traits that critics obliquely referred to as her ‘mannerisms’. Many reviewers described her vocal quality as golden or silver music with a floating, ‘caressing quality’ (Atchison Daily Globe, December 12, 1885). Yet, she elongated certain vowel sounds and took in air every few words, leading some critics to complain of a languid drawl in her voice. In this way, her vocal style was regarded as breathy ‘baby talk’ (Rocky Mountain News, August 30, 1885) which, like Marilyn Monroe’s voice, was appealing to some audiences and abhorrent to others. A recording of Rehan performing monologues from Twelfth Night and As You Like It survives at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, enabling twenty-first-century critics to hear her for themselves. Her charmingly awkward movements found a similar divide. Her unpredictable, bouncing, twirling stride, which became known as the ‘Rehan roll’ (Chicago Evening Mail, July 9, 1887), was ridiculed by the reviewer of the London Times (August 4, 1884) who described Rehan as ‘stalking round the stage like a giraffe’. Additionally, she had a habit of pointing or tilting her chin on stage, seen in photographs of the actress in character, which was often imitated by her admirers and mocked by her detractors. For many reviewers, Rehan as Katherine was able to overcome these actorly mannerisms and truly become one with the character. The New York Star (January 19, 1887) praised her acting, particularly her naturalness in the role, in which she ‘at no point [gave way] to the mannerism that distinguishes much of her acting of a haphazard sort’. The reviewer for the New York Herald (January 29, 1887) felt that her lack of mannerisms in the role allowed Rehan to reveal ‘greater skill and finer art than hitherto exhibited’. For the critic at the New York Times (‘Mr. Daly’s Great Triumph’, January 19, 1887), Rehan’s ability to overcome her typical mannerisms in the part ‘demonstrated the constantly increasing skill of this fine actress’. However, many other men—witnessing the exact same performance—saw her usual glaring faults ‘freely displayed in the extraordinary character of Katherine’ (New York World, ‘Shakespeare at Daly’s Theatre’, January 19, 1887).

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     315

The critics were therefore divided: was this performance a step forward for Rehan; a chance for her to move away from her usual characterisations into a full-blooded performance? Or was she simply applying her usual nineteenth-century methods to a Shakespearean character? Rehan’s physical appearance in the production—her body type, size, carriage, and costuming—also became a point of contention. The actress, who was a statuesque five foot eight inches (1.73 m), was clad for this performance in an ornate brocade gown and a fire-red wig which matched the temperament of her character (see Fig. 14.1). Fellow actor Otis Skinner (1923, 158) described her Katherine as a ‘blaze of terra cotta brocade, wigged in a wreath of curling red hair, [which] was a gorgeous thing to look on as she dashed storming upon the scene at her first appearance’. For some critics, she was an ideal vision of Katherine: her fire, beauty, and bearing were a true embodiment of Shakespeare’s character. Town Topics (January 20, 1887) enthused ‘Miss Ada Rehan not only plays well, extremely well, but she looks in her auburn hair particularly handsome’ and the New York Evening News (January 19, 1887) felt that Rehan ‘was an ideal in beautiful costumes, and not only filled the eye by her beauty, but more than satisfied the most critical of Shakespearean critics’ in her presentation of the character. For others, she had neither the figure, voice, nor presence to carry off this demanding part. The critic for the New York Evening Post (January 19, 1887) complained that Rehan is not particularly well fitted for [the role of Katherine] by her physical characteristics. Her form is too slight, her voice is too weak, and her features too small to give full effect to the scorn and passion of this imperious beauty, and her skill in elocution is scarcely sufficient to express the full significance of some of the pungent lines allotted to her.

The review in The Critic (January 29, 1887) concurred: ‘She has not the face, voice, or figure to maintain so formidable a personality […] her shortcomings are due more to physical limitations than to a failure of artistic perception’. While interpretation of an actor’s physical presentation of a role is dependent upon the viewer’s internalised ideal of the character, the fact that Rehan’s audiences were so torn on the issue of her appearance in the part is another indicator of this actress’s divisive quality. To this day, the final scenes of The Taming of the Shrew prove to be the most challenging for an actress. Katherine undergoes a complete emotional and temperamental revolution, moving from a tempestuous, headstrong virago to a meek, humble, and submissive wife. The critics that viewed

316     Lezlie C. Cross

Fig. 14.1  Ada Rehan as Katherine in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, 1887 (Photograph by O. Almquist. ©Alamy Photos)

Rehan’s first Shrew in January of 1887 saw two different performances of these final scenes. Some saw an actress too committed to the forceful anger of the shrew and unable to make the emotional turn to soft submission at the end. In the New York Tribune (January 19, 1887), drama critic—and devoted Rehanite—William Winter felt obliged to admit that Miss Rehan’s impersonation of ‘Katherine’ exhibited but one defect—that it did not give the requisite hint of any woman-like softness underneath that virago exterior—which is partially cultivated and not altogether natural. The submission seemed, therefore, a little sudden and a little insincere—at the end of act fourth;—but the portrait of ‘Katherine’ as a vixen was magnificent.

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     317

The critic for the New York World (January 27, 1887) agreed: ‘Miss Ada Rehan does not, as Katherine, show the gradual awakening of her love for Petruchio, which would soften her choler’. For the reviewer at the New York Commercial Advertiser (January 19, 1887), Rehan ‘failed slightly in the portrayal of her submission to her lord’ in the final scene ‘by making the physical abnegation more prominent than the mental’. In other words, she could go through the motions of showing her fealty to her new lord, but the actress could not reach the emotional levels to show the character’s complete transformation. Yet, others applauded Rehan for her ability to transform the character from a virago to a being of pure womanliness. In a virtual refutation of the review in the New York World, the Rochester Express (January 22, 1887) found that ‘the delicate moderation of her performance, its subtle gradations, surprised those who has been taught to expect a little of everything good from Miss Rehan’. In other words, her incremental changes from shrew to wife throughout the play exceeded even her fans’ expectations of her artistic ability. Similarly, the reviewer for the New York Star (January 19, 1887) saw the full transformation of the character: ‘[w]e see a young woman, spoiled with luxury and self-will, with full-blooded impulses, who is won as [if ] by her own desires and the flattery and force of a superior nature as by extravagance in the method of wooing’. In this, he felt that Rehan had discovered and made manifest, ‘the true intent of the poet’. Her ability to make this difficult transformation made her, for many critics, the supreme embodiment of the role; the Katherine that Shakespeare had intended when he first penned the play. Taking in sum all of these contrasting critical viewpoints, theatre historians receive two radically different views of the same performance. No two reviewers experienced the same theatrical product, the same Ada Rehan. Some saw an artist of the first tier and others a weak, mannered actress who only ever played one character. This dichotomy can be summed up in two different reviews: that of the Philadelphia Inquirer (January 21, 1887) which declared that her performance was a ‘major triumph’ in which the actress, ‘entering into the spirit of the merry, wily, charming shrew, and interpreting it to the wrapt [sic ] audience with dazzling splendor of person, with apt intelligence, with grace and charm and spirit unexampled and inimitable’. For this reviewer, Rehan was able to fully enter the character and bring the audience along with her on Katherine’s journey. She was achieving the high art of the theatre. However, John Carboy in the New York Sunday Dispatch (January 23, 1887) felt the polar opposite. He appreciated that Rehan ‘possesses impulsiveness, theatric instinct, a keen and quiet sense of whatever

318     Lezlie C. Cross

humor there is in a character’ but in his eyes, these qualities—which served her well in modern comedies—did not enable her to ‘rise to that point of dramatic intelligence in her reading which would make her delineation of the Shrew’s nature as artistic portraiture’. She was a competent mimic, but not an artist. How can an actress of such variable reception be enshrined amongst the greatest of her generation? If the (by and large) men who reviewed her performances could not come to a conclusion about her value as an artist—or whether she could even be considered an artist—how is history meant to receive her?

George Bernard Shaw ‘Never Can Tell’ As one of the most prolific, vocal, and influential critics of the late nineteenth century, George Bernard Shaw has had a lasting impact on the reception of Ada Rehan’s acting. And the problem was (and is) that Shaw never could tell how he felt about Rehan as an actress. Sometimes, especially in her performances of Shakespeare and Sheridan, he thought she was thrillingly inspired, exceeding Terry and Bernhardt. But mostly, he found that her potential was squandered in Daly’s unworthy comedic trash. Shaw wondered if the exhilaration of her successes superseded the workaday mundanity of the majority of her representations. Shaw’s major frustration with the actress was that she allowed her talent to be wasted in Daly’s comic German adaptations. He felt that this collection of light entertainments had the deleterious effect of dragging her genius down to a lowbrow level. He was appalled that in the title role of The Countess Gucki by Franz von Schönathan (in 1896), Rehan dared to use the same ‘effects’ which she had employed as Viola in Twelfth Night (in 1893). He felt her parallel actorly manipulation of both the highest of dramatic literature and the trivial trash of Schönathan’s play was ‘cynical and shocking’ (1909, 45). The fact that he could detect Rehan’s use of the same mannerisms in both plays revealed to him that she was not an artist, but a mountebank, practising on a gullible audience. He seethed, ‘This trifling of the cherished trophies of her art to make a miserable bag of tricks for a part and a play which the meekest leading lady in London would rebel against, was to me downright sacrilege: I leave Miss Rehan to defend it if she can’ (1909, 44). While he uniformly hated her performances in contemporary comedies, when it came to the issue of Ada Rehan’s depiction of Shakespeare’s women, Shaw was deeply conflicted. On one hand, she was

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     319

the actor-product of Daly, whose Shakespearean staging techniques Shaw abhorred. For Shaw, the scenic and staging tricks Daly employed in his Shakespearean productions ‘totally destroy the naturalness of the representation, and so accord with his conception of the Shakespearean drama as the most artificial of all forms of stage entertainment’ (1906, 170). He deplored what he saw as Daly’s ‘systematic policy of sacrificing the credibility of the play to the chance of exhibiting an effective “living picture”’ (1906, 172) in his Shakespearean productions. Rehan was both a product of the Daly school and the signature moving element in his living pictures. Shaw perceived that she allowed herself to be used as Daly’s pawn, to allow him to ‘exploit [her] unrivalled charm of poetic speech’ (1895, xviii) to bring credibility to his otherwise huckster productions of Shakespeare. Shaw maintained that, as the leading actor of Daly’s company, Rehan had the power—should she choose to use it—to guide the manager’s hand. She could then star in more complex, enriching plays including Shakespeare’s late comedies and the new realistic drama (including Shaw’s own) being produced in London. On the other hand, Shaw saw her as the sole bright light in Daly’s belaboured productions, the singular element that lifted the evening above the clap-trap produced. In Daly’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1895), Rehan’s mere presence elevated the drama for Shaw: ‘When she is on the stage, the play asserts its full charm; and when she is gone the stage carpenters and the orchestra are doing their best to pull the entertainment through in Mr. Daly’s way, down drops the whole affair into mild tedium’ (1906, 174). Her performance as Rosalind in As You Like It tempted him to ‘unhesitatingly declare Miss Rehan the most perfect Shakespearean executant in the world’ (1909, 325) spurring him to wish he could see her in more substantial Shakespearean roles. And the more that Shaw saw of Rehan, the more he grew to appreciate her art. Over the years, he found that ‘Miss Rehan’s style grows nobler, and takes her further away from the skittish hoyden of Mr. Daly’s dramatic imagination’ (1932, 167). But was this enough to erase the stigma of those modern comedies? Shaw’s continuing internal conflict regarding Rehan is seen in his review of Daly’s Twelfth Night (1893): ‘And the moment she [Rehan] strikes up the true Shakespearean music, and feels her way to her part altogether by her sense of that music, the play returns to life and all the magic is there’ (1961, 8). The vocal quality which Rehan brought to the production, which Shaw equated to music, brought the play to life for him, adding undefinable theatrical magic. He further explains: ‘[w]e have all heard Miss Rehan perform this miracle with Twelfth Night, and turn it, in spite of the impossible Mr. Daly, from a hopelessly ineffective actress show into

320     Lezlie C. Cross

something like the exquisite poem its author left it’ (1961, 8). Again, in his estimation, Rehan was able to take Daly’s inferior offering and make it something that even the divine William would recognise and value as his own work. His emphasis in this review on Rehan’s method of speaking Shakespeare’s verse reveals another point of contention for Shaw. Was she a miraculous speaker of the text, or was she an untrained Irish American floundering her way through the poetry? In one publication, he praised her verse-speaking, commenting that ‘her treatment of Shakespearean verse is delightful after the mechanical intoning of Sarah Bernhardt’ (1906, 173). In another, he enthused that in the third and fourth acts of As You Like It she achieved ‘miracles of vocal expression’ (1961, 24). But later in that same review he lamented that she made ‘nonsense of the verses by wrong conjunctions and misplaced commas, which show that she has never worked out the logical construction of a single sentence in her part’ (1932, 25–26). Perhaps he saw flaws in her approach to the text, but valued the innate beauty of her vocal instrument. Despite what he considered to be her deficiencies, Shaw found the ‘heart’ Rehan brought to her Shakespearean roles enchanting. But he recognised that she only appeared as the lightest (and easiest) of Shakespeare’s heroines. Yes, she made an enchanting Rosalind, but could she perform to the same level in the more challenging comedic roles—Isabella in Measure for Measure or Imogen in Cymbeline—not to mention the tragic roles? Did she have the emotional range and technical ability to succeed in those parts? Shaw’s expert opinion was no. She was charming as Rosalind, Viola, and Katherine because those characters were, in intellect and temperament, similar to Rehan herself. As he succinctly observed, ‘the critic in me is bound to insist that Ada Rehan has as yet created nothing but Ada Rehan’ (1961, 25). Shaw echoed the bewilderment of L. Clarke Davis (quoted above) when he continued (emphasis mine): I cannot judge from Miss Rehan’s enchanting Rosalind whether she is a great Shakespearean actress or not: there is even a sense in which I cannot tell whether she can act at all or not. So far, I have never seen her create a character: she has always practiced the same adorable arts on me, by whatever name the playbill has called her.

With this dire pronouncement Shaw, the leading voice amongst English critics, contributed to Rehan’s eventual oblivion.

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     321

The Svengali Narrative In addition to the divisive reception of Rehan’s acting in her own time, the narratives surrounding Daly’s influence on and control of Rehan are one of the complicating factors in considering her legacy. The actress was notoriously reserved and jealously guarded her private life from the press. Terry and Bernhardt both published their own autobiographies, managed the press, and firmly controlled the narratives that surrounded them and shaped their reception. Rehan’s reticence allowed rumours and speculation to form the basis of our understanding of the actress and the manager she worked with for over twenty years. The biographical sketches of Rehan which appeared in periodicals and in William Winter’s study of her life and career all featured the same key milestones. Ada Rehan (originally Delia Crehan) was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1857. At the age of eight, her family emigrated to the United States, establishing themselves in Brooklyn. Rehan’s start in acting was accidental: she stepped into a role in James J. McCloskey’s melodrama Across the Continent, managed by her brother-in-law Oliver Doud Byron, when the actress cast was too ill to go on. Rehan began acting in earnest and soon moved on to Mrs. John Drew’s company in Philadelphia. It was here that she was inadvertently billed as Ada C. Rehan, a spelling which stuck. With her new appellation, she then went on to act in various regional houses, playing minor roles with some major stars, such as Edwin Booth. In 1879, playing in Albany as Bianca in David Garrick’s Shakespeare adaptation Katherine and Petruchio, she caught the eye of theatre manager Augustin Daly, who adopted her as a member of his acting company at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. She quickly moved up the ranks at Daly’s, becoming one of the ‘big four’ actors heading the company, alongside John Drew, James Lewis and Mrs. G. H. Gilbert. According to this standard history, it was not until Daly swept her up from obscurity that she became a real actress. This origin story implies that Rehan had no training, just a little natural charm and the powerful influence of Augustin Daly who made her. This story is repeated numerous times in contemporary reviews of her acting and chronicles of her career. In 1916, upon Rehan’s death, The Literary Digest (Vol. 52, February 5, 1916, 289) reported that ‘[i]t is said with much truth that Augustin Daly made her what she was’. The Illustrated American (‘Our Gallery of Players’, August 22, 1891) describes the moment that Daly saw Rehan perform in Albany as the instant in which ‘Augustin Daly first saw the actress who was to make him,

322     Lezlie C. Cross

and whom he was to make’. The contrast between Rehan’s shy and retiring nature off stage and the heights of comedic glee and emotional fervour she achieved on stage also led several commentators to observe that it was Daly, not Rehan, who created the stage persona. Rehan herself (quoted in Marra 1999, 67) reported that ‘Mr. Daly watched and directed most every performance’ and that she, throughout her career, strived to reach his high expectations for her. This persistent account of Rehan’s development as an actor, which gives Daly the credit for her wide appeal, is exacerbated by the perhaps more pervasive description of their relationship by reference to George du Maurier’s 1895 novel Trilby. In this literary metaphor, Rehan is aligned with the titular heroine of the novel, who is seduced, manipulated, and controlled by her manager, the evil (and not incidentally Jewish) Svengali. Despite his harsh treatment of Trilby, Svengali transforms her into a great singer and, therefore, into a star. This comparison was first put forward shortly after Rehan’s death in 1916, by several people who knew the manager and actress, including Mrs. Clement Scott, wife of the British drama critic, and W. Graham Robertson, a costumer for the Daly company in London. Mrs. Scott forcefully made the connection between du Maurier’s novel and Ada Rehan in Old Days in Bohemian London (1919, 164). In it, she describes Rehan’s transformation following Daly’s death in 1899, when the actress was in her early 40s. She had, according to Scott, ‘changed so that hardly anyone would have recognized her’, completely abandoning the dramatic ambitions which she pursued during Daly’s lifetime. Scott, stripping Rehan of her individual agency, avowed that ‘without Augustin Daly, Ada Rehan could not even speak her lines effectively’. In her view, Daly had been the entire dramatic force behind Rehan’s success; she herself had no power to move audiences—nor was even capable of a dramatic performance. Daly was the artist and Rehan merely the paint. She summed up her employment of the Trilby metaphor by averring that ‘George du Maurier’s drama has never been so truthfully realized on the stage as here, in life ’ (emphasis original). W. Graham Robertson, who both witnessed Rehan on the stage and knew her socially, figured the actress as painfully shy and ‘intensely self-conscious’ (1931, 217). He marvelled that the woman who shrank from social engagements could be the actress who ‘could nightly flare forth into the incarnation of terrible vitality, the “Tiger burning bright”, the flower of terrible vitality that was her Katherine the Shrew’ (218). For Robertson, the answer was that she was an ‘exquisite instrument’ which Daly, the musician hidden behind the scenes, played with virtuosity (225). He also perceived that she

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     323

was little more than Daly’s ‘mouthpiece’: in speaking with her about her acting choices, he found that she merely repeated Daly’s theatrical rationales rather than espousing her own opinions of the characters and their motives (225–27). When Rehan’s career faltered following Daly’s death in 1899, Robertson’s certainty that she was nothing but the voice of Daly was seemingly confirmed. He too employed the literary metaphor for their relationship, as he declared ‘[i]n real life they played the Trilby-Svengali drama of du Maurier’s romance, and as Trilby’s voice died with Svengali, so did Ada Rehan, the actress, vanish for ever after the death of Augustin Daly’ (232). This narrative was picked up by Cornelia Skinner, whose father Otis Skinner acted with Rehan at Daly’s Theatre from 1884 to 1887. In her 1948 portrait of her father’s career, Family Circle, she paints Daly as ‘a dictator’ whose ‘word was rigid law’ (77) and Rehan as the helpless victim of Daly’s dictatorial control. Skinner (81) provides the following description of Rehan and her relationship with Daly: Deciding she [Rehan] was something he wanted, he had snatched her away [from Mrs Drew’s Theatre in Philadelphia] and established her in his theatre, where he set about making her over, deliberately destroying her happygo-lucky spirit, turning her into a conventional fin-de-siècle woman of the world—poised, highstrung, witty, and neurotic. Daly became her Svengali. She was helpless without his minutest detail of direction.

Here, Skinner adopts both dramatically compelling narratives: that Daly made Rehan what she was (and broke her in the process) and that, like Trilby, Rehan was nothing without her manager’s domineering influence. Additionally, in coded language—calling Rehan Daly’s ‘grande maîtresse ’ (80)—Skinner appears to confirm the rumours that Daly and Rehan, like Svengali and Trilby, had a sexual relationship. In deploying this narrative as a metonym for the Daly/Rehan relationship, Skinner, like Scott and Robertson, effectively took away Rehan’s agency and diminished her power as an artist in her own right, ceding all of her considerable influence to Daly. Rehan is figured as nothing more than his puppet. The Svengali narrative has become the backbone of several modern studies of Daly and Rehan, especially in the work of Kim Marra in Strange Duets (2006) and her essay in Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (1999). The pervasiveness of this narrative has warped the way Rehan’s legacy has been received. She is not evaluated based on her performances, but on rumours about her personal life, rumours which are largely unsubstantiated—partially due to her own obsessive desire for privacy.

324     Lezlie C. Cross

Rehan’s career spanned the first decades of the women’s suffrage movement. Throughout the United States and Europe in the late nineteenth century, conceptions of the role of women were changing. At the time of the actress’s death in 1916, the women’s rights movement was in full swing. This change in social attitudes regarding female agency coloured how readers received the Rehan/Daly Svengali narrative. Whereas in the mid-nineteenth century, it was not unusual for a male manager to exert strong control over his female charges, by the time of Rehan’s death a woman who was nothing without male control was seen as weak and ineffectual. This perception of Rehan has persisted. Kim Marra (1999, 62) characterises the actress as gaining her ‘unprecedented level of social and professional prestige for an American actress by playing her part in the gendered metadrama of frontier conquest’. How could such a woman, a female conquest, a mere mouthpiece, be considered a genius or a great actress in her own right? The comparisons with her European counterparts—the names that have lasted—are inevitable. Both Bernhardt and Duse were their own managers as well as being interpretive artists; making business decisions and shaping their own public image. Terry, although managed by Henry Irving, publicly discussed her methods and approaches to her roles as well as her frequent clashes with Irving over issues of interpretation. These strong, multi-talented women typify the independent New Woman of the 1890s; a woman unlike Rehan, who according to these narratives, was nothing without Augustin Daly. It is easy to forget an actress who was merely the pawn of her manager.

Conclusion When looking at Rehan’s virtual disappearance from the theatrical record, it is tempting to simply attribute it to her nationality, as the sole American in the line-up of notable actresses of the period. Perhaps it is inevitable that Terry, Bernhardt, and Duse, as old-world Europeans, were and are more internationally recognised and lauded for their theatrical talents than an Irish-born actress from the United States, which, in the nineteenth century, was still in its theatrical infancy. However, to jump to that conclusion would be to ignore the truly complex issues surrounding Rehan’s reception in the late nineteenth century and, therefore, how the actress and her career are to be interpreted by theatre historians. The Illustrated American (‘Our Gallery of Players’, August 22, 1891) clearly articulated the challenge: ‘Be she only a good actress, or be she a great actress, is a question that we shall discuss in this generation’—and

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     325

their generation could not come to a clear determination. The critics were divided. For some, she was the greatest actress of the period, surpassing Terry and Bernhardt. Her assumption of Shakespeare’s heroines, particularly her mastery of the difficult role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, enshrined her in the annals of performance history. For others she was a good actress in a competent company which produced charming, delightful fare; nothing more. Some audiences appreciated her work in the 1880s and early 1890s, but found she was not able to cope with the move towards naturalism and realism on the stage, becoming a relic of a bygone era within her own lifetime. Others doubted if she was an actress at all. For some, she appeared to always be herself in every role she assumed, thus not truly acting. For others, she appeared to be little more than the pawn of Augustin Daly, the raw material with which he crafted his performances, not truly an actor in her own right. This indecisive response to Rehan in her own time has made it difficult for historians to quantify her acting and therefore justify her appeal. I contend that this complexity is why she has, by and large, gone missing from the historical record. But perhaps it is time to embrace the disconcertingly multifaceted nature of this signature performer and restore her to her proper place in the ranks of her theatrical peers.

Bibliography Most of the newspaper reviews cited in this chapter come from the Daly’s Theatre Scrapbooks, 1863–1899, listed below. Every effort has been made to make the citations as full as possible. Adams, William Davenport. 1891. ‘Ada Rehan: Her Life and Work’. The Theatre, April, 1891, 173–79. Andrew, Richard Harlan. 1971. ‘Augustin Daly’s Big Four: John Drew, Ada Rehan, James Lewis and Mrs G. H. Gilbert’. Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Archer, William. 1896. The Theatrical ‘World’ of 1895. London: Walter Scott. The Bookman: An Illustrated Literary Journal. 1898. ‘Chronicle and Comment’. The Bookman: An Illustrated Literary Journal 8, no. 3, November 1898. Cutler, Jean Valjean. 1962. ‘Realism in Augustin Daly’s Productions of Contemporary Plays’. Dissertation, University of Illinois. Daly, Joseph F. 1917. The Life of Augustin Daly. New York: Macmillan. Daly’s Theatre (New York, NY). 1961. Daly’s Theatre Scrapbooks, 1863–1899. Duncan, Isadora. 1988. Isadora: My Life. London: Penguin. Felheim, Marvin. 1956. The Theater of Augustin Daly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

326     Lezlie C. Cross

Hapgood, Norman. 1901. The Stage in America, 1897–1900, vol. 1. New York: Macmillan. Hendricks-Wenck, Aileen Alana. 1988. ‘Ada Rehan: American Actress (1857–1916)’. Dissertation, Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College. Izard, Forest. 1915. Heroines of the Modern Stage. New York: Sturgis & Walton. Jefferson, Joseph. 1897. The Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson. New York: Century. Marra, Kim. 1999. ‘Taming America as Actress: Augustin Daly, Ada Rehan, and the Discourse of Imperial Frontier Conquest’. In Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater, edited by Jeffrey D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, 52–72. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marra, Kim. 2006. Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865–1914. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. McGhee, Mildred Mae. 1919. ‘The Acting of Ada Rehan (Ada Crehan 1860–1916): A Study Based on Contemporary Opinion’. MA Thesis, University of Iowa. Odell, George C. D. 1940. Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 14. New York: Columbia University Press. Ranous, Dora Knowlton. 1910. Diary of a Daly Debutante: Being Passages from the Journal of a Member of Augustin Daly’s Famous Company of Players. New York: Duffield. Rehan, Ada. [189-]. Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It by William Shakespeare. [United States]: E. Berliner’s Gramophone. [Library of Congress: https://lccn.loc.gov/99390147.] Robertson, W. Graham. 1931. Life Was Worth Living: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson. New York: Harper and Brothers. Scott, Clement. 1919. Old Days in Bohemian London (Recollections of Clement Scott). New York: Frederick A. Stokes. Scott, Clement. 1986. The Drama of Yesterday and Today, vol. 2. New York: Garland. Shaw, George Bernard. 1906. Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 1. New York: Brentano. Shaw, George Bernard. 1909. Dramatic Opinions and Essays, vol. 2. London: Archibald Constable. Shaw, George Bernard. 1895. ‘Introduction’. In The Theatrical World of 1894. London: Walter Scott. Shaw, George Bernard. 1932. Our Theatre in the Nineties. London: Constable. Shaw, George Bernard. 1961. Shaw on Shakespeare. Edited by Edwin Wilson. New York: E. P. Dutton. Skinner, Cornelia Otis. 1948. Family Circle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Skinner, Otis. 1923. Footlights and Spotlights: Recollections of My Life on the Stage. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Stokes, John, Michael R. Booth, and Susan Bassnet. 1988. Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Terry, Ellen. 1909. The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday, Page.

14  Ada Rehan: The Case of the Missing International Star     327

Wilde, Oscar. 2000. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Henry Holt. Winter, William. 1891–1898. Ada Rehan: A Study. New York: Privately Printed for Mr. Daly. Winter, William. 1891. Daughter of Comedy. Philadelphia: Press of Globe Printing House. Winter, William. 1893. The Life and Art of Edwin Booth. New York: Macmillan.

15 Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity Makiko Yamanashi

Introduction In medieval Japan, women played an active part on both sacred and ­secular stages. It is commonly believed that today’s all-male Kabuki tradition grew out of a sacred dance performance by a woman, the shrine priestess Okuni, in 1603 (Kokuritsu 2009, 198–205). However, during the following 250 years of the Edo shōgunate (1600–1868) and the corresponding national isolationist policy (1639–1854), censorship was gradually implemented to control theatres by the application of strict moral codes and this included prohibiting women from performing in public (Wakita 2001, 221). It is largely due to the legacy of this period that Japanese traditional performances such as Kabuki, Nō and the puppet theatre, Bunraku, are still predominantly performed by men. Given the continuation of these allmale performance traditions today, it is not difficult for Japanese people to imagine a stage without women. At the same time, now that the role of the actress is taken for granted in Japanese theatre, it is also quite hard to imagine that women were forbidden to appear on the stage in earlier times. Until about a century ago, it required a great deal of courage and hard work for Japanese women to perform in public, and they needed determination to pursue stage careers and achieve status and respect as actresses. The role of the Japanese actress or joyū—literally ‘woman who acts’—was Makiko Yamanashi (*)  Universität Trier, Trier, Germany © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_15

329

330     Makiko Yamanashi

not created in a single day. The acknowledgement of the very existence of actresses would require several decades of serious effort by groups and individuals who tried to open up the hitherto male-dominated realm of Japanese theatre. It was not until sometime after the ancient Edo regime opened the nation’s doors to the outside world in the mid-nineteenth century that female performers other than the geisha emerged. The term geisha literally means ‘a woman who entertains a guest using her performance skills’ (Tanaka 2007, 194), but these skills or arts (which included dancing, playing music and intellectual conversation) were practised in the context of serving customers in tea houses, where food and drink were also supplied, not on stage. Only gradually during the Meiji (1868–1911), the Taishō (1912–1926) and the early Shōwa period in the 1930s, did Japanese society begin to accept women ‘on stage’. Restricted by the national ideology of ryōsai kenbo (‘good wives and wise mothers’) advocated by the imperial regime and patriarchal Japanese society, women in Japan only gradually gained public recognition. They slowly rejected the earlier feudal system and began fighting cultural prejudice against women, hoping to achieve a new independent womanhood. If the existence of jogakusei (female students) was seen as a ‘sign of enlightenment’ as the term ‘student’ became a status for girls to aspire to and be proud of, one accepted within conventional norms (Honda 1990, 8–24), so the joyū could be seen as an icon of modern womanhood during the advance of democracy in the Meiji to Shōwa periods. Westernisation at this time came to mean almost the same as modernisation in Japan, and women became a powerful symbol of modernity and of the shake-up of c­ onventions and taboos; they ‘emerged’ to liberate society from the pre-existing norms regarding human rights, family, love, marriage and maternal morality which were challenged by women obtaining a job and professional career. If self-determination and the right to work are to be reckoned as elements of women’s drive for independence, the history of the Japanese actress can also be re-evaluated in those terms. My chapter will focus on this transitional period from the late nineteenth century to the pre-World War II period, when social democracy inspired Japanese women to break down conservative ideas about womanhood and become professional working women: such roles included that of the actresses. Building upon the premise that the rise of the actress was an element of women’s emancipation, my analysis first points out that the starting point for Japanese women performing on stage can found in the Meiji school education system and its cultural festivals, where girls were taught music and drama. I go on to examine selected performances and performers,

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     331

firstly in terms of genre and then through the work of individual actresses. To do so, I start by looking at five popular genres enacted by female performers: Onna Kabuki, Onna Kengeki, Musume-gidayū, Asakusa Opera and Revue. I continue by discussing five pioneering actresses who reflected the changing cultural attitudes towards women on stage. The chapter ends by demonstrating how these female productions and performers contributed to breaking down the Japanese convention of male-dominated theatre practice. My work also aims to reveal the way in which Japanese actresses became symbols of modernity as a result of their establishment of a professional identity, the scandals in their private lives and the struggles between Japanese performance traditions and newly imported Western ideas and practices.

Educating Women: Performing at School Festivals Elementary schooling for girls started in 1872, while higher education for women began later at private colleges such as Atomi-gakuen (1875), Jissenjogakkō (1899), Tokyo-joshi-kōtō-shihan-gakkō, now the Ochanomizu Women’s College (1900) and Nihon-joshi-daigaku (1901). It was at the music classes and cultural festivals held at these schools that women first learned to perform on stage. Singing and playing music were regarded as a part of their musical education, whereas gymnastics and dancing were often considered as a part of their physical and intellectual training. They would not only learn teamwork through choral singing and choreography, but were also introduced to new kinds of personal relationships and ideas about romantic love through performing in Western dramas. In these all-girl schools, female students had to act a great variety of dramatic roles: they would play the full range of characters—young boys, men, old and young women, vagabonds, pierrots—and do so in both Japanese and Western costumes (Takahashi 1985, 25–39). Despite the inevitably amateurish quality of these performances, the school environment was, nevertheless, important both for providing young Japanese women with a safe space to become familiar with Western theatrical repertoires and also for reducing the public prejudice against women performing on stage. The importance of school performance in introducing Western performance expectations to the male-dominated Japanese theatre is especially obvious in the fields of opera and revue. In 1903, Tokyo Music School (today’s Tokyo University of the Arts, then the only co-educational state

332     Makiko Yamanashi

institution) staged Gluck’s Orfeo. However, when they attempted to re-stage the production in 1908, it was banned by the Ministry of Education for moral reasons, namely that male and female students should not be allowed to perform together on the same stage (Higashi 2017, 350). It was in these circumstances that Takarazuka Shōjo Kageki (Takarazuka Girls’ Opera) was founded in 1913 on the express condition that it should be a school for girls only. Even today the all-female Takarazuka Revue still consists only of graduates from Takarazuka Music School and the Takarazuka performers are never called joyū (actresses) but seito (students)—a tangible legacy of that time. It can be said that these performing Japanese women existed in a state of frozen development at the critical threshold between musume (girls) and onna (women). Accordingly, their performances inevitably conjure up a unique atmosphere somewhere between a school festival and professional show business.

Modern Theatrical Genres for Girls and Women From the Meiji to the Taishō periods, the image of progressive women slowly shifted from so-called atarashii onna—‘new women’, well-educated girls from mainly bourgeois families—to modan gâru or ‘modern girls’ (abbreviated as moga ), who might not be able to afford to enter higher education but flouted conventions. I argue that a number of female performers can be seen as types of these ‘new women’ and ‘modern girls’, carving out careers for themselves in the theatre industry. This section will look at the significant genres, both traditional and modern, in which female performers played central roles: Onna Kabuki, Onna Kengeki, Musume-gidayū, Asakusa Opera and Revue. Throughout the Edo period, Kabuki was the most popular form of theatre in Japan. As part of their ‘cultural reformation’ programme, the Meiji government desired to make the Grand Kabuki into a national theatrical tradition, equivalent to European Grand Opera as the representation of the imperial nation. As part of this process, Kabuki as theatre for the people was increasingly taken over by the official elite which marginalised female Kabuki performers as they became restricted to appearing in small downtown Kabuki theatres. Ichikawa Kumehachi (1846–1913) and Nakamura Kasen (1889–1942) were female Kabuki performers who gained considerable popularity in Kanda: Kasen even became the chief of the Kanda Theatre. Kasen can be seen not only as one of the first female theatre managers, but also as an up-and-coming entrepreneur with a genius for innovation.

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     333

For instance, she combined cinema footage with her modern shinpa dramas (a mixed-media technique now known as rensageki, meaning literally ‘chain drama’) as well as producing popular repertories from Kabuki (Tsuchida 2012, 70–71). The female Kabuki performer was called onna-yakusha, rather than joyū (actress), and would have learned Kabuki ’s kata (set of forms) in order to act both male and female characters. The all-male Kabuki tradition was opening its door to female performers at a time when men and women performing together was still considered immoral, and Kasen started promoting the joint Kabuki with established male Kabuki actors at her Kanda Theatre in 1919. Naturally, and ironically enough, in her own performances with the Kabuki actors, she came to play more female characters than before but in the traditional all-male Kabuki way (Tsuchida 2012, 72). Gidayū has long been the musical form associated with Kabuki, originally played and sung almost exclusively by professional male performers. The term Musume-gidayū, incorporating musume meaning ‘girls’, refers to the execution of the traditional narrative performance by young women instead. This new genre became a popular sensation after 1877 when the new legal control of yose (traditional entertainment houses) permitted female performers (Mizuno, 1998, 76–99). In 1886, when there were only nine theatres in Tokyo, there were 230 yose houses (Mizuno 1998, 3) where Japanese women gradually got the chance to appear on stage. By the 1890s, ­individual Musume-gidayū were supported and celebrated by rival groups of fans amongst university students, novelists and poets in cities like Tokyo and Osaka. This became a frequent target for criticism and moral censorship and created prejudice; as a result the term ‘taregeta ’, used for female performers of gidayū, acquired pejorative overtones (Mizuno 1998, 195–209). The narrative art of gidayū had a long tradition of solo performance accompanied by a musical instrument. These classic narratives, previously written and performed by male gidayū, were now performed by beautiful young girls. When famous lines expressing romantic feelings were performed by girls impersonating men, it excited the emotions of not only female audiences but also many male members of the audience: few of these had previously had the opportunity to see women on stage, since only the rich could afford to see geisha singing and dancing in ozashiki (houses of entertainment). The new development gave birth to female stars. Takemoto Ayanosuke (1875–1942) became a leading Musume-gidayū star at the age of thirteen. Her personal name Ayanosuke is masculine, and her male-impersonations seem to have been an important factor in her success; her costumes were cunningly crafted in such a way to project a youthful andro­ gynous aura. She retired after about ten years as a star while rivals were

334     Makiko Yamanashi

appearing to take her place, such as Takemoto Kotosa, Takemoto Kyōko, Toyotake Roshō, and the sisters Toyotake Shōgiku and Shōnosuke. These young girls seem to have been both high-profile and powerful, but they were still rare in the competitive entertainment industry. There were a small number of other genres that had traditionally been exclusively male in which women, though limited in number, began to perform and become prominent during the 1920s and the 1930s. Shirasu Masako, married to the diplomat Shirasu Jirō, was the first women to dance Nō on stage in 1924 and wrote a number of books about Nō: female Nō performers were officially acknowledged in 1948. In the Japanese puppet theatre tradition, Bunraku, the puppeteers and musicians were also all originally male, but in 1925 a small troupe consisting of female puppeteers appeared—Otome Bunraku (the Maidens’ Puppet Theatre). A further ­category of the traditional performing arts, Onna Kengeki, is also significant. Literally translated, Onna Kengeki means Women’s Swordplay; mature women impersonating men in masculine attire were the attractions in samurai dramas. The pioneer in this field is generally considered to be Kajiwara Kajō who performed as a handsome samurai in her popular 1920s repertoire (Kamiyama 2014b, 267). But it became more fashionable in the 1930s when two stars, Ōe Michiko (1910–1939) and Fuji Yōko (1912–1980), increased its popularity significantly. Ōe had trained with the Takarazuka Revue and included Western techniques such as tap-dancing in her samurai drama, alongside another Kengeki actress, Nakano Hiroko, who gained a reputation as a handsome male-impersonator (Kamiyama 2014b, 269). In 1938, the contemporary theatre critic Oka Kitarō commented on Ōe as follows: ‘This Kengeki is quite different from usual Kengeki, she is first and foremost a fully developed actress - a true actress’ (quoted in Kamiyama 2014a, 129). Talking about Fuji Yōko, Mori (1992, 45–46) argues that she appeared to take advantage of her sex-appeal in subverting her femininity to achieve masculinity in Japanese conventional male attire in a way that was more enjoyable for the audience. However, the art of good Kengeki was to craft male characters as convincingly and stylishly as the skilful actress could manage. This was essentially more challenging than just impersonating Western male characters because it meant confronting national Japanese conventions, physically creating an alternative to the hitherto mainstream all-male stage dramas. They would do their best to perform handsome Japanese samurai in a stylised manner and attracted not only female members of the audience but also many male audiences as well. In this way, Onna Kengeki was, like Onna Kabuki, a metaphor for modernity, evolving from traditional Japanese performance

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     335

practice: it suggested an antithesis to, rather than a reinforcing of stereotypical Japanese manhood, by combining its image with an alluring aura of femininity. In parallel with this shifting approach to Japanese conventional theatrical genres, a more significant number of female performers can be observed in the newly imported Western genres. The first of these was Asakusa Opera, named after the area of downtown Tokyo in which it flourished. Not strictly Grand Opera in the Western sense, Asakusa Opera embraced all sorts of musical theatre, including translated adaptations of Western opera, operetta and dance in all its forms (Nakano 2017, 356–59). It is commonly held that the success of this genre was initiated by Takagi Tokuko (1891–1919), who was famous as Japan’s first dancer to perform in the pointe shoes of Western ballet. She had worked in vaudeville in America and in 1916 started a series of musical productions named Global Variety in Japan, presenting American-style musical comedy (Soda 1989, 158–65). Asakusa Opera was then popularised by similar female performers who could dance and sing in the Western style (Sugiyama 2015, 114). These stars included Sawa Morino (1890–1933) famous as a sexually alluring dancer; Kawai Sumiko (1893–?) a chorus girl; Hara Nobuko (1893–1979) an instructor at the Imperial Theatre’s Opera Department; Hara Seiko (1895–1977) the founder of modern dance in Japan; and Kimura Tokiko (1897–1962) a well-known opera singer (Sugiyama 2015, 118). The golden age of Asakusa Opera was short because the entire area was completely destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. However, it enjoyed an intensive, fertile seven years in which these Western-style productions (musical theatre modelled on Western ideas) gave Japanese women a greater opportunity to perform on stage to a wider public. The irony was that, despite their rising reputation as actresses proper both in artistic and technical terms, the gossip and scandal surrounding their private lives not only made them famous, but also risked exposing them to loss of public favour. In order to ‘protect’ young girls from these risks, some companies, such as the Takarazuka Revue, operated along the lines of the earlier school system. Revue was thus developed somewhat strategically into a prominent genre in Japan: it became phenomenally popular and continues to thrive right up to today. The all-female revue was established by Takarazuka in 1913; the Shōchiku Revue followed in 1922. These all-girl productions with spectacular staging, dancing and singing triggered a revue boom in Japan. They were especially successful because they operated in the context of a music school that educated female students not only as stage performers but also

336     Makiko Yamanashi

as skilful, well-trained women; the organisations became respected institutions for girls to aspire to and for society to acknowledge. The schoolgirl identity also enabled aspiring actresses to transition from student amateurs to professional performers. This situation was a key factor in revue’s success in Japan because the female students were able to protect themselves from the usual clichés about woman performing in public being depraved, dangerous and responsible for moral corruption. In effect, the all-female revue attracted many female audience members who particularly idolised otokoyaku or male-impersonators, seeing them not only as representing a new type of disciplined, chivalrous male unlike the traditional Japanese man, but also as providing an optimistic portrayal of Japanese womanhood fighting for equality with men both on stage and in society. One early Takarazuka star, Amatsu Otome (1905–1980), for example, was much admired for her dancing of Shishimai, traditionally performed by male Kabuki actors (Yamanashi 2012, 86). In 1930, a Shōchiku star, Mizunoe Takiko (1915–2009), adopted a male-style haircut for the first time ever in a Japanese all-girl revue and established her fame as a dansō no reijin—a beautiful woman in male attire. In 1933, when she was still only eighteen but already at the height of her stardom, Mizunoe led a workers’ strike to fight for women’s rights to a proper salary and better working conditions (Nakayama 1993, 179–80). This strike made Mizunoe even more popular as a social idol amongst young Japanese women. After retiring from Shōchiku revue, she became Japan’s first female film-producer (Mizunoe and Abe 1992, 13–14). In contrast, the Takarazuka otokoyaku star, Kasugano Yachiyo (1915–2012), born in the same year as Mizunoe, remained within the institution as a Takarazuka icon until her death, maintaining her legendary status as a symbol of Japanese revue and dedicating the whole of her life to instructing her junior female colleagues. When she passed away in 2012 at the age of ninety-six, theatre scholar Suzuki Kunio (January 2013, 39–50) described her as a master of the Platonic Idea who mastered stylised gestures and forms derived from European visual aesthetics as successfully as Japanese physical dance. Takarazuka and Shōchiku (until its dissolution in 1996) have been the joint authorities on revue, the genre’s guiding lights and a cradle of female performers, producing pioneering singers and actresses who established significant careers for themselves on stage, on screen and in society throughout the twentieth century. Inspired by the grand Shōchiku and Takarazuka revues, numerous lesser revue troupes and productions have mushroomed. Even if one considers the recorded instances alone, there were more than twenty-five female revue troupes established across the country by the 1930s (Kurahashi and Tsuji

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     337

2005, 191–93). Furthermore, there is some evidence of interaction between maiko (traditional dancing maidens in the geisha world of Kyoto) and the maiko girls’ spectacular Miyako Odori—a Japanese-style revue emphasising synchronised dance routines (Hamaguchi 2015, 73–78). Kawai Dance was a unique example of a modern Western-style dance troupe related to both revue and maiko which was formed only from the maiko girls of a single tea house. Founded by Kawai Kōichirō in 1921, the all-girl dance company enthusiastically introduced classical ballet, Spanish dance, polka and sometimes even acrobatics into their work. The girls were also trained to play Western musical instruments such as the xylophone and trumpet (Shibata 2014, 180–84). Though they would have been cynically called a ‘Geiko [or Young Geisha] Dance Company’, what Kawai Dance aimed at was a serious exercise in popularising Western dance in the hope of modernising and reinvigorating Japanese dance conventions. The girls were positively acknowledged as ‘Modern Geisha’ (Watanabe 2003, 100) and ‘Swing Girls of Modern Times’ (Hashizume 2005, 246) and represented a modern trend in Great Osaka—the second biggest city of Japan. Though they employed a Russian ballet instructor, their dance was developed by imitating Western models. Their claim to originality is thus in some doubt, but the important fact is that the traditional maiko girls adopted Western dance forms and became part of the nationwide trend of all-girl revues. Along with the remarkable success of the all-girl revue, revues featuring male and female performers on stage together were also gaining increasing popularity and acceptance. Revue was often staged between film screenings at cinema theatres as part of Asakusa Opera (Sugiyama 2015, 125). Asakusa Casino Follies (1929–1933) was a cabaret-style theatre dedicated to revues of erotically nuanced comical sketches, while Shinjuku Moulin Rouge (1931–1951) was another organisation trying to produce revues with theatrical aspirations but gradually inclining towards variety (Nakano 2011, 76–99). In Hibiya, near the Imperial Palace and Japan’s first Western-style Imperial Theatre, the Nichigeki [i.e., Nihon Theatre] Dancing Team (1936– 1981) became famous for their high-kicking dance revues while the Music Hall located in the same building would present nude shows. These different revues catered for a wide variety of audiences and combined to create an unprecedented boom in modern genres, in which women had a much greater opportunity to express themselves in displays which ranged from innocent charm to erotic allure. Revue girls can be criticised as frivolous and flashy or pitied as objects of the male gaze or patriarchal exploitation: both perspectives deserve academic examination. However, perhaps more interestingly, the revue performer can also be seen as a representation of the active

338     Makiko Yamanashi

emancipation of Japanese women and revue itself as a metaphor for modern­ ity invigorated by the increasingly significant presence of women and a symbol indicating the dawn of a new age. Whichever of the genres presented above one considers, it can be argued that Japanese women on stage were seriously and consciously searching for new identities to express their independent womanhood in the transition period as traditional values gave way to modern attitudes. If they belonged to one of the collective all-female groups, such as the revue institutions and troupes discussed above in particular, and performed under their affiliated identity, their professional lives were perhaps easier and safer. However, it was by no means a rapid straightforward path for an actress to become accepted socially and for the performing arts to be considered a respectable profession in its own right. This was especially difficult in theatres performing ‘straight plays’ where the female performers were naturally expected to perform on the same stage with their male colleagues. The next section focuses on those ground-breaking individuals who paved the way with great difficulty to careers as a joyū or actress. Only through their hard work, determination and personal sacrifice were Japanese women on stage able to achieve social recognition.

Introducing the Joyū: Professional Actresses There are several different words to describe a performer in Japanese. Yakusha is the common term for stage performers, including traditional Nō and Kabuki actors. In the Meiji and Taishō period, there were also female performers in this tradition, such as Nakamura Kasen who formed the Onna Kabuki troupe discussed above, who were specifically called Onna-yakusha (female yakusha ). In contrast, the word haiyū was created in the Meiji period mainly to refer to performers in the new theatres, and it came to be applied further in the twentieth century to actors in film and TV dramas. Yakusha and haiyū are not in themselves gender-specific terms. It was not until the word joyū was used that an exclusively female performer was signified. The fact that joyū was thus distinguished from yakusha and haiyū shows how rare it was and how distinct a female performer was considered amongst the male-dominated actors’ world. Joyū was not a discriminatory term, but the need to highlight the role of ‘women in the performing profession’ created a subtle ambivalence implying a need for differentiation from male performers, but also a female performer’s pride in her status and a self-consciousness brought about by the public attention she received. This section will

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     339

look at four pioneering joyū: Kawakami Sadayakko, Matsui Sumako, Miura Tamaki and Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu, with a brief mention of Hanako and Mori Ritsuko. In the course of the theatre reform movement in the 1890s called Shinpa, which aimed at a more realistic drama as opposed to traditional Kabuki, a handful of female performers emerged, such as Chitose Beiha (1855–1918) who could be considered as one of Japan’s earliest actresses. Nevertheless, Kawakami Sadayakko (1871–1946) is usually considered to be Japan’s first actress or joyū proper, in terms of public recognition. Sada, as she was known, was a well-known professional geisha of high rank, who had as her patron the statesman, Itō Hirobumi. At a time when performers in general were still harshly denigrated as kawara kojiki (beggars living on the riverside), being a geisha offered unique opportunities for advancement and a well-paid profession for female performers who could dance, sing and converse to entertain distinguished guests. Despite her financially secure status as a geisha, Sada’s importance came as a result of her choice to marry the politically-driven satirical actor, Kawakami Otojirō (1864–1911). She accompanied him on tour abroad with his group of seventeen male performers. At the time of their first visit to America in 1899, Sada was present simply as a wife and not expected to perform. However, Western audiences were not appreciative of Kabuki-style female impersonators. The Kawakami troupe was in serious financial difficulty and realised their only option was for Sada to make her debut onstage before the American public. At first, her pride in being a geisha and a supportive wife to Otojirō, who as the troupe’s star might feel humiliated, made her hesitant, but the reality was that Sada’s acting onstage led the troupe to success (Downer 2003, 93–96). After leaving America, they travelled to London and then to Paris where Sada’s appearance at the International Exposition of 1900 proved a popular sensation (Senzoku 2004, 23–35). In the programme of Les Musiques Bizarres, their performance as La Ghéisha et le Samurai (La Danseuse et le Chevalier: the Geisha and the Warrior) was presented 218 times in total at Le Théâtre de Fuller run by the American dancer, Loie Fuller (Kawakami 1901, 55). Sadayakko appeared as a woman in an elaborate kimono and also as a male-impersonator in the shirabyōshi tradition and was a hit with the literati and artists in the Parisian media. Their success seems to be owing in large part to Fuller’s management ability. Fuller herself danced using their Japanese setting as a backdrop and created a revue-like exotic stage, producing a spectacle with significant visual impact supported by the newly invented scientific device of coloured lighting (Inoue 2017, 64–85). Five years after Sada’s success, Fuller sponsored another ex-geisha actress, Hanako

340     Makiko Yamanashi

(1868–1945), who also became a sensation in Europe and the model for 53 works by Auguste Rodin (Negishi 2017, 90–118), although she never performed to acclaim in Japan. What this suggests is the development of Japanese-ness as an exotic commodity in Europe—performance being yet another thing which sold well and satisfied the curiosity of the Western audience in the contemporary craze for all things Japanese. Commercial enterprises such as Fuller’s theatre could have sold whatever was in demand, however stereotypical, cliché-ridden and debased their fabrication of Japanese-ness was. Paradoxically what was in demand in Japan in the new theatrical market was the fabrication of the West represented by translated dramas called akagemono—literally meaning Japanese performers playing red-haired (i.e. Western) characters. On their return to Japan, Kawamaki and Sadayakko started their own company, Kawakami Theatre, which regularly performed foreign dramas in Japanese translation. These were in reality more honangeki (adapted works) than honyakugeki (translated works). But however imitative, parodic or kitsch these adaptations of foreign dramas might have been, their capacity for entertaining the Japanese public in new ways should not be underestimated. The contrasting approaches of adaptation and faithful translation have been much discussed in Japanese theatre most notably by the twentieth-century playwright Kishida Kunio (1934). In Japan where learning by imitation is a long tradition in most performing arts practice, presenting things modelled on, or inspired by, anything Western was taken as a positive approach. This was ‘modern’ and radiated an enlightening or romanticising aura superior to the domestic and the traditional. When presenting adaptations of Western dramas, however, female parts could not be acted by men impersonating women, but required the physical presence of real women, actresses. In 1908, Sadayakko founded the Teikoku Joyū Yōseijo (the Imperial Actress Training Institute): as Japan’s first official institution for the training of actresses, it made a significant contribution to the history of women acting on stage in Japan. This school enabled ordinary women other than apprentice geisha to begin a career of professional performance. However, this new undertaking met with harsh criticism and warnings that it would create women who would prove socially harmful (Toita 1973, 55). The negative public reaction shows how difficult it still was for a woman to become an actress. Despite its infamous reputation, the school was eventually annexed as an adjunct to the Imperial Theatre which opened in 1911, intending to produce ‘proper actresses’. In addition, in 1924 Sadayakko set up Kawakami Jidōgekidan (the Kawakami Children’s Theatre) in order to train children; this operated until 1932.

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     341

One of the first apprentices at Sadayakko’s school was Mori Ritsuko (1890–1961). Mori graduated with high marks from Atomi Girls’ High School, yet chose to become a joyū. However, because of this career choice, her name was deleted from the school’s register of alumni and her younger brother committed suicide (Ikeuchi 2008, 24–25). On the other hand, her father, a renowned lawyer and politician, organised a grand party to celebrate his daughter’s stage debut and she survived despite the severe prejudice against actresses (Mori 1930, 17–19, 277–80). Becoming an actress meant becoming a ‘new woman’ and was thus a scandalous event in any case. The leading feminist campaigner for women’s liberation, Yosano Akiko (1878–1942), sympathised with actresses as a new category of working women emerging within society and advocated the view that they should be regarded as brave, passionate, innocent women with the courage to endure becoming targets of criticism in their attempts to contribute to a new art form, at a time when the majority of Japanese women were still content to lead conventional lives, desiring nothing more than to marry men of high status (Yosano 1915). Matsui Sumako (1886–1919) was another key figure in the emergence of Japanese women on stage. She was a leading actress at the Bungeiza Theatre, which was led by Shimamura Hōgetsu (1871–1918): Shimamura was one of the leaders of a group involved in furthering theatrical reform and also a dramatist, novelist and poet. In 1906, together with Tsubouchi Shōyō of Waseda University, Shimamura formed Bungei Kyōkai—the association to reform Japanese literature, fine art and theatre by adopting European standards of realistic acting (Nakano 2006). Shingeki, literally meaning new drama, would mainly stage foreign plays in Japanese translation. In these translated Western plays, female characters were naturally expected to be acted by female performers. Two key roles made Matsui Sumako famous: Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, both staged in 1911. Ironically, Matsui who played iconic ‘new women’ like Nora (a woman who stops being doll-like and develops into a strong, independent human-being) led a personal life as scandalous as the characters she played and conducted a love affair with Shimamura, despite the fact that he had a wife and children. Both Matsui and Shimamura were expelled from Tsubouchi’s art circle, and in 1913 they established another independent organisation, the Geijtustuza. In 1914, Matsui played Kachusha in Tolstoy’s Resurrection for this new company. The theme song The Song of Kachusha became a national hit (Shimizu 1998, 14). However, Shimamura died unexpectedly of Spanish flu in 1918, and Matsui committed suicide two years later. It can be argued that these times were still hard

342     Makiko Yamanashi

for women: just as Sadayakko was dependent on Kawakami’s management, Matsui could not sustain her status as an actress without a man’s support. Like Sadayakko and Hanako, Miura Tamaki (1884–1946) is yet another example of a prominent woman who achieved success on stage abroad. Despite her talent and her own wishes, Miura’s parents only allowed her to enter the Tokyo Music School on condition that she married the man of her father’s choice—a military doctor. Miura accepted this arranged marriage at the age of seventeen and went on to study singing. At the school’s festival of 1903 mentioned above, Miura performed in Gluck’s Orfeo where her singing of Eurydice established her reputation as a soprano (Marukawa 1985, 155). She graduated with distinction and was immediately appointed as a junior professor of the Tokyo Music School. However, her promising future was destroyed by the scandal of her divorce when she would not accompany her husband to the north of Japan for his work but chose music and to remain in Tokyo. Miura created further scandal by remarrying an assistant professor of medicine at Tokyo University. Miura was forced to resign from her teaching position in 1909 so as not to damage the school’s reputation. Yet another scandal arose when she became a leading singer affiliated to the brand new Imperial Theatre in 1911. The exceptionally high salary she was awarded was jealously criticised by her female colleagues and gave rise to comment in the press (Marukawa 1985, 156). Defeated by one scandal after another, Miura decided to leave Japan in search of greater freedom to live and work as a singer. In 1914, she and her husband headed for Germany to seek tuition from the renowned singer, Lilli Lehmann (1848–1929). Fatefully, the outbreak of World War I made them change their destination to London. This turned out to be a fortunate accident for Miura because she passed an audition for a charity concert at the Royal Albert Hall and made her European debut there with great success. She was then invited to sing the role of Butterfly or Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Miura put everything she could into the part, earning the ultimate accolade from Puccini himself who called her ‘my favourite Butterfly’, able to bring to life an authentic representation of a Japanese woman (Yoshimoto 1947, 19–23). Despite the early staging of Madame Butterfly at the Imperial Theatre in 1914 (coincidentally just after Miura’s departure), followed by an adaptation in the Asakusa Opera style, the reception of Puccini’s opera in Japan was initially unfavourable due to the humiliating orientalist depiction of Japanese culture and the pathetic storyline given to the Japanese geisha compared to the portrayal of Western culture and characters as assertive, dominant and successful (Mori 2017, 130–35). It has been suggested that this reception might well have been a response to an increasingly militant political regime

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     343

(Mori 2017, 135). Nevertheless, when Miura returned to Japan as the country’s first prima donna to sing the role of Butterfly, having performed the role for two thousand performances before deciding to retire from the international stage in 1936, she was celebrated as an icon of Japanese cultural triumph. In the same year, Miura presented her Madame Butterfly at the prestigious Kabuki Theatre and a recording was broadcast on radio that reached people right across the country, familiarising them with the opera’s melodies (Satō 2015, 26). In Miura’s interpretation, the lyrics indicating Butterfly’s deep humiliation were deleted or softened, and the pride and dignity of the heroine at the finale, culminating in her suicide, were interpreted by the contemporary Japanese media as highlighting devoted Japanese womanhood fallen victim to Western arrogance and domination (Mori 2017, 135) or criticised outright as a national disgrace (Marukawa 1985, 160). In any case, Puccini’s opera, along with all other foreign theatrical works, was shortly banned due to the military hostilities which led to the Pacific War. Soon after the end of the war in 1946, Miura at the age of 61 was the first to hold a solo recital at Hibiya Concert Hall where she sang Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey ). Miura was a woman of undoubted courage and fortitude which she displayed throughout her long, eventful life. She shone on the international stage, bridging the cultural divide between Japan and the West and surviving the period of cultural isolation during World War II through her passion for music. Last but by no means least amongst these ground-breaking figures is Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu (1886–1944). When the family’s business went bankrupt, her parents sold her as a young girl to work for the magic troupe, Tenichi-ichiza, led by Japan’s pioneering magician Shōkyokusai Tenichi. Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu (who took her master’s name) made her stage debut at the age of twelve, in 1897, and gradually developed her talents until she became known as the queen of magic—appropriately enough, given her stage name Tenkatsu, meaning ‘heavenly victory’. Tenkatsu was a cultural idol as a modern female performer and every bit as well-known at that time as Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako. As with Sadayakko, Tenkatsu’s most significant formative period took place outside Japan. From 1901 to 1905, the eight members of Tenichi’s troupe toured abroad, starting in America and travelling to England, Germany and France, before finally returning to America again. Perhaps the highpoint of the tour for Tenkatsu was her appearance at the popular revue theatre, the Casino de Paris. The fact that the first performance on their return was staged in the prestigious Kabuki Theatre testifies to her stardom. Soon after her master Tenichi’s retirement in 1911, Tenkatsu became the leader of her own troupe, Tenkatsu-ichiza.

344     Makiko Yamanashi

Her troupe achieved phenomenal success, since it included a large number of attractive girls dancing and singing to enhance the magic show. The fast-moving production was presented like a colourful revue. Based on her own experience abroad in variety theatre, Tenkatsu was skilled in adopting Western trends and styles. Tenkatsu also danced in glamorous and revealing costumes, displaying her body to full advantage. Her butterfly dance in a transparent floating robe that reflected the brilliant light projected onto it might well have reminded her audience of the famous ‘serpentine dance’ of Loie Fuller (see Fig. 15.1). Although she was not an actress but a magician and hence regarded as coming from an inferior cultural category, Tenkatsu did not hesitate to try to perform plays such as Shakespeare’s Tempest and Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

Fig. 15.1  Postcard of Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu (1886–1944), actress, magician and founder of her own troupe, undated (©Postcard Museum, Japan)

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     345

In 1915, the same year in which both Sadayakko and Matsui Sumako performed Salome to critical acclaim, Tenkatsu attempted the same role under the supervision of Osanai Kaoru, one of the leaders of the modern theatre movement at that time. Osanai was not satisfied with the performances of Sadayakko and Matsui due to their modest approach to the role and expected Tenkatsu to expose more of her body (Minami 1985, 200–1). Judging from the photographs of the production, Tenkatsu was certainly a most visually attractive Salome, but her vocal and acting skills could not compete with the two fully trained actresses. However, although her reputation as a magician could not easily compete with that of an actress, working in her own specialist field had advantages for her, since magic gave her greater freedom to create her own productions and attract a wider audience. Moreover, the physical advantage of possessing very light-coloured skin gave her what was commonly seen as a relatively more Westernised glamour. This was not only attractive to the male gaze. Tenkatsu’s impact as a strong-willed and beautiful female performer was sufficiently powerful that her picture was frequently used on the commercial labels of cosmetic products, sweets and alcoholic drinks (Kawazoe 2014, 170–71). These three types of product clearly reveal the target audience for their sales and prove that her fans were drawn from a wide social range and included women, children and men. In examining the careers of these pioneering female performers, it is noteworthy that those who toured in America and Europe achieved domestic success on their return to Japan. This is because the Western assessment of an actress had a positive impact in Japan where actresses were still subjected to social prejudice and neglect. Westernisation and modernisation within Japan were two sides of one coin. Thus, those who established their reputation abroad could use it to their advantage in promoting their careers when they came back to Japan. Actresses’ Kichōkōen (gala productions to commemorate their return home from abroad) stirred national pride; recognition abroad gave extra weight to their respectable status as female performers. All of these women were regarded as new models of professional woman, breaking down the conventions of Japanese womanhood and transforming the status of the Japanese female performer from that of geisha to actress, singer or magician. This served to broaden the number of spheres in which women could work. At a time when success for women was seen as achieving a good marriage, those women who chose to become actresses seem to have had a different dream—they wanted to be more independent and true to themselves, their talent and their ambition. It required strenuous effort and extraordinary drive for a woman to remain strong enough not to lose her way or sense of identity despite persistent scandals and personal attacks.

346     Makiko Yamanashi

Indeed, actresses were unable to avoid scandal and gossip, which often brought them greater fame and celebrity than the critical acclaim garnered by their performance skills. This was particularly the case at this time before the advent of visual broadcast media, when only a limited number of people could go to the theatre and actually see their performances and so most only got to know the women by reputation, whether good or bad, through newspapers and magazines. Many female performers dropped out of public life due to constant criticism by the media and ended up seeking security in conventional lives as housewives, but there were a few fortunate, strongwilled women who resisted and built up successful careers for themselves as actresses and performers. All in all, they contributed to creating wider horizons and greater possibilities for the female performers coming after them as attitudes slowly changed towards women in Japanese society.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an extensive although by no means completely comprehensive overview of the Japanese women who performed on stage at a period of transition between tradition and modernity. My focus has been on the female performers from the Meiji period of the late nineteenth century to the early Shōwa period of the 1930s. It was a crucial transition period for Japanese women performing in public, as they moved from the conventional role of a geisha to the modern profession of joyū or actress. The emergence of Japanese women on stage corresponded closely to the emergence of women in Japanese society generally. The first section of my chapter looked at the importance of increased education for girls in the early period. It was no coincidence that school festivals provided female students with an initial opportunity to appear on stage and develop an interest in theatre which stayed with them, whether as potential audience members or performers. In fact, female performers in Japan have largely been supported by female audiences who became powerful consumers; when Japanese women no longer remained secluded at home but came into town to enjoy leisure activities, theatre-going became a popular option. In a changing society in which Japanese women gradually began to study and work in the public sphere, theatre was one of the realms which accommodated women and gave them an attractive opportunity to display their talents and personal presence to the public. Those modern theatrical genres catering for female performers starting with the transformed traditional male genres of Onna Kabuki, Onna

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     347

Kengeki and Musume-gidayū were revitalised by the Western-influenced modern Asakusa Opera and Revue. It is also significant that at the very time when the number of women on stage were increasing, so were the numbers of women in the audience. The Takarazuka and Shōchiku revues in particular built upon institutions that their female audiences grew to identify with and adore. The fact that most of the fans who support and attend the ongoing revue theatre of Takarazuka today are women proves how appealing and inspiring the girls performing on stage have been to female audiences. Analysis of female audiences would be immensely informative here but would require a further article on the reception of the performed female body, involving an in-depth discussion of gender-related issues in terms of both historical and social content. What was remarkable in Japanese theatre history was that these all-female theatre genres sprang up and gained popularity by breaking down the long-established norm of a male-dominated theatre industry. The thoughts and feelings of the anonymous masses who were reacting to these new genres, to female performers and to the changing position of women are hard to grasp fully, but their collective memory and the few remaining documents should not be dismissed as unimportant since the rise and fall of these genres were undoubtedly a vital force for the modernisation of Japanese theatre. The second section focused on individual performers in order to demonstrate the process by which the joyū as a professional performer attained public recognition in Japan. The pioneering Japanese actresses discussed in this article are: Sadayakko, Mori Ritsuko, Hanako, Matsui Sumako, Miura Tamaki and Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu. They led very different lives and survived many hardships in their passionate desire to find a way to perform on stage. They were sometimes brought down by gossip and political ideology, but they proved themselves unyielding and determined to establish their status as women performers. They were inspired by Western predecessors, willing to learn from Western culture and adopt foreign performing techniques in order to establish a position for women in the realm of Japanese theatre. The public accreditation of women performing on stage as joyū was closely related to their liberation from the long-established feudal patriarchy and to the rise in their social status. The relationship between women and modernity in Japan can be observed in Japanese women at the threshold of performing the conventional and the progressive. Needless to say, ‘modernisation’ did not simply mean belief in Western ‘progress’ or ‘civilisation’, nor merely imitating Western standards. As far as these female performers were concerned, they seem to have been seriously and consciously searching for their own identity. Their identity as

348     Makiko Yamanashi

actresses meant a new identity for Japanese womanhood, fighting against surviving feudal institutions. In order to achieve this, adopting an alternative Western style was a positive means to attract people with something different, new and surprising. It can be said that women were better fitted for this role because their presence on stage was itself a stimulating new spectacle. The Japanese actress became a symbol of modernity which had considerable impact not only on the theatrical world, but also on Japanese society in general. There were intellectual women who fought theoretical and ideological battles for women’s independence and human rights, but we should not forget these women on stage, including a number of anonymous, now forgotten performers, who fought in practice. If the former stand for the intellectual liberation of women, the latter stand for the physical liberation of women. Therefore, the theatre industry resoundingly reflects the rising force of Japanese women in attaining public recognition. Over the last century, the role of the joyū has developed a highly positive image as a successful career choice for women in Japan. There are now just as many actresses as actors. While the all-male Kabuki and all-female Takarazuka still continue as major single-sex theatre companies, in the majority of Japanese theatrical productions today it is taken for granted that both male and female performers will appear on stage, and it would never occur to the audience that actresses are inferior to actors. However, this present favourable situation for actresses was made possible only by the painstaking endeavours of their predecessors. It is the writer’s hope that this chapter has been able to illuminate the work of those women on stage at the dawn of the modern era. From the Meiji to early Shōwa via the Taishō periods, the rise of female performers brought Japanese theatre not only a dramatic transformation, but also a leap forward to offer ever wider performative possibilities.

Bibliography Note: All translations from the Japanese are by the author, unless otherwise specified. Anderson, Joseph L. 2011. Enter a Samurai: Kawakami Otojirō and Japanese Theatre in the West. Tucson: Wheatmark. Downer, Lesley. 2003. Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Bewitched the West. New York: Gotham. Hamaguchi, Kuniko. 2015. ‘Takarazuka-kageki no Nihonbuyō to sono Shūhen [Japanese Dance and Its Peripheral in Takarazuka Revue ]’. In Nihon Engeki no

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     349

Kioku to Bunka 3: Sutēji Shō no Jidai [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 3: The Age of Stage Show ], edited by Masaaki Nakano, 61–88. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Hashizume, Setsuya. 2005. Modan Shinsaikyō Corekushon - Metoroporis no jidai to kioku [Modern Shinsaikyō Collection: The Age and Memory of the Metropolis ]. Tokyo: Kokushokankōkai. Higashi, Harumi. 2017. ‘Shoki no Opera Taiken [Early Opera Experience]’. In Opera/Ongakugeki Kenkyū Handobukku [Opera/Music Theatre Research Handbook ], edited by Takashi Marumoto, 346–50. Tokyo: Aetes Publishing. Honda, Masuko. 1990. Jogakusei no Keifu [The Origins of Female Students ]. Tokyo: Seido-sha. Hosokawa, Shūhei, ed. 2005. Korekushon Modan Toshibunka 14: Revue [Collection Modern Urban Culture 14: Revue ]. Tokyo: Yumanishobo. Ikeuchi, Haruko. 2008. Joyū no Tanjō to Shūen: Pafōmansu to Gendā [The Birth and the End of Actress: Performance and Gender ]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Inoue, Satsuki. 2017. ‘1900-nen Pari-banpaku no Kawakami Otojiō・Sadayakko [Kawakami Otojiō・Sadayakko at the Paris 1900 Exposition]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 5: Engeki no Japonizumu [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 5: Japonism in the Theatre ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 63–88. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Kamiyama, Akira, ed. 2014a. Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 1: Wasurerareta Engeki [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 1: Forgotten Theatres ]. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Kamiyama, Akira. 2014b. ‘Setsugeki・Kengeki・Onna Kengeki・Modanizumu no nagare ni miru [Setsugeki・ Kengeki・Onna Kengeki Seen in the Current of Modernism]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 1: Wasurerareta Engeki [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 1: Forgotten Theatres ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 241–76. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Kamiyama, Akira. 2015. ‘Kokusai Gekijō to Nichigeki: Shōwa no Grando Rebyū [The International Theatre and the Nichigeki: The Grand Revues of the Shōwa Era]’. In Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 3: Sutēji Shō no Jidai [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 3: The Age of Stage Show ], edited by Masaaki Nakano, 241–78. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Kamiyama, Akira, ed. 2017. Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 5: Engeki no Japonizumu [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 5: Japonism in the Theatre ]. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Kawakami, Otojiro. 1901. Kawakami Otojirō O-bei Manyūki [Mr. Kawakami’s Travels Round the World ]. Osaka: Kanaobunendō. Kawazoe, Hiroshi. 2014. ‘Tenshō toiu Spekutakuru [The Spectacle Called Tenshō]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 1: Wasurerareta Engeki [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 1: Forgotten Theatres ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 153–74. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Kishida, Kunio. 1934. ‘Honyakugeki to Honangeki [Translational Drama and Adaptational Drama]’. Gekisaku 3, no. 7. Tokyo: Hakusui-sha, July 1934.

350     Makiko Yamanashi

Accessed February 13, 2018. http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/001154/files/44508_ 36701.html. Kokuritsu, Gekijō [National Theatre], ed. 2009. ‘Nihon no Dentōgeinōkōza Buyō・Engeki [Japanese Traditional Theatre Seminar Dance・Drama]’, 198–205. Tokyo: Kokuritsu Gekijō. Kurahashi, Shigeki, and Norihiko Tsuji. 2005. Shōjo Kageki no Kōbō [The Rise and Fall of Girls’ Opera ]. Tokyo: Seikyū-sha. Marukawa, Kayoko. 1985. ‘Sekaino Primadonna Ochōfujin Miura Tamaki [The Primadonna of the World Madame Butterfly, Miura Tamaki]’. In Betsusatsu Rekishi Dokuhon Denki Shirīzu 15 - Meiji Taishō wo Ikita Jūgonin no Onnatachi [Supplementary History Reader Biography Series 15—Fifteen Women Who Lived in the Meiji and the Taishō Periods ], edited by Chihaya Takahashi, 154–60. Tokyo: Shinjinbutsuōrai-sha. Marumoto, Takashi, et al., eds. 2017. Opera Ongakugeki Kenkyū Handobukku [The Research Handbook for Opera and Music Theatre ]. Tokyo: Artes. Minami, Hiroshi. 1985. ‘Umi wo Watatta Bibō no Kijyutsushi: Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu [The Beautiful Magician Who Went Overseas: Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu)]’. In Betsusatsu Rekishi Dokuhon Denki Shirīzu 15 - Meiji Taishō wo Ikita Jūgonin no Onnatachi [Supplementary History Reader Biography Series 15— Fifteen Women Who Lived in the Meiji and the Taishō Periods ], edited by Chihaya Takahashi, 196–202. Tokyo: Shinjinbutsuōrai-sha. Mizuno, Yūko. 1998. Shirarezaru Geinōshi: Musume Gidayū Sukyandaru to Bunka no Aida [Unknown Theatre History: Musume Gidayū Between Scandals and Culture ]. Tokyo: Chūōkōron-sha. Mizunoe, Takiko, and Kazue Abe. 1992. Minna Yū-chan ga Sukidatta - Tākī to Yūjirō to Kantoku-tachi [Everyone liked Yū-chan—Tākī and Yūjirō and Directors ]. Tokyo: Bunen-sha. Mori, Hideo. 1992. Yume Maboroshi Onna Kengeki [Dream, Fantasy, Women’s Sword Drama ]. Tokyo: Chikuma-shobō. Mori, Keiko. 2017. ‘Opera no Japonizumu: Mikado to Chōchō-fujin wo reini [Japonism in Opera: The Mikado and Madame Butterfly as Case Studies]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 5: Engeki no Japonizumu [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 5: Japonism in the Theatre ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 119–42. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Mori, Ritsuko. 1930. Joyū-seikatsu Nijūnen [Twenty Years of Actresses’ Lives ]. Tokyo: Jitsugyo-no-nihon-sha. Nakano, Masaaki, ed. 2006. Bungei-kyōkai Hyakunen ten [The Exhibition of One Hundred Years of Bungei-kyōkai ]. Tokyo: Waseda University Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum. Nakano, Masaaki. 2011. Mūran Rūju Shinjuku-za: Keiengeki no Shōwa-shōshi [Shinjuku Moulin Rouge: A Concise History of Shōwa Light Comedy ]. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha.

15  Japanese Women on Stage: From Tradition to Modernity     351

Nakano, Masaaki, ed. 2015. Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 3: Sutēji Shō no Jidai [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 3: The Age of Stage Show ]. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Nakano, Masaaki. 2017. ‘Asakusa Opera’. In Opera Ongakugeki Kenkyū Handobukku [The Research Handbook for Opera and Music Theatre ], edited by Takashi Maramuto et al., 356–59. Tokyo: Artes. Nakayama, Chinatsu. 1993. Tākī - Mizunoe Takiko den [Tākī—The Story of Mizunoe Takiko ]. Tokyo: Shinchō-sha. Negishi, Takako. 2017. ‘Hanako no Jidai [The Age of Hanako]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 5: Engeki no Japonizumu [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 5: Japonism in the Theatre ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 89–118. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Satō, Suguru, 2015. ‘Hōsōkageki no kōryū to Bōkaru Fea no kessei [The Rise of Opera Broadcasting and the Formation of “Vocal Fair”]’. Ōbun Ronsō 88: 25–51. Tokyo: Nihon University. Senzoku, Nobuyuki. 2004. ‘Une Super Star de la Belle Époque: Autour de Kawakami Sadayakko’. In Pari 1900: Beru Epokku no Kagayaki [Paris 1900: The Radiance of the Belle Epoch ], edited by Gilles Chazal and Nobuyuki Senzoku. Tokyo: RKB Mainichi. Shibata, Eri. 2014. ‘Odoru Geiko tachi - Dansu Kanpanī Kawai Dansu [Dancing Geiko Girls—Kawai Dance Company]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 1: Wasurerareta Engeki [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 1: Forgotten Theatres ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 175–201. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Shimizu, Hideo. 1998. Nijuseiki Nippon no uta: Omoideno Senzen/Senchū Kayōdaisenshū [The Japanese Songs of the 20th Century: A Major Collection of Pre-war and Wartime Songs ]. Tokyo: Nippon Columbia Co. Ltd. CD no: GES-31022-31033. Soda, Hidehiko. 1989. Watashiga Karumen: Madamu Tokuko no Asakusa Opera [I am Carmen—Madame Tokuko’s Asakusa Opera ]. Tokyo: Shōbun-sha. Sugiyama, Chizuru. 2015. ‘Beteran vs Shōjo: 1920-nendai Asakusa toiu butai de kagayaita joseitachi [Veterans vs Girls: The Women Who Shone on the Stage Called Asakusa in the 1920s]’. In Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 3: Sutēji Shō no Jidai [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 3: The Age of Stage Shows ], edited by Masaaki Nakano, 113–32. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Suzuki, Kunio. 2013. ‘Otokoyaku no Idea (1) - Kasugano Yachiyo [The Idea of the Male-Impersonator (1)—Kasugano Yachiyo]’. Kyōritsu Joshi Daigaku Bungeigakubu kiyō [Kyōritsu Women’s University Literary Faculty Bulletin ] 59: 39–50. Tokyo: Kyōritsu Joshi Daigaku, January 2013. Takahashi, Chihaya, ed. 1985. Betsusatsu Rekishi Dokuhon Denki Shirīzu 15 - Meiji Taishō wo Ikita Jūgonin no Onnatachi [Supplementary History Reader Biography Series 15—Fifteen Women Who Lived in the Meiji and the Taishō Periods ]. Tokyo: Shinjinbutsuōrai-sha. Tanaka, Yūko. 2007. Geisha to Asobi [Geisha and Play ]. Tokyo: Gakushūkenkyū-sha.

352     Makiko Yamanashi

Toita, Yasuji. 1973. Yume wa Pari ka Rondon ka [Whether the Dream Is Paris or London ]. Tokyo: Tōhō Imperial Theatre. Tsuchida, Makiko. 2012. ‘Onna-yakusha to iu Sonzai to sono Rekishiteki Ichizuke: Nakamura Kasen no Geirekiwo Tōshite [The Examination of Onna-yakusha and Its Historical Position Through the Entertainment Career of Nakamura Kasen]’. Tokyo University of Arts Music Department Bulletin 38: 67–116. Tokyo: Tokyo University. Tsuchida, Makiko. 2014. ‘Onna Yakusha to Shōshibai no Yukusue - Kanda Gekijō jidaino Nakamura Kasen [The Fate of Female Performer and Small Theatres— Nakamura Kasen at Kanda Theatre]’. In Kindai Nihon Engeki no Kioku to Bunka 1: Wasurerareta Engeki [Memory and Culture of Japanese Theatre 1: Forgotten Theatres ], edited by Akira Kamiyama, 61–92. Tokyo: Shinwa-sha. Wakita, Haruko. 2001. Joseigeinō no Genryū: Kugutsush・Kusemai・Shirabyō-shi [The Origin of Women’s Performing Arts ]. Tokyo: Kadokawa. Watanabe, Hiroshi. 2003. Nihonbunka Modan Raposodi [Japanese Culture—Modern Rhapsody ]. Tokyo: Shunjū-sha. Yamanashi, Makiko. 2012. A History of the Takarazuka Revue Since 1914: Modernity, Girls’ Culture, Japan Pop. Leiden: Global Oriental/Brill. Yosano, Akiko. 1915. ‘Shūto to Yome ni tsuite [About Mothers-in-Law and Wives]’. In Taiyō, September 1915. Accessed February 13, 2018. http://www. aozora.gr.jp/cards/000885/files/3320_48832.html. Yoshimoto, Akemitsu, ed. 1947. ‘Ochōfujin - Miura Tamaki Jiden [Madame Butterfly—The Autobiography of Miura Tamaki]’. Accessed February 13, 2018. http://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/000788/files/54343_58389.html.

Part V Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century Greece, England, Russia and America

Introduction Chronological organisation of chapters, while making for theoretical simplicity, does not always work perfectly in practice—dramatic performance and individual performers’ lives rarely fit neatly into discrete time periods. Xenia Georgopoulou’s chapter on the ‘women’s age’ of modern Greek theatre starts in the late nineteenth century but continues into the 1940s, chronicling the half-century period in which female acting stars dominated the theatrical scene, between the traditional male-led theatre of previous generations and the later pre-eminence of ‘directors’ theatre’. Georgopoulou’s story is one of professional and political rivalry as well as artistic success. She opens by recounting the lives and careers of two pairs of rival ‘divas’. Evangelia Paraskevopoulou and Aikaterini Veroni started their careers in the 1890s, making their names performing almost identical repertoires (both took Sarah Bernhardt as role model) and supported by competitive and sometimes violently enthusiastic fans. Their purely artistic rivalry gave way to the combined professional and political rivalry of their twentieth-century successors, Marika Kotopouli and Kyveli Adrianou, whose lives were played out against a political context of world wars and social crises which inevitably shaped their professional careers and in which they were unavoidably caught up. Georgopoulou’s account culminates in the political assassination of emergent star Eleni Papadaki, denounced in 1944, probably by her colleagues; her chapter makes a striking contrast to the collaborative attitudes and mutual support of the female performers discussed elsewhere in this part.

354     Part V: Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century Europe, Russia & America

The twentieth century saw a revolution in mass-market entertainment with the arrival of radio, film and later television. At the same time, live entertainment continued to flourish; in Britain, the centuries-old model of companies led by an actor-manager became gradually less important. The new Edwardian musical comedies were immensely popular. Women played increasingly important roles, not only as performers, but as writers, producers, directors and managers. Maggie Gale’s chapter offers a historical overview of this period; she considers the increasing respectability and professionalization of the industry and changing professional practices for women in the first half of the twentieth century in the UK. The theatre offered one area in which women, subject to numerous direct and indirect discriminatory practices in most workplaces, were able to make progress. Gale describes the industry’s increasing democratisation as the newly established professional training courses, which women were frequently instrumental in setting-up, became the normal route of entry into the profession. Acting remained a difficult, precarious profession for the majority, providing only low pay and demanding an almost infinite flexibility in its workforce; however, those who enjoyed success could achieve celebrity and financial security; many extended their theatrical careers by moving into films and the post-war establishment of the Arts Council produced a changing theatrical landscape in which further opportunities opened up in nationally subsidised theatre companies. Rose Whyman and Maria Ignatieva’s chapter explores the lives of women performers in a very different political context. While theatre in the West became increasingly commercialized and competitive, Whyman and Ignatieva examine the lives of women performers in Soviet Russia who pursued careers against a background of revolution and civil war in the 1910s and 1920s, describing the ways in which they then adapted both personally and professionally to life in a Stalinist and post-Stalinist regime in the 1930s–1950s. Whyman and Ignatieva focus on four of the most brilliant, successful and innovative contemporary Russian actresses of the early twentieth century, Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova, who all trained at the Moscow Art Theatre under Konstantin Stanislavsky and his ideologically-approved ‘System’ of training performers for socialist realist art. The chapter details the tensions, difficulties, disagreements and compromises they faced and what it meant for each of them to work within a system in which their primary relationship and personal allegiance were to the state. Despite this, all four went on to enjoy successful careers as performers, teachers and directors.

Part V: Early to Mid-Twentieth-Century Europe, Russia & America     355

In their struggles, Birman, Giatsintova, Tarasova and Pyzhova had to combat the restrictions of working within a prescriptive, repressive Soviet regime and the general prejudice against women. The five pioneering black performers Cheryl Black focuses on, in her chapter on the Harlem Renaissance, were similarly embattled on the other side of the Atlantic, fighting against racism and sexism in the United States in the early twentieth century. Progressive groups were emerging in America at this time, intent on securing rights and privileges for all US citizens, regardless of class, gender or race. The expressive arts offered limited opportunities to African Americans—white managements were reluctant to recognise the talents of black performers, who were expected to fit into the demeaning stereotyped roles so often prescribed by contemporary white culture. Despite this, a significant number were able to build successful careers and theatre was a popular, highly visible site that offered a potentially powerful weapon for positive social change. Anita Bush, Abbie Mitchell, Rose McClendon, Mercedes Gilbert and Venzella Jones were all talented African Americans of the so-called Harlem Renaissance/New Negro era, who refused to accept societal limitations and became successful performers and theatrical entrepreneurs in order to create work and opportunities that enabled African-American artists to exercise the full range of their talents across the variety of venues and genres. Black (below, 426) makes the point that ‘an actress in this era was also an activist—just seeking a professional career and financial independence was a political and entrepreneurial act that took courage, commitment and initiative’. They took different routes, from vaudeville and musical theatre to scripting their own shows, to achieve success performing, directing, teaching and writing in the ‘legitimate’ theatre, on Broadway, in radio and later in films. All achieved professional recognition and success through hard work and determination; all were committed to creating better working conditions and greater opportunities for African-American performers and to advancing the status of their community, producing a vision of society that a truly United States might achieve.

16 Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage: Personal and Political Rivalries from Paraskevopoulou and Veroni to Kotopouli, Kyveli and Papadaki Xenia Georgopoulou

The roots of the Western theatrical tradition in ancient Greece are well established; the plays of this period are still held in high esteem and performed regularly all around the world. Modern Greek theatre is less familiar. The first modern Greek plays were published before the Greek revolution of 1821, in Vienna and elsewhere. As far as the stage is concerned, modern Greek professional theatre emerged in the 1860s, well after the establishment of the Greek State in 1827. As this chapter demonstrates, the emergence of celebrity actresses, apart from their personal rivalries, often involved politics, a significant factor in modern Greek theatre which developed in the shadow of two world wars and against a background of civil political turmoil. In current Greek theatre the role of the director is paramount, but this was not always the case. Modern Greek theatre was dominated for well over a century by the larger-than-life figures of its star actors and actresses. At the dawn of the Greek professional theatre, the function of the director was fulfilled by the leading actor, or even by the playwright himself, as was probably the case with Dimitrios Vernardakis (Altouva 2014, 258). Even when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the state-funded Royal Theatre and

Xenia Georgopoulou (*)  Department of Theatre Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_16

357

358     Xenia Georgopoulou

private theatre company Nea Skini (literally ‘New Stage’), both established in 1901, put new emphasis on the director (Delipetrou 2003, 6; Gouli 2003b, 8), the situation did not change. Despite the efforts of directors Thomas Oikonomou at the Royal Theatre and Constantinos Christomanos at Nea Skini to create ensemble productions including a number of wellknown actors of the time (Freris 1996, 31), many of the productions continued to be based on individual stars such as Marika Kotopouli and Kyveli Adrianou. It was not until much later, in the mid-1940s, when Karolos Koun, the director and founder of Theatro Technis (literally ‘Art Theatre’), successfully promoted productions based on group work (Mavromoustakos 2005, 38), that the domination of star names began to wane. Until then, most theatre companies were still based on the larger-than-life figures of leading actors and actresses. The first Greek troupe owners were male. Despite the existence of famous actresses such as Pipina Vonassera within these companies, professional rivalries at the beginning of modern Greek professional theatre mainly concerned male stars such as Dionysios Tavoularis and Nikolaos Lekatsas. Soon, however, rivalry in the Greek theatre became a female issue. Each generation had its own rival ‘divas’: Evangelia Paraskevopoulou and Aikaterini Veroni (who emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century) were replaced by Marika Kotopouli and Kyveli Adrianou (from the beginning of the twentieth century), and a latent rivalry has been indicated later on (in the 1930s) between the younger actresses Eleni Papadaki and Katina Paxinou, who were involved in various intrigues at the National Theatre. In the twentieth century, actors became involved in politics, and so did the female stars of the time. Some of the latter even developed personal relationships with politicians; on the whole, however, the significant historical events of the century often made actors express themselves politically, at times in violent ways. This essay sets out to explore the theatrical rivalry between Greek theatre’s first pair of female stars, Paraskevopoulou and Veroni; the political involvement of their successors, Kotopouli and Kyveli; and finally, the case of Papadaki, in which her good relationship with the German regime and her colleagues’ hostility appear to have led to her subsequent political assassination. This chapter on the development of modern Greek theatre and the role played by its leading actresses seeks to share with English-speaking readers a part of Greek theatre history that is known to Greek readers, but has received little exposure in the wider world.

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     359

Evangelia Paraskevopoulou and Aikaterini Veroni: Artistic Rivals In the 1880s, the first Greek celebrity actresses emerged: Evangelia Paraskevopoulou (1865–1939) and Aikaterini Veroni (1867–1955). Theatre historian Giannis Sideris (1990, 187) argues that this was the first time that women were regarded as the star performers in a theatrical production. Moreover, the two actresses acquired additional fame due to their personal rivalry, which spurred a similarly polarized response in the Greek audience (Freris 1996, 31). Evangelia Paraskevopoulou was an outstanding dramatic actress, one of the larger-than-life stars of Greek theatre. She started her career in Constantinople, capital of the Ottoman Empire, in 1876, and worked with a number of theatre troupes of the time. In 1883, she also charmed the Athenian audience and was soon established as one of Greece’s leading actresses. In 1892, she was joint company manager with actor Dimitrios Kotopoulis at the Paradissos (literally ‘Paradise’) theatre, where she acted in a variety of plays. She performed in theatres all over Greece, as well as in Constantinople, in a repertoire which ranged from ancient Greek drama to the work of contemporary Greek playwrights, such as Dimitrios Vernardakis, and from Shakespeare to Dumas. She was last seen on stage in 1932 (Exarchos 1995, 58–60). Paraskevopoulou copied Sarah Bernhardt’s repertoire (Puchner 1999, 105), aspiring to be ‘the Sarah Bernhardt of the East’ (Chatzipandazis 2014, 242); indeed, Theodoros Vellianitis explicitly compared her to the French star (Puchner 2004, 414–15). In March 1888, she was already performing Marguerite Gautier (the leading part of La dame aux camélias by Alexandre Dumas the Younger) in Athens, following Bernhardt’s performance in Constantinople (Altouva 2014, 249), and in 1900, she too, like Bernhardt, took on the male role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Yanni 2005, 213). Aikaterini Veroni was born in Constantinople of theatre-loving parents, and four of her siblings also became theatre performers (Chatzipandazis 2014, 241). She first appeared on the stage in 1883 as Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Nikolaos Lekatsas, who also gave her the parts of Jessica in The Merchant of Venice and Desdemona in Othello. Two years later, in 1885, she appeared in Athens, and very soon became a leading actress, forming her own company, Ellinikos Dramatikos Thiassos Athinon (literally ‘Hellenic Dramatic Company of Athens’), like several leading actors of the time. Veroni performed all over Greece as well as in Constantinople, Smyrna and elsewhere,

360     Xenia Georgopoulou

both with her own company and as a member of other companies. Her ­repertoire ranged from Shakespearean tragedies to French boulevard theatre, and from Ibsen to contemporary Greek playwrights. She also collaborated with the Royal Theatre (Sarafis 1953, 11–12). Her final appearance on stage was in 1934 (for a concise biography of Veroni, see Exarchos 1995, 89–91). Like Paraskevopoulou, Veroni chose plays that had been presented by Sarah Bernhardt in Constantinople in 1888 (Puchner 1999, 105), such as Adrienne Lecouvreur, by Ernest Legouvé and Eugène Scribe, and La dame aux camélias, by Alexandre Dumas the Younger (Altouva 2014, 249). Later on, she was characterized by Le Figaro as ‘the Greek Sarah Bernhardt’ (Sarafis 1953, 11). Veroni often chose the same plays as Paraskevopoulou, feeding an artistic rivalry that soon transferred to the audience and divided the spectators into two artistic ‘parties’ (Chatzipandazis 2014, 265), the ‘Paraskevopoulians’ and the ‘Veronians’ (Exarchos 1995, 59; Sarafis 1953, 9–11). Rivalry between the fans of Paraskevopoulou and Veroni had already begun before Veroni’s arrival in Athens (Altouva 2014, 253, 261). Alexia Altouva argues that Paraskevopoulou’s presence, which monopolized the Greek stage, created the need for an alternative female presence; moreover, the reviews of Veroni’s performance in Patras raised an eagerness among the Athenian theatregoers to meet the new female star, and prepared the way for the antagonism that ensued (Altouva 2014, 251, 254). Veroni’s first appearance on the Athenian stage was with Adrienne Lecouvreur on 10 October 1892. The following day the play was performed by both Veroni and Paraskevopoulou, thus producing their first direct confrontation on the Athenian stage (Altouva 2014, 255; Sarafis 1953, 8). Neither the Athenian audiences nor the reviewers took definite sides on this first confrontation. However, a few days later, after Veroni’s second performance of Merope by Dimitrios Vernardakis, the polarization between the fans of the two leading ladies grew greater and their rivalry also became evident in the press (Altouva 2014, 256–57). The part of Marguerite Gautier, already being played by Paraskevopoulou, became a challenge for Veroni, and yet another basis of comparison between the two actresses (Altouva 2014, 250, 260). (Walter Puchner [1999, 107] argues that female antagonism in the Greek theatre led to the staging of more of Dumas’s plays involving female protagonists.) A series of newspaper reviews followed, taking the side of one or the other of the two actresses (Altouva 2014, 249–50). In 1893, when both actresses played the leading part in two different productions of Vernardakis’s Fausta, their fans dragged their carriages through the streets of Athens

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     361

(Chatzipandazis 2014, 265; Exarchos 1995, 90; Sarafis 1953, 11). The two actresses also competed in Shakespearean parts, particularly Ophelia and Desdemona (Yanni 2005, 83). Mara Yanni (2005, 210) argues that this competition between Veroni and Paraskevopoulou, ‘the new shining stars of the Greek theatre’, was a ‘relocation’ of the earlier rivalry between the male stars Dionysios Tavoularis and Nikolaos Lekatsas. The rivalry between Paraskevopoulou and Veroni was widely known in Greece at this time; it also became a dramatic sketch that was part of the political and social satire (epitheorisis ) Open-Air Athens by Elias Kapetanakis and Nikolaos Laskaris, first performed in 1894 (Chatzipandazis 2014, 264). It appears that the antagonism between the two leading ladies was so strong that it overshadowed the political rivalry of the time between Charilaos Trikoupis and Theodoros Deligiannis. It is said that when Trikoupis, the Prime Minister of the time, met Veroni, he thanked her for stopping political strife through her rivalry with Paraskevopoulou (Sarafis 1953, 9; Freris 1996, 31). Although the rivalry between Paraskevopoulou and Veroni cannot be seen as politically based (like that between Kotopouli and Kyveli), it seems that towards the end of the nineteenth century ‘the Greek actors and their affairs were well established among the major issues of local affairs, on which the satirical scene felt obliged to comment’ (Chatzipandazis 2014, 264–65). Furthermore, as the incident with Trikoupis proves, such artistic feuds often served as a useful diversion from the political problems of the time. Veroni gave her audiences a style of acting very different from that of Paraskevopoulou; the latter was more dramatic, but the former more refined (Sideris 1990, 191). Veroni was mostly praised for her recitation, her graceful and natural acting, the lack of exaggeration, her vocal and expressive transitions, and her singing ability, although for some critics she lacked her rival’s pathos (Altouva 2014, 248, 251, 261). Paraskevopoulou, on the other hand, was passionate in her vocal, facial and bodily expressions and was particularly famous for her acting in scenes involving the heroine’s madness or death (Altouva 2014, 449–50). However, she was often charged with exaggeration; moreover, critics detected certain defects in her acting, such as the peculiarity of her voice, or an unnatural, often monotonous style of delivery (Altouva 2014, 451–53). Although Veroni was much praised and became extremely popular, and despite the defects detected by critics in her rival’s acting style, Altouva observes that Paraskevopoulou remained the audience’s favourite (2014, 451–53). The Athenian press remarked that Paraskevopoulou was the first Greek actress who managed to retain the spectators’ interest across

362     Xenia Georgopoulou

three distinct theatrical seasons in a row (from March to October 1892). She attracted people from all social classes: from the Viceroy and princes, who were regulars, to the many ordinary working people in her audience, as well as people who had never previously shown any interest in theatre; she inspired a series of reviews, articles, comments and discussions; she presented a whole world of female roles; she inspired younger actresses; and she gave hope for a renaissance of the Greek stage (Altouva 2014, 451, 453–54). Despite the fact that the two stars proved more compelling than the politics of the period in the hearts of their audiences, it seems that they were not directly involved in politics themselves: their rivalry was purely artistic and personal. In contrast, the second pair of rivals, Marika Kotopouli and Kyveli Adrianou, who succeeded them in the next generation, became directly involved in politics, where they also found themselves supporting opposing parties.

Marika Kotopouli and Kyveli Adrianou: Rivals in Art and Politics When Paraskevopoulou and Veroni were reaching the end of their careers, a second pair of rival actresses appeared on the Greek stage: Marika Kotopouli (1887–1954) and Kyveli Adrianou (1887–1978) (Kaltaki 2003a, 19; Valsas 1994, 488). More specifically, Thodoros Chatzipandazis argues that Kotopouli took the place of Paraskevopoulou and Kyveli that of Veroni (2014, 343). The antagonism between these two new stars of the Greek theatre lasted for almost thirty years (Kaltaki 2003a, 19), and generated a rivalry between their fans too (Kaltaki 2003a, 22; Marchand 2002, 103; Ploritis 2003, 3). Marika Kotopouli first appeared on the stage with her parents, Dimitrios and Eleni, when she was a child (at the age of seven), just like her sisters, Fotini and Chryssoula, with whom she also collaborated when she formed her own company much later, in 1908 (for concise biographies of Marika Kotopouli and her family, see Exarchos 1995, 40–44, 149–53). In fact, her very first appearance on stage was as a 40-day-old baby, in a play which normally used a doll, and from 1897, she regularly appeared in her parents’ productions (Anemogiannis 1994, 11–21; Gouli 2003a, 15; Proussali 2003, 8). In 1902, at the age of fifteen, she became the youngest actress ever hired by the Royal Theatre (Anemogiannis 1994, 22; Gouli 2003a, 15; Kounenaki 2003a, 3). In 1906, she left the Royal Theatre

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     363

(Anemogiannis 1994, 22; Proussali 2003, 8–9) and collaborated with ­various actors until 1908, when she established her own company under the name of Nea Skini (after Christomanos’s by-then-defunct company) initially with the collaboration of Constantinos Sagior (1908–1910), and then with Edmondos Fürst and Telemachos Lepeniotis (1910); Kotopouli’s company was later named after her, from 1911 until the end of her career, a year before her death in 1954 (Anemogiannis, passim; Delipetrou 2003, 6; Kounenaki 2003a, 3; Proussali 2003, 9). In 1929, Kotopouli co-founded an artistic theatre company with journalist and playwright Spyros Melas and a colleague, Mitsos Murat, which they called Elefthera Skini (literally ‘Free Stage’). The company introduced new ideas into theatre practice, such as the necessity for a director, and the importance of set design, music and lighting. Unfortunately, the project failed, being too sophisticated for the audience of the time (Chatzidakis 2003a, 11–14; Delipetrou 2003, 7; Gouli 2003a, 18; Kounenaki 2003a, 3; Proussali 2003, 9). However, Kotopouli continued with other innovations. Kotopouli was influenced in many ways by Thomas Oikonomou at the Royal Theatre, notably in appreciating the contribution of the director, and collaborated with Karolos Koun (Gouli 2003a, 18; Mavromoustakos 2005, 38), Fotos Politis (Gouli 2003a, 18) and Dimitris Rondiris at the National Theatre (Delipetrou 2003, 7; Mavromoustakos 2005, 60–61). She even hired Giannoulis Sarantides, a collaborator of Jacques Copeau, from Paris, to direct her (Proussali 2003, 9–10). She also employed set and costume designers, including the set designer Kleovoulos Klonis and costume designers Giorgos Anemogiannis and Antonis Fokas, and collaborated with the painters (and set and costume designers) Giannis Tsarouchis, Nikos Chatzikyriakos-Gikas, Nikos Eggonopoulos, the composer Manos Chatzidakis and other young artists of the time (Delipetrou 2003, 6; Gouli 2003a, 18; Kounenaki 2003a, 3; Proussali 2003, 9–10). Kotopouli also supported the use of the demotic, that is, modern Greek vernacular—as opposed to the katharevousa, an archaic conservative form of the Greek language (Delipetrou 2003, 6). She was also a feminist and was involved in the Greek Actors’ Union, which she sponsored on many occasions, aiming mainly at the improvement of its members’ skills (Kounenaki 2003a, 3; Proussali 2003, 9). To that end she also established a Drama School, which, although it did not last long, created the basis for future theatrical education (Delipetrou 2003, 7; Kounenaki 2003a, 3; Proussali 2003, 10). Moreover, her home became a philological and artistic meeting point (Delipetrou 2003, 5).

364     Xenia Georgopoulou

Kotopouli could move from one genre to another with characteristic ease, being equally at home in light musical theatre, serious modern drama and classical tragedy (Delipetrou 2003, 7; Kounenaki 2003a, 3; Proussali 2003, 10). Indeed, Anna Synodinou, one of her much younger colleagues, argued that Kotopouli was for Greek theatre the equivalent of Maria Callas for opera (Synodinou 2000, 75). Kyveli Adrianou became famous as ‘Kyveli’ (Exarchos 1995, 60, 91) and established herself as a female star through her work at Constantinos Christomanos’s Nea Skini. Kyveli first met Christomanos in 1901, when she was a student at the Drama School of the Royal Theatre (Gouli 2003b, 8; Kounenaki 2003b, 3; Papakosta 2003, 6), and collaborated with him for the next five years (Gouli 2003b, 9–10; Kounenaki 2003b, 3; Papakosta 2003, 6). After the closure of Nea Skini in 1906, she went to Paris with the man who became her second husband, theatrical entrepreneur Costas Theodorides. When they returned to Greece in 1908, Theodorides established a theatre company bearing her name (Papakosta 2003, 7). From 1911, Kyveli collaborated with director Thomas Oikonomou, and in the 1920s, she hired the French regisseur Albert Rouland in an attempt to align her company with the developments that had established the need for directors in contemporary theatre (Gouli 2003c, 20). Like Paraskevopoulou and Veroni, Kotopouli and Kyveli competed using a similar repertoire, involving mostly plays of the French boulevard theatre (Chatzidakis 2003c, 17–18; Gouli 2003a, 17; 2003b, 11; Kounenaki 2003b, 3) as well as works by contemporary Greek playwrights (Gouli 2003a, 17, 18; 2003b, 11; Kaltaki 2003a, 21–22; 2003b, 13–15; Kounenaki 2003b, 3). They often copied one another, with one occasionally announcing a play that had been recently (or was about to be) presented by the other (Anemogiannis 1994, 24; Gouli 2003a, 17; Kaltaki 2003a, 21). Playwrights such as Grigorios Xenopoulos wrote plays especially for them (Chatzipandazis 2014, 386), and the two leading ladies often collaborated with the same actors and actresses who switched between their respective companies (Kaltaki 2003a, 19). Moreover, both Kyveli and Kotopouli were married for parts of their careers to theatrical entrepreneurs, Costas Theodorides and Giorgos Chelmis, respectively (Chatzipandazis 2014, 416); the contribution of both Theodorides and Chelmis to their fame was considerable (Sideris 1999, 107). Both Kotopouli and Kyveli travelled to Paris to update their repertoire (on Kotopouli see Proussali 2003, 9; on Kyveli see Papakosta 2003, 7). However, the antagonism between the two stars was not restricted to presenting the latest French boulevard plays (Chatzipandazis 2014,

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     365

369–70; Kaltaki 2003a, 21) or wearing the most elegant Parisian gowns; as Chatzipandazis observes, their rivalry extended to their private as well as their public lives. Their love affairs, their marriages and their divorces seemed to interest their audience as much as their performances on the stage (Chatzipandazis 2014, 345). Kyveli’s affair with Mitsos Murat, a colleague at Nea Skini, their marriage (in 1903) and their rapid split (in 1906) were for some newspapers matters of greater interest than the assassination of Prime Minister Theodoros Deligiannis, which took place at the same time (Chatzipandazis 2014, 345–46); the fact that Kyveli left her husband and children to go to Paris with Theodorides was much discussed in the press (Papakosta 2003, 7). As for Kotopouli, her mourning after the assassination of her lover (the diplomat, politician and writer Ion Dragoumis) in 1920 was commented on as much as her performances at the theatre (Chatzipandazis 2014, 346). The antagonism between Kotopouli and Kyveli, similar to the political animosity between the supporters of the Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and those of King Constantinos I (Chatzipandazis 2014, 343), was increased by their opposing political allegiances (Gouli 2003a, 17; Kaltaki 2003a, 22): Kotopouli was a royalist, while Kyveli supported Venizelos, the leader of the Liberal Party (Gouli 2003a, 17; 2003c, 19; Kaltaki 2003a, 22; Papakosta 2003, 7). Another aspect of their lives both Kotopouli and Kyveli shared was their personal involvement with contemporary politicians. Kotopouli had a long-lasting affair with Ion Dragoumis, which started in 1908 and ended violently with Dragoumis’s assassination in 1920. Her house was a meeting place for royalists of the time, and Dragoumis, who had criticized Venizelos on several occasions, also kept his study there (Gini 2003, 29–31). Kyveli’s support for Venizelos, on the other hand, was so fervent, that the ‘Venizelians’ considered her a fellow member of the Liberal Party, whereas the royalists frequently expressed their dislike of her during times of political strife. Her support for Venizelos was underscored by her marriage to Georgios Papandreou, a politician from Venizelos’s Liberal Party (Papakosta 2003, 7). In spite of her relationships with great figures of the Liberal Party, Kyveli eventually became a fervent anti-communist. Alcibiades Kaltakis surmises that her trip to Russia in 1933 caused her to reject the Soviet model altogether. Despite this shift in Kyveli’s political views, many were surprised when, late in her life and shortly after the funeral of her last husband, Papandreou, in 1968, a letter apparently written by her in support of the dictator Georgios Papadopoulos appeared in the press. Papandreou’s funeral

366     Xenia Georgopoulou

on November 3, 1968, during the dictatorship of 1967–1974, had given the people an opportunity for an act of political resistance: 300,000 people had attended the funeral, which was a blow to the dictatorship whose leaders were disturbed by the large turnout. On November 23, Kyveli’s letter addressed to the ‘President’ appeared on the front page of the newspaper Eleftheros Kosmos under the title ‘Mrs. Kyveli condemns the profane political exploitation of G. Papandreou’s funeral’. In this letter, the elderly Kyveli expressed her indignation at this event and took the opportunity to express her gratitude to the so-called ‘Revolution of April 21, 1967’, for saving the country from certain communist danger. The letter was typed and signed by Kyveli. Her son, Giorgos Papandreou, said that the actress had agreed to sign a letter that would be written on her behalf by the dictators. Kaltakis argues that, no matter whether the letter was written by the regime or by Kyveli herself, the actress was still responsible for signing it. (On Kyveli’s support for Papadopoulos, see Kaltakis 2003.) Unlike Kyveli, Kotopouli remained more or less consistent in her conservative political ideas. Moreover, based on her celebrity as well as her support for the regime of August 4, 1936 (i.e. of the dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas), she managed to obtain considerable financial support from the state and agreed to make her theatre a semi-public company, whose repertoire and collaborations were controlled by the Department of Letters and Arts (Chatzipandazis 2014, 453). She also wrote a comment on the dictator Ioannis Metaxas for Nea Estia in February 1941, where she mentioned the dictator’s ‘direct solutions to all the problems of modern Greek theatre’—though without going so far as to list these. According to Kotopouli, the Greek theatre of the time owed its ‘modern, progressive activity, […] its rebirth’ to Metaxas (Kotopouli 2001, 56–57). The actress is clearly referring to the measures taken by Metaxas’s regime for the ‘purge’ of the theatre and the various innovations that took place subsequently. More specifically, during the dictatorship several female artists of the light musical theatre were exiled on the grounds of their scandalous lifestyles, according to police claims. Moreover, in 1939, the State established two more organisations, originally as branches of the National Theatre: Lyriki Skini (literally ‘Lyric Stage’) and Arma Thespidos (literally ‘Thespis’ Chariot’). The former aimed at supporting the neglected ‘serious’ musical theatre (i.e. opera), while the latter, inspired by similar Italian prototypes from the Mussolini era, was created in order to spread the official theatrical culture to the masses in the Greek provinces and was specifically intended to tour throughout Greece (Chatzipandazis 2014, 452).

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     367

Kotopouli’s involvement in politics included her work on stage. From 1908 and throughout the following decade, she was involved in the epitheorisis, a dramatic genre mainly based on political satire and generally regarded as a lesser art form, especially for an actress of her quality (Chatzidakis 2003b, 26–28; Delipetrou 2003, 6–7; Gouli 2003a, 17; Kounenaki 2003a, 3). During the Greco-Italian war, Kotopouli, like others, adapted her repertoire making it politically and historically topical (Mavromoustakos 2005, 34). Though a royalist, Kotopouli also befriended and collaborated with Spyros Melas, a friend of Venizelos. During the German regime of the Second World War, Melas helped her to stage her 1942 version of Shakespeare’s Othello, thanks to his good relations with the German regime. Although Shakespeare was banned by the Germans as an author of Greece’s allies, this production can scarcely be considered a major act of resistance, since Shakespeare kept his prominent place in the German literary canon even during the Third Reich. Still, the production made an overtly anti-racist statement, presenting a weakened Moor of Jewish origin; the critic Michalis Rodas talks about Jewish ‘overtones’ in ‘some scenes’, without becoming more specific (quoted in Krontiris 2007, 75; for more on this production, see Krontiris 2007, 30–31, 69, 74–76, 78–80). The polarized allegiances of the Greek stage that had started with Paraskevopoulou and Veroni and had been perpetuated by Kotopouli and Kyveli were diminished to some extent by the establishment of the National Theatre in 1930, when new leading ladies emerged. However, this new generation of actresses (the most important being Eleni Papadaki, Katina Paxinou and Katerina Andreadi) had already collaborated with Marika Kotopouli and were influenced by her reformation of acting styles (Freris 1996, 32–33). The National Theatre did not open until 1932. Although both Kotopouli and Kyveli were invited to participate, they were convinced that it would not be to their advantage to become involved with a company where they would not be in control (Chatzipandazis 2014, 446). Instead, the two stars unexpectedly joined forces (Gouli 2003a, 18; Kaltaki 2003a, 22; Papakosta 2003, 7). A typical result of this collaboration was their production of Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller, in which Kotopouli played Elizabeth I of England and Kyveli the title role, her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots (Delipetrou 2003, 7). (On their collaboration see also Eliadis 1996, 245–54; Synodinou 2000, 14–15.) This partnership was obviously aimed at confronting the newly established National Theatre (Gouli 2003c, 21; Papakosta 2003, 7).

368     Xenia Georgopoulou

However, the collaboration between these two leading ladies did not last. In 1934, Kyveli decided to abandon the stage, as she had promised her third husband, Georgios Papandreou, whereas Kotopouli continued as the only remaining female star on the Greek stage, owning the major private company of the time, now in competition with the newly established National Theatre (Chatzipandazis 2014, 453). She also founded her own luxurious and fully equipped theatre (the ‘Rex’) in 1937 (Delipetrou 2003, 7; Gouli 2003a, 18; Mavromoustakos 2005, 256). Kyveli eventually returned to the stage sixteen years later. In 1950, she collaborated again with Kotopouli, and later during the 1950s with the National Theatre and occasionally with other private companies, as well as performing in her own theatre at Syntagma Square. In the 1960s, she also performed in several productions by the National Theatre of Northern Greece (Gouli 2003c, 19). In spite of their involvement in political life, Kotopouli and Kyveli managed to survive the vicissitudes of the time. Their political views often affected their theatrical career (Gouli 2003c, 19). Kyveli was even arrested for her ideas in 1917; the ‘Constantinians’ (i.e. the royalists) forbade her to act, and after that she spent some time in Paris (Papakosta 2003, 7). She was soon back in Greece, however, with no further impact on her life. By contrast, a younger colleague of hers, who had never expressed her political thoughts, lost her life on political grounds. This young actress was Eleni Papadaki.

The Case of Eleni Papadaki: When Rivalry Becomes Fatal In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Eleni Papadaki was regarded as one of the three leading actresses of the Greek stage, alongside Kotopouli and Kyveli (Marchand 2002, 96, 98), although she was almost twenty years their junior. Kotopouli herself, who collaborated with her in several productions in 1932, commented on her talent in an interview she gave the same year (Kotopouli 2001, 58). Papadaki was born in Athens in 1903 (for a concise biography, see Exarchos 1996, 371–72). She graduated from the Drama School of Ellinikon Odeon (literally ‘Greek Conservatory’) in 1924 and collaborated with several theatre companies before establishing her own in 1931. When the National Theatre was in the planning stages, Papadaki was included among the actors and actresses they intended to hire. As she was younger than

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     369

Kotopouli and Kyveli, she was expected to provide fresh interpretations of the roles that her older colleagues had performed in the past (Marchand 2002, 96). Moreover, Papadaki had a unique way of studying and analysing her parts (Andrianou 2003, 12, 14; Kounenaki 2003c, 2; Marchand 2002, 32–40); as Irini Kalkani observes, she read ‘everything that had been written about the playwright and the play, the actors that performed it in the past, its era and its atmosphere’ (quoted in Marchand 2002, 34). Although she did become one of the leading actresses of the National Theatre, Papadaki faced various complications from the very beginning of this collaboration. Despite the fact that she had agreed to join the company, she was ruled out of the list of collaborating actors and actresses because she failed to return in time from Constantinople, where she was performing with her own company. Although she had sent a letter explaining that she would arrive a little late (she eventually arrived in Athens a couple of days later), this was apparently ignored, which caused outrage in the press. Eventually, the list was reconsidered, and Papadaki was indeed appointed as a leading actress at the National Theatre (Marchand 2002, 98–103). When the National Theatre finally opened, the gap left by the absence of the great leading actresses Kotopouli and Kyveli was filled by two younger female stars, namely Papadaki and Katina Paxinou (Chatzipandazis 2014, 446–47), who also developed a rivalry of their own (Freris 1996, 37; Marchand 2002, 104–6); however, their rivalry was not as fervent as those between Paraskevopoulou and Veroni, or Kotopouli and Kyveli (at least not on Papadaki’s side). This antagonism between the two young female stars of the National Theatre was apparently exacerbated by directors Fotos Politis and Dimitris Rondiris, who seemed to prefer Paxinou (Marchand 2002, 104). On other occasions Politis favoured Katerina Andreadi or Vasso Manolidou (Marchand 2002, 104), while Papadaki was regularly disregarded (Marchand 2002, 96–127; Ploritis 2003, 5–6); despite this, she became at the same time the victim of her colleagues’ antagonistic behaviour (Papadouka 2003, 23). The critics, however, who seemed to favour Papadaki, underlined the unfair way in which she was treated, which resulted in more frequent appearances on the stage of the National Theatre until the end of her short life (Freris 1996, 37; Marchand 2002, 106). Unlike Kotopouli and Kyveli, Papadaki’s indirect involvement in political life ended dramatically with her premature death. The actress was assassinated soon after the liberation of the country from the German regime in October 1944, when, in December 1944, Athens became the site of violent conflict between the new Government (which included members from a range of political affiliations, and was supported by the English forces)

370     Xenia Georgopoulou

and their political opponents, ELAS (Ellinikos Laikos Apeleftherotikos Stratos [Greek People’s Liberating Army]), which was the army of EAM (Ethniko Apeleftherotiko Metopo [National Liberation Front]), the main force of resistance during the German regime, created by KKE, the Greek Communist Party, in 1941. In October 1944, the leftist Board of Directors of the Greek Actors’ Union met in order to decide on the expulsion of the members who had ‘betrayed the sacred National Greek Fight’, and Papadaki was among the actors and actresses that were expelled (Marchand 2002, 326–37). Some of Papadaki’s colleagues tried to warn her that her communist colleagues were planning a trial and subsequent execution of those actors they regarded as traitors. She also found an anonymous note on her door, most probably by a leftist colleague, who advised her to leave her house immediately. Polyvios Marchand, Papadaki’s biographer, argues that this note is probably another clue that Papadaki’s arrest was due to her colleagues’ denunciation (Marchand 2002, 357). However, the actress refused to go into hiding, on the grounds that she had done nothing wrong. Indeed, Papadaki was never personally involved in politics; on the contrary, she was described as ‘apolitical’ by people who knew her (Kounenaki 2003c, 2; Marchand 2002, 328). Still, she was regarded as a de facto supporter of the right wing, due to her social position and education: she came from a bourgeois family; went to a German school; also learnt French, English and Italian; attended ancient Greek literature courses at the School of Philosophy of the University of Athens; and studied piano and vocal technique at the Greek Conservatory (Marchand 2002, 44–46, 325, 328). But this was not all. Papadaki’s fluency in German had enabled her smooth relationship with the German regime during the Second World War, which enraged her colleagues, despite the fact that she managed to save several of them from execution (Marchand 2002, 288–94). Moreover, her close relationship with Ioannis Rallis (the third Prime Minister of the German regime), due to his friendship with her father as well as his involvement in the National Theatre as the President of the Board of Directors, also proved fatal (Marchand 2002, 285–90). Papadaki was arrested on December 21, 1944 at the house of her colleague Dimitris Murat; her arrest warrant was issued on the orders of a member of the People’s Police of the Greek Communist Party bearing the code name ‘Orestes’. It seems that there were lists in EAM and the Militia with the names of the ‘reactionaries’ of the area that were to be arrested, in order to be kept as hostages or to be killed. Papadaki’s name was included, under the description ‘Rallis’s girlfriend’.

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     371

The member of EAM appointed to arrest Papadaki was Costas Bilirakis (at the time a student at the Medical School) along with two members of the Militia. After looking for her at her home, they eventually found her at the house of Dimitris Murat, who was a member of EAM. When they arrested her, Murat went with her. They first stopped at the Headquarters of EAM, where Murat was told that Papadaki was being taken to the People’s Police Headquarters for a detailed interrogation and nothing more. As a result, Murat left her to be handed over to the People’s Police by Bilirakis and his companions, who then returned to her house to look for weapons and the expensive jewellery she had supposedly been given by Rallis. They found nothing suspicious, and when they were asked why they had arrested Papadaki, they replied that she had been betrayed by her colleagues. Apparently, this is what Papadaki also believed. Later that night she was taken to a concentration camp (at the Water Refinery plant), where ‘Orestes’ gave the order for her death on the grounds that she had been convicted by the Actors’ Union. A little later she was stripped, left in just her underwear, and then shot in the back of the head by the executioner Vlassis Makaronas. Papadaki’s body was identified a month later. On January 26, 1945, Sam Bradenburg, a violinist at the orchestra of the Athens Conservatory who had been in a relationship with Papadaki since 1937, was brought to the place of her execution and identified her body. ‘Orestes’, who ordered her execution, was himself executed towards the end of the month by EAM for his criminal activity, which ignored the official leadership of the Greek Communist Party. Makaronas was executed after a trial on February 21, 1948. (For the full story of Papadaki’s arrest and execution, see Marchand 2002, 344–52). Papadaki’s death divided the theatrical world (Mavromoustakos 2005, 52) and was exploited by both the political Right and the Left. The Right argued that it was the work of the Communist Party, and the Left alleged that ‘Orestes’ worked for the Intelligence Service (i.e. the English Secret Services) (Freris 2003, 27; Marchand 2002, 376–81). Marchand, basing his analysis on witness accounts, blames her colleagues and argues that no one tried to save her (2002, 382–89). In the notes of Aimilia Karavia (a close friend of the actress) on Papadaki’s life is a story told by one of her colleagues, Sofia Spanoudi: according to Spanoudi, one of their fanatical colleagues admitted in a discussion about Papadaki in 1945 that her colleagues ‘took her to trial, convicted her and executed her’ (Marchand 2002, 381; 2003, 10). Olympia Papadouka, on the other hand, an actress who belonged to EAM, argues that blaming the communists was the easiest thing to do at the time.

372     Xenia Georgopoulou

She observes, however, that Papadaki’s behaviour during the German regime was at times provocative, firstly due to her relationship with Rallis (the nature of which remains obscure) and secondly due to the generally good relations between her and the Germans (Papadouka 2003, 23–24). The Communist Party soon admitted that Papadaki was killed by one of its people and condemned this crime through Nikos Zachariadis as a major political mistake (Freris 2003, 27; Marchand 2002, 376). It was clear that there was no evidence of any involvement of the Intelligence Service (Freris 2003, 27–28; Marchand 2002, 377, 380–81, 388–89). In any case, the person behind ‘Orestes’ who ordered Papadaki’s assassination still remains a mystery (Freris 2003; Kounenaki 2003c, 31; Marchand 2002, 367; Papadouka 2003, 23).

Leading Ladies and Politics in the Post-War Period The involvement of Greek actors in the political life of the country has never ceased. During the Civil War that followed the country’s liberation from the Germans, several were exiled; others found various means of resistance during the dictatorship of 1967–1974. In more peaceful periods, numbers of actors and actresses were involved in politics, such as Melina Merkouri, who became Minister of Culture with the Socialist Party (PASOK) in 1981– 1989 and 1993–1994, or Anna Synodinou, who was elected as a member of the Parliament for the right wing (1974, 1977, 1981, 1985, and 1989). Nowadays, both older and younger actors are to be found in the Greek Parliament, such as Eleni Gerassimidou (from the Greek communist party [KKE]). What has changed in the Greek theatre, however, is the theatrical status of contemporary actors and actresses. Of course, there were still stars in the generation that followed Papadaki and Paxinou, and some degree of rivalry between leading ladies continued to be seen, as, for example, between the blonde Aliki Vougiouklaki and the brunette Tzeni Karezi (both born in the early 1930s). However, as directors have become more influential in shaping theatrical productions, there has been less space for larger-than-life actresses and their rivalries. Nowadays, some actors and actresses are certainly more famous than others; some of them may even own theatres named after them too. However, the era of celebrity actresses and their colourful rivalries has passed and seems to be gone for good.

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     373

Bibliography Altouva, Alexia [Αλεξία Αλτουβά]. 2014. Το ϕαινόμενο του γυναικείου βεντετισμού στην Ελλάδα τον 19ο αιώνα. Αθήνα: Ηρόδοτος. Andrianou, Elsa [Έλσα Ανδριανού]. 2003. ‘Γεννημένη για την τραγωδία’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 9, 2003. Anemogiannis, Giorgos [Γιώργος Ανεμογιάννης]. 1994. Μαρίκα Κοτοπούλη. Η ϕλόγα. Αθήνα: Μουσείο και Κέντρο Μελέτης του Νεοελληνικού Θεάτρου. Chatzidakis, Giorgos [Γιώργος Χατζηδάκης]. 2003a. ‘Η πρωτοπόρα “Ελευθέρα Σκηνή’’’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Chatzidakis, Giorgos [Γιώργος Χατζηδάκης]. 2003b. ‘Η Μαρίκα της επιθεώρησης’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Chatzidakis, Giorgos [Γιώργος Χατζηδάκης]. 2003c. ‘Το μπουλβάρ και τα “ακατάλληλα’’’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 16, 2003. Chatzipandazis, Thodoros [Θόδωρος Χατζηπανταζής]. 2014. Διάγραμμα ιστορίας του νεοελληνικού θεάτρου. Ηράκλειο: Πανεπιστημιακές Εκδόσεις Κρήτης. Delipetrou, Evdokia [Ευδοκία Δεληπέτρου]. 2003. ‘Ζωή γεμάτη πάθος και τέχνη’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Eliadis, F. [Φ. Ηλιάδης]. 1996. Μαρίκα Κοτοπούλη: Βιογραϕικό CORPUS. Αθήνα: Δωρικός. Exarchos, Theodoros [Θεόδωρος Έξαρχος]. 1995. Έλληνες ηθοποιοί. ‘Αναζητώντας τις ρίζες’. Από τα τέλη του 18ου αιώνα μέχρι το 1899 (τ. 1). Αθήνα: Δωδώνη. Exarchos, Theodoros [Θεόδωρος Έξαρχος]. 1996. Έλληνες ηθοποιοί. ‘Αναζητώντας τις ρίζες’. Έτος γέννησης από 1900 μέχρι 1925. (Ν-Ω) (τ. 2). Αθήνα: Δωδώνη. Freris, Markos D. [Μάρκος Δ. Φρέρης]. 1996. ‘Το ϕαινόμενο της ‘μεγάλης πρωταγωνίστριας’. Συνέχεια και διαδοχή στο ελληνικό θέατρο’. In Για τη Μαρίκα Κοτοπούλη και το θέατρο στην Ερμούπολη, 31–43. Αθήνα: Κέντρο Νεοελληνικών Ερευνών Εθνικού Ιδρύματος Ερευνών. Freris, Markos D. [Μάρκος Δ. Φρέρης]. 2003. ‘Οι ευθύνες για τον θάνατο της Παπαδάκη’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 9, 2003. Gini, Eleni [Ελένη Γκίνη]. 2003. ‘Ο παράϕορος έρωτας με τον Ίωνα Δραγούμη’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Gouli, Eleni [Ελένη Γουλή]. 2003a. ‘Θεατρίνα από … κούνια’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Gouli, Eleni [Ελένη Γουλή]. 2003b. ‘Μια μύστις με στόϕα πρωταγωνίστριας’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), February 16, 2003. Gouli, Eleni [Ελένη Γουλή]. 2003c. ‘Στη σκηνή μέχρι το τέλος’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), February 16, 2003.

374     Xenia Georgopoulou

Kaltaki, Matina [Ματίνα Καλτάκη]. 2003a. ‘Κοτοπούλη-Κυβέλη: ο βεντετισμός στην ακμή του’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Kaltaki, Matina [Ματίνα Καλτάκη]. 2003b. ‘Προβάδισμα στου Έλληνες συγγραϕείς’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), February 16, 2003. Kaltakis, Alkiviadis [Αλκιβιάδης Καλτάκης]. 2003. ‘Προχωρείτε απερίσπαστος, κ. Πρόεδρε!’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), February 16, 2003. Kotopouli, Marika [Μαρίκα Κοτοπούλη]. 2001. Έκϕρασις. Edited by Eva Georgoussopoulou [Εύα Γεωργουσοπούλου]. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης. Kounenaki, Peggy [Πέγκυ Κουνενάκη]. 2003a. ‘Μαρίκα Κοτοπούλη “η κυρά μας η δασκάλα’’’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Kounenaki, Peggy [Πέγκυ Κουνενάκη]. 2003b. ‘Η Κυβέλη του μύθου’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), February 16, 2003. Kounenaki, Peggy [Πέγκυ Κουνενάκη]. 2003c. ‘Άγνωστες μαρτυρίες και αναπάντητα ερωτήματα’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 9, 2003. Krontiris, Tina [Τίνα Κροντήρη]. 2007. Ο Σαίξπηρ σε Καιρό Πολέμου. 1940– 1950. Αθήνα: Αλεξάνδρεια. Marchand, Polyvios [Πολύβιος Μαρσάν]. 2002. Ελένη Παπαδάκη. Μια ϕωτεινή θεατρική πορεία με απροσδόκητο τέλος. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης. Marchand, Polyvios [Πολύβιος Μαρσάν]. 2003. ‘Στη ζωή και στον θάνατο σϕραγίσθηκε από την αδικία’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 9, 2003. Mavromoustakos, Platon [Πλάτων Μαυρομούστακος]. 2005. Το θεάτρο στην Ελλάδα 1940–2000. Μια επισκόπηση. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης. Papadouka, Olympia [Ολυμπία Παπαδούκα]. 2003. ‘Όχι, δεν την “έϕαγαν” οι συνάδελϕοί της…’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 9, 2003. Papakosta, Alexia [Αλεξία Παπακώστα]. 2003. ‘Η ζωή και ο μύθος μιας σπουδαίας θεατρίνας’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), February 16, 2003. Ploritis, Marios [Μάριος Πλωρίτης]. 2003. ‘Αμάλγαμα πάθους και μέτρου’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), March 9, 2003. Proussali, Evi [Εύη Προύσαλη]. 2003. ‘Μια ρηξικέλευθη ηθοποιός’. Καθημερινή (‘Επτά ημέρες’), January 19, 2003. Puchner, Walter [Βάλτερ Πούχνερ]. 1999. Η πρόσληψη της γαλλικής δραματουργίας στο νεοελληνικό θέατρο (17ος-20ός αιώνας). Μια πρώτη σϕαιρική προσέγγιση. Αθήνα: Ελληνικά Γράμματα. Puchner, Walter [Βάλτερ Πούχνερ]. 2004. Ράμπα και παλκοσένικο. Δέκα θεατρολογικά μελετήματα. Αθήνα: Πορεία. Sarafis, Ath. [Αθ. Σαράϕης]. 1953. Αικατερίνη Βερώνη. Αθήνα. Sideris, Giannis [Γιάννης Σιδέρης]. 1990. Ιστορία του νέου ελληνικού θεάτρου 1794–1944, τ. 1 (1794–1908). Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης. Sideris, Giannis [Γιάννης Σιδέρης]. 1999. Ιστορία του νέου ελληνικού θεάτρου 1794–1944. τ. 2, μέρος 1. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης.

16  Leading Ladies on the Modern Greek Stage     375

Synodinou, Anna [Άννα Συνοδινού]. 2000. Αίνος στους άξιους. Αθήνα: Καστανιώτης. Valsas, M. [M. Βάλσας]. 1994. Το νεοελληνικό θέατρο από το 1453 ως το 1900. Translated, edited and with an introduction by Chara Bakonikola-Georgopoulou [Χαρά Μπακονικόλα-Γεωργοπούλου]. Αθήνα: Ειρμός. Yanni, Mara. 2005. Shakespeare’s Travels. Greek Representations of ‘Hamlet’ in the 19th Century. Athens: National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

17 British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations Maggie B. Gale

During the first half of the twentieth century, actresses engaged in a range of activities within an expanding market where film, an enhanced repertoire of plays, popular variety and revue all offered an extended range of opportunities for professional engagement. A reflection in part of the many social anxieties about gender equality more generally, women’s professional presence in, and sometimes dominance of, UK theatre culture between the opening of the twentieth century and the Second World War was much debated, at a historical moment which brought with it real transformation in terms of women’s labour and their experience of social and professional agency. The decades covered here were shaped by key events which impacted significantly on women’s professional as well as domestic lives: the campaign for the vote, the First World War (1914–1918), industrial unrest in the 1910s and 1920s, economic decline and the full vote for women in 1928, and political unrest in the 1930s leading up to the Second World War. The post-war establishment of the Arts Council in 1946 signalled a shift in both the state attitude to funding the arts and the professional framework in which actresses worked: to some extent, it provided a new alternative to the commercial theatre model.

Maggie B. Gale (*)  University of Manchester, Manchester, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_17

377

378     Maggie B. Gale

Those actresses born at, or working from, the latter end of the nineteenth century are the first generation of women in the performance industries for whom there are substantial amounts of visual materials and, in some cases, films of their work. In reading and assessing actresses’ professional lives, we have the benefit of a proliferation of photographs, postcards, memorabilia and audio and audio-visual records of performances; even so, as with many other women professionals, actresses’ historical presence and analyses of what they did and how they did it—the strategies employed in their working lives—remain less visible than those of their male counterparts. This is in part because of the modernist legacy where both the male-dominated literary establishment and the avant-garde have shaped historical narratives. Whilst significant social as well as technical transformation shaped the arts, so too as Christine Gledhill (2008, 20) notes, did the ‘opposition between art and commerce’ which was so much part of modernist discourse; this ‘tapped into unresolved class issues under pressure of democratisation’. Press discourse on actresses also reflected anxieties over the democratisation of the profession. If the division between art and commerce has shaped histories of actresses’ work as well as their relation to the ‘social landscape’, it has also often been one of the roots of exclusion in terms of assessments of their labour. As recent work shows, it is frequently in the commercial sectors of the theatre that actresses’ labour has had a more vibrant and consistent presence, building substantially from the nineteenth century (see Bratton 2011; Glenn 2000; Marra 2006; Schweitzer 2009). Many actresses actively reflected on their sense of ‘the professional’ in their own practice and on their complex position in the professional hierarchy of the fast-developing industry itself. Such reflections can often be found in autobiographical form, and this underpins the scope of coverage in this chapter which focuses on the interweaving of onstage and offstage lives in order to facilitate a reading of the shape of actresses’ professional practices onstage and offstage. As Tracy C. Davis (1989, 66) has noted, historical retrieval of women’s performance practices has to make an organic connection between women’s domestic and professional lives and contextualise both in terms of the wider social domain. The focus here then is the actress, defined broadly to include those who worked as performers in the commercial or independent sectors, or indeed those who worked across forms including film by the late 1910s. The fluidity of employment between one form or location of arts’ practice and another was not uncommon, nor was the necessity to shift between different professional roles—writer, performer, manager, producer, public servant and philanthropist. In exploring the different contexts of labour, it is

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     379

possible to identify patterns of practice amongst actresses working in the UK over a fifty-year period. These include actresses’ practical engagements with the conditions of employment for women in theatre both on and off stage, their contributions to educational frameworks which became the dominant means through which they might enter the profession by the 1930s (Sutherland 2007), their use of creative partnerships and networks and their ability to adapt themselves to new contexts for work. Access to the professional labour market and thus to professional status per se was still a relatively new development for women at the beginning of the period covered here: it was still limited by social and gender prejudice. As actress and director Florence Farr (1860–1917) noted (1910, 19): ‘in all occupations the well-paid businesses are for men, the ill-paid for women’. With women’s work largely presumed to be connected to domestic duty, access to professional qualification was limited and the Marriage Bars prohibited married women from having equal employment status to men. Prejudice about women’s capacity for the sustained accumulation and application of professional skills added to existing inequities in terms of social status and citizenship: assumptions that women were unsuitable for traditionally male professions such as medicine and law prevailed. Jane Lewis (1984, 220) notes that both direct and indirect discriminatory practices sustained the inequities in women’s professional status in occupations from teaching, through medicine and law, to the civil service. Nevertheless, Harold Perkin’s (1989) assertion that these decades saw the continuation of the ‘rise of professional society’ is of interest here then, as it resonates with developments in the theatre and performance industries in particular. Various associations and formal professional affiliations began to dominate by the early decades of the twentieth century, as part of a continual move to specifically professionalise the industry and raise its social status (see Gale 2019; Sanderson 1984). The theatre industry was becoming more consciously professionalised as it moved into the mid-century, and to some extent, this was one of the few professions in which women were able to progress. With the split between the ‘legitimate’ and the ‘non-legitimate’—which had largely shaped theatre provision up until the mid-nineteenth century—becoming less significant by the opening decades of the twentieth, there was a shift in the demographic frequenting theatre. Whilst not ‘equal’, women had much more access to professional status within the theatre and performance industries than elsewhere (see Davis 1991), and indeed, they understood how professional associations could improve their security of employment and range of professional choices (see Paxton 2018; Gale 2019; Gale and Dorney 2019).

380     Maggie B. Gale

Nevertheless, heightened levels of professional status offered in the industry existed within, and were shaped by, wider social frames of inequality. This is the context within which actresses negotiated their own, often extensive and prolific, professional lives. There were a variety of ways of entering the profession and an assortment of means through which to manage one’s professional career as an actress, in a vocational setting which was becoming more acceptable to the middle classes—the expanding class.

The Profession of Actress: The Conditions and Range of Employment Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington Don’t put your daughter on the stage The profession is overcrowded And the struggle’s pretty tough And admitting the fact She’s burning to act That isn’t quite enough … (Nöel Coward 1935)

Coward’s popular, satirical song about mothers with ambitions for their daughters to find fame, and possibly marriage, through stage work also identified the mismatch between aspiration and the reality of professional life for actresses. Women, across the classes, who entered the profession during the early decades of the twentieth century did so mostly through familial connections via the growing body of agents—many of whom had growing reputations for unscrupulous operations (see Marion 2019)—or, as the century progressed, through graduating from one of the newly founded drama schools (Sutherland 2007). In her groundbreaking work, Actresses as Working Women, Tracy C. Davis (1991, 40) identified the fact that, notwithstanding the inherently faulty status of census data, while the number of performers seeking work increased over the latter decades of the nineteenth century, it was the increase in the numbers of women seeking to enter the profession which was astounding: the proportion rose from some 27:100 women to men in 1841 to 101:100 by 1911. Davis (1991, 49) points to the fact that theatre had become a more ‘respectable calling’ by the opening decades of the twentieth century: actresses from middle-class, non-theatre backgrounds like Lillah McCarthy (1875–1960), or the Vanbrugh sisters, Irene (1872–1949) and Violet (1867–1942), who were supported in their wish to act by their families

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     381

(Vanbrugh 1931; McCarthy 1933; Vanbrugh 1948). Although it was also an industry that offered real economic reward at one end of the scale— successful actresses and female performers could demand wages based on their market value—the theatre was also a profession which relied in substance on flexible, low-paid labour, offering precarious and fluctuating employment opportunities. Theatre and film acting, as previously noted, offered women a social status which was, even by the middle of the twentieth century, difficult to find in other professions. Many actresses continued their working lives after marriage; there was no legislation that impacted on their vocation in the same way as, for example, with the teaching profession. Many actresses also managed difficult or very public divorces, avoiding the social stigma which would necessarily have been attached to being a divorcee in other professions. It was not that actresses were immune to such frameworks for acceptable social and moral conduct. It was more the case that the relation between their public selves (through the workings of celebrity culture), their professional selves (being identified with the roles they played), and their private selves was often complex with all three being frequently conflated. Actresses, by trade, broke with traditional frameworks for femininity and family life, economic power, freedom of movement and public profile: their job was to draw attention to themselves as women. This was less the case as the twentieth century progressed, but their ‘conspicuous’ status marked them still (Davis 1989, 99), within a social frame where working women’s lives generally were scrutinised, and non-equal pay and working conditions remained the norm. Many actresses consciously negotiated these kinds of issues in the ways in which they managed or wrote about their professional lives: often actresses’ autobiographies emphasise struggles with managements, with balancing family and professional commitments, with consistently finding suitable work and so on. Notwithstanding the promise of fame and economic gain, being an actress was a tough profession with few guarantees. As Coward suggested, ‘burning to act’ was ‘not enough’. The performance industries expanded significantly during the 1890s to the 1910s, and openings for actresses grew both in theatre and later in film. Trade papers, and later fan magazines, often carried stories warning of ruthless managers and poor contracts, whilst actresses and performers offered constructive advice for young women wanting to join what was fast becoming an overcrowded profession. Ada Reeve (1874–1966), whose career spanned music hall—where she was a child performer and musical comedy stardom in the 1900s—and who went on to work as a character actress in British films in the 1940s, was often quoted warning would-be actresses of

382     Maggie B. Gale

the pitfalls of joining an unregulated profession without training or appropriate theatrical connections. For this ‘stage-struck … army of girls who want to go on the stage’ (The Performer, June 4, 1908, and see Reeve 1954), Ada Reeve warned parents, as did Coward some twenty-odd years later, that ‘average fair looks and a fair voice’ were not enough in such a demanding and precarious profession. Lena Ashwell (1872–1957), leading actress, theatre manager, producer and activist, also stressed in her essay for the Fabian Society Women’s Group ‘Acting as a Profession for Women’ (1914) that most actresses spend their working hours looking for work, in an insecure trade and living, at times, in impoverished circumstances. She proposed the ‘life of a successful actress is undoubtedly one of the very best, so far open to women’, but that, ‘it is not a fact that the best and greatest actresses are always the successful ones’ (1914, 312). Ashwell saw cinematographic work, still in its relative infancy, as a ‘supplementary trade’ at this point: like a number of other high-profile actresses of her generation such as Irene Vanbrugh, Ashwell did not move significantly into film work (Ashwell 1929, 1936). However, by the 1920s, actresses like Ruby Miller (1889–1976) who had made her name as a ‘Gaiety Girl’ (Darewski 1933) or Fay Compton (1894–1978) who, from a theatrical family, had begun stage work in her teens, were able to move lucratively and with ease and frequency between stage and screen acting (Compton 1926). A number of actresses, who had already achieved substantial success in theatre from young ages, extended the breadth and length of their careers through film work. Having had prolific stage careers since their teens, Constance Collier (1878–1955) and Gladys Cooper (1888–1971) had high-profile careers in Hollywood films in their fifties. Others such as Sybil Thorndike (1882–1976) or Peggy Ashcroft (1907–1991) worked predominantly in theatre but acted in films sporadically. By the early 1950s, however, an actress like Vivien Leigh (1913–1967) was unusual in being able to move with ease between high-profile film roles and stage work. The conditions of employment for actresses changed little over the period as a whole: unionisation had by the 1930s become more consolidated in the form of the British Actors’ Equity Association and brought with it more regulated control over contracts. However, whilst numerous actresses’ careers had begun through familial networks or letters of introduction in the nineteenth century, for example, by the mid-twentieth century, there were more and more layers of ‘agents’ shaping employment for actresses—from theatrical and film agents, managements with extended contractual rights, to producers and directors. Their significance in determining employment and, thus, the significance of an actress’s fan base grew over the period as a whole.

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     383

As the costs of production became more prohibitive, so too the number of independent ventures launched by actresses—such as Lena Ashwell’s management of the Kingsway Theatre before the First World War, or her management of the Century Theatre after it (Gale 2004; Leask 2012)—became less economically viable. Some actresses’ careers were shaped by their antagonistic relations with managements and limiting contracts—Vivien Leigh is a particular case in point. Leigh had legal wrangles with David Selznick’s studio, after the global success of Gone with the Wind (1939), over her choice of parts. She consistently fought to play roles she thought would challenge her, rather than necessarily bring profit to the studios, or indeed that gratified the whims of the studio director (see Dorney and Gale 2018). Many actresses early in the period, such as Ashwell, Cooper, McCarthy and Gertrude Kingston (1862–1937) had managed their own theatres. By the mid-century, this was more unusual and certainly less usual than in the late nineteenth century (Davis 2000; Gale 2004, 2019; Kingston 1937): this was as much to do with cost and the narrowing ownership of theatre real estate as it was with gender. It also maps onto a more general move away from the actor–manager model as a whole. There were a number of women, however, who had begun their careers as actresses but turned to playwriting—Clemence Dane (1888–1965), Gertrude Jennings (1877–1958) and Dodie Smith (1896–1990), for example, all had prolific careers as playwrights both for stage and screen. Others like Irene Hentschel (1891–1979), Auriol Lee (1880–1941) and Margaret Webster (1905–1972) began working as actresses then developed successful careers as directors and producers (see Gale 1996). Numerous actresses, such as Maud Gill, spent many years between acting engagements finding work as stage managers, for example, until, if lucky, they found fame with one particular role and moved, as Gill (1938, 244) puts it, ‘from the level of an actress who has to strap-hang in crowded omnibuses to that of an actress who can hail a taxi without a sense of crime’. These actresses etched lasting careers for themselves in a fastmoving and unpredictable employment market. The rhetoric used to praise popular actresses at the beginning of the century—‘delightful’ and ‘gracious’ with the requisite reference to their ability to adapt to being a ‘charming hostess and companion’ offstage and at home (Lewis 1901, 332–42)—highlighted their feminine status. In line with this, actresses were more often discussed in terms of innate or ‘natural’ ability rather than in terms of labour, or the learned acquisition and application of skills. To some extent, this attitude gave way to talk of actresses being artists or even good businesswomen by the 1920s, at a time when other professional fields were opening out to women more generally.

384     Maggie B. Gale

Whilst they often operated outside of the traditional expectations of womanhood, actresses’ professional status was often framed by whatever questions around women and culture featured in current debates. Perceived as a social group, their opinions on products, on events or current debates on women, often made good news copy in the expanding market for the popular press. Their domestic activities were marketable in forms such as home economist and journalist Elizabeth Craig’s The Stage Favourites’ Cookbook (1923), from which fans could learn how to cook Alice Delysia’s ‘Poulet en Montmartre’ or Fay Compton’s ‘Mary Rose Cake’, amongst other theatrical-culinary delights. Actresses also regularly contributed to debates as journalists—in particular Clemence Dane and Viola Tree (1884–1938).

Managing the Profession, Looking After the Actress Like their male contemporaries, actresses fought hard to gain recognition of their professional status, although their efforts often had a more radical political impetus focusing on gender inequalities, not just professional ones. The Actresses’ Franchise League is a good example. Formed in 1908, ‘as a bond of union between all women in the Theatrical profession who are in sympathy with the Woman’s Franchise Movement’ (Paxton 2018, 1) it had, by 1913, a similar number of members to the Actors’ Union (see Gale 2019). This organisation focused specifically on working conditions and professional networks for women from across the industry, aligning itself very specifically with the suffrage movement. Some scholars have suggested that the League was dissipated by the First World War (Kelly 1994; Hirschfield 1984; Holledge 1981) but in fact its work, and key membership, continued operations into the 1950s (Paxton 2018). The League commissioned and sponsored performances, raised funds and organised events, but it also provided training for women to speak at political rallies. Other contemporary organisations concerned themselves with care for professional theatre women. Again, these were frequently set up by actresses who understood the hardship of finding affordable accommodation and a sociable place for respite, which could be secured on an ad hoc basis, during the long working week in London. Thus, Lena Ashwell led a team of women, including her sister Hilda who had already started a club for girls selling theatre programmes, and the actresses Eva Moore (1868–1955), and Madge Kendal (1848–1935) in founding the Three Arts Club in 1911

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     385

(Ashwell 1936, 177). Inspired by Ashwell’s visit to the Professional Woman’s League residential club in New York, the Three Arts Club was designed to be self-sufficient with members raising the money for running costs (Leask 2012; Gale 2004). Tracy C. Davis (1991, 61) suggests the club was largely for the middle classes and did not have the same radical remit as the actress Kittie Carson’s earlier Theatrical Ladies’ Guild established in 1891, providing financial and practical support for women struggling to cope with balancing precarious theatrical careers, insecure finances and bringing up young children. Carson (born Emily Courtier-Dutton) was married to the editor of The Stage which publicized and documented a lot of the work of the Guild. She also founded the Actors’ Orphanage in 1896 which became the Actors’ Orphanage Fund in 1912 and paid for a school and a children’s home (see Cockin 2008). However, both the Three Arts Club and the Theatrical Ladies’ Guild made use of charitable labour from actresses, in order to facilitate welfare, and both were motivated by the strong belief in equalizing the professional position of women in the industry. The Three Arts Club building, at 19A Marylebone Road, had accommodation of 100 rooms, ‘a large concert-hall, with a small stage, in addition to a spacious dining hall, writing and reception rooms’ (The Dominion, May 9, 1911) and a robust administrative structure and pricing system—£1.1s for town members; 10s 6d for country members. Its activities ran well into the 1910s. Actress Virginia Compton (née Bateman, ? - 1940) also set up the Theatre Girls Club in 1915. She was mother to five children working in the arts, including Fay Compton (see below) and the novelist Compton Mackenzie. From a theatrical family, she also married into a well-known theatrical dynasty. (Her husband, Edward Compton, himself the son of an actor, founded the Compton Comedy Company which toured throughout Britain from the 1880s into the early decades of the twentieth century.) Her experience as actress and manager shaped Virginia Compton’s running of the Theatre Girls Club which shared the model provided in the Three Arts Club with its concern for the welfare of young women seeking paid employment in theatre. By the mid-1930s, fees were set at £1.10s per week if in employment and £1.1s if out of work—for cubicle-based accommodation and four meals a day—and an annual subscription of 2s 6d. This was not so much a club as a busy hostel for girls aspiring to work in the performance industries. The club took into account the seasonal nature of theatre work: members might find employment as dancers, extras in film or as usherettes. Residents would share information about up-and-coming

386     Maggie B. Gale

opportunities and could also use the club as a base if they found intermediate employment in shop or demonstration work for example. Recognising that the insecure nature of employment had a consequent impact on the ability of performers to sustain a professional life, such organisations as these provide evidence of actresses’ proactive awareness of the gendered nature of welfare needs. The other area in which actresses of the period managed their control of professional development was through developing and engaging in systems of training. With the two large drama schools being established in the early 1900s (RADA in 1904 and Central School of Speech and Drama in 1906; see Sutherland 2007), numerous actresses gained reputations for their skills as teachers. Both schools borrowed from existing patterns of educational provision epitomized in actress-manager Sarah Thorne’s (1836–1899) School of Acting, opened in Margate in 1885, providing classes to company members on, for example, voice production, gesture and mime, and pace of delivery in performance. Her students included Harley Granville Barker, Gertrude Kingston, Ben Greet—who began his own Academy of Acting in 1896 (Sanderson 1984, 34)—and the Vanbrugh sisters, Irene and Violet. Other actresses ran small schools or offered training for would-be professionals. Rosina Filippi (1866–1930) is a familiar name as author, actress and teacher running her own classes in elocution as well as teaching in the established drama schools and producing her own handbook for performers (Filippi 1911). The Etlinger Dramatic School in Paddington was taken over by actress May Witty (1865–1948) in 1922 where newcomers such as Joyce Carey (1898–1993) were trained by established actresses like Kate Rorke (1866– 1945) who also taught at Beerbohm Tree’s (R)ADA. Constance Benson (1864–1946), an actress who had run a large-scale touring company with her husband Frank Benson, set up the Dramatic School at Pembroke Hall in Kensington in 1919 offering a curriculum that included elocution, fencing and dancing (Croall 2011, 34–35) and also published a popular text on acting technique, One Hundred Practical Hints for the Amateur in 1930. Like many other aspects of actresses’ working lives, details of their educational entrepreneurship are scarce. But it is clear that opening small drama schools was one way in which actresses could earn a regular supplementary income and capitalise on their professional reputation, as well as offer a framework for professional development for other actresses. Thus, Sybil Thorndike’s sister, Eileen Thorndike, opened a drama school in Bideford in Devon then founded the Embassy School with Ronald Adam in 1933. In 1927, popular actress Fay Compton set up the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art, run with her sister, actress Viola Compton (1886–1971).

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     387

Ex-students note that Compton’s School offered more ‘individual attention’ than RADA, and in the mid-1930s students—predominantly female— spent mornings in an ‘all sorts mix of … fencing, mime, film technique, tap dancing’ (Le Mesurier 1984, 25) and focused on the intricate details of stage business in the afternoon syllabus working with classical texts (Roberts 1967, 11). Adverts for the Studio appear regularly in The Times from the early 1930s onwards. Initially offering ‘complete training in Stage and Film’, later adverts are more bold: ‘Can you act? Let Fay Compton Studio teach you’ (July 20, 1931) or, ‘Children trained, amateurs coached. Private lessons and classes in elocution, singing and dancing’ (September 7, 1933, 21). Fay Compton (1894–1978) was one of a number of high-profile actresses working successfully across stage and screen in the 1920s and this gave the school, and its annual networking of student work, a particular cachet. Training in such organisations was framed around working with the repertoire, but also around potential employment openings: here, actresses strategically provided a crucial service for the wider industry in terms of shaping and controlling a ‘legitimate’ means of entering the profession.

Actresses’ Careers in Partnership and Beyond There is no question that while ‘actresses were vulnerable to prejudices that affected all women working in the public sphere’ (Sutherland 2007), the period under examination here saw them become much more pragmatically aware of the dynamic complexities of women’s professional lives. This impacted on their ownership of their professionalism in practice: from managing roles, or even companies, to attending to and capitalising on their massive fan base, in the case of ‘stars’ like Tallulah Bankhead (1902–1968) or Vivien Leigh. Bankhead’s fans were once described by novelist and playwright Arnold Bennett, as ‘girls in seated queues at the pit and gallery door … these stalwarts of the cult … bright, youthful and apparently happy’ (quoted in Bankhead 1952, 107). Leigh’s archives are full of long and detailed letters, and notes of gifts, to her global fan base. (The archives for both Vivien Leigh and Lillah McCarthy are in the Department of Theatre & Performance at the V & A. The Bristol Theatre Collection has extensive archives for Ada Reeve, Maud Tree and Cicely Courtneidge.) These actresses and others like Phyllis Dare (1890–1975) who details her sometimes fretful interactions with her fans (Dare 1907) were fully aware of the ‘elements and interactions that make up the whole web of mutual understanding between

388     Maggie B. Gale

potential audiences and their players’ (Bratton 2003, 37). These webs and networks were part of advanced professional life, enhanced from their nineteenth-century forebears perhaps because of the increase in affordable print and other media through which their professional persona could be projected and circulated. In previous generations, professional partnerships were a common means by which actresses could establish their professional profile beyond the work they achieved onstage. A number of the generation of actresses whose careers crossed over from the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth had production partnerships with men: most famously perhaps, Ellen Terry (1847–1928) with Henry Irving; Ellaline Terriss (1871–1971) with Seymour Hicks; Maud Tree (1863–1937) with Herbert Beerbohm Tree; Irene Vanbrugh with Dion Boucicault; Lillah McCarthy with Harley Granville Barker; and Sybil Thorndike (1882–1976) with Lewis Casson (Casson 1972). Such partnerships became less common by the 1930s to the point where Vivien Leigh’s professional and prolific partnership with Laurence Olivier in the 1940s and early 1950s, where both were such high-profile performers, seemed almost nostalgically anachronistic. Other creative partnerships were shaped by specific collaborations: for example, Gladys Cooper working with Gerald Du Maurier whilst she was managing London’s Playhouse Theatre in the 1920s (Cooper 1931). Constance Collier collaborated with Ivor Novello as co-author of the smash hit The Rat and the play on which Hitchcock’s Downhill (1927) was based, as well opening a London ‘bohemian’ night club with him (Collier 1929). Frequently such creative collaborations become glossed over in theatre histories or even undermined altogether: thus Matthew Sweet (2005, 59) in his recent analysis of Ivor Novello as a screen idol claims Constance Collier was an incidental collaborator, ‘a sickly, middle aged actress’. Less intentionally dismissive no doubt, Judith Mackrell (2013, 240) implies The Dancers in 1922 was authored primarily by Gerald Du Maurier with Viola Tree’s collaboration: in fact, of the two, she was the writer and followed up The Dancers with the less successful, but poetic, The Swallow in 1925 (Gale 2019; Tree 1926). Other actresses had the misfortune of being clouded by analyses of their partner’s careers: Lily Brayton (1876–1953) is a particular case in mind. Brayton was both the performance and business partner of Oscar Asche with whom she produced, amongst other hit shows, Chu Chin Chow in 1916—one of the longest-running plays in the West End before the 1950s (see Singleton 2019). Historiographic practice has until recently obscured the depth and breadth of her artistic work as Shakespearean actress, popular star, designer and producer in favour of Asche who, as a

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     389

profligate gambler and eventual bankrupt, perhaps appeals more to theatre historians with a particular, robustly masculinised, version of history to construct. A number of actresses also had artistic partnerships with other women or indeed created a series of roles for particular actresses: for example comic character actress Sydney Fairbrother appeared in a number of successful productions of Gertrude Jennings’ plays in the 1910s and 1920s. Gladys Cooper, not known particularly for any feminist leanings, had a reputation in the ‘theatre world’ as ‘a woman with a certain amount of business’ (1931, 17) and suggested that working with women brought particular advantages: I prefer to do business with women … Women are more alert to new ideas in business – perhaps because they are newer to business … they make up their mind more quickly. Men are far too fond of going out to lunch to talk business. (Cooper 1931, 161)

Helen Grime’s (2013, 146) recent work on Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies (1891–1992) details her theatrical partnership with Marda Vanne (1896–1970) in South Africa in the 1940s with the Ffrangcon-Davies Marda Vanne Shakespeare Company. Here two actresses, both with significant careers, and, in the case of Ffrangcon-Davies, a recognition for work in roles from the classical as well as contemporary repertoire reinvented themselves as arbiters of, albeit a colonialist, repertoire of plays in the South African theatre prior to a shift in power to the post-colonial Afrikaner nationalists.

Reinventing the Self: A Professional Strategy for Survival The unprecedented breadth and depth of expansion of the industry created more frequent shifts in fashions, trends and styles of performance, both in terms of the genres and contents of performance and the kinds of skills needed to work in them. A number of actresses rode over such changes moving with seeming ease from one professional context to another and, in the case of Ada Reeve, Gladys Cooper and Constance Collier, from one continent to another. Successful actresses had to have a capacity to respond to the changing tides of the market, especially if they were no longer in a strong position to shape it. This was not unique to the twentieth century, but the process of production and circulation was perhaps more frenetic both

390     Maggie B. Gale

because of the expansion of the market, and the enhanced means of marketing and circulating its products. Sustaining audience interest and keeping fan bases engaged over the length of a long career became gradually more challenging. British actress Glenda Jackson recently returned to the professional stage after some twenty-three years as an elected politician. In her former career as an actress, she noted on a number of occasions that while for actors there is a trajectory of available roles which followed their maturity from Hamlet to Lear, there is no such repertoire for women—interesting then that her return to acting at the Old Vic Theatre in 2016 was in the title role of King Lear. For actresses from the period explored here, however, there was little likelihood of playing lead male in a Shakespeare production: despite a trend for Shakespeare travesty in the nineteenth century (Howard 2007). While there were a range of parts for aging women—most commonly matriarchs and comedy spinsters, many of which were authored by women playwrights such as Dodie Smith or Gertrude Jennings—a number of actresses simply reinvented themselves. As previously noted Ada Reeve talks proudly of how she trained herself to work on film sets late in life: her last role as ‘Old Woman’ was in The Passionate Stranger directed by Muriel Box in 1957 in her eightythird year. Film, arguably, provided more opportunities for older actresses in small roles than the stage. [For further discussion of opportunities for older actresses, see Chapter 28 by Mary Luckhurst, while for further discussion of women playing male Shakespearean leads including Jackson as Lear, see Chapter 32 by Jami Rogers.] For some actresses and performers, the necessity to adapt one’s skills to fit new professional challenges came earlier in their careers and continued throughout them. For Cicely Courtneidge, who had one of the most various and extraordinary performing careers of the period, this was certainly the case. The daughter of Robert Courtneidge, the socialist producer of hit musical comedies including the long-running The Dairymaids (1906), she had a familial network that initially gave her access to work, with her first major role in The Arcadians in 1910. Her father invested heavily in productions which did not run, and she was left without employment, after having had star billing as a teenager: she had only ever worked for her family at this point. Courtneidge retrained herself from ‘romantic heroine’ to comedy performer, working her way up the billing hierarchies of music hall. Marital and professional partnership with Jack Hulbert bought her other successes in revue, and she then moved successfully into film in the early 1930s, in part to cover debts incurred by an incompetent manager who had all but bankrupted the Courtneidge Hulbert partnership.

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     391

Courtneidge (1953, 115) suggests this was a ‘golden time for everyone in our profession’, in terms of the opportunities offered by the British film industry which had at that point received heavy investment. But not all actresses made such a seamless move: Courtneidge starred in more than a dozen popular films before the Second World War, during which she did charity performances before returning to both stage and film. Also developing a recording career, her last performances were in the mid-1970s. Cicely Courtneidge had originally trained herself by watching other performers and building her own physical and vocal skill base. She then retrained herself as a comic and again to work in film studios. As a businesswoman, she recouped losses by working in film, where she didn’t have to invest her own money, and, as she points out, earned more from a film that took eight weeks to make than in a whole year in her own theatre production (Courtneidge 1953, 117). Like Lena Ashwell, Courtneidge details the labour of theatre work in her autobiography, as well as acknowledging the chasm that separates employment from ‘resting’—the activity Ashwell suggested might take up the majority of an actress’s career. Actresses were very much public figures in the first few decades of the twentieth century, but many chose not to move into film or even to continue in the business after marriage. Edna May (1878–1948) an American actress who had made the successful transfer to British theatre, and Pauline Chase (1885–1962), who played Peter Pan from 1906 to 1913 in the West End, for example, all stopped working once married: Gertie Millar (1979– 1952) stopped working after the death of her husband and theatre partner Lionel Monckton in 1924, and her remarriage the same year. Whilst they had very significant public profiles, huge fan bases and a very consistent level of press coverage of their working and personal lives, they did not take their careers beyond this stage. Some gave up acting for playwriting and, in the case of Cicely Hamilton, for journalism working with small press magazines as well as larger publishers (Spender 1985; Moran 2017). Others, like Lily Brayton, gave up work later in their careers: unusually Brayton’s longestrunning role (in Chu Chin Chow) was taken up in her fortieth year. Some like Zena Dare (1887–1975), postcard beauty and renowned actress in musical comedy, only found the level of fame they had experienced in their youth in roles later in their careers: she featured in Ivor Novello’s last production, King’s Rhapsody (1949), which ran for two years. Histories of theatre often separate out the popular from the ‘legitimate’ in a manner which does not reflect the fact that all forms of performance are part of the same industry (Savran 2004). Here, I have looked at the professional lives of actresses across a range of contexts, bringing together women

392     Maggie B. Gale

who ‘acted’ with those who ‘performed’, as a way of understanding how they were shaped by and responded to the changing status of women and the industry at a significant time of social transformation. While not all of these women shared the same type or length of career, it is possible to argue that they all understood their professional lives as necessitating e­ ngagement with networks and associational cultures and with structures of care and education for the profession. Many of these actresses worked as hard off stage as on, building careers which stretched over decades and across a variety of media: they evidence a real understanding of the labour involved in the business of being an actress.

Bibliography Ashwell, Lena. 1914. ‘Acting as a Profession for Women’. In Women Workers in Seven Professions: A Survey of Their Economic Conditions and Prospects, edited by Edith Morley, 183–91. London: George Routledge. Ashwell, Lena. 1922. Modern Troubadours. London: Gyldendal. Ashwell, Lena. 1929. The Stage. London: Geoffrey Bles. Ashwell, Lena. 1936. Myself a Player. London: Michael Joseph. Bankhead, Tallulah. 1952. Tallulah: My Autobiography. London: Victor Gollancz. Benson, Constance. 1926. Mainly Players: Bensonian Memories. London: Thornton Butterworth. Benson, Constance. 1930. One Hundred Practical Hints for the Amateur. London: Samuel French. Bratton, Jacky. 2003. New Readings in Theatre History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bratton, Jacky. 2011. The Making of the West End Stage: Marriage, Management and the Mapping of Gender in London 1830–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Casson, Jon. 1972. Lewis and Sybil: A Memoir. London: Collins. Cockin, Katharine. 2008. ‘Dutton, Emily Courtier- [Known as Mrs Charles L. Carson; Performing Name Kittie Claremont]’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/57870. Collier, Constance. 1929. Harlequinade: The Story of My Life. London: John Lane The Bodley Head. Compton, Fay. 1926. Rosemary: Some Remembrances. London: Alston Rivers. Cooper, Gladys. 1931. Gladys Cooper. London: Hutchinson. Courtneidge, Cicely. 1953. Cicely. London: Hutchinson. Courtneidge, Robert. 1930. I Was an Actor Once. London: Hutchinson. Craig, Elizabeth. 1923. The Stage Favourites’ Cook Book. London: Hutchinson.

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     393

Croall, Jonathan. 2011. John Gielgud: Matinee Idol to Movie Star. London: Bloomsbury. Dare, Phyllis. 1907. From School to Stage. London: Collier. Darewski, Madame Max [Ruby Miller]. 1933. Believe Me or Not! London: John Long. Davis, Tracy C. 1989. ‘Questions for a Feminist Methodology in Theatre History’. In Interpreting the Theatrical Past, edited by Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie, 59–81. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Davis, Tracy C. 1991. Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture. London: Routledge. Davis, Tracy C. 2000. ‘Female Managers, Lessees, and Proprietors of the British Stage (to 1914)’. Nineteenth Century Theatre 28, no. 2: 114–44. The Dominion. 1911. ‘Three Arts Club’, May 9, 1911. Accessed October 13, 2018. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/DOM19110505.2.113. Dorney, Kate, and Maggie B. Gale, eds. 2018. Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Farr, Florence. 1910. Modern Woman: Her Intentions. London: John Palmer. Filippi, Rosina. 1911. Hints to Speakers and Players. London: Edward Arnold. Gale, Maggie B. 1996. West End Women: Women on the London Stage 1918–1962. London: Routledge. Gale, Maggie B. 2004. ‘Lena Ashwell and Autobiographical Negotiations of the Professional Self ’. In Auto/biography and Identity: Women, Theatre and Performance, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, 99–125. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gale, Maggie B. 2019. A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900–1950: Citizenship, Surveillance and the Body. Abingdon: Routledge. Gale, Maggie B., and Gilli Bush Bailey, eds. 2012. Plays and Performance Texts by Women 1880–1930: An Anthology of Plays by British and American Women from the Modernist Period. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gale, Maggie B., and Kate Dorney, eds. 2019. Stage Women, 1900–50: Female Theatre Workers and Professional Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gill, Maud. 1938. See the Players. London: Hutchinson. Gledhill, Christine. 2008. ‘Play as Experiment in 1920s Cinema’. Film History 20: 14–34. Glenn, Susan. 2000. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grime, Helen. 2013. Gwen Ffrangcon Davies: Twentieth Century Actress. London: Pickering and Chatto. Hindson, Catherine. 2016. London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Hirschfield, Claire. 1984. ‘The Actresses’ Franchise League and the Campaign for Suffrage 1908–1914’. Theatre Research International 10, no. 2: 129–53.

394     Maggie B. Gale

Hirschfield, Claire. 1987. ‘The Suffragist Playwright in Edwardian England’. Frontiers 9, no. 2: 1–6. Holledge, Julie. 1981. Innocent Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre. London: Virago. Howard, Tony. 2007. Women as Hamlet: Performance and Interpretation in Theatre, Film and Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Katherine. 1994. ‘The Actresses’ Franchise League Prepare for War: Feminist Theatre in Camouflage’. Theater Survey 35, no. 1: 121–37. Kingston, Gertrude. 1937. Curtsey While You’re Thinking. London: Williams and Norgate. Leask, Margaret. 2012. Lena Ashwell: Actress, Patriot, Pioneer. Hertfordshire: Hertfordshire University Press. Le Mesurier, John. 1984. A Jobbing Actor. London: Elm Tree Books. Lewis, Arthur. 1901. ‘The Famous Actresses of Europe’. Strand Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, March 1902: 332–42. Lewis, Jane. 1984. Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change. Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books. Mackrell, Judith. 2013. Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation. London: Pan. Marion, Kitty. 2019. The Autobiography of Kitty Marion: Actor and Activist, edited by Viv Gardner and Diane Atkinson. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marra, Kim. 2006. Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theater 1865–1914. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. McCarthy, Lillah. 1933. Myself and Some Friends. London: Thornton Butterworth. Moran, Sean. 2017. The Stage Career of Cicely Hamilton. Berlin: Peter Lang. Paxton, Naomi. 2018. Stage Rights! The Actresses’ Franchise League, Activism and Politics 1908–58. Manchester: Manchester University Press. The Performer. 1908. ‘Ada Reeve and the Stage Struck’. The Performer, June 4, 1908. Perkin, Harold. 1989. The Rise of Professional Society: England Since 1880. London: Routledge. Reeve, Ada. 1954. Take It for a Fact. London: Heinemann. Roberts, Peter. 1967. ‘Knights of the Theatre: 5—Alec Guinness, Confessions of a Chameleon’. The Times, December 4, 1967. Sanderson, Michael. 1984. From Irving to Olivier: A Social History of the Acting Profession 1880–1983. London: Athlone Press. Savran, David. 2004. ‘Towards a Historiography of the Popular’. Theatre Survey 45, no. 2: 211–17. Schweitzer, Marlis. 2009. When Broadway Was the Runway: Theatre, Fashion and American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Singleton, Brian. 2004. Oscar Ashe, Orientalism and British Musical Comedy. Westport: Praeger. Singleton, Brian. 2019. ‘Lily Brayton: A Theatre Maker in Every Sense’. In Stage Women 1900–50: Female Theatre Workers and Professional Practice, edited by

17  British Actresses, 1900–1950: Professional Transformations     395

Maggie B. Gale and Kate Dorney, 191–215. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spender, Dale. 1985. Time and Tide Wait for No Man. London: Pandora. Sutherland, Lucie. 2007. ‘The Actress and the Profession: Training in England in the Twentieth Century’. In The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, edited by Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes, 95–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sweet, Matthew. 2005. Shepperton Babylon: The Lost World of British Cinema. London: Faber and Faber. Terriss, Ellaline. 1955. Just a Little Bit of String. London: Hutchinson. Tree, Viola. 1925. The Swallow, Unpublished Manuscript, Lord Chamberlain’s Play Collection, British Library, UK. Tree, Viola. 1926. Castles in the Air. London: Hogarth Press. Vanbrugh, Irene. 1948. To Tell My Story. London: Hutchinson. Vanbrugh, Irene. 1951. Hints on the Art of Acting. London: Hutchinson. Vanbrugh, Violet. 1931. Dare to Be Wise. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

18 Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova: ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses, Stanislavsky’s System and the Moscow Art Theatre Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

This chapter considers the artistic and cultural contribution of the ‘­second wave’ actresses of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) who worked at the MAT itself and at the MAT Studios in the revolutionary and civil war period (1910s–1920s) and who went on to have distinguished careers as performers, teachers and directors in Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR (1920s–1970s). The MAT had been founded in 1898 by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko and soon became famous throughout Russia, Europe and America for its staging of the new drama of Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen and others and for innovative stagings of the classics. The leading actresses of the original MAT included Stanislavsky’s wife Lilina, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, Maria Andreyeva and Olga Gzovskaya. Stanislavsky himself was a true patriarch, who expected obedience, submission and unquestioning trust from the actresses he trained early in his career, but, at the same time, an idealized view of the female performer as muse was an essential element of his artistic vision (Ignatieva 2008). Examination of the work of the first generation of actresses at the

Maria Ignatieva (*)  The Ohio State University at Lima, Lima, OH, USA Rose Whyman  Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_18

397

398     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

MAT reveals a number of tensions brought about by the combination of Stanislavsky’s approach to working with women, his conservatism and somewhat puritanical moral views and the sexuality associated with the profession of actress, as well as, on occasion, their political radicalism—Andreyeva, for example, was a Bolshevik. For the ‘second wave’ actresses, Stanislavsky remained a dominating figure but there were tensions between the representations of femininity they embodied and the conventional and gendered behaviour in the plays produced by the MAT, which were generally authored and directed by men. There were also developments and complexities in the application and teaching of what became known as Stanislavsky’s ‘System’. These complexities became even more pronounced in the MAT Studios where Leopold Sulerzhitsky whom Stanislavsky considered his only ‘true’ disciple, was initially in charge. This responsibility was then taken on variously by Evgenii Vakhtangov and Mikhail Chekhov. At different times, Stanislavsky viewed both Vakhtangov and Chekhov as errant students who diverged from his principles, but each developed aspects of the System in ways which still continue to be influential in the practice of acting. The actresses who worked with them included Maria Ouspenskaya, who was a member of the First Studio, toured with the MAT and remained in America. Serafima Birman was accepted in the MAT troupe and joined the First Studio of the MAT in 1913. She worked with Vakhtangov and continued acting with the company from 1924 to 1936 as the First Studio became the Second Moscow Art Theatre (MAT-2), and taught for Vakhtangov at the Third Studio. Sofia Giatsintova was accepted at the MAT in 1910, along with Lidiya Deikun; both worked for the First Studio, then Giatsintova continued at the MAT-2, and Deikun at the MAT itself. Nadezhda Bromley and Olga Pyzhova joined the MAT in 1914/15 and then worked with Vakhtangov in the First Studio. Bromley went on to work with Chekhov in the MAT Second Studio and continued to write and direct as well as act. Lastly, Maria Knebel worked in Chekhov’s studio, then the Second Studio and with the MAT troupe from 1924 to 1950. The experiences of these actresses illuminate the System in practice, and what occurred as a result of the departure of Vakhtangov and Mikhail Chekhov. In the 1930s, Stanislavsky’s ‘System’ (or a received notion of it) was endorsed by the state as the ideologically correct way of training performers for socialist realist art. Some of the actresses taught the System, while not necessarily using it fully in their own roles and having to keep silent about their allegiance to Chekhov, or to avant-garde movements such as those led by Vsevolod Meyerhold. Some of these actresses went on to

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     399

work professionally as directors; most were involved as acting teachers in various schools including the major Russian actor training establishment, GITIS. Some continued to work at the MAT and others in a number of different theatres. The loyalty and obedience demanded by Stanislavsky to his ideal of theatre art were replaced by the demands of what Geoffrey Hosking (2001, 486) has called ‘the Stalinist neopatriarchal social system’. While Marxist teaching on emancipation from traditional gender roles in the creation of the New Soviet Man and the New Soviet Woman had been a lynchpin of the Bolshevik attempt to transform society, by the 1930s it was clear that policies such as easy divorce and abortion available on demand were creating instability in various ways and the birth-rate was falling. While the notion of the stable family as a cornerstone of society was reinstated, it was with a new slant as the Soviet family and the authorities attempted to ‘construct a particular set of gender relations – a triangular set of relations in which the primary relationship of individual men and women was to the state, rather than to each other’ (Ashwin 2000, 1–2). For these actresses to sustain a career, it was necessary to dedicate themselves, ostensibly as workers in the interests of the Communist cause. Success in the past had always been dependent on negotiations with male directors, teachers, playwrights and actors but was now increasingly dependent on submission to the dictates of the Soviet state. This analysis strives to reassess Stanislavsky’s work and examine the social and cultural role of the actress in early twentieth-century Russia and in the Stalinist period. It recognizes and acknowledges the importance of these women whose work overall has been overshadowed as a field of study in the development of theatre practice in Russia with the exception, to some extent, of Maria Knebel and Maria Ouspenskaya. While the work of all these women remains under-researched, we have chosen to focus on four actresses here: Serafima Birman, Sofia Giatsintova, Olga Pyzhova and Alla Tarasova, as the critical survey of these four actresses’ careers involves interesting comparisons and throws light on the position of the actress in the revolutionary period and after.

‘Second Wave’ Stage One: Serafima Birman (1890–1976) and Sofia Giatsintova (1891–1982) These two actresses began their careers at the MAT together. Lifelong friends and colleagues, they became the leading actresses of the First Studio and the MAT-2, where they also began to direct. After the closure of the

400     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

MAT-2, they accompanied Ivan Bersenyev, Giatsintova’s husband, to work in other Soviet theatres; both also worked in film. While their roles and styles of acting differed, they were united by a commitment to principles of acting established before the Revolution in the First Studio and in other avant-garde experiments.

Serafima Birman Birman was born in Kishinyev in Moldova to a German army-captain and a Moldovan mother. There was no interest in the theatre within her family. Her step-sister fought to study medicine in Moscow, after a period during which women’s education had been repressed, and she encouraged Birman to leave home in 1908 to study at the historical-physiological faculty of Higher Courses of Ger’e for women. Birman secretly also took the School for Dramatic Arts course run by the MAT actor Alexander Adashev along with Vakhtangov. She was accepted into the MAT troupe and joined the First Studio in 1913. She taught for Vakhtangov at the Third Studio and worked with the MAT-2 from 1924 to 1936. She then joined what became known as Teatr Moskovskogo Soveta, the Theatre of Moscow City Council (Mossoviet) from 1936 to 1938, with Giatsintova, Bersenyev, and other MAT-2 members. There she staged Maxim Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, playing the main role in an acclaimed production. In 1938, she was one of the founders of the Teatr Leninskogo Komsomola (Moscow Komsomol Theatre). She worked there until 1958 and then rejoined the Mossoviet troupe. As a film actress, she won the Stalin prize for her role in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in 1946 and was given the award of People’s Artist of the RSFSR. She published four books: The Actor and the Role (1934), The Actor’s Labour (1939), The Path of the Actress (1959), Encounters Gifted by Destiny (1971).

The System or the Avant-Garde? In the autobiographical writings of late nineteenth-century actresses, there were conventions governing the presentation of the female self in theatre work, including a public dedication of oneself to the sacred Art of Theatre (Meisel 2008, 154). This was continued by the new generation of actresses, who refer to realizing their prizvanie (vocation) in relation to the MAT. Birman, in her writings, professes just such a vocation, love and respect for

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     401

her teacher Stanislavsky, describing herself as being ‘purified’ by encounters with him when he critiqued her technique (1962, 49–50). She also dedicates herself to art in the service of the Soviet state and proclaims allegiance to Stanislavsky’s System—he was upheld as the authority on acting as socialist realism was imposed. Despite this, and despite the detailed explanations of the System in her writings, Birman’s own work developed away from it towards the avant-garde and the extent to which she used the System in her acting is questionable. As avant-garde work was repressed under Stalin, she could not acknowledge her experimentation but the opportunities she took to practise this indicate her search for self-determination within the patriarchal and neopatriarchal systems in which she lived. Stanislavsky entrusted the teaching of his developing System (which met resistance among the first wave of MAT actors) to Leopold Sulerzhitsky, a follower of Leo Tolstoy’s spiritual and ethical philosophy, in Adashev’s school and then to Vakhtangov. In 1911, Birman (1975, 82) writes, ‘a new concept of the theatre and of acting as a profession was formed. Our purpose was to reveal the truth, to probe the depths of human experience’. Vakhtangov began to experiment himself, incurring Stanislavsky’s disfavour for a time, and Birman (1975, 86) speaks of Vakhtangov as a genius, though she says he made mistakes and had faults. However, Mikhail Chekhov was the actor whom Birman most admired. Neither of them wanted to work from personal experience as Stanislavsky propounded, developing roles from affective memory work, because their pasts held painful memories. Like Chekhov, who developed his ideas of ‘psychological gesture’ and ‘imitating the image’ as an alternative to Stanislavsky’s ideas, Birman developed a technique which departed from a psychologically realistic approach. A further major factor in Birman’s development was her appearance. In view of the conventions around character type (amplua ), regarding representations of femininity and gendered behaviour in roles, she would not be considered for ‘heroine’ parts such as Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House or attractive female roles such as Maria in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, roles for which her peer Giatsintova gained fame. She maintained that because her long nose and thinness precluded such opportunities, she played mostly bit parts during her early career. An important role finally came her way in 1921, when Vakhtangov staged his expressionist version of August Strindberg’s Erik XIV with Chekhov as Erik and Birman as the dowager queen, to great acclaim. Visually influenced by Cubism and showcasing Vakhtangov’s experiments with the grotesque, the production was seen as relevant to the Revolution in its depiction of the social conflict between the court and the ordinary people. This was one of Chekhov’s great roles and

402     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

Birman was equally acclaimed for her ‘strong, majestic, embittered Dowager Queen’ (Rudnitsky 1988, 53). She herself writes, ‘My queen was fearfully lonely and unhappy’ and remarks that she had developed her image as that of ‘a giant black bat’ (Solovyo’eva et al. 2010, 48). Further roles as antiheroines or, as Birman (1975, 90) called them, ‘extraordinary women’ were to follow and her unusual appearance lent itself to comedy and character work, so she was to acquire a reputation as a consummate artist of ­tragi-comic grotesque.

Tragi-Farce and Eccentrism Continuing to develop her own acting and pedagogic method in the 1920s, beyond the conventions of amplua, she wrote in 1928 that she began to work on the borders of tragi-farce. Tragi-farce, a genre for which the work of Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) had been formational, was the theatre aesthetic based upon the presentation of a distorted reality, where farcical events have tragic aspects or consequences. A related genre of circus-like farce was developed by Meyerhold and Eisenstein, celebrating the revolution and linking ideas from Russian formalism and circus: the concept of the grotesque was also combined with virtuosity of performance in the productions of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s Factory of the Eccentric Actor in which angularity and precision, extremes in movement and voice, were used to shock or jolt the audience. The term ‘eccentrism’ came to signify this style and the related acting methods were part of the rebellion against Stanislavsky’s psychologism. As Listengarten (2000, 181–88) discusses, ­tragi-farce later developed into an intellectually nuanced form reflecting in a coded way the ambivalence of Soviet political realities: despite the attempts to quell it as socialist realism became dominant and theatrical representation an ideological battleground, it persisted in various ways.

Birman’s Synthesis While ideas of the grotesque and tragi-farce were emerging, Birman took as one of the bases for her work Tolstoyan philosophy with its non-­ orthodox Christianity and idea of non-resistance to evil that had influenced the System through Sulerzhitsky. While Birman often played the roles of anti-heroines such as Vassa, or Efrosinia Staritskaya, she used Stanislavsky’s precept that if you are playing a bad character you should look for what is

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     403

good in them. She extended this idea when playing Queen Anne in 1929 in a production of Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, writing that her portrayal of this grotesque character, whom she saw as ‘ugly morally and physically’ was against ‘despotism, tyranny’, for from a human point of view ‘a denunciation of all that is hostile to life and man is the equivalent of affirming all that is beneficial to them’ (Birman 1975, 90–91). Birman found middle ground in the dispute between Stanislavsky and Meyerhold on the grotesque, the foundation of which for Stanislavsky had to be psychological content and for Meyerhold external gesture and movement. However, in her writings she could not mention Meyerhold, whose star had fallen by the time she began to write in any detail, as had Chekhov’s, and so accounts of her work from the 1930s acknowledge Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Sulerzhitsky as her only influences. However, Birman’s link with Meyerhold and actors of what might be called the ‘grotesque eccentric’ school has been well established (Shestova 2013, 77–82).

Birman as Director By 1924, Birman was emerging as the first female director at the MAT in the First Studio. With the scheduling of Alexei Tolstoy’s Love Is the Book of Gold she asserted her independence of thought, since Mikhail Chekhov disagreed with its inclusion in the directorial plan (Solovyo’eva et al. 2010, 59). The play concerns a book published with the consent of Catherine II, which offers advice on how a ‘gallant cavalier should behave towards the fair sex and love relationships’ and tells the story of a court romance. Giatsintova (1989, 215) writes of Birman’s satirical comedic imagination in the treatment of this text and psychologically truthful decisions for scenes. In view of its success, the First Studio was reformed in 1924 as the MAT-2, with Chekhov as artistic director, Bersenyev in the directorate and Giatsintova and Birman as the leading actresses. As time went on there were disagreements about the direction of the theatre particularly between Chekhov and A. D. Dikii, who left in 1926; as Soviet policies towards the arts became increasingly dictatorial and opposed to the avant-garde, Mikhail Chekhov’s work was attacked for mysticism and condemned as antiSoviet, prompting his emigration in 1928. Productions of the MAT-2 were increasingly seen as irrelevant to Soviet life while the original MAT and Stanislavsky began to be canonized. As the role of theatre critics became increasingly politicized, articles such as ‘Down with the eccentric school!’ in 1936 (attacking Birman and leading actors who worked with Meyerhold)

404     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

sealed the fate of the MAT-2 and it was closed, after which a difficult time ensued for Birman and others.

Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova The writer of ‘Down with the eccentric school!’ had also ferociously attacked Birman’s Queen Anne but help came from Maxim Gorky whose particular socialist-realist approach had found favour with Stalin. He had admired Birman in The Man Who Laughs and responded positively to her request to produce his play Vassa Zheleznova. Birman directed the revival at Mossoviet in 1936, also playing the title role. She questioned her right to put on a play by the ‘great realist’, asking ‘Did I, an eccentric actress possess the qualities and abilities required of Gorky’s heroine?’ (1975, 91). Gorky encouraged the project, emphasizing in his rewriting the class politics in this tragedy of a tyrannical bourgeoise struggling to keep her family and business together. Birman’s Vassa was seen as ‘complex, cruel, unbending’, but nevertheless a ‘human woman’ as another character calls her (Gromov 1976, 120). It was a controversial production but the play continued in the repertoire with the reviews becoming more positive, despite the sympathy evoked for a character deemed a class enemy. Moreover, through this role, Birman asserted the avant-garde aspects of her method, though it was not until 1975 that she could write explaining eccentrism as ‘justified exaggeration and sharp but carefully considered accentuation’ (1975, 91).

Birman on Film Birman is probably best known outside Russia as the murderous Efrosinia Staritskaya in Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, Part 1 for which she won the Stalin prize in 1946, playing Ivan’s aunt who believes her own son Vladimir should be on the throne. Eisenstein had to do battle with the Film Committee to get permission for Birman to play the role, as they considered her unsuitable in view of Stalin’s ideas about the film. She struggled with the role of a noblewoman and writes that the first meeting with cinematographer Andrei Moskvin ‘was ghastly’ as he could not see how her physical attributes would work on film (1975, 106–7). Unlike other film directors she had worked with, Eisenstein expected her to achieve the role without much preparation and direction and she was

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     405

struggling with the culminating scene when they heard that a commission from the Film Committee was coming to see how work on Ivan the Terrible was progressing, including how she was coping with her role. Birman writes of this scene that: at rehearsals I had always tried to discover in myself the attributes of a domineering woman … a ‘ruler’, a ‘matriarch’ but all of this was suddenly supplanted by the knowledge that I, Efrosinia, was a sinful woman, but that moment had come when I would no longer have to resort to deception, intrigue, disloyalty and crime.

Then, instead of seeing Ivan dead and ‘expecting to find supreme happiness’, Staritskaya sees that the corpse is her son, finding ‘instead supreme anguish’. Eisenstein said that the film committee had not recognized her and thought it was another actress, approving the scene. She experienced exultation at this culmination of her work as a tragi-grotesque actress (1975, 114–19). The project of the pre-and post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde was to explore the language of the body, the transformation of the human body into the actor’s instrument. While avant-garde art was vilified and suppressed under Stalin, as an actor Birman was able, at least sometimes, in roles such as Staritskaya, to assert both her eccentrism and her humanist ethos through her artistic creation of powerful anti-heroines and class enemies.

Sofia Giatsintova Giatsintova was born in Moscow, the daughter of a professor of art history, so her upbringing, unlike Birman’s, took place in the privileged circles of the intelligentsia. Her father knew Stanislavsky personally and, with her uncle Alexei Venkstern, acted in a Shakespeare theatre circle. She was accepted at the MAT in 1910, selected as one of five from 500 examinees, along with Dikii and Deikun. She writes of the MAT as her ‘destiny’ (sud’ba ), the word occurring frequently in her writings. Starting with small roles in Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird and in crowd scenes such as in Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit she graduated to small speaking roles. She had successes in some of these but her acting career really began to develop, like that of Birman, in the First Studio. Giatsintova played twenty-three roles in her twenty years in the Studio and then at the MAT-2. Studio roles included Clementina in Herman

406     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

Heijermans’ The Wreck of the Hope, Ida Buchner in Gerhardt Hauptmann’s The Festival of Peace and the hearth fairy in an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Cricket on the Hearth. She was an elf in Juliusz Slowacki’s Balladyna but her first main role was Maria in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in 1917, opposite Chekhov in his acclaimed performance as Malvolio. She played Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew and Sanka (the confidante of Princess Darya) in Love Is the Book of Gold. From 1924, at the MAT2, the range of her roles continued to expand: she was the young peasant woman Kekkina in Baby (The Women ), which was based on two commedia dell’arte plays by Carlo Goldoni in 1924; Sima in Crank, a Soviet play by Alexander Afinogenov in 1929, and Amaranta in John Fletcher’s The Spanish Priest in 1934. She played a tragic role in Pavel Sukhotin’s Darkness of the Liberator in 1931 and Nelly in an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted (1932). She was particularly proud of her creation of a lyrical image, a character that was psychologically accurate but also had poetic dimensions in In 1825, a play written by her cousin, Natalya Venkstern, about the Decembrist revolt. Giatsintova played across the age range, from girls (Nelly, Kekkina), to mature women such as Natalya Petrovna in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country and the role of Genevieve, in Prayer for Life, Georges Duval’s chronicle of a family spanning the decades from 1872 to 1933, where she played the protagonist’s mistress at a number of different stages in her life. For Giatsintova, the role went beyond amplua (1989, 345). After the closure of the MAT-2, Giatsintova played Rachel, Vassa’s daughter-in-law in Birman’s production of Vassa Zheleznova. From 1938 to 1957, Giatsintova led the Komsomol Theatre together with Bersenyev, Birman and Giatsintova, and, after her husband’s death in 1951, became sole artistic director until 1957. She was at the Moscow Stanislavsky Drama Theatre from 1958 to 1960 then rejoined the Komsomol Theatre in 1961, where she remained for the rest of her life. She played roles from Russian classics (Turgenev, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Ostrovsky) and from plays by contemporary Socialist Realist writers such as A. and P. Tur, as well as acting parts in plays from outside Russia, such as Sarah Farrelly, wife of the antifascist in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine. Like Birman, she had success in film roles in the later part of her career. In 1963, Giatsintova published The Life of the Theatre, about Russian theatre, and in 1989 published her memoirs, Alone with Memory, an account which deals with her childhood and her career up until the ­closure of the MAT-2.

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     407

The System and the Development of Giatsintova’s Own Methods Giatsintova’s attitude to Stanislavsky was adulatory although, unlike Birman, she does not describe any cathartic moments as a young actress, other than that ‘my legs went from under me’ the first time she met him (1989, 51). She describes how, as with Birman, he called her for a one-to-one rehearsal when she was in Ostrovsky’s Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man. She writes that she was afraid as she saw what he wanted from her in that role but felt she did not have the personal qualities needed, so cunningly set herself tasks she felt she could accomplish that were on the lines he wanted. She writes ‘Stanislavsky moulded me … he threw me all sorts of adaptations’ (1989, 55). At that time he was experimenting with various types of exercises including concentration exercises such as asking students to count the squares on a curtain. Giatsintova hated these exercises but initially felt she could not say so. When she did pluck up the necessary courage, he told her she need not do this and said that different things worked for different artists (1989, 51–52, 55–56). More prepared to speak up for herself to Stanislavsky than Birman, Giatsintova also notes that the presence at rehearsals of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko and Stanislavsky’s lessons with her were ‘the highest school of theatre art’ (1989, 62). This was despite the difficulty of her encounters in her early period working at the MAT with NemirovichDanchenko, whom she described as being her ‘personal enemy’ at that time (1989, 48). She recounts that he once said: I don’t think there is anything to be done with you. You are clever, as far as I can see, you have an attractive appearance and you will have success as an ingénue in the provinces. You are a typical Polina [from Ostrovsky’s A Profitable Position ] but you can’t play Mashenka in Enough Stupidity - you don’t have the comic qualities, the mischief.

She asks whether he was wrong, answering herself, ‘Yes and no – I did become a character actress’ (1989, 48–49). In fact, she did get the opportunity to play Mashenka, replacing Alisa Koonen who became ill, and her performance was acclaimed by all, including Nemirovich-Danchenko, Stanislavsky, and even Lenin, who saw the production in 1918.

408     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

The First Studio Giatsintova was one of the original group of students who began working in 1911 on the System. When the First Studio began, Stanislavsky asked them to take responsibility for the Studio: male members took charge of the stage and communications with the MAT with the assistance of Sushkevich, of accounting, the relationship with the audience and artistic production, while, reflecting contemporary attitudes towards women, the actresses were asked to prepare the breakfasts, a task which Deikun and another actress undertook (Gromov 1976, 55). Giatsintova expresses deep admiration for Sulerzhitsky and his direction of the Studio, both in artistic terms and with regard to the ethical and moral direction he gave to it and its members (1989, 79–86). However, she continued to question some of the bases of the developing system, particularly the requirement that the actor had to work from personal experience in improvisations and roles, writing, ‘I hated the études, because you had to “go from yourself ”, you could not even change your name’ (1989, 84). While she also admired Vakhtangov, she was prepared to resist him, challenging Vakhtangov’s interpretation of her role as Ida Buchner in The Wreck of the Hope though she eventually had to take on his directorial concept (1989, 55). It was Mikhail Chekhov, however, whom she, like Birman, idealized as an actor. Though Stanislavsky rejected Chekhov’s acclaimed performance as Hamlet in 1924, she writes that she lay awake at night, repeating to herself Chekhov’s speeches as he had performed them (1989, 239). She attributed the success of the Studio to him (1989, 100–2). She went so far in defence of Chekhov’s ideas after their suppression as to write, in comments on the ‘image’ of the role, ‘Chekhov’s image is not only the role. It is admirable heroism, courage of the heart. I would say it is patriotism’ (1989, 168). Like Birman, Giatsintova was inspired by Chekhov’s use of the grotesque, challenging in her own way received representations of feminine, gendered behaviour in roles. Giatsintova’s use of the grotesque was more subtle than Birman’s eccentric style. She ‘possessed such sharp expressiveness, individuality in the twenty years of MAT-2’s art … and particularly … found grotesque colours in the last act of Duval’s Prayer for Life, where she played an older woman stubborn in her desire to remain a girl’ (Gromov 1976, 113). In contrast, Giatsintova was considered to have perfected ultra-realistic roles such as Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House, about which she writes she wanted to express ‘the brightest, boldest thoughts about woman, her life … her nature that is alive, freedom-loving, fearless, relating her to our time, her desires are ours’ (1989, 131). Borisova writes that Giatsintova’s idea of womanhood,

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     409

women of courage, will, civic honesty and intellect was expressed in Nora and in The Taming of the Shrew, where Giatsintova’s Katherine was ‘feminine, pure, naïve and not bad tempered’ (Gromov 1976, 67). Giatsintova’s range was wider than Birman’s, though her roles tended to less ‘extraordinary’ women. Her approach also departed from Stanislavsky’s System: Rudnitsky summarizes it as an ‘approximation to life’, by which he meant her roles were theatricalized, rather than drawing mainly on personal experience and direct observation from life (quoted in Giatsintova 1989, 532). In 1934, she wrote: We worked out our own system a long time ago; we departed from Stanislavsky’s System a long time ago, keeping its healthy roots which are true and feed into Socialist Realism … but our manner of acting, our taste, style and repertoire differentiates us from the first MAT, from our teachers. (Smeliansky 2011, 222)

Giatsintova as Director As a director at the MAT-2, Giatsintova worked as a co-director on Baby with Birman and Deikun, with V. V. Gotovtsev on the second production of Twelfth Night in 1933, in which Chekhov was replaced by Azarin, and with Birman on The Spanish Priest, Prayer for Life and other plays. The criticism that led to the closure of the theatre (Giatsintova 1989, 360) focused to a large extent on the ethos instituted by Sulerzhitsky. Devastated by the closure of their spiritual home, the company regarded the move to the theatre belonging to Yevsei Lyubimov-Lanskoi which became Mossoviet as a temporary measure and they wanted a theatre ‘home’ of their own. Moving to the Komsomol Theatre in 1938, with Bersenyev as artistic director, allowed Birman and Giatsintova new directing opportunities. The working partnership they had enjoyed before was maintained at the Komsomol Theatre but Giatsintova was also the sole director on productions such as A Month in the Country (1939), Ivan Popov’s The Ulyanov Family (1949), and The Cherry Orchard (1955). She was Artistic Director of the theatre from 1952 to 1958. Like Birman, Giatsintova publicly dedicated her art to the service of the state with increasing frequency. While she writes of the First Studio, ‘The October revolution [of 1917] came completely unexpectedly for us’ (1989, 165), she, Birman and other actresses underwent training as nurses and worked in hospitals as the First Studio became a field hospital for a time. In World War II, she wrote that it was the task of Stanislavsky’s actors to

410     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

work for the destruction of Hitler (1989, 138). Such statements perhaps facilitated her film career as a Soviet actress and Giatsintova joined the Communist Party in 1951.

Giatsintova on Film In 1946, Giatsintova starred in Mikhail Chiaureli’s socialist realist film The Vow. She played Varvara Petrovna, a woman who walks to Moscow to give Vladimir Ilyich Lenin a letter of allegiance from the working people of Stalingrad, only to find that Lenin has just died. She presents the letter instead to Stalin who has just spoken at Lenin’s funeral on Red Square and dedicated himself to Lenin’s cause. An article in her archive proclaims that the film reflects Stalin’s struggle to create a new state, from 1924 to the present, depicting ‘the genius of our time, Comrade Stalin, and that great love and trust which the Soviet people have in him’. The director notes that in such a film, ‘the slightest falseness would be unforgiveable’ in Giatsintova’s symbolic creation of an ‘image of a Soviet woman in its internal truth … bearing through the most difficult time a crystal pure love for the Motherland, for Stalin, for her children, among whom she raised worthy sons of the Bolshevik party’ (Chiaureli 1946). The film won Giatsintova the Stalin Prize, but has scarcely been shown since Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1955, she was awarded the title of People’s Artist of the USSR. While Giatsintova was praised for the truthfulness of her performance in The Vow, it is interesting that in the same archive folder there is a cutting about The Great Citizen, a two-part film from 1937 to 1939 directed by Fridrikh Ermler, in which Bersenyev played Kartashev, who attempts to send a delegation to interfere with the party congress of 1925, his portrayal of this ‘cunning and vile enemy … evoked the contempt and hatred of the whole auditorium’ (RGALI ϕ.1989 op. 1, 262 Materialy o Berseneve Ivane Nikolaeviche, Velikii Grazhdanin ). Bersenyev’s performance was applauded, presumably according to the same standards of Stanislavskian psychological ‘truthfulness’ as Giatsintova’s which seems contradictory. The director of The Vow seemed to think the actress had to be truly committed to the film’s message in order to produce this ‘truth’ whereas Bersenev was not taken to be committed to the views of a class enemy. Later, in 1957, Giatsintova played the role of Lenin’s mother Maria in the film of Popov’s The Ulyanov Family. Rudnitsky notes that the ‘leitmotif of the role was self-possession’ (quoted in Giatsintova 1989, 540).

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     411

The consummate artistry of the MAT actress and her commitment to the ethos of the Studio perhaps enabled her to perform in roles depicting Stalin’s idea of the Soviet woman with self-possession and some truth as in life, though there is no way of knowing her true political beliefs, since to commit oneself to the Communist cause was the only way to remain in work.

‘Second Wave’ Stage Two: Alla Tarasova (1898– 1973) and Olga Pyzhova (1894–1972) In 1924, Stanislavsky (1999, 136–38), while on tour in the United States, wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko that two actresses were vitally important for the future of the MAT: Alla Tarasova and Olga Pyzhova. Tarasova accepted the offer, while Pyzhova rejected it: Pyzhova went instead to work at the MAT-2, joining her friends from the First Studio. Tarasova gradually became a star in theatre and film, the People’s Artist of the USSR—the title was introduced in 1936, replacing the earlier title of ‘People’s Artist of the Republic’. (Among the first recipients of the title in 1936 were Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Ivan Moskvin.) Tarasova was also awarded the Stalin Prize four times. As for Pyzhova, while she was a success as Mirandolina from The Mistress of the Inn in America, she returned to the MAT-2 only to be fired in 1927, as a member of the opposition to artistic director Mikhail Chekhov. Afterwards, Pyzhova worked at the Theatre of the Revolution, but then retired from theatre entirely and dedicated her life to teaching, becoming in 1939 the first woman in the USSR to be awarded the title of Professor of Acting in any theatre institution.

Alla Tarasova Tarasova was born to the family of a doctor in Kiev in 1898—the year the MAT was opened. Having fallen in love with MAT when it toured her home town, Tarasova went to Moscow and auditioned at the age of 17. She was advised to become a student of the School for Dramatic Arts, but, at the same time, she started playing in crowd scenes in various MAT productions. In addition to her studies at the School for Dramatic Arts, she attended classes at the University.

412     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

The Second Studio Upon the closing of the School for Dramatic Arts, Vakhtang Mchedelov, one of the teachers there, encouraged the young actors to continue their training, and he himself became the centre around whom the Second Studio revolved. Thus, the Second Moscow Art Theatre Studio was established, opening with The Green Ring by Zinaida Gippius: Tarasova had become its star and played the lead, Finochka. The Studio’s teaching schedule was packed with classes, from morning until 6 p.m.: lessons on diction and articulation, singing and dancing, fencing and manners, declamation and rehearsing scenes from plays. The company were also taught theatre and art history. Indeed, the parallels between the roles of Sulerzhitsky in the First Studio and Mchedelov in the Second are unavoidable. The members of the First Studio, established in the pre-war years, would always be aware of their mission in the art of theatre. Sulerzhitsky was a devotee of the Stanislavsky System and its ethical foundation and believed in the great ethical cleansing mission of the theatre. For him, theatre was the mirror of the time, and he inspired students to portray its pain, suffering, and kindness to the weak. At the same time, Sulerzhitsky was in active opposition to the regime, to imperialistic war, and Leo Tolstoy’s policy of refusing to resist evil by force became the core of his philosophy. The First and Second Studios, although separated only by four years, were in reality two different generations. The Second Studio, led by Vakhtang Mchedelov, was organized during the troubled years of World War I. It had become an oasis for the talented, able artistic youth who wanted to act, and who were unified by Mchedelov, a fatherly figure who saw his mission as inspiring and fusing them together under the very difficult financial circumstances of the Studio. The first production of the Studio clearly showed to everyone at the MAT that one of the students had the potential to become a ‘heroine’, that is, an actress able to play tragic or heroic parts. Tarasova, in her role of Finochka, was compared to Vera Kommissarzhevskaya in her ability to openly express the passion and pain of the character. NemirovichDanchenko watched the production three times: he was not certain that Tarasova would be equally good on a big stage, but in the little studio theatre ‘she gave a performance of remarkable spiritual purity’ (Tarasova 1978, 42). Vadim Shverubovich wrote that after the first public performance Tarasova became the darling of the whole of Moscow.

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     413

Tarasova as MAT Actress In 1917, Stanislavsky rehearsed Tarasova as Nina Zarechnaya in Chekhov’s The Seagull opposite Mikhail Chekhov as Treplev. Stanislavsky suggested Tarasova create a series of mental pictures in her mind to gain a better understanding of Nina’s emotional rise to heaven and tragic fall back to earth at the end (Stanislavsky 2000, 144). Unfortunately, Tarasova became sick; rehearsals were stopped and never renewed. Tarasova, like many of her contemporaries, was caught up in the political turmoil of the time: while recovering in the Crimea, she and her husband were cut off from Soviet Russia and joined what became called the ‘The Kachalov Group’—a group of MAT actors who found themselves stranded in the territories controlled by the White Army. This unique situation gave Tarasova a rare chance to play many legendary MAT parts, such as Anya in The Cherry Orchard and Ophelia in Hamlet which she would never have played otherwise at the MAT because of the hierarchy and strong competition there. Czech critics called her ‘the ideal Ophelia … the actress who reached the greatness of Shakespearian art’ (Tarasova 1978, 45). Among the numerous epithets the critics employed to describe her, four were used most often: pure, passionate, innocent, non-sentimental. Olga Knipper, who was also in the Kachalov Group, wrote that ‘the actress has a true nerve [i.e. temperament] … but is very inexperienced yet’ (Tarasova 1978, 45). Unlike the leading female actors of the MAT and the actors of the First Studio, Tarasova had not yet experienced the influence of a great director to help her create her characters and teach her the art of polishing details. This did not happen until 1922 when Tarasova joined the group of the MAT actors touring Europe and the United States. It was during the first and second years of the tour, when Tarasova worked with Stanislavsky that she performed to the greatest acclaim, and reached the peak of her international stardom. When she played Irina in The Three Sisters, Olga Bokshanskaya wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko that she performed wonderfully in the first two acts, but was not convincing in Irina’s hysterics. She also played Anya in The Cherry Orchard, having rehearsed the role in Paris with Maria Lilina as Varya, and with Stanislavsky in the United States. Among her many roles are the greatest, legendary leading female roles of the Art Theatre, including Sonya in Uncle Vanya, opposite Stanislavsky as Vanya, for which she won praise from the reviewers who described the essential quality of her Sonya as ‘compliance without apathy’ (Tarasova 1978, 47). Stanislavsky rehearsed Tarasova in the roles of Sasha in Ivanov and Grushenka in The Brothers

414     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

Karamazov: she played both in the United States in 1924. Tarasova’s acting was praised by Eleonora Duse, and Max Reinhardt invited her to perform in his American revival of The Miracle. At the end of the tour, Stanislavsky wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko that Tarasova ‘will replace Knipper and Germanova … not a single play in the future could be staged without her’ (Stanislavsky 1999, 137). However, the attitude towards MAT’s classical productions in the Soviet Union was sour (even hostile at times) although Zhizn’ Iskusstva in 1927 acknowledged how deeply Tarasova’s acting connected with the best MAT traditions. The actress was recognized as part of the MAT’s glorious past, but not the promising future. Oddly enough, as if balancing her three years of international fame, at the MAT Tarasova was often employed as the replacement of the lead when the leading actress was sick. Thus, she replaced Vera Sokolova as Elena in The Days of the Turbins in 1926, and Olga Androvskaya as Suzanne in The Marriage of Figaro in 1929. As Tarasova wrote herself, she played the lead eight times at short notice (Tarasova 1978, 68). The new Soviet plays, whether Vsevolod Ivanov’s Armoured Train 14–69 in 1927 or Elizaveta Petrovna by Dmitry Smolin in 1928, or Vladimir Kirshon’s Bread, either failed to provide her with leading roles or were inferior dramatic materials lacking multidimensional characters. Although Tarasova started to rehearse the role of Serafima Korzukhina in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Flight, rehearsals were terminated in January 1929 due to the play being banned as it was felt that it glorified the White forces in the civil war. Nevertheless despite her disappointment, these years could be considered as the period of her maturing as an actor.

Tarasova and the MAT Master-Directors Tarasova’s personal work with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko throughout her career, in Moscow and abroad, placed her in a unique position as an actress whose roles were thoroughly rehearsed by the two great masters. Neither Stanislavsky nor Nemirovich-Danchenko abandoned their plans to work with the actress, whom they once called a ‘heroine’, that is, an actress capable of playing such roles (Tarasova 1978, 42–43). In 1930, Tarasova was cast as Desdemona in a short-lived production of Othello, which was discontinued after the tragic death of Vladimir Sinitsyn who was playing Iago. In 1932, Tarasova was cast as Alexandra Negina in Ostrovsky’s Talents and Admirers, and she and other members of the cast worked on this with Stanislavsky from 1932 to 1933. The rehearsals at Stanislavsky’s home were

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     415

led by him in accordance with the new development of the System, and his conviction that the method of physical action would help to cleanse the acting of the cast from the clichés and bad habits of previous productions. Nonetheless, the process of adjustment to the new method was not easy for Tarasova, as the rehearsal diaries testify: Tarasova. You taught us in the past that before the creative process started, we needed to build within the correct self-awareness (feeling). Stanislavsky. We made a colossal mistake. It was wrong to suppose that first I have to learn how to swim and only after that to go bathing. The feeling will be coordinated by action. (Stanislavsky 2000, 207)

Stanislavsky criticized Tarasova’s tendency to display temperament for the sake of temperament. He advised her to create a gradual development of emotions before reaching their powerful emotional peak. Stanislavsky pointed out the essential characteristic of Negina: despite a great belief in her own acting talent, she is naïve and helpless in daily matters and thus destined to lose her struggle with the more practical people surrounding her. Stanislavsky encouraged Tarasova to see her role in perspective, arguing ‘it does not help to smother your temperament but to learn to manoeuvre it’ (Stanislavsky 2000, 207). At this stage of the System’s development, Stanislavsky saw rhythm as one of the most important components of acting, and it was rhythm which the actress kept losing during the rehearsals. Stanislavsky was not present at the final stages of the production, and many nuances he had encouraged Tarasova to develop during the rehearsals did not reach fruition. The critics were merciless in their reviews, accusing the theatre of not condemning the merchant Velikatov and of not finding in Negina’s character the social roots of her behaviour. Despite the reviews, the show was well-received by MAT audiences and was kept in its repertoire until the beginning of the Great Patriotic War in June 1941. In 1948, the production was restored to the MAT repertory with the same cast: Tarasova, at the age of 51, played Negina who was 22. The show was finally dropped from the repertoire in 1957.

Tarasova as Star Actress In the early 1930s, the Soviet style of life and art was changing rapidly: the Soviet neoclassical style was emerging, bringing with it a new appreciation of Russian classical literature and drama. Just as Tarasova’s individuality, shown

416     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

through Finochka, made her a legend in 1916, her roles of Katerina in the film based on Alexander Ostrovsky’s The Thunderstorm (1934) and of Anna in Anna Karenina (1937) and Masha in The Three Sisters (1939) in the theatre, made Tarasova the most popular actress of the time and a legend in Soviet theatre. Showered with titles and awards, serenaded by critics and loved by the officials, she reached the peak of her career in this period, and her individuality and her talent magically matched what the French call l’air du temps. Tarasova was also described as obshchestvennitsa (a socially active actor): out of the entire group of female actors of the time, she was the most outspoken and wholeheartedly pro-Soviet. By the time, however, that Tarasova was enjoying her greatest success, one defining characteristic of her acting had become clear: portraying and living through the great passions of her heroines, both on stage and in films, the actress was unable to show the specific features of her characters’ social milieu. Maria Lilina, one the greatest character actors of the MAT, admired the sincerity of her acting but she also wrote that Tarasova’s Anna ‘is so apparently not … aristocratic’ (Tarasova 1978, 70). Watching The Thunderstorm today, one can clearly see that there is nothing of the merchant class in Tarasova’s Katerina, even though she drinks from a saucer and is dressed like a merchant’s wife. Vitalii Vilenkin wrote that NemirovichDanchenko saw the tragedy of Anna Karenina not in the gradual development of her passion but ‘in big emotional chunks of action … He strove to inspire the actress to the great heights of true tragedy’ (1998, 148). According to Tarasova’s MAT partner, Pavel Massalsky, Tarasova overwhelmed spectators by the authenticity and immediacy of her character’s passion. In a TV programme dedicated to Tarasova, he said that ‘she was one of the greatest actors of the century but not in the understanding of Stanislavsky’s realism, although she proudly called herself his student. The origins of her talent are in Ancient Greece … when THEATRE was still THEATRE, and it was not trying to portray “the realities of life”…’ (http:// tvkultura.ru/brand/show/brand_id/28767). In 1939, Tarasova rehearsed and performed Masha in The Three Sisters. In Masha, Tarasova played the overpowering surge of love: ‘she is gorging on her feelings, is wrapped in them entirely. This is the song of love, which elevates humans, makes them truly beautiful’ (Tarasova 1978, 79). Tarasova, evacuated with the rest of the theatre during World War II, continued to rehearse and perform. Among her greatest successes in 1945 was her role of Kruchinina in the film Guilty Without Guilt, based on the play by Alexander Ostrovsky and directed by Vladimir Petrov, the director of the film The Thunderstorm (1934). Critics commented that Tarasova brought out the tragedy of abused and humiliated motherhood, a theme that had become

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     417

very familiar to audiences by the end of the war. The last time Tarasova played Kruchinina at the MAT was 8 February 1973. Her final appearance on the MAT stage was 14 February that year, in the role of mother in Mikhail Roshchin’s play Valentin and Valentina, less than two months before her death. Tarasova’s roles at the MAT were highly regarded by audiences and critics alike. At the age of seventy, she started teaching at the Moscow Art Theatre School-Studio and was granted the title of Professor. Tarasova saw her mission as inspiring students and ‘preaching … devotion and complete dedication’ to the art of the theatre (Tarasova 1978, 184), a trait she herself demonstrated throughout her long career.

Olga Pyzhova Though only three years older than Tarasova, Olga Pyzhova could not have been more different in her upbringing and life circumstances, her temperament, style, and artistic gifts. Unlike Tarasova, who came to Moscow from Kiev, from a well-to-do family, Pyzhova, who was from the impoverished aristocracy, learned how to earn her living early in life. She studied for a few years at the Institut Blagorodnykh Devits (Institute for Daughters of the Nobility) but quit it and trained as an accountant: she was hired by one of the banks in St. Petersburg where she moved after the death of her father. Through her aunts, she was introduced to the world of St. Petersburg’s bohemian elite: artists, writers and poets. With her aunt, she attended the MAT productions when the company toured to St. Petersburg. One of the productions she liked in particular was The Mistress of the Inn starring Olga Gzovskaya: only ten years later Pyzhova would captivate the hearts of American spectators as Mirandolina in the same show. Having decided that she wanted to become a MAT actress, Pyzhova went straight to NemirovichDanchenko who advised her to go to Moscow and audition. Pyzhova passed the exam successfully, being one of only two actors out of two hundred applicants who were accepted that year. In 1914, she became a student of the First Studio and a sotrudnik (employee) of the MAT.

First Studio Students of the First Studio constantly prepared and performed scenes for the other students, as well as to Vakhtangov, Sulerzhitsky, and Stanislavsky himself, who would come to assist Sulerzhitsky and talk to the students.

418     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

Pyzhova, whose talent for comic and character parts was obvious to Sulerzhitsky and Vakhtangov, was encouraged to work on a short vaudeville piece with Sofia Giatsintova and Mikhail Chekhov, A Match Between Two Fires, which had become Chekhov’s great success and is described in every encyclopaedia entry about the great actor. Pyzhova’s habit of taking advantage of all the creative possibilities the Studio offered developed early: while still a student she tried directing. The pedagogical style that Pyzhova observed in the First Studio and adopted later as her own was to teach the students not to trust their first impressions of the character, nor to rely upon their first emotions, but to grow their feelings from the inside, and then find support for them in the character’s behaviour (Pyzhova 1974, 97). But she also realized that ‘truthfulness’ and ‘naturalness’ in stage behaviour, although important for the realistic theatre, could not replace the foremost important quality for an actor: the ability to imagine and fantasize. Evgenii Vakhtangov rehearsed Pyzhova in four parts: the twins Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Lizzy in Berger’s The Deluge, and Mermaid Goplana in Balladyna by Juliusz Slowacki. Although none of the productions was new, Vakhtangov’s goal was to enable Pyzhova to find her own personal connections to existing parts performed by other actors, and to help her recreate them as unique and fresh, to make them her own. In her memoirs, Pyzhova repeatedly states that the training at the First Studio came not directly from the System but from the detailed individual and directorial work on their parts, as well as their observations of the great masters on stage. She also emphasized that before directors started working with actors on their roles, actors studied and worked on the parts themselves. The practice of the First Studio, as well as of the MAT, was to bring to a director a thoroughly researched part. Preparing the twins in Twelfth Night, Pyzhova related easily to the character of Viola, but felt disheartened about Sebastian: she decided not to get into details and play him superficially. Vakhtangov, on the other hand, reminded her that Viola and Sebastian were two different characters, and, as an actor, she needed to create both equally convincingly. Vakhtangov suggested Pyzhova first find different rhythms for Viola and Sebastian, and radically dissimilar movements and intonations. Paradoxically, after having created Sebastian first, Pyzhova was better able to craft Viola. For her portrayal of the prostitute Lizzi in The Deluge, Vakhtangov advised her to get rid of sentimentality and vulnerability: the former actress and prostitute was completely burnt out, and thus had become fearless. Pyzhova rehearsed the role of Goplana from Balladyna with Vakhtangov.

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     419

Trying to find the non-human behaviour of the mermaid and to avoid ­traditional clichés, Pyzhova envisioned her posture as that of twisted tree roots. ‘Determine your final sketch of the character, and, once you have found it, rehearse only within it’, Vakhtangov told Pyzhova (1974, 59). But it was the role of Calibri in the Second Studio dramatization of Turgenev’s short story Lieutenant Ergunov’s Notes that made Pyzhova feel an actor-author. Turgenev did not provide Calibri with detailed characteristics: Pyzhova created the character herself and, as she wrote, the character started living within her (1974, 93). Stanislavsky, after having watched the rehearsal, gave the participants his permission to perform for the audience. At a very early stage of her career, Pyzhova realized that the greatest goal of acting is transformation into another character, the ability to become somebody else (Pyzhova 1974, 93). In 1923, after the MAT’s first successful tour in the United States, Stanislavsky invited Pyzhova to perform Mirandolina in The Mistress of the Inn, the role which he had rehearsed in the past with Olga Gzovskaya. Unlike the refined seduction of Ripafratta that was ‘crocheted’ by Gzovskaya, Stanislavsky suggested a radically different interpretation for Pyzhova: her Mirandolina is an energetic country girl, democratic by nature. Being offended by Ripafratta, she cried first but then started plotting her revenge. Stanislavsky, having noticed Pyzhova’s tendency not to think about the ‘superobjective’, (the overall or main objective of the role), warned her against the danger of not creating the wholeness of the character. He drafted the sketch of Mirandolina’s emotions on stage, where the peak came with her fainting in Ripafratta’s arms. Working on Mirandolina with Stanislavsky showed Pyzhova how to use the System without relying on terms or theoretical postulates. As she wrote in one of her books, ‘before … I had always built my roles without methodology, but now I learned how to recall my own findings … I realized that logic and analysis are necessary for creating any role’ (Pyzhova 1974, 65). Inspired by the System that had shown her the path to Mirandolina, Pyzhova worked on Varya in The Cherry Orchard using the lessons from the System.

Pyzhova’s Transition from MAT-2 to Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Revolution In 1924, Pyzhova re-joined the First Studio, which had become the MAT2. Although she played her old roles in The Deluge and Twelfth Night, she was not cast in the theatre’s new productions. Pyzhova attached herself to

420     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

the group of those opposed to Mikhail Chekhov’s leadership: as a result, she had to leave the MAT-2. She and other members of the group were welcomed by Vsevolod Meyerhold to the Theatre of the Revolution, where she worked until 1938. Meyerhold observed that Pyzhova ‘overcame her MATism, and could become an example of an actor with new technique and new life credo’ (Solovyo’eva et al. 2010, 479). Pyzhova in turn wrote that work with Meyerhold required ‘a cultured and educated actor’, and, as a student of Stanislavsky’s, Vakhtangov’s, and a former actor of the First Studio, she felt prepared for the challenge. At the Theatre of the Revolution Pyzhova played parts in various Soviet plays, such as Xenia Travern in Alexei Faiko’s A Man with a Briefcase (1928), and Veronica in Anatoly Glebov’s Inga (1929). In Faiko’s work, Xenia Travern returns from immigration with her son, Goga. Finding herself rejected by her former husband and realizing she will be an outcast in this new life, Xenia commits suicide. Xenia was one of Pyzhova’s rare parts in Soviet plays that allowed her to portray an emotionally rewarding character’s development, including a mother’s tenderness, hopes, desperation over betrayal, and death. Goga, her son, was played by Maria Babanova and became her triumphant role: the ‘duet’ between the two actresses was praised by theatre critics and spectators alike. Another of Pyzhova’s successes at the Theatre of the Revolution, according to the critics, was as the Nurse in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet directed by Alexei Popov (1935). Pyzhova presented her as a woman of the Renaissance, hot-blooded, sly and optimistic, thirsty for life and full of truly carnivalesque joy.

Pyzhova as Teacher Occasional roles in films and directing did not overshadow Pyzhova’s main passion in life: teaching. Starting in 1934, she spent forty years teaching acting at GITIS (State Theatre Institute) and VGIK (State Institute of Cinematography). In 1939, she became the first ever female Professor of Acting. Having taught 39 ‘national studios’, special 4-year courses for ethnic minorities, including Kazakh, Kirghiz, Tadzhik, Dagestan, Uzbek actors, and many others, Pyzhova’s contribution to theatre art is enormous. Following in the footsteps of her great teacher, Stanislavsky, she never taught ‘theory’, but always tried to teach through example, talk, exercises and improvisations: ‘She always tried to merge the concrete educational tasks and exercises with the universal, human meaning’ (Pyzhova 1974, 403).

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     421

Conclusion In this chapter, we have aimed to uncover some of the hidden history of the ‘second wave’ actresses, to reposition these women in relation to the history of the MAT and the dominance of Stanislavsky and to indicate some of the harsh realities of maintaining a career as an actress under the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes. Of the four actresses, Tarasova received the most extensive official recognition and was showered with favours. The extent of her fame was unprecedented; however, to a large extent this was because she stayed at the MAT, which in view of Stalin’s approval of the theatre and Stanislavsky’s System was not in danger of being closed, or its artists purged, unlike the MAT-2. The Stanislavsky System became the only official training for actors as socialist realism had become the only officially approved writing style. So, with Tarasova passionately living ‘universal’ women’s passions, she became the idol of the time. Tarasova also encapsulated the model of the new Soviet-style star system, especially with her portrayal of Anna Karenina. The other three actresses’ creativity could be seen as having been challenged by the regime and its neopatriarchal system. Pyzhova along with Dikii and others clashed with Chekhov at the MAT-2: Chekhov was very much in favour with the officials in the mid-1920s and was protected in this conflict by Anatoly Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, responsible for Culture and Education. Pyzhova’s roles at the Theatre of the Revolution were mostly character parts, and she was unable to achieve the recognition she had enjoyed with Mirandolina in the United States. Neither Birman nor Giatsintova, whose lives and careers were devastated by the closure of the MAT-2, were ever able to regain the sense of theatre as ‘home’. The four actresses’ lives and creativity came at a time of unprecedented tragic political and cultural events: World War I, the 1917 Revolution, the change of regime in Russia, Stalin’s dictatorship and purges, World War II, Cold War and de-Stalinization, and the stagnation of the 1970s. As always in times of trouble and uncertainty, the flow of individual lives is interrupted by the necessity of making crucial decisions. The choice to stay meant to be at home and continue with their profession but also required the endless necessity of proving their loyalty to the Soviet regime. In their memoirs, Birman and Giatsintova wrote about the émigré artists who were their former colleagues, Nikita Baliev, Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, and Mikhail Chekhov, with love and sympathy, but also, it could be said, slight condescension: in their view it was a basic ‘given’ that

422     Maria Ignatieva and Rose Whyman

professional fulfilment could not be achieved by the émigré outside Russia. Perhaps, this was true; however, even if it was not clear to the actresses as the authors of the memoirs, it is clear to their readers that for the émigrés, departure from the Soviet Union was a matter of life and death. Despite purges, closure of theatres, and deaths of their friends in prison, even if they doubted the essential rightness of the regime, they always believed that the only place for them to live and work was Moscow and the Soviet Union. The four actresses’ collaboration with and service to the State was appreciated: all four achieved official recognition in theatre and film, some more, some less, and their lifestyles were secured firstly by good salaries and later pensions and they all lived in high-quality apartments provided by the state. In this way, the lives and professional careers of all four women were intertwined with the Soviet regime, with its successes and failures, utopian beliefs and merciless reality.

Bibliography Ashwin, Sarah. 2000. ‘Introduction’. In Gender, State and Society in Soviet and PostSoviet Russia, edited by Sarah Ashwin, 1–17. London: Routledge. Birman, Serafima Germanova. 1959/62. Put’ Aktrisy [The Path of the Actress ]. Ìîscow: Vsesoyuznoye Òeatral’noye Îbshchestvo. Birman, Serafima Germanova. 1975. ‘Life’s Gift of Encounters’. Soviet Literature 3, no. 1: 74–119. Chiaureli, Mikhail. 1946. ‘Rozhdeniye film’a ‘Klyatva’, Komsomol’skaya Pravda, 2.7.1946. RGALI ô. 1989 îp. 1, 262 Materialy o Berseneve Ivanye Nikolaevichye. Giatsintova, S. 1963. Zhizn’ Teatra [The Life of the Theatre ]. Moscow: GIDLMPR. Giatsintova, Sof ’ya. 1989. S p amyat’yu nayedinye. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Gromov, V. A. 1976. Sof ’ya Vladimirovna Giatsintova. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Hosking, Geoffrey. 2001. Russia and the Russians—A History from Rus to the Russian Federation. London: Penguin. Ignatieva, Maria. 2008. Stanislavsky and Female Actors: Women in Stanislavsky’s Life and Art. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Kozintsov, Georgy, Georgy Kryzhitsky, Leonid Trauberg, and Sergei Yutkevich. 1975. ‘Eccentrism’. The Drama Review: TDR 19, no. 4, New Performance and Manifestos: 95–109. Listengarten, Julia. 2000. Russian Tragifarce: Its Cultural and Political Roots. London: Associated Universities Presses.

18  ‘Second Wave’ Russian and Soviet Actresses     423

Meisel, Maude F. 2008. ‘Self-Presentation on Stage and Page in the Memoirs of Russian Women Performers’. In Mapping the Feminine: Russian Women and Cultural Difference, edited by Hilde Hoogenboom, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, and Irina Reyfman. Bloomington, IN: Slavica. Pyzhova, Olga. 1974. Prizvanie [The Calling ]. Moscow: Iskusstvo. RGALI ϕ.1989 op. 1, 262 Materialy o Berseneve Ivane Nikolaeviche, Velikii Grazhdanin. Rudnitsky, Konstantin. 1988. Russian and Soviet Theater 1905–1932. Edited by Lesley Milne and translated by Roxanne Permar. New York: Harry Abrams. Shestova, I. 2013. ‘Serafima Birman: ot pervoi studii MKhAT k Mkhat Vtoromy’. Russkoye Akterskoye Iskusstvo XX Veka 4: 67–120. Smeliansky, Anatoly, ed. 2011. MKhAT Vtoroi: Svidetelstvo i Documenty 1926– 1936. Moscow: Moskovskii Khudozhetvennyi teatr. Solovyo’va, Inna. 1973. ‘Serafima Birman’. In Aktery Sovetskogo Kino, 9, edited by À. Ì. Sandler, 33–49. Moskva: Iskusstvo. Solovyo’eva, I. N., A. M. Smelyansky, and O. V. Yegoshina, eds. 2010. MKhAT Vtoroy: Opyt vosstanovleniya biografii [Moscow Art Theatre the Second: Restoring Biography ]. Moscow: Moskovskiy Khudozhestvennyy Teatr. Stanislavsky, Konstantin. 1999. Sobranie Sochinenii [Complete Works ], 9 vols, 9: 136–38. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura. Moskva: Iskusstvo. Stanislavsky, Konstantin. 2000. Stanislavsky Repertiruet [Stanislavsky Rehearses  ]. Edited by I. N. Vinogradskaya. Moscow: Moscow Art Theatre. Tarasova, Alla. 1978. Iskusstvo [Collected Essays ]. Edited by O. Radishcheva and E. Shingareva. Moskva: Iskusstvo. Vilenkin, Vitalii. 1998. ‘Anna Karenina’. In Moscow Art Theatre: One Hundred Years, edited by Anatoly Smeliansky, Inna Solovyova, and Olga Egoshina, 2 vols, 1: 148–50. Moscow: Moscow Art Theatre.

19 Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era: Anita Bush, Abbie Mitchell, Rose McClendon, Mercedes Gilbert, Venzella Jones Cheryl Black

Although historians differ regarding the precise chronological parameters of what is generally known as the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ or the ‘New Negro’ era, there is general agreement that the first few decades of the twentieth century marked a crucial time for African Americans, characterized by a new, or renewed, determination to secure the full rights and privileges of American citizenship. This spirit of anti-racist activism and pride in Black identity and achievement was to some extent allied with other early twentieth-century progressive movements on behalf of workers’ rights and women’s rights. In 1925, Howard Professor Alain Locke (1925, 631) celebrated the advent of the ‘New Negro’ movement and declared Harlem its mecca. Locke, along with W. E. B. Du Bois and other cultural leaders, was keenly aware of the important role that the expressive arts might play in the social revolution underway. They not only encouraged, they mandated ‘New Negro’ artistic production, and African American musicians, poets, novelists, visual artists, and theatrical artists rose to prominence. The theatre was already recognized as one of the few professions open to African Americans and by which African Americans were achieving a degree of fame and financial success. Opportunities, however, were limited to music, vaudeville, and minstrelsy. The minstrel tradition, with its grotesque and degrading caricatures of African Americans was especially problematic.

Cheryl Black (*)  Department of Theatre, Fine Arts University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_19

425

426     Cheryl Black

Opportunities to perform serious dramatic roles or roles that accurately portrayed African American lives were virtually non-existent. Cultural leaders increasingly called for new forms of theatre to combat false and degrading representations with authentic ones, for a theatre, in Du Bois’s (1926, 134) famous mandate, ‘about us, by us, for us, and near us’. For African American women, facing double discrimination based on race and gender, the need for gainful employment as well as personal fulfilment was even more urgent. For African American women, even in the North, ‘women’s work was synonymous with domestic service. After World War 1, Black women constituted more than a fifth of all domestics in New York and Chicago, and over one half in Philadelphia. In 1920 fully 90% of Black women in Pittsburgh made their living as day workers, washerwomen, or live-in servants’ (Jones 1985, 155). In Harlem in the 1920s, 96.5% of Black women were employed as houseworkers/maids and laundresses (Bracks and Smith 2014, xiv). Even in virtual reality (on stage and screen), African American women seemed bound to kitchen and laundries, although Hattie McDaniel allegedly defended her frequent film appearances in ‘mammy’ roles by declaring that she would rather play a maid for $700.00 a week than be one for $7.00 a week (Saltz 2008). Even before Du Bois issued his famous call, ‘New Negro’ women were looking to the theatre as an avenue toward economic and personal autonomy. African American women seeking a career on stage, however, had also to contend with long-held prejudices against the theatre as a haven for persons of questionable morals—vulgar men and scantily clad women, cracking risqué jokes and shimmying the night away. As the twentieth century progressed, ‘New Negro Women’ hoping to enter the profession sought to elevate it as well—to use it to improve not only their lives, but their communities and the nation at large. In this sense, and to some extent, any African American woman who managed to carve out a career as an actress in this era was also an activist—just seeking a professional career and financial independence was a political and entrepreneurial act that took courage, commitment, and initiative. Among this generation of pioneers, however, five women emerge whose careers are especially noteworthy as exemplars of successful actress-entrepreneurs of this era, who were highly regarded as artists and cultural leaders by their peers and whose entrepreneurial actions included founding and running their own theatre companies. These actress-entrepreneurs sought to create work for themselves and others that would not only provide economic and personal autonomy, but also a means by which they might challenge existing essentialist notions regarding racial and gendered

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     427

identities. They sought control over their own careers and also held a vision of what a ‘Negro’ theatre should be, in keeping with a larger social vision of what life in America should be for all its citizens. The women are nearly exact contemporaries and this investigation highlights correspondences as well as divergences within their experiences. The women are Anita Bush (1883–1974), Abbie Mitchell (1884–1960), Rose McClendon (1884– 1936), Mercedes Gilbert (1889–1952), and Venzella Jones (c. 1900–c. 1980). Before beginning this exploration, however, it is important to note that antecedents existed. Forerunners of the actress-entrepreneurs of the ‘New Negro’ era include concert singers and vaudeville entertainers Alberta, Mabel, Essie, and Alice Whitman, who toured as the Whitman Sisters’ New Orleans Troubadours from the 1890s to 1930s, and Sissieretta (‘Black Patti’) Jones, who also organized her own company, Black Patti’s Troubadours (later known as The Black Patti Musical Comedy Company), which toured successfully from 1888 to 1915. In 1876, musical prodigies Anna and Emma Hyers formed a touring musical company offering works like Pauline Hopkins’s Out of Bondage and Urlina the African Princess (Tanner 1992, 24–26). Debuting in 1883, Henrietta Vinton Davis toured for nearly a decade as a dramatic reciter, winning acclaim as an interpreter of speeches from Shakespeare, Schiller, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and others. The first African American actress to enjoy a non-musical career, in 1893 Davis formed her own company in Chicago and toured the Caribbean (Robson 2012, 120–40). Also a pioneering actress-activist, in 1919, Davis gave up her performing career to join Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association, becoming a leader in that organization. ‘Queen of the Cakewalk’ Aida Overton Walker (1880–1914) was instrumental in elevating the theatre as an acceptable career for women, even though she worked exclusively in vaudeville and musicals. After rising to fame as a member of Black Patti’s Troubadours and early Black musicals featuring her husband George F. Walker and his partner Bert Williams, Walker formed and managed several successful vaudeville acts such as Aida Walker and her Abyssinia Girls, Happy Girls, and Porto Rico Girls (Tanner 1992, 46). David Krasner (2011, 118) has pointed out Walker’s ability to successfully ‘maneuver the tight space’ between degrading stereotype and authentic cultural expression in marketing the cakewalk. Krasner describes Walker as carrying on a ‘rearguard action’ in African American newspapers, defending the theatre as a viable and decent career for black women and, in fact, a powerful weapon for positive social change: ‘In this age we are all fighting the one problem–that is the color problem! I venture to think and dare to

428     Cheryl Black

state that our profession does more toward the alleviation of color prejudice than any other profession among colored people’ (Walker quoted by Krasner 2011, 117). Krasner (2011, 119) aptly attributes Walker’s success to her ‘ken as entrepreneur’ as well as her remarkable performing talents. Walker would undoubtedly be better known today (and a featured subject in this chapter) if she had not died of kidney failure in 1914 at the age of 34.

Anita Bush: ‘Little Mother of the Negro Drama’ All of the women featured in this chapter were almost certainly aware of and inspired by their pioneering foremothers, and two of them were mentored by Aida Walker. But by 1915, the stage was set for a new act in African American theatre to begin, and a young and determined Anita Bush raised the curtain on it. In that year, the enterprising Williams and Walker alumna formed the Anita Bush All-Colored Stock Company, a venture that eventually earned her the title of ‘Little Mother of the Negro Drama’. Born in 1883, the daughter of a Brooklyn tailor whose clients included theatre professionals, a stage-struck seventeen-year-old Anita Bush and her sister (first name unknown) obtained parts as serving maids in a touring production of Antony and Cleopatra. Later, Bush recalled appearing in every scene possible and learning everyone’s lines (Thompson 1972, 7). Three years later, Bush talked her way into a chorus role in the touring company of the renowned entertainers Bert Williams and George Walker. Bush spent six years on the vaudeville circuit with this famous ­company, performing in five of their shows, learning how to sing, dance, and act, and at some point developing a desire to exercise more control over her own career. In 1909, she made her Broadway debut in Rosamond Johnson’s musical Mr. Lode of Koal. In that same year, she lured some of the best Williams and Walker dancers to join her newly formed troupe, Anita Bush and Her 8 Shimmy Babies. Bush’s company performed on the music hall circuit until 1913, when a back injury ended her dancing career (Hill and Hatch 2003, 202). After a year on crutches, however, she conceived an even bolder and more original plan, a plan in keeping with her personal goals as an actress—she would form a Negro stock company to perform legitimate drama. Producer Jesse Shipp scoffed at the idea, assuring Bush that she would not be able to find enough trained actors to form a company. Undaunted, Bush signed a contract with the manager of the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem (then a venue for vaudeville and motion pictures). With a core company destined for future greatness consisting of herself, Charles Gilpin,

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     429

Carlotta Freeman, Dooley Wilson, and Andrew Bishop, the company opened its first show, The Girl at the Fort, in November 1915. The experiment was a huge success; the company played for six weeks, changing the bill on a weekly basis, with Bush selecting and casting the plays. Audiences were enthusiastic and the Black press hailed Bush’s company as a groundbreaking artistic and social endeavour that would ‘raise the standard of the colored theatrical profession’ and ‘prove that the Negro can do other than sing and dance’ (Hill 1987, 217). The Lincoln Theatre manager, Marie Downs, was so pleased with the response to the performances she demanded that Bush change the name of the company to the ‘Lincoln Players’. Bush refused, and promptly moved the company to the Lafayette Theatre, taking her players and the audience with her. Throughout 1916, the company continued its stock repertory, presenting a new play each week, usually an abridged or adapted version of a popular Broadway play by the likes of Dion Boucicault or David Belasco. Perhaps in response to criticism of the white-authored repertoire, in January 1916 Bush offered a prize for the best sixty-minute play depicting Negro life, although there is no record of a production resulting from this competition. Meanwhile, new actors joined the company, including Mrs. Charles (Ida) Anderson, Clarence Muse, and Abbie Mitchell. Ironically, by March 1916 the press was referring to the group as the Lafayette Stock Company, and eventually, the name by which the company would go down in theatre history, the Lafayette Players. Although she has never explained why—­ perhaps the management at the Lafayette was more to her liking—Anita Bush acquiesced to the name change, and she remained with the company as a leading lady and director/manager until 1920. The Lafayette Players went on to become one of the most influential theatre companies in American theatre history, remaining active until 1932, producing more than 250 plays of astonishing variety in terms of genre and style, including dramas, melodramas, mysteries, thrillers, musicals, social ‘problem’ plays, tragedies, and comedies. Virtually all their plays, however, were written by white playwrights, although they did produce a few plays by African American playwright Frank Wilson. It is fair to say that developing playwrights was not the highest priority for Anita Bush or the Lafayette Players. The company did, however, fulfil its mission to provide practical training and opportunities for African American actors and to develop an audience more open to a broad range of entertainment genres. Like the larger Harlem Renaissance cultural milieu of which it was a part, the Lafayette Players was a moveable feast, with touring companies that took its Harlem hits to Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit,

430     Cheryl Black

Washington DC, and Los Angeles. Bush toured frequently, perhaps to insure that the quality of a Lafayette Players’ production remained consistent. For over a decade, the Lafayette Players operated like a national repertory theatre, with leading actors apparently functioning as actor-managers of the various touring subsidiaries; hence, the Players are sometimes referred to by the names of the leading actors, as the Bishop Players (led by Andrew Bishop) or the Evelyn Preer/Edward Thompson Company (Thompson 1972, 176– 78, 195). The Harlem location remained its hub and was part of the 1920s’ Harlem vogue that attracted black residents and white tourists. White producers journeyed to the Lafayette to recruit new talent, and the roster of Lafayette Players who made the transition to Broadway and/ or Hollywood beginning in 1917 include Bush, Andrew Bishop, Clarence Muse, Charles Gilpin, Inez Clough, Jack Carter, Edna Thomas, Lawrence Chenault, Dooley Wilson, Abbie Mitchell, Evelyn Ellis, Evelyn Preer, Edward Thompson, Thomas Mosley, Rose McClendon, Susie Sutton, Sidney Kirkpatrick, and Laura Bowman. The 1920s saw a flurry of white-authored ‘Negro’ plays and the end of the practice of using white actors in blackface to portray Black characters in serious roles. The Lafayette Players subverted this tradition, in fact, by casting Black actors as white characters, a practice that included the use of makeup and wigs and caused some controversy. The Players continued to produce until 1932, finally succumbing to the economic blows dealt by the Great Depression. After leaving the Players in 1920, Anita Bush carried on as an actress, entrepreneur, and activist. She formed another vaudeville dance troupe, for which she also wrote sketches, which remained active until the late 1930s. She appeared in two ‘race’ films, The Bull-Dogger (1921) and The Crimson Skull (1922) and performed in the Federal Theatre Project’s Swing It in 1937 as a ‘Harlem society reporter’. In the 1930s, Bush served as an officer in the Negro Actors Guild (NAG), founded in 1937 to promote the welfare of Negro actors and actresses in every branch of the theatrical profession. Her impact can hardly be overstated. During her lifetime, she was widely recognized by her peers as the ‘Mother of Negro Drama’ the ‘originator of the present dramatic renaissance in the arena of colored theatricals’ and the visionary behind the legendary Lafayette Players, responsible for launching the careers of a generation of successful performers. Lafayette alumni Dooley Wilson, Jack Carter, and Evelyn Ellis credited Bush with having given them their first chance on the legitimate stage (Thompson 1972, 54, 239). Bush’s personal life remains a mystery. According to the Internet Movie Database IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0124090/bio), Bush married a man named John Givens in 1907, but I have found no other

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     431

mention of him or any other family member other than her parents and sister in any primary or secondary source. She seems to have devoted her life entirely to her career and she also seemed to have few regrets. In an interview with Sister Francesca Thompson in 1970, just four years before Bush’s death, she claimed that she severed her ties with the Lafayette Players because the management had broken their agreement with her, an explanation that suggests she still functioned as the company manager with whom the theatre management had to negotiate, referring to her (apparently somewhat frustrated) desires to ‘bring colored show business to the top of the ladder’ and to ‘pay good salaries and treat my actors right’. Admitting that she had left with ‘regret and some bitterness’, Bush maintained: ‘I feel no bitterness today. I know a great sense of accomplishment … I look back with pride upon the project that I know was my own idea and whose initial success was due to my instigation’. For Bush, the ‘job was finished. I brought legitimate drama to Harlem. The seed which I planted had grown larger than I ever dared to dream’ (Thompson 1972, 147).

Abbie Mitchell: A Pioneer in a New Advancement of Her Race One of the Lafayette Theatre’s most celebrated leading ladies, Abbie Mitchell, shared with Bush an early career in musical theatre. Born in 1884 in New York’s lower east side but raised in Baltimore, Mitchell must have desired a performing career from a very early age, as she made her dramatic debut at 14, in the musical Clorindy; Or, The Origin of the Cakewalk. A year later she married its composer Will Marion Cook, giving birth to a daughter in 1900 and a son in 1903. Meanwhile, she appeared as the female lead in another of her husband’s musicals, Jes Lak White Folks, composed to showcase her talent. In 1903, Mitchell sang leads in Jesse A. Shipp’s hit musical In Dahomey, starring George Walker and Bert Williams (who performed in blackface). These all-Black musicals of the early twentieth century were sensational hits, playing successful runs on Broadway and equally successful European tours. Although not entirely free of traditions from minstrelsy, other aspects, including the complexity of Cook’s music and other, more atypical characters, represented breaks from the past. In 1905, Mitchell starred in Ernest Hogan’s Memphis Students Company at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, sparking a legal skirmish between Cook and Hogan regarding the rights to Mitchell’s talents. Cook secured the

432     Cheryl Black

rights to the show in November 1905 and took his wife and the Memphis Company to Europe (Sampson 1988, 349–50). Despite Cook’s micro-management, the company came to be known as Mitchell’s, and they toured as Abbie Mitchell’s Memphis Students for the next two years (Sampson 1988, 358). Returning to New York in 1908, Mitchell performed leading roles in Cook’s Bandana Land and Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson’s The Red Moon, including their European tours. As suggested by its title, Bandana Land evoked the minstrel trope of nostalgia for the South; The Red Moon, though not without its problematic aspects (a picaninny chorus and Native American stereotypes), represented a significant break from, as Lester Walton (1908, 6) put it, ‘the ordinary coon show’ in its inclusion of a college boy chorus and an interracial romance. Mitchell’s performances in all these musicals made her a favourite with audiences and critics, praised for her beauty, her rich voice, clear enunciation, and acting ability. One prescient reviewer of The Red Moon opined in the Boston Globe (1909) ‘it is easy to suspect that in a straight play Miss Mitchell might surprise’. Even as Mitchell and Cook were enjoying tremendous success as professional collaborators, their personal relationship was disintegrating. By all accounts, Will Marion Cook was a troubled man, frequently described as ‘eccentric’. According to Mitchell, her husband’s ‘eccentricity’ included fits of temper, destruction of her personal belongings, and physical abuse. After six years of marriage, she sought independence: ‘He always treated me like a baby. Now I am a woman and I refuse to be bullied’ (quoted in New York Telegraph 1906, Mitchell Clippings File). Although granted a divorce in 1908, Mitchell was back in court a year later asking for protection from her ex-husband and claiming that he had threatened her with a gun (New York Telegraph 1909, Mitchell Clippings File). Despite the turmoil, Mitchell and Cook eventually resumed a productive professional relationship. Mitchell continued to sing Cook’s songs in recitals for the rest of her career; they performed benefits together for various causes; and she joined him on a European concert tour in 1920, breaking a contract with the Lafayette Players to do so (Thompson 1972, 148). Newspapers reported two subsequent marriages for Mitchell, in 1910 to railroad employee William Charles Phillips (Walton 1910, 6), and in 1926, to poet Leslie Tompkins, a man twenty years her junior (‘Kitty’ 1926, 6). In 1930, Mitchell issued a denial that Tompkins was seeing ‘other women’ and that she was contemplating divorce. I could find no further information about either of these alleged marriages. Mitchell’s New York Times (1960, 86) obituary identifies her as the widow of Will Marion Cook with no reference to any other marriage.

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     433

In 1912, Mitchell apparently suffered some form of vocal distress, which may have encouraged her move into non-musical dramatic work. She debuted with the Lafayette Players in 1916, quickly winning as much acclaim in drama as she had in musicals. Of mixed racial ancestry (her father was German Jewish), Mitchell was extremely successful in the Lafayette’s classical (white) repertoire, winning fame as Madame X in the popular melodrama of the same name, Camille in Alexandre Dumas’ play Camille and Marguerite in Goethe’s Faust (a combination of operatic and dramatic versions) and eliciting comparisons to Eleonora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt (Butler 1929, 14). From the late 1920s through the 1940s, Mitchell appeared on Broadway in African American roles (usually ‘making down’, i.e. darkening her complexion to fit white audience expectations of what an African American should look like), including the mother of a lynching victim in Paul Green’s Pulitzer-winning In Abraham’s Bosom (with Rose McClendon) and Catfish Row’s Clara in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (the musical version of white southern writer DuBose Heyward’s Porgy ). As Clara, Abbie Mitchell was the first artist to record the iconic aria Summertime with Gershwin accompanying her on the piano and conducting. Mitchell portrayed servants in Coquette (opposite Helen Hayes) and The Little Foxes (opposite Tallulah Bankhead). She undoubtedly found greater satisfaction in portraying the militant café owner Binnie in the Theatre Union’s production of Paul Peters and George Sklar’s Stevedore, and the mother of a World War II veteran in Maxine Wood’s On Whitman Avenue, a play dealing with segregation in housing and produced by Canada Lee in 1946. That same year, Mitchell starred in a non-traditionally cast Arsenic and Old Lace at the McKinley Square Theatre in the Bronx, with a young Ruby Dee as Elaine. In the 1930s, Mitchell toured as Cora Lewis in Langston Hughes’s Mulatto, a role created by Rose McClendon and being played at the time on Broadway by Mercedes Gilbert. In addition to stage work, Mitchell continued to give recitals throughout the United States and Europe that combined classical and spiritual compositions, embraced the new medium of radio (most notably as the ‘Studebaker Songbird’ from 1929 to 1931), and appeared in five films, from Uncle Remus’s First Visit to New York in 1914 to Junction 88 in 1947. Teaching the next generation of artists was always an important goal to Mitchell. She headed the vocal department at Tuskegee from 1931 to 1934 and taught at Atlanta University in 1943. She also coached an impressive roster of future stars, including Fredi Washington, Adelaide Hall, Butterfly McQueen, and Etta Moten.

434     Cheryl Black

Although Coquette and Little Foxes were long-running hits that most certainly advanced Mitchell’s career (at least financially) Mitchell expressed frustration at the kinds of roles she, as an African American actress, was offered. In a 1929 article titled ‘Abbie’s Ambition’, she declared that she ‘lives yet for her greatest glory and hopes to be one of the pioneers in a new advancement of her race’ (Butler 1929, 14). During the Little Foxes run in Boston, an interview with her was headlined ‘Abbie Isn’t Tickled With Role’ (Hazzard 1940). In a letter to her god-daughter Elise Hawkins, Mitchell (January 20, 1943) was even more forthright: ‘I for one am disgusted with the asinine parts given to women like me in support of women possessed of no more god-given talent, experience, or training than I have been given’. In at least one instance, Mitchell refused to perform in a work she considered degrading. In 1925, she abruptly left the Alabama Fantasies (a ‘plantation revue’ with echoes of minstrelsy) after singing her first number, explaining to the Amsterdam News (1925, 6) that she felt some of the numbers ‘should be allowed to remain buried in the past’. As a founding member of the NAG, Mitchell used her voice to lobby for better opportunities for African American actors, presenting, at one meeting, an ‘impassioned plea for support of the Negro Theatre movement so that Negro actors would have something other than the “stupid” roles now assigned to them in the Broadway theatre’ (Bostic 1943, 31). Mitchell formed her own company, the Abbie Mitchell Players, in Chicago in 1935, debuting with three one-act pieces by Paul Green, and premiered an original play, Wanting by Elsie Roxborough, in 1936. In the early 1940s, she launched a new effort, centred in New York: [We needed] a place where young aspirants could learn how to act, sing, dance artistically … the time is here when we must create something of our own – fight to keep it going … With a place to sell [our] wares, we might develop men and women to write something around our African culture, our present and past years. (Mitchell January 20, 1943, Mercer Cook Papers)

Although clearly interested in combating racism, Mitchell was also interested in highlighting women’s experiences. The Abbie Mitchell Players scored successes in 1943 with Allan Kenward’s Cry Havoc, which portrayed World War II experiences of nurses on Bataan, and an original, one-woman dramatization of the life of Harriet Tubman written and performed by Mitchell (debuting in 1944). At about the same time, Mitchell worked as an actress-director with the Ira Aldridge Guild, directing In Abraham’s Bosom and The Eternal Magdalene for them in 1943, and the Frederick Douglass Players of the Harlem People’s Art Group, directing Cry Havoc for them in 1944.

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     435

Despite her steady employment throughout a fifty-year career, in the 1940s Mitchell shared with Hawkins her financial difficulties, her realization that ‘age and eyesight are against me’ in terms of her career, and her loneliness after her son Mercer accepted a teaching position in Haiti, although his illustrious career as a university professor and, later, US ambassador must have been a compensating factor (Mitchell August 5, 1943, and August 3, 1945, Mercer Cook Papers). Her daughter Marion, who had married dancer-choreographer Lewis Douglas in 1919, died in 1950. Mitchell died in 1960. Mitchell’s granddaughter Marion Douglas (born in England in 1920) has carried on her grandmother’s legacy, enjoying a distinguished career as an actress and theatre educator. Her many contributions include directing the Children’s Theater at the Harlem School of the Arts. Douglas has stated her career objectives as: ‘To express and create through humor; to enhance the vitality of life and to communicate the mature outlook of age as a desirable achievement’ (Goldfarb 1993, 346–47).

Rose McClendon: Visionary Crusader for an Authentic Negro Theatre Although not entirely free from the discriminatory practices and stereotypical casting faced by her contemporaries, Rose McClendon achieved an unprecedented degree of success in ‘legitimate drama’, and she arrived at it by unusual means. In 1904, during the years that Bush and Mitchell were winning applause in Williams and Walker musicals, McClendon was settling down to relatively genteel domesticity as the wife of H. P. McClendon, who had trained as a chiropractor (and was known in Harlem as ‘Dr. McClendon’), but made his living as a Pullman porter for the Pennsylvania railroad. The couple did not have children, but Rose McClendon seemed to enjoy teaching young children, especially drama, serving as a volunteer director of Sunday school plays and pageants at the Hope Day Nursery and St. Marks AME Church. Around 1916, McClendon began special night classes with Franklin Sargent at the American Academy of Dramatic Art. Stories of how this extremely rare opportunity came about vary but the mere fact that it happened suggests that McClendon was a woman of unusual ability, audaciousness, or both. According to McClendon, she was primarily motivated by her desire to be a better teacher of drama, but she must have also harboured some ambition for an individual career, which she determinedly pursued for

436     Cheryl Black

the next two decades (Crisis 1927, 55). She made her stage debut in 1919 at the age of thirty-five in Butler Davenport’s Justice (an anti-racist play with an integrated cast), then spent the next five years on the Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) circuit, performing a long-suffering wife in a popular vaudeville sketch ‘White Mule’ opposite Charles Gilpin and Lawrence Chenault, and as the female lead in Frank Wilson’s ‘dramedy’ Pa Williams’ Gal at the Lafayette Theatre. In 1924, McClendon made her Broadway debut as a devout laundress who saves her sister from sin in Nan Bagby Stephens’ Roseanne (replacing white actress Crystal Herne who had created the role at the Greenwich Village Theatre in blackface). McClendon’s performance garnered rave reviews, and the play toured successfully on the Black circuit. In 1926, McClendon scored an even bigger triumph as an ageing, Camille-esque quadroon in Laurence Stallings’ operatic Deep River (all the other quadroon roles were played by white actresses). New York critics hailed McClendon’s performance as one of the best of the season, using terms like ‘grace’, ‘charm’, ‘imperious beauty’, and ‘innate aristocracy’ to describe her performance (quoted in Black 2010, 48–49). It was a vision of African American womanhood that had not previously existed in the minds of white America. McClendon won similar accolades for her appearances in three of the decade’s landmark productions: as the wife in Paul Green’s In Abraham’s Bosom (1926); as the ‘Catfish Row aristocrat’ Serena in DuBose Heyward’s Porgy (1927) see Fig. 19.1; and as a southern servant (former slave) in Paul Green’s House of Connelly (1931), the inaugural production of the Group Theatre. In 1934, McClendon appeared in John C. Brownell’s comedy Brainsweat and another Paul Green vehicle, the ‘symphonic drama’ Roll, Sweet Chariot, and, in 1935, in Langston Hughes’s Mulatto. These high-profile performances further reinforced McClendon’s reputation as an actress of formidable technical and emotional gifts. Like Mitchell, McClendon was also a radio performer, portraying a character on Carlton Moss’s serial Careless Love, which was broadcast on NBC Radio from 1931 to 1932 and in 1933 performing the female lead in the radio series John Henry‚ Black River Giant starring Juano Hernandez as John Henry. McClendon’s dreams, however, did not end with Broadway or broadcast success; she was also committed to her Harlem community and to a vision of a theatre that would serve a social and cultural purpose for her race. Decades later, actor-producer Dick Campbell, who met McClendon in 1931, recalled ‘it was the dream of Rose McClendon to have a theatre group that could do any kind of plays – plays that were actually something that expressed Black life as it existed’ (quoted in Gill 2000, 22).

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     437

Fig. 19.1  Rose McClendon as Serena in the Theatre Guild production of DuBose Heyward’s Porgy, 1927 (©Alamy Photos)

McClendon began to fulfil that goal by offering advice and professional leadership to the newly formed Harlem Experimental Theatre (HET). This theatre was the brainchild of actress, teacher, and librarian Dorothy Randolph Peterson in close partnership with librarian and playwright Regina Andrews. According to Adrienne Macki Braconi, the ‘ultimate agenda’ of the HET was to ‘establish a permanent repertory theater in Harlem to reform race relations’. In order to achieve this goal, the company intended to provide training for theatre artists in all areas, particularly to serve as a ‘laboratory for the Negro playwright’ (Braconi 2015, 95). These goals were precisely in keeping with Rose McClendon’s vision for an authentic ‘Negro theatre’, and in 1931 she directed several plays for HET: Edward Perry’s Harlem Beauty Shoppe, Ridgely Torrence’s Ryder of Dreams, and an original play, Taxi Fare, co-authored by McClendon and Bruce Nugent. At about the same time, McClendon co-founded (along with Frank Wilson and Carlton Moss) and served on the executive committee of the Negro Repertory Theatre, organized as a Negro unit of the ‘Repertory

438     Cheryl Black

Playhouse Associates’ for the purpose of the ‘training and development of black actors, directors and stage technicians in order to establish a definite folk theatre for the production of worthwhile Black plays’. The group conducted a six-month training programme, followed by a studio production of Andrew Burris’s You Must Be Bo’n Again and a public showcase of Wallace Thurman’s Jeremiah the Magnificent (Peterson 1997, 150). Outside of Harlem, McClendon served on the advisory board of the Theatre Union, a professional workers theatre operating in New York from 1933 to 1937. McClendon was clearly in sympathy with the Popular Front goals of this company, which also produced one of the era’s most militant indictments of racism, Stevedore. McClendon’s increasing interest in leftist politics is revealed by her membership of the Henri Barbusse Memorial Committee (Barbusse was a French communist and leader in the International Movement Against War and Fascism), her performances on programmes sponsored by the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and for the Scottsboro Boys, her appearance in Archibald MacLeish’s anti-capitalist Panic (a benefit for the New Theatre), and her membership of the Women’s Committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). McClendon performed with or served on the boards of several other organizations dedicated to social change, including Butler Davenport’s Free Theatre, Herbert V. Gellendré’s Negro Repertory Company, the New Theatre League, and the Group Theatre. As Jay Plum has noted, given McClendon’s political activism, it is surprising that no FBI file on her exists (1991, 63). McClendon’s political sympathies were strongly in evidence when she organized, along with Dick Campbell, the Negro People’s Theatre (NPT), selecting Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty for its premiere production on June 1, 1935. 4000 people attended the NPT’s first performance at Rockland Palace, but there is no information regarding profits derived from it, and a letter from McClendon to Campbell later that month (quoted in Gill 2000, 22) describes her attempts to arrange a benefit for the company: [Y]ou can see by this leaflet that we are working like mad. I have contacted all of the active theatre groups and find them eager to work for and with us, so we must carry on. Our greatest concern is now to raise $150.00 by next Friday to pay for the house … I don’t know where it’s coming from, but I do know we will have it. That is just how much faith I have in what we are doing.

On the day of the benefit, the New York Times published McClendon’s (1935, xi) manifesto for

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     439

a Negro theatre operated by Negroes as a cultural experiment and based upon a program of social realism … Such a theatre could in the course of time alone, create a tradition that would equal the tradition of any national group. It is possible within such a structure to develop not an isolated Paul Robeson, or an occasional Bledsoe, or Gilpin but a long line of first-rate actors.

On October 19, 1935, 3000 people attended a second NPT performance at the Manhattan Opera House. The bill included a one-act play that Clifford Odets wrote and directed for the Negro People’s Theatre, titled Remember, which depicts a Negro family suffering the brutal effects of unemployment, poverty, and racism, and the one-act play Bivouac Alabama by Theatre Union playwright (and Stevedore co-author) Paul Peters (Brenman-Gibson 2002, 381). Although there are no records of the Negro People’s Theatre after October 1935, its influence, as Jay Plum has argued, was lasting, contributing directly to the development of the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (Plum 1991, 66). According to FTP Director Hallie Flanagan (1985 [1940], 63), the inauguration of a separate FTP Negro Theatre which established units in 23 cities ‘was undertaken at McClendon’s advice, who secured the interest of organizations and individuals, including a number later on the Project’. Flanagan suggested that McClendon head the Harlem Unit, but McClendon wanted someone more experienced in direction. Finally, she agreed to co-direct the Unit with director John Houseman. Her close involvement was reported by Regional Director Elmer Rice (1936, xi) in a New York Times article which listed McClendon as one of the ‘leaders’ who was ‘carrying out the plans’ of the FTP in New York. Rose McClendon’s impact on the Federal Theatre Project and African American theatre was tragically ended by her death in July 1936 (her health had forced her to leave the cast of Mulatto in December 1935). According to Glenda Gill (2000, 30), she suffered from cancer. Her obituary in the New York Times (1936, 29) hailed McClendon as a ‘crusader for the advancement of the Negro in the theatre’, stating that the Negro People’s Theatre ‘directly inspired the Negro units of the Federal Theatre Project’. McClendon’s legacy and the spirit and goals of the Negro People’s Theatre also continued in the Rose McClendon Players, organized in her honour by Dick Campbell, his wife Muriel Rahn, and playwright George Norford, in 1938. The Rose McClendon Players, ‘a real community theatre of, by, and for the community’, included future luminaries Frederick O’Neal, Ossie Davis, Loften Mitchell, Lorenzo Tucker, Canada Lee, Dooley Wilson, and Marie Young. During their five years of operation, the Rose

440     Cheryl Black

McClendon Players produced only plays written by black playwrights. They ended production in 1942, after a majority of their members had either joined the armed forces or taken jobs in defence plants (Rowe 1942, 21). A direct line of influence may be drawn from this company and the FTP Negro Units to the influential American Negro Theatre, producing from 1940 to 1950.

Mercedes Gilbert: Committed to a Cause Larger Than One Woman’s Career Mercedes Gilbert’s current obscurity belies her achievements during the years in which she flourished as an actress and entrepreneur of the New Negro era. Gilbert was born in 1889, a native of Jacksonville, Florida; her father was in the furniture business and her mother was a dressmaker. She graduated from Edwards Water College and Brewster Hospital Nurses Training School, serving for two years after graduation as an assistant superintendent at the school. She moved to New York in 1916 for additional training as a private nurse, but after failing to find employment as a nurse, she turned to more creative pursuits. Gilbert first enjoyed success as a songwriter (‘They Also Ran Blues’, ‘Decatur Street Blues’ and ‘Got the World in a Jug’) and then as a writer of vaudeville sketches, eventually writing a sketch she performed on the Pantages circuit with comedian Mantan Moreland. She then spent two seasons touring with a white vaudeville troupe playing the part of a Negro maid. In 1921, she launched a film career, appearing in The Call of His People (1921), Body and Soul (1925), and Moon Over Harlem (1939). In 1927, she made her stage debut in the musical comedy Lace Petticoat, as Mammy Dinah and later that same year appeared as a Portuguese girl in the drama Lost. In 1929 Gilbert was featured in Malinda, a ‘drama of the South and Harlem’ featuring blues singers, Zulu and Spanish dancers, a Voodoo man and a character named Magnolia, and in Bamboola, billed as ‘a unique AfroAmerican musical comedy’. From 1930 to 1935, she appeared as Moses’s wife, Zipporah, in one of the decade’s biggest hits, the Pulitzer prize-winning Green Pastures. Although Green Pastures launched careers and provided substantial incomes for many Black actors, it was frequently condemned by Black critics for its ‘primitive’ portrayal of African American religion. From Green Pastures, Gilbert was offered the lead role of Cora in Mulatto (replacing the second of two white actresses who had replaced Rose McClendon). After

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     441

its Broadway run, Gilbert toured with the cast and also revived the role for productions in Brooklyn and the Bronx in 1940. Although some Black critics objected to this play’s depiction of the ‘tragic mulatto’ and the character of Cora, a white bigot’s housekeeper/mistress, it was Gilbert’s favourite role, perhaps because it came from the pen of a Black playwright. In 1941, Gilbert toured in a summer stock production of Little Foxes (playing the role of Addie that had been created by Abbie Mitchell) and in 1944 created the role of the maid Sophronia in another acclaimed Hellman vehicle, The Searching Wind. Along with these stereotypical representations, Gilbert had more interesting opportunities with disappointingly short runs. Gilbert was cast as Mom in How Come Lawd? written by Trinidadian playwright Donald Heywood and produced on Broadway in 1937 by the Negro Theatre Guild. Despite a stellar cast that also included Rex Ingram and Leigh Whipper, How Come Lawd? closed in two days. In 1945, Gilbert appeared as The Tall Woman in Carib Song, a musical play with a West Indian setting choreographed by Katharine Dunham that ran for a month. In 1946 an eagerly anticipated, all-Black Lysistrata, which ­featured Gilbert as Lampito and a star-studded ensemble, closed after four performances. In 1950, Gilbert performed Sister Bessie Rice in an all-Black Tobacco Road produced by Jack Kirkland and the Negro Drama Group. Once again a stellar cast could not prevent an early closing. These disappointing Broadway experiences only strengthened Gilbert’s entrepreneurial desire to create her own material—a desire that had emerged at the outset of her career and was always in evidence. In 1938, she wrote, produced, and performed the lead in the WMCA radio serial Ma Johnson’s Rooming House. In 1941, she explained her discontent with current casting practices, including a specific grievance against the Federal Theatre Project, to a Chicago Defender reporter (Moses 1941, 20): White producers everlastingly think in terms of casting us as menials, flunkies and buffoons … Speak out against these things year in and year out and you are considered a trouble [maker] – I have not yet gotten over the kicking around the legitimate actor received at the hands of those in the driver’s seat with respect to the late FTP.

Two actions by Gilbert both occurring in 1936 reveal her uncompromising sense of her own self-worth and her commitment to challenging racist representations. During the run of Mulatto, Gilbert filed charges with Actors Equity against Leon Janney, another actor in the cast, who sent a letter to radio personality Harry Herschfield referring to Gilbert as ‘that colored

442     Cheryl Black

person’ and claiming that producer Martin Jones was unhappy with her ­performance and intended to fire her. Herschfield read a portion of the letter over the radio station WMCA (Rowe 1936, 6). Equity rules stipulated that such actions were punishable by fine, suspension, or expulsion. I found no evidence of a resolution of Gilbert’s action, but she was not fired and Janney was on Broadway the following season. In the same year, Gilbert sent a letter to Lady Kathleen Simon, noted anti-slavery and anti-racist activist. In the letter, Gilbert named films The Emperor Jones, Sanders of the River, and Green Pastures (even though, or perhaps because, she had performed in the play for years) as ‘creating undue and unreasonable prejudice against the Negro race’. Gilbert solicited Lady Simon’s assistance in requesting the withdrawal of these ‘libelous and slanderous pictures’ from exhibition in Great Britain (Gilbert 1936, NAG File). In 1941, Gilbert’s efforts towards control over her career culminated in her creation of One Woman Theatre, a solo performance genre composed of dramatic sketches, monologues, poems, and songs. In March, Gilbert made her triumphant solo debut at St. Martin’s community theatre in Harlem (Chicago Defender 1941, 21; M. E. F. 1941, 10). Gilbert’s clippings file at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center includes a programme and publicity flyer that provide substantial information about the content and nature of the show. The programme includes personal recommendations from five college administrators, suggesting her major audiences, and commendations from six newspaper reviews from publications in New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Charleston, and West Virginia, suggesting the breadth of her ‘circuit’. A note states that part of the proceeds from the performance will go to the Adam Clayton Powell Sr. fund for education, suggesting her commitment to serving a cause larger than her own career. The content of the material described suggested realistic portrayals of the lives of ordinary African Americans, including an entire act devoted to contemporary marriage. Part 1 consisted of a monologue ‘Morning in the Country’, a character sketch ‘In a Courtroom’, a ‘Harlem Street Scene’ specified as 135th and Lenox, and Intermission (music). Part 2 was a ‘Solo Drama: Three Women in His Life’. The characters portrayed were his mother, his wife, and the other woman. The publicity flyer lists additional titles from Gilbert’s one-woman repertoire, including eight poems, sketches titled ‘Guest of Honor’, and ‘Excursion Day’ and monologues ‘Harlem Street Scenes’, ‘Sally’s First Letter Home’, ‘I’m Glad I ain’t no Hand to Talk’, and ‘Who Was Dat Fust Monkey’s Ma?’ (Gilbert Clippings File).

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     443

An unidentified clipping in this file includes one of her monologues (unnamed, c.1941), a poignant moment in the life of a hardworking yet impoverished mother—a situation that was likely to be familiar to many in her audience: Lucy, honey, wake up. We’re home. We’re at our station now. Wake up! Yes, child, I know you’re tired. I’se tired, too. I never worked so hard in all my life as I did today. But we have to – we have to work hard. We got to get some money together, if we’se going to send little Joey away. The doctor says he needs fresh air. He’s got to have fresh air. He’s got to have milk. He can’t get no fresh air in a back apartment on an airshaft so we just got to send him away. Hmm … Lord, it sure is funny when I think about how I used to hate the farm and how I used to crave after the coming into the big city – with the big tall houses and the crowds and the lights. I got tired of milking the cows – got tired of the quiet, early mornin’s the dew on the grass. Now here I is, workin’ myself to death, so that Joey can have just a little bit of what I didn’t want.

In 1942, the Chicago Defender (Moses 1942, 23) reported that Mercedes Gilbert’s One Woman Theatre had been added to the roster of artists managed by Dick Campbell (the others being his wife Muriel Rahn, soprano, and Ruth Upsom, pianist). According to Campbell, One Woman Theatre would be seen coast-to-coast the next season at colleges, high schools, churches, and community organizations, and Miss Gilbert had been compared favourably to such solo artists as Cornelia Otis Skinner and Ruth Draper. She continued to tour One Woman Theatre until at least 1947. During the war years, Gilbert was not exclusively tied to her One Woman Theatre. In 1943, she participated in two performances noted for their political import. In March, Gilbert performed in the National Urban League’s radio broadcast ‘Heroines in Bronze’, which dramatized the lives of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Phyllis Wheatley, voiced by Gilbert, Fredi Washington, and Edna Mae Harris, respectively. Canada Lee narrated, and music was provided by the Eva Jessye Choir and soloist Ann Brown (Savage 1999, 171–72). On June 7, Gilbert appeared in Langston Hughes’s For This We Fight, staged at Madison Square Garden as part of a ‘Negro Freedom Rally’. Directed by Dick Campbell and also featuring Paul Robeson, Canada Lee, and dancer-choreographer Pearl Primus, For This We Fight attacks racism and segregation, drawing parallels between Jim Crow and Nazism and urging educational advancement and equal opportunities in war industries for African Americans. The ultimate message was ‘unity of Negroes with progressive forces’ (McLaren 1997, 156).

444     Cheryl Black

Gilbert’s social activism was also manifested in her professional affiliations. In 1936, Gilbert was a director of the Colored Actors and Performers Association. In August 1939, she headed a Citizens’ Committee in Harlem to aid the Harlem Suitcase Theatre. Gilbert was an active member of the Negro Actors Guild, serving on its membership committee in 1940. She was also a member of the National Negro Congress and Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority. The esteem in which Gilbert was held by her peers is indicated by her receiving Sigma Gamma Rho’s Blanche Edwards Award for outstanding contributions in 1938. Founded at Butler University in 1922, Sigma Gamma Rho is devoted to public service, leadership development, and the education of youth. I found little information regarding Gilbert’s personal life. She married Arthur J. Stevenson, a waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, in 1922. I found no evidence of the couple having children, although they remained married until the time of Gilbert’s death in 1952.

Venzella Jones: ‘Brilliant Bossy Dictatorial Genius’ Like that of Mercedes Gilbert Venzella Jones’s current obscurity belies her significance. Jones is a figure virtually lost to history, and lack of documentation as well as numerous variations on the spelling of her name (Venzella, Venezuela, Venezuella, or Vanzella) make her story difficult to retrieve, but what is available is important to recover and may hopefully lead to further investigation and enlightenment. To avoid confusion, I will use ‘Venzella’ throughout this chapter. A native of Pittsburgh, Venzella Newsom Jones was born into a certain degree of privilege: her father was the Reverend Daniel Newsom and her mother, Arlinne Newsom, was a teacher. Jones followed in her mother’s footsteps and was particularly interested in theatre as an educational and cultural resource. Although I have found no record of her birth or death, in 1919 Venzella Newsom Jones copyrighted ‘Songs of Valor’ (Catalog of Copyright Entries, 26) and by 1923 Venzella was a Sunday school teacher and ‘local star’ who gave dramatic readings at church and school events. Although ‘Jones’ was evidently her married name, and newspapers always referred to her as ‘Mrs’ Jones, I found no information regarding her husband or her marriage.

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     445

In 1924, Jones organized the Imperial Art Players and directed them in a ‘triumphant’ national tour of Damon and Pythias as well as other largecast spectacles including A Midsummer Night’s Dream (The Pittsburgh Courier 1925, 16). By 1925, Jones had formed the Venzella Jones Repertory Group, which remained in operation until at least 1968, usually performing in churches or community centres. Titles and venues include A Dream of Queen Esther at the Harlem Boys Club; Family Portrait (with an interracial cast of 30) at St. Augustine’s Church in the Bronx; and Back from the Wars to benefit Lenox Avenue Boys Club. In the mid-1920s, she also directed the Morgan Dramatic Club at Morgan State College and taught dramatics and public speaking at Rust College in Mississippi. In 1927–1928, Jones was back in Pittsburgh, directing and starring in the Imperial Art Players’ A Woman’s Honor and Beyond Pardon, to benefit the Sorosis Vitae club, and giving a dramatic reading at the Ebenezer Baptist Church to benefit the Coleman Home for Colored Boys. In 1929, Jones was in New York, giving dramatic readings and directing the Dramatic Club of the St. James Literary Society and quickly acquiring in New York the same reputation for artistry and high standards she had enjoyed in Pittsburgh. Jones began teaching private classes in drama at the Urban League and made her Broadway debut as a waitress ‘anxious to be somebody’ in Savage Rhythm in 1931. That same year she co-authored, performed in, and directed A Child of the King, ‘a drama of Negro life’—her co-author was Alvin Childress, who had also made his Broadway debut in Savage Rhythm, at the W. 137th St. YWCA. Jones’s cast included Childress, Juano Hernandez, and Carlotta Freeman. In 1932, Jones performed Bess in Heyward’s Porgy in Toronto. By 1935, Jones must have established a strong reputation in Harlem theatre circles, as she was appointed Director of the Negro Youth Theatre of the Federal Theatre Project. Her ensemble for the ‘Butterfly Ballet’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream included a young Thelma McQueen, who took from this show the name by which she became famous. In 1937, the Negro Youth Theatre presented a very successful production of Conrad Seiler’s Sweet Land, a play portraying the lives of southern sharecroppers, with a large integrated cast. In her study of the Negro Units of the FTP, Tina Redd reports a change in Jones’s title from Unit Director to ‘play director’ when Negro Youth Theatre personnel were subsumed within the larger ‘Negro Theatre’ Project 806 (Redd 1997, 52). Evidence suggests that both race and gender played a role in Jones’s demotion. Redd quotes a member of the group who claimed ‘there is a great amount of prejudice against this unit

446     Cheryl Black

because it has a woman as its supervisor and director; and she being a Negro makes it still worse’ (Redd 1997, 49). Jones’s association with the FTP as well as the New Theatre League, an organization dedicated to producing ‘progressive social drama’, suggests her sympathies with leftist political ideals. In 1937, Jones, along with Molly Day Thatcher (Mrs. Elia Kazan), judged a youth drama contest for New Theatre League. The winning play portrayed a strike among young factory workers. In the 1940s and 1950s, Jones continued to perform and direct, usually plays with racial themes for charitable causes, in New York and nationally. She also continued to teach private classes in drama and began a career in radio, performing in episodes of popular radio dramas Our Gal Sunday (CBS, 1937–1959) and the Cavalcade of America’s ‘Experiment in Humanity’ (1950) and ‘Uncle Eury’s Dollar’ (1951). The Venzella Jones Repertory Group performed Edwin Hopkins’ Back from the Wars in June 1950 to benefit the Lenox Avenue Boys Club, although in this case one reviewer found the play ‘hardly worthy of the talents of Miss Jones and her players’ and accused the producer (also Hopkins) of doing this ‘splendid directress an injustice’ in enlisting her services (Phillips 1950, 19). Although a harsh dismissal of the play, the review reveals the high esteem in which Jones was held. In 1951 Jones directed Jo Sinclair’s The Long Moment, a drama about racial passing, at St. Martin’s Church in Harlem. The last record of a Venzella Jones Repertory Group performance is 1968, in Family Portrait at New York’s Salem Methodist Church. I have been unable to find a record of Jones’s death but her former student, actress/playwright Alice Childress, recalled seeing her a few days before she died, ‘around 1980’ (quoted in Perkins 2011, xv). Jones’s impact on future generations is substantiated by testimony from Alice Childress (1916–1994) who married Jones’ collaborator Alvin Childress in 1934. In an interview with Kathy Perkins, Childress ‘spoke of [Jones] with tremendous excitement’ as one of the mentors who deeply influenced her, providing Childress with her first professional theatre training. ‘Under Jones, Alice Childress studied the classics and performed in little plays Venezuela Jones wrote. She was the only woman Alice Childress knew at the time who wrote plays and Jones made her aware of the racism prevalent in the theatre at the time’ (Perkins 2011, xiv). Childress described Jones as ‘a brilliant bossy dictatorial genius … embittered by the doors closed to great artists of African descent. Not always kind to me and others … But I don’t believe I would have become a part of the theatre if her life had not touched mine’ (quoted in Perkins 2011, xv).

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     447

Conclusion This investigation illustrates the nexus of economic, aesthetic, personal, and political imperatives that these women negotiated, and indeed, must still be negotiated by women in theatre and society, especially by those whose racial, ethnic, or sexual identities trouble the dominant culture. There is much to celebrate and much to learn from the challenges they faced, their many triumphs, and their disappointments. Although information about their personal lives is scanty, it seems that, even though they all married (and Mitchell possibly multiple times), their careers took precedence. Although it is impossible to know how they felt about their husbands, the demands of their careers, including frequent travel, would have made traditional domestic arrangements difficult, if not impossible. Records indicate that of the five, only Mitchell had children. Mitchell also endured domestic abuse. Her story is a tragic one, and her professional achievements even more remarkable under the circumstances. If Will Marion Cook is an unfortunate example of the harm that male partners may inflict, Dick Campbell emerges in this narrative as one example of a supportive male ally in the lives of two of our five featured women. This investigation also reveals a close network among the African American acting community during this era; two of the actresses worked with Williams and Walker; three worked with the Federal Theatre Project; three worked with the Lafayette Players; three worked in radio; three worked in film; four toured on the vaudeville circuit; all of them worked on Broadway, occasionally together, and they performed many of the same roles. Throughout the course of their careers, these women frequently had to choose whether or not to accept roles in Broadway shows that offered financial security and fame but in which they were compelled to play servants or other stereotypes. None of them escaped playing stereotyped roles at some point, but they all also achieved a measure of success in escaping stereotype and performing and/or producing some of the era’s most progressive works, including progressive radio broadcasts that reached large national audiences. Most importantly, these women were entrepreneurs and activists as well as artists. Discontented with the status quo in terms of their personal careers as well as in their chosen field and society at large, they set out to make a difference. They wrote and directed original work that portrayed authentic African American experience and celebrated African American history. They organized and headed companies that challenged prevailing notions of African American identities and abilities. They allied themselves with

448     Cheryl Black

other progressive social movements and organizations. They were leaders in Harlem’s premiere advocacy organization for African American actors, the Negro Actors Guild. And they coached, mentored, and taught the next generation of artists, who carried on the tradition of artistic and social progress. They might all take pride, as Anita Bush did, in the gardens that have grown from the seeds they planted. Their impact is especially significant because their ‘Harlem Renaissance’ was a moveable feast. The Abbie Mitchell Players, the Lafayette Players, the One Woman Theatre, the Venzella Jones Repertory Group, as well as the Federal Theatre Project, reached audiences in theatres, schools, churches and community centres across the nation. Direct lines of influence may be traced from the Lafayette Players, the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Units, the Negro People’s Theatre, and the Rose McClendon Players to African American artists and organizations producing work today that continues to challenge negative representations and to create theatre that offers a larger vision of what life in America should be.

Bibliography Black, Cheryl. 2010. ‘Abject No More: Authority and Authenticity in the Theatrical Career of Rose McClendon’. Theatre History Studies 30: 42–64. Bostic, Joe. 1943. ‘Why a Negro Theatre?’ The People’s Voice, February 27, 1943. Bracks, Lain’tin L., and Jessie Carney Smith, eds. 2014. Black Women of the Harlem Renaissance Era. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Braconi, Adrienne Macki. 2015. Harlem’s Theaters: A Staging Ground for Community, Class, and Contradiction, 1923–39. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Brenman-Gibson, Margaret. 2002. Clifford Odets: American Playwright. New York and London: Applause. Bush, Anita. n.d. ‘Clippings File’. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Unpublished archive material. Butler, Bennie. 1929. ‘Abbie’s Ambition’. Interstate Tatler, February 1, 1929. Catalog of Copyright Entries. n.d. Washington, DC: Library of Congress. Chicago Defender. 1941. ‘Mercedes Gilbert’s Act Hailed’, March 15, 1941. Chicago Defender. 1946. ‘Etta Moten Gets Lead Role in Lysistrata’, September 14, 1946. Cole, Bob, and J. Rosamond Johnson. n.d. ‘Scrapbook’. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Unpublished archive material. Crisis. 1927. ‘Dramatis Personae’. Crisis 34. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1926. ‘Krigwa Players Little Negro Theatre’. Crisis 32: 134–36. Flanagan, Hallie. 1985 [First edition 1940]. Arena. New York: Limelight Editions.

19  Actress-Entrepreneurs of the Harlem Renaissance / New Negro Era     449

F., M. E. ‘Mercedes Gilbert Heard in Monologue’. 1941. New York Age, March 22, 1941. Gilbert, Mercedes. 1936. Letter to Lady Simon. Negro Actors Guild File, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. October 10, 1936. Gilbert, Mercedes. n.d. ‘Clippings File’ (covering years 1921–1950). Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Unpublished archive material. Gill, Glenda E. 1988. White Grease Paint on Black Performers: A Study of the Federal Theatre, 1935–1939. New York: Peter Lang. Gill, Glenda E. 2000. No Surrender! No Retreat! African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Goldfarb, David A. 1993. ‘Marion Douglas’. In Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine, 346–47, 2 vols. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing. Hazzard, Alvira. 1940. ‘Abbie Isn’t Tickled with Role’ [The Boston Saturday Evening Quill ], March 16, 1940. Mitchell Clippings File, Billy Rose Theatre Division. New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Hill, Errol, ed. 1987. The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays. New York: Applause. Hill, Errol, and James V. Hatch. 2003. A History of African American Theatre. London and New York: Cambridge University Press. Internet Movie Database. n.d. ‘Anita Bush’. Accessed October 30, 2018. http:// www.imdb.com/name/nm0124090/bio. Jones, Jacqueline. 1985. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present. New York: Basic Books. ‘Kitty’. 1926. ‘Louisville’s Elite’. The Pittsburgh Courier, May 19, 1926. Krasner, David. 2011. ‘The Real Thing’. In Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Locke, Alain. 1925. ‘Enter the New Negro’. Survey Graphic. New York: Albert and Charles Boni. McClendon, Rose. 1935. ‘As to a New Negro Stage’. New York Times, June 30, 1935. McLaren, Joseph. 1997. Langston Hughes, Folk Dramatist in the Protest Tradition, 1921–1943. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Mitchell, Abbie. n.d. ‘Clippings File’ (covering years 1900–1600). Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Unpublished archive material. Mitchell, Abbie. n.d. Correspondence with Elise Hawkins, Mercer Cook Papers (covering years 1903–87), Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Unpublished archive material. Moses, Alvin. 1941. ‘Alvin Moses Says’. Chicago Defender, December 6, 1941. Moses, Alvin. 1942. ‘Alvin Moses Says’. Chicago Defender, April 4, 1942.

450     Cheryl Black

Negro Actors Guild. ‘Clippings File’. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture New York Public Library. New York Amsterdam News. 1925. ‘Alabama Fantasies a Hit at the Lafayette Theatre’, January, 1925. New York Times. 1936. ‘Rose McClendon, 51, Negro Actress, Dies’, July 14, 1936. New York Times. 1960. ‘Abbie Mitchell, Actress, Is Dead’, March 20, 1960. People’s Voice. 1943. ‘Aldridge Guild Presents Play’, January 2, 1943. Perkins, Kathy A., ed. 2011. Selected Plays by Alice Childress. Evanston: University of Illinois Press. Peterson, Bernard L., Jr. 1997. The African American Theatre Directory, 1816–1960. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Phillips, Hillary. 1950. ‘Off-Broadway’. New York Age, June 3, 1950. The Pittsburgh Courier. 1925. ‘Where E’re You Find ’Em, Beauty and Charm Abound’, July 4, 1925. The Pittsburgh Courier. 1930. ‘No Truth in Report, Says Diva’, September 27, 1930. Plum, Jay Thomas. 1991. ‘Broadway, Harlem, and the Federal Theatre Project: The Theatrical Careers of Rose McClendon: 1919–1935’. MA Thesis, University of Maryland. Redd, Tina. 1997. ‘The Struggle for Administrative and Artistic Control of the Federal Theatre Negro Units’. PhD Diss., University of Washington. Rice, Elmer. 1936. ‘The Federal Theatre Hereabouts’. New York Times, January 5, 1936. Robson, Thomas. 2012. ‘A More Aggressive Plantation Play: Henrietta Vinton Davis and John Edward Bruce Collaborate on My Old Kentucky Home ’. Theatre History Studies 32: 120–40. Rowe, Billy. 1936. ‘Mulatto Star Charges Slander’. Pittsburgh Courier, July 2, 1936. Rowe, Billy. 1942. ‘The Rose McClendon Players Have Gone to War to Act for Democracy’. Pittsburgh Courier, December 12, 1942. Saltz, Rachel. 2008. ‘The Triumph and Pain of a Hollywood Trailblazer’. New York Times, August 21, 2008. Sampson, Henry T. 1988. The Ghost Walks: A Chronological History of Blacks in Show Business, 1865–1910. Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press. Savage, Barbara Dianne. 1999. Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War and the Politics of Race: 1938–1948. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press. Tanner, Jo A. 1992. Dusky Maidens: The Odyssey of the Early Black Dramatic Actress. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Thompson, Sister Francesca. 1972. ‘The Lafayette Players, 1915–1932’. PhD Diss., University of Michigan. Extract reprinted in The Theatre of Black Americans: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Errol Hill, 211–30. 1980, 1987. New York: Applause. Walton, Lester A. 1908. ‘Red Moon’. New York Age, September 10, 1908. Walton, Lester A. 1910. ‘Music and the Stage’. New York Age, August 25, 1910.

Part VI Late Twentieth-Century America and England

Introduction At this stage in our narrative, two major changes coincide. Whereas in the chapters featured previously women had been fighting to obtain recognition and opportunities within a male world, accepting the agenda set by patriarchal societies, the rise of second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s in Britain and the USA saw women claiming the right to set a new agenda of their own, to tell the stories they considered important, to control their own work and their own bodies. A proliferation of feminist theatre collectives sprang up, initially as branches of existing progressive companies (such as Red Ladder and Theatre Centre) and then as independent companies run by and for women, such as the majority of the companies discussed below. Together with this historical cultural development, this volume coincidentally reaches the period from which women who had been influential in shaping the theatrical scene are still living and working, able to tell their own story. With the exception of the first chapter, in which Dorothy Chansky pays tribute to the achievements of groundbreaking performance artists of 1960s to 1990s America, the remaining chapters in this part have been written not by scholars but by practitioners, albeit ones who in many cases are now also practising academics, in itself an indication of how far the twenty-first century has been willing to acknowledge the changed status of female performers. While the next part of this volume will open out the discussion across the globe, the majority of this part looks in close detail at one relatively

452     Part VI: Late Twentieth-Century America and England

tiny area in time and geography. Many of the practitioners writing below knew or knew of each other, many had worked together or been inspired by each other’s productions and example, and all would subscribe to much the same sets of beliefs and world view. Yet each chapter examines a different aspect of the jigsaw: Dorothy Chansky provides a distinctly American viewpoint; Anna Furse offers a European and multi-media perspective, Sue Parrish a fiercely political narrative; Bernardine Evaristo highlights the specific experience of black women performers; the account by Women and Theatre provides insights into collaborative working in a non-metropolitan context, reminding us of the importance of community roots; Jenny Sealey reveals the complex interplay between gender and disability as experienced by female performers. These are all very individual stories, very personal accounts of lives and careers lived. Together they provide a vivid, multifaceted picture of late twentieth-century feminist theatre and its legacy reaching forward to the present day. If this volume tells the story of women moving inwards from the margins, here they have definitely arrived centre stage and are clamouring to be noticed. The opening chapter, by Dorothy Chansky, positions us initially in 1960s America, at the moment that second-wave feminism kicks off. It explores the emergence of feminist performance art, a genre in which performers use their bodies as living canvases to create work that was a cross between theatre and art. Often, as here, the immediacy of the body is used to shock, challenging viewers to face their prejudices. Chansky focuses on three leading exponents of this new genre. Adrian Piper exploited her ability to pass as either black or white in order to challenge racist preconceptions, interacting with strangers in tightly improvised scenarios within everyday situations. Karen Finley wrote and performed scripted theatre pieces, but became most famous for packaging her body for the viewer by smearing it with chocolate or with excrement, challenging male expectations of the naked female body as a pornographic property. Carolee Schneemann too used her naked body to challenge male preconceptions, most notably in Interior Scroll (see Fig. 20.3), a performance piece in which she slowly drew from her vagina a scroll from which she read a feminist polemic. Anna Furse’s contribution is an immensely personal memoir—her own life and body are at the centre of the experience. Furse was involved in most of the key movements and moments of the 1970s and 1980s, working across Europe on international collaborations throughout her life and pushing at the boundaries of conventional theatre to include dance and multi-media inputs. Furse describes training as a dancer, her subsequent work with Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, and going on to perform, devise, write, direct,

Part VI: Late Twentieth-Century America and England      453

train and teach. Her personal experiences with IVF led her into ongoing collaborations between art and science and as both practitioner and academic she remains deeply committed to Practice as Research (PaR). Sue Parrish’s politically driven chapter charts the evolution of the feminist struggle in theatre over the last forty to fifty years via her own personal history and that of the Women’s Theatre Group (WTG), relaunched as Sphinx Theatre Company under her leadership in 1990. WTG was the UK’s leading separatist feminist theatre collective and Sphinx continues their campaigning role and support for established and emerging writers. Their latest initiatives include the Women Centre Stage project, which has organised conferences, performance platforms and publications, and the publication of the Sphinx Test, a theatre equivalent of film’s Bechdel Test, aiming to encourage the expansion and extension of female roles. Bernardine Evaristo describes her training at Rose Bruford College and founding of the first female-only black theatre company, Theatre of Black Women (TBW), together with fellow students, Paulette Randall and Patricia St. Hilaire. This was initially an act of self-empowerment to enable the three to write, produce and perform their own work, but TBW subsequently went on to support and develop other black women writers and performers, before being wound up in 1988 when funding was withdrawn. Looking back, Evaristo reflects that, despite the sudden proliferation of all-black theatre companies in the 1970s and 1980s, this was a short-lived moment and nothing has significantly improved in the last three decades; she concludes that there is an urgent need once again for companies such as TBW to give black women a voice. The next chapter moves the focus away from the metropolitan context, while still remaining in the UK. It was written collaboratively by three of the founder members of Birmingham-based company, Women and Theatre (WAT), founded in the 1980s and one of the very few regional feminist companies still going strong today. The opening section, by Polly Wright, charts the early years of WAT, providing an account of the company’s collaborative working practices, their research-based devising process and their use of techniques such as ‘interrupted role play’ and hot-seating in post-show audience interactions. She records how pressures from funders and external collaborators forced WAT to move away from gender-blind casting and how their access to funding from non-Arts organisations led to their increasing focus on Theatre for Purpose (Applied Theatre) productions. Subsequent sections by Polly Wright and Jo Broadwood demonstrate how the working practices developed at WAT have supported them through their later careers; they discuss the role of theatre in areas such as medical research, conflict

454     Part VI: Late Twentieth-Century America and England

resolution and supporting young people at risk. The closing section of the chapter, by current Artistic Director Janice Connolly, outlines how WAT continues to serve the women of Birmingham 35 years on. This volume-part ends with another very personal account—Jenny Sealey, Artistic Director of Graeae, the UK’s leading D/deaf and disabled theatre company, talks to Clare Smout, herself a former theatre director, about her experiences as a Deaf performer in the late 1980s and early 1990s, touring in small-scale all-women productions which took issue-based theatre into local communities to stimulate debate and change. Sealey goes on to describe her subsequent work as Artistic Director of Graeae and as Co-Artistic Director of the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony, focusing on the feminist work she is producing for and with the company and the difficulties of dealing with ‘men in suits’ when both female and Deaf. Unlike the earlier contributors to this part, responding to the imperatives and possibilities of second-wave feminism, Sealey (the youngest of this group) stands on the cusp of this period, her experiences as a performer shaped by one context, but her ongoing career as a director formed as much by third and even fourth-wave feminism and international cross-fertilisation as by earlier practice and expectations. Her account forms a bridge into the final part of this volume.

20 ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance: Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Carolee Schneemann Dorothy Chansky

The single unifying characteristic of the case studies in this handbook is that its subjects are women. If this sounds tautological, it is worth considering how the words ‘female’, ‘woman’, and ‘actress’ appear throughout the volume largely as givens—the recognized (or assumed or accepted) basis for prejudice, anger, preferential treatment, segregation, prohibition, exploitation, voyeurism, or (occasionally) opportunity. Genres, modes of accommodation or protest, visual styles, laws governing women’s appearances (for or against) as performers, and a host of other things have changed across time; the bedrock reason for the differentiation has not. Philosophy, religion, and psychoanalysis provide rationales for how the binary is undergirded, but that there is a recognized boundary—a kind of indelible line in the sand, as it were—underwrites almost all of the behaviours, exclusions, and even specialness concerning women performers as a class and as individuals. This chapter explores the oeuvres of performing women for whom the given of being a woman was and is itself the impetus for their work. Dubbed ‘performance art’ in its early years, this work has now entered theatre studies as a staple. A number of the women who began doing such work in the 1960s had attended art school; some later practitioners trained in theatre. Karen Finley, who straddles both worlds, having gone to art school but later segueing into writing plays featuring herself but that others could perform, articulated succinctly in a 1991 interview the bottom line motivation for the outrage and utter failure of understanding that drives Dorothy Chansky (*)  Lubbock, TX, USA © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_20

455

456     Dorothy Chansky

her work: ‘I’ve suffered… just from the fact of being “born a woman”’ (Juno and Vale 1991, 48). And lest this seems like an issue that faded after the glory days of second wave feminism, consider the cri de coeur of then twenty-four-year-old American writer Heather Burtman in a 2017 newspaper essay entitled ‘My Body Doesn’t Belong to You’: ‘[M]y body makes life dangerous for me. My breasts, my hips, the way I walk. Any woman’s breasts, any woman’s hips, the way any woman walks’. This observation makes clear that women are read as performing seduction even when they simply perambulate from point A to point B. The street has been the stage for at least one of the women in this chapter. So have the subway, a department store, cocktail parties, art galleries, ‘alternative’ performance spaces, college campuses, and ‘regular’ theatres. All the world is indeed a stage, when all the world is seeded with gendered landmines. The performers in this chapter—Adrian Piper, Karen Finley, and Carolee Schneemann—are united in their collective cry of ‘not fair’ cum ‘why can’t you see?’ but their métiers and individual lives are hugely varied. One is a mother; all went to art school; one has written theatre scripts; one holds an earned Ph.D. in philosophy and the other two honorary doctorates; all three are or have been university or college professors; one is mixed-race identifying for many years as black; one traces her roots to rural Pennsylvania, another to suburban Chicago, and the third grew up in Harlem; one’s father was a doctor, another’s was a lawyer, while the third’s was a musician and a suicide. All have been subjects of scholarly articles and doctoral dissertations. All have used and foregrounded their female bodies to explore, variously, intersections of race/ gender and racism; domestic violence; cancer; sexual pleasure; professional discrimination; and foremost: the unavoidable, irreducible social effects of being a human possessed of legible cisgender female characteristics and wanting to be recognized as an artist and a human with individual identity and rights. The 1960s–1990s—the first ten years, with regard to female performance artists, called by one researcher ‘highly charged and theatrical’ (Roth 1983, 16) and most of the entire period labelled an era of ‘angry women’—saw an outpouring of performances by women that coexisted and meshed with other kinds of American activism, characterized by: criticism of social and political inequities;… radical public disclosure of personal humiliation, pain and injustice…; and… calls for a new consciousness which… would integrate political action, cutting-edge theory, linguistic reconstruction, adventurous sexuality, humor, spirituality and art toward the dream of a society of justice. (Juno and Vale 1991, 4)

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     457

Linked causes included environmentalism, opposition to the Vietnam War, feminism, civil rights, opposition to ageism, and garden-variety resentment of the patriarchal military-industrial complex whose stranglehold affected everything from salaries to selection for exhibition in art galleries to admission to professional graduate studies to abortion rights to pay scales to differential prices for dry cleaning. The remainder of the chapter investigates the three individuals: Piper, Finley, and Schneemann. While they are neither the only recognized women performance artists of the 1960s–1990s nor the only ones with important legacies, they stand out for all being the subjects of many studies, for having been prolific, for having continued to work when they could have rested on their laurels or ‘moved on’, and, of course, for producing galvanizing, unique work(s). Each section considers the works for which its creator is best known within the decades under consideration, her legacy, and, for the two still alive in 2019, the work she continues to do.

Adrian Piper ‘My work’, wrote Adrian Piper (b. 1948), ‘intentionally holds up for scrutiny deep-seated racist attitudes that no individual socialized into a racist society can escape, no matter how politically correct or seasoned such an individual may be’ (1996c, 251). Piper, who has spent most of her life identifying as African American, generated a corpus of work fuelled by her ability to pass for white and the resulting reception, confusion and prejudice to which this has given her access when others misread, questioned, or resented the possibilities posed by her non-labelled, often hard-to-pigeonhole presence. She is 1/32 Malagasy—that is, from Madagascar—1/32 African of unknown origin, 1/16 Igbo (Nigeria), and 1/8 East Indian (Chittagong, India [now Bangladesh]), in addition to having predominantly British and German family ancestry (APRA Archivist, pers. comm. June 1, 2018). Piper’s parents, who encouraged her artistic and intellectual interests beginning in her early childhood, both suffered the effects of bigotry on their careers in the 1950s and 1960s, with her father, a lawyer, choosing to fight in the Army during World War II as a white man (Jones 2002, 120– 23). He was able to do this because he had two birth certificates: one identifying him as black, the other as white (Berger 1999b, 28). As one scholar puts it, ‘Piper invents new ways of being black and free in public’ (Cervenak 2006, 116).

458     Dorothy Chansky

Inevitably, gender intertwines with race in Piper’s performance work, something especially clear in her Mythic Being project, discussed below. ‘To the extent that the primary foundation of racism is visual, it is commensurate with sexism’ she told an interviewer in 1990. ‘Some people are discriminated against because they have breasts, while others are discriminated against because they have woolly hair. If you happen to have breasts and woolly hair, you are in double trouble’ (Berger 1999a, 94). Piper’s formal training in philosophy, in which she earned a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1981, additionally fed her ability to think and write articulately about identity and communication. Piper had her first lessons in drawing at age three; she attended a progressive private school that focused on the arts and on students’ development as individuals. While in her teens she began taking courses at New York’s School of Visual Arts; she earned an associate’s degree there in 1969, then enrolling at New York’s City College, where she studied philosophy. Piper identified herself and her earliest work with Conceptual Art, a movement whose practitioners prioritized process over end product, seeking: to establish a link between art practice and the ideological and institutional structures in which it is embedded… [to] expose the previously suppressed fallacy of the sphere of artistic production as separate from the conditions of instrumentality and consumption that bear upon all aspects of social and cultural experience. (Wark 2001, 44)

But Conceptual Art’s downplaying of the personal coupled with its focus on art and the art world as the loci of their interest did not satisfy Piper, and her desire to confront spectators directly—especially including those beyond art insiders and aficionados—led to a series of live performances for which she remains famous. Because she does not regard herself as separate from the world in which she seeks recognition for all individuals in their uniqueness, the audiences for which she has staged her performances have ranged from any and all random passers-by on the streets of New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts; to department store shoppers, subway riders, and museumgoers; to guests at private parties; to herself alone in her studio. Below I discuss four well-known and much studied performance pieces, presented between 1970 and the late 1980s. The 1970 Catalysis series sought, as its name suggests, to catalyse spectators, who were to be surprised by Piper’s ‘in your face’, unannounced appearances as a sometimes smelly, sometimes creepy, always unsettling mess. She described the pieces in a 1972 interview with critic Lucy Lippard

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     459

(76). In Catalysis I, ‘I saturated a set of clothing in a mixture of vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil for a week then wore them on the D train during evening rush hour’. In Catalysis III, ‘I painted some clothing with sticky white paint with a sign attached saying “WET PAINT”, then went shopping at Macy’s for some gloves and sunglasses’. In Catalysis VII, she went to the Metropolitan Museum and blew large bubblegum bubbles, allowing these to burst and stick to her face. Catalysis actions also involved filling a handbag with ketchup, which was entirely evident when Piper reached into the bag for a comb or for her wallet. As critic Peggy Phelan (1998, 7) observes of the Catalysis series, ‘the performance… seeks to inspire a new perception of what constitutes the order of the social field, at the level of dress, sanity and the distinction between private and public acts’. By this point, at just age twenty-one, Piper had ‘stopped using gallery frameworks’ and articulated that she was ‘turning myself into an object’ (Lippard 1972, 78). She wrote of these pieces in her journal, ‘the significance and experience of [them] is [sic ] defined as completely as possible by the viewer’s reaction and interpretation. Ideally the work has no meaning or independent existence outside of its function as a medium of change’ (1996b, 42). In 1971, then beginning to be deeply steeped in philosophy, especially Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Piper undertook a performative engagement with her own consciousness of herself as both subject and object in a private work called Food for the Spirit. The term ‘performative’, drawn from J. L. Austin’s language philosophy, refers to actions or words that do things rather than describe or illustrate things (Auslander 2006). Here, Piper’s self-conscious activities and her photographing them marked her doings as performances and not merely living her life. For two months she fasted, read Kant, became obsessed with ‘space, time, and the transcendental self ’ (Piper 1996a, 54–55) and did what might be called reality checks when her anxiety that she was ‘disappearing into a state of Kantian self-transcendence’ (Wark 2001, 46) led her to photograph herself looking in the mirror as she lost weight along with psychological groundedness. The quest to understand selfhood in terms of both rationality and transcendence yielded Piper’s comment on ‘the paradox of human rationality; if we didn’t have it, we couldn’t function at all. Yet these rational categories are invariably inadequate and insensitive to the uniqueness of an individual’ (Berger 1999a, 88). Piper coins the term ‘pseudorationality’ to describe the denial, dissociation, and rationalization we undertake to explain away phenomena not fitting our existing worldviews. The hope she offers is that even those categories and experiences that ‘confront and overwhelm us… are mutable’ (Berger 1999a, 88, 90).

460     Dorothy Chansky

One might argue that Piper’s next and longest performance piece, its multiple parts and iterations collectively called The Mythic Being, revisited the question of the subject’s uniqueness and her awareness and apprehension of the object (when both of these are the same person, in this case herself ) while including an additional party: an audience whose role was also dual, as they were challenged with apprehension of Piper as object and subject and of themselves as either or both. Between 1972 and 1975, across several media, Piper performed as an invented character she called the Mythic Being—a person not herself and ‘a persona who could be perceived by many… onlookers as a social threat’ (Cottingham 1999, 65). Piper explains a mythic being as ‘a fictitious or abstract personality that is generally part of a story or folktale used to explain or sanctify social or legal institutions or natural phenomena’ (Smith 2011, 48). Because her mythic character was a scruffy, macho young man with a big Afro (Piper’s own hair was long and smooth at the time), large reflecting sunglasses, a moustache, an attitude at once confrontational and defensive, and often with a cigarette in his mouth, Piper was able to play with being ‘the self-conscious site of other people’s economic and epistemic wandering’ as well as exploring the experience her own awareness and experience of being simultaneously self and other (Cervenak 2006, 122). The work was, as Sarah Jane Cervenak succinctly puts it, ‘an exploration of the troubling disparity Piper came to realize between her own self-image and the one that her “catalysed” audience had of her’ (2006, 118). ‘Indeed’, adds Cervenak, ‘the discord between being a self-conscious object and a being able to transcend the contingencies of the internalized spectator is that which animates the complexity of the Mythic Being project’ (2006, 121). Piper/the Mythic Being appeared as a cross-dressed, racialized male on the street, in photographs, in doctored photographs, in an eight-minute segment of a film by Peter Kennedy (Other Than Art’s Sake, 1973), and in paid advertisements in the Village Voice. The film, of course, offers a perspective on live audience that is slightly different from what one might have experienced as a real-time, live audience member on the street on a non-filming day, simply because the presence of the camera is evident in the reactions to it by spectators themselves. In an interview about the project (available in part online), Piper (1973) explains her purpose: ‘To see what would happen if there was a being who had exactly my history only a completely different visual appearance to the rest of society. That’s why I dress as a man’. The Mythic Being took to the streets, reciting over and over again memorized snippets from Piper’s journals. From the film footage, it is clear that Piper made no attempt to disguise her voice, performing the Mythic Being

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     461

as, in John P. Bowles’s words (2007, 638), ‘a constellation of racial, sexual, and gender ambiguities’. Bowles (623) argues for understanding all genres of the Mythic Being series as ‘Piper’s performance of her inability to inhabit norms of race or gender’, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s (2008, 168–69) articulation of the subject’s difficulty in surmounting the problem of only existing through ‘the recognition’ of others. Piper was misrecognized as white from childhood on; as the Mythic Being, she chose to be misrecognized as male. The Mythic Being series solidified her ‘reputation as provocateur and philosopher’ (Cembalest 2013). Photographs of the Mythic Being include images of the Being on a Cambridge sidewalk titled The Mythic Being: Cruising White Women (1975) in which he/she sits on a public step gazing at a white woman walking by. Another series of photos staged the Mythic Being mugging a white man, although the obvious disparity in size between the Mythic mugger (slight and shorter) and her much larger victim hint that the action was planned for the camera. In both cases, viewers are meant to see racial difference and aggression. The five images in The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus (1975) are photographs that Piper doctored with crayon and into which she inserted captions in the form of thought bubbles. In these, the Being crosses a crowded street, heading towards the viewer, beginning in the first frame as a small figure in the distance and almost lost in the hustle and bustle of the wide city avenue and under the caption ‘I am the locus of consciousness’. As he/she looms closer, the thought bubble in the second frame says ‘surrounded and constrained’. By the fifth and final frame, the other people are nearly obliterated, the Being is prominently in the front of the frame, and the bubble says ‘Get out of my way, Asshole’. In another doctored photo from 1975, The Mythic Being: I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear, the thought bubble contains the post-colon line of the title and the Being is depicted only as a face, half of which is obscured in shadow, and part of which is covered by his hand holding a cigarette. Aggression and self-awareness are present as challenges but also, one might say, as unexamined assertions that may or may not apply to any actual person. It is important to understand the photo series as performances just as much as the in-person endeavours were. In ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, Philip Auslander (2006, 6) argues for a nuanced understanding of performance documentation—an understanding troubling the notion that only a performance before a live audience can be the impetus for a performance photo or video (he calls this ‘documentary’ photography or recording). Auslander argues for allowing an event staged precisely for the camera and therefore in the interest of future viewings to

462     Dorothy Chansky

count fully as a performance belonging to a category he calls ‘theatrical’. Piper’s carefully manipulated images (posed shots, doctored prints, captioning) comprise a documentation that ‘participates in the fine art tradition of the reproduction of works rather than the ethnographic tradition of capturing events ’, said ‘works’ nonetheless fully qualifying as performance because of their framing, documentation, and commitment to future audiences. The captions/bubbles in The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus (see Fig. 20.1) suggest attitudes Piper might have anticipated evoking among strangers via the Being’s demeanour and affect. The entire Mythic Being project is, as Bowles succinctly labels it, anti-essentialist. Yet invoking stereotypes only to undermine them by not being what these call to mind (there is no actual threatening black man in any of the incarnations), Piper ran the risk of reifying stereotypes. Cherise Smith (2011, 76–77) notes that in the logic of Piper’s defensive strategy ‘the audience, not the artist, was responsible for retrieving and activating the stereotype. Yet in mapping the constellation of signs that constitute the stereotype of the black male, the series validated it simultaneously’. Smith (77) points deftly to the difficulty of assessing interventionist work that, while it exposes the artist’s power to assert her

Fig. 20.1  Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being: I Am the Locus, 1975. Five gelatin silver prints, oil crayon. Each 8” x 10” (20.3 cm x 2.54 cm). Detail: photograph #2 of 5. (Collection of the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago. ©Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin)

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     463

difference from her adopted persona, also runs the risk of using that power to ‘subordinate her “other”’. Surely this is the dilemma facing the mutability to which Piper nods and which she aspires to instantiate. In the last of Piper’s now-iconic performance works, she waited for the (live) audience to make the first move before enacting her intervention. My Calling (Card) #1: Reactive Guerrilla Performance for Dinners and Cocktail Parties and My Calling (Card) #2: Reactive Guerrilla Performance for Bars and Discos were staged 1986–1990 and literally involved printed cards Piper carried and handed out in social situations where she felt provocation warranted them. It was #1 that generated the most attention and that Piper addressed in gallery discussions in the late 1980s. (#2 basically indicated that she wanted to be alone and was not at the bar to be picked up.) In social situations where Piper overheard a racist remark, she would hand to the person who spoke or laughed at the remark one of her cards, the contents of which were: Dear Friend, I am black. I am sure that you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past, I have attempted to alert people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative, or socially inappropriate. Therefore my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe that there are no black people present, and to distribute this card when they do. I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me. Sincerely yours, Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

Unsurprisingly, the few responses that are available for examination (recorded at one of the gallery ‘metaperformances’ in which Piper discussed the work) indicate discomfort among white audience members and contain spoken responses calling Piper patronizing, herself racist, and engaging humourlessly in ‘policing’. Only when Piper answers the question of how it makes her feel to hand out the cards with ‘They ruin my evening’, do people drop their guard (Berger 1999b, 31). Humanities scholar David Marriott (2013, 4) situates the power—and the conundrum—of Piper’s ‘making the defensive rationalizations of racism visible’ in the realm of etiquette and the performativity of language. All forms of etiquette depend on exclusion, but its ‘conventionalized forms… can no more distinguish inner sincerity from outward conformity than it can distinguish insincere but polite tolerance

464     Dorothy Chansky

from deep-seated racist conviction’. Did the party guest chuckle at the racist remark because it was made by her boss, whom she feared displeasing or embarrassing? Using the terms of linguistics, Marriott (6) argues for Piper’s ‘understanding racism as a kind of illocutionary force [italics original], rather than a referential belief to be verified by subjective truthfulness or sincerity’. The terms of racism pervade our language and culture; they are ‘normative; given from elsewhere and imbricated in a historicity that is irreducible to meaning or intention’ (8). Piper has taught at a number of prestigious US universities, including Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Michigan. She was professor of philosophy at Wellesley College (Hillary Clinton’s and Madeleine Albright’s undergraduate alma mater ) from 1990 to 2008. She has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as grants from the National Endowments of both the Arts and the Humanities. She received the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. A travelling retrospective—her seventh—opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in March 2018. Since 2005, she has lived in Berlin, where she runs the APRA (Adrian Piper Research Archive) Foundation Berlin and edits The Berlin Journal of Philosophy (Piper, n.d.). Marriott (2013, 19) summarizes Piper’s oeuvre ‘(across a variety of media) as an attempt to cut through the regulative rules of racist-sexist social life’. In a performative move that challenges reception, thinking, response, categorization, and outsider (i.e. not Piper’s own) understandings of rationality— pseudo or otherwise—in 2012 Piper officially retired from being black, saying that her new racial designation would be ‘6.25% grey, honouring my 1/16th African heritage’ and inviting her friends and followers to join her in a celebration of her ‘new adventure in pointless administrative precision and futile institutional control’ (Piper 2012). In this departure from what Sarah Jane Cervenak (2006, 118) calls the ‘prison-house of value’, Piper, on the move as much as ever, tells her followers that they may, if they wish, refer to her as ‘The Artist Formerly Known as African American’ (Cervenak 2006, 118; Piper 2012). Americans and other fans will recognize an homage to the musician Prince, who, in a 1993 rebellion against producers Warner Brothers, changed his name to a symbol and was dubbed ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’.

Karen Finley Karen Finley came as close as any progressive performance artist could to being a household name in the very early 1990s. She got national press as the ‘chocolate-smeared woman’ (Evans and Novak 1990) and made up 25%

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     465

of the infamous National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Four. In a 1991 interview, she articulated precisely what onstage action earned her the former descriptor: I cover myself up [in performance] in ways that I feel society covers up a woman—as in the ritual where I put chocolate all over myself… I use chocolate because it’s a visual symbol that involves eating as well as basically being treated like shit… so it works on different levels. There are so many occasions where you go into a job or situation and you just have to eat the shit—there’s no other way out. Then I stick little candy hearts (symbolizing ‘love’) all over my body— because after we’ve been treated like shit, then we’re loved. And many times that’s the only way people get love. Then I add the alfalfa sprouts (symbolizing sperm) because in a way it’s all a big jack-off… we’re just something to jerk off onto, after the ‘love.’ Finally, I put tinsel on my body, because after going through all that, a woman still gets dressed up for dinner. (Juno and Vale 1991, 49, italics original)

The ‘NEA Four’ is the umbrella term for a quartet of performance artists (the other three are Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, and John Fleck) who were recommended by a panel of peer reviewers in 1990 for grants from the US federal government-funded National Endowment for the Arts in the ‘Solo Performance’ category but who did not receive funding, as the agency itself did not go with the panel’s recommendation. Conservative outrage over art that used urine, a catalogue essay that denounced Jesse Helms, then Senator for North Carolina, and general fury at sexually explicit and profanity-peppered work had the Endowment nervous. A scant three months after the non-funding, the four filed suit against the NEA. The Endowment settled with them out of court in 1993 and they received their grants, but they decided to litigate, as the NEA had predicated its action on a recently passed ‘decency clause’, which stipulated that the NEA must consider not just artistic merit but ‘general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs of the American public’. In 1998, the Supreme Court heard arguments against the ‘decency clause’, and, while they upheld the clause, they declared it ‘advisory’ and ‘meaningless’ (Carr, n.d.). Finley’s work has always had at its heart a righteous outrage at abuse dealt out in patriarchal, consumer capitalist culture under the aegis of ‘normalcy’. The power sought and expected by men (even men with little money, education, or professional status) means that women who do not conform to a controllable ideal are fair game for physical and mental assault, derision, humiliation, and outright victimization. Indeed, the deadliest aspect of Finley’s critique may be that such assault is often freely visited upon women

466     Dorothy Chansky

who do conform to ideals. She names this assault by refusing to trick it out as the sexually titillating advertising or movies or family drama where it is presumably ‘explainable’ because it is presented via airbrushed norms or in the guise of individual problems or as narrative imperative. The venom she has spewed in performance is not attached to singular, realistic, dramatic characters, and the body she exposes is not cloaked in the coy draperies of pornography. As one scholar puts it ‘Finley’s poetics of the body, wherein she refuses the discursive body by insisting on the flesh behind the word’ (Pramaggiore 1992, 282) succinctly explains why her free-roaming scenarios of anal sex, incest, defecation (often in the context of sexual intercourse), and her smearing her own body with smashed up eggs, chocolate jello, raw hamburger, or canned yams have provoked bilious outrage in print and, supposedly, at least one instance of audience members tossing lit cigarettes at her during a performance (Carr 1993, 144). ‘Finley frustrates fetishistic viewing practices by thwarting our desires for tastefully representable female bodies that are of a particular size [and] that do not ingest or excrete… [N]udity is not necessarily pleasing, displayed body parts do not provoke sexual arousal’ (Pramaggiore 1992, 284). As Finley herself put it in a 1987 interview, ‘People are scared of my information… If I was doing porn they’d be very happy… I destroy the games people live on’ (Finley and Schechner 1988, 152–53). This ‘raw quaking id’ (Carr 1993, 141) was born in 1956 in Chicago and raised in the nearby suburb of Evanston, near Northwestern University, the oldest of six children and the daughter of vaguely non-traditional suburban parents. Her fair-skinned, red-haired father was a sometime jazz drummer who also ran a vacuum cleaner business. Her brown-skinned mother was a political activist, fan of Karl Jung and theosophy, and a seamstress who ran her business at home. Finley attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was influenced by performance artists Carolee Schneemann (see below), Linda Montano, Vito Acconci, and Gina Payne, as well as by one of her MFA professors, Brian Routh, whom she married (they later divorced) and with whom she performed. Finley’s father committed suicide in 1979, when she was home for the Christmas holiday break, and it was after this that she started performing in a formal sense, motivated by both an art school assignment to make a performance using food and feeling she couldn’t paint after the suicide ‘because I couldn’t be alone by myself… I think that was one reason why I started performing’ (Clements 1990). She had, however, staged transgressive acts in ‘real life’, in a manner not unlike Adrian Piper’s in the latter’s street, subway, and museum performances. According to one source, Finley enjoyed, as a teenager, enacting fake epileptic seizures or feigning

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     467

vomiting in front of restaurants ‘to see whether or not people would keep eating’ (Carr 1993, 143). Finley and Routh appeared in Germany at the 1981 Theatre for the World Festival as Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler in a performance that one night had Routh lapping excrement from a bucket in which the diarrhoea-stricken Finley (clad primarily in a corset and garter belt) had been relieving herself offstage. (Myth has it that Hitler was sexually aroused by faeces and female defecation.) They also incorporated into their acts anti-Semitic incidents they had witnessed during their stay in Cologne. The duo were, unsurprisingly, controversial and generated much audience pushback. Finley moved to New York in 1984 and began performing short solo sets at after-hours clubs, where she could anticipate audiences who were likely drunk, possibly on drugs, and certainly under the influence of loud music and lighting that alternated between smoky-dark and flashing. Her performances included pouring canned yams over her bare buttocks and putting down interruptions from male spectators who dropped their pants in an attempt to insult and distract her. Her primary venue was the club Danceteria, where she also worked as a bartender and performed at a monthly cabaret. Her theme was routine abuse freely exercised by those who took gender and class privilege as a right. In 1986, Finley premiered The Constant State of Desire at The Kitchen in New York City. This is one of her three best-known pieces and certainly the one that put her on the map. It was followed by her writing in 1987 We Keep Our Victims Ready. Both pieces appear in Finley’s first anthology, Shock Treatment, but other, slightly different versions of Constant State appeared in TDR in 1988 and in Champagne’s anthology Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists, thereby mimicking in print Finley’s performance style in which, avoiding meticulously choreographed rehearsals to guarantee repeatability, she sought a never-quite-the-same-twice mode, aiming to be a kind of ‘medium’, wanting her work to be ‘different than acting’ and working to ‘pick up the energies from the people’ in the audience (Finley and Schechner 1988, 154). A review of the twenty-fifth anniversary reissue of Shock Treatment praises the collection of ‘percussive performance monologues [and] fractured prose’ for its ‘apt irony: with its stories of failed abortions, images of rotting corpses, and leaking bodily fluids, her book is an attempt to “shock” readers but instead only confirms the grim reality of living in America today’ (Smith 2015). An essay unpacking the first performed iteration of The Constant State of Desire tells much about Finley’s embodiment of her text, even as essayist Catherine Schuler (1990) laments the difficulties many early viewers

468     Dorothy Chansky

experienced in grasping Finley’s feminist cries for compassion and tolerance. Describing a monologue called ‘Hate Yellow’, Schuler notes that the yellow dress Finley wore and the yellow-draped set belied the titular assertion. The brief monologue tells us: ‘I hate yellow so much. And I see you walking down [sic ] my neighbourhood with your new teeth and solid pastel-coloured shirts. Yuk. Don’t you know that I’m only happy when I’m depressed?… when I’m wearing black?’ (Finley 1990b, 61). In performance, Finley then removed her dress, put raw eggs and stuffed animals in a clear plastic bag, smashed the contents until the toys were yellow, and then used the animals as applicators to cover her body in egg, finally sprinkling herself with glitter and confetti. Schuler (1990, 133) writes that ‘the contradiction between the spoken text and visual signs is unambiguous and reflects tension between the dominant, socially constructed image of “Woman” and the often sublimated realities of women who reject traditional roles’. Although Schuler (1990, 138) herself seems to grasp fully the purpose of Constant State, she interviewed spectators who expressed hostility, in part because of Finley’s presentational style (which ‘resembles an evangelical preacher’s—repetitive and annoying’), owing either to the lack of sympathetic, realistic, identifiable characters or to an inability to read beyond shock value (arguably the NEA voters’ stone wall). Yet Finley’s text provides a clear roadmap to her purpose, and it is hard to believe that, decades after Brechtian theatre’s theories of performer standing apart from role in order to reveal social situatedness, Finley’s approach was arriving out of nowhere. In another monologue from The Constant State of Desire, titled ‘Refrigerator’, she portrays a childhood molestation, here blaming a father, although she has pointed out in interviews that her own father never raped her. (The quotation below is from the Out from Under iteration. In Shock Treatment the lengthy piece is broken into several subsections and the main title under which they all appear is ‘The Father in All of Us’.) The speaker in the monologue shifts—always in the first person—from being a little girl to being an adult male remembering his father’s cold shoulder when the son came out as gay, to speaking from the grave; the father being addressed shifts from being a biological parent to being God: You call yourself a father, provider, the punisher, the moneyman. Baby, you sure been punishing me… It’s the father in all of us that gives us the Berlin Wall, saves the whales, makes treaties, makes decision and reasons, bridges and tunnels, cures diseases, ways and means. Politics and social disorders. It’s the father, it’s the father, it’s the father in all of us. (Finley 1990a, 69)

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     469

The final lines encapsulate the position from which Finley rages. Profit, ego, power, and the need to control others make our culture run and it is a culture in which women and ‘others’ routinely suffer, although the ‘us all’ clearly implicates women as being capable of playing the victimizer, too. It is the universal ‘other’ that/who motivates We Keep Our Victims Ready, in which women, AIDS victims, and veal calves—penned in to keep their flesh tender for slaughter, sale, and consumption—coexist in pain. In 1990, the year Finley was turned down for the NEA grant, Victims was presented at Lincoln Center’s Serious Fun Festival in New York and later at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Finley had definitely ‘arrived’, although this would not make her either universally understood or universally appreciated. Nonetheless, by this point, New York Times reviewer Marcelle Clements (1990) could start her story by flatly declaring ‘Karen Finley’s subject is not obscenity. Her subject is pain, rage, love, lovelessness, need, fear, dehumanization, oppression, brutality and consolation’. Clements also noted that in-the-know critics saw Finley’s texts as ‘more predictable, less original than the images she creates, not as iconoclastic as the emotional states into which she leads her audiences’. The monologue ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre’ from We Keep Our Victims Ready plays on the love motif of the holiday and not on the life of the saint, although it nods to the February 14, 1929 killings of seven gang members for control of organized crime in Chicago during Prohibition: it relentlessly contrasts acts of violence with the putative love in whose name these are enacted. Again, the ‘I’ in the piece shifts from male to female, and old to young, personal to impersonal. A three-minute YouTube clip (Finley, n.d.) features Finley performing the monologue after smearing herself with the signature chocolate. The clip also shows the stark contrast between the casual, personable banter she offers her audiences before going into her ‘rant’/trance/iconoclastic state and that state, visible in the monologues proper. I tied your hands together as a child because you were touching your penis too much. I tied up your penis because I love you. I put you down as a child because I didn’t want you to expect too much out of life. I ridicule you, I belittled you because I love you. … I shot myself because I love you. If I loved myself I’d be shooting you.

470     Dorothy Chansky

I drink myself to death because I never loved myself. I love you. But I love my liquor more. (Finley 1990b, 116)

Between writing We Keep Our Victims Ready in 1987 and becoming both a household name and visible in the mainstream via the Lincoln Center performances and The New York Times in 1990, Finley wrote and performed The Theory of Total Blame, a bona fide play with multiple characters and an indictment of what Americans like to call traditional motherhood. The dark caricature of a domestic drama featured matriarch Irene, ‘an alcoholic whose pussy stinks’ and the mother of four dysfunctional adult children (Finley quoted in Hart 1992, 126). Blame premiered at The Kitchen in New York in 1988 with Finley herself in the role of Irene (see Fig. 20.2). It subsequently went on to be performed at the RAPP Art Center in New York’s East Village in June, 1989; at the Pyramid Arts Center, Rochester, New York, in October, 1989; and at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in November and December 1989. The play takes place at a family holiday gathering and features Finley’s signature foulmouthed woman and messy use of food to focus on entrapment resulting from prescribed and proscribed domestic and familial roles. Finley as Irene started the play seated at an old kitchen table (one review [Sullivan 1989] described the set as ‘provided by the Salvation Army’), ‘outfitted in a housedress, her legs wide open to expose all, shaping a large slab of ground beef into a meatloaf ’ (RJN, n.d.). Lynda Hart (1992, 114) elaborates on the activities of this ‘masochistic mother who never stops working’, to note her constantly trudging back and forth from the refrigerator to the table where she is preparing food. She randomly grabs items from the refrigerator, and mixes them up into disgusting, unconsumable, virtually unrecognizable, messes… Her meatloaf ends up all over her body, bits of raw beef hang from her nose, stick to her hair, litter the floor. Ketchup runs down her arms and legs. She shoves uncooked beef into one son’s face. Irene has no recipes and she refuses to feed her children.

Here the mirror held up to the everyday is minus the distorting lens of good manners or theatrical propriety. Irene’s dialogue careens from resentment to insecurity to sarcastic irony to touting the value of putting one foot in front of the other to raw explosion of pain to humane insight, all linked to her domestic role. She tells her children that she’s always intended to make their lives as miserable as possible; conversely, she tells them that waiting on

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     471

Fig. 20.2  Karen Finley in The Theory of Total Blame, 1989 (Photograph by Dona Ann McAdams. ©Dona Ann McAdams)

them is her raison d’être, since a ‘mother stops being a mother once she stops being needed’ (Finley 1993, 228). She rewards herself with alcohol, because: no one else rewards me for going to work every day. No one else goes to work like I do. I clean this damn house. I had five kids, three miscarriages, and one abortion. I’ve been a mother, a whore, and a slave. I’ve been needed, rejected, and desired but never valued by any of you. (1993, 233–34)

Hart’s (1992, 127) reading of the work is that it ‘assaults not only a popular reading of psychoanalysis as a discourse that blames the mother for everything… but also affronts the totalizing tendency of some feminist theories of the maternal’. Finley’s performance style—her ability to go from chatty to hysterical and her no-holds-barred willingness to use her body as a simultaneous site of stereotype and excess—lit up the text’s imbricated degradation of and sympathy for the ‘typical’ mother’s plight.

472     Dorothy Chansky

In the late 1990s, Finley ‘began to change her associated affect in earnest’, moving to Los Angeles, posing for Playboy in chocolate and considering another way to deploy her body, ‘attempt[ing] to repurpose it, celebrating the stickiness and playing with the affect, instead of continuing to use it as an expression of body horror and violence’ (Bean 2016, 99, 100). She had already written a play, Lamb of God Hotel, in which she herself did not appear, realizing that her own presence would detract from a work she hoped might be picked up by others—a work that again dealt with how the powerful and privileged ignore and/or sacrifice those who are weak, ill, or otherwise deemed negligible. Also in the 1990s, Finley gave birth to her daughter, Violet, whose father, Michael Overn, had been her manager and became a lawyer as a result of the NEA case (Finley, pers. comm. May 2, 2018). (The two married in 1988 but are now divorced.) In the new century, Finley created a series of works that were collected in a 2011 volume entitled The Reality Shows. Using the real-life figures of Laura Bush, Terri Schiavo (of the right-to-die/life-support stand-off between husband and parents when the eponymous figure in the case was declared to be in a persistent vegetative state following a heart attack and oxygen deprivation to her brain), Martha Stewart, Liza Minnelli, and Jackie Kennedy, Finley exposed what Ann Pellegrini calls ‘the violent, even deadly costs, borne by those onto whom we dump the feelings that we cannot bear to have and to hold for ourselves’ (Finley 2011, 18). Finley performed The Jackie Look, a one-woman show in New York in 2010. The one-hour piece is largely about the need we have to fix icons in our collective memories and to judge them. ‘Please release me from your gaze’, says Finley’s Jackie (Kennedy Onassis), who, speaking from the grave, time-travels to sit with Coretta Scott King and watch Michelle Obama at the latter’s husband’s inauguration (Finley 2011, 230). The text is remarkably soulful and tender, trafficking in sympathy and outreach as much as resentment and outrage. Finley went on to perform it in Los Angeles and in Dallas, always garnering praise for her ability to rivet an audience and shift in register from chatty to edgy. In the most extended review of the piece, scholar and fellow NEA Four performance artist Holly Hughes (2013, 137–38) points out how Finley shares with Jackie the burden of ‘liv[ing] in the public imagination like a fly frozen in some famous piece of amber’ (chocolate-smeared/pink suit and pillbox hat) unable to escape either the public’s obsession or its entrenched, fixed idea that leaves no room for personal truth, much less evolution. Hughes notes how Finley, in performance, ‘moved between various styles of delivery ranging from academic lecture… to personal confession and political satire, shifting from a

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     473

deliberately imprecise performance of Onassis to an array of Karen Finleys’, leaving her audience—as she did twenty-five years earlier—‘riveted but not entertained’ (Hughes 2013, 135, 139, riffing on Carr’s [1993, 142] comment, ‘Finley rivets, but she doesn’t entertain’). Finley herself—now a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts—could have been summing up her entire career from midstream when she said, in a 1991 interview: ‘I look at my performance as a pep rally—really I think of myself as a motivational speaker! ’ (Juno and Vale 1991, 49, italics original).

Carolee Schneemann If a single image had to serve as rubric for the tribulations, interventions, and breakthroughs of ‘bad girls’ feminist performance of the 1960s–1990s, any shortlist of possible ‘best’ options would necessarily include the nowiconic image of Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) performing Interior Scroll (see Fig. 20.3). This work was first offered at the Women Here and Now festival of 1975 in East Hampton, Long Island (New York), and then repeated with slight revisions at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado in 1977. In the piece, Schneemann stood nude in front of an audience—on a table in East Hampton and on a small proscenium stage in Colorado— striking the sorts of poses used by models in drawing classes and slowly pulling from her vagina a long scroll from which she read text she described in shorthand as being about ‘“Vulvic Space”—about the abstraction of the female body and its loss of meanings’ (Juno and Vale 1991, 72). The most frequently reproduced photo (a series of thirty-two additional stills is readily available) (McPherson 1997, 236–37) shows the artist/performer in three-quarters profile with her feet wide apart, knees bent, and leaning over slightly at the waist. One hand anchors the emerging scroll right at her vagina; the other is extended in front of her body and holds the end of the scroll about eight inches below eye-level and arm’s length from her face. In that position, with her lips slightly parted, she is clearly reading. Her body is outlined in paint (East Hampton) or mud (Telluride). The text for the mostly female artist audience in New York was drawn from Schneemann’s writings about exteriorizing the interior, ancient goddesses, snake symbology, and refusing the idea that women could be known via centuries of male-dominated ‘truths’. Amelia Jones (1997, 12) parses Schneemann’s explanation of the scroll as ‘like a ticker tape… plumb line… the umbilicus and tongue’ (McPherson 1997, 234) and in the context of the nudity as Schneemann’s ‘integrat[ing] the occluded interior of the female

474     Dorothy Chansky

Fig. 20.3  Carolee Schneemann in Interior Scroll, 1975 (Photograph by Anthony McCall. ©Carolee Schneemann)

body… with its mobile exterior, refusing the fetishizing process, which requires that the woman not expose the fact that she is not lacking but possesses genitals, and they are nonmale’. The 1977 spoken text was different. Schneemann was invited to the festival to introduce a programme of erotic films by women and took exception to the session title, ‘The Erotic Woman’. Refusing the idea that there is ‘an’ erotic woman, chafing at being so labelled (although the films being shown did not include any by her), and stating clearly that the films might be found, among other things, to be ‘anti-erotic’ (Schneemann 2003, 155), Schneemann offered a different text, which expresses garden-variety feminist outrage, sly wit, and a pointed critique of how women’s art is dismissed by even the most avant-garde of (male or male-tradition-identified) critics and artists, to whom it is illegible but to whom it does not occur that they themselves lack reading/reception skills. The text reads, in part:

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     475

I met a happy man a structuralist filmmaker –but don’t call me that it’s something else I do— he said we are fond of you you are charming but don’t ask us to look at your films we cannot there are certain films we cannot look at the personal clutter the persistence of feelings the hand-touch sensibility the diaristic indulgence the painterly mess the dense gestalt the primitive techniques

(I don’t take the advice of men who only talk to themselves) PAY ATTENTION TO CRITICAL AND PRACTICAL FILM LANGUAGE IT EXISTS FOR AND IN ONLY ONE GENDER

… he protested you are unable to appreciate the system the grid the numerical rational procedures— the Pythagorean cues—

I saw my failings were worthy of dismissal I’d be buried alive my works lost ………

476     Dorothy Chansky

he said we can be friends equally tho we are not artists equally I said we cannot be friends equally and we cannot be artists equally

he told me he had lived with a ‘sculptress’ I asked does that make me a ‘film-makeress’?

Oh No he said we think of you as a dancer (McPherson 1997, 238–39)

Ironically (and clearly intentionally), the dismissive list of reasons why the obtuse male filmmaker ‘cannot look’ at Schneemann’s work contains a not inaccurate summary of the many actual and acknowledged ingredients in her generally multimedia creations. She always considered herself a painter, although her media included far more than traditional paint. In a 1974 letter to choreographer and videographer Margaret Fisher, Schneemann wrote, ‘I consider myself a painter still and forever (no matter what “medium”)’ (Stiles 2010, 218). She kept and culled material from diaries; she embraced (or at least did not refuse) what might be seen as clutter; she hand-touched—among other objects—individual frames of film; the persistence of feelings might be said to be the motor driving precisely her pursuit of a ‘dense gestalt’ as the hegemonic and easily explainable bored and even offended her. Indeed, if one needed to describe this polymath’s work in a single word, that word might be ‘collage’. By putting in her (fictionalized) critic’s mouth the very words she would use herself or accept from a more attuned observer to discuss her art, she not only undercut the opposition’s power by striking the first blow—she also had the last word, at least in the context of the short performance. By the time Schneemann performed Interior Scroll, she was internationally (albeit not necessarily ubiquitously) acclaimed as a filmmaker, a painter, and a performance artist. She was also the survivor of three (illegal) abortions and a nervous breakdown, at the end of her third marriage, and fully cemented in history as a part of the 1960s avant-garde that included (among her close friends, colleagues, and collaborators and not counting a very wide circle of sympatico acquaintances) filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Judson choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer,

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     477

Fluxus member Alison Knowles, Happenings ‘guru’ Allan Kaprow, and avant-garde composer James Tenney, who was also her first husband. In the next few paragraphs, I want to trace Schneemann’s work as a performance artist up to the creation of Interior Scroll. I then return to a discussion of that piece to focus on its work as a performance, as it would be a mistake to reduce its importance to the content of the written text, witty and trenchant though that is. Finally, I outline briefly the status Schneemann enjoyed (although that did not include financial security) in the years since the 1970s Interior Scroll, which had a site-specific, participatory revival in the mid-1990s. Carolee Schneemann was born to parents she described as modelling ‘deep intimacy and sensuousness and delight’ (2003, 131). (In a 1956 letter to Stan Brakhage, a rebellious seventeen-year-old Schneemann would articulate a slightly different view of her parents, calling them ‘really depraved because they have peasant souls trapped in upper class [sic ] hypocrisies. They don’t want to know how it really is’ [Stiles 2010, 4, italics original].) Her father was a doctor and mother enjoyed sewing. The family lived in rural Pennsylvania, where caring for and birthing animals as well as gardening and pitching hay were ordinary activities. As Schneemann herself succinctly put it, with regard to her comfort with and interest in sexuality, ‘Growing up in the country was very important…. Nudity was also clear and direct’ (Stiles 2010, 4). She claims to have started drawing ‘before I could speak’ (Daly and Rodgers 2001, 15), elsewhere asserting in a 1966 letter to her friend Chieko Shiomi that she ‘had only one art lesson’ at age twelve: ‘A man who painted seascapes tore up a brown paper bag and scattered it over the floor: “There” he said “see the relationships they make? That’s a gestalt!”’ (Stiles 2010, 106). Schneemann attended Bard College, where she studied art and also chafed at professors’ beliefs that women artists—both named and anonymous, present and past—were either largely unimportant or had not existed. From an early age, she resisted domesticity, motherhood, and traditional wifeliness as desiderata. She earned an MFA in art at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign after marrying Tenney when she was seventeen. She was deeply influenced by, among others, the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and Antonin Artaud. By the early 1960s, she was familiar with the work of the Living Theatre, involved with the intermedia arts and performance group Fluxus, and had worked closely with Kaprow. Schneemann later spoke of New York’s ‘Happenings, environments, events… the generative forms in the late 1950s and early 1960s’, asserting that ‘with no

478     Dorothy Chansky

exception, all this complexity and intercutting was initiated by painters—it was a visionary theatre of painters’ (Oddey 2000, 158). Visionary theatre by a painter might be a way to describe Schneemann’s film Fuses, which was begun in 1964 and completed in 1967. The twenty-two-minute colour work, part of ‘Autobiographical Trilogy’, was ­ accompanied by a soundscape created by Tenney; Schneemann, Tenney, and their cat Kitch were the key performers. The film, which received special commendation at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, captures from shifting perspectives and via extreme closeups the lovemaking of the couple. There was no outside camera person—just Schneemann—and she describes the cat as ‘the filmic eye, a metapresence inviting the viewers’ (2003, 42). The work was made over a period of months and ‘follows lyrical seasonal changes… I wanted what was around us to be coming in and out of season, of frame, of focus, of flesh’ (2003, 42). In observations that challenge the ‘personal clutter’ claim, critic Scott MacDonald offers an explanation of Schneemann’s work useful for refuting the accusations of narcissism and pornography levelled at Fuses: [Her works] are personal, not only in the usual sense of being based on particular experiences of the author, but in a radically different sense as well; they are conceived as artistic accretions delivered to the reader or viewer by Schneemann from inside the emotional environment within which they develop. (Forte 1990, 257)

Schneemann worked not only with shifting perspectives, eroticism, i­nteriority/exteriority, and the passage of time; she devoted hours to manipulating ‘the celluloid itself: burning, baking, cutting, and painting it, dipping… footage in acid, and building dense layers of collage’ (Schneemann 2003, 45). Accordingly, the work was original and performative not only for what it depicted but also for how it was technically and physically crafted, thereby bringing into being (rather than only recording or describing) an optic and consciousness. Dave McCullough articulated the specificity of the collaged working(s) in an insightful 1969 review, describing the film as … intersubjective, merging two foci of sexual experience—male and female— analogously to the way binocular vision fuses two images… Schneemann’s main technical accomplishment is in overlaying forms to reiterate the theme at several levels, e.g. when the coupled bodies making it on the bed themselves make it with faces and forests, the trees with the sky, etc. (Stiles 2010, 10)

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     479

To call Schneemann a performer in the film is to point to what she did and did not see as authentic performance. While she had appeared prior to Fuses in a few (male) friends’ films, she regarded these instances of being framed by others’ needs and (male) biased ways of perceiving as ‘a terrifying experience: experiences of true dissolution… I felt that whoever I really was had been obliterated and that they had needed to obliterate me… I became historicized and immobilized’ (Schneemann 2003, 35). Indeed, this understanding of performance as externalizing an interior self and believed-in truth (rather than impersonating something—even an idea of one’s self ) is a key to reading Meat Joy, still arguably Schneemann’s best-known work and one in which she was the guiding, but not the only, performer. The fact that Schneemann’s 1976 book is called More Than Meat Joy points to the centrality of that piece in establishing her reputation. Meat Joy was offered at the May 1964 Festival of Free Expression in Paris and then remounted in London and New York. In Schneemann’s own description, it ‘has the character of an erotic rite: excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chickens, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, rope, brushes, paper scrap’ (McPherson 1997, 63). The work—variously named as a ‘theatre/dance piece’, ‘a Happening (Visual Drama)’, or ‘Kinetic Theater’ (Stiles 2010, 85, 93; Roth 1983, 130), was intended not only as celebratory of sexuality and the senses but also as ‘an assault on repressive culture’ (Juno and Vale 1991, 69). Schneemann scored the piece in precise segments; sequence, soundscape (largely popular American songs of the moment, but also some read passages), and lighting were all orchestrated by her in advance of the start of rehearsals. The nine performers, of whom she was the central female, concluded the performance with paint, meat, and fish covering their nearly nude bodies. (Full nudity in Paris would have invited legal action.) In a letter to Tenney of May 30, 1964, written just after the first performance, Schneemann described the difficulty of working with men who were unable to ‘move into life ’ as they remained stuck in ‘their annoying, their non-health’, adding ‘there is no man as healthy as you!’ (Stiles 2010, 87–88, italics original). (Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Tenney performed the central male role in the New York performance.) In 1967, Schneemann was invited to create a performance piece for the Dialectics of Liberation Congress, held in London under the auspices of the Institute of Phenomenological Studies, an independent organization run by ‘a small group of radical antipsychiatry psychiatrists’ (Harding 2010, 123) including Joseph Berke (Schneemann’s advocate) and R. D. Laing. Berke invited Schneemann to create a performance piece embodying the ‘subversive re-education, backwards to first principles!… to

480     Dorothy Chansky

demonstrate the mutilations which our regimented technological rationality inflicts upon man’s apprehension of reality of himself ’ (McPherson 1997, 151). Schneemann arrived in London to find that she was not listed in the Congress programme, that her desire to include in her performance piece footage from Fuses would be permitted but not defended should there be obscenity charges (she opted for projected stills), that she was not welcome at the opening dinner, and that the performance piece she had been invited to create was seen by some to be a priori objectionable, intrusive, and perhaps better excluded since not subjected to the pre-approval of (male) attendees (McPherson 1997, 153). Indeed, her desire to incorporate p ­ articipants’ key ideas from their talks into her work (which was to be presented at the end of the Congress) met with vigorous objection. The participants comprised a veritable Who’s Who of male radicals and innovative leftist thinkers, including Allen Ginsberg, Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, Gregory Bateson, and Erving Goffman. The piece Schneemann did create involved dozens of performers and assistants; it was called Round House, after its venue; it was suitably sexual and was again described by its creator as ‘a ritual performance’ (McPherson 1997, 153). Years after the Congress, one of the event’s organizers, David Cooper, admitted to Schneemann ‘We didn’t welcome a woman taking an equal space among ourselves, we distrusted a theatrical form, and we certainly didn’t want a very young woman putting on a performance which incorporated our own words with a countering physicality’ (McPherson 1997, 151). Here is the key to appreciating Interior Scroll. While the male participants in the 1967 Congress purported to favour rebellion and freedom, they were, as James Harding explains (2010, 130–33), unable to conceive of performance—not text—‘as a source of serious critical dialogue in which everything was on the table, including the Congress itself ’; Schneemann turned the putative rebellious intervention of the Congress on its head by ‘subordinat[ing] the social scientific discourse of the Congress to the aesthetic discourses of her own performance’. Here I return to Interior Scroll to revisit that work as what Stefka Mihaylova (2009) calls ‘performed criticism’. In Mihaylova’s elegant and sophisticated reading, Schneemann presents her body in this work without intending it to be ‘an unmediated, “truthful” body’. Rather, by virtue of the paint or mud she carefully applied at the start of the performance and the clear appropriation of traditional model’s poses, Schneemann is ‘illustrat[ing] how the female body has been constructed through male appropriation via the artistic convention of the nude’ (266). Schneemann was not merely writing trenchant discursive prose; nor was she ‘exposing’ some

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     481

timeless female essence. She ‘reclaims the nude by becoming both the author and the object of her own artistic representation’ (266). My shift in tense from the last paragraph’s penultimate to its final sentence is strategic, as I want to embrace both Auslander’s and Amelia Jones’s ideas that performance documentation is itself performance and can be read and experienced years after its instantiating iteration by audiences no less invested in its ability to speak than were its original audiences. Jones (1997, 12) states clearly that, despite whatever romantic ideas about ‘being there’ may be unproblematically assumed to have truth value, ‘there is no possibility of an unmediated relationship to any kind of cultural product, including body art’, adding that the specificity of historical moment brought to a performance by its original audience (if there was one) is not superior to the intersubjective experience of later readers/viewers, who bring a ‘pattern of history’ to their viewing—one that is meaningful and neither superior nor inferior to the former. So, Interior Scroll as documented continues to speak performatively across the decades, ‘as a performance that directly reflects an artist’s aesthetic project or sensibility and for which we are the present audience’ (Auslander 2006, 9). Schneemann did create another live performance of the piece, however. In 1995, she worked with five women in a mined cave in Rosendale, New York, to allow the women to experience and recreate the work. Schneemann taught them how to fold and lubricate the scrolls, enabling not merely a viewed but a participatory experience of the work and reiterating what Mihaylova (2009, 256) names as the ‘assertion of the fleshy, gendered body not as a deterrent to critical thinking but as its enabling condition and of performance as a critical discourse in its own right’. In an interview shortly after the event, Schneemann reaffirmed her belief that there was still work for women solo performance artists in ‘bringing forward the suppressed forms of the imagination’ (Oddey 2000, 159). Schneemann’s first sale of a work to a cultural institution did not occur until 1992, when the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art purchased a 9′ × 6′ (275 × 185 cm) photo grid of Infinity Kisses. In 1996, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City featured a retrospective of Schneemann’s work from 1963 to 1996. In 1997, critic Robert C. Morgan (98) asserted that ‘her work represents at its very best… an impulse toward the liberating concept of the body and the mind as a totality’. Schneemann taught at several colleges and universities, including the California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Hunter College, and Rutgers University, where she was the first female art professor hired. She was the recipient of major awards, including a 1993 Guggenheim

482     Dorothy Chansky

Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Maine College of Art (Portland, Maine), and a 2000 Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association, 2000. In 2017, an exhibition organized by Sabine Breitwieser and opening in 2015 in Frankfurt, Germany, finished its journey via Salzburg, Austria, to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA PS1) in New York, where it remained until March 2018. In a pair of reviews, two (women) critics sum up Schneemann’s career via responses to the retrospective. Mechtild Widrich (2017, 210) unqualifiedly calls Schneemann ‘ahead of her time and especially of 1970s feminism’ (for her refusal of the then-current focus on ‘maternal subjectivity’), and Jillian Steinhauer (2017) simply asserts her belief via her title ‘Carolee Schneemann Finally Gets Her Due’, with the subheading ‘For more than 60 years, Schneemann fought against the way women’s art is often dismissed’. Perhaps most comprehensively, Holland Cotter of the New York Times in May 2018 sums up an assemblage of reasons for celebrating and presenting Schneemann and her work: Carolee Schneemann is an artist I’d move right into the cleared-out spotlight, not just because she has star quality, which she does, or because she has majorly shaped art history, which she has. I’d put her there because, in a career of some 60 years, she’s been one of the most generous artists around: generous with her presence, her thinking, her formal and political risk-taking, and her embrace of embracing itself — across genres, genders and species.

In a 1994 series of short essays by ‘older’ artists, Schneemann says ‘since the early 60s my painting/constructions and photographic, visual, and performance works have been considered abject or obscene… feminist, erotic, political. Now I myself am obscene, taboo’ (Schneemann 1994, 19). The performance artists in this chapter have all been regarded as obscene, beyond the pale, dangerous, or pornographic, their work(s) situated on a spectrum from deserving of censorship to not worthy of the designation ‘art’ or funding, to risible or crude at best and illegible at worst. Performance history has given these ‘bad girls’ the last laugh, if not always a comfortable berth from which to enjoy it. Whether they were or are pleasant, companionable, generous, or accepting (perhaps ‘suitably feminine’) is irrelevant. Our world is the richer for their bold performances and their legacies.

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     483

Bibliography Auslander, Philip. 2006. ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’. Performing Arts Journal 84: 1–10. Bean, Christine Simonian. 2016. ‘Sticky Performances; Affective Circulation and Material Strategy in the Chocolate Smearing of Karen Finley’. Theatre Survey 57, no. 1: 88–108. Berger, Maurice. 1999a. ‘The Critique of Pure Racism: An Interview with Adrian Piper’. In Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, edited by Adrian Piper, Maurice Berger, and Jean Fisher, 76–98. Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County. Berger, Maurice. 1999b. ‘Styles of Radical Will: Adrian Piper and the Indexical Present’. In Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, edited by Adrian Piper, Maurice Berger, and Jean Fisher, 2–32. Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County. Bowles, John P. 2007. ‘“Acting Like a Man”: Adrian Piper’s Mythic Being and Black Feminism in the 1970s’. Signs 32, no. 3: 621–48. Burtman, Heather. 2017. ‘My Body Doesn’t Belong to You’. New York Times, June 18, 2017. Carr, C. n.d. ‘Timeline of NEA 4 Events’. Accessed May 28, 2018. http://franklinfurnace.org/research/essays/nea4/neatimeline.html. Carr, C. 1993. ‘Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts: The Taboo Art of Karen Finley’. In Acting Out: Feminist Performances, edited by Lynda Hart and Peggy Phelan, 141–51. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cembalest, Robin. 2013. ‘Adrian Piper Pulls Out of Black Performance-Art Show’. Last Modified October 25, 2013. http://www.artnews.com/2013/10/25/ piper-pulls-out-of-black-performance-art-show/. Cervenak, Sarah Jane. 2006. ‘Against Traffic: De/formations of Race and Freedom in the Art of Adrian Piper’. Discourse, 28 no. 2 & 3: 114–129. Clements, Marcelle. 1990. ‘Karen Finley’s Rage, Pain, Hate and Hope’. New York Times, July 22, 1990. Cotter, Holland. 2018. ‘Shock of the Nude’. New York Times, February 1, 2018. Cottingham, Laura. 1999. ‘The Autobiography of Adrian Piper’. In Adrian Piper: A Retrospective, edited by Adrian Piper, Maurice Berger, and Jean Fisher, 60–75. Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland Baltimore County. Daly, Ann, and Angela Rodgers. 2001. ‘Carolee Schneemann: A Life Drawing’. TDR 45, no. 2: 15. Evans, Rowland, and Robert Novak. 1990. ‘New Art Storm Brewing’. New York Post, May 23, 1990. Fanon, Frantz. 2008. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. Revised edn. London: Pluto Press. Finley, Karen. n.d. ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre’ (from We Keep Our Victims Ready ). Accessed May 27, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvBnkx-pECo.

484     Dorothy Chansky

Finley, Karen. 1990a. ‘The Constant State of Desire’. In Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists, edited by Leonora Champagne, 55–70. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Finley, Karen. 1990b. Shock Treatment. San Francisco: City Light Books. Finley, Karen. 1993. ‘The Theory of Total Blame’. In Grove New American Theatre, edited by Michael Feingold, 221–57. New York: Grove Press. Finley, Karen. 2011. The Reality Shows. New York: The Feminist Press at Cuny. Finley, Karen, and Richard Schechner. 1988. ‘Karen Finley: A Constant State of Becoming: An Interview’. TDR 32, no. 1: 152–58. Forte, Jeanie. 1990. ‘Women’s Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism’. In Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, edited by Sue-Ellen Case, 251–69. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harding, James. 2010. Cutting Performances: Collage Events, Feminist Artists, and the American Avant-Garde. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hart, Lynda. 1992. ‘Motherhood According to Finley: The Theory of Total Blame’. TDR 36, no. 1: 124–34. Hughes, Holly. 2013. ‘Karen Finley’s “The Jackie Look”’. Storytelling, Self, Society 9, no. 1: 135–39. Jones, Amelia. 1997. ‘‘Presence’ in Absentia: Experiencing Performance as Documentation’. Art Journal (Publication of the College Art Association) (Winter): 11–18. Jones, Vanessa E. 2002. ‘The Fallen Academic Star of Adrian Piper’. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 36: 120–23. Juno, Andrea, and V. Vale, eds. 1991. Angry Women. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications. Kennedy, Peter, dir. 1973. Other Than Art’s Sake. Sydney: Sydney Film-makers Co-operative. http://www.adrianpiper.com/vs/video_tmb.shtml. Lippard, Lucy. 1972. ‘Catalysis: An Interview with Adrian Piper’. The Drama Review: TDR 16, no. 1: 76–78. Marriott, David. 2013. ‘On Racial Etiquette: Adrian Piper’s My Calling (Cards) ’. Postmodern Culture 24, no. 1: [27 pages, numbering visible on print downloads but not online]. Accessed May 28, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1353/ pmc.2013.0056. McPherson, Bruce R., ed. 1997. More Than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings. Kingston and New York: McPherson & Company. Mihaylova, Stefka. 2009. ‘Whose Performance Is It Anyway? Performed Criticism as Feminist Strategy’. New Theatre Criticism 25, no. 3: 255–73. Morgan, Robert C. 1997. ‘Carolee Schneemann: The Politics of Eroticism’. Art Journal 56, no. 4: 97–100. Oddey, Alison. 2000. ‘Aphrodite Speaks: On the Recent Performance Art of Carolee Schneemann’. New Theatre Quarterly 16, no. 2: 155–62. Pellegrini, Ann. 2011. ‘Introduction’. In The Reality Shows by Karen Finley, 9–28. New York: Feminist Press of the City University of New York.

20  ‘Bad Girls’ of 1960s–1990s American Performance     485

Phelan, Peggy. 1998. ‘Portrait of the Artist’. The Women’s Review of Books 15, no. 5: 7–8. Piper, Adrian. 1973. Mythic Being [from Other than Art’s Sake, directed by Peter Kennedy]. APRAF (Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation), Berlin. Accessed May 29, 2018. http://www.adrianpiper.com/vs/video_tmb.shtml. Piper, Adrian. 1996a. ‘Food for the Spirit (1971)’. In Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, edited by Adrian Piper, 54–55. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piper, Adrian. 1996b. ‘Talking to Myself: The Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object (1970–1973)’. In Out of Order, Out of Sight Volume 1: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, edited by Adrian Piper, 29–53. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piper, Adrian. 1996c. ‘Xenophobia and the Indexical Present I: Essay (1989)’. In Out of Order, Out of Sight, Volume I: Selected Writings in Meta-Art 1968–1992, edited by Adrian Piper, 245–51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Piper, Adrian. 2012. ‘News—September 2012’. APRAF (Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation), Berlin. http://www.adrianpiper.com/news_sep_2012.shtml. Piper, Adrian. n.d. ‘Biography’. APRAF (Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation), Berlin. Accessed May 29, 2018. http://www.adrianpiper.com/biography.shtml. Pramaggiore, Maria T. 1992. ‘Resisting/Performing/Femininity: Words, Flesh, and Feminism in Karen Finley’s The Constant State of Desire ’. Theatre Journal 44: 262–90. RJN. n.d. ‘Karen Finley, the Ultimate Black Sheep’. Accessed May 29, 2018. www. rjn.stumble.com/old_site/KAREN.HTML. Roth, Moira, ed. 1983. The Amazing Decade; Woman and Performance Art in America 1970–1980. Los Angeles: Astro Artz. Schneemann, Carolee. 1994. ‘Ages of the Avant-Garde: Carolee Schneemann’. Performing Arts Journal 16, no. 1: 18–21. Schneemann, Carolee. 1997. ‘Interior Scroll’. In More than Meat Joy: Performance Works and Selected Writings, edited by Bruce R. McPherson, 234. Kingston and New York: McPherson & Company. Schneemann, Carolee. 2003. Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Schuler, Catherine. 1990. ‘Spectator Response and Comprehension: The Problem of Karen Finley’s Constant State of Desire ’. TDR 34, no. 1: 131–45. Smith, Cherise. 2011. Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Smith, Nathan. 2015. ‘Still Radical 25 Years On’. The Los Angeles Review of Books. Last Modified September 27, 2015. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/ still-radical-25-years-on/#!.

486     Dorothy Chansky

Steinhauer, Jillian. 2017. ‘Carolee Schneemann Finally Gets Her Due’. New Republic. Last Modified November 15, 2017. https://newrepublic.com/ article/145824/carolee-schneemann-finally-gets-due. Stiles, Kristine, ed. 2010. Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of Carolee Schneemann and Her Circle. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press. Sullivan, Dan. 1989. ‘“Total Blame”: A Performance-Art Virago Turns Playwright’. Los Angeles Times, December 2, 1989. http://articles.latimes.com/1989-12-02/ entertainment/ca-198_1_karen-finley. Wark, Jane. 2001. ‘Conceptual Art and Feminism: Martha Rosler, Adrian Piper, Eleanor Antin, and Martha Wilson’. Woman’s Art Journal 22, no. 1: 44–50. Widrich, Mechtild. 2017. ‘Imaging Her Aesthetics’. Art Journal 76, no. 1: 209–12.

21 Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre and Performance Practice Across Four Decades Anna Furse

When I started writing this in 2016, I was in the dressing room in Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, putting on make-up, wig and costume. I hadn’t performed in thirty years, save for one small silent appearance, by default, in a recent piece here in Dublin two years previously. I was premiering Anna Furse Performs An Anatomy Act: A Show and Tell. In this production, I conflated everything I do and have done with theatre: write, direct, perform, produce and collaborate closely on all visual and musical content. Perhaps this audacity might be better understood if I also explain that this performance takes the form of a theatrical anatomical lecture, punning on the spectacle of the Renaissance Anatomy Theatre (my look references Queen Elizabeth I, see Fig. 21.1). My onstage persona is that of theatrical academic, which I have been in real life for some years. I deliver an episodic meditation on death and the cadaver, speaking of the Renaissance body, representative art and anatomy, and how our bodies are and always have been political sites. I rip a small opening across my left breast. I tell the audience I wanted to start with a teensy bit of burlesque as live flesh always goes down well. They laugh. I learned to make audiences laugh by parodying the way cisgender female bodies are gazed upon in live performance decades ago and how ‘the theatre of sex and the sex of theatre’ (the subtitle of our 1983 BloodGroup production Dirt) are often intertwined for women.

Anna Furse (*)  Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_21

487

488     Anna Furse

Fig. 21.1  Anna Furse in Anna Furse Performs an Anatomy Act: A Show and Tell, 2016 (Photograph by Nina Klaff. ©Anna Furse)

An Anatomy Act is the first project in a series of works and events entitled The Theatre of Our Bodies. Our bodies and what they mean, how they function, attract the gaze, repulse, reproduce, die, and how they speak our minds—willy nilly— remains an abiding fascination, as is my increasing realisation of how fundamentally alienated most people are from their corporeal construct and functioning. We are entirely dependent on our bodies’ health, effect on and responses to the world and yet leave its fundamental truths to the experts. This, it seems to me, is a feminist issue. In the early 1970s, when my feminism was born, alongside struggling for political and economic rights, appropriating our bodies as ourselves was an important act of empowerment. We needed to wrest power over our sexual and reproductive rights. Wombs remain a contested space for political and legislative control, as a vociferous cross-party pro-life lobby lurks in the UK and has come to the fore in Trump’s America. Four decades of working in theatre first as a performer/deviser and then as a director and writer constitute half-and-half pre- and post-HE (Higher Education), two decades in each. Before HE, I was directing new works, devised and text-based, with a range of companies including my

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     489

own BloodGroup, co-founded in 1981. Despite Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister paring away the cultural budget, during the 1980s there was still a relatively healthy array of revenue and project funded Alternative Theatre organisations. I directed touring companies, TIE work (Theatre in Education), youth theatre, repertory productions and Graeae’s first women’s project A Private View by Tash Fairbanks, with Jenny Sealey MBE on her first (acting) job. [Jenny Sealey discusses this project in detail in Chapter 25, below.] The British Council requested that we convert the central lesbian relationship to ‘good friendship’ for a Malaysian tour, and I enhanced our set locally with figurative paintings by a woman artist and friend. At each venue, a man in the back of the auditorium would gesture to me with hand signals to conceal certain body parts from view. The body is not a universally easy topic. Post-HE, I was Head of Movement at Rose Bruford College and led international workshops in Europe and the USA. Teaching was a laboratory in which to test ideas and research a methodology. I investigated a feminist dramaturgy—how we see, the way theatrical images ignite meaning and the resonances of montage. My mantra was drawn from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1974, 795), in which she states: ‘The free woman is just being born’ and continues by asking, quoting Rimbaud (letter to Pierre Demeny, May 15, 1871), ‘Will her ideational worlds be different from ours?’ I trusted that if we could discover an imaginative syntax based on free association of ideas (drawing on Surrealist methods), we might liberate a new poetics, an authentic ideational world, in contrast to the prevalent realist play-based feminist theatre. I worked on this premise for some years, exploring women’s stories and memories, the contents of handbags, deconstructing fine art images, testing the body’s presence, interactivity and gesture. Resulting dramaturgies were experiments. My works on eating disorders, hysterias, ability, impairment, sexuality, reproduction, anatomy and death have been inspired by feminist theory, interdisciplinary thought and cultural studies that bring illuminating insight into the significance of the body, socially, economically, politically and psychoanalytically. From Marx and Bakhtin’s analyses of the body and class, to Foucault’s deconstructions of the body and power, to Freud’s hysterical body, to Merleau-Ponty’s argument for embodied knowledge and to Butler’s parsing of gender, we can now comprehend corporeality in multiple modes and through many lenses. But at the core of my early work was the principle that if ‘the personal is political’ then research in studio had to work from trusting what arose, intuitively and imaginatively, when working via free assoc­ iation in relation to material and textual stimuli. For this process to work,

490     Anna Furse

I knew that the body had to be trained so that reflexes were sharp, resistances were broken down, and impulses could be followed through. My original research enquiry was dance. Dancing from the age of three, by eleven I had won a scholarship from the Inner London Education Authority to the Royal Ballet School. This was truly vocational. My dedication was nun-like. I slept in my pointe shoes (actually to soften the blocking!). I was the last to know the latest Beatles album or kiss a boy, but was initiated by with-it girlfriends who hung out at the Hammersmith Palais dance hall and taught me to drink snowballs. I took to miniskirts, frosted lipstick and Mary Quant false eyelashes. I spent all my pocket money on Fonteyn and Nureyev’s legendary partnership (standing room at 7/6 in old money—37½p today) as news of the Vietnam War, Bob Dylan and hippies seeped into my consciousness around our overpopulated kitchen table. I knew deep down that our ballet minds were being inhibited. I was an academic achiever and won the annual Choreographic Prize twice in a row, awarded by Sir Frederick Ashton and Léonide Massine, respectively. Our teacher walked in on rehearsal to find my cast standing on their heads. She tried to ban this dangerous sport. I insisted. She relented. My themes were (1) algebraic equation and (2) revolution via original Bach and Moogsynthesised Bach. I was a teenager. I was rebelling in my way against the establishment, testing, trying movements we’d never been taught and exploring a different aesthetic. No one ever suggested that I might have a career ahead as a creator. Women simply didn’t do this. It took me years to find the confidence to put my own voice on the line. In 1970, I quit the Royal Ballet system. They said I was the most expressive dancer in my year but my bones were not long enough. The institution’s doctor pinched the tiniest amount of flesh on these and wrote ‘too fat for the company’. I was 5ft 3ins and weighed 50 kilos. They advised me to work in Europe or train to teach. I made a different decision: I’d give it all up and train my brain. The Principal beamed and said she’d give the whole school the day off if I got into university. I did, and she didn’t. I cut my hair off, wore midi-skirts and took ‘A’ levels in a college where I forced my feet to turn in because the boys would quack behind me. My absent father suggested I apply to Central School of Art (where he taught) for Stage Design, but, intellectually hungry, I applied to university. Aware of my lack of education and in panic before my interviews, I spread masses of books on my bed that I knew were significant but hadn’t ever read, hoping for some kind of osmosis. Exeter University offered me a place, but one July afternoon I walked into the University of Bristol Drama Department and knocked randomly on an academic’s door. A brief conversation about Molière’s

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     491

Don Juan later, he said I was in. I asked for a year off. To this day, I don’t know how this worked out because I had nothing in writing, but in good faith moved to Paris to grow some life experience. In 1971, I was invited to a performance at Peter Brook’s newly founded International Centre for Theatrical Research (CITR). I had no idea who he was. He was interviewing for an unpaid translator. They played two versions of Peter Handke’s Kaspar (a play I later directed in Ljubljana). In one, the actors were seated at long tables at mics. In the other, they burst from cupboards stuck high to the enormous breezeblock walls. To this day I remember Kaspar, his cheeks stuffed with rags, stammering ‘I want to be what my father once was’ (in fact, originally ‘I want to be a horseman like my father once was’, but more Freudian in this version perhaps). It was thrilling. I was hired. I was told to be a fly on the wall. So I literally perched each day on a high shelf against this wall and observed, wrote notes, sketched. Peter then broke his own rules and let me join in: Tai-chi classes with a teacher he flew in from Switzerland and with Moshé Feldenkrais himself. He was so prescient, cross-legged and gnomic on the red carpet, philosophising about his search in measured tones. Then Ted Hughes arrived to write The Conference of the Birds, and I was dispatched to the green room with Olivetti and dictionary, feverishly translating his unstoppable output. One day, in my default pinned-to-wall position, Miriam Goldschmidt came over and said, ‘We really need you. It’s very hard to work without an audience’. A young woman with a Louise Brooks black bob and dark green raincoat arrived, and I was to look after her. This was the iconoclastic designer Sally Jacobs, over for the revival of Brook’s radical white box production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fiercely independent, Sally was characteristically annoyed that I had been appointed to walk her to her hotel. Two decades later, she was to become a close collaborator and is now my best friend. I was simultaneously being politicised by my soixante-huitard friends. The flat I shared with a Portuguese girlfriend became a base for passing revolutionaries from the anti-fascist underground, watched by the secret police. By coincidence, when we’d viewed this flat, the socialist leader in exile, Mario Soares, later President of Portugal, was living there, working at a typewriter. After the 1975 Revolution (accurately predicted by her comrades), my friend worked in theatre. In 1977, she told me of a man called Augusto Boal who adapted my idol Paolo Freire’s literacy project into theatrical practice. They were using Boal to educate illiterate Portuguese peasants. The seeds of my teaching began.

492     Anna Furse

In 1972, Glynne Wickham, pioneer of Drama in Higher Education, was our Head of Department at Bristol University. All the academics were male. My circle was alternative, feminist, and by our third year insisted the staff hand over to us the budget for the annual production—normally directed by a tutor—so that we could turn our politics into practice. Our ‘Women’s Week’ included a full programme of plays, devised work and film. We were breaking new ground. These were early second-wave feminist days, and at the time there were only three women directors in the UK, including Buzz Goodbody. For my dissertation on Women’s Week, I made a model diagram of how gender conditioning affects confidence and choice in leadership and creativity. In my final year, I returned to Paris where I assisted in a French Lycée and danced again: jazz with Arlene Phillips’ student Molly Molloy, choreographer for Le Crazy Horse. Her gyrating aesthetic was paradoxically liberating for a feminist ex-ballerina. Now I was doing sexed-up pliés without holding onto a barre to the Righteous Brothers’ You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling. At this time, the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski was recruiting for ­‘paratheatre’, which would attempt to transcend the separation between performer and spectator by inviting interactive exchange. I was vetted in cafés, then summoned to the Cartoucherie de Vincennes. The wait was long; very long; a test of perseverance. I met Grotowski in a lugubrious space. He was like a mole who hadn’t yet seen the light. He was eating cheese, wearing a green parka, his eyes twinkling behind thick-rimmed glasses. He asked me what I was searching for, and I plunged into an inelegant spiel about how I distrusted-authority-and-male-authority-and-was-politically-against-individualistic-liberation-indulgences … and yet was compulsively drawn to his work. He looked me in the eye, still twinkling, lit a cigarette and said something that I’ve held close all my life since: ‘doubt before, doubt after, but never doubt during’. This project, in a chateau in the Charente region of France, was a defining moment. For ten days without any regulation of work, only some basic ground rules, I found latent energies, took wild risks and shared unrepeatable impulses. I barely slept or ate, my endorphins abnormally high: I’d injured my wrist and it swelled like a melon, but I felt nothing. I had never planned my future since quitting ballet. I’d drifted. I’d found politics and purpose but no career path. On graduating, I moved to San Francisco, worked in a record store, danced jazz again, this time with Ed Mock, and then returned to London, determined to dance professionally. A sudden telegram from Poland invited me to come back to work with Grotowski’s paratheatre. It was Easter weekend. I had three days to get visa, ticket and the legally obligatory ‘daily dollars’. I arrived in Wroclaw, one of only six chosen. We ran out of the city for hours on end. We were told to

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     493

get lost in the forest full of wild boar. We ran on roads at night, heads up to the stars. We survived on meagre rations of bread and cheese we’d managed to buy in the depleted stores before coming to the deep countryside. I struggled. I got injuries. I was not in good shape physically or psychologically. I felt alienated and failing. When I asked Teo Spychalski at the end why he’d brought me here he said, ‘You flew too high in France. You had to land’. Tough love. At this time, I was commissioned to write a cover story for Spare Rib on ballet. I met and was enamoured by the New Dance community and friends: Jacky Lansley, Fergus Early, Mary Prestige, Emilyn Claid, Rose English, Sally Potter, Phil Jeck, musicians from the London Musicians Collective and film-makers from the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. I joined X6, devised pieces with Jacky’s Women’s Workshop and worked with the New Dance Magazine Collective—that earned me a gig writing for the dance pages in Time Out and a cover story for Sunday Times Magazine. We called ourselves Helen Jives, performing punky feminist tat at X6 and the Drill Hall. I was now determined to work in professional theatre. I auditioned (a full day of interrogative politics) and was invited to the agitprop Broadside Mobile Workers’ Theatre. That same week I was offered and took the job of researching physical theatre improvisation for the experimental Reflex Action, Wales. I was the only woman. Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff was then a thriving hub, a centre for all the experimental Welsh companies—Cardiff Laboratory Theatre, Moving Being and Paupers Carnival—and a touring venue for UK and European companies. It was there that my friend Jill Greenhalgh (then with Cardiff Laboratory) launched the Magdalena Project in 1986. Having keenly heeded my Grotowski stories, the director decided one night to work alone with me. He gave me a poem and told me to move constantly whilst speaking this over and over. At dawn, he went off to buy cigarettes and came back with a copy of Penthouse. He opened the centre spread, inhaled his cigarette and drawled, ‘Let’s see who’ll keep me awake, you or her?’ This was a significant jolt. It belongs in the growing catalogue of women reporting abuse today in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein exposure. I remain paradoxically grateful. I decided from that night on that I would never be directed by a man again but would make my own work, form a women’s company. With my partner, the dancer and choreographer Laurie Booth, I wanted out of Thatcher’s Britain. But Florence, where we settled into a tiny studio in Dante’s house, proved unstable. Cultural activity was run by the Communist Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana (ARCI), and things were chaotic. Thankfully we were in high demand in Switzerland and

494     Anna Furse

Germany to run workshops and survived by commuting across the Alps to earn what were then small fortunes. Laurie and I introduced the postmodern dance technique, Contact Improvisation, for the first time to a European community, and I offered experimental Women’s Performance Workshops. A bendy schoolgirl, Sasha Waltz, came to everything and became our friend. By the end of the year, for all the joys of this itinerant life, we decided to return to London. I wanted to launch my company. I approached Suzy Gilmour from Helen Jives to collaborate on an adaptation of Genet’s The Maids. The Director of the York and Albany Women’s Festival booked our A Barricade of Flowers. We called ourselves BloodGroup, toured extensively in the UK and Europe and caught the eye of John Ashford who was then running the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) in London. He said this work was, unusually, ‘European’. The ICA became our London home alongside Impact, Hesitate and Demonstrate, Lumiere and Son, and Rational Theatre. We were the only overtly feminist company, our enthusiastic audiences were defined differently as a ‘cult following’ and even here we felt ‘othered’. During rehearsals in the Women Free Arts Alliance (where I ran workshops on a grotty carpet, to which Mona Hatoum, then an unknown Palestinian artist came), I had a phone call from Rose Bruford College, wanting a movement teacher for their new Community Theatre Arts course. I joined a dedicated team. In weekly three-hour staff meetings, we politicised everything, from teaching voice against the conservatoire principle of RP (received pronunciation), to how, in my case, to train the body democratically, drawing on postmodern dance and Contact Improvisation, harnessed with customising Grotowski/Brook training in reflexes, and my quest to embolden women’s presence on stage. It was riveting. There I met Noël Greig, a BloodGroup admirer, who introduced me to Gay Sweatshop’s designer Kate Owen for our second show Dirt: The Theatre of Sex and the Sex of Theatre. Dirt was inspired by a book of essays by French prostitutes I’d translated (Jaget 2000) and also by an affecting incident I needed to confront: at a performance on ‘erotic dancing’ by my friend Dianne Torr in New York’s trendy Mud Club, she exposed the arty audience to her day job. I was disturbed by the instant male arousal in this tightly packed audience. It seemed that even with all the irony Dianne was summoning she couldn’t but stimulate an unchecked male gaze erectus. Dirt opened with an Edwardian tableau parodying Manet’s satirical painting Le déjeneur sur l’herbe, a distant soundtrack of a cricket game with a warplane suddenly zooming over, dropping toy soldier parachutists into our teacups. The Falklands War was being sexualised in the tabloids at the

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     495

time. We were angry. Structured as a revue, we dressed and undressed, quoting ways in which women are eroticised across genres. We stripped naked as slides formed from cut-up words (like ransom notes) told the audience: We know you are looking embarrassed giggles from audience We know You are looking at Us more giggles Do you know We are looking at You Looking at Us? relieved laughter

Our nudity, and the fact we were stating that women working in the sex industry were performing—no differently from actors and dancers—was ‘incorrect’ at the time (1983) when feminists were exhorting women not to work in the sex industry. The press raved. Controversy was rife. We sold out everywhere, including the ICA theatre that was a hub of the European avant-garde. We shared our three-week Dirt season with Jan Fabre. Odd programming indeed. Women’s theatre at the time was simply not like us. We provoked, worked with images and physical action, unsettled convention, put ourselves on the line. Rick Fisher, our lighting designer, said I should get down to Sadler’s Wells to see a German company Pina Bausch. He said we had a lot in common. I went, was smitten and awed. I never called my own work ‘tanztheater ’ despite straddling dance and theatre most of my life. I don’t begin with form. Form follows the imperative of content. I begin with the idea. A hunch. A dramaturgy develops to organise ideas according to this imperative of content, whether a piece with or without utterance, a text at the start of rehearsals or one that evolves during. It is the ideational material I’m working with that feels more important than anything, which is why I write plays as well as devise. The next BloodGroup piece was probably unconsciously influenced by Bausch. The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was at the height of its resistance to nuclear weapons. I imagined a metaphor for the Cold War: the split human family, divorce, alienated children. The Cold Wars cast of six included two men. Our holocaust-shattered ‘family’ emerged, stunned, from a wood and glass house (inspired by Kantor’s Dead Class ), struggling to remember happy family rituals across seasons, tenuously and physically (there was very little speech in BloodGroup shows). The composer, Sylvia Hallet, was travelling abroad during rehearsals, so we decided to take the

496     Anna Furse

risk of my devising to her wall-to-wall score, like a dance piece. On a sand-covered floor, I choreographed from the outside for the first time. Cold Wars was dark, melancholic and liminal. We performed at the ICA and toured the UK, to Switzerland and the Incontroazzionne Festival, Sicily. I needed to develop. I wanted to direct Clam by Deborah Levy. I had co-directed her Pax for Women’s Theatre Group and was movement director on Heresies at the RSC. Kate Crutchley, Oval House’s tireless supporter of new work, commissioned this. I cast Andrej Borkowski (whom I’d known from the Polish company Akademia Ruchu) and Mine Kaylan. I was having issues with hiding the fact of my direction within the ethos of the core company collective. In these times, it was taboo for women to put ourselves forward. A card-carrying feminist was supposed to work in horizontal structures, whereas direction, even if not authoritarian, is a leadership role. It was a crisis time for us all. Another turning point. Nonetheless, the following year, 1986, Suzy Gilmour and I resuscitated our duo. I suggested working on the Gnostic Gospels, revivifying the binary we’d explored in Barricade, to explore the Virgin/Whore myth. Our Magdalene and Virgin had indeed washed up on the shores of Southern France and become immortal hermitesses living side by side. Set in World War II (we tended to be obsessed by war), we created a mirroring doubling: blue suits and very long white wigs, both identical yet opposite. We premiered at the ICA and toured to the Polverigi and Edinburgh Festivals, with a second London season at the Drill Hall. During this time, I decided to stop performing and direct, unapologetically. Paola Dionisotti and Juliet Stevenson had seen and loved Strokes, and we subsequently formed a company to mount a quirky time-travelling American play about nineteenth-century women explorers, On the Verge by Eric Overmyer. We co-produced with Birmingham Rep and the new Lilian Baylis Studio Theatre. The experience brought me close to profound differences of methodology between the devising fringe and the plays-based mainstream. It was tough but we found a way, and I learned a lot. At this time, 1989, Jonathan Petherbridge, Artistic Director of York Theatre Royal, invited me to become Associate Director, but suddenly resigned. Annie Castledine then commissioned my first play Augustine (Big Hysteria), inviting me to be her Associate at Derby Playhouse. By some quirk of fate, she too resigned. Then, from left field, I was offered the Artistic Directorship of Paines Plough. It was a risky appointment. The Board wanted me to bring my visual and physical aesthetic to new writing. In my first week (no pressure), I was asked to decide whether to fulfil a commission of Stephen Jeffreys’

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     497

The Clink. Paines Plough was a tight-knit family. I felt it important to have a smooth transition. I agreed, bringing designer Sally Jacobs and composer Stephen Warbeck into the production team, using a large cast and a chorus of supernumeraries. The first comment Ruth Mackenzie, from my Board, made at curtain was: ‘How many people were on that stage?!’ I wanted new writing to mean new theatre: larger ensembles, international collaboration, working with dance, live art, music, visual theatre, unconventional sites. The Board had agreed as a condition of my taking up the appointment that I should bring my play, still in Derby’s schedule, with me. When Max Stafford-Clark asked about my first project line-up and heard I was directing my own writing, he warned, ‘Be very careful’. New writing is a sacrosanct protected species in the British theatre ecology. The lore has been: the writer writes, and the director ‘serves’ this. My own roots with Brook, my sensibility regarding totality and ensemble, meant the writer would be a collaborator within the creative team, including actors, designer and composer. This was controversial at the time, but is now acknowledged by the current Paines Plough directorship as pioneering. If today there is more fluidity between performance and theatre, live art and text, it remains a fact that plays are about relationships between people whilst performance is about people’s relationship to the world. I work with both, according to context. A given topic influences an imperative of form, and I refuse to be partisan in the text/devised debate. The question should always be, rather: how to excite the imagination of the spectator. Augustine won a Time Out Award for Writing and Direction. It accidentally hit a zeitgeist as child abuse and false memory syndrome erupted suddenly in the media, and this was the ‘Freud Wars’ era. We toured the production widely, with Shona Morris as the protagonist and an actor fresh from RADA, James Dreyfus, as the young Freud. Sally designed. The Anglo-Soviet Association invited us on an eventful tour to Ukraine in the aftermath of the recent nuclear accident at Chernobyl. The actors insisted I guarantee health and safety, so I consulted Greenpeace for advice on clean water and uncontaminated food. I packed a suitcaseful of nuts, dried fruit and chocolate as company rations. When we arrived at Moscow airport, an embarrassing mountain of ostentatious green shiny bottles of mineral water awaited us. Our generous producing theatre was embracing market forces: they were funded by a porn merchant. We couldn’t have survived without our interpreter’s painstakingly calm explanation of every foible we encountered. Audiences literally thronged us. Psychoanalysis had been suppressed under Communism but was coming out of the woodwork. James found an old Cyrillic copy of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams in a Kiev bookstall.

498     Anna Furse

Augustine’s asylum oppression was read as a metaphor for the treatment of Soviet dissidents. I drank far too much vodka to cope with the stress of the company’s neediness and anxiety and spent most of the tour with a headache, wearing dark glasses. My first three years at Paines Plough were a crescendo of successes. The Arts Council raised the Annual Revenue by 15%, defining us as a ‘Key Strategic Organisation’. It seemed I could do little wrong. I was establishing unprecedented cooperation with French theatres and was Consultant to the Comédie de Caen. I commissioned April de Angelis, Suzy Gilmour, Lavinia Murray and Anna Reynolds. At one AGM, the Chair took me aside to remark that I was commissioning too many women. I was perplexed. It seemed obvious to commission women writers to redress the glaring imbalance. Besides, we also produced work by male writers: the adaptation of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London commissioned by the British Council as a French co-production was written by Nigel Gearing, and I directed Michael Azama’s Crossfire, on the first Iraq War. I took on two assistant directors, Sara le Brocq and Roxana Silbert, former students of mine at Drama Studio. We were running a regular School Without Walls (inspired by Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society ) of workshops and labs. When I returned from Down and Out (which had played at Paris’s Théâtre de Gennevilliers alongside Howard Barker’s Wrestling School), I discovered that finances were wobbling. I spent a year recovering a deficit to zero. I had to cancel larger-scale projects and streamline production costs. Through Thelma Holt, I found new premises in the Aldwych and produced Wax by Lavinia Murray, an extraordinary monologue on Marie Tussaud, to keep us on the road. We toured UK and to the Scenes D’Outre Manche Festival at Lille’s Théâtre de la Metaphore, paired again with The Wrestling School. At the time, I was undergoing the biggest upheaval of my life: fertility treatment. I left Paines Plough in January 1995. I’m certainly not the first nor the last Artistic Director to encounter withdrawal of support from their Board—the 2016 departure of Emma Rice from Shakespeare’s Globe is a more recent case in point. In the UK, unlike the rest of Europe, the artist is not in charge, it’s the management. It seems illogical that boards appoint artists specifically because of their willingness to take risks and innovate, only to punish them for this later. I was out of a job and pregnant. My miracle baby girl was born in the 1995 heatwave. Within three weeks of her birth, I was writing a book, Your Essential Infertility Companion, as I breastfed, wondering how to reshape my professional future. Elaine Showalter, my friend since writing Augustine, organised a semester’s teaching

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     499

at Princeton University for myself and partner Jack Klaff, which gave us space, time and money to write. This was UltraViolet for the puppetry duo Doo Cot—about a same-sex couple who had opened a school for children in World War II Provence. It was based on a true story: Violet was disabled with a severe spinal injury. She and her American partner wrote children’s books together. Violet eventually killed herself. This piece integrated Doo Cot’s habitual junk puppetry with video, live cello and live narration. I was then invited to apply for an academic job at the University of North London whose new BA in Performing Arts I’d validated. The idea was that I’d have a split contract, half to direct a new venue, The Rocket on the Holloway Road, and half to teach. No sooner was I in post than the theatre project fell through. And that’s how my full-time career in HE teaching began, with henceforth more sporadic professional productions. For one of these, in 1997, I moved to Ljubljana with my toddler, commissioned to direct at the Cankarev Dom—the city’s grandiose Art Centre. I chose Handke’s Kaspar, which had initiated me into Brook’s company years earlier. I wanted to relate this to the appalling war that was still raging to the east of former Yugoslavia. Outraged by reports of rape camps and that a school had been the main one, my Kaspar: Speech Torture would present a woman as Bosnian, incarcerated in a geometric blackboard set on which her two tormentors wrote instruction. In my dramaturgy, her conditioning to become socialised was to morph into a grey-suited, American-anthemsinging, efficient and keen, corporate. I was risking a double message: overlaying ethnic cleansing with the cultural and economic Americanisation of the Eastern Bloc post 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show opened the City of Women Festival together with the emerging Marina Abramovic. It concluded at the Pandora 2000 Festival in Vienna. Invited back to Princeton in 1999, I wrote there my Theatre Centre commission Gorgeous, on body image disorder, to be directed by Rosamunde Hutt. Theatre Centre, always supportive, were genuinely astonished when the production—that they had feared might be dealing with a very white middle-class phenomenon—opened in an Inner London girls’ comprehensive and went down a storm. Eating disorders are rampant, and it’s hard for teachers to tackle the topic. The play gave access to difficult conversations. The show sold faster than any in the company’s history and was taken by the British Council to Malaysia and the Philippines. It also ran for six years at the New Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, popular with educators, social workers and young audiences. Its success speaks volumes, tragically. My PaR (Practice as Research within the Higher Education research environment) began in 2001 when I started to work with ‘sci-art’ support from

500     Anna Furse

the Wellcome Trust. Five years earlier, I’d volunteered as a subject for the TV series Making Babies (BBC1, 1996) because I wanted to lend political voice to the obscure IVF (in vitro fertilisation) medical environment I’d been thrust into. There were vital issues for women to grasp: fertility treatment and abortion rights being analogous in terms of the right to choose. At the time, funding was a postcode lottery, privileging those who could afford to pay, whilst the media misrepresented medical facts. Society was prejudiced and confused. IVF was discussed alongside Dolly the Sheep and cloning, propagating deeply misinformed anxieties about ‘designer babies’. The BBC edited out my politics and the camera crew broke agreed boundaries, sneaking into the birthing room. Our consultant, Robert Winston, was on the cusp of his media career and clearly enjoyed the camera. In this emerging field of reproductive medicine, a woman’s voice had yet to be heard. All this triggered my 10-year project The Art of A.R.T. (Assisted Reproductive Technology) and my determination to bring the taboo of assisted reproduction into public understanding. This included two productions, a performance installation in two hospitals, a small video installation, and a BBC radio play. In 2001, the Wellcome Trust launched me with a grant to research and develop a project on IVF. My science partner was Simon Fishel, who’d been involved in the first IVF birth team. Yerma’s Eggs was devised in response to Lorca’s Yerma, a tragedy set in pro-natalist Spain under Franco which depicts the ostracism and desperation of a wife unable to conceive. It included vox pop interviews asking questions such as ‘How many eggs is a baby girl born with?’ and ‘How many sperm are in a single ejaculate?’ I also asked what IVF meant. The public responses were staggeringly ignorant. The Wellcome Trust subsequently gave me a generous Impact Award for the full project, and I was able to found Athletes of the Heart. My company was deliberately made up of artistic and personal difference. I gathered performers who each had a personal association with non-parenting/Other parenting/subfertility. Yerma’s Eggs played Riverside Studios and the Explore at Bristol. We projected onto performers’ bodies lurid micro-digital photography—then groundbreaking—that included a single egg cell and a single sperm penetrating the egg. We also projected—for the first time ever in public—innovative 3D/4D images of the baby in utero. I became aware that the process of medical imaging was akin to cultural image-making: the apparently true-to-life image of the interior of the womb is in fact a manipulation, a mediatisation and aestheticisation of nature, with political connotations. Images of the foetus make the mother disappear, foregrounding the unborn as protagonist, which is why such images are used by Pro-Lifers. Visiting Professor Stuart Campbell’s Harley Street surgery,

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     501

I noticed three different coloured versions of a still 3D/4D baby: blue, green and ochre. We’d been using the ochre that he’d sent us, thinking this to be ‘real’. I asked him what these colours signified, and he said the colouration was computer-generated but people tended to prefer the ochre as more lifelike and attractive. My quest into medical imaging began. My next project Glass Body: Reflecting on Becoming Transparent focused entirely on the way we imagine our interiors alongside how our interiors are imaged. Commissioned by the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, with Arts Council and Wellcome Trust support, my scenographer Agnes Treplin designed our egg-shaped structure on a floor of its vast glass and steel atrium. Patients as well as medics and the public would come to our performances, which would last twenty-five minutes, for sixteen people at a time. We performed two to three times a day for three weeks. The performer was Butoh artist Marie Gabrielle Rotie, enacting a very simple, highly controlled score of movement and object manipulation within inches of the audience, with video by Lucy Cash projected in triptych and an evocative sound score by Graeme Miller. The performance ended with a painting that I was to return to in my current production: Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp (1632). The audience was invited to linger in our dark blue pod, to play on our state-of-the-art transparent touch screens with our Reproductive Toy—a puzzle where you assemble your own reproductive system from random male/female parts. Again, public ignorance was rife. Guests could also paint or write, and each was given a Petri dish containing paper and pencil. I have hundreds of confessional, touching notes. Lucy, who’d worked in radio, was keen to bring my work to BBC radio. With Karen Rose of Sweet Talk producing, I was commissioned to write and direct my first radio drama, My Glass Body, for Radio 3’s The Wire. This was a meditation on the rollercoaster journey of infertility and treatment from the woman’s point of view with dense sound score by Graeme Miller. IVF had made me reconsider my relationship to technology. Back in Vienna in 2000, I was drinking brandy with Zeljko Hrs, one of the Kaspar actors who’d become a close friend, and talking about the Internet and email, a new tool he’d initiated me into. I was musing at its intimacy and how it would change everything we assumed about narrative. Zeljko had taught me a word ‘inat ’ meaning male stubborn pride that he said had driven the Balkan War. I suddenly had a hunch: that we consider making a work together that harnessed new technology to work on masculinity. Don Juan. Who? /Don Juan. Kdo? was born. With Mik Flood (Director of Chapter Arts Centre when I worked there) as Executive Producer, we sought a co-production with Mladinsko

502     Anna Furse

Gledalisce in Ljubljana. The Artistic Director was excited about the project’s futuristic ethos. An AHRC, British Academy and ACE grant later, we commissioned an especially assembled ‘cyberstudio’ in which to gestate our work. I cast four Mladinsko actors, plus Giovanna Rogante and Tanya Myers, with Marie Gabrielle Rotie joining later. We began our durational research online: each week, wherever we were in the world, we’d meet in our chat room as I guided frank writing about men, desire, sexuality and ‘the Don Juan in our minds’. I wanted to scrape beneath the surface of political correctness and unlock uncomfortable truths, because things on the gender front still seemed pretty messed up to me. Eighteen months later, we held 500 pages of text in our hands, the provenance of any word, phrase or sentence anonymous, our collaborative writing being what Stephen Lowe called in his programme notes a kind of ‘masked ball’. Zeljko and I whittled this down to thirty pages. I took this text, without scenes, characters or structure, into rehearsals. All I knew was I wanted 1000 feather pillows and a huge red carpet. We improvised for weeks. As we explored our theme, I began to see a form emerging and knocked the text into a shape. The key was that there was no stable Don Juan, nor lover. But we did coil the scenes around a central conceit: a silver screen cliché scene of seduction and abandonment. The company was ferociously passionate about this work—words they’d crafted together and a long creative process in which they’d invested much of themselves. This was high risk. There was no constant psychology to play; only collective understanding of our problematised takes on men and woman, sexuality and power. We previewed at Mladinsko and in London’s appropriately damp and shady Shunt Vaults, before premiering in Ljubljana and headlining the FeEast Festival at Riverside Studios in 2008. We could have toured this more and certainly wanted to, but it was an expensive and logistically complex project since the unique performers were impossible to replace. I later published the text in my anthology of performance texts for Methuen, Theatre in Pieces: Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration (2011, 315–448), giving the project some longevity. Soon another hunch: I’d long wanted to work on Ibsen’s Lady from the Sea, a play with an extraordinary turning-point scene at the end: the older husband tells the wife, who’s being drawn to leave him for her ex-lover, that he won’t hold her back, that she’s free. And in this moment of freedom, because she now feels free, she decides to stay. I’ve always found this psychology existentially and politically true. Maja Mitic of DAH Teatar wanted to collaborate. Maja had recently left her older medical partner, feeling trapped. I gave her the play, and she declared it the story of her life.

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     503

With a grant from AHRC and ACE, we worked on this in Belgrade. DAH Teatar, an important force of feminist activist theatre in Serbia, works with serious poverty of means. Their equipment was faulty, and there were hardly any lights. But somehow Antonella Diana, our scenographer from the neoBarba feminist theatre Teatret OM in Denmark, managed to make it fabulous on a shoestring. Our Sea/Woman presents an actress working on the original text between English and Serbian. The closer she gets into the words and the errors of translation, the deeper she confronts her own anxiety neurosis, discovering an Ibsenesque identification with the sea, a pervading theme of the play. Our text alludes to marine catastrophe, the sea as a signifier of the unconscious and stimulating fear of the uncanny in the Freudian sense. It’s a polluted stale sea into which Ibsen’s Ellida throws herself in a desperate search to escape her stifling existence as a provincial doctor’s wife. A couple of years afterwards I get an email from Maja: ‘what doesn’t destroy you makes you stronger’. During our work, her partner had been making overtures to win her back. Not only had she gone back but she’d married him. They were on a honeymoon cruise on the Costa Concordia when it sank off the coast of Italy in January 2012. Both fortunately survived. For Maja, life and art had become one. We still think of remaking our work that would add two more layers to our deconstruction: the pre-collaboration and post-collaboration real-life stories. Becoming Head of the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths College in 2011 consumed me and little work was made. I managed one more production, When We Were Birds, a piece about body memory, in 2013. I wanted to work with my long-lost Royal Ballet School peer Esther Linley, who had a professional career as a leading ballerina as well as a dance theatre maker in Austria. We literally returned to the scene of our childhood, the Royal Ballet School’s White Lodge in Richmond Park, with Lucy Cash and Graeme Miller as sound and video collaborators. I wanted this to be a solo for Esther, but she asked me to join her onstage. I hadn’t performed in thirty years. I reluctantly agreed, and we made the work one boiling July in Palermo to premiere at the Cantieri Culturali Zisa. Esther then couldn’t continue touring but we had gigs booked in Ireland and Newcastle. And that’s how I found myself performing again, alone. It’s not where I wish to end up: on stage. My drive remains to write, create and direct. Whenever I’m beset by recurring doubt at the current social and political purpose of theatre, a new rush of international applications from all continents to my MA in Performance Making reignites the conviction that there’s still purposeful work to be done through the specific

504     Anna Furse

thrill, complexity and politics of live-ness. Writing this account has of course necessitated a great deal of elimination as I’ve directed over fifty productions. There are ongoing struggles now and, likely increasingly, ahead in terms of fighting for equal pay, reproductive rights, inclusivity, opposing racism, violence and abuses of power, averting ecocatastrophe, famine and all man-made acts of destruction. This won’t go away. Art-making, like a simple act of kindness, is a positive gesture, a way of trying to make sense, of asking questions of society, and give some imaginative contours to how we might rethink what oppresses, excludes or confuses us. In the midst of making An Anatomy Act, it occurred to me that I’d made works on birth and sex and was now making one on death. Perhaps, then, the four decades tell another story: that the personal remains political. We cannot help but invest what we are living in our work. If I’ve lived my life forwards and here have tried to understand it backwards, it remains a fact that in the creative process, its accidental moments of discovery, the part that intuition, hunches and gut feelings play, not to mention economic imperatives or the serendipity that frequently determines a path, are the more pragmatic truths that can elude both our critics and scholars of theatre. A new generation of women with a sense of entitlement to a level playing-field finally occupies at least some of the centre stage. I would hope that the history of my generation’s contribution might alert us to how relatively recent is the merest notion of any gender equality—and fragile. Witnessing today’s right-wing manoeuvres on both sides of the Atlantic to reverse feminism’s hard-won gains, we might be wise, across generations, to brace ourselves for more provocations ahead than we perhaps bargained for. It is the possibility of intergenerational cooperation to resist social, political and ecological disaster, fuelled by our imagination, that motivates me now as I gaze in horror towards our precarious future.

Bibliography Athletes of the Heart. n.d. Accessed June 5, 2018. http://www.athletesoftheheart. org. Athletes of the Heart. n.d. ‘When We Were Birds (Esther Linley and Anna Furse)’. Accessed March 20, 2018. https://vimeo.com/53867710. Azama, Michel, and Nigel Gearing. 1993. Crossfire. London: Oberon. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1968. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

21  Birth, Copulation and Death: Feminist Theatre     505

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1974. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Random House. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Eliot, T. S. 1932. Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama. London: Faber and Faber. Foucault, Michel. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Allan Lane. Foucault, Michel. 1990–1992. The History of Sexuality. Translated by Robert Hurley, 3 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund. 1976. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. 1956. Studies on Hysteria. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Furse, Anna. 1997. Augustine (Big Hysteria). Amsterdam: Harwood Academic. Furse, Anna. 2001. Your Essential Infertility Companion, 2nd edn. London: Thorsons. Furse, Anna. 2011a. ‘“In Every Litre of Seawater There Are Two Tablespoons of Salt”: On Making Sea/Woman ’. Women: A Cultural Review 22, no. 4: 411–27. Furse, Anna. 2011b. ‘Lecture at Science + Culture Ideas Exchange at the Glasgow Science Centre’. Accessed March 20, 2018. https://vimeo.com/26922530. Furse, Anna, ed. 2014. Theatre in Pieces, Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration: An Anthology of Play Texts 1996–2011. London: Methuen Drama. Furse, Anna, et al. 2014. ‘Don Juan. Who? / Don Juan’. Kdo? In Theatre in Pieces, Politics, Poetics and Interdisciplinary Collaboration: An Anthology of Play Texts 1996–2011, edited by Anna Furse, 315–448. London: Methuen Drama. Handke, Peter. 1972. Kaspar. Translated by Michael Roloff. London: Eyre Methuen. Ibsen, Henrik. 1960. The Lady from the Sea. Translated by Michael Meyer. London: Hart-Davis. Illich, Ivan D. 1971. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper and Row. Jaget, Claude, ed. 2000. Prostitutes: Our Life. Translated by Anna Furse. Bristol: Falling Wall Press. Jeffreys, Stephen. 1990. The Clink. London: Nick Hern. Kantor, Tadeusz. 1977. Umarla Klasa [‘Dead Class ’]. Directed by Andrzej Wajda, from the 1975 play.] Accessed June 5, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=a235hHGFIps. Levy Deborah. 1987. Heresies; Eva and Moses: Two Plays. London: Methuen. Levy Deborah. 2000. Plays 1. London: Methuen. Live Collision Festival. 2013a. ‘Anna Furse—Draff’. https://vimeo.com/193907270. Live Collision Festival. 2013b. ‘Artist Profile #5 Anna Furse’. https://vimeo. com/95181565. Marx, Karl. 1933. Capital. Translated by Eden Paul and Cedar Paul. London: Dent.

506     Anna Furse

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A. Landes. Abingdon: Routledge. Molière. 2008. Don Juan and Other Plays. Translated by George Graveley and Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Orwell, George. 2001. Down and Out in Paris and London. London: Penguin. Overmyer, Eric. 1990. On the Verge; or the Geography of Yearning. London: Samuel French. Unfinished Histories. n.d. Accessed March 20, 2018. http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/blood-group-2/.

22 Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage Sue Parrish

Context Feminist women working in English theatre are engaged in an exhausting existential struggle. Even as recently as 1991, the (female) Arts Council officer assigned to us at Sphinx Theatre Company commented, ‘Oh but Sue, women can’t be artists, women are mothers’. The English dramatic canon is dominated by male writers and male protagonists in a way in which the novel is not. This chapter focuses on the feminist dimension to my theatre career. As a director, I am constantly seeking female characters who are emancipated from stereotype, who have autonomy within the story, authority as protagonists and authenticity as complex characters. Throughout, I have been inspired by three key comments which drive my work: John Berger’s (1972, 47) observation in his seminal work, Ways of Seeing that ‘Men act and women appear’; Simone de Beauvoir’s (1953, 6) statement in

Sue Parrish (*)  Sphinx Theatre Company, London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_22

507

508     Sue Parrish

The Second Sex that ‘Man is the subject–he is the absolute–she is the other’; and most of all by Sue-Ellen Case’s (1988, 143) optimism in Feminism and Theatre that: [n]ew feminist theory would … construct new critical models and methodologies for the drama that would accommodate the presence of women in the art, support their liberation from the cultural fictions of the female gender and deconstruct the valorisation of the male gender… This ‘new poetics’ would deconstruct the traditional systems of representation and perception of women and posit women in the position of the subject.

My own personal background is unspectacular. Educated in London at a girls’ school, like many of my theatre contemporaries I played male roles in drama. Experiencing the power of the protagonist became an unconscious guiding force in my theatre life. I started as a director at the Half Moon Theatre in Alie Street, a tiny converted synagogue which became a major Fringe political theatre in Aldgate, London. I served an exhilarating apprenticeship, assisting on Antony Sher’s early performance in a local playwright Billy Colville’s debut play, Mozzle, Simon Callow as the lead in Brecht’s Arturo Ui, and the UK premiere of Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay starring Frances de la Tour, fresh from playing Helena in Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the RSC. These were among many other modern classics given iconic productions. It was a profoundly formative ­experience, observing leading actors exploring difficult texts, being pitchforked into the front line of political theatre, which was never reduced to the soapbox. The Half Moon also hosted many cutting-edge feminist and gay companies: Women’s Theatre Group (WTG), Cunning Stunts, Bloomers, Gay Sweatshop and Bloolips. It was a melting pot of fiercely contested argument and experiment. The London theatre scene was radically enriched by the many brilliant foreign companies who visited. The Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel in 1949, had revolutionised artistic attitudes in their 1956 visit, and in 1964 Peter Daubeny initiated the World Theatre ­season. This annual festival at the Aldwych Theatre continued until 1975 and showcased over forty companies from around the world, introducing groups such as the Comédie-Française, Schiller Theater and Moscow Art Theatre to London as well as providing a platform for less widely known plays and companies, most famously Welcome Msomi’s revelatory Zulu adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Umubatha. Meanwhile, at the Roundhouse, we were shaken and inspired by Jérôme Savary’s Le Grand

22  Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage     509

Magic Circus; Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre Du Soleil’s epic 1789 from France; and from Japan, Stomu Yamash’ta’s The Man from The East. These shows, eschewing a formal narrative structure, brought collage and epic spectacle on a grand scale to the UK. It had never occurred to me that there were no female directors; anything seemed possible. However, in the post-sixties world a generation of women, educated to expect equality, discovered they were second class across all professions. For us, in the midst of the cultural maelstrom, alongside the exhilaration there was a profound sense of exclusion, the absence of recognisable modern women onstage or in film or TV, the overwhelming experience of entitled men speaking to men over our heads, and the absolute diminishment of women into stereotype, while men were the human archetype. We had expectations but not entitlement. Coming to feminist consciousness for many of that generation gave rise to anger and bitterness; however, it was also a spur to social and cultural analysis and, more importantly, creativity. It was an age of explosive political movements, mainly Marxist inspired. Many theatre people were involved with ideas of revolution and utopianism, and political theatre companies mushroomed: 7.84, Belt and Braces and Red Ladder the most significant. Women found that within these companies they played handmaid roles; indeed, to their eternal shame, many comrades regarded feminism as a ‘diversion’. Women began to organise and form their own companies.

The Women’s Theatre Group (WTG) and the Women’s Playhouse Trust In 1973, Ed Berman, who ran the Almost Free fringe theatre in London, launched the legendary Women’s Festival which focused a wave of artistic activity and gave birth to the WTG and Monstrous Regiment. Many theatre feminists had been politicised by the Women’s Liberation Movement, which came to prominence in 1970 when the first UK Women’s Liberation Conference took place at Ruskin College, Oxford. The conference formulated The Four Demands, which became a guiding force in feminism and particularly for the WTG, now Sphinx. They were: ‘equal pay now’; ‘equal education and job opportunities’; ‘free contraception and abortion on demand’; and ‘free 24-hour nurseries’. At later conferences further demands were added: ‘financial and legal independence for all women’ (in 1974); ‘an end to all discrimination against lesbians and the right to a self-defined

510     Sue Parrish

sexuality’ (also in 1974); and finally, ‘freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital status, and an end to the laws, assumptions and institutions which perpetuate male dominance and aggression to women’ (in 1978). The WTG was very much driven by these Seven Demands and was from the start a collective separatist company, unlike Monstrous Regiment which included men. It was a strong article of faith that women should be seen driving the van, doing backstage jobs as well as performing. This in itself was revolutionary, and the company members were often subjected to horribly sexist, misogynist behaviour by male backstage crews. The first shows of WTG were devised: abortion, teenage sex, equal pay, industrial action and female image were the subjects. An ensemble-based, devising, Brechtian-influenced acting and presentational style was forged, and in 1978, the company graduated to commissioning writers, many of whom are now well known: Timberlake Wertenbaker, April de Angelis, Donna Franceschild, Deborah Levy, Bryony Lavery and Winsome Pinnock among others. In ‘Feminist Theatre’ (n.d.), Elaine Aston argues that the WTG, along with Monstrous Regiment, ‘were seminal to the innovation of a feminist-theatre tradition and to creating a counter-cultural body of women’s plays and performances’. As a freelance director, I drew inspiration from the many feminist companies who added their invention, theatrical imagination and sheer zest to these heady days: Cunning Stunts, Bloomers, Mrs. Worthington’s Daughters, Beryl and the Perils. However, the brick walls of discrimination and general sexism for a female freelance director soon became clear, and I joined the newly formed Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators (CWTDA), becoming Secretary and organising the first event at the ICA in 1979, for which Kate Millet, author of Sexual Politics (1970), came from America as a speaker. A universal consciousness of inequality and minority status among women across the professions gave rise to a new solidarity and ‘sisterhood’. Most prominent women artists, journalists and politicians would share their experiences with huge generosity. There was a tremendous 400-strong queue down the Mall to attend, and we continued with a second sold-out event at the Young Vic at which Beryl Bainbridge, Angela Carter, Caryl Churchill and Michelene Wandor spoke. These meetings were incredibly exciting and validating; there was a sense of pioneering, of women having the space to speak and set the agenda without men interrupting and dominating the conversation. Out of these meetings came the most transformative group in my life, the Women’s Playhouse

22  Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage     511

Trust in 1981. This combusted in playwright Pam Gems’ basement, with founder Sue Dunderdale, my colleague in the Conference, and others, and from there it developed into a company led by Rosemary Squire, chief executive and co-founder of the Ambassador Theatre Group, a West End and worldwide theatre company, and now a Dame; Jules Wright, a Resident Director of the Royal Court and one of the illustrious group of Australian women, along with Germaine Greer and Carmen Callil at Virago, who blasted through the prevailing class-ridden English society; and me, a freelance director. As part of the changing landscape of new writing by women initiated at the Royal Court, Jules directed the premiere of Masterpieces by Sarah Daniels, which exposed and commented on the damaging or destructive effects of pornography for the first time. The great achievement of the WPT was to demand a place for women in the mainstream. Most of the ‘alternative’ companies were motivated by democratic instincts and played to fringe venues, schools, prisons, factories and village halls. Although hugely significant in consciousness-raising and creating opportunities for women writers, actors and directors, playing on the fringe could be seen as perpetuating the marginalisation of women. This second wave of feminism enabled the ‘coming out’ of many leading women actors, until then ‘in the closet’ about their career opportunities. It has become a commonplace for star actresses to publicly discuss the unequal representation of women on stage and screen nowadays, but in 1980 it was unheard of. Through Pam Gems’ connection to Jane Lapotaire, for whom she had created the acclaimed role of Piaf at the RSC, we swiftly collected a group of star performers to head the group: Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Glenda Jackson, Jane Lapotaire, Diana Quick, Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson and Fiona Shaw joined in the search for a West End theatre. Alongside the fundraising and property search, the company produced the first revival of Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance, starring Harriet Walter and Alan Rickman, directed at the Royal Court Theatre by Jules Wright, followed by Spell No 7 by Ntozake Shange, the first black play at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by me, and My Heart’s a Suitcase by Clare McIntyre at the Royal Court directed by Nancy Meckler. The WPT had set up the first women’s writers’ workshops, always overpopulated, and staged public events at the ICA. Two landmark events were Marilyn French outlining the poverty of the women’s roles in Shakespeare to a packed auditorium of angry and anguished RSC actresses [for further discussion of this topic, see Chapter 32 by Jami Rogers], and Hélène Cixous revealing the inspirational artistic relationship between writer and director at the Théâtre du Soleil with Ariane Mnouchkine. WPT eventually bought the Wapping Pump House in

512     Sue Parrish

Wapping, which Jules Wright ran very successfully as a visual arts gallery and restaurant until 2015 when she died tragically young. By then, I had left to pursue freelance directing. Through all the many discussions in that seething time, discrimination within the theatre establishment seemed insurmountable. It was my insight that we needed statistical evidence to breach it. I commissioned the first survey into the representation of women in theatre in 1982 through the Conference of Women Theatre Directors (CWTDA). It was the first theatre survey which set the pattern for many statistical analyses which have followed.

The 1983 CWTDA Conference Survey The focus of this was female directors and writers across 120 UK national, regional, touring and alternative theatres. In answer to the question of how many female directors he had employed, the Artistic Director of one regional theatre replied he would rather employ a one-legged Chilean refugee. The statistics were devastating: only 7% of produced playwrights were women, and 12% of directors. Worse, the women writers included Agatha Christie, who accounted for half the productions, bringing the statistic down to 3.5% without her. It was clear that the better-funded the theatre, the fewer women would be employed, and the obverse was also true. The struggle was for women to be taken seriously as artists and professionals and for equality for 51% of the population. Copies were sent to the Arts Council and all major theatres to be met with a resounding official silence, but reverberating throughout the profession. The CWTDA continued to meet and campaign for some years after my departure in the mid-1980s. In 1984, Sue Dunderdale directed a huge benefit performance at the Piccadilly Theatre for the Miners’ Wives, which I assisted on. This was during the ferocious struggle between the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher and the mining unions. It brought together many leading actresses alongside fringe performers for a celebration of sisterhood in a brave, packed performance. I was again struck by the enormous generosity of the professional community. In 1990, I was appointed Artistic Director of the WTG, whose dwindling constituency signalled a need for rethinking and a refocus. The simple feminism of WTG’s 1970s mantra, ‘plays about women by women and for women’, needed to reflect a more complex reality, and the backlash against feminism was in full swing. Feminist theatre had developed a closed ideology, in which feminist politics could be reduced to a soapbox simplicity.

22  Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage     513

Thatcherism had taken hold at the Arts Council: there would be no more ‘brownie points’ for socially ‘worthy’ clients we were told; the ‘dedicated’ companies like the WTG and Gay Sweatshop had had their day; equality had arrived. The company now had to prove its vision was unique, professional and successful. Fortunately, WTG was in the middle of a tour of Bryony Lavery’s hit lesbian bodice ripper, Her Aching Heart, and had two good commissions in train: a play about the first English actresses by April de Angelis, Playhouse Creatures, and a play about Bessie Smith, Every Bit of It, by the poet Jackie Kay, both of which were exciting prospects but not ready. The WTG re-launched as Sphinx Theatre Company to demonstrate a fresh direction and a contemporary feminism. The company in 1990 was still a separatist company, and an all-­ female Hamlet was my first production. I wanted to discover if the deep soul of the play, set in a fiercely competitive male world, could be rendered by female actors. Playwright Claire Luckham wrote a prologue for the historical character of Moll Cutpurse (celebrated as Dekker and Middleton’s ‘Roaring Girl’ in their 1611 play of that name) as a framing device, pitching the audience straight into the gritty world of Shakespeare’s theatre, much like the recent prison settings for the Phyllida Lloyd’s trilogy of all-female Shakespeare productions at the Donmar Warehouse (2012–2016). The power of a female interpretation brought Hamlet’s cruel treatment of Ophelia and jealousy of Gertrude into sharp focus and portrayed the friendship of Horatio and Hamlet as more than ‘buddies’. The show confounded many ‘wimmin’s issues’ expectations, but it would take several years to overcome the ingrained prejudices against a company with a feminist perspective. Clearly, cross-gender casting as a stratagem to address the inequality of women’s representation can only ever be a partial solution. [For further discussion of this, see Chapter 32 by Jami Rogers.] The deconstruction of femininity and exploration of masculinity needs more rigour in rehearsal. The work of Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms around drag kings and the study of the Japanese onnagata tradition both have relevance here, as does Michael Shapiro’s seminal 1994 work, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Themes of masculinity and femininity are deeply embedded in Shakespeare’s plays, as described in Marilyn French’s Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981). The change in the cultural landscape to render women as people must begin with writers. One of the early plays that WTG produced was Lear’s Daughters, Elaine Feinstein’s prequel to King Lear, which explores the history of this dysfunctional family and is still widely studied.

514     Sue Parrish

The WTG had commissioned women playwrights for some years, however, due to the Group’s ensemble and political commitment, as in many other political and community theatre companies, commissions could be prescriptive. The ensemble had morphed into a loose collective to accommodate plays with different racial settings, and with my Half Moon and Women’s Playhouse Trust experience of developing new work I redrew the relationship between playwright and company to encourage women writers to explore their own artistic direction. The first decision I made to promote that artistic focus was to separate political discussions from artistic work, while acknowledging a clear commitment to a broad feminism. I was explaining this in my first meeting with our (female) Arts Council officer, Sian Ede. Her response famously was: ‘Oh, but Sue, women can’t be artists, women are mothers!’ (I have since had confirmation from the Arts Council archives that this was the prevailing attitude to women in the arts.) This was the start of the hugely successful annual Glass Ceiling meetings held from 1991 to 2005, principally at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Theatre. They proved landmark events where distinguished women artists and thinkers shared their creative experiences with colleagues and the public. Conversations, often chaired by Jude Kelly OBE, ranged through academic considerations of female characters in Shakespeare contrasted with the work of Aphra Behn, discussed by Professor Janet Todd and lecturer Juliet Dusinberre; a consideration of feminine languages in writing and theatre with Hélène Cixous, Dame Janet Suzman, Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner; and discussions exploring representation of female aggression, victimhood, collaboration and endemically, women’s lack of confidence. Most memorable was a discussion in 1993 around ‘The Personal and the Political’ with Helena Kennedy QC, Beatrix Campbell OBE, Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya and Bangladeshi ­writer-in-exile, Taslima Nasrin. The roll call of brilliant women who brought their unique visions to the Glass Ceiling is long; it includes the pellucid reasoning of Hélène Cixous; Sarah Kane’s anarchic bombs; and the star power of Germaine Greer. However, in 2006 our new survey confirmed the slow rate of progress: women writers had improved from the 1983 survey from 3% to 9% overall or 17% for new writing productions. Female directors had doubled from 12% to 23%, but female roles remained stubbornly at 35–38%. The period from 2009 to 2013 saw four ‘Vamps, Vixens and Feminists’ meetings (at the Olivier Theatre; the Young Vic; the celebratory event at the South Bank for the first WOW (Women of the World) festival; and lastly at the West Yorkshire Playhouse) take a more political focus. They gained drive and momentum

22  Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage     515

from the 2007 Gender Equality Duty, which arts organisations, including the Arts Council, had ignored. The sell-out discussions with leading writers and practitioners explored strategies to combat women’s inequality across the arts and raised the seemingly intractable question of parity for women. WTG was founded by actresses committed to advance the position of women and who were in search of plays and roles. This has remained Sphinx’s mission: to create exciting and innovative theatre pieces which place women at the centre of the action, expanding the range and repertoire of women’s characters. I considered realistic/naturalistic plays simply locked women into contemporary social reality, presenting women as secondary: as wives/ mothers/girlfriends, dependent on men for their emotional and day-to-day lives. In line with this, the company has more recently developed ‘The Sphinx Test’ for playwrights, practitioners, programmers and literary managers (see Fig. 22.1). This is a tool created in conjunction with Sphinx Associate Rosalind Philips as a development of cinema’s Bechdel test: it asks whether a work of fiction features at least two, preferably named, women who talk to each other about something other than a man. It is in use by several university drama departments and theatres and seeks to extend and expand the range of female roles. In addition to commissioning new work for Sphinx, I drew on European and Japanese sources. Many of our plays have been published and have a continuous presence in schools, youth groups, drama schools, amateur and professional productions. The legacy of our artistic feminist direction has informed the next generations. Three productions stand out. Playhouse Creatures by April de Angelis is the perfect example of exploring women’s autonomy and is now a modern classic. Distinguished by de Angelis’s rich power of language, character creation and comic originality, the play evokes the precarious seventeenth-century new world of women onstage with absolute authenticity. Laura Thompson recently commented in the Daily Telegraph (July 24, 2012): At the heart of the play lies Germaine Greer’s famous aperçu that all women are female impersonators. It is, undeniably, a feminist piece, although de Angelis is far too intelligent a writer to be merely ideological.

Of course, none of us knew we had played a part in creating a classic! The second, Goliath by Bryony Lavery, was based on the book about the riots across England by the writer/journalist Beatrix Campbell. The director Annie Castledine pitched the idea to me and asked to work with Bryony Lavery who, at that point, was mainly known as a comic writer.

516     Sue Parrish

Fig. 22.1  The Sphinx Test, created by Rosalind Philips, Helen Barnett and Sue Parrish (Design by Ifan Bates. ©Sphinx Theatre Company)

Nichola McAuliffe was cast and together they created an epic performance with McAuliffe playing nineteen characters. It was a huge critical and box office hit, touring major theatres in the UK, and ending up playing to the cognoscenti at the Bush Theatre in London. However, all of us treasure the performance at the Liverpool Everyman to an audience with young men bussed over from Manchester by community policemen, shouting ‘Go girl!’ as Nichola got into her rap.

22  Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage     517

The third came from Pam Gems. In addition to our collaboration in the Women’s Playhouse Trust, I had worked with Gems several times, and in 1997 I asked her over a convivial tea if she had a play for us. She gave me the script of The Snow Palace, about the Polish writer Stanislawa Przybyszewska’s huge project on the French Revolution, Danton. Gems had written the play for the RSC as a companion piece to their 1996 production of her adaptation, The Danton Affair, but they had not staged it. Despite the large cast, which with much work Pam reduced to six, I was immediately caught by the story. Janet Suzman was also intrigued by the play and came on board as director, with Kathryn Pogson as Stanislawa. The opening scenario was shocking; in a freezing tumbledown shack Stanislawa took snow from her doorstep to make a hot drink, a totally compelling silent sequence. She is stubbornly independent, intense and fanatically driven, and her struggle to survive and keep her creative flame burning, even as she dies of malnutrition and hypothermia, is heart-stopping. In her magnificent performance Pogson stunned audiences in the TMA award-winning production, which has since been revived twice. We took The Snow Palace back to Poland, to open the British Council’s Festival in Lodz and Warsaw, to be greeted by Andrez Wajda, the director of the epic 1983 film, Danton, based on Przybyszewska’s original play. He embraced me, asking me to pass the embrace on to Pam Gems who could not be with us. A treasured encounter! Sphinx has so far premiered more than fifteen new works, with repeat UK tours for several, including another surprising hit by Diane Esguerra, Sweet Dreams. This was based on Freud’s case study of Dora, Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (first published in German, 1905), which toured to schools and universities to demonstrate Freud’s methodology, first as a fivehander and then as a two-hander with Jonathan Oliver and Ann Marcuson as Sigmund Freud and Dora. One performance stands out: at Southwark Playhouse, a fifteen-year-old girl improvising a scene with Dora—despite not having spoken at school for a year. Teachers were amazed. Sphinx has passed many milestones with a legacy of numerous plays and innovative roles. Working with playwrights April de Angelis, Pam Gems, Bryony Lavery, Diane Esguerra, Eileen Atkins, Hélène Cixous, directors Annie Castledine, Janet Suzman, Maria Aitken, and star actors Frances Cuka, Nichola McAuliffe, Kathryn Pogson and Kika Markham among many others, Sphinx has taken feminist plays from the fringe into the mainstream. Most recently Sphinx has produced two major events, both under their umbrella project Women Centre Stage, launched in 2014: the Women Centre Stage Heroines

518     Sue Parrish

Festival at the National Theatre in 2015; and Power Play at Hampstead Theatre, famous for its new writing ethos, in 2016. These events were developed from the conversations and debates over the years of Glass Ceilings and Vamps, Vixens and Feminists into a focus on creating new work—to consolidate the analysis and discussion clarifying cultural stereotypes imprisoning female characters, into the creation of an immersive wave of new work. This was achieved by preparatory Hothouse meetings with writers and directors, and writers’ workshops focused on specific tasks like creating a female protagonist. Women Centre Stage brought together 130 artists each with 14 hours of performances, 40 commissioned plays, workshops and panel discussions. The legacy of this work has spread wide and deep, not least in spawning similar events and encouraging the 70 young feminist companies across the UK. In 2018, we published a volume of plays selected from the many works commissioned and developed as part of the Centre Stage project: Women Centre Stage: Eight Short Plays by and about Women features work from the new generation of female playwrights such as Georgia Christou and Stephanie Ridings as well as plays from stalwarts of the feminist movement such as April de Angelis, Winsome Pinnock and Timberlake Wertenbaker. As I write, we are currently preparing for a further Women Centre Stage event for later in 2018 to continue into 2019, honouring the Suffragette Centenary and commissioning ambitious new work for Hampstead Theatre. The new challenge is threefold: for established women writers to be consistently produced on main stages; to equip emerging women writers to bridge the transition to the main stage from the cocoon of studio spaces; and to radically change the 2–1 representation of women onstage. Recent data shows that female artistic directors, the commissioning and programming power in theatres, are a shocking minority at a fifth, with the spending power of just 13% of the Arts Council theatre budget. Finally, the ugly fallout from the 2017–2018 sexual harassment scandals worldwide presents a long overdue opportunity for gender relationships across societies to be scrutinised. There is a growing confidence among women that they can be heard and their views respected. Feminist practitioners in the arts need to draw on the vast resources of the pioneers and blaze a vigorous new trail!

22  Feminist Theatre: Putting Women Centre Stage     519

Bibliography Aston, Elaine. n.d. ‘Feminist Theatre’. In Drama Online. Accessed April 4, 2018. http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/genres/feminist-theatre-iid-2485. Aston, Elaine. 1999. Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook. Abingdon: Routledge. Aston, Elaine. 2010. Feminist Views on the English Stage: Women Playwrights, 1990– 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Behn, Aphra. 1996. ‘The Lucky Chance’. In The Rover and Other Plays, edited by Jane Spencer, 183–270. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berger, John. 1972. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books. Brecht, Bertolt. 1976. The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. London: Methuen. Case, Sue-Ellen. 1988. Feminism and Theatre. New York: Methuen. Daniels, Sarah. 1991. Masterpieces. In Sarah Daniels: Plays 1, 159–223. London: Methuen. Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton. 1987. The Roaring Girl, edited by Paul A. Mulholland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. De Angelis, April. 1994. Playhouse Creatures. London: French. De Beauvoir, Simone. 1953. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. London: Jonathan Cape. Fo, Dario. 1987. Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay. Translated by Leno Pertile. Adapted by Bill Colvill and Robert Walker. Corrected Edition. London: Methuen. French, Marilyn. 1981. Shakespeare’s Division of Experience. New York: Summit. Freud, Sigmund. 2013. A Case of Hysteria (Dora). Translated by Anthea Bell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fujita, Minoru, and Michael Shapiro, eds. 2006. Transvestism and the Onnagata Tradition in Shakespeare and Kabuki. Folkestone: Global Oriental. Gems, Pam. 1988. The Snow Palace. London: Oberon. Lavery, Bryony. 1998. ‘Her Aching Heart’. In Bryony Lavery: Plays 1, 85–142. London: Methuen. McIntyre, Clare. 1994. My Heart’s a Suitcase. London: Nick Hern. Millet, Kate. 1970. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday. Parrish, Sue, ed. 2018. Women Centre Stage: Eight Short Plays by and About Women. London: Nick Hern Books. Shange, Ntozake. 1992. Spell No 7. In Ntozake Shange: Plays 1, 65–116. London: Methuen. Shapiro, Michael. 1994. Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Torr, Diane, and Stephen J. Bottoms. 2010. Sex, Drag and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Women’s Theatre Group and Elaine Feinstein. 2000. Lear’s Daughters. In Adaptations of Shakespeare, edited by Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, 215–32. London: Routledge.

23 Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account Bernardine Evaristo

Theatre of Black Women, formed in 1982, was part of a movement of black theatre companies who emerged in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s. At one point, there were around thirty-five such companies nationally including Double-Edge, Carib Theatre, British Asian Theatre, Loose Change, Wild Iris, Options, the Black Theatre Co-op, Black Mime Theatre, Munirah, Tamasha, Talawa, Ariya Opera, Temba and Tara Arts. Each company catered to their own constituencies, performance aesthetics and interests. Funded by the Greater London Council, Greater London Arts, the Arts Council charities and regional arts funders, it was a breakthrough era in British theatre. The founders of these companies were either immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, the ‘Second Generation’ who were raised in Britain and knew it as home. A fuller discussion of these groups and this period can be found in Nicola Abram’s 2018 volume, Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. What these groups had in common was the desire to make the kind of theatre that would otherwise be absent from the theatre landscape and to situate black and Asian experiences at the heart of their artistic practice. It was, of course, in reaction to a British theatre sector that rarely included people

Bernardine Evaristo (*)  Brunel University, Uxbridge, Greater London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_23

521

522     Bernardine Evaristo

of colour and, if it did so, often as tokens or stereotypes. The Britain of over thirty-five years ago was very different to the country today in many ways. Frontline racism was at the forefront of the experiences of people of colour. It was more direct, unapologetic and prevalent, especially with regard to the media and the police. While institutionalised and more subtle forms of racism continue to be problematic today, there is a level of integration and acceptance that was absent back then. The 1980s also saw a proliferation of black and Asian women’s arts activism across the board. (Many Asian women also identified as black at that time.) Individuals and groups sprang up to directly address the gaps in arts provision. Theatre of Black Women belonged equally to this movement, peopled by women we knew personally, who were part of our community. There was the black women’s acapella group, Sisters in Song, inspired by the African American group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and the all-female reggae band, Abacush. On the literary front, publications included Black Women Talk Poetry (1987), which was Britain’s first black women’s poetry anthology, edited by Da Choong, Olivette Cole Wilson, Gabriela Pearse and myself, and the mixed-genre anthology Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women, edited by Shabnam Grewal, Jackie Kay, Liliane Landor, Gail Lewis, and Pratibha Parma (1988). Second Generation black women visual artists were also on the rise and were featured in two prominent exhibitions: Black Women Time Now at Battersea Arts Centre (1983–1984) and The Thin Black Line at the ICA (1985), both curated by Lubaina Himid, who, as it happens, won the Turner Prize in 2017. This was the climate in which Patricia St. Hilaire, Paulette Randall and myself formed our own troupe and in so doing became Britain’s first black women’s theatre company. The genesis of the company really began in 1979 when we three young black women, plus two others, Barbara Robinson and Joan Williams, were accepted onto the Community Theatre Arts Course (CTA) at the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama, one of London’s foremost drama schools. This in itself was arguably a historical moment as drama schools were loath to accept black students at that time, let alone black women. The argument was that, as there was little work for black actors, it wasn’t worth training us. Patricia had previously been involved with a youth theatre group at Hoxton Hall in the East End and at Britain’s first black arts centre, Keskidee. I had spent my teenage years at Greenwich Young People’s Theatre, based in Woolwich where I grew up, and it was my introduction to theatre, the arts and community creativity. I loved it there. As a result, I became an avid

23  Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account     523

theatre-goer. The first black actress I ever saw was Cleo Sylvestre in a Bubble Theatre tent production on Blackheath Common in 1973. Two years later, I saw Peter Brook’s landmark production The Ik at the Roundhouse, featuring the black German actress, Miriam Goldschmidt. Around that time, I also saw Brenda Arnau in a musical production of Two Gentlemen of Verona in the West End. Also in 1975, Angela Bruce appeared as the first black character on Coronation Street. Seeing these four actresses of colour made me realise a career as an actress was possible. It’s so important for young people to have role models, and these were mine. Also, as it happened, I am mixed-race and so were they. I could visualise myself working as an actor. I applied to drama school with varying degrees of success and was eventually accepted into four schools. I chose Rose Bruford College’s CTA course over a more traditional course and school because it seemed to me that there was a place for me in community theatre, which I considered liberal, political and more inclusive than the establishment companies such as the National Theatre which I had also begun to frequent in my teens. I made the right decision and over the next three years discovered that this ground-breaking course not only trained me and my fellow founders, Paulette and Patricia, to be politically conscious actors, but it also trained us to be proactive in creating our own theatre. While we drama students acted in plays by Brecht, Lorca, Shakespeare, Caryl Churchill, Pam Gems and many others, we also developed the skills to make theatre where none existed through creating our own solo shows and group-devised plays. In many ways, Rose Bruford was an amazing institution, not least because we were extremely lucky to work with trail-blazing women theatre practitioners who were brought in to teach and direct us. The course, under the leadership of Stuart Bennett, was clearly ahead of its time. We explored contact improvisation with Anna Furse, who co-founded the women’s performance art troupe, BloodGroup. [For Anna Furse’s account of her own career, see Chapter 21, above.] We were taught by Hazel Carey for movement, who formed Loose Change Theatre Company with her South African compatriot Lyn Darnley, who taught us voice and is now Head of Voice at the RSC. Jude Alderson founded the women’s cabaret company The Sadista Sisters and taught us musical theatre. I remember Sara Hardy, a founder of the lesbian feminist theatre company Hormone Imbalance in 1979, directing us in a group-devised show about homeless women. Sue Dunderdale, whose career now spans theatre and the small and large screen, was a visiting director, as was Sue Parrish, who went on to become Artistic Director of Sphinx Theatre Company (formerly the Women’s Theatre Group). [For Sue Parrish’s account of her own career,

524     Bernardine Evaristo

Women’s Theatre Group and Sphinx Theatre Company, see Chapter 22, above.] We were also directed by Libby Mason, who had worked with Gay Sweatshop and the Women’s Theatre Group and who went on to become the first female director of Theatre Centre. Leah Bartal, who introduced us to the Feldenkrais Method, had co-authored a book on movement and creativity, and Jess Curtis and Sue Colville also taught us voice. Many of these women have continued to forge successful careers for themselves in the arts and academia. When I think of it now, we were hardly taught by any men at all. Our education was led by female powerhouses who, through example, nurtured in us a fearless ambition to be at the helm of our own creativity. Another unusual thing about the course is that the student body in our year was predominantly female. Whether that was intention or not, I’ll never know. In any case, the five black women among us gravitated towards each other and discussed the race and gender we embodied, finding common ground. In contemplating important social issues as part of our training, it seemed natural that we eventually would create a play about black women, in fact about five very different kinds of black British women, that we called Coping, an experimental piece which used monologues and song to explore the challenges the characters faced. This was directed by Yvonne Brewster, an ex-Rose Bruford student herself who had been Britain’s first black drama student and who later founded Talawa Theatre Company; she was a visiting director brought in especially to work with us. The CTA course encouraged us to perform our group-devised plays in the communities most relevant to them and we took Coping to some London venues including a couple of colleges and Brixton Black Women’s Centre, where it was extremely well received. It confirmed that there was a demand for theatre that explored black female issues and perspectives. Just before we left Rose Bruford, Patricia, Paulette and I all had short theatre pieces produced at the Royal Court Black Writers’ Festival in 1982. Mine was a polyvocal dramatic poem called Moving Through, a kind of comingof-age poetic and experimental piece based on my childhood. Paulette’s play was called Fishing—about two teenage girls; Patricia’s was Just Another Day— about a mother–daughter relationship. The latter two plays were naturalistic and dialogue-based and appeared at the Royal Court Young Writers’ Festival later that year, having won a competition to do so. By the time we left Rose Bruford, the three of us had made the decision to become our own employers, to create our own theatre and establish our own theatre company. It seemed the most obvious thing to do in the light of the paltry number of parts that were available to black actresses, which were often limited to the reductive stereotypes of four kinds of roles: nurse, cleaner, prostitute, prisoner.

23  Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account     525

Theatre of Black Women was obviously a very literal name, but it was the age of literal names, among others the Black Theatre Co-op and the Women’s Theatre Group. ‘Theatre of Black Women’ did the job of spelling out our identity and our intentions. It was an uncompromising ­proclamation that was seen as an act of defiance. To us, it was an act of selfdetermination and self-affirmation, a naming of ourselves in an alternative theatre culture that was predominantly white and male, or black and male, or white and female—all demographics that marginalised our presence. Our remit was to counteract the notorious lack of representation of black women in all areas and levels of theatre by being at the helm of our own creativity, from actors and playwrights through to artistic directors. The ‘mission statement’ for Theatre of Black Women read thus: Theatre is a powerful mode of communication and Theatre of Black Women is the only Black women’s theatre company in Britain. As such we concern ourselves with issues such as Black women in education, health, housing, feminism in history and in the arts. Our theatre is about the lives and struggles of black women and provides an opportunity for Black women’s voices to be heard positively through theatre. We use theatre to promote positive and encouraging images of Black women as individuals, examining and re-defining relationships with men, living independent lives, giving and receiving support from other Black women, discovering our own Black identity and celebrating their Black womanhood.

We began to raise funds from the various funding bodies and our first production as TBW in 1983 consisted of three one-women plays directed by Jude Alderson of The Sadista Sisters (also a former visiting director at Rose Bruford), which we took to the International Women’s Festival at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. They were all experimental pieces. Patricia’s was called Hey Brown Girl—a piece about black men and women; Paulette’s was called Chameleon—about fitting into two cultures; and mine was called Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite—a poetic coming-of-age story about a young mixed-race woman who feels alienated from her environment. Shortly afterwards, Paulette was offered a position to train as a theatre director at the Royal Court Theatre alongside Max Stafford-Clark. Patricia and I jointly wrote the next production, Silhouette (1983), which was about an encounter between a mixed-race contemporary woman and a woman who had died as a slave in the Caribbean 200 years earlier. Pyeyucca (1984), written by myself with additional material by Patricia, was a play that focused on a repressed young black woman whose rebellious alter-ego

526     Bernardine Evaristo

is personified on stage by a character called Pyeyucca. Both plays toured the UK for many months as well as to mainland Europe. Our productions were always experimental in nature and characterised by a mixture of dramatic poetry, visual symbolism, fragmentation, movement and music—a theatrical collage, if you like, a kind of poetry-theatre. We had been inspired by Ntozake Shange’s ground-breaking choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, which transferred from New York to London’s Royalty Theatre in the West End in 1979. This ground-breaking production with its seven female characters placed centre stage and speaking through rich, imagistic, intimate monologues struck a chord with us as young women desperate to find and create theatre that spoke from and about us. In this new and fertile theatrical territory of black women’s theatre, we didn’t want to force our creativity into expected modes of theatre practice, especially not conventional kitchen-sink drama. We didn’t want to follow any forms laid down by our theatrical forebears in Britain because, well, we didn’t actually see them as our forebears, nor did we connect to African or Caribbean theatre with its male biases. Our productions were not polemical. We employed narrative, dramatic and often heightened poetry to rise above the quotidian into the world of the imagination. It would be hard to get a sense of our plays from the scripts alone, which exist without a proper written description of how the overlaying of movement, music, set and props turned what looks like a sequence of poems on the page into a full theatrical production. (Because of this, we’ve always turned down offers of publication.) As the company grew, Patricia and I nurtured new writers to produce their first plays, sometimes spending weeks workshopping scripts with a director and actors before the script was complete and rehearsal began. Chiaroscuro by Jackie Kay was a verse drama which explored, through the filter of its four female characters of different cultural backgrounds and sexualities, issues of racism, sexism and homophobia. It was Jackie’s first play, and the initial idea was workshopped by four actors and the director JoanAnn Maynard over a period of four weeks to develop the ideas and themes. We also produced two plays by a new writer, Ruth Harris. These were The Cripple (1987), a one-woman play based on the story of a disabled Jamaican woman called Pauline Wiltshire, and The Children (1987) a four-hander drama about one woman’s journey of self-discovery. Our only Theatre In Education play, Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail, drawing on Caribbean Anansi folktales, was written by a mother and daughter team of debut playwrights, Gabriela and Jean Pearse.

23  Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account     527

‘Finding your voice’ and ‘speaking out’ were very popular expressions in the 1980s. If you had a voice, you were heard, validated, acknowledged, included. In a British society where black women did not have a public voice (and they still rarely do today), forming Theatre of Black Women was a radi­ cal act. We saw ourselves as outsiders, and we were determinedly feminist in our perspective, which we wore as a badge of honour. Patricia and I refused to accept being considered secondary, and we were uncompromising and vociferous in our objections to the inequality we saw in theatre around us. There were several heckling incidents at plays and an incident when a mug of water was poured over a white male theatre director whose portrayal of black women we found sexist and offensive. This ‘coming of rage’ period was important as a driver for creativity and positive action. The proselytising power of ground-breaking black feminist literature coming out of America was a huge inspiration and support and articulated the concepts and concerns that we British women would otherwise have struggled with in isolation. As Claudia Tate wrote in her introduction to her book of interviews, Black Women Writers at Work, ‘One must speak for oneself if one wishes to be heard. We are realising that no one else can or will say what she has to say, and that silence condemns the silent to misrepresentation and neglect’ (1984, xxvi). Forming Theatre of Black Women was an act of self-empowerment, another popular throwback term. It was an act of taking control of our artistic practice from conception to delivery. The company was important for its time, and, like all the other theatre companies of this period, it grew out of resistance and marginalisation from the so-called mainstream and protest at the power structures of this society. Through our theatre, we were able to provide perspectives excluded by the status quo. We excavated and reimagined histories and explored identities, cultures and stories that placed the periphery in the centre—on our own terms, whether the issue was race, gender, class, culture, sexuality or disability. By the late 1990s, the establishment theatre sector had opened up to more of a multiplicity of voices and the kinds of productions that would have once been labelled alternative are now considered mainstream and show at the National Theatre or in the West End. Theatre of Black Women was my distant past. It exists as a moment in time, a memory, archival, historical. Patricia and I were young women developing our voices and our skills and providing opportunities for other new playwrights to develop theirs. A couple of other black women’s theatre companies also came and went, Munirah (whom we mentored) and Options, who existed for a year a two in the mid-1980s. Our company eventually

528     Bernardine Evaristo

disbanded in 1988 when we fell out of favour with Greater London Arts, who were our main funders. But it was time to go anyway. We’d probably gone as far as we could with our brand of theatre and times were changing. It felt like black people in Britain were being more accepted and doors were opening. I was personally exhausted from the treadmill of writing funding applications and running a company and desperately needed a break. I was no longer writing for theatre or acting but running the company, something that was never my ambition. We formally disbanded the company in 1988. In the early 1990s, Patricia wrote for English National Opera and Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble before leaving the arts. Paulette has been a theatre director for over thirty years now and is one of our leading lights. She also directs for television and was Associate Director working with Danny Boyle on the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. I went on to become a writer of many books of fiction and verse fiction with the corporate giant Penguin Random House and am currently Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and Vice Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2019 I was awarded the Man Booker Prize (jointly with Margaret Atwood) for my novel Girl, Woman, Other. Yet while I might appear to have become an establishment figure, garlanded with an MBE, as is Paulette, the countercultural activist inside me is still very much alive and I use my position to advocate for change and inclusion, only this time from inside the citadel. For many years, I didn’t see a great need for more black women’s theatre companies. Theatre of Black Women had been a historical necessity, but I wanted to believe in the integrationist ideal, even when the evidence didn’t support this. But today black actors still struggle in the UK and the exodus to America grows. The theatre hierarchy has hardly changed in three decades, and people of colour are rarely in positions of power at the helm of theatre companies, working as funders or in the media defining the critical reception. In my experience of over thirty years in the arts, I have come to realise that if the lobbying abates, then the status quo reverts to business as usual and that is the white, (primarily) male middle-class protecting and promoting its own interests and deciding on ours. It is only with the rise of Fourth Wave feminism and black feminist voices gaining a groundswell of support on social media, that I once again see the urgency and possibility of black women theatre-makers coming together again to tell our stories on our own terms.

23  Theatre of Black Women: A Personal Account     529

Bibliography Abram, Nicola L. 2018. Black British Women’s Theatre: Intersectionality, Archives, Aesthetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Choong, Da, et al., eds. 1987. Black Women Talk Poetry. London: Black Womantalk Press. Grewal, Shabnam, et al., eds. 1988. Charting the Journey: Writings by Black and Third World Women. London: Sheba Feminist Publishers. Shange, Ntozake. 1975. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf. New York: Scribner. Tate, Claudia. 1984. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum. More information on the unpublished plays mentioned can be found at http:// www.blackplaysarchive.org.uk, which aims to document the first professional production of every play by black British, African and Caribbean writers in the UK.

24 Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994) Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

This chapter charts the early years of Birmingham-based theatre group, Women and Theatre (womenandtheatre.co.uk), founded in 1984 and still going strong in 2018. Three of the four founder members (Jo Broadwood, Janice Connolly and Polly Wright) recently recorded a conversation about the early work of the company, re-visiting the productions and events of this period and reflecting on the growth of a distinctive style, participatory approach and company management which was always led by women and on the evolution of a ground-breaking research-based process which prioritised the voices and concerns of women. The main body of this collaborative chapter has been written by Polly Wright, drawing on transcripts of the reunion conversation, together with a combination of archive materials, to provide a portrait of a ground-breaking feminist theatre group which responded to the Second Wave Feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s in a distinctive and non-Metropolitan way. The chapter closes

Polly Wright (*)  The Hearth Centre, Birmingham, UK Jo Broadwood  The Cohesion and Integration Network, Manchester, UK Janice Connolly  Women and Theatre, Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_24

531

532     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

with individual snapshots by Polly Wright, Jo Broadwood and Women and Theatre’s current Artistic Director, Janice Connolly, outlining the influence of the company’s early years on the subsequent work of the founding members and summarising the current ethos and practice of Women and Theatre (WAT) thirty-four years on.

Polly Wright: ‘Knitting Without a Pattern’ WAT Birmingham present a kind of Theatre in Education for adults when the audience, while expecting to be entertained, have more crucially been invited to come inside the subject of the play and help think and feel it through. (David Hart, West Midlands Arts Report 1986, Women and Theatre archive)

The title of this main section, ‘Knitting Without a Pattern’, was chosen by former founder members of the Birmingham group Women and Theatre (WAT) when we met in 2018: it makes reference to an image which was first coined in a 1986 interview with journalist Boyd Tonkin to describe our creative approach. Local poet and Arts Officer, David Hart, in the West Midlands Arts report used in my epigraph above, chose similar imagery to capture the effect of WAT’s work on their audiences. Hart refers to the methodology of Theatre in Education (TIE), an approach originally pioneered by Gordon Vallins at the Coventry Belgrade Theatre in 1965, in which theatre is used as a pedagogical method of teaching children any subject on the curriculum via the experience of theatre and theatrical methods rather than encouraging them to be passive recipients of knowledge (Belgrade Theatre Company 2015). Hart suggests that our approach with adult audiences has similarities with the TIE method. At no point is the audience given a ‘pattern’ of how to think or feel but encouraged to experience situations and respond in individual ways. This chapter charts the early years of the development of WAT, Birmingham, from 1984 to 1994, as it grew from its feminist community roots into a professional women’s theatre company with a national reputation. The focus of the first section of the chapter will be on the birth and evolution of WAT’s methodology and the feminist determination to capture faithfully the voices of the women they were representing—methodology that the founding members continue to draw on for their own current innovative practice in various fields. Over the period 1984–1994, WAT devised and produced sixteen plays, two audio tapes, a video (in partnership with Second Sight Video) and two education packs. WAT’s archive materials from this decade could be

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     533

viewed as an artefact that reflects the development of the company itself. Documents from the earliest years resemble unstructured pieces of knitting, including jumbles of handwritten drafts of scripts written in four very distinctive hands; yellowing typewritten scripts; managerial documents; letters; cuttings of reviews; 1980s health education leaflets; and notes in W. H. Smith notebooks, scribbled all over with doodles, arrows, question marks and underlinings. Documents from the end of the period, however, include typed up scripts in the right order; orderly collections of photographs and reviews in folders; slickly produced Theatre in Health Education videos; and Theatre in Sex Education packs. Although developments in technology were partly responsible for the changes in presentation, the documents also seem to show a company growing up and evolving into one with an increasingly strong sense of organisation and identity. WAT developed from a group of nine female participants on a WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) evening course called ‘Women and Theatre’, into an unpaid women’s community theatre group of the same name, and then to a professional company of four full-time company members, Jo Broadwood, Janice Connolly, Sue Learwood and Polly Wright (see Fig. 24.1), falling to three in 1986 when Sue Learwood left to take up a career in Further Education. WAT became a legally constituted company in 1985, with a board of directors and a constitution, and received Arts Council project funding from 1985 onwards. By 1994, however, we had become less dependent on arts funding as we increasingly received commissions from statutory bodies in health and education. Initially, the company members shared everything equally, including selecting subjects for the plays; researching, writing, directing and performing them; day-to-day administration; drawing up funding applications; even driving the van, which was an old ambulance and very appropriate for our health-related work. However, as our work expanded, we decided to take on external directors and stage managers, an administrator, one external writer and even male performers, though the core (female) company members were always in charge. An overview of the chosen topics for plays indicates how the company was responding to key concerns for women in the 1980s: the topics ranged from the nuclear threat and support for the women at Greenham Common (the women’s peace camp set up to protest against nuclear weapons being based at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire) to the position of young women in care, to tranquilliser addiction, to women and AIDS, to the glass ceiling on women’s employment prospects, to women’s involvement in the responsibilities of unpaid caring roles. Despite all this variety, the overarching theme which never varied was the impact of

534     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

Fig. 24.1  Founder Members of Women and Theatre, Birmingham, c.1985: Sue Learwood, Janice Connolly, Polly Wright, Jo Broadwood (from l. to r.) (Photographer unknown. ©Women and Theatre, Birmingham)

inequality on women’s self-esteem, health and advancement in a male-dominated world. Distinguished actress, comedian and political activist Maggie Steed (1984, 64) describes experiences very similar to those of WAT when writing of her early career work with the pioneering Coventry Belgrade TIE Company: Anyone who works in a company that runs itself, tries to make theatre which is relevant to a chosen audience and talks and entertains about the lives of that audience is very lucky …[it] will make them tear their hair out but … also helps to make good theatre possible. A woman in that sort of set up has the unusual opportunity to have a real influence over what goes on, and it is possible to gain a lot of confidence and clarity about feelings and ideas.

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     535

Often successful actors are dismissive of any time they spent in TIE, and sometimes even fail to mention it on curriculum vitae. Although WAT was never a TIE company, comments such as Steed’s recognise the positive impact of autonomy, as opposed to hierarchical structures, on the experience of those who work in small-scale theatre; her observations also validate the type of approach which closely integrates performers and audience. WAT’s methodology altered and evolved over the decade but it is possible to unpick five distinct strands of development: firstly, development of a feminist action research approach as defined by Ann Oakley (1981) which built on a strong relationship between the performers and the female groups they were representing; secondly, a practice of building on interactive theatre methods to promote dialogue with audiences; thirdly, development of a character-led approach to the writing/devising of original material; fourthly, the growth of WAT’s burlesque comic style and its suitability as a vehicle for serious comment about women’s equality; and fifthly, changes in WAT’s artistic practice as it responded to the alterations in patterns of arts’ commissioning towards the end of this first decade. WAT’s connectedness with their audiences grew directly from community feminist roots, when in 1983 nine women enrolled in a course of evening classes in drama, organised by the WEA and led by community artist Sue Learwood. The participants were mostly young professionals in the fields of teaching and social work, united by a wish to explore their passionately held feminist beliefs and their concerns about the nuclear threat through the medium of theatre. Sue Learwood brought an imaginative vision to the course which included drama games and exercises, structured improvisation sessions and guided character work that together laid the basis for our subsequent collaborative theatrical methodology; all of these produced an exuberant theatrical comedy with serious intent, echoing the style of creative passive resistance used at Greenham Common. All the crucial elements for the later development of Women and Theatre’s subsequent practice emerged from the foundations laid in that short course. WAT, Birmingham became a professional company in 1986, on receipt of funding from the then West Midlands County Council, closely followed by Arts Council support, but the close connections which were maintained with the volunteer community group of mainly health and social

536     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

care professionals laid the foundations for a reciprocal relationship between funding commissioners, clients and theatre practitioners which continued to be a hallmark of WAT’s work. Our first productions were commissioned by social work departments to explore the key issues of the day for young, underprivileged girls and women, issues which included teenage pregnancy and living in the care of the local authority. Because of WAT’s strong links with social services and youth and girls’ work organisations, we easily gained access to groups with whom we used action research workshops, so the groups benefited from the drama input whilst the company gathered the material they needed. WAT would typically take along work in progress, in order to try out different perspectives and endings. The TIE technique of ‘hot-seating’ was regularly used, in which actors remain in character after the performance to be interrogated by the audience, a technique promoting engagement between the audience and their fictional counterparts. The company noted down the girls’ responses and contributions, paying close attention to their vocabulary and phraseology and listening to the cadences of the Birmingham accent to ensure accurate replication. It was not a ‘verbatim theatre’ methodology, such as that pioneered by Peter Cheeseman’s company in Stoke-on-Trent, but it was one which was faithful and respectful of original sources (for more on verbatim theatre, see Paget 1987). The reciprocal nature of the work was appreciated by staff, who commented on the gains the girls made in confidence, self-awareness and drama skills as a result of our workshops. WAT’s first professional play about young people in care, a devised work, All the Way Home, was thought to be so authentic that the social workers who commissioned it were concerned that it might be too emotionally disturbing to show to audiences of girls in care. This turned out to be our first experience of professional gate-keeping. In the event, the accuracy of the portraits was such that the girls found their fictional counterparts moving but also very funny. Performances were always followed by workshops in which the actors remained in character and the strong identification the girls experienced with their onstage counterparts often triggered them to make profound observations about their own lives, accompanied by discussions of the changes they could make. The embedded nature of WAT’s work and the richness of their researching and devising processes became more complex as the company grew; this marked it out from other feminist companies of the time, as it ensured accountability to their audiences. Just as David Hart (1986) commented on the audience feeling its way to understanding the subject matter, WAT’s research methods, often using drama-based questioning approaches, allowed

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     537

them as writers to feel their way towards the themes, before devising the play. David Hart continued his report by remarking, ‘It’s interesting how what seems quite a low-key approach to the subject allows the evidence and the characters’ experience to accumulate in a relentless way so that it creeps up on you’. WAT’s research approach could be described as feminist, in the sense that it draws on the shared female experiences of researcher and respondent to elicit complex and often contradictory private accounts, as opposed to public accounts which can be informed by a desire to please the perceived expectations of the researcher (Oakley 1981). WAT’s company members were keen to develop as artists and to learn about new approaches in contemporary theatre, so as the ‘designated director’ of All the Way Home, Sue Learwood, took us through a process loosely based on Mike Leigh’s character-led devising method. WAT was lucky enough to have been granted funds for a nine-week writing and rehearsal period for this, allowing us time to devise believable and complex characters and situations through enacting tasks given us by the director. On one occasion, for instance, Sue asked the three actors to go into central Birmingham and take photos of themselves in character in a station photo booth before returning to improvise the narrative of their fictional family. The photograph was kept as a reference point throughout the whole devising and rehearsal period. Living in Birmingham, we were not directly influenced by London-based feminist theatre groups such as Women’s Theatre Group and Monstrous Regiment, which were running at the same time in the mid-1980s, but our organic devising practice had much in common with theirs, as described by Bryony Lavery (1984, 28): They [Monstrous Regiment and the Women’s Theatre Group] did not start with a script … they started with what they, the actors and administrators and directors, wanted to say … In [Female Trouble] we had three and a half weeks’ rehearsal time, a definite opening time a title and NO SCRIPT. The idea was to discover what we all wanted to say.

However, the significant difference between our approach and that of the feminist theatre groups mentioned above was that we were constrained in what we wanted to say, though by the findings of our research into women’s experience of a subject, as opposed to the restrictions of an existing script. The following extract from All the Way Home is an example of WAT’s ability to represent the complexities of character through a combination of careful research and a character-led devising process. Sixteen-year-old Sylvia is here fantasising about doing up her flat after leaving care:

538     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

Sylv: I’m gonna have this colour in my room. Magnolia – it’s going to be great, my flat. Cream fitted carpets – no patterned rubbish like here. Plants everywhere and pastel blue furniture. In the ­bathroom – black tiles and mirrors everywhere. Tracey: You’ll see yourself on the bog! Sylv: And in the corner of the lounge – a cocktail cabinet … so you can offer dinner guests drinks!

The recognisable authenticity of this dialogue elicited emotional responses from the audiences of young women in care; it captured the poignancy of the hope they felt when faced by an uncertain future and also their craving to express individuality when all they have known is institutional life. Post-show discussions with audiences of people with lived experience of the subject, usually in non-theatrical settings, became a key feature of WAT’s work as it developed in this period in which the company drew on educational drama methods to set up dialogues between key protagonists and the audiences they represented. The company also experimented with a process we called ‘interrupted role play’, in which the action of the drama is halted and alternative endings explored by members of the audience. We drew on educational practice and models for this approach, only later discovering Augusto Boal’s theoretical models of participatory theatre and his practice of ‘Forum Theatre’ (Boal 1985, 139). WAT became aware of the need to capture the multilayered responses which emerged in the post-show discussions which followed Swings and Roundabouts, our devised play about tranquilliser addiction, after which members of the audience were often moved to make personal disclosures in response to the moving central portrait of an addict. Swings and Roundabouts was devised by the company, directed by Sue Learwood, and knitted together strands of satire with accurate representation of the hidden voices of tranquilliser addicts we accessed in research. The main narrative belonged to a lonely addict, Irene, whose isolation was depicted through silent scenes, showing her doing ordinary domestic tasks at home, and whose only human interaction is with the GP, who, in turn is addicted to the habit of prescribing tranquillisers. Swings and Roundabouts toured the UK in the mid-eighties and wherever it was performed, it elicited strong personal responses. The company felt privileged to hear these accounts, but also felt that women’s stories on this painful subject should be recorded in some way as evidence of the effects of tranquilliser addiction, with the aim of influencing medical practice. About eight years later, the company approached health authorities with the

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     539

proposal that drama could be used to generate and capture rich responses on sensitive subjects, which could be recorded on video and audio devices and then fed back to policy-makers. This led to the commissioning of studies in which drama was used as a qualitative health research approach to elicit and capture patients’ perceptions of NHS services; these will be explored in greater depth in Polly Wright’s personal account in the next section of this chapter. The fourth strand woven throughout the early work was the juxtaposition of ‘trenchant’ satire alongside truthful representation of hidden voices, with the aim of exposing the motivations of the powerful whilst providing advocacy for the powerless. One of WAT’s early plays, The Saving of Erutan (‘Nature’ spelt backwards), which was strongly influenced by the creative feminist activism at Greenham Common, used pantomime conventions to enlist the audience in the struggle to save the planet from male villains who were bent on unleashing the contents of ‘jars of doom’ upon defenceless nature. This strand of burlesque was picked up again strongly in Swings and Roundabouts two years later to represent the power of pharmaceutical companies, as the ‘gods’ Cosh and Dosh whipped salesmen into a frenzy to encourage them to bribe GPs to push their drug Bliss onto powerless female addicts. What do we want to make? Profit! What do we want to kill? Pain! What does pain stop? Peace! What gives them peace? Bliss!

As Joy Hendry commented in her review for The Scotsman (1986): ‘It sounds pretty dire stuff – a play about women and tranquillisers, but Swings and Roundabouts was, in fact, very witty, hilarious in places, and full of trenchant hard-hitting satire’. The comedy of power became less funny and more sinister as WAT’s cartoon style merged into a dystopic presentation in our 1987 play about women and HIV/AIDS, Putting it About, directed by Cheryl Crown. The play captured all the apocalyptic horror of 1980s’ perceptions of the epidemic by setting the play in a near future in which women, the second wave of people infected by the virus, are quarantined by the faceless government in ‘hotels’—temporary halfway-houses somewhere between hospital and the outside world. The Guardian reviewer (Pat Ashworth, October 25, 1988) described how:

540     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

the walls and window frames lean at crazy angles, held together with dozens of clamps … outside the autumn leaves have been swept into neat mounds, but not removed … the sound effects are of rain, sirens and breaking glass.

Within this surreal framework, however, WAT wove realistic experiences of women’s inequality with their trademark carefully observed comedy. Working-class Margaret, the uninfected warden of the hostel for infected women with AIDS, captures the complexities of following her own advice on safe sex and the use of condoms: It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. I had every intention of getting him to wear one, I’d even bought a packet – they’re in my handbag – but I just couldn’t find the right moment. If I’d brought it up too soon he’d think I was planning the whole thing, and it would have taken away all the romance, and if I’d said it too late, it might have put him off the idea altogether. I can’t even say I got carried away because it was on my mind all the time. (Putting it About, 1987, WAT archive)

The cognitive dissonance in this speech resonated very strongly with audiences and found expression in laughter of recognition at the complexities of behaviour which coy sex education messages fail to address. But, most importantly, the representation of all the women in the hostel contained important messages about inequality and health, because the less powerful are less likely to experience sufficient self-respect to adopt behaviours that protect their health, and in the case of HIV/AIDS such inability is lethal. WAT were very conscious of being an all-white company in one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the UK. From the mid-1980s onwards, the company developed a policy of reflecting that diversity by casting black and minority ethnic (BAME) actors wherever possible when new actors were taken on. In Putting it About some of the effects of racial inequality/prejudice on health behaviours were explored: Dione: AIDS feeds on black people who think ‘I won’t get it ’cos it’s a white man’s disease’ and white people who think ‘I won’t get it because it’s a black man’s disease’. (Putting it About, 1987, WAT archive)

This policy of reflecting the city’s diversity remains an ongoing commitment. In our cabaret/drama The Glass Ceiling, WAT successfully merged our burlesque and naturalistic styles to address the issue of female confidence

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     541

when entering, or returning to, the workplace. This was a timely piece as women were not well represented in the workforce in the late 1980s, and the conflict between the demands of parenthood and personal ambition was a constant theme in feminist literature. Birmingham-based playwright David Edgar, not usually an enthusiast for devised theatre, commented positively in a private letter of support to the company: The Glass Ceiling is really a play in the form of a cabaret, which allows you to treat a serious and painful theme with both trenchancy and lightness of touch. I thought the show struck a really clever balance between individual sketches and the pursuit of a consistent theme. Even the apparently discrete sketches fitted into the overall pattern – there were some delicious internal echoes and the central core of double and treble Linda scenes added up to a comprehensive treatment of a timely and painful subject. (1991, WAT archives)

Directed by physical theatre director Ruth Ben Tovim, The Glass Ceiling brought together clown-like comedy with slick dialogue, which expressed the anxieties many women experience about appearance and self-worth. Wearing identical wigs, all three performers played the alter-egos of Linda, a woman poised to return to the workplace after having had a family; they also played objects in her life. The most significant object was the ever-present mirror, who kept up a running negative commentary on Linda’s appearance, whilst her alter-ego physically mirrored her actions, causing her to sink lower and lower to the floor: Let’s have a look at you. What look are you going for now? You’ve always wanted to work for a circus! At least you’ve got a sense of humour – well most fat women have! Can you really face going out? Why don’t you stay in and EAT! Feeling guilty? Well, once you’ve eaten as much as you can, you can always throw up. (The Glass Ceiling, 1989, WAT Archive)

Another speech about a return to work was delivered whilst the performer physically echoed the ebb and flow of her confidence by moving up and down: DOWN: Why did they employ me? I don’t know anything? All I know about is the house. What am I doing in a boutique – I can’t even spell it. They’ll expect me to look good all the time… I looked good at the interview, but it took me three hours to put my face on…

542     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

UP: But the interview went alright – I know I did well on the maths test – if I keep the books balanced and my figures straight – they’ll put two and two together and they’ll make me chief accountant! DOWN: But what about my babies? They’ll have no-one to come home to – they’ll become latchkey kids, wandering round the streets, smashing milk bottles… (The Glass Ceiling, 1989, WAT archive)

As has already been noted, a key feature of WAT’s work was to explore the experience of inequality by weaving fragments of ordinary speech, drawn from research, into the dialogue of characters who are trying to survive in a world where the odds are stacked against them. For example, in All the Way Home, a girl who has been in care a long time shows new girl Marie the ropes, whilst clearly relishing a demonstration of her own slice of power: Old Girl: You’ll get pocket money. How old are you? Marie: Fifteen – nearly sixteen. Old Girl: Still at school? Marie: Yes – haven’t been for a while… Old Girl: Yeah – well you’ll get £….That goes up to £…. when you’re sixteen – as long as you’re at school. Otherwise you’ll be on the Dole… What school you at?…Yeah – well they’ll probably keep you there. Marie: I’m not going back to school. Old Girl: They’ll make you… Who was on duty last night… when you came in? Marie: A woman. Don’t know. Old Girl: If any of the other girls get at you, tell me – I’m the eldest so they listen to me. (All the Way Home, 1985, WAT archive)

As Arts Council funding declined throughout the 1980s, WAT’s position was stronger than that of many other companies at the time because of our relationship with health and social care organisations, which had its roots in WAT’s community beginnings. In the mid-1980s, a board of artists and health professionals in the West Midlands set up the Theatre in Health Education Trust to attract money for Theatre in Health projects. Much of the government funding the trust attracted was dedicated to preventing the spread of HIV and, given their reputation for addressing serious subjects in a light and humorous way, WAT were often recipients of funding. The company members, however, felt somewhat ambivalent about our growing reputation for Theatre in Health education work, which was

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     543

frequently categorised under the heading of ‘Theatre for Purpose’, later commonly referred to as ‘Applied Theatre’. Our ambivalence about such labelling led us to make the decision to apply for arts funding as well as health funding every year, to enable us to develop an annual non-‘Applied’ project on a topic of our own choice, with the dual aims of exploring our own experiences as women whilst also developing our artistic skills. The Glass Ceiling was a prime example of such a project. However, it could be said that, despite the name, WAT’s external reputation at the end of the 1980s was increasingly for excellence in Theatre in Health Education, rather than for ‘arts for art’s sake’ feminist theatre, which perhaps contributed to a company identity crisis. Included amongst the management papers (1991, WAT archive) is a letter which records a meeting between organisational development consultant Lynne Howells and the three remaining company members (Polly Wright, Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly) to reflect on our achievements to date and to clarify our future direction. The letter refers to Howell’s sense of bewilderment about what she described as our lack of a ‘sense of purpose and direction’, our ‘low energy’ and our need to ‘separate both a little or a lot from each other’. Ironically, the date of this letter was almost the same as our 1990/1991 annual report which outlined a year which was one of the most successful to date in both financial and artistic terms. It is clear from the wording of Howells’ letter that there were tensions in the company both about the identification of our future artistic direction and also about the nature of our employment as either full- or parttime company members. The tensions about our future direction revolved around questions of what type of company we perceived ourselves to be, and whether or not our mission was to remain primarily feminist or have an exclusive focus on Theatre in Health. Our financial position was a key determining factor in these discussions, because by this time over two-thirds of our funds derived from health funding bodies as opposed to arts organisations. One knock-on effect was that commissions from health and education bodies could have specific requirements which meant that we didn’t have a free hand in our writing and casting processes. An example of this change was a commission by Staffordshire Education Department in 1990 to develop a TIE sex education piece, to be delivered to all schools throughout the region: here our previous feminist ‘gender blind’ casting strategy was less acceptable to the funders than the more literal choice of a young male actor to play the young man in the resulting play, Someone Like You. At around the same time, WAT’s play about informal caring and marital breakdown, From This Day Forward, was also breaking the original ‘gender

544     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

blind’ mould; the external writer commissioned for this project, Catherine Wigglesworth, strongly recommended casting a man to play the part of the husband in order to facilitate greater authenticity in the research process. From This Day Forward attracted enthusiastic reviews which clearly indicated that the general style and quality of WAT’s work hadn’t changed, but the reference in one review (Rikki Warburton, Eastbourne Gazette, November 1, 1990) to ‘perhaps a touch of feminism’ in the content shows that the outside world now perceived feminism to be only a small part of our theatrical mix: From This Day Forward… Harrowing stuff it could be and is not… There is humour and tenderness, and a good deal of sheer humanity, and political overtones, if you like, with perhaps a touch of feminism… On any level… great theatre.

It may have been that that deviation from our initial purpose as a feminist company served to weaken the bonds between the founder members, which was why we were seeking to clarify our mission on the 1991 development day, as well as seeking ways to explore other avenues of employment through re-defining ourselves as part-timers. Certainly we spent a significant amount of time discussing whether or not to change our feminist name to one less specific and which perhaps reflected our growing body of health education work. No agreement was reached, which gives an indication that uncertainty about our identity underpinned the lack of purpose and direction noted by the development consultant. Eventually tensions over our identity and mission may have been critical factors contributing to the departure of all the original members except Janice Connolly by 1994; however, individual needs for more secure and defined career paths also played a part. The disbandment was not acrimonious (Polly Wright went on working in partnership with WAT until 2000) and did not ultimately affect the survival of the company, as Janice demonstrates in the final section of this chapter. During the early 1990s, the company developed an impressive track record in feminist management, with a commitment to good employment practices, including the provision of maternity pay, which was very rare amongst small arts organisations at the time. Jo Broadwood and Polly were both the beneficiaries of these good management practices in ways which opened doors to our future work away from the company: in 1991 WAT enabled Jo’s participation in London Bubble’s Rainbow of Desires course run by Augusto Boal; in 1993 the company paid for Polly to do an MSc in Health Promotion at what was then the University of Central England, where she was able to learn about the theoretical background

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     545

of participatory theatre and to develop her ideas about its potential as a qualitative research technique (Wright 1994). Like all theatre companies of the time, WAT was funding-dependent and, as arts funding declined, the company’s strength in accessing health and social care partnerships served us very well and comprised an essential factor in the company’s survival. Unlike the vast majority of companies set up in the 1970s and 1980s, WAT continues successfully to this day, against all the odds, never losing the company reputation for artistic excellence and for addressing inequality by knitting together strands of authentic research and comedy: feeling their way towards a pattern.

Polly Wright: ‘The Play’s the Thing’—Drama in Medical Research and Training I left WAT in 1994 to take up a job at Fircroft College of Adult Education in Birmingham, where I worked as Senior Lecturer for Community Organisation, Literature and Drama. In 2003, I set up my own arts and health company, the Hearth Centre. I also worked part-time in the Interactive Studies Department of the Medical School at the University of Birmingham, delivering modules in communication skills, and developing a new Literature in Medicine module. In 2016, I left Birmingham University to focus exclusively on the development of the Hearth Centre. Throughout all this, the influence of my years at WAT has been central. In 2003, I was asked to write a play about early intervention in schizophrenia to be performed to non-executive directors on NHS mental health trusts. At around the same time, I was also commissioned to develop a play about young male suicide. The launch of these plays, When Time Collapses and Revolving Door, led directly to the foundation of the Hearth Centre—a Centre for Health, Education and the Humanities with art at its heart of which I am artistic director (www.thehearthcentre.org.uk). Both plays toured nationally; after the tour of Revolving Door, The Hearth Centre was shortlisted for a MIND media award. Revolving Door was re-developed in 2016 for use in training psychiatrists and, specifically, to promote dialogue with GPs about suicide prevention. It was performed again at the Old Joint Stock Theatre in Birmingham in 2018 in conjunction with a talk by suicide prevention campaigner Jonny Benjamin MBE, author of Stranger on the Bridge (2018) about his own suicide attempt. Health professionals and audiences alike commented on the

546     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

play’s accuracy and emotional truth. Benjamin described it as ‘one of the most powerful things I’ve ever seen’ (Facebook Post, June 25, 2018). One of the main legacies of my time with WAT lies in the development of ideas around the use of drama methodology as a qualitative social research approach, first explored in partnership with WAT; then within the adult and higher education organisations where I worked; and, more recently, through the Hearth Centre, in partnership with many institutions of Higher Education in the UK and abroad. The MSc in Health Promotion which I completed whilst still a member of WAT equipped me to approach health authorities with proposals to use drama to research patient perceptions of NHS services. I built on our reflection that interactive theatre, in which there is a verbalised exchange between audience and performers, can elicit useful data for social research if it is recorded and analysed. In our work with WAT, we had observed that drama has much in common with a feminist research approach as outlined by Ann Oakley (1981); it can draw out ‘private’ rather than ‘public’ accounts where people acknowledge the contradictory and paradoxical nature of their personal behaviour. I proposed using this methodology to analyse emergent themes and compile our findings in a report to the commissioners, with recommendations for policy changes. The proposals were accepted and led to many commissions by health and educational organisations. After leaving WAT, I continued to work in conjunction with the company for some years, using Christine, one of the later plays we devised together, to research health experiences. One of our commissions was from Fircroft College, researching barriers to education; whilst Christine depicts a health scenario, we felt that it would also be a good catalyst for discussions about what might prevent or promote a return to education. The play tells the story of Christine, who goes to her GP when she discovers a lump in her breast, and shows four consultations between GP and patient, in between which both characters deliver monologues to the audience about their internal fears and anxieties. When the audience of single parents hot-seated ‘Christine’ following the action of the play, they clearly identified particularly closely with her, saying, ‘I am Christine’, but most women recognised the portrait as a snapshot of their former selves. They recognised Christine’s lack of self-esteem and lack of hope. One comment echoing the general feeling was, ‘She negates her own life – if you think negative, you’ll live negative’. They felt she was repeating self-destructive patterns of behaviour and needed help to break the cycle of despair. They perceived Christine as self-blaming, regarding the bad things in her own life as ‘her own fault, when it isn’t – it’s down

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     547

to circumstances – not her’. Participants observed that people in Christine’s situation ‘knew what they needed, but their life experiences get in the way’. It was felt that lack of confidence and self-belief inhibited the ability to change, and that it was imperative that she ‘build herself up’ before attempting a return to education. All interactions were recorded and analysed in a report (Wright 2000) and connections were maintained with the audience groups, many of whom went on to take up educational opportunities at Fircroft and other colleges (Bowl and Wright 2003). One comment from the report stands out: ‘I went on from an access course to complete a degree. It all started with that play’. Christine was also used in studies commissioned by Birmingham Health Promotion and Dudley Priority Health to promote discussions of NHS services and address reasons behind the low uptake of services by specific groups. One key method was an extended improvisation approach, called the ‘corporate character’ method, often used in our early years to get the ball rolling when devising a play, in which a group creates a character together. The group sits in a circle and is asked to create a character from scratch, building up a biographical circle in which each member of the group offers one detail about the character: age, gender, where they live, etc. All details are noted on a flipchart, after which the group is then asked to create a relationship circle where each member of the group acts a character in that person’s life: partner, child and so on. Once the central character is created, the group puts them into situations with members of the relationship circle, which provide the basis for subsequent scenes. We adapted this technique as the central method of our enquiry, in which we asked groups to create two characters—one who did take up NHS services and one who didn’t, and then developed short scenes about the people and approaches most likely to influence or deter the characters from taking positive steps about their health. We always followed this with a lengthy group discussion, in which we deconstructed the fiction they had created, and asked people to reflect on the policy changes necessary to encourage uptake of services by the people they perceived as unlikely to do so. The following extract from the findings of the drama-based enquiry into perceptions of breast screening services is a good example of the way exact language is captured through drama: The non-uptake character created by the group fended off good advice with aphorisms and defiant denials: ‘She doesn’t understand herself ’; ‘She’s angry’; ‘I’ll know if I’ve got anything’; and ‘I ain’t got no lumps’ or ‘Nobody in my

548     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

family’s got anything’. Other people in her life were shown to collude with her negative approach. Her local corner shop keeper [sic ] says: ‘My granny always say: ‘Leave well alone. What you don’t know about – you won’t worry about!’ and her work colleague comments: ‘They squeeze you. I reckon they do more damage.’ (Wright 1996, 9)

These perceptions, and those of a group of Asian participants, had a direct positive effect on marketing approaches and significantly increased uptake. For the twenty-two years which followed the commissioning of ­drama-based enquiries, I have gone on to apply versions of the same method in a wide variety of contexts, as a creative way of revealing group perceptions. I’ve used it to explore ideas about what constitutes mental health and factors that influence its deterioration with mental health service users, staff and medical students. I’ve also used it to explore medical students’ perceptions of the impact of social factors on health, asking them to create characters who do or do not smoke. In 2018, the Hearth Centre was commissioned to create BAME characters who do or do not engage in diabetic research. The latter commission led to a further development in which professional actors embodied the characters the groups developed, for further use in Hearth’s professional training. In 2017, the Hearth Centre was approached about the use of ­drama-based approaches to improve the performance of international psychiatrists applying for UK registration but who were failing due to lack of confidence, cultural unease or poor language skills. We used Jacques Lecoq’s ‘Tension States’ physical theatre method which Ruth Ben Tovim had used with WAT to devise The Glass Ceiling. Initially using relaxation methods, actors from Hearth put the psychiatrists into different stages of physical tension, from floppy inaction to extreme panic, in order to identify effects on behaviour under exam conditions and difficult scenarios in professional practice. According to evaluation feedback from the psychiatrists from the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust who commissioned us, twothirds of the participant cohort subsequently passed their exams. Work in the early years at WAT has influenced all my subsequent practice, including a recent commission from Birmingham University Medical School to work with groups of Asian women, using drama to capture their feelings about factors which promote or undermine Muslim well-being. The resulting play, Alum Rocks - Representing Hodgehill, told the true story of an Asian women’s walking and running group; this play echoed WAT’s practice in the early years of capturing hidden voices to ‘tell Truth to Power’ when we performed the play to a group of mainly male councillors in Birmingham’s

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     549

Council House. A highlight of the event lay in a passionate hot-seating exchange between a young Asian woman in character and a male councillor in the audience about whether or not she had independent choice as to how to lead her life. ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ he yelled. ‘Oh, yes I do!’ she replied, to thunderous applause from the cast and part of the audience. Took me right back!

Jo Broadwood: Using Drama as a Tool for Personal, Interpersonal and Societal Change I officially left WAT in 1993 but I had already begun to work as a freelancer elsewhere. My interest in peacebuilding and wider issues of social justice had remained strong throughout my 10 years with the company and I had started to feel constrained by our focus on health. In 1991, whilst still at WAT, I attended Rainbow of Desires, a course hosted by London Bubble and run by the influential Brazilian theatre practitioner and political activist Augusto Boal, founder of Theatre of the Oppressed and populariser of techniques such as Forum Theatre, techniques similar to those independently developed and practised by WAT. Here Boal’s focus was on internal ‘oppressions’ and designed to help privileged Westerners deal with ‘the cops in our heads’. I found this approach and methodology immensely stimulating and the wider application beyond theatre to using drama in formal and informal educational settings was immediately apparent. Two of the other participants, Nic Fine and Fi Macbeth, became lifelong friends and led me to a sustained and long-lasting exploration of the use of drama outside the realms of formal performance spaces and as a tool for personal, interpersonal and societal change. Both Nic and Fi were theatre practitioners working at Leap Confronting Conflict, an organisation exploring the application of theatre as a tool for supporting young people at risk to better manage conflict in their lives. I subsequently joined them at Leap. My first assignment was at Feltham Young Offenders Institute, delivering a leadership training programme for young men on remand. I vividly remember standing in the prison chapel waiting for the young men to be brought down from their cells wondering aloud how I had gone from a decade of working in a virtually all-female environment to being the only woman in an all-male environment. I stayed with Leap for 18 years, growing with the organisation to become their Head of Training and eventually Director of the Leap Academy for Youth

550     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

and Conflict. As importantly, I developed the core principles and practice of Leap’s distinctive style of facilitation which were in part informed by my experience of improvising and devising as a theatre performer and writer. Following the disturbances in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley in 2001, Leap’s work in schools in the East End of London addressing racial tension and the rise of the far right attracted the attention of national government; I was recruited as an advisor to areas where there was a lack of community cohesion and/or tensions over racism, resources and perceptions of immigration. For the next ten years, I brokered conversations across England between and within different groups, communities, local authorities and public and third sector organisations about what mattered most to local people, whether it was to do with housing allocation, use of resources, concerns and fears about newcomers, young people, immigration. This was difficult and challenging work, tackling deep-seated prejudice and unconscious bias, and training and supporting residents and staff to do the same. Many of the frameworks I used were drawn from international peacebuilding and wherever possible I would ‘put them on their feet’ using drama so that participants could have a felt experience of the issues being discussed. In 2010, with the advent of the coalition government, this programme was disbanded. With other former advisors, I set up a community interest company, Talk for a Change, to continue the work in the UK and internationally. Then in 2014 I became CEO of StreetDoctors, a national network of trainee and junior doctors teaching emergency lifesaving skills to young people most at risk of violence. In 2019 I returned to social peace work and am now CEO of the Cohesion and Integration Network, a newly-launched charity which works via a network of supporters and members to create a more integrated and less divided UK society. On the surface, it may look as though I have strayed a long way from theatre but aspects of it have continued to play an important and vital part of my work. The ten-week improvisational drama course run by Sue Learwood, where WAT began, was a foundation course in skills that were then honed and refined over the next decade of co-creation and devising theatre with Janice and Polly. Being able to listen, to work with what is being offered to you, to make offers, develop shared ground, to say ‘Yes, and …’ (rather than ‘Yes, but…’) are core skills of improvisation; they are also core skills for facilitation, particularly in conflict transformation and when dealing with anger, despair, resignation and community tensions. The techniques we practised and those put forward by Boal also continue to guide my work. A young inmate in a workshop uses the others in the room to sculpt physical images of key events that have influenced him in his short life. Seeing the nods from other young men as they recognise elements of their

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     551

own stories, he begins to acknowledge some of the deeper reasons behind his inability to manage his anger. A newly housed refugee tells a roomful of local people how she escaped war and torture and made a dangerous journey across land and sea. As the listeners empathise with her loss and acknowledge her courage, their reservations about newcomers are quietly put aside. A group of residents and community leaders are tasked with the job of coming up with ideas for how to improve their local area. Initially the mood in the room is one of cynicism and despair, ‘too little, too late’ and ‘nothing will come of it, just like before’. The local priest is encouraged to intervene and tells a story of finding hope when everything looked bleak. One by one, others join in telling their own stories of hope until the mood in the room transforms. WAT taught me the power of storytelling to affect change, to connect with others, to conjure emotions and to evoke a mood or a shared vision of the future. WAT’s focus on marginalised and hidden voices (whether it was women affected by HIV, girls in the care system or the plight of carers) was when I first experienced the importance of providing platforms for the voices of those without access to power. Having your story shown back to you, whether via a piece of theatre or as part of a group training programme on conflict, gives us the space to recognise ourselves and to separate ourselves from the story and therefore create the possibility of a different ending. Connected with the importance of being given a voice is the idea of your story being witnessed by others. When we first showed All the Way Home to a roomful of girls who had experienced the care system, their roars of laughter came because they recognised themselves and their own stories, and their stories were being witnessed, possibly for the first time. Once a story is told, it is harder to ignore the new truth it brings to light. Creating spaces where people tell their stories and are heard by those with the power to change the endings continues to be a vital part of my work, whether it is with decision-makers in a local area listening to the needs of residents, or with politicians and lawmakers listening to a woman describing how her land being grabbed by a multinational palm oil manufacturer has impacted her livelihood, her family and her future. The act of being witnessed (having an audience) also has the power to be personally transformative. A young man declares to his peers that when he is released he will return to education. A farmworker in an area of South Africa blighted by foetal alcohol syndrome declares to other women workers her intention to improve the lives of young people in her community. A commitment made in front of an audience means we are more likely to hold ourselves and others to account. I hugely value the creative space that WAT provided me. The fact that the company was for the most part women-only and women-led gave me room

552     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

to develop as a performer and a writer that I doubt I would have found for myself elsewhere. Obviously, being part of an organisation with no clearly delineated roles or areas of responsibility wasn’t always comfortable and the dynamics between the three of us as women and as artists were sometimes difficult. But as a young gay woman from a working-class background (who hadn’t really figured out her next step after achieving the goal of a university education) it was a rich and rewarding environment to work out who I was and what I wanted to do in the world, with brilliant female role models to emulate. I remain staunchly feminist, and am excited by this next generation of women, by their determination and courage, by their critique of privilege and exploration of issues around the intersections of gender, race, faith and class with feminism. I’d like to think that WAT’s work in some small way was a part of paving the way for this generation of activists. Of course we got some things wrong, but there was much that we got right. Above all, we were audacious and determined, funny and perceptive, putting women’s voices and stories centre stage, telling the stories that would otherwise not have been told.

Janice Connolly: Women & Theatre: Still Going Strong A lot happens in 35 years. We started before computers, the Internet, Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. We have worked through 7 prime ministers (possibly 8 by the time this is published) and survived at least two recessions. We have witnessed the miners’ strike, the decreased power of the Trade Unions, Northern Rock, The Banking Crisis and the ensuing massive cuts to public spending and we are still here. When I became sole Artistic Director of Women & Theatre (now W&T rather than WAT) about 20 years ago, it was a very different company in terms of its structure. The original model of the core team doing everything and us all performing together had changed over time. We employed a lot of freelance artists, fundraisers, directors and stage managers on a project basis. I remember thinking long and hard about what W&T was—what it stood for and how working for W&T as a freelance artist differed from working for other companies. W&T remains a female-led company with artistic and operational methodologies that are grounded in an open, collaborative and solution-focused philosophy. The original core values are deeply embedded in the work we

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     553

have made and continue to make. Our mission is to make ‘Deep work about things that matter’. We continue to develop new work from in-depth research; talking to people with direct experience of the issues we are making work about. We are committed to social change and continue to work in partnership with health and social care professionals to this end. Indeed, W&T owes much of its longevity to the strong partnerships in Health and Social Care it has forged over the years. We work very closely with Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Foundation NHS Trust in particular and our offices are based within their estates. Delivering projects across arts, health and community sectors, we work with a range of target groups including older adults, disadvantaged young people, women on probation and mental health service users. We work in a range of different ways, devising bespoke project models to deliver the desired outcomes most effectively. We deliver performances, participatory projects and workshops engaging a variety of people. Projects have included: small-scale touring productions like The Bad One (2008), a modern-day fairy story about a girl cut in half to separate her from her wild side; site-specific theatre such as Gay Birmingham: Back to Backs (2011) which presented hidden lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) histories in a National Trust property, Birmingham’s last surviving set of houses built back-to-back around a communal courtyard; productions led by disadvantaged young people such as Word Lounge (2017) at Birmingham Hippodrome; and participatory courses in probation settings, older people’s residential homes and mental health settings. What unites our work is our commitment to exploring contemporary issues and giving voice to the experiences of real people particularly those traditionally under-represented in mainstream theatre. Our participatory strand—involving the making of new work with communities—has gone from strength to strength over the last ten years. This participatory work follows the same principle of putting ordinary people’s voices centre stage as we do with research-based work. The difference is that we are now facilitating those individuals and communities to perform, write and devise for themselves; creating new theatre about the things they care about, the things they want to say. This work is a joy to facilitate and I am constantly struck by how creativity is in all of us—the many not the few. It used to be the domain of the white, middle-class, able-bodied man to create theatre. As a women’s theatre company, I see it as part of our raison d’être to open up the stage for all comers. The result is fresh engaging relevant theatre that everyone wants to see. A tweet just last Saturday in response to our project Women of Longbridge (2018) is characteristic of our audience reaction and sums up our mission perfectly: ‘Between Women of Longbridge

554     Polly Wright, with Jo Broadwood and Janice Connolly

and Rocking the Wire, @Womenandtheatre have been consistently brilliant this year. Their commitment to telling the stories of local women, in consultation with those who experienced it, is great’. The reputation of the company built on the many years of excellent work continues to grow and we regularly work in partnership with our local theatres; Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham Hippodrome and Midlands Art Centre. Two recent productions, For the Past 30 Years (2014) and Starting Out (2016), both produced in association with Birmingham Repertory Theatre, have helped to raise our profile. Featuring a series of commissioned monologues, the plays focused on women and work: the first capturing the experiences of women who had spent the last three decades working in different sectors, whilst the second exposed the reality of young women entering the world of work in 2016. The plays also responded to the significant discrepancies that still exist in mainstream theatre in the number of plays produced written by women compared with men, and the fact there are more main roles for men than women. W&T continues to address this inequality: putting female writers, performers, as well as the voices and experiences of women, centre stage. The present company structure consists of myself, Janice Connolly, as Artistic Director, Jess Pearson as General Manager, Rachel Snape as Project Manager, Jo Gleave as Lead Artist Practitioner and Matt Smith as Marketing & Fundraising Assistant. We employ a large and diverse number of freelance artists, directors and stage managers on a project basis who all, I hope, feel the benefit of the foundation building blocks based on equality laid down in the 1980s and firmly rooted in feminism. One of our long-term freelance artists commented recently that W&T had allowed her to keep on working when her children were small and that without the flexible approach W&T has always tried to have she might well have given up performing altogether. On a personal level being part of a women-only set helped me as a working-class woman to find my voice as a writer, performer, facilitator and businesswoman. There is a legacy of equality which threads through all our work and how we work together. I am keen to not fan the flames of hierarchy that still can pervade the world of theatre. Equity recently circulated an online questionnaire in response to #MeToo and it was affirming to be able to say that my professional experience of working for the past 35 years has not included bullying or any other type of abuse at work. I think this is a reflection of the kind of company that we wanted to set up all those years ago. We were always financially savvy and it is no small feat that we have successfully earned and raised sufficient income to cover salaries, running costs

24  Women and Theatre, Birmingham: The Early Years (1984–1994)     555

and project activity with little or no guaranteed long-term funding. Strong company management and an ethical businesslike approach from brilliant staff have ensured our survival. We continue to be effective fundraisers and attract exciting commissioned work from different sectors. We keep our hearts, eyes and ears alive to which direction the wind will blow next—we remain contemporary and responsive. When we started in 1984, no one would have predicted that 35 years later W&T would still be going. Writing this today, it feels as fresh as it ever did. We’ve just had a company meeting: cooking up new ideas for future projects, laughing together, keeping an eye on the finances—same as it ever was.

Bibliography Belgrade Theatre Company. 2015. TiE 50—Theatre in Education Then and Now. http://www.belgrade.co.uk/news-and-blogs/blogs/tie-50-theatre-in-educationthen-and-now/. Benjamin, Jonny. 2018. Stranger on the Bridge. London: Pan Macmillan. Boal, Augusto. 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: New York Theatre Communications Group. Bowl, Marion, and Polly Wright. 2003. ‘Flexible Friends: Beyond Formal Partnerships in Community Education’. Journal of Access and Credit Studies 4, no. 2: 90–101. Hart, David. 1986. West Midlands Arts Report 1986. Women and Theatre archive. Lavery, Bryony. 1984. ‘But Will Men Like It? Or Living as a Feminist Writer Without Committing Murder’. In Women and Theatre: Calling the Shots, edited by Sue Todd, 24–32. London: Faber and Faber. Oakley, Ann. 1981. ‘Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms’. In Doing Feminist Research, edited by Helen Roberts, 30–61. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Paget, Derek. 1987. ‘“Verbatim Theatre”: Oral History and Documentary Techniques’. New Theatre Quarterly 3, no. 12: 317–36. Steed, Maggie. 1984. ‘Introductions’. In Women and Theatre: Calling the Shots, edited by Sue Todd, 62–74. London: Faber and Faber. Tonkin, Boyd. 1986. ‘Plan for a Preventive Policy’. Community Care. December 11. Wright, Polly. 1994. ‘An Appraisal of the Uses of Drama in Health Promotion’. MSc. Diss., University of Central England. Wright, Polly. 1996. A Needs Assessment of Lay and Professional Perceptions of Breast Health, and the Use of Theatre as an Effective Method of Health Education in this Field. Report to Dudley Priority Health. Unpublished. Wright, Polly. 2000. The Play’s the Thing: Report Phase Two. Project Report to National Institute of Adult Continuing Education and Department for Education and Employment.

25 Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation, February 2018: Gender and Disability Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

Since 1997, Jenny Sealey has been Artistic Director of Graeae, the UK’s most successful disabled-led theatre company. Their company credo, ‘a force for change in world-class theatre – breaking down barriers, challenging preconceptions and boldly placing D/deaf and disabled artists centre stage’, applies equally to Sealey herself. Under her twenty-two years of leadership, the company has gained worldwide recognition, pioneering the concept of ‘aesthetics of access’, creating a radically new dramatic language by embedding a range of tools such as bilingual BSL/English, pre-recorded BSL, creative captioning and in ear/live audio description into the text from the very beginning of the artistic process. Over this period, the company have evolved from a small-scale touring group to a major presence on the theatre scene, collaborating with leading theatres around the UK and abroad in main-stage productions of new and classic plays. Since 2008, the company has also developed a reputation for large-scale, large-cast events including outdoor performances involving circus skills, giant puppets and sway poles. Sealey lost her hearing suddenly at the age of seven, after hitting her head on a school desk. She went on to study dance and choreography at Middlesex Polytechnic. She subsequently worked as an actor for theatre companies with

Jenny Sealey (*)  Graeae Theatre Company, London, UK Clare Smout  University of Birmingham, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_25

557

558     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

a strong political, social and educational agenda (such as Graeae, Theatre Centre and Red Ladder) and helped found both Common Ground Sign Dance Company and London Disability Arts Forum. She started her directing career with Interplay Theatre in Leeds and became Artistic Director of Graeae in 1997. In 2009, Sealey was awarded an MBE for services to Disability Arts. In 2012, she was both Artistic Advisor to Unlimited 2012 and co-Artistic Director (with Bradley Hemmings) of the London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony, subsequently winning Liberty’s Human Rights Arts Award and being named in the Time Out and Hospital Club’s ‘h.Club 100’ list of the most influential and imaginative people in the creative industries. She directs not just at Graeae but with disabled-led companies around the world. In conversation with Clare Smout, Jenny Sealey here talks frankly about the challenges of her early life and career, her experiences of acting in all-female productions in the 1980s and 1990s, the marginalisation of women, particularly disabled women, and her theatrical practice. While Sealey is famous for her campaigning and creativity in the field of Disability Arts, this is underpinned by an equally strong feminist instinct and support for ‘the girls’. Much has already been written about Sealey’s years at Graeae, most recently in the company’s 2018 volume Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress. This chapter explores the other strand of her practice and the way in which the two commitments have been interwoven throughout her life. In line with current UK usage, the term ‘Deaf ’ is used throughout this chapter for those born Deaf who use sign language, ‘deaf ’ for those who became deaf later and also/only use lip-reading and speech, and ‘D/deaf ’ as the default inclusive term.

Jenny Sealey Growing up D/deaf in an all-hearing world was an experience of frustration and continuous nodding of the head, smiling inanely to demonstrate you were following the conversations or the lecture because it was easier to lie than constantly say ‘pardon’. I did not really say with confidence ‘My name is Jenny and I am D/deaf ’ until 1987 when I went to an audition for Graeae’s first all-female play, A Private View, written by Tash Fairbanks and directed by Anna Furse. There I was confronted with an extraordinary array of physical, sensory and communicative difference. Or actually not difference but a glorious indifference to our various impairments with a focus on doing a good audition in a supportive accessible environment. This audition was an awakening—a baptism of fire and a baptism of shedding

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     559

the loneliness I had felt since I became deaf, age seven. At last, I had found where I belonged. I can still feel the goose pimples as I speak. I had got the job and had the privilege of working with Merry Cross, who walked with crutches, Letty Kaye, a wheelchair user and Kaite O’Reilly, who is visually impaired. I was interested into delving into the lives of these women, learning about their different approaches and coping mechanisms as disabled women which ranged from ‘be as normal as possible, don’t moan and get on with it’ to the strident ‘use your impairment and lack of access as a political tool to fight for rights’. The whole process was my spring awakening, my rite of passage, my giant stride into a community which would become my whole life. The tour took us to small venues up and down the country and to institutions where disabled people were ‘lumped’ together with no independence. I remember a Graeae Board member saying they were somewhat concerned with the ‘sexiness’ of the production as these people (in the institutions) are discouraged from engaging in sexual relations. I started to realise the importance of the play and the potential impact it could have to make people start fighting against infringement of human rights. This experience influenced everything I have done since and a commitment to make theatre that matters for people that matter.

Early Years In retrospect, going deaf at the age of seven did have and continues to have a profound impact on my life but not necessarily one that I’ve excavated and had deep therapy for. It’s one of those things that just is. My family were very much ‘Right! This is it. Let’s move on, let’s get on with it’ so I wasn’t at any point allowed to be maudlin. I just had to think, ‘Oh right, how am I going to do this?’ I had to teach myself to lip-read; I had to try and understand what it meant to be D/deaf; at the grand age of fifty-four, I’m still trying to figure it out! I had no time really to be upset or angry—I just wanted to fit in and belong at school but I was very aware of that feeling of being ‘other’—I still am now. If I can’t hear what’s going on around me, I go into my ‘Jenny bubble’. My ‘Jenny bubble’ is fantastic but it can be very lonely and isolating. It means I have a million conversations in my head and sometimes those conversations are so real I think I’ve actually had them with people. It’s a rather weird world and quite a fantastic world as well; what it has meant for me, more than anything, is that I have to look, really look very intently at people’s faces, because of lip-reading. All my learning has

560     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

been done through looking. That was why I carried on doing ballet after becoming D/deaf, because I could look at the person in front of me, watching what they were doing. I look all the time at how people communicate with each other; look at people’s body language to get what they mean as I might not always get what they were saying. So it’s a brilliant, brilliant starting point to be an actor or to be a director and I wouldn’t be that sort of actor or director if I hadn’t been D/deaf. I wouldn’t have done that. You just see things clearly, I suppose, because of the sound being cut out. I have to always make sure that the visual world of any play that I direct feels authentic to me. If that’s authentically real, then I know that the sound will be real, if that makes sense. But I do have interpreters or assistants who can hear to back me up, to make sure that I am getting it right because I have that thing, you know, that as a D/deaf director you can’t be seen to be wanting because the rest of the world has low expectations as to what you can achieve. So we can’t fuck up at all. Actually, we have to do better—it’s the same when you talk to black kids, you know, they feel that they have to be better, because they know people don’t expect much; it’s not dissimilar. So, as I’ve said many times, ballet really did save my life, as school was so horrendous, so hard. Up to this day I still don’t know how much I missed but I know I missed a lot. So for that reason I do feel very angry. Even now D/deaf schools are few and far between—I went to a large state comprehensive and the isolation you feel if you’re the only D/deaf person in a massive comprehensive, which I was, it’s brutal. You become very good at nodding. I’m the best nodder in the world! It’s sad—you’re thinking, ‘What the fuck are they talking about? I have no idea!’ So you’re watching really intently, piecing the whole world together. Fortunately for me, my local higher education college had a prearts course and I had this most phenomenal drama teacher, Marielaine Church—the director Jonathan Church’s mum. She was Canadian and she had the best lip pattern in the world. So I was very lucky because Marielaine worked with me, setting up cuing systems to help me pick up on my lines, a process I still use now with my actors. And it’s a fantastic way to work because it means everyone has to own the play and has to work out how to look, how to be aware. I did ‘A’ level Theatre Studies and English and then I went on to be accepted at Middlesex Polytechnic, now Middlesex University, in London. They wouldn’t let me major in drama but they let me do dance and choreography. As it was a BA in Performance Arts, we had to do music and drama as well, so I was really lucky. I was very good friends with a woman called Fizz (Elizabeth) Fost, who was doing drama. She said

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     561

to me ‘Can I direct you in Dario Fo’s [monologue] A Woman Alone?’ So she did. The entire drama department came out to watch, curious how this D/ deaf girl was going to do it. I earned my stripes that day! It’s something I will always remember. They came out of curiosity and but I did good and I loved it. Fizz gave me the confidence to really think about acting. With the dancing, I was good but I knew I was never going to be a good enough dancer—I have large breasts, I don’t like pain and I do like my pasties and my beer—so when the Graeae audition came up, it was like, ‘Oh, right, I’m going to go for the part’ and I did. I got the job and that’s when I worked with Anna Furse. [See Chapter 21 for Anna Furse’s detailed account of her own career.] Through all my education at school and at Middlesex Poly, I didn’t have any support, so I didn’t go to lectures. I went to the library which again is very isolating and my learning suffered. You can learn from listening and watching but it’s very different learning just through reading. I ended up doing a lot of reading and not always understanding what it was I was reading so that’s something I do feel really resentful about. When I was at school, a social worker would come round once in a while and ask, ‘Alright, Jenny?’—‘Fine’—‘Oh good’—End of! At university, there was no support whatsoever, not even anyone asking if you were alright. It was all about, ‘How are we going to cope with someone like you on our course?’ I didn’t know then what help I could have or what to ask for because actually, my mum, in all her loveliness, just treated me like my sisters and made no allowances for me being deaf at home. I didn’t know how to be D/deaf until I went to my first Graeae audition. And then it was—‘Okay, this is brilliant’—here are all these women, D/deaf, disabled, women wheelchair users, women with white sticks, a guide dog, women who were BSL-users who signed, women who were deaf and spoke. So, it’s like, ‘Oh, hello, this is the real world; this is the world in which I want to belong’ and it was an epiphany. It was an extraordinary moment in my life and it was seeing Caroline Parker who is the most fantastic D/deaf actress. She wears about a million different colours, and I only ever wear two. She had flippers on—we had to bring something; I can’t remember what I took but she had flippers—rainbow-coloured flippers, of course— but she was signing and talking and I thought at last that was alright, it was alright to talk. There was such a rigid hierarchy in the D/deaf community. If you’re not born Deaf and you can speak then you’re not really ‘Deaf ’. I didn’t understand all the experiences they had but I have been Deaf longer than I have been hearing so I am Deaf. But the British Sign Language (BSL)

562     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

community was unwelcoming. I remember trying to learn sign language; it was the other Deaf people that put me off—they’d say ‘You’re not signing that very well. Put your hands away. We’ll get someone to sign properly for you’. In a way the discovery of being a D/deaf woman is ongoing. If it’s just one-to-one I’m alright. I can lip-read. It is harder to lip-read someone if they have a big beard or a different accent though. I find the judgement within the Deaf community very hard because it means I don’t belong in either the Deaf or the hearing world. I do get where they’re coming from because there is a real lack of understanding and support or provision within Deaf education, but I went through that too in my mainstream education.

Acting for Graeae—A Private View So, the first play I worked on was A Private View in 1987, and we toured it nationally and internationally. Perhaps not the best play in the world but the most eye-opening experience in that I had no idea that disabled people were so institutionalised. When we took the play to different institutions, we realised the lack of human rights they had and that all the women we met were denied any sort of sexuality. Relationships were absolutely forbidden in those sorts of places so I was there right at the hub when the whole movement was fighting for independent living. It was an extraordinarily exciting time for a young naïve D/deaf woman suddenly to be in the Graeae world, grappling with the politics of ­disability. It was terrifying, terrifying to realise that society was so damning and judgmental. You know, if you are different, you are just sidelined, pushed away, so it made me realise the value, the sheer value of a company like Graeae ‘creating theatre that matters for people that matter’. I still go round with that mantra twenty years on. We toured all over the place to a mixture of institutions and theatres. People were ‘allowed out’ of their institutions to come to a theatre space to see us. There were women-only and men-only institutions and any that were mixed were internally segregated. It was a really harsh regime; people were stripped of being human and sadly, as we’re talking now in 2018, it’s heading back that way— at a rate of knots. We haven’t advanced at all—we’re going back in time: it’s heartbreaking! But being part of A Private View was brilliant. Having that space and time to talk to Merry Cross who walked with crutches—she was hugely political—talking to her about her fight, and then talking to Letty Kaye who was

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     563

a wheelchair user and single mum with three boys, one of whom was deafblind. She would say ‘Jenny, just get on with it – you just get on with it. Don’t bemoan your situation “I’m a wheelchair user, my son is deafblind” – you have a life to live’, whereas Merry said, ‘No, come on, Letty, you need to use this; we need to fight with this, campaign together’. Kaite O’Reilly was the fourth member of our cast—she later wrote peeling (2002) for us, the first all-female play I directed for Graeae. We were both very new to this world and we were learning so much from these women and learning a lot about ourselves and also about the whole ‘partially’ thing. I’m partially deaf—I hate the word ‘partially’—but I can hear a little, Kaite can see a little, so we joined forces. We felt very marginalised—those whose disability is not 100% are often sidelined by other members of their community. But we were ‘partially’ together, if you know what I mean, so we had a lot of time together trying to figure out what our place in the world was, all that we were being part of and that was a sort of another epiphany. Letty and Merry in their own different ways already owned who they were but we were learning. And the play itself too, it dealt with sexuality, it dealt with humour, it dealt with loss, with the whole experience of becoming disabled, so it was quite epic really. I think a lot of the times, certainly in terms of women, we are not always allowed to write about those moments when we feel sorry for ourselves. There’s a particular moment in A Private View where Merry’s character just doesn’t want to be this disabled women—she just hates what’s happening to her. And we got quite a lot of flack from that from within the disabled community who say we just have to be robust and not play victim. But I always questioned that in a way. I understand why—we need to be seen as survivors because we are, we have to be, because if we’re not survivors, they’ll just shove us off the end of the table—but sometimes it’s alright just to feel really shit, it’s human. I think more writers need to be allowed to tap into that. Self-pity is not the right word but allowing yourself to feel vulnerable is important—but needs to be carefully written if this is part of a play. I think also that within the context of disability, it’s very important that disabled women have a voice because there’s also a messy hierarchy in the relationship between disabled men and disabled women. I can’t think of how to describe that but I know for disabled women in particular, looking at all the feminist books, we are not in them. I remember this so clearly. As a teenager trying to discover the political world, I joined CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), Greenpeace, campaigns for banning fox-hunting and all of that and my friends would buy all the feminist books and where was I in it? We just weren’t anywhere. It pissed me off.

564     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

But now suddenly with A Private View, being with other women, being with the women from Graeae, it’s ‘Right, come on, we can write history now’, make sure we are part of that history because we can/want to be feminists because, do you know what I mean, it’s like there’s so much prejudice out there: white, middle-class and non-disabled and they were alienating the rest of us. I think that’s changing now but feminism’s still got that aura of privilege, a lot still needs to be done to really equalise women. Just recently I’ve had a conversation with Helen Marriage from Artichoke because she did a lovely trailer for the launch of 14–18 NOW [the World War I Centenary Arts Projects umbrella], celebrating the centenary of women’s suffrage and—beautiful trailer, women’s groups of all kinds—but again where were we? Where were the disabled women in the trailer? We weren’t anywhere. We weren’t anywhere. And it breaks my heart. So I’m having a meeting with her as I’m damned if we are going to be left off that list. [‘Helen subsequently brought in Sisters of Frida, a disabled feminist organisation, and Graeae women also marched as part of the June 10, 2018 event, Processions. It was magnificent.’ (Sealey, pers. comm. July 8, 2018)] So still, for us D/deaf disabled women in the arts or anywhere, still it’s an ongoing bloody battle to be included, but being in these situations gives you the courage to really fight and find non-disabled allies and knowing that you’re part of this great big fantastic hotchpotch of weird therapy—you feed off each other—you need each other.

Acting in Women’s Companies—Theatre Centre and Red Ladder [Theatre Centre and Red Ladder are two of the leading left-wing touring theatre companies from the second half of the twentieth century, both still in existence despite changes to funding, society and the theatre scene. Theatre Centre is a Young People’s Theatre (YPT) company set up in 1953 with a remit ‘to commission new writing and educational theatre to tour around schools and venues across the UK’ and ‘undertake the development of multi-ethnic theatre in casting, content, and employment throughout the organisation and a commitment to feminism’ (Theatre Centre n.d.). In 1983, it added a Women’s Company and in 1985 a Mixed Company, ‘formed to reflect the multi-racial population and to integrate disability arts’ (Theatre Centre n.d.). Red Ladder’s current commitment as ‘Britain’s leading radical theatre company… to make provocative theatre that contributes to social change and global justice’ (Red Ladder n.d.) reflects its ongoing mission since the 1960s. In around 1986, the company articulated an

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     565

expanded ‘New Policy’, headed by the intentions: ‘To create an artistically exciting socialist feminist theatre’ and ‘To take this work to audiences who would not normally see theatre, young people 14–25 and the adults who work with them [and to] perform on their own ground, in Youth Clubs and places where they normally meet, rather than in theatre venues’ (Red Ladder 2015).] After A Private View, I then went to work with Theatre Centre’s Women’s Company. I later worked with Red Ladder Women’s Theatre Company in a third all-female play. The one other company I really, really wanted to work with was Women’s Theatre Group [later relaunched as Sphinx Theatre Company and still going strong under the leadership of Sue Parrish—see Chapter 22]. I went to two auditions with them but didn’t get either job. So my second all-female play was for Theatre Centre’s Women’s Company. It was by Tash Fairbanks again and directed by Libby Mason. A Foreign Correspondence (1990) placed four women in this beautiful play about war in El Salvador and the need for the struggle to be communicated to the wider world. It was also a play about mothers and daughters, friendship and feminism. Caroline Parker and I were the two D/deaf members of the cast—Young People’s Theatre always understood and acted on the diversity agenda in a way that the larger companies did not! I loved being with them—so many conversations about ethnic diversity. It was good for me—I started to understand about black women’s experience. And we really talked to each other. We were allowed, actually allowed to be vulnerable with each other. And we were a very, very disparate ­dysfunctional sort of group—quite a funny sort of group: Caroline’s thing was always ‘Where’s my pudding?’; Angela would always say, ‘I can’t believe we’ve got another show!’; Janet would always say ‘I don’t think Libby likes me’; mine would be, ‘Shall we cancel?’. What was brilliant about Theatre Centre was they took us on tour working with such diverse schools, colleges and detention centres. We played to many audiences entirely made up of young men. We were acutely aware of being young women and somewhat nervous about how they would take the play. But they were some of the keenest, most astute listeners and we had extraordinary debates after exploring the world of women soldiers, war as working class fodder and the role of loyalty. Had this been a mixed gender company the conversations (and indeed the play) would have been very different and not allowed us to be empowered in the way we were as an allwomen company. One of my most memorable performances was working with a group of young men in this tiny little prefab and the set was just a simple table and some props, and Angela stood up on the table and she whacked her head

566     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

on the ceiling of the prefab. And she said ‘Ow!’, then she starts to laugh, we all started laughing. And the boys started to laugh—it was a brilliant, brilliant unifying moment. Then one of them said, ‘Can we get on with the show please?’ and bang, off we went, back into the show. I loved dialogue with those young men because together we were a quite formidable force; we didn’t think we had to apologise and they didn’t expect us to apologise for who we were. There was something weirdly wonderful about that day and I think that today, more than ever, young boys need see to see plays with all-women casts and broker conversations. They’re so fucked up now. Well, girls are as well. We really need to learn from the past, what was needed then and think about what is needed now. We were doing brilliant, topical plays and taking them to young people back then and we need to do it again now urgently. At Red Ladder, I was the only disabled actor in the company, the only D/deaf person, but there was a sign language interpreter, Sandra, so she and I signed bits of the play. Caught (1992) was an all-female play about teenage pregnancy, written by Julie Wilkinson and touring to youth clubs in Yorkshire and Lancashire. The Red Ladder process was that as soon as the show came down we went straight to mix with the audience in smaller groups to discuss the issues in the play. Most of these conversations took place outside with everyone smoking (it was the 1990s) and the girls asking the boys to bugger off as they wanted to have their own conversation with us. So—meeting these assertive thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year-old girls who were pregnant, talking to them, talking to their boyfriends. Talking. The complexities of being a sexual young woman, the expectation to have sex, the nervousness to say no, the dead-end desperation of life in these estates, the lack of a good education fuelled the debates and the ones with the boys showed the mix of bravado and vulnerability and desire to talk about all this ‘stuff’ but not sure how to do this with their girlfriends. But having to separate off afterwards and talk individually was hard. I hoped always we’d get a very small group of girls because I would have to lip-read—the interpreter would be off with another group of girls— so I did find that really hard. I was so aware that I was missing important information. I remember this young girl who said that she’d been raped by this guy, he was now inside [in prison] and her mum was going to pay money to hire a hit-man for when he came out. This was a huge disclosure. Then I had a conversation with Sandra, the interpreter, and it was: ‘Oh, my God! I just had a similar conversation with one of my girls!’ We realised that the two girls and their mums were paying the same hit-man, we put them together—but we had to disclose that to

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     567

the youth club. They were important, youth clubs. The demise of youth clubs has seriously impacted on our young people as they were more than just a hanging out space with a good youth leader and Red Ladder— they were somewhere that encouraged critical debate and learning as well as a support network so necessary at such a complex time in those young lives. But as an actor, being in schools or being in a youth club, you have to be good. Most kids don’t give you the time of day if they think you’re rubbish. We were, in some of those youth clubs, very acutely aware that we were women—but we were talking with other young girls and we were also talking with the boys. So, like everything I’ve ever done it was a baptism of fire, of acute emotional and intellectual learning, more emotional than intellectual really. I’m so lucky because all of this fuels your political understanding of the world. I get slightly demoralised when young people want to go to drama school just to be famous. They need to be doing Red Ladder tours to learn about the world. I don’t think they should be allowed on the big stage until they’ve done a Red Ladder tour, until they’ve worked with groups of five-year olds in deprived areas of London, until they see the world we live in. I think it’s crucial, I really, really do. I would give anything for the Theatre In Education (TIE) movement to come back. It would have to be different, obviously but still. I’ve just been talking to Ava Hunt who’s now at Derby University. She’s just taken her students into schools with Peacemaker, which was written by David Holman for Theatre Centre back in 1982. We were discussing how Peacemaker hadn’t changed, how much five-year-olds loved it… it is TIE at its best and I think, you know when we talk about drama being eradicated from the curriculum… oh my God! Oh my God! We as practitioners have a huge responsibility—we have to get back into schools, we have to. All-women productions are immensely important. On my second Red Ladder tour, we were a mix of men and women of diverse ethnicities and class, all together. The small companies did diversity, of course they did, they’ve been doing it forever. But somehow at Red Ladder the two men in our company commanded more attention because of their gender. Back then and, still now, there’s a perceived idea that the men would have something more interesting to say, that men would be more able to conduct an interview. It’s just something about that presence that men have—they just take over and it infuriates me. Women can be competitive with each other but we give each other space but somehow men won’t. They don’t even realise they just do it, whereas women might say, ‘I just want to take over this bit, is that alright?’. There’s a bit more democracy within a group of women.

568     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

I don’t say we’re perfect but we’ve got a bit more imagination, you don’t feel threatened—threatened’s probably too strong a word—but sometimes, with men, you just think anything for a quiet life: you just let them get on with it!

Directing for Graeae—Bent, Peeling, Signs of a Diva and The House of Bernarda Alba At Graeae, I don’t have that problem [of men taking over] in the rehearsal room as there is a woman at the helm, directing. I work with very nice men, very good, very kind men who will challenge me but at the same time if I cast men I cast very strong women, and—within the Graeae sensibility—we have an ethos of respect, absolute respect, equality, everyone matters, everyone has to have their say and we have to work as a team. I’m really clear about that. For the most part, touch wood, I’ve been very lucky with my casts. When I directed Martin Sherman’s Bent (1979) for Graeae in 2004, with its all-male cast, within the company there was some antler-­locking. Every character was played by two people: one disabled man and one D/deaf man, so each of the characters was played by two people. This meant the production could be completely bilingual, one speaking and one using sign language—so then suddenly I had a whole handful of actors; two ‘Max’s would interact with two ‘Rudi’s—there were four people interacting. And I remember one of the cast spoke to me, ‘Jen, this is hard…’. I went, ‘Yes it is, but it really is interesting, it’s exciting’. ‘Yes, but I can’t have an ego’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He explained, ‘Because I’m paired with David. We’ve got to work so closely together—the rhythm, the beat, the timing, share the emotional landscape. I can’t embellish, improvise or play with the timings or have my ego in this’. My response was, ‘Well no, it is an ensemble piece, sharing the narrative of what happened to gay men during the holocaust, so everyone’s ego has to be set aside in response to this and the process’. I think that’s very much the Graeae thing. You can’t be in this world with a massive ego—you need an ego to support your inner work but not an ego that’s going to intrude on the work. [Sealey’s work with this all-male cast on Bent had been preceded two years earlier by an all-women play, peeling (2002), written by Kaite O’Reilly, Sealey’s colleague on A Private View fifteen years before that. O’Reilly’s highly metatheatrical play was inspired by and set in the context of Euripides’ tragedy, The Trojan

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     569

Women, which depicts the impact of war on the women of the losing side. Unlike Bent, where Sealey was applying innovative staging methodologies to an existing scripted play, peeling was a specially commissioned new work, written following a research and development (R&D) period with actors at Graeae. As such, it enabled Sealey, O’Reilly and the company to explore methods of embedding a new language of storytelling into the play’s ‘text’ from the very start. The production was ground-breaking, both in establishing Graeae as a nationally-­ recognised mainstream theatre company and also in terms of its imaginative development of the ‘aesthetics of access’ and inventive deployment of modern technologies, experimenting with methodologies that have since become central to Graeae’s work. Sealey (2018a, 101) explains their approach to the show: We created and projected PowerPoint slides of the text for the first time, using a different font and colour for each woman and a generic font for the Trojan Women chorus. I was mindful that not all D/deaf people find reading easy and… to combat this, Mark Haig… made short films [to follow] each of the ‘epic’ moments, with images that encapsulated the essence of the text. We chose music from Shostakovich, Evelyn Glennie, and other, more obscure musicians. The images were timed with the music. We dared to play with the concept that everyone gets most of the information but not always at the same time.

Lyn Gardner’s review for The Guardian (April 6, 2002) is worth quoting here in full, both for the description it provides and as offering an external and contemporary perspective on the production and what it achieved. It is quite a performance. Alpha [sic], Beaty and Coral are three disabled actresses cast as the chorus in a production of The Trojan Women. They are the ticks on the equal opportunities monitoring form, ‘the right-on extras stuck at the back while the real actors continue with the real play’. Three bickering women marooned behind a screen in ridiculous, huge, crippling frocks. Out of sight and out of mind. But in Kaite O’Reilly’s dense, dangerous play they seize centre-stage. As the story unfolds of the women of Troy who lose their children in the bloody conflicts of men, so in parallel run the stories of Alpha, Beaty and Coral and all the women of the world who weep for their lost children, victims of eugenics and genocide. The central images of the play are a laughing pair of children somersaulting down a hill into oblivion, and mothers who play the Pied Piper and lead their children on a merry dance to death, rather than seeing them slaughtered by an advancing army. O’Reilly’s drama, given a striking and cleverly judged production by Jenny Sealey for Graeae Theatre Company that integrates sign language and surtitles into its very fabric, occasionally seems to hark back to the campaigning feminist theatre

570     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

of a couple of decades ago. But it is saved from being dated or over-worthy by the sheer quality of the writing, its angry wit (‘Crippling up. The 21st century’s answer to blacking up’) and its mixture of the snug and the epic, recipes and genocide. Peeling has all the deceptive simplicity and hopeful despair of a Samuel Beckett play. As in Beckett, the characters are tragic and comic, heartbreaking and ridiculous. As in Beckett the joke is ultimately on us. This is a major piece of theatre from a company that is refusing to be relegated to the sidelines, and it is acted with honesty and terrific chutzpah by Caroline Parker as the uppity Alpha, Lisa Hammond as the beautiful, bitter Beaty and Sophie Partridge as fierce, fragile Coral.

[In conversation, Sealey’s discussion of the piece concentrates on the actors, their vulnerability and her responsibility towards them as director.] Thinking about my responsibilities about putting disabled women on stage, certainly through plays like peeling—any disabled actor they’re putting themselves on the front line because that’s what actors do anyway but if you’re disabled, a physically different actor, there’s like a double barrier because audiences are so not used to seeing difference on stage. Peeling was a massively bold piece. We had our girls, three girls all physically very different [from most of the audience], stripping off to their knickers and vests. I remember having conversations with Sophie Partridge (Coral). She said, ‘Well Jenny it’s alright. It’s okay, we’re different. This is my body… I’m very aware that it might not be aesthetically pleasing to somebody else, but it’s very aesthetically pleasing to me’. Wow! She had the most beautiful speech as her character, Coral, saying ‘My body’s criss-crossed with scars like Crewe Station… I like feeling them… It’s beautiful.’ I love that quote and I can still feel that moment… her sort of bravado and grit, you know, she held it on that stage. I saw her in a David Glass show afterwards with Kathryn Hunter and she’s wrapped up in swaddling clothes and not in her chair and the two male audience members in front of her went, ‘Aah, what’s that—oh my God—What is it?’ And that ‘it’ is a dear friend and a bloody good actress. Fuck them, it so upset me! It wasn’t a play which gave her any power (I did argue with David Glass about that afterwards) but in peeling, she was in command, she was in her chair, and that’s the other thing I have to bear in mind, I’m acutely aware of, even if you play a character that’s vulnerable as a woman on stage, I have to make sure that the actors themselves aren’t vulnerable on that stage. There was another actress of very short stature and there was one audience member—it was a school audience—who made a comment and on the day she wasn’t feeling very brave and it really got to her and she left the stage… it was harassment so quite rightly she left the stage

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     571

and we stopped the show and that’s something I have to always remember to say to my artists—at any point, if you feel threatened or made uneasy by the audience, we can stop the show because we really really care about you but we will then have discourse with the audience about why we have done this. In 2014, the Drill Hall commissioned a one-woman musical, Signs of a Diva. I had worked behind the bar there for many years and had a good working relationship with them and so did Nona Shepphard who wrote all their all-women pantos. Nona wrote the play and she and I directed Caroline Parker in a bittersweet story about Sue Graves—a character who ran a funeral parlour but in her spare time was ‘Tammy Frascati’ (her favourite diva plus her favourite drink)—who told the story of her life and in-­ between signed songs from all the great divas—Tammy, Aretha, Tina, Nina and so on. This joyous show, playing to a room full of women night after night, was a testimony of how much all of us love a good story; the fight those divas had to prove themselves felt very fitting for the three of us and we have revived the show repeatedly in subsequent years. [As we go to press, Sealey’s most recent all-women production is a collaboration with Manchester Royal Exchange of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, featuring Kathryn Hunter as the elderly matriarch, domineering over her 5 unmarried daughters and all-female household. Lorca’s exploration of family and inter-female interaction is something Sealey had been wanting to direct for over two decades even though it is, as she says, a ‘cruel’ play and one in which a single (unseen) male and his sexuality are the focus for all of the women’s attention and energies. Both she and Hunter have expressed concerns about the extent to which the play embodies the oppression of women by women. However, both Sealey and Hunter felt the rehearsal process and performance enabled them to access a more nuanced appreciation of the dynamics and interactions between the women. Hunter (2018, 206) comments: The themes of Bernarda Alba became more vivid doing the show with Graeae. Bernarda locking up her daughters appeared as an act of protection, which many of the disabled actors recognised from their own parents’ actions. Bernarda’s fear of what others might say also appeared in a different light… It felt like Bernarda was justified on one level, wanting to protect her daughters from these assaults on their dignity.

Alfred Hickling (2017) highlights the significance of the production’s interplay between gender, (dis)ability and difference and the relevance of the sensitivities of writers, cast and producing team to the play’s themes:

572     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

It is notable that García Lorca, a gay man in a deeply masculine culture, chose to set his parable [about the rise of fascism in 1930s Europe] entirely among women. The sense of disconnect is emphasised by Jo Clifford, a transgender playwright who has revised her 2011 adaptation to suit the unique capabilities of Graeae, a company of [D/]deaf and disabled performers whose raison d’etre is to embrace and celebrate difference.

Staging the play ‘in the round’ created challenges for the use of projection and surtitles, but was strangely appropriate to Graeae’s inclusive vision, given the architectural form’s unification of cast and audience and its democratisation of the audience experience, bringing all audience members close to the action and creating a space in which no single viewpoint is privileged and everyone attending experiences the action from a different angle. Graeae’s integration of pioneering communication techniques continues to evolve, with the translator, Jo Clifford, herself also a playwright and performer [for further discussion of Clifford’s work, see pages 797–99 in Chapter 34, by Emma Frankland, below], adapting her translation not just to respond to the rhythms of BSL but also to integrate audio description of characters’ physical actions into the spoken text, description ‘so seamlessly embedded into the dialogue that it did not seem like a visual language signifier’ (Sealey 2018c, 194). Hunter (2018, 204) comments on discovering ‘the beauty of BSL, which has a very different structure to spoken English, with tremendous poetic potential’ and adds, ‘It was fascinating to watch Jo Clifford also discover this and re-write her adaptation accordingly. Lorca’s poetic language and BSL made very good bedfellows!’ Hunter (2018, 205) also emphasises discovering ‘that silence is a many-layered country… that silence has rhythm and texture… that speed is not always efficient’, ‘silence – often deemed to be a time when nothing happens – became a country full of atmosphere and events’. Sealey herself is still dissatisfied with her staging solutions here (especially for blind audiences), analysing the failures, acknowledging that ‘finding the perfect balance between creative experimentation and equal access for all audiences is a constant challenge’ (2018c, 192–95). She is keen to address the play again, even wondering about the effect of an all-male production. However, reviewers saw the production as an outstanding success, in which the embedded aesthetics of access are singled out positively as interacting with the play’s themes to ‘take a great play to a new level’ (Gardner 2017), ‘create an extra layer of meaning and interpretation adding to the richness of the text’ (Turnbull 2017), and ‘open several further dimensions to the play’s thematic preoccupations (Shuttleworth 2017). ‘It sums up this brilliantly paradoxical production that when Hunter has the final word, it is not a word at all, but a terse repetition of the BSL gesture commanding silence’ (Hickling 2017).

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     573

London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony [In early February 2011, Sealey was on the tube in Tokyo during one of Graeae’s international collaborations when she received a text message from Martin Green, Director of Ceremonies for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, saying they would like to consider her and Bradley Hemmings as joint artistic directors for the Paralympic Opening Ceremony. Four months later, ‘after six interesting, creative, brutal and challenging interviews’ (Sealey 2018d, 272), the appointment was confirmed. Bradley Hemmings was highly experienced in staging large out-door events and had been director of Greenwich+Docklands International Festival since 1995 (for a full profile of Hemmings see Shenton, 2016). He and Sealey had already worked together. Sealey (2018b, 214) describes him as ‘a genius at fostering artistic collaborations as well as supporting and challenging artists to take new risks’. She is writing here from long-term personal experience: in 2008 Hemmings had ‘inspired [Graeae] to be brave enough to step out from the safety of the black box theatre and into the outdoor arena’ (Sealey 2018b, 214) by brokering a collaboration between them and the Australian physical theatre group Strange Fruit, famous for their outdoor work using 4-metre-high sway poles. Graeae and Strange Fruit had been producing regular joint productions for Greenwich+Docklands International Festival ever since. However, while Sealey and Hemmings himself worked well together, co-­ directing the Paralympic Ceremony was not always easy and brought Sealey up hard against ‘the men in suits’. She frequently felt marginalised as a woman, a practitioner and the only D/deaf person in the organisational process.] Where there’s loads of suits, I’m very quiet—so intimidated by men. I’m very, very intimidated by clever men. I’m alright one-to-one but if there’s a group I really, really, really struggle. It’s very interesting, if I go to a meeting with two male interpreters (which I very rarely do) how I am perceived is very different—the men in the meeting think the interpreters do my job. But if I’ve got two women interpreters, the men see them as my carers. So I have to think about all those things: how I’m presenting myself, who I’ve got with me. Doing the 2012 Paralympic ceremony was brutal, so brutal actually. We had a picture of Miss Landmine Sierra Leone on our wall. There’s a beauty pageant every year in Sierra Leone of women who had their limbs blown off by landmines and when the ideas and group discussion were getting too academic, I would say, ‘Miss Landmine from Sierra Leone, is she going to get that? This is so British and elitist.’ We needed to have something with heart.

574     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

It is the heart that is universal. Sometimes they’d say, ‘Yes, Jenny, I know Miss Landmine might not get that reference – does it matter?’ And I’d say, ‘Yes, it does matter.’ That was one of our battles. It was so hard but we were very lucky—we had a producer called Catherine Ugwu, an extraordinary woman. When it was all over, many of the male directors (not all but a lot of them) got gongs on the Queen’s honours list. Catherine didn’t but she was the one on the shop floor, day in and day out being there for us. I was very aware of my place in the pecking order within the hierarchy. I loved working with the volunteers, loved being with my professional cast. I went to all the rehearsals, learnt all the routines and knew many of the volunteers by name. I like getting involved, getting my hands dirty. Bradley and I complemented each other really really well. I won’t have a word said against him. He’s seriously intellectual, so clever, and I, I am not. I haven’t had the education. For the Opening Ceremony, Bradley and I were equally hell-bent on making sure this was the most equal and diverse, inclusive ceremony ever in the history of time—and it was! [‘Bradley and I don’t do nice, we do story, we do politics, we do narrative. So for the Paralympics we took on “The Declaration of Human Rights”, that was our narrative’ (Sealey, quoted in Duggan, 2017).] And I was working with Charlotte, a young autistic girl, at Orpheus Centre and we were doing The Tempest. We got to Miranda’s bit about a ‘brave new world’ and I said, ‘Charlotte, what do you think that means?’ She said, ‘Oh, she likes people’. I thought, ‘O God, yes – she looks without judging’. And I said to Bradley ‘The Tempest! The Tempest!!’ So we went to our next [Ceremonies Committee] interview for the Paralympics and we talked about ‘brave new world’. ‘That’s what we want – a brave new equal world. That’s what we want our central message to be’. They laughed. And it was just because Danny Boyle was also using The Tempest for his opening ceremony. And here were we, not knowing any of that. In Boyle’s ceremony, the focus was on Prospero and his speech ‘This isle is full of noises’, but for us, the focus had to be Miranda: what we wanted are her words. We had a good balance. We had Miranda (my lovely Nicola MilesWildin), we had Stephen Hawking, we had Ian McKellen, we had Alison Lapper, we had the disability anthem ‘Spasticus Autisticus’. We had Beverley Knight, singing ‘I am What I Am’ at the end. She was fab. Really a lovely lovely woman—fantastic! ‘I Am What I Am’—it was the right ending for that ceremony—and we had Lizzie Emeh from Heart n Soul and Caroline Parker up on that stage singing and signing with Beverley Knight, and we got the girls there, we did. We really did. It feels a long time ago but sometimes it seems like just yesterday.

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     575

Thinking about that thing of women and confidence, after that happened, it was extraordinary; it was hard. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You’re cocooned, you’re married and in love with all those people you’re with because you just, you can’t talk to anybody else outside it and when that’s finished, your world falls apart, weirdly, and everyone suffered from this almighty anti-climax. I crashed very badly and also had to re-earn my right to be back at Graeae because you know they were alright without me so why would they need me back? I had to re-earn my place in the company. All I really wanted to do was to be in a classroom with 5-year-olds. I just needed to feel re-grounded. It took me a long time to get myself back up after that. I’m still not quite sure what happened, but yes, I think that was probably that—I went straight back to work. I didn’t have a holiday.

The Future I was thinking about the issue around women. I had a very lovely conversation with Roxana Silbert [Artistic Director of Birmingham Rep] the other day because I want to do Sarah Kane’s [1999 play] 4.48 Psychosis. In 2020, it will be 20 years since Kane died and in 2020 Graeae will be 40. I want to do it with an all-women cast aged 18, 21, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, eight women, and I want to set it in the domestic domain because mental health is at home. I don’t want to set it in a white box. She said, ‘Oh, do you not want to have men in it?’ and I said, ‘No! No. I just want women. It is a play about anyone’s mental health but I want to do it about women and mental health’. Sarah Kane was only 28 when she killed herself. So young. And it’s about how we learn, are learning. What can the 80-yearold learn from that 18-year-old and what can that 18-year-old learn from an 80-year-old? And about how the intersection of the generations can try and strengthen and certainly empower the young to take on the world, because I still don’t think that we are equipping our young women for this world and we need to because the world is a very difficult place with all this technology and selfies and narcissism and X Factor and all that shit. It’s reminding me of my responsibility as a theatre-maker to take these issues very very seriously. I was working in Sri Lanka, with mothers of disabled children. They were talking to me about how hard it is to get their disabled children to be recognised in society. We think we’re bad here in the UK but there they’re trapped and there’s no support, no nothing. All these women are terrified

576     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

about what’s going to happen to their kids when they die. I asked, ‘What about their brothers and sisters?’ They said, ‘No—their brothers and sisters don’t want to have anything to do with them because they have an impact on their prospects of marriage. What do we do?’ The only thing I know how to do anything about something is to write a play, so I said, ‘Do a play, and do that play for people to inform people about the situation. Maybe that play will be listened to by people higher up able to make policy’. So I went back a second time and started some work with them. I was hoping to go back a third time but then I met the producer Sunethra Bandaranaike, who founded the Sunera Foundation in the UK, and she told me they had gone for it and made and performed a play. All the women and their kids got together and they put on a very big play for the community. The power of women getting together. They just did it. I was so, so proud of them—performing was not something that they do. They realized that was one way of getting their message across. So that was brilliant! Brilliant! I thought, ‘Good on you, girls’. What it takes was their authentic voice. Only they know what’s really going on and how that really feels. I wish I could carry on and try something with a mothers’ group here. I do realise that a lot of my work is geared towards women. Sadly, there’s quite a lot that still throws me in women’s theatre, around disabled women and all the taboos around sex, the expectations, in any relationships, lesbian and straight relationships, because there’s still a lot of assumptions and received notions about all of that. And to this very day I am still cross that Eve Ensler in writing The Vagina Monologues did not include one experience of a disabled woman. When we did it (in 2003) we had 38 disabled women on that stage at the Cochrane Theatre and 6 or 7 women interpreters. It was phenomenal. But the irony was not lost—there was not one disabled woman’s experience in the writing. There’s such a lot of work to be done in and around that. A lot of work. Every time I think maybe I should really move on, there just seems to be far too much to do. With the Arts Council cuts, cuts to Access to Work and the whole crass, brutal Personal Independence Payment (PIP) set-up, it feels like we need to be working faster and doing more. I’ve been at Graeae now for 20 years and I will move on, of course I will, and I was thinking ‘Ooh, I wonder what the company would be like if its next incoming director was a man, how that would shift things’. Interesting. What I do know, and it’s important, is that no matter who gets the next job after me, the company will carry on because really there’s so much we have to do. Right next door I’ve got a roomful of 18–25-year-olds who we’re training up to be the next generation of actors and they’re brilliant—my babies.

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     577

Thank you for allowing me the time and space to revisit the emotional rollercoaster of Graeae and remember the incredible women I have been lucky enough to work with: it’s been a fantastic journey.

Bibliography Fo, Dario. 1991. A Woman Alone. Translated by Gillian Hanna. In A Woman Alone and Other Plays, edited by Franca Rame and Dario Fo, 5–26. London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Publishing. Furse, Anna. 2018. ‘On A Private View by Tash Fairbanks’. In Reasons to Be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 72–73. London: Oberon. Duggan, Ciaran. 2017. ‘“A Red Rag to a Bull”: House of Bernarda Alba - Director Jenny Sealey Talks Challenging Disabled Stereotypes and the Paralympics’. http://www.mancunianmatters.co.uk/content/290176420-red-rag-bull-housebernarda-alba-director-jenny-sealey-talks-challenging-disabled. Ensler, Eve. 2001. The Vagina Monologues. London: Virago. Gardner, Lyn. 2002. ‘Review: Kaite O’Reilly’s peeling ’. The Guardian, April 6. Gardner, Lyn. 2017. ‘Interview: Kathryn Hunter Rules the Roost as Lorca’s Bernarda Alba Makes a Bold Return’. The Guardian, January 24. Graeae. 2018. Reasons to Be Graeae: A Work in Progress. London: Oberon. Graeae. n.d. ‘Home Page’. Accessed August 1, 2018. www.graeae.org. Graeae. n.d. ‘Past Production Pages—Bent ’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http://graeae. org/our-work/bent/. Graeae. n.d. ‘Past Production Pages—Peeling ’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http:// graeae.org/our-work/peeling/. Graeae. n.d. ‘Past Production Pages—Signs of a Diva ’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http://graeae.org/our-work/signs-of-a-diva/. Graeae. n.d. ‘Past Production Pages—The House of Bernarda Alba ’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http://graeae.org/our-work/house-bernarda-alba/. Hickling, Alfred. 2017. ‘Review: The House of Bernarda Alba ’. The Guardian, February 8. Hunter, Kathryn. 2018. ‘On Performing in Graeae’s The House of Bernarda Alba ’. In Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 98–104. London: Oberon. Kane, Sarah. 2000. 4.48 Psychosis. London: Methuen. Lorca, Federico Garcia. 2011. The House of Bernarda Alba. Translated by Jo Clifford. London: Nick Hern Books. O’Reilly, Kaite. n.d. ‘Peeling: Synopsis, Production Details, Reviews’. Accessed August 1, 2018. https://kaiteoreilly.com/work/2017/2/15/peeling. O’Reilly, Kaite. 2002. Peeling. London: Faber & Faber. O’Reilly, Kaite. 2016. Atypical Plays for Atypical Actors. London: Oberon Books.

578     Jenny Sealey, with Clare Smout

O’Reilly, Kaite. 2018. ‘On Working with Graeae’. In Reasons to Be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 105–110. London: Oberon. Red Ladder. n.d. ‘Home Page’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http://www.redladder. co.uk/. Red Ladder. 2015. ‘The Changing Shapes of Red Ladder’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http://www.redladder.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Changing-Shapes-ofRed-Ladder-June-20151.pdf. Sealey, Jenny. 2013a. Shift Happens V. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= nSqE-JRdgfw. Sealey, Jenny. 2013b. uSpark Shorts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= z0tPw3Oovm8. Sealey, Jenny. 2015a. ‘Disability: Casting a Revolution’. TED Talk. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=VFmDNK2GMGI. Sealey, Jenny. 2015b. ‘Sidelined’. TED Talk. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=5i40jb4LJxU. Sealey, Jenny. 2018a. ‘Peeling by Kaite O’Reilly’. In Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 98–104. London: Oberon. Sealey, Jenny. 2018b. ‘People Beginning with B’. In Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 214–28. London: Oberon. Sealey, Jenny. 2018c. ‘Plays Beginning with B’. In Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 184–95. London: Oberon. Sealey, Jenny. 2018d. ‘Unlimited and Beyond’. In Reasons to be Graeae: A Work in Progress, edited by Graeae, 264–79. London: Oberon. Sealey, Jenny, ed. 2002. Graeae: Plays 1: New Plays Redefining Disability. London: Aurora Metro. Shenton, Mark. 2015. ‘Bradley Hemmings: People Love Spectacle, Surprise, Outdoor Theatre’. Accessed August 2, 2018. https://www.thestage.co.uk/features/ interviews/2016/bradley-hemmings-people-love-spectacle-surprise-outdoor-theatre/. Sherman, Martin. 1979. Bent. London: Amber Lane. Shuttleworth, Ian. 2017. ‘Review: The House of Bernarda Alba ’. Financial Times, February 9. Strange Fruit. n.d. ‘Home Page’. Accessed August 2, 2018. http://www.strangefruit. net.au/. Sunera Foundation. n.d. ‘Home Page’. Accessed August 7, 2018. http://www.sunerafoundation.org/. Theatre Centre. n.d. ‘T.C’s History’. Accessed August 1, 2018. http://www.unfinishedhistories.com/history/companies/theatre-centre-3/. Theatre Centre. 2018. Home Page. Accessed August 1, 2018. http://www.theatrecentre.co.uk/. Theatre Centre. 2018. ‘Peacemaker by David Holman’. Accessed August 1, 2018. http://www.theatre-centre.co.uk/shows/1982/peacemaker/.

25  Jenny Sealey of Graeae in Conversation: Gender and Disability     579

Turnbull, Jo. 2018. ‘Review: Graeae Theatre Company: The House of Bernarda Alba’. http://disabilityarts.online/magazine/opinion/graeae-theatre-company-housebernarda-alba/. Unfinished Histories. n.d. ‘Unfinished Histories: Recording the History of Alternative Theatre’. Accessed August 2, 2018. http://www.unfinishedhistories. com/.

Part VII The Twenty-First Century—Around the Globe

Introduction Whereas the previous part focused almost entirely on the UK, these final chapters open out again to explore developments across the globe, including work in India, South Africa, Oman, Australia, New Zealand, North and South America and Europe. The authors of these chapters are a mix of practitioners and academics, many at the start of their careers, looking forward with optimism and determination to a future world which they are campaigning to change. Unlike the Second Wave feminists with their emphasis on new writing and the need to put women’s issues and women’s narratives centre stage, these mainly younger authors focus overwhelmingly on the right of women to claim the classical canon for themselves, casting against tradition or reshaping existing works, challenging the male norms and experiences that have shaped our cultural landscape. These are movements which elide binary gender distinctions and racial difference. Paradoxically, by insisting on equality of representation for those who are female, black, ageing or disabled, these initiatives are taking us closer to a world in which gender, race and ability are irrelevant and individuals are judged without reference to aspects which would previously have pigeon-holed them in restrictive categories. It is thus perhaps appropriate that we end with a chapter which fundamentally disrupts traditional definitions of gender and perhaps even the very premise underpinning this volume. Emma Frankland’s account of the struggles of trans women for recognition on stage and screen,

582     Part VII: The Twenty-First Century—Around the Globe

their use of performance as a political tool and their enforced reliance on self-scripted work and performance art has very clear parallels with the challenges and strategies of Second Wave feminists, as explored in Part VI above. In particular, Frankland’s accounts of how she uses her body as a canvas (see Fig. 34.1) are strongly reminiscent of the 1960s–1990s American performance art detailed by Dorothy Chansky in Chapter 28 or Anna Furse’s early work (see Chapter 29). However, despite these parallels, Frankland too, in line with other female performers discussed in this part, explicitly claims the right to be cast as a Shakespearean hero. Perhaps in the case of trans women we are seeing a speeded-up equivalent of Second, Third and Fourth Wave Feminism compressed into a shorter process. Perhaps a time is indeed coming when all women will be considered eligible for any role, when all have the potential to move from the margins to claim the centre stage. In the opening chapter of this part, Diane Daugherty draws on forty years of fieldwork in Kerala, India, to record the history and practice of the region’s two classical theatre forms, kutiyattam and its seventeenth-century offshoot kathakali. As devotional dance dramas, these traditions survived for centuries relatively unchanged, with responsibility for keeping them alive passed down through matrilineal descent within the temple-serving castes. However, late twentieth-century developments saw non-hereditary practitioners being trained in both art forms and female performers taking part in the previously all-male sphere of kathakali. Daugherty examines these changes and looks in detail at the work of two leading contemporary female performers: Kalamandalam Girija (kutiyattam ) and Geetha Varma (kathakali ). The murky roots of apartheid in South Africa lie in the ruthless land grab of European immigrants who displaced and expropriated the indigenous peoples, overlaid by an inherent racism. The situation was never simply black and white though, but complicated by a large mixed-race population. Democracy reversed the social hierarchies but the place of ‘coloureds’ in the rainbow nation was still insecure. In her chapter, Amy Jephta explores the position and identity of mixed-race performers in the cultural politics of the new South Africa in terms of the naming, placing and embodying of ‘coloured’ women across a variety of contemporary media. Mary Luckhurst highlights the limited opportunities for older actresses, even for those as celebrated as Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench who have received the accolade of being created ‘Dames of the British Empire’. She examines their increasingly outspoken social and theatrical critique of the marginalised place of older women and the determined, imaginative ways they have devised of addressing this, particularly

Part VII: The Twenty-First Century—Around the Globe     583

by creating their own one-women shows or playing celebrities, including the British sovereigns Elizabeth I, Victoria and Elizabeth II and theatrical ‘royalty’ such as Ellen Terry. Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer analyse Lazarus Theatre Company’s modern and experimental production of the first published play by a woman writer, Elizabeth Cary’s seventeenth-century drama The Tragedy of Mariam, bringing together into one discussion a wide range of issues addressed separately in more detail elsewhere in this part. Building on strategies employed successfully in this production, they argue for a specifically feminist dramaturgy that addresses issues of editing, casting, staging and ensemble work to provide a new approach to classical drama. Susan Marshall describes the extraordinary work of director Donatella Massimilla and her team of professional actresses with the female inmates at San Vittore Prison in Milan, placing her account in the context of contemporary theories on theatre as part of a social rehabilitation process. Marshall draws on her own first-hand experience as costume designer for the company, on interviews with those involved and on excerpts from the devised plays. These scripts are developed in workshops within the prison, using an agreed theme or well-known play as inspiration for a production woven from the prisoners’ personal and cultural memories, reflections, songs, poems and even nursery rhymes. These are then performed by the professionals and prisoners together at the Piccolo Teatro, Milan. Anna Kamaralli argues that women of colour are seldom given opportunities to play Shakespeare’s heroines and that the choice to cast such women in leading roles is often a politically charged decision. She offers a brief overview of such moments in the USA and UK, before focusing in detail on Australia and New Zealand and on the recent castings of black women in Shakespeare’s longest female roles, with particular emphasis on Rosalind and Cleopatra. Kamaralli has conducted extensive interviews with the actors concerned and much of her analysis comes directly from the performers’ own opinions and insights. Jami Rogers argues passionately that female performers have only a limited classical canon of their own and should be given the opportunity to play not just Shakespeare’s minor male roles but also the great Shakespearean male leads. Rogers investigates why gender-blind casting of leading roles is such a recent development, explores through personal interviews the experiences of women who have recently taken on these roles, and concludes by refuting the objections of the male establishment to cross-gender casting. Tracy Irish highlights the vital contribution drama practice can make to education around the world in the twenty-first century. Drawing on her

584     Part VII: The Twenty-First Century—Around the Globe

own experiences working on classical drama within schools in India, Oman, Los Angeles and the UK and building on the theories of embodied cognition and Peter Brook’s ‘culture of links’, Irish argues for the importance of theatre practice within education to enable young women to gain confidence in their own identities in a world increasingly shaped by social media and shifting values to challenge the cultural assumptions of a male-dominated literary canon and a patriarchal society. Emma Frankland’s chapter opens with an account of the history of trans women on stage as both performers and characters, with particular reference to John Lyly’s sixteenth-century comedy, Galatea. She continues with an analysis of current representations of trans characters, the opportunities available to trans performers and writers and the public and critical responses. She ends with a detailed account of her own work over the last decade. Frankland argues throughout for the need for authentic and wide-ranging representations of trans women on stage and film, for the requirement that trans characters should be portrayed by trans actors (‘nothing about us without us’) and for the potential of performance as a tool for political change and a medium to give voice to those marginalised by society.

26 Women on the Classical Kerala Stage: The Kutiyattam and Kathakali Traditions Diane Daugherty

Kerala State lies on India’s south-west coast. Many readers will be familiar with it as a tourist destination because this verdant paradise boasts some of the world’s most beautiful beaches. The green of its palm trees and the red, orange, yellow and white of its tropical flowers appear in the make-up of Kerala’s two classical theatre forms: kutiyattam and kathakali. Kutiyattam, a regional variant of India’s classical Sanskrit dramatic tradition, survived in Kerala’s temple theatres. Kutiyattam means ‘combined acting’. The phrase describes several of the form’s conventions. A kutiyattam performer combines a codified sign-language system of the hands, face and eyes with stylized movement and vocalization. When the playwright’s text is staged, there is combined acting—a number of characters appear onstage simultaneously. Finally, and most importantly, kutiyattam combines male and female actors. Some claim that kutiyattam is the oldest continuously performed dramatic tradition in the world. It is difficult to say if women always participated. We do know that a kutiyattam actress caused a literary lovers’ quarrel in the fourteenth century. Kathakali, which has its roots in kutiyattam and Kerala’s indigenous martial art, emerged in the seventeenth century. This highly stylized total theatre blending virtuosic mime, athletic dance, percussive music, elaborate costumes and spectacular make-up was, until the second half of the ­twentieth century, the domain of upper-class Hindu men. After the caste system Diane Daugherty (*)  London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_26

585

586     Diane Daugherty

was legally abolished in 1947, boys of all backgrounds were permitted to train at the arts academies. Indian girls, however, were still restricted to private instruction in their homes or at the rare institution that offered instruction to both boys and girls. It is remarkable, therefore, that in 1975 a group of highly skilled young women formed an all-female kathakali troupe, Tripunithura Vanitha Kathakali Sangam. Family values play an important part in Kerala’s ability to perpetuate ancient art forms, as have political and religious traditions. The maharajas of Cochin (central Kerala) and Travancore (southern Kerala), unlike those of other Indian regions, were not polo players. Their idea of a competition was holding a contest in which one person quoted a Sanskrit verse and the next person had to quote a Sanskrit verse beginning with the same first letter as the one just recited. They were ardent supporters of the performing arts. Kutiyattam and kathakali are devotional dramas and the British, whether operating via the Madras Presidency that governed northern Kerala or via the Regents stationed in Cochin and Travancore, kept their hands off religious art forms. Kutiyattam was further protected by its venues. It played in purpose-built theatres (kuttambalams ) or in halls within the grounds of temples that only high caste Hindus could enter. Similarly, although kathakali played inside only a few temples, it most frequently played on the estates of landed aristocrats or on a stage outside the walls of a temple compound. Neighbours and tenants were invited; the Regent was not. A final factor in Kerala’s ability to preserve art forms for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, is the practice of matrilineal descent by the temple-serving castes. To put it as simply as possible, you are born into your mother’s family and live with your mother throughout your life. This was advantageous for women of the nambiar–nangiar community. Their caste’s hereditary occupation was kutiyattam performance. The women (nangiars ) served as actresses, voices chanting Sanskrit verse, and as musicians, marking the rhythm by striking small cymbals. Men of the family (nambiars ) played a drum (mizhavu ), applied make-up to the performers and arranged stage decorations. Nangiars could travel to and stay at distant temples supervised by their brothers, cousins and uncles. Children grew up exposed to the tradition from birth: during my last trip to Kerala in February 2017 I visited artists whose nine-month-old son is already drumming. Another caste, chakyar, had the hereditary occupation of acting the male roles in kutiyattam. This chapter is an ethnographic study that attempts to bring together and put on record data that I collected during more than forty years of fieldwork in Kerala. It discusses kutiyattam and kathakali training and performance over this period and several of the key female performers. It focuses in particular

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     587

on two women whom I first met in 1988: Kalamandalam Girija (1958–)— kutiyattam—and Geetha Varma (1964–)—kathakali. (Many artists in these traditions use the name of the institution with which they are affiliated or where they received their training as part of their professional names; Girija trained and taught at Kalamandalam.) Both these women, without any intention of being transgressive, were so. Girija was the first woman outside the hereditary performance community (nangiar ) to be trained in kutiyattam, while Geetha only realized that her training was something remarkable when she attended university and told surprised new acquaintances that she knew kathakali. My discussion of contemporary women on the kathakali stage is limited to the artists whose performances I have witnessed. K. K. Gopalakrishnan (2016a, 252–55) presents an enlarged discussion and impressive photographs of women kathakali performers in costume and make-up.

Women on the Kutiyattam Stage: Feudal Kerala, Land Reform and Patronage of the Arts Kutiyattam is the only regional variant for staging classical Sanskrit plays to have survived in India. It is a sustained living practice, not a reconstructed one. In kutiyattam, men and women share the stage—an unusual occurrence in medieval Asian theatre. Kutiyattam is an in-body art. A student must learn the hand-gesture language used to sign the verses sung by the nangiar seated stage right or the dialogue the actor voices herself. It follows she must also learn the modes of chanting. There are stylized walks to master. Exercises, that include rolling the eyes in figure eights, build the facility to act with the eyes, a kutiyattam actor’s most expressive tool. Other exercises tone the facial muscles an artist needs to show the nine basic emotions (bhavas ): love, mirth, sadness, anger, vigour, fear, disgust, wonder and peace. An accomplished actor will communicate the dominant emotion and modify it through tiny movements of the mouth, cheeks, eyes, eyelids, eyebrows and forehead. Three drummers, positioned upstage, accompany the performers. Two men play a copper drum (mizhavu ) whose shape is described by L. S. Rajagopalan (2010, 58) as ‘something like an egg—the broader end up’. A third man plays the edakka, a small drum ‘considered to be a very auspicious instrument’ (Rajagopalan 2010, 1). An instrument of the gods, it must never touch the ground and, therefore, is ‘invariably hung from a peg or a rafter in the temple’ (Rajagopalan 2010, 4). Two women, seated stage right, keep the rhythm by striking small cymbals (see Fig. 26.1).

588     Diane Daugherty

Fig. 26.1  Kalamandalam Girija (c.) with Sajith Vijayan (l.), and Hari Menon (r.) in Trivandrum, 2015 (Photograph by Sreeraj T. ©Sreeraj T)

Just how old is kutiyattam? Some claim a 2000-year heritage for kutiyattam. Others, including me, think these claims are a bit exaggerated. I like to focus on the evident participation of women described in the fourteenth-century poem Unnunilisandesam (A Message to Unnunili ). The poem recounts a misunderstanding that occurred when the poet and Unnunili went to the theatre. Trying to sort things out, the lover messaged his suspicious partner in a poem. ‘Don’t you remember?’ he queries his beloved. ‘We went to the Tali (Siva) temple to see a live drama. That cursed woman, the nangiar playing Tapati, looked directly at me when she delivered her lines in Prakrit—harsh words meant for somebody else’ (meant for the play’s hero, Samvarana, whom Tapati fears loves another woman). ‘Then you began heaving deep sighs and didn’t talk to me for some time’ (Pishorati 1940, verse 99 translated by Rajagopalan). What does this tell us? In the poem, Tapati is embodied by a woman. Starring female roles were, in the heyday of kutiyattam, taken by women (nangiars ). While the play, Tapati-Samvaranam (The Love Story of Tapati [The Sun God’s Daughter] and [King] Samvarana ), is still in the active kutiyattam repertoire, the extract staged today features the hero and his companion, a jester, who speaks in the local language, Malayalam. Tapati does not appear.

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     589

Women performers were not only erased from Tapati-Samvaranam, but from all but two kutiyattam dramas. The sub-genre of kutiyattam, nangiar kuttu, a solo female storytelling performance in which a nangiar plays episodes in Lord Krishna’s life, was also almost erased. In her dissertation on kathakali written at Cornell University in 1934, Emily Gilchrist Hatch (285–87) provides an appendix listing temples in Travancore (southern Kerala) which held annual kutiyattam and nangiar kuttu performances. Today only one of the hereditary performances listed there continues. Hatch included twelve days of nangiar kuttu performances at the Ambalapuzha Krishna Temple in her appendix. In 2006, this series was restored. Three of the performers were hereditary (nangiars); eight, including Kalamandalam Girija and Kalamandalam Krishnendu (1985–) were non-hereditary performers. This revival is ongoing, but the number of days has been reduced to five because of ‘lack of funding from the temple authorities’ according to kutiyattam drummer Kalamandalam Rateesh Bhas (Facebook message to author, September 12, 2017). Six women participated in 2017. All were non-hereditary kutiyattam performers. Over the centuries, nambiar–nangiar and chakyar families were granted land in exchange for conducting annual performances propitiating a temple’s principal deity. The performing families got a hefty share of the produce from this land, cultivated by tenants. In addition, the sponsor of each year’s performance made prescribed payments of money and cloth to the performers. Manuals handed down from generation to generation indicate that the fee a king was obliged to pay when he underwrote the annual performance was more than twice that assessed a high caste Brahmin patron (Jones 1984, 98). Not only were kutiyattam ’s performers feudal landlords, but so were the temples and the patrons. Feudalism in Kerala began to erode at the end of the nineteenth century but was still evident in 1947 at the time of Indian independence. The pensioning off of the maharajas of the princely states of Travancore and Cochin at independence was keenly felt by artists. The Cochin royal family had been ardent supporters of the arts. Any artist who registered had been fed and allowed to perform during the annual temple festival. Geetha Varma (2017) told me that formerly there were as many as eight kathakali stages going at once during the festival. The family palaces in Tripunithura were popularly known as ‘Kathakali Palaces’. Kutiyattam was conducted for forty-one days in the family temple. Just before independence, the Cochin princes had initiated the full staging of an important play that had fallen out of the kutiyattam repertoire. The project had to be scrapped.

590     Diane Daugherty

Ten years after Indian independence, voters in the newly created Kerala State elected a communist (Marxist) government. A series of land reforms stripped patrons, some performers and performance spaces (temples) of the rice-growing land that had financed kutiyattam. Kerala’s ‘land to the tiller’ law, initially proposed in 1957 by the democratically elected communist government, was finally enacted in 1969 and implemented over the next few years. To put it simply, if you had tilled a parcel of land or had lived on a parcel of land for two generations, it was yours. Temples challenged the 1969 land reform act claiming they needed rental income from tenants to function. In 1970, the Kerala courts ruled that temples as landlords ‘could not claim better treatment than human beings’ and would not be exempted (Oommen 1971, 71). Redistributive land reform whisked away any remaining vestiges of the feudal system that had subsidized the arts.

Kerala Kalamandalam and Painkulam Rama Chakyar In tune with the nationalist revival of pride in Indian culture, the poet Vallathol Narayana Menon (1878–1958) and art lover Manakkulam Mukunda Raja established the Kerala Kalamandalam (Institute of the Arts) as a training centre for kathakali in 1930. In 1933, the princes of Cochin donated a piece of land in Cheruthuruthy to Kalamandalam. In 1941, due to ‘financial constraints’, management of Kalamandalam was taken over by the Cochin State Government. In protest co-founder Mukunda Raja resigned his post as Secretary of Kalamandalam (K. K. Gopalakrishnan, Facebook message to author, January 3, 2018). Post-independence in 1957 the first elected government of the new state (a communist government) made Kalamandalam a state-supported academy. The opening of a kutiyattam section in 1965 detached the art from temple ritual and offered training regardless of caste. Appointing Painkulam Rama Chakyar (1904–1980)—hereafter Painkulam—to head the unit was fortuitous. The first chakyar to carry kutiyattam outside temple precincts, he gave an impromptu performance at the home of a nambudiri (Kerala) Brahmin in 1949. In 1956, he staged Subhadra-Dhananjayam (The Love Story of Subhadra and Arjuna ) in a high school. It was broadcast by All India Radio. In 1965, he registered his nephew, also named Rama Chakyar (1950–)— hereafter referred to as Raman—and Sivan Namboothiri (1950–) as his first male students at Kalamandalam. In deciding to train Sivan, a non-hereditary actor, Painkulam knew the can of worms he was opening. Some years earlier

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     591

Mani Madhava Chakyar (1899–1990) had trained his two sons who were nambiars (kutiyattam drummers) to act. When they appeared as actors with their father in a temple performance, conservative chakyars were displeased. As punishment Mani Madhava Chakyar was not invited to participate in the performance cycle in Vadakkumnatan’s temple theatre in Thrissur. One son, P. K. Narayanan Nambiar (1927–)—hereafter Nambiar—became Painkulam’s colleague at Kalamandalam teaching drumming. Together they revolutionized the interaction between the performer and the drum establishing synchronization between the two. Nambiar also precipitated the revival of women’s kutiyattam performance when, in 1984, he published Srikrishnacharitham Nangyarammakkoothu (A Nangiar’s ‘Playing’ of Lord Krishna’s Story—hereafter Lord Krishna’s Story ). Nambiar’s book is an acting manual (attaprakaram ) for a solo performance by a nangiar. The other son, P. K. G. Nambiar (1930–), continued to act in his father’s troupe and is listed in the 2017 directory of active kutiyattam performers published by Sangeet Natak Akademi (Delhi-based academy for the arts—hereafter SNA) Kutiyattam Kendra [Centre] in Thiruvananthapuram. The following incident demonstrates the displeasure some hereditary kutiyattam actors felt about Painkulam’s decision to train Sivan. Ironically Sivan’s caste, nambudiri Brahmin, is higher on the caste ladder than is the temple-serving caste, ambalavasi, to which kutiyattam performers belong. (Sivan has since been awarded the equivalent of a British MBE, becoming Padma Shri Kalamandalam Sivan.) After consulting Guru Kalamandalam Rama Chakyar, K. K. Gopalakrishnan, former director of the SNA Kutiyattam Kendra, messaged this to me (Facebook message to author, November 7, 2017): Again, discussed with Rama Chakyar. He said the following It might be in 1972; anyway before 1975. The temple was Kotassery Siva temple [a family temple] near Manjeri in Malappuram dist[rict], owned by a few local Nambootiries. They have invited both Painkulam and Ammannur [Ammannur Madhava Chakyar] as they wanted to see them both together on stage. Painkulam said it was the time that he should groom his disciple [Sivan] and thus would go only if his students too were allowed to perform. But Ammannur objected to this and said Raman was alright but Sivan was not acceptable. When Painkulam was not ready to compromise, Ammannur said his elder brother (Parameswara Chakyar – Raman’s father) was also against it. Even then Painkulam did not agree. Hence only Ammannur and team went for the performance. […] Ammannur started the program with Purusharthakoothu [verbalization/improvisation on fixed topics by kutiyattam ’s jester]. After the second day’s performance he lost his voice a bit and the next afternoon when he was resting one Karuthedathu Nambootiri [one of the

592     Diane Daugherty

sponsors] remarked to Ammannur [that] had he compromised on Painkulam taking his disciples he need not ‘struggle/stress his throat’ like that continuously.

Painkulam stood his ground on the issue of training non-hereditary students. Before the incident when Rukmini Nangiar (1945–) quit the kutiyattam training programme at Kalamandalam, Painkulam had again stepped outside the hereditary community and, in 1971, invited Girija to join his classroom. She told me (Girija 2017) that she did not face the discrimination that Sivan had. This is probably because Painkulam only asked Girija to perform in ‘safe’ temples like Venganallur where, in 1951, the Maharaja of Cochin had granted the Painkulam family hereditary rights to perform kutiyattam (Chakyar 2015, 119). Two more non-hereditary women who went on to make their mark in kutiyattam joined Girija in Painkulam’s classroom: Kalamandalam Sailaja (1961–) in 1974 and Margi Sathi (1965–2015) in 1976. Guru Kalamandalam Girija is today the senior woman institutionally trained for kutiyattam performance. On February 10, 2018, she celebrated her sixtieth birthday. Her continuing involvement with kutiyattam is well in line with hereditary artists (nangiars ) who still performed/perform at her age. In 1992–1993, I met women older than Girija who continued to fulfil their hereditary obligations to offer nangiar kuttu (solo performance of Lord Krishna’s Story) as propitiation of a temple deity. Sarojini Nangiaramma (1940–), at age seventy-seven, still exercises her hereditary rights to perform ritual nangiar kuttu in three temples. Sarojini was family-trained as opposed to institutionally trained. She only knows the first thirty-five or so verses of Lord Krishna’s Story. Again, I point to Kerala family values which guide a woman of Sarojini’s age to carry on with her commitment to her heritage devotional art form. Younger nangiars who are institutionally trained give both temple and secular performances. In 2007, a Kutiyattam Register was published by the arts institution Margi, which was founded to provide performance opportunities to trained artists and includes both a kathakali and a kutiyattam wing. The Register listed thirty-four women in its section of living female kutiyattam actors. Of these, sixteen were family-trained nangiars who ‘enjoy the traditional right of ritual performance in the temples concerned’ (Venugopalan 2007, 162–72); the other eighteen artists included were institutionally trained. Of these, one is a nangiar who rarely performs and three are nangiars who give both temple and secular performances; fourteen are non-hereditary performers, including Girija and Kalamandalam Krishnendu who give concert performances, in which the performance is not part of temple ritual even though the venue may be a hall on the grounds of a temple.

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     593

Ten years later SNA Kutiyattam Kendra released a Kutiyattam Artistes’ Directory in conjunction with a three-day workshop for all kutiyattam artists held from September 7–9, 2017 in Thiruvananthapuram (‘the place where Vishnu lies on the snake’, Kerala’s capital city). Of the thirty-one female ­artists listed, five are nangiars; twenty-six are non-hereditary kutiyattam performers. With the help of Facebook, I have expanded the Artistes’ Directory. My directory lists forty-four active female kutiyattam performers: five are nangiars, thirty-nine are non-hereditary. Five factors would account for the growth in the number of non-hereditary women artists: (1) an expanded repertoire of roles for women; (2) the publication of an acting manual for Lord Krishna’s Story; (3) the naming of kutiyattam as a ‘Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’ by UNESCO in 2001; (4) the upgrading of Kerala Kalamandalam to a Deemed University for Art and Culture; and (5) the creation of the SNA Kutiyattam Kendra. In 1971, when Girija began her training, there were only two dramatic roles for women in the active kutiyattam repertoire. The first is Subhadra in the eighth-century play Subhadra-Dhananjayam. Every five years, Act 1 of Subhadra-Dhananjayam (The Love Story of Subhadra and Arjuna ) plays for eleven nights in the Thrissur Vadakkumnatan (Siva) Temple. On the ninth night, a curtain is held for Subhadra’s entrance. When it is removed, spectators see a quaking maiden standing on a stool. Subhadra is in the clutches of a demon who has snatched and flown off with her. The demon drops her when he sees Arjuna aiming an arrow at him. Arjuna catches her as she falls from the sky (i.e. jumps from the stool). They take one look at each other and fall in love. The next day Subhadra has the opportunity to give an elaborated performance before she mysteriously vanishes. The other female role in the active repertoire in 1971 was Lalitha—the gross demoness, Surpanakha, disguised as a beauty—in Surpanakhankam (The Surpanakha Act ). (Jones 1984 includes an English translation of the play.) Importantly, Painkulam included Lalitha’s nirvahana (a flashback on past events) in his teaching. In the Vadakkumnatan Temple staging by the Ammannur family, Lalitha has been stripped of her flashback. Here her flashback verses have been shifted to become part of Rama’s flashback. Aparna Nangiar (1984–) (daughter of the current head of the Ammannur family, Kuttan Chakyar [1950–]) acted a portion of Lalitha’s flashback on January 28, 2018, in an annual festival at Ammannur Gurukulam. It will be interesting to see if the Vadakkumnatan staging continues with the truncated role for Lalitha or is now expanded to re-include Lalitha’s flashback. Painkulam restored women’s roles that had disappeared from the staging of a number of plays. He cast his students as Sita in Jatayuvadham

594     Diane Daugherty

(The Killing of Jatayu ) and Surpanakhankam (The Surpanakha Act ); Vijaya in Toranayuddham (The Battle at the Garden Gate ); and Tara in Balivadham (The Killing of Bali ). They also played roles in Svapna-Vasavadatta (The Dream of Vasavadatta ) and Naganamdam (Joy of the Serpents ), among others. Kalamandalam premiered its signature production, an adaptation of the farce Bhagavadajjukam (The Farce of the Saint/Courtesan ) in 1976. In the ‘Garden Scene’ which Painkulam choreographed specifically for Girija and Sailaja, the two women sing in unison, show the hand gestures (mudras ) simultaneously and dance together. There are three roles for women in Bhagavadajjukam (The Farce of the Saint/Courtesan ) expanding the available roles for women. Painkulam taught the entrance piece for nangiar kuttu (chedi purappad ) and the description of the garden in the ‘Vrindavanavarnanam’ (‘Entry into Vrindavana’) episode of Lord Krishna’s Story. He intended to take up Lord Krishna’s Story in detail but died in 1980 before he could do so. In 1981, Girija was given a teaching post in the Kalamandalam kutiyattam department. Raman and Sivan had been given teaching posts in 1976; Sailaja was given a post in 1972. The four taught kutiyattam until each retired aged ­fifty-six, the mandatory retirement age imposed by the Kerala government.

Solo Acting (nangiar kuttu ) In nangiar kuttu, one of the kutiyattam clusters of forms, an actress tells the story of the god Krishna, blending kutiyattam ’s codified sign language systems for the hands, face and eyes with movement and mime. By changing her position onstage, assuming a different stance, and/or adjusting her costume, she plays multiple roles. The performer is an omniscient narrator who describes and then acts out what she describes. One minute she is the demon Alambusa, kidnapping Subhadra by pulling her hair. Repositioning her body, she is Subhadra, in pain, because someone is dragging her by her hair. She recreates demons, divinities, soldiers, sweethearts, animals, even inanimate objects. Characters, objects, and situations travel in, out, and through her body one after the other. Lord Krishna’s Story is an interlude between Acts I and II of SubhadraDhananjayam. At some point, it was extracted from the play and became a separate performance for a nangiar. When Nambiar collated family texts and published an acting manual for Lord Krishna’s Story he hoped, according to his daughter, Jayanthi, to provide a resource for traditional families who were not exercising their rights (duties) to perform nangiar kuttu as

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     595

temple ritual. Nambiar’s manual contains 217 verses. Each is accompanied by a basic explication that gives hints as to how the verse might be enacted. Nambiar did not compose the acting manual. He edited manuals inscribed on palm leaves from the collections of his mother’s and wife’s families. I have held those palm leaves in my hands. He never dreamt the impact it would have on the revival of the form as a concert performance. Using his publication as a guide, a number of non-hereditary women have staged full-text performances of Lord Krishna’s Story. Today, nangiar kuttu is more frequently staged than group acting (kutiyattam ) and is better attended. Girija was the first institutionally trained artist to perform nangiar kuttu. She performed ‘Vrindavanavarnanam’ (‘Entry into Vrindavana’) at Kalamandalam in 1984 (Nambiar, verse 80). She has gone on to develop some half dozen episodes of Lord Krishna’s Story including ‘Kamsashapam’ (‘The Curse on Kamsa’) which she acted in 1988 in response to a request by me and my colleague Marlene Pitkow. The two of us were collaboratively studying an all-female kathakali troupe. We requested any athletic portion of Lord Krishna’s Story. Girija chose an episode that includes a king’s preparation for a hunt. We had wondered if Lord Krishna’s Story had episodes that demanded the physicality of kathakali. Indeed, it does. From the 1980s through to the mid-1990s, two performers, Usha Nangiar (1969–) and Margi Sathi, independently developed nangiar kuttu choreography for all the episodes in Lord Krishna’s Story. They did so in very different contexts. It is difficult to know whether to label the first, Usha Nangiar, as family trained or institutionally trained. She was initiated into kutiyattam by Painkulam in 1979 and officially began her training with Ammannur Madhava Chakyar (1917–2008)—hereafter Ammannur—in 1980. However, growing up in a performing arts family she was inevitably exposed to kutiyattam from her childhood. Usha’s father, Chathakkudam Krishnan Nambiar (1924–2001), was an accomplished drummer in his own right: he was not only Ammannur’s preferred drummer but also worked with Painkulam, whom he considered his best friend (Nangiar 2015). Usha made her debut performance (arangettam ) in December 1979 in the Painkulam family temple at age ten. She played the role of Subhadra and fell from the stool into the arms of Sivan, playing Arjuna. The next morning Sivan and Raman were walking along a lane, when Usha passed by and Sivan joked, ‘I held this girl in my arms last night’ (Nangiar 2015). In 1971, when she was three months into her training, Girija had similarly fallen into Sivan’s arms in her debut performance. Girija applied the make-up for Usha’s debut and played Subhadra in the next day’s performance. In 1980, wearing the skirt and blouse she had received as a present for giving her

596     Diane Daugherty

debut performance, Usha formally became Ammannur’s disciple. In the first stage of her discipleship, Kuttan Chakyar (1950–), Ammannur’s nephew and heir, taught Usha at her home. In 1982, the Ammannur Chachu Chakyar Smaraka Gurukulam—hereafter Ammannur Gurukulam—became a registered society, but the residential model of family-training remained. This institution is based in Irinjalakuda and was where both Ammannur and Painkulam had trained. During her college years, Usha stayed in quarters on the grounds of the Vadakkumnatan Temple in Thrissur during the Ammannur family’s annual performance. By 1988, as the senior student, she was living in Irinjalakuda in the traditional guru/disciple family-training arrangement. In 1989, with the help of L. S. Rajagopalan (1922–2008), I commissioned Usha’s performance of Lord Krishna’s Story in the theatre (kuttumbalam ) of Vadakkumnatan Temple. I commissioned Usha’s performance of another episode in 1990 (Daugherty 2017, 180–81). In 1991, Usha took over performing Lord Krishna’s Story in the scheduled slot in Vadakkumnatan’s ritual propitiations of the deity—beginning the day before the shining of the Rohini star (Krishna’s star) and running for six days. During the next five years, under Ammannur’s guidance, she worked her way through all of the verses of Lord Krishna’s Story. In 1989, Ammannur had theorized that Lord Krishna’s Story ‘was a training piece for a nangiar that should take some two or three years to learn’ and would not allow Usha to omit a single verse in her temple performances of the full story (Chakyar 1989). In recent years, similar full-text performances of Lord Krishna’s Story have now been undertaken by a number of non-hereditary artists. In 1997, Usha lost her caste identity when she married mizhavu drummer Kalamandalam V. K. K. Hariharan (1965–) whose ancestral community (nair ) ranked below hers on the caste ladder. Tradition is strictly followed in the Vadakkumnatan temple theatre and only chakyars, nambiars and nangiars may perform on its stage. Usha was no longer invited to participate in the Vadakkumnatan performance series. That same year she accepted a post in the theatre department of Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit and said ‘yes’ to multiple commissions to present the full Lord Krishna’s Story, giving her the opportunity to reimagine her previous performances in a new context. She also went on to develop further new solo compositions, as will be discussed below. In contrast to Usha, Margi Sathi (1965–2015) was a non-hereditary kutiyattam artist who trained at Kalamandalam. In 1988, Appukuttan Nair (1924–1994) invited her to join the staff at Margi, an institution in Thiruvananthapuram founded to preserve Kerala’s classical arts. Sathi was

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     597

mentored there by Padma Shri Kochukuttan Chakyar (1928–2009) and Appukuttan Nair. Because Margi staged monthly performances, one of which was devoted to nangiar kuttu, Sathi was able to choreograph all of the major episodes in Nambiar’s acting manual for Lord Krishna’s Story. Not only did she continually reimagine her performance of Lord Krishna’s Story, she also compiled verses and published two performance manuals for solo kutiyattam acting: Sriramacharitham (Lord Rama’s Story ) in 1999 and Kannakicharitham (Kannaki’s Story) in 2002. She was creative to the end. Three months before her death on December 1, 2015, she premiered her composition and choreography for Lord Ganesha’s Story. Her performance of this on October 10, 2015, turned out to be her final performance. Both Usha Nangiar and Margi Sathi paved the way for today’s committed nangiar kuttu performers.

Kutiyattam Proclaimed a ‘Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage’ The news that UNESCO had proclaimed kutiyattam a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’ was splashed across Kerala’s newspapers and televisions. I told my friend Sudha Gopalakrishnan, coordinator of the UNESCO application, about my experience on the day after the announcement was made. She remembered our conversation and reconstructed my account as follows (Gopalakrishnan 2011b, 4): On 24 May 2001, I [Daugherty] hired a taxi to go to watch a kutiyattam performance, something I had been doing periodically. But today the taxi driver looked at me differently. “Oh, you are going to watch the kutiyattam performance. You know it has won UNESCO recognition!” The taxi driver, who had apparently never seen a performance himself or heard about kutiyattam before, was proudly informing me that kutiyattam had won world recognition. Kerala, which prides itself on its hundred percent literacy and has a population that reads newspapers and watches television, seems to have noticed its own art form after the UNESCO news.

UNESCO recognition skyrocketed kutiyattam ’s profile. New institutions where women could train were established. Performance opportunities for women were increased through festivals funded by UNESCO/Japan Fundsin-Trust and the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The funds sponsored a number of publications and an international conference was held. These events, post-proclamation, stand out in my mind:

598     Diane Daugherty

1. In 2002, Mizhavu Kalari was founded by V. K. K. Hariharan and his wife Usha Nangiar. Two of today’s prominent female artists, Kalamandalam Sindhu (1976–) and Kalamandalam Sangeetha (1988–) apprenticed themselves to Usha, training in the traditional guru/disciple setup at Mizhavu Kalari. 2. Nepathya was founded in 1998 by Margi Madhu Chakyar (1966–) and his wife Dr. Indu G. (1977–). Nepathya became a registered private cultural institution in 2004. It holds several annual festivals which provide performance opportunities for women. 3. In October 2004, Margi held a nangiar kuttu festival. All of the prominent artists performed. Another aficionado (rasika ) and I agreed that we liked Girija’s performance the best because of its clarity and technical perfection. 4. From November 29 to December 4, 2005, SNA, Delhi, the Government of Kerala’s Department of Culture, and Margi sponsored an Ascharyachudamani (The Wondrous Crest Jewel ) festival. This ninth/ tenth-century play, by Sakthibhadra, has seven acts. Each is performed as a separate entity. Four were preserved by the traditional families; three were revived at Margi using acting manuals prepared by Ammannur. Staging these ‘lost’ acts extended the available roles for women. Importantly, Margi also published the acting manuals making them available to all kutiyattam artists, just as Nambiar’s publication made an acting manual for Sri Krishna’s Story available to any artist. Five institutions participated in the 2005 festival—in alphabetical order, Ammannur Gurukulam, Kerala Kalamandalam, Mani Madhava Chakiar Smaraka Gurukulam, Margi, and Nepathya. Although UNESCO/Japan ­Funds-in-Trust was not involved in funding the festival, the concept of the festival was very much in the UNESCO game plan—that the various training centres join together in the effort to preserve and promote kutiyattam. 5. The Ascharyachudamani (The Wondrous Crest Jewel ) 2005 festival programme announced two solo female performances: Lalitha’s Nirvahana (flashback) in Act 1, Parnasalankam (The Act of the Leafy Hut ) and Mandodari’s Nirvahana in Act 5, Asokavanikankam (The Act of the Asoka Garden). (Mandodari is Ravana’s wife.) Both had been erased from the tradition over the centuries. As I explained earlier, the verses for Lalitha’s flashback in Act 1 Paranasalankam (The Act of the Leafy Hut ) had been transferred to Rama’s flashback, as had those for Lalitha’s flashback in Act 2 Surpanakhankam (The Surpanakha Act ). We know from a surviving production manual (kramadipika ) that historically Mandodari had an entrance piece and flashback in Act 5. The manual (Jones 1984, 133–34)

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     599

gives the first and last verses of the flashback. After a thorough search through the archives of hereditary families, Usha Nangiar determined the verses were lost and sought the help of a Sanskrit scholar to write verses for the flashback. With funding from Maya Tangeberg-Grischin, she premiered Mandodari’s flashback in 2003. Several younger artists, including Aparna Nangiar and Kalamandalam Sangeetha, have now also performed Mandodari’s flashback. (In 1983, Ammannur had restored Mandodari and her serving maid to the final scene in Act 5. They eavesdrop as Ravana woos Sita. However, aside from Mandodari grabbing Ravana’s arm as he is about to strike Sita with his sword, there is not much acting for the two women.) 6. In 2006, an international seminar on ‘Kutiyattam and Asian Theatre Traditions’ was held in Thiruvananthapuram from January 14–15. UNESCO/Japan Funds-in-Trust provided some of the funding. Participants came from France, Germany, India, UK and USA. I had the memorable experience of serving as Conference Coordinator. 7. The revival of twelve days nangiar kuttu in the Ambalapuzha Temple (described above) was funded, in part, by the UNESCO/Japan Funds-in-Trust.

Kerala Kalamandalam Deemed University of Art and Culture Over the years that I have been associated with Kalamandalam (1976– 2018), it has moved from a certificate-granting institution to a Ph.D. granting institution. In the early 1990s, Kalamandalam became a residential performing arts high school. However, the carrot of earning an endof-school diploma while training in an art form did not attract the male students who it was hoped would respond. It did appeal to female students. Kalamandalam Krishnendu (1985–) was one such student. She joined Kalamandalam in 1997 and began the curriculum, based on Painkulam Rama Chakyar’s training programme, but formalized into a syllabus. V. S. Sharma, then chairman of Kalamandalam, has recorded what was covered in each year of the six-year diploma course and the one-year post-diploma (1995, 217–19). During Krishnendu’s studies, the programme was continually upgraded. In 1999, Plus Two was offered and nangiar kuttu was added as a subsidiary subject. In 2007, Kalamandalam became Kalamandalam Deemed University of Art and Culture. The deemed university grants B.A.,

600     Diane Daugherty

M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. qualifications. The imbalance between the number of women and men enrolled at Kalamandalam continues. In January 2018, there were forty-two female students enrolled in the kutiyattam acting programme, but only five male students—these figures include those enrolled in the first year through to and including those pursuing a Ph.D. (Kalamandalam Sindhu, Facebook message to author, January 4, 2018). Throughout most of her education, Krishnendu shared the classroom with male students and learned the male roles—as had Girija, Sailaja and Sathi. Girija has acted Sri Rama, Jatayu, and Ravana. The facial decoration for male characters in kutiyattam is so transforming that it is difficult to discern the gender of the performer. Krishnendu began performing male roles in 2002, playing a male character in Kalamandalam’s popular production of Bhagavadajjukam (The Farce of the Saint/Courtesan ). A year later she acted as Vibheeshana (Ravana’s brother) in Toranayuddham (The Battle at the Garden Gate ). In 2008, she graduated to the role of Ravana in Asokavanikankam (The Act of the Asoka Garden ). Interviewed in 2009, Krishnendu told Leah Lowthorp how empowered she felt performing Ravana: As part of the Kutiyattam M.A. program initiated at Kerala Kalamandalam in 2008, Kalamandalam Rama Chakyar assigned his students the performance of opposite gender roles several times. For one of these assignments, Kalamandalam Krishnendu performed Ravana’s nirvahanam [flashback] in Asokavanikankam (The Act of the Garden Asoka; Act 5 of Ascharyachudamani) over two and a half hours. She described the experience, ‘I have mostly performed women’s roles in Kutiyattam, but I have gotten the most satisfaction from playing Ravana in Asokavanikankam (The Act of the Garden Asoka); last year. […] Everyone came to watch the performance. […] When I take that into account, I get a lot of satisfaction performing Kutiyattam, and one of the reasons I found it so satisfying was because it was nirvahanam [flashback], which allows the actor more freedom’. (Lowthorp 2016, 100–1)

Several years ago, Krishnendu began giving a full-text performance of Lord Krishna’s Story. She is offering this series of performances, at her own expense, in the hall of a temple in Cheruthuruthy. I asked her recently, ‘Do you feel more empowered performing nangiar kuttu (which is also a flashback) than the flashback of a male character?’ She responded, ‘Definitely’ (Facebook message to author, January 23, 2018). During a 1998 interview, Ammannur asked me what I thought of women performing male roles. I replied that it seemed to me that there were any number of female roles that had fallen out of the active repertoire which women

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     601

might revive. I was thinking of the Subhadra-Dhananjayam project for which I was seeking funding. Appukuttan Nair, the founder of Margi, had commissioned Ammannur to provide an acting manual for Subhadra-Dhananjayam, Act 2 (The Love Story of Subhadra and Arjuna). Early in 1998 Rama Iyer (?–2012), who had worked closely with Nair, told me about the manual. That led me to conceive my project—producing Act 2 and staging Subhadra’s Act 5 flashback would extend the active repertoire and add to the roles available for female actors. As a result, with funding from the American Institute of Indian Studies, Margi staged Act 2 in twelve performances between January 26 and September 20, 2001. Usha Nangiar and Margi Sathi acted Subhadra’s entry and flashback in Act 5 between May 6 and September 29, 2001. Margi has since revived Act 2 and Ammannur Gurukulam mounted Act 2 as part of the celebration of the centenary of Ammannur’s birth. In 2003, in anticipation of my sixtieth birthday celebrations, I arranged a research grant for Usha Nangiar to scour family archives for anything relating to female roles. She found verses for an interlude between the celestial maidens and the friends to Tapati, Menaka and Ramba, in TapatiSamvaranam. Usha prepared her own acting manual for Menaka’s entrance and flashback and for a kutiyattam sequence with Ramba for performances on August 12–14, 2004 (Paul 2004). Usha has since restaged this series of performances casting Kalamandalam Prasanthi (1990–) as Ramba. Kalamandalam-trained Krishnendu, Sangeetha, Prasanthi and Haritha (1996–) (names given in order of age) have established themselves as independent nangiar kuttu artists, but often have to shoulder the expenses of staging their performances. The difficulty of finding stages for trained Kalamandalam artists is not a new issue. Usha Nangiar observes, ‘Talent alone is not enough, the artistes should also get more platforms to perform, better remuneration and acceptance. All of these are required for the art form to survive and flourish’ (Soman 2016). K. K. Gopalakrishnan (1960–) seems to have had these very goals in mind when designing the programme that he put in place as Director of the SNA Kutiyattam Kendra (Centre) in Thiruvananthapuram.

The Founding of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) Kutiyattam Kendra The SNA Kutiyattam Kendra was founded in May 2007. K. K. Gopalakrishnan served as its second director from December 1, 2010 to December 30, 2016. I was introduced to ‘KK’, as he is known, after attending a performance at Kalamandalam in late summer, 1992. At the time, I

602     Diane Daugherty

held a Fulbright-Hays Senior Research Scholar Grant and was affiliated with Kalamandalam to conduct a project entitled ‘Nangiar Kuttu from the Temple to the Concert Stage’. KK had asked the State Bank of India, his then employer, to station him at a branch near the Kalamandalam so that he could involve himself in its activities, particularly its kathakali troupe’s performances. He is an informed expert on many performance traditions of Kerala. He has demonstrated this over the years by varied articles that have appeared in the Friday Arts Review of The Hindu, South India’s premier English-language newspaper, and Sruti, a respected magazine for the performing arts. He has recently written a cover article for a special issue of Nartanam that celebrated fifty years of institutionalized kutiyattam training at Kalamandalam. KK’s lavishly illustrated book, Kathakali Dance-Theatre (2016), has been well received. His appointment as director, like that of Painkulam Rama Chakyar to Kerala Kalamandalam, was an inspired choice. He wrote in an email to me on September 4, 2016: I believe that a form like Kutiyattam can be sustained/disseminated only by regular performances in its own land–creating new/more audience across the state as well more performance spaces–and supporting the up and coming up artists to earn something for a living through the art plus support for teaching and learning. Merely presenting/showcasing Kutiyattam in some international festivals or once in a while in cities like Delhi or Chennai is not going to help much for the betterment of its roots. If the form is strong and safe in its own soil, it will sustain and people from outside come in search of it. It cannot be popularized but can be disseminated.

KK’s first move was to set up fortnightly performances at Thiruvananthapuram’s Government Museum which is adjacent to a park where people like to walk in the evening. On the first Wednesday of each month, starting in August 2012, an item from kutiyattam was performed— either a full combined acting performance or a male nirvahana (flashback). The third Wednesday of the month was devoted to nangiar kuttu (solo female acting) and, occasionally, chakyar kuttu (male oral storytelling). Each performance was preceded by a lecture-demonstration to help the audience follow the performance. The remuneration for the performance was relatively generous. Senior nangiar kuttu artists would be paid 20,000 rupees, plus 1000 rupees for the lecture-demonstration. A younger established artist, like Kalamandalam Sangeetha, would have been paid 15,000. The fee for kutiyattam lecture-demonstrations and performances was a bit higher since more artists were involved (Gopalakrishnan 2015).

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     603

KK expanded on this by scheduling performances throughout Kerala which were staffed by artists from the various institutions which SNA Kutiyattam Kendra supports as well as by independent artists, as described in an email he sent to the author, April 9, 2016: At Harippad Koothambalam since Jan 2016 (on the Shasti day, very important at the temple with many devotees coming), Kochi Kerala Museum since March 2016 (on the first Saturday) and Kannur since Nov 2015 (second Wednesday). Program to start on dot time with no speeches or VIPs on stage; just a 10 minutes class on the mudra, a brief lec[ture]-dem[onstration] on the episode under performance focusing on the significant acts/sloks and mudras–only by a practising artist then 75 to 120 minutes of performance of Kutiyattam or Nangiarkoothu. We sponsor the artist’s fee including travel, and the local collaborator has to provide the stage, light and sound etc. enabling me to use more funds for artistic activities.

Another outreach programme was aimed at students in Year Ten of their education. The state syllabus includes a chapter on kutiyattam. Through an informal survey, Gopalakrishnan found that, to his dismay, more than ninety per cent of the teachers who teach the topic and students who learn it had never seen a kutiyattam performance. Working with the Ministry of Education and a prominent union of Kerala State school teachers, between 2013 and 2015 the Kutiyattam Kendra conducted a series of lecture-demonstrations in all fourteen districts of Kerala geared to the material that the students were studying (Gopalakrishnan, email to author, March 2, 2018). Senior artists like Kalamandalam Girija, Kalamandalam Sailaja, Margi Sathi and Usha Nangiar were among the women who participated. It is widely accepted within the kutiyattam world that KK expanded the opportunities for performance, particularly for young kutiyattam artists. As Krishnendu (2017) has noted: [Since K. K. Gopalakrishnan took charge of ] Sangeetha Nataka Akademi’s Koodiyattam Kendram in Thiruvananthapuram … artistes are getting more opportunities to perform. However, we are also creating stages for ourselves for longer performances and creative satisfaction.

Krishnendu founded Natyavedi Ottapalam and is performing Lord Krishna’s Story under its sponsorship. Encouraged by Gopalakrishnan, Sangeet Chakyar (1965–) established Angika which often stages its performances in the same hall attached to Pangavu Temple that Krishnendu uses. Angika celebrated its first anniversary on January 29–31, 2018 by staging Krishnendu’s

604     Diane Daugherty

nangiar kuttu performance of ‘Kamsavadham’ (‘The Killing of Kamsa’), the most challenging episode to act from Lord Krishna’s Story. On the other two days, Balivadham (The Killing of Bali ), which requires five male actors, was staged. Balivadham has a token female role, Tara (Bali’s wife), which Painkulam had reinstated. Persuaded by Gopalakrishnan, Jishnu Pratap (1989–) set up Rangadhwani, a Centre for Kutiyattam. Rangadhwani uses the Haripad temple theatre as its performance space. Between August 26 and September 4, 2017, Rangadhwani staged a nangiar kuttu festival involving five non-hereditary artists (listed in order of age): Kalamandalam Sindhu, Kapila Venu (born 1982 and trained at Ammaunnur Gurukulam), Kalamandalam Krishnendu, Kalamandalam Sangeetha and Kalamandalam Prasanthi. The first local organization to provide performance opportunities for Kalamandalam-trained artists was Mrunmaya, founded by Kalamandalam Girija.

Guru Kalamandalam Girija Mrunmaya Centre for Theatrical Research was founded in 2013, but Girija had been extending the kutiyattam repertoire for many years before that. Girija believes that Painkulam was looking for another play that he could trim, transform and make into a hit like Bhagavadajjukam (The Farce of the Saint/Courtesan  ). While Girija likes solo performances, multi-character plays are more interesting to her. Her work in extending the kutiyattam repertoire has focused on Sanskrit dramas. She chose to stage portions of Venisamharam (Tying the Hair in a Braid ). The title of this play, written ‘somewhere earlier than 800 A.D.’, refers to the refusal of Draupadi, the heroine of the epic Mahābhārata, to bind her hair until it is dipped in the blood of her violator, Dussassana (Bhattacharya 1994, 242). Girija directed Act 1 in 2007 and Act 6 in 2015. I am particularly excited by her latest venture with this play. On July 22, 2017, using the go-to performance space in Cheruthuruthy, Pangavu temple hall, Mrunmaya staged the Act 2 entrance of the queen, Bhanumati (Girija), and her two attendants played by Krishnendu and Kalamandalam Resmi (1990–). I wish I could have been there. Act 2 provides a tremendous role for the queen. I do hope Girija will carry on with this act. She continues to explore the possibilities of kutiyattam. On September 27, 2017, she performed with the famous Bharati Shivaji (mohiniyattam ), and Anil Kumar (kathakali ) to enact ‘Sita Sambhashanam’, a collaboration of the major female portrayals in traditions

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     605

of Kerala. A fuller record of the items that Girija has choreographed, composed and/or directed can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Kalamandalam_Girija. Fortunately, Girija did not experience the heartache that Sivan did as a non-hereditary actor. The only difficulty arose in arranging a marriage for her. Men from her caste background, moosad (a temple-serving caste higher than nambiar–nangiar ), were not interested in a wife who had a job, let alone one as a performing artist. Her father had to look outside her own caste and found Vijayan Nair. They celebrated their thirty-first anniversary on January 25, 2018. Had it not been for Painkulam’s decision to recruit from outside the hereditary caste and train Girija, female kutiyattam would be very different today. Of the forty-four women who are active in kutiyattam performance, according to my database, five are hereditary and thirty-nine are non-hereditary. Girija trained more than half of these forty-four kutiyattam actresses— twenty-three, including two nangiars. With her father’s permission and her guru’s guidance, Girija transgressed social boundaries. She is the pivotal figure in the burst of growth of female kutiyattam artists.

Women on the Kathakali Stage: The Emergence and Evolution of Kathakali Kathakali has its own mythology, a body of legends that deal with its inception, its growth and its famous artists. Eugenio Barba (1967, 37) recounts one legend that purports to explain not only how kathakali, but also krishnattam came into being. Krishnattam, a cycle of plays based on the life of Krishna, is performed daily—except for the monsoon months of June to September—in the Guruvayur Temple: Krishna appeared in Calicut in 1657. He met a high priest and gave him a peacock feather; to celebrate this extraordinary event, the Krishnattam was created… The spectacle soon became famous all through the state of Malabar [northern Kerala]. The Raja of the neighbouring state of Kottarakkara asked the Zamorin [of Calicut] to let him have a troupe of the Krishnattam … the Raja was told that such a refined form of art could not possibly be understood and appreciated in his State. Incensed, the Raja asked the gods to wreak a terrible vengeance. The gods answered in a dream in which they taught him a new form of dance-drama: the Kathakali.

606     Diane Daugherty

Indeed, a prince of Kottarakara, in southern Kerala, did compose eight plays based on the Ramayana. They were designed to be staged on eight successive nights and were, collectively, known as ramanattam (Rama Stories ). Two of the plays written by the Kottarakara prince are variants of kutiyattam plays: Balivadham (The Killing of Bali ) and Toranayuddham (The Battle at the Garden Gate ). There is considerable disagreement as to when the plays were written. Many believe that ramanattam predates krishnattam and is the first theatre form to emerge from kutiyattam. In the latter half of the seventeenth century another prince, also said to have had a ‘vision of a more developed form of theatre’, tried his hand at playwriting (Jones 1983, 21). A Kottayam (northern Kerala) prince, who was a gifted poet, wrote four plays based on stories from the Mahabharata. To allow for plays based on themes drawn from both of the sacred epics, the name of the form was changed from ramanattam to kathakali (story-play). One of the Kottayam prince’s plays, Kalyanasaugandhikam (The Flower of Good Fortune ), is adapted from the kutiyattam play of the same title. Another legend centres on Kaplingattu Nambudiri, a late eighteenth-century theatrical genius. Kaplingattu, so the story goes, was stymied by the problem of transforming human performers into mythological characters: One night he escaped into the solitude of the sea shore where he prayed … and sat in deep contemplation. Looking out into the sea he saw the forms of the gods, demons and other mythological personalities appearing over the waves from the waist upwards. The Kathakali characters are modelled after this divine vision. (Iyer 1955, 54)

Kaplingattu, scholars agree, did improve kathakali facial decorations, but certainly is not responsible for creating the make-up designs. He elaborated upon traditions for decorating the face that had been evolving since kathakali emerged as a theatre form. Many of kathakali ’s make-up traditions parallel those of its parent, kutiyattam. Today, except for the shape of the mark on the forehead, the two sets of make-ups for heroes and divinities match perfectly. This make-up design is called paccha (‘green’) because of the base colour. However, as in kutiyattam, some kathakali characters—for example, Siva—substitute an orange-gold base for the green. In both forms scoundrels who have some redeeming traits wear katti or ‘knife’ make-up. The name derives from the moustache-like pattern which is shaped like a knife. A broad category of facial decoration called tadi (‘bearded’) is used in both forms for ‘demonic characters or characters representing animal traits

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     607

such as Hanuman, Sugriva, and Bali’ (Gopalakrishnan 2011a, 81). The black make-up for an ogress also travelled from kutiyattam to kathakali. Not only did kutiyattam ’s facial decorations for male characters move into kathakali, but so did the hand-gesture language that actors use to sign the dialogue and the facial expressions to communicate the nine states of being (emotions or bhavas ). What did not travel was the mixed cast of men and women onstage together. Kathakali is performed by an all-male cast, traditionally men from a nair background, warriors who trained in Kerala’s indigenous martial art, kalarippayattu. Kathakali ’s expansive footwork is drawn from this martial art. On February 22, 2017, Geetha Varma and I mused on the subject: Why didn’t kathakali inherit the practice of women playing heroines? Geetha is a member of the Tripunithura Vanitha Kathakali Sangam (Women’s Troupe). Formed in 1975 this first ever all-female kathakali troupe—based in Tripunithura, the residence of the Cochin royal family—was started by Radhika Varma (1958–), Geetha’s sister-in-law. All of the members are from castes who were traditionally patrons and performers of the art. Many, including Radhika and Geetha, are members of the Cochin royal family. In the past, wealthy families housed kathakali artists in an arrangement similar to the patronage system of Renaissance Europe. Then and now actors, musicians, make-up men and dressers are typically hired individually and each must travel to the site of the performance. The itinerant nature of kathakali explains, in part, why men play the female roles. A lady walking alone at night to or from a performance is not acceptable in Kerala’s codes for the behaviour of women. In fact, the women of nambudiri households were called antharjanam (‘people inside the house’). Historically many families did not allow women to see kathakali performances—even those held on their own estates—let alone participate in them. Geetha told me (Varma 2017) that in more liberal families women could sit together in back of the audience of men and watch a kathakali performance held as part of the festival for the family deity. Geetha and Radhika were not the first women from their family to perform kathakali. Reading from Menon’s Kathakalirangam (The Kathakali Scene ) published in Malayalam, Geetha recounted the legend of Kartyayani. To paraphrase, three hundred or so years ago there was an actor named Bali Otikkan who specialized in the role of Bali, the monkey king. He was famous for his roar and no actor wanted to play his brother, Surgriva, because their roar could not match Otikkan’s. Kartyayani, an actress known for her portrayal of bearded roles, was drafted to play Surgriva because

608     Diane Daugherty

she was very tall and transgender. (Here Geetha’s eyes roll.) Sadly, when Kartyayani heard Bali’s roar, she fainted (Varma 2017). Geetha was drawn to playing male characters because of the complexity of the roles, her height and the leanness of her face. On February 24, 2017, she and I and her crown travelled the thirty-minute ride by auto-rickshaw from Tripunithura to an important Siva temple in Kochi. Geetha has had a special crown made that is lighter than the one that would be provided by the sponsor of the performance because of an accident she had in 2013. Two young men on a two-wheeler did something silly. They zipped around a bus and collided with Geetha. She fell and hit her head. Lucky for her they were medical students who knew what needed to be done to transport a patient with a potential concussion to hospital. Geetha was in a coma for three months. Miraculously, she recovered and began performing again in 2015. Tonight, she is going to act as Virabhadra, a fierce incarnation of Siva, in the play Dakshayagam (Daksha’s Sacrifice ). I saw Geetha play this role in 1988 when Marlene Pitkow and I split a Fulbright-Hays Collaborative Grant to investigate the troupe. We reported our results in an article, ‘Who Wears the Skirts in Kathakali?’ in 1991. In Kochi, the green room is very different from what it was thirty years ago. Men and women, in various stages of preparation, share the room. In 1988, male actors applied make-up to many of the troupe members. Male actors who were appearing with the troupe in that night’s performance did their make-up separately. As Pitkow and I noted (146): The boys learn to apply the makeup, another important external aspect of creating a character. Three troupe members paint their own faces. The rest must be painted by hired male actors. The women readily admit that failure to learn the makeup is a shortcoming.

When Geetha and I enter the green room, a three-tiered paper frame, applied by a makeup expert, is already in place on the face of Rengini Suresh (1973–) who will play Siva. The papers are set in chutti—a paste made from rice flour mixed with a lime created by boiling seashells. I spent many hours in kathakali green rooms watching male actors paint their faces while doing the research for my doctoral dissertation, so I really enjoy watching a woman performer deftly finish her facial decoration. Geetha begins the face painting for her character, Virabhadra, by drawing numerous black lines on her face. Virabhadra’s makeup features a namen (mark on the forehead) in the shape of a trident, a symbol of Siva. Using the mid-rib of a coconut leaf as a brush, Geetha outlines the trident with

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     609

lampblack paint. The trident starts in the middle of her nose and flows over most of her forehead ending at the hairline. She will later fill the trident with yellow paint. Next, Geetha draws black lines that create a ‘bandit’s mask’ around her eyes. The mask starts just above each nostril, follows the curves of the eye sockets and continues straight up her temples to the hairline. Then, beginning at the base of her nose she draws an elongated ‘moustache’ which also continues up her temples to the hairline. These lines will guide the make-up expert who will embed serrated paper extensions on her face and outline elements of the design with white paste. Geetha’s interaction with the chutti artist is interesting. Her facial decoration includes a large knob that goes on end of the nose. She wants to paste the knob on herself and communicates this to him through the hand-gesture language of Kerala arts because he is deaf. Once the papers and the knob are in place, Geetha is so transformed it is impossible to tell her gender (see Fig. 26.2).

Fig. 26.2  Geetha Varma as Virabhadra, 1988 (Photograph by Diane Daugherty. ©Diane Daugherty)

610     Diane Daugherty

She and the male actor who is playing Daksha are both experienced actors. The male student in training who plays Bhadrakali, another fierce incarnation of Siva, is not. It is very clear in the performance that there are two senior actors and one novice. It is impossible to tell the gender of the performers. On the way home, Geetha does, however, scold herself for not removing her nail polish—a giveaway that she is a woman. The only actor who needs assistance in applying the make-up, other than the assistance of the chutti artist, is Sasikala Netungati (1965–) who plays Sati, Daksha’s adopted daughter and Siva’s wife. (Sasikala, who is not a member of the troupe, organized the performance.) A male actor applies a light beige make-up base and an eye treatment that is an exaggeration of what Kerala women wear in daily life. The chutti artist applies dots above her eyebrows and around the mark on her forehead. This is not a complicated make-up and I am a bit surprised that Sasikala has not learned how to do her own make-up. I am more than surprised by an element of her costume. Men who act the stree vesham (female) roles in kathakali wear a red prosthesis. Previously, a scarf hung around the neck was adjusted to cover the false breasts. Radhika Varma certainly adjusted the scarf to cover the prosthesis in 1988. In the interim, male actors began to drape the scarf so that the false breasts were exposed. Loads of long bead necklaces provide little cover. The nipples on the prosthesis are visible. Sasikala chooses to drape the scarf so as to reveal the prosthesis. The necklaces fall in the cleavage. Neither Geetha nor I like this. It poses a dilemma. Should a female actor who is taking a role played by males who are pretending to be females follow the trends? In the end, I must say ‘yes’ if she is to conceal from the spectators that she is a woman. I must confess that as young researchers Marlene Pitkow and I came to Kerala with our theory packed in our suitcases. As Kathy Foley (2016, 464) explains, ‘Daugherty and Pitkow’s premise— “We expected to find a feminist subtext”—was not the reality’: They found that women customarily give up performing in their twenties when they marry and therefore had little time to mature in an art where actors only begin to reach their stride in their thirties or forties…. Still, Daugherty and Pitkow saw women had the physical and artistic stamina needed to master this demanding art.

The Sangam (Ladies’ Troupe) has allowed three of its members to continue to act into their fifties. The troupe has also absorbed younger women who are trained kathakali artists. These include Rengini Suresh and

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     611

Dr. Haripriya Nambudiri (1973–). ‘Sometimes’, Radhika explained to us years ago, ‘I am tempted not to perform because it takes… [me] away from … [my] children. But … I have to go. The troupe must move forward. It must be there to afford other women the opportunity to perform’ (Daugherty and Pitkow 1991, 141). In 2016, Radhika, the guiding light of the troupe during the last forty-odd years, accepted the Nari Shakti Puruskar award on their behalf from the President of India. This award is presented to eminent women and institutions rendering distinguished service to the cause of women. In 2017, the troupe was given the Mali Foundation Karnashapadham Award. Geetha, like Kalamandalam Girija, had the support of her family when she transgressed social norms. It was, in fact, her mother who suggested that she train in kathakali and Radhika’s father was instrumental in setting up the all-female troupe. As in Girija’s case, it was Radhika’s guru who encouraged her to continue performing and conceived of the idea of forming an all-female troupe so that his student would not suffer indignities like those endured by Charvara Parukutty, the only woman to declare herself a professional kathakali artist and perform in an otherwise all-male production.

The Future of Women on the Classical Kerala Stage Marlene Pitkow and I concluded our 1991 article thus (154): To guarantee the troupe’s survival, TKK [Tripunithura Kathakali Kendra in those days] needs to aggressively recruit youngsters to train and replace members who leave. Then women who wish to continue will be able to perform through their lives.

On February 24, 2017, the same night that Geetha was acting in Kochi, her daughter Aarcha Gowri Varma (1995–) was in Tripunithura performing with two members of the Ladies’ Troupe in Kiratam (The Hunter ): Parvathi Menon (1966–) took the lead role playing Siva disguised as a hunter; a founding member of the troupe, Radhika Ajayan (1965–), played Parvathi in disguise; Aarcha herself played Arjuna. There are three other women in the troupe who, like Aarcha, are in their twenties. I hope they will continue with kathakali and jump the hurdle of performing after marriage and childbirth. Members, who for various reasons left the troupe for a number of years, have returned. Fingers crossed the troupe

612     Diane Daugherty

will carry on so that its members can, like the most famous contemporary kathakali actor, Kalamandalam Gopi, continue to perform into their eighties. I am more hopeful about the future of women on the kutiyattam stage than on the kathakali stage. Of the women in the database of active performers that I prepared, nine are Generation Z—born between mid-1990 and mid-2000. The youngest of these emerging artists is Anjana S. Chakiar (2004–). Among the oldest in this group is Athira Hariharan (1999–), daughter of V. K. K. Hariharan and Usha Nangiar. Most encouraging are the twenty-two millennials born from early 1980 to early 2000. Of this group, fourteen are married and mothers and are performing. They have crossed the hurdle that has led many women to leave the field: the lack of a supportive husband who allows and accommodates his wife continuing to perform kutiyattam. One woman, who will remain anonymous, told me that her new husband forbade her to continue with kutiyattam. She was to be a ‘flower in his lapel’ and nothing more. In February 2017, I asked two unmarried women who have trained at Margi, Margi Amritha (1993–) and Margi Visishta (1996–), if they planned to continue kutiyattam after marriage. They both gave the same answer, ‘If my husband allows’. Margi Amritha is an enthusiastic artist who is juggling a teaching job and involvement with Margi. Margi Visishta is studying for an M.A. in Sanskrit and continuing to perform at Margi. Kalamandalam Sindhu (1976–), a non-hereditary artist, joined Margi in 2007 and participated in the training of Margi Amritha and Margi Visishta. In 2017, she became a part-time teacher at Kalamandalam teaching advanced students, but still retains her affiliation with Margi performing there on a monthly basis. As mentioned earlier, actors in the in-body arts of kutiyattam and kathakali do not reach their prime until their forties. Sindhu exemplifies this. On February 24, 2018, she gave an astonishing performance in Thiruvananthapuram of ‘The Killing of Kamsa’ episode from Lord Krishna’s Story. A tuned-in photographer captured the power of her performance which can be viewed on the internet (Syamlal 2018). With Sindhu in the lead as a performer and teacher and with some two dozen institutionally trained younger women following behind, I am confident about the future of women on the kutiyattam stage.

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     613

Bibliography Amritha, Margi. 2017. ‘How I Became a Kutiyattam Performer’. Interview by Diane Daugherty. February 7, 2017. Anon. n.d. ‘Kalamandalam Girija’. Accessed March 9, 2018. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Kalamandalam_Girija. Barba, Eugenio. 1967. ‘The Kathakali Theatre’. Tulane Drama Review 11 (Summer): 37–50. Bhattacharya, Biswanath. 1994. Sanskrit Drama and Dramaturgy. Delhi: Sharada. Chakyar, Ammannur Madhava. 1989. ‘Nangiar Kuttu as a Training Piece’. Interviewed by Diane Daugherty and L. S. Rajagopalan. July 4, 1989. Chakyar, Ammannur Madhava. 1998. ‘Acting Manuals and Females Playing Male Roles’. Interviewed by Diane Daugherty and P. N. Ganesh. October 5, 1998. Chakyar, Margi Madhu. 2015. Kutiyattam & Kerala Temples. Translated by L. S. Rajagopalan. Athens, GA: Athens Area Arts Council. Cheerath, Bhawani. 2016. ‘Making Art Forms Accessible’. The Hindu, June 2, 2016. Daugherty, Diane. 1985. ‘Facial Decoration in Kathakali Dance Drama’. PhD Diss., New York University. Daugherty, Diane. 1996. ‘The Nangiar: Female Ritual Specialist’. Asian Theatre Journal 13, no. 1 (Spring): 54–67. Reprinted in Nartanam 16, no. 3 (July–September): 89–106. Daugherty, Diane. 2000. ‘Fifty Years On: Arts Funding in Kerala Today’. Asian Theatre Journal 17, no. 2: 237–52. Daugherty, Diane. 2005. ‘The Pendulum of Intercultural Performance: Kathakali King Lear at Shakespeare’s Globe’. Asian Theatre Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring): 52–72. Daugherty, Diane. 2010. ‘Subhadra Redux: Reinstating Female Kutiyattam ’. In Changing Roles and Perceptions of Women Performers in Indian Culture, edited by Heidrun Bruckner, Hanne de Bruin, and Heike Moser, 153–67. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Daugherty, Diane. 2011. ‘A Kutiyattam Wedding’. Indian Folklife 38 (June): 27. Daugherty, Diane. 2017. ‘Nangiar Kuthu: Interference, Intervention and Inheritance’. In Women in Asian Performance, edited by Arya Madhavan, 173– 86. London: Routledge. Daugherty, Diane, and Marlene Pitkow. 1991. ‘Who Wears the Skirts in Kathakali?’ TDR: A Journal of Performance Studies 35, no. 2 (Summer): 138–56. Foley, Kathy. 2016. ‘Diane Daugherty’. Asian Theatre Journal 33, no. 2 (Fall): 459–73. Girija, Guru Kalamandalam. 2017. ‘My Choreographies’. Interview by Diane Daugherty. February 17–18, 2017.

614     Diane Daugherty

Gopalakrishnan, K. K. 2015. ‘Kendra Programs’. Interview by Diane Daugherty. February 11, 2015. Gopalakrishnan, K. K. 2016a. Kathakali Dance-Theatre. Delhi: Niyogi. Gopalakrishnan, K. K. 2016b. ‘Kutiyattam: Fifty Years of Transcendence into a Secular Art Form’. Nartanam 16, no. 3 (July–September): 11–53. Gopalakrishnan, Sudha. 2011a. Kutiyattam: The Heritage Theatre of India. Delhi: Niyogi. Gopalakrishnan, Sudha. 2011b. ‘Kutiyattam: UNESCO Proclamation and the Change in Institutional Model and Patronage’. Indian Folklife 38 (June): 4–8. Hatch, Emily Gilchrest. 1934. ‘The Kathakali: The Indigenous Drama of Malabar’. PhD Diss., Cornell University. Iyer, K. Bharatha. 1955. Kathakali: The Sacred Dance-Drama of Malabar. London: Luzac. Jones, Betty True. 1983. ‘Kathakali Dance-Drama: An Historical Perspective’. In Performing Arts in India, edited by Bonnie C. Wade, 14–44. Boston: University Press of America. Jones, Clifford Reis, ed. 1984. The Wondrous Crest-Jewel in Performance. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kale, M. R., ed. 1936. Venisamhara of Bhatta Narayana. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Kannan, Ettumanoor. 2017. Kutiyattam Artistes’ Directory 2017. Thiruvananthapuram: SNA Kutiyattam Kendra. Krishnendu, Kalamandalam. 2017. ‘Nangyarkoothu Artistes Often Create Stages for Themselves’. The Times of India, July 25, 2017. Lowthorp, Leah. 2016. ‘Freedom in Performance: Actresses and Creative Agency in the Kutiyattam Theatre Complex’. Samyukta 16, no. 2 (July): 83–108. Madhavan, Arya. 2017. ‘Between Roars and Tears’. In Women in Asian Performance, edited by Arya Madhavan, 83–96. London: Routledge. Menon, K. P. S. 1986. Kathakalirangam [The Kathakali Scene  ] (Malayalam). Calicut: Mathrubhumi. Nair, D. Appukuttan, and K. Ayyappa Paniker, eds. 1993. Kathakali: The Art of the Non-Worldly. New Delhi: Marg. Nair, Malini. 2016. ‘Breaking Through Koodiyattam’s Caste-Barriers: Kalamandalam Girija’s Revolutionary Journey’. The News Minute, August 7, 2016. Nair, Malini. 2017. ‘Koodiyattam, Once an All-Male Bastion, Is Increasingly Ceding Space to Female Artists’. The Hindu, July 23, 2017. Nambiar, P. K. N. 1984. Srikrishnacharitham Nangyarammakkoothu [A Nangiar’s ‘Playing’ of Lord Krishna’s Story ] (Malayalam). Trichur: National Book Stall. Nambudiri, Sudha. 2017. ‘Art for Art’s Sake’. The Times of India, November 25, 2017. Nampoothiri, Hareesh N. 2017. ‘New Chapter for Koodiyattam?’ The Hindu, September 21, 2017. Nangiar, Usha. 2015. ‘My Training’. Interview by Diane Daugherty. February 10, 2015.

26  Women on the Kerala Stage: Kutiyattam and Kathakali     615

Oberlin, Heike. 2016. ‘Nangiar-Kuttu: The Changing Role of Female Performers’. Nartanam 16, no. 3 (July–September): 107–34. Oommen, M. A. 1971. Land Reforms and Socio-economic Change in Kerala. Madras: Christian Literature Society. Paul, G. S. 2004. ‘Fillip to Female Characters’. The Hindu, August 20, 2004. Pishorati, Attur P., ed. 1940. Unnunilisandesam. Trivandrum: B.V. Book Depot. Rajagopalan, L. S. 2010. Temple Musical Instruments of Kerala. New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Academy and D. K. Printworld. Santhosh, K. 2004. ‘Koodiyattam Courses Attract Few Boys’. The Hindu, August 30, 2004. Sathi, Margi. 1999. Sreerama Charitam Nangiarammakoothu [A Nangiar’s ‘Playing’ of Lord Rama’s Story ] (Malayalam). Kottayam: Current Books. Sharma, V. S. 1995. ‘Kutiyattam at Kerala Kalamandalam’. Sangeet Natak nos. 111– 114: 217–19. Soman, Deepa. 2016. ‘New Koodiyattam Artistes Need More Stages: Usha Nangiar’. The Times of India, October 19, 2016. Soman, Deepa. 2017. ‘Nangyarkoothu Artistes Often Create Stages for Themselves’. The Times of India, July 25, 2017. Syamlal, V. S. 2018. ‘Kamsavadham’. Posted February 27, 2018. https://www. vssyamlal.com/kamsavadham. Varma, Geetha. 2017. ‘Thirty Years On’. Interview by Diane Daugherty. February 22–24, 2017. Vasudevan, Vinu. 2005. ‘Drawing to a Close’. The Hindu, February 18, 2005. Venugopalan, P. 2007. Kutiyattam Register. Thiruvananthapuram: Margi. Visishta, Margi. 2017. ‘How I Became a Kutiyattam Performer’. Interview by Diane Daugherty. February 8, 2017.

27 Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women in Post-Apartheid South African Performance Amy Jephta

Identities are narratives, stories people tell themselves and others about who they are (and who they are not) … The identity narratives can be individual or they can be collective … can shift and change, be contested and multiple … Constructions of belonging, however, cannot and should not be seen as merely cognitive stories. They reflect emotional investments and desire for attachments … always produc[ed] through the combined processes of being and becoming, belonging and longing to belong. (Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’, 2006, 202)

The central preoccupation of this essay is one that has had and continues to have a profound effect on my own work as a ‘coloured’ female playwright in present-day South Africa. I have repeatedly questioned to what extent my cultural and perceived racial identity speaks to the form and content of my artistic work. This opens further questions around the subjectivities of creating work while bearing in mind the responsibilities of representation. There is an unspoken onus to ‘speak for’ or on behalf of people who look like me and share a similar historical position while acknowledging that there is ‘no single coloured experience, nor any single voice that speaks in its name’ (Erasmus and Pieterse 1999, 168). I have by turns embraced and rejected attempts to define myself through the lens of South Africa’s cultural, racial and socio-political history: the weight of representation and the onus placed on black women to perform their politics are a heavy burden to bear. Here, I attempt to map out these traces of representation in works created by South African Amy Jephta (*)  Screenwriter/Playwright/Director, Cape Town, South Africa © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_27

617

618     Amy Jephta

women about ourselves, with a particular focus on the demographic labelled ‘coloured’—a term that immediately complicates where we are positioned in the landscape of South African politics. The aim is to provide a window into contemporary representation of ‘coloured’ women on the South African stage as well as to provide frames through which to analyse these conceptualisations of ‘colouredness’. South African performance has a rich legacy steeped in protest theatre and resistance to oppression and discrimination. ‘Black’ theatre began to flourish in townships around South Africa from as early as the 1920s with the advent of theatre groups like Methethwe Lucky Stars and the Bantu Dramatic Society reflecting black life, ritual and customs. By the 1950s, theatre in and from the townships thrived while the formalisation of apartheid law saw access to formal venues shrink and a new, subversive breed of ‘protest theatre’ emerge in spaces like the Market Theatre in Johannesburg and The Space in Cape Town. These new venues emphasised non-racialism and allowed performers, writers and directors from all races to participate. In 1964, the Shah Theatre Academy in Durban was founded by Ronnie Govender and Muthal Naidoo, with the inaugurating company consisting of prominent South African-Indian actresses including Fathima Meer, Devi Bughwan, Hassan Mall and Ansuyah Singh (Bose 2009, 366). Companies like Junction Avenue also initiated work that questioned the government and aimed to be a tool for social change, with their performances forming part of the Black Consciousness Movement. The early ’90s saw a move towards participatory, workshop and forum theatre forms while political change and upheaval became reflected in the works of writers of colour including Gcina Mhlope and Fatima Dike. The post-1994, post-democracy period also saw a marked shift in the breadth of content covered by practitioners, as well as the questioning of an identity fractured in the wake of apartheid. In the present day, identity in South Africa remains intangible, subject to ambiguity and multiple interpretations and re-interpretations through the lens of history. While defined in clear binaries by the apartheid government (at least in the bureaucratic sense, albeit with some anomalies), South Africa after the birth of democracy in 1994 heralded the possibility for reinvention. Although racial categorisation has not been completely abandoned— South African citizens are still classified as either ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’ in official identity documents—the conversation around what constitutes a South African identity has seen a distinctly post-colonial shift in society and, consequently, within the performance landscape. For black performance-makers and artists, the new democratic South Africa offered an opportunity to refocus cultural frames of reference beyond the strict confines

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     619

of race labelling. In reality, though, much of the framework of apartheid racial classification and its legacies will take decades to dismantle, amongst these the classification known as ‘coloured’. The apartheid-era emphasis on keeping races apart based on ‘conceived ethnic differences’ (Baines 1998, 1) designated ‘coloured’ as a separate racial category somewhere between ‘black’ and ‘white’. The uneasy categorization placed ‘coloured’ people somewhere in the middle as a group that ‘consequently constituted less defined social, cultural and political spaces within South African society’ (Malimba 2012, 54). Under its sweeping banner, a heterogeneous group of people were classified together based on nothing more than a perceived mixed-race ethnicity. In the words of Zimitri Erasmus and Edgar Pieterse (1999, 168), the term ‘refers to those South Africans loosely bound together for historical reasons such as slavery and a combination of oppressive and preferential treatment during apartheid’. In 2015 and 2016, a wave of student protests and a call for free, decolonized education led to a resurgence in questions of identity politics amongst young black university students. The acceptance or rejection of terms of classification, alongside the semantic complexities of identifying black people in South Africa (variously expressed as ‘Coloured’, ‘coloured’, ‘so-called Coloured’, or simply ‘black’), has further complicated the formation of any singular identities within the country. There simply is no way to present a unified, unsplintered version of what it means to be ‘coloured’ within South Africa, if such a definition is at all useful in a post-apartheid frame. As a departure point, it must be accepted that the identities referred to in this paper are contested, mutable and subject to individual reading. The concept of identity narratives as referred to by Yuval-Davis places emphasis on the evolving nature of identities, the acknowledgement that multiple identities may exist within the same group, that ways of identifying may be contested from the inside. This fluidity of representation is evident in the work of ‘coloured’ female artists and practitioners in South Africa—a shift away from binarisms and an emphasis on the mutability of identity. The appellation ‘coloured’ was a categorisation used in the first instance to divide: the creation of a third racial category in a hierarchy of privilege. In its aims to split the country down racialised lines, this legacy of apartheid continues to have substantial, felt effects within South African society, much of it within black communities. Along with the geographical displacement that formed the cornerstone of apartheid’s policies of segregation, questions of identity have been difficult to dismantle post-1994. While it continues to be used in civil society with little critical discourse, the categorization is now held up to intense and deserved scrutiny by those grouped under its

620     Amy Jephta

sweeping banner. ‘Coloured’ theatre practitioners and artists have by turns embraced and challenged their identity configurations in post-apartheid South Africa, questioning their position in post-democracy and the burden of representation placed upon them. Playwright Nadia Davids (2002, 3) directly articulates this question when talking about her play, At Her Feet, a series of monologues in which various Muslim women grapple with and unpack their identities in a post-9/11 world: I try to address the issue of how it is that I relate to the outside world based on certain identities that have been prescribed. For me it used to be very much a race issue, based on the fact that I am a South African woman who is not white, and not black, but classified as coloured … it has been very much about where do I position myself as a Muslim woman, or as somebody who happens to be born into Islam as a faith?

Davids’ thoughts highlight the onus of representation for many ‘coloured’ female practitioners. She articulates the burden and the responsibility of representing a complex and fractured group of people forced into a single mould in much the same way as playwright Malika Ndlovu (published as Lueen Conning 1999, 15), whose work explicitly battles against imposed definitions by having one of her characters state that being ‘coloured’ is: A frame created especially for you, by someone else. An outsider whose opinion matters more than yours or mine. But it’s not what they see that robs us of our identity. We betray ourselves. We play the part. We stick to what we know, malicious when one of us chooses a life beyond those confines.

Younger, emerging playwrights like Amee Lekas grapple with identity and positioning in more indirect ways: through metaphor and story. Lekas’ play Dans van die Watermeid (Dance of the Water Nymph ) touches on various iterations of what it means to be a ‘coloured’ woman. The work plays with and subverts several tropes of ‘coloured’ womanhood: the sexualised girl child, the bitter spinster, the religious older mother, giving space and voice to characters who often linger on the fringes [In Chapter 12 of this volume, Pam Cobrin explores the use of very similar tropes in nineteenth-century American drama]. Her work consciously sifts through these tropes in an attempt to find a deeper humanity and a nuanced portrayal of the ‘coloured’ identity, placing these characters front and centre in the narrative. These few examples highlight some of the multiple, contested ways in which the ‘coloured’ identity is represented by women performance makers. It also points to the difficulties of transcending race as a black woman in South

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     621

Africa. While this chapter explores other ways in which we have grappled with our contested identities and self-representation in post-apartheid performance, it will attempt to analyse these representations through three keyframes: naming, placing and embodying. It is worth bearing in mind that there is a fluidity between disciplines, spun between what playwright and academic Temple Hauptfleish (1992, 65) has called a ‘continuum of performance forms which range from ritual song and dance to formal classical theatre in the western sense’. Along this continuum exists a series of ‘other’ forms, outside conventional spaces and traditional structures that have filtered into and influenced performance across the whole country. While an existing canon of black female practitioners has grappled with these tangled identities throughout their careers, a new wave of younger artists have fed into and begun to steer the conversation. The spaces where these conversations are most robust are not always formalized theatres or traditional mediums. They exist on new media platforms and in reflexive mediums such as performance poetry and hip-hop—spaces that allow for fluidity. For the sake of this discussion, ‘performance’ is used as a broad catch-all for these forms. Although not working within mainstream forms, poets Toni Stuart and Blaq Pearl, underground lyricist Dope St. Jude and YouTube content creators Kelly-Eve Koopman and Sarah Summers have pushed forward a conversation about how young ‘coloured’ South African women negotiate their identities in a post-apartheid milieu. Alongside these are a wave of women working in more classical forms as playwrights (Nadia Davids, Malika Ndlovu, Sylvia Vollenhoven and Amee Lekas), as actors (Vinette Ebrahim, Rehane Abrahams), and as artists (Bernie Searle). Form is seen to speak to content, reflecting what Edouard Glissant (1989, 28) has called metissage, the creation of a fluid, creolized identity formed through inheritance, reimagination and evolution. However, this creolization also makes it difficult to pin down or summarize a typical artistic form or a singular thematic thread. Ways of being and identifying are the product of individuals as much as country politics, as is typical for an unsettled culture. The ‘identity’ referred to here contains multiplicities and remains in flux, constantly pushing back against itself.

Negotiating Representation: Naming We wear apartheid race classifications like tattoos on hidden skin … Of all these tags that hint at identity, the one that has caused me the most harm is ‘coloured’. Decades of the new South Africa and colouredness is still a daily insurance of being

622     Amy Jephta

marginalised. Reverberations of a heritage of genocide and dispossession. (Sylvia Vollenhoven 2016, cited in Marianne Thamm, Written on the Soul, 2016)

Several performance makers and academics have chosen to reject the term ‘coloured’ for personal or political reasons or have, more directly, addressed its definitions (and redefinitions) in their work. In her play A Coloured Place, Malika Ndlovu pushes back against an assimilation of the term, using the work to ‘def[y] and free herself from the rigid subject positioning of the label’ (cited in Tobin 2001, 10). This rejection, the push back against what is seen to be a rigid and closed definition, has been an essential theme in the work of performance makers. Yet the term itself is a contentious one that demands unpacking. Engagement with identity, culture and race politics in South Africa is by design an unsolvable and complex tangle of ideas and contesting, often contradictory, opinions. It would no doubt be a simpler task to present the broader history of ‘South African women on stage’ without wading into cultural specifics. What constitutes the representation of a ‘black’ experience as separate from a ‘coloured’ experience? Who is to decide on these essentialist readings? What to make of practitioners who consciously distance themselves from the mire of identity politics and choose not to name their work as such? The purpose of grappling with the question posed by Denis-Constant Martin (1998, 523), ‘What’s in the name “Coloured?”’, is not to draw clear boundaries around an identity, but rather to illustrate that these terms ‘are not value free’. And in many instances, the act of interrogating the applicability of the term has also fed directly into the themes explored by performance makers. Wrestling with this mutable identity forms the basis for much of the work discussed here, whether in an overt political sense or as negotiated through an underlying theme or metaphor. Yuval-Davis (2006, 203) highlights Frantz Fanon’s notion of resistance against imposed constructions of identity. She points out that the politics of resistance against such a constructed identity needs to be directed ‘not only at oppressed people’s social and economic locations but also against their internalizations of forced constructions of self and identity’. Ndlovu’s A Coloured Place is seen to challenge these enduring, internalised myths and stereotypes around the ‘coloured’ identity, with the playwright saying about the work that ‘relating myself to the term Coloured has always been a problem for me’ (1999, 7). The characters overtly state their rejection of classification, seen to be a negation of the complexities of their identity. They reiterate in the process that attempting to create or define a homogenous group is simply not possible within the quicksand that is South African

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     623

identity politics. If there is such a designation, as Constant-Martin (1998, 523) has pointed out, it exists only because of classification by the apartheid government. To call oneself ‘coloured’ therefore is, for Ndlovu and others, to identify with and legitimize something imposed upon a population of people. Far more productive, for Ndlovu and others, to disentangle themselves and challenge the forced identity from arm’s length to remain unimplicated in its rigid definition and over-complication around issues of identity. The contestation of these apartheid-era race classifications has similarly seen an urgent acceleration in contemporary South Africa outside of academic discussion. With the global mood shifting towards the monitoring and interrogation of individual identity politics, and the entrance into public discourse of a socially and politically conscious stream of university graduates, notions of what comprises ‘colouredness’ have been put under the lens by a newer stream of practitioners. In a 2017 interview, hip hop artist Dope St. Jude (Kriger 2017) calls herself ‘brown’, a term that feels, for her, to be unencumbered by historical definition—a way of negotiating a safe space to invent and re-invent herself: When I use the word brown it’s a middle ground between my coloured identity and my black identity. It’s difficult for me to intellectualise it, identifying as black in the Biko sense and then also identifying as coloured, coming from a coloured community. But being first generation coloured I understand the dynamics between black and coloured in South Africa.

Similarly, Rehane Abrahams uses her play What the Water Gave Me (2006) to problematize and redefine what it means to be a ‘coloured’ woman, seeking ‘to disconnect Coloured/ness from its historically ascribed labels of “subordinate”, “marginal” and “forgotten”’ (Malimba 2012, 54). In a chapter entitled ‘Don’t call me Coloured’ (2007), Daniel Hammett points to a distinct shift away from embracing racial identities in post-apartheid South Africa. The rejection of this classification surrounds its implied homogeneity, its erasure of solidarity with fellow black South Africans, the entrenchment of division and the furthering of an apartheid-era agenda. In reference to the naming of place in the post-colony, Oliver Nyambi et al. (2016, 9) state that names ‘most clearly reflect the ease with which white superiority inscribed … landmarks or institutions. These names can … survive time and haunt new nations decades after independence’. Although this notion is used with reference to landmarks or physical space, an ascribed labelling by the apartheid government has continued to ‘haunt’ black South Africans.

624     Amy Jephta

However, in some sectors of the community, the identity has come to be adopted and embraced as a distinctive way of living, being and identifying. A sense of agency and pride has accompanied the presentation of performance makers like lyricist Janine Van Rooy (aka Blaq Pearl). Rejection of the identification ‘coloured’ is also seen in some quarters to be a dangerous act. A rejection of the nuanced differences in lived experiences can be read as an erasure of those who choose to associate themselves with this identity. Kay Jaffer (1998, 100) points out that even though ‘coloureds’ share common experiences and points of similarity with our fellow black South Africans: There are critical points of difference … it is difficult to speak for very long about one South African experience, one South African identity … we have to acknowledge the other side of the ‘common’ experience, the ruptures and the differences which make up the South African reality.

For young performance makers, there is now a moment for the r­e-articulation of what comprises ‘colouredness’, if such a term is even useful. Can it be remade, grappled with and re-imagined? Or should it be rejected outright? These problems of naming are inevitable in the aftermath of a history where so much emphasis was placed on categorisation and race labelling. Whilst, on the one hand, holding up the utopian ideal of a non-racial ‘rainbow nation’, there is an inevitability to the re-emergence of a racial discourse at this stage of the country’s democracy. Issues of naming within this identity also exist beyond the word ‘coloured’. In a similar vein, the nomenclature meid holds historical weight as a tool of violence used on the bodies of ‘coloured’ and black women and points to a gendered perspective around naming. Used by Amee Lekas in the title of her play, Dans van die Watermeid, the term is derived from the Dutch meid, meaning ‘girl’ but came to be used as a derogatory and belittling form of address for black and ‘coloured’ women by Dutch colonialists. Meid will also often and interchangeably refer to a prostitute (shortened from the colloquial straatmeid— street girl) or a ‘loose woman’. In my own play, Kristalvlakte (2016), Meid is used as a proper noun for the character Miela, a prostitute—a substitution for her real name, her identity erased by her sexuality. In Lekas’ Dans van die Watermeid, the character Ouma Mildred talks about the daughter, down-on-her-luck, calling home for help. She dismisses her daughter’s pleas with ‘Kaantie, die klimeid loop en wees sleg by Tafelberg se voetenent’ (‘Meanwhile, this loose girl had been selling herself at the foot of Table Mountain’) (2017, 19). Promiscuity and implied sexual deviance is seen to be an erasure of identity in both these

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     625

instances, illustrating an internalised sexual politics with regards to the ‘coloured’ female subject. The confluence of the terms of address hints at sexual violence embedded within ‘colouredness’, where the latter is defined as the product of miscegenation, or ‘interracial sex’ (Malimba 2012, 55). Erasmus and Pieterse (1999, 17) point out that ‘the notion of miscegenation imbues coloured identities with reprehensibility and impurity’, a point of view that normalises black women’s bodies for sexual access and violence with the justification that they are already unclean. Words used to name ‘coloured’ female bodies are thus seen to be closely tied to colonial control and slavery. In her work, however, Lekas later reconstitutes and reclaims the word with the unseen eponymous character of the Watermeid (water nymph). This Meid is, in contrast, seen to be a female deity: a mythological creature who lives at the bottom of a well, believed by the characters to be their ultimate liberator. The Meid reborn as Messiah.

Negotiating Representation: Placing There is a difference between the transplanting (by exile or dispersion) of a people who continue to survive elsewhere and the transfer … of a population to another place where they change into something different, into a new set of possibilities. (Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 1992, 14)

Besides the contestation of belonging to a social and political space, legacies of physical space are intrinsically tied into the ‘coloured’ experience in South Africa. The history of forced removals during apartheid and the racially-charged politicization of public land—ongoing even in contemporary Cape Town city—have influenced not only the content of performance by ‘coloured’ female practitioners but also its aesthetics. Many of the works referenced here have attempted to create a performance language to express this connection to space, the complex underlying politics of being an exile within your own country. Glissant’s notions of transplantation versus transfer, as seen in the above epigraph, sits uneasily with the historical experience of ‘coloured’ people in South Africa. Although it can be read as ‘transplantation’, in Glissant’s terms, the notion of continued survival is up for debate. In many senses, the forced removals during apartheid destroyed much of the existing cultural and social fabric of the community. The displacement of ‘coloured’ and black citizens to the Cape Flats (in Cape Town) and to parts of Soweto (in Johannesburg) demanded a transformation and adaptation to the new landscape. In the process, families were fractured and trauma

626     Amy Jephta

around space created that continues to feed into the creative process. Rehane Abrahams’ work speaks directly to this trauma, stating in the introduction to her What the Water Gave Me (2006, 5) that, ‘The geography I inhabited was one of fissures, fractures, cracks like my grandmother’s body, scarred with the many keloids of open-heart surgery’. Works like Nadia Davids’ Cissie (2008) and Toni Stuart’s 2013 Ma Ek Kom Huistoe (Ma I’m Coming Home) reflect the restlessness inherent in that habitation, the yearning for a lost place: Ma, I’m coming home my heart overflows with yearning and the tears roll down my cheeks like rocks and pull the breath from my lungs I have walked through the skin on the soles of my feet winding through another country’s streets

The above is performed by Stuart in a lyrical, lilting style that leans towards the soothing cadences of a lullaby. Ksenia Robbe points to a similar nostalgia for place in Nadia Davids’ Cissie, a moment where the character Sara ‘feel[s] [her] feet walk and pick out a path [she has] no map for’ and recalls: That stretch of road – I remember passing it when I was very young (always on the way to town) and whispering to my mother in an undertone that it would make a lovely playground. (cited in Robbe 2017, 7)

Examinations of place are almost inevitably seen to be linked to journey, to the migration of the ‘coloured’ subject between worlds, realities and spaces, a nomad in her own country. I’ve spoken elsewhere of the ‘coloured’ migrant figure. As a legacy of apartheid’s forced removals to the outlying Cape Flats, being a black citizen in Cape Town necessitates a daily migration in and out of the city. The economic centre of the Cape remains inaccessible to the majority of its citizens—accessible during the daytime as a place to work, although not as a place to live. This constant transitory state of passing through, unfixed and rootless, is one that has enjoyed thematic

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     627

exploration in Davids’ and Stuart’s work, and is seen again in the work of Rehane Abrahams. Abrahams speaks not only of these journeys being taken on foot, but also by sea. As Baderoon (2014, 68) points out, the sea is ‘haunted by allusions to slavery and capture’. The sea signifies loss, with its connection to slaves brought into or via the Cape across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans: the start of a longer journey for themselves and the generations that followed. The title of Abrahams’ play reflects this quite literally— the bittersweet gift of What the Water Gave Me (2006) is seen to be not only stories of her past and a passage for her ancestors to the Cape, but also the inherited trauma of the sea. Abrahams seems to find the connection between the sea and her ‘colouredness’ unavoidable. To be connected to the Mother City (Cape Town) is to be intimately connected to the ocean and what that ocean means for brown bodies, what it was given as well as what it has taken. Playwright Koleka Putuma harkens back to this same trauma in her work: water is treated as an ‘intimate, bodily experience [and] … a public one, weighted with history’ (Baderoon 2014, 68). In the 2016 poem Water, Putuma writes that: [Yet] every time our skin goes under It’s as if the reeds remember that they were once chains And the water, restless, wishes it could spew all of the slaves and ships onto shore

In both these pieces, water is seen to be a key element in defining an identity. When Yuval-Davis (2006, 199) speaks of the intertwined relationship between location and identity, this is seen to be reflected in the case of ‘coloured’ peoples’ forced removals to areas like the Cape Flats. Location is seen to create a sense of community and belonging, even in the case where such a belonging was imposed or created through man-made intervention, as in the case of forced removals. A sense of place is used to define an identity, the story of ‘how we got here’ feeding into an identity narrative that Nadia Davids (2007, 45) has called a ‘mythologized account’ of space and place. Yuval-Davids (2006, 203) goes on to differentiate between ‘belonging’ and the ‘politics of belonging’—belonging being the feeling of safeness, of ‘feeling at home’, an emotional attachment to a place and context that is often taken for granted—while the ‘politics of belonging’ refers to an ‘imagined community’, the creation of boundaries that makes the differentiation between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ and the continued maintenance of these boundaries. She calls for the separation to be made between these two, as without such a separation, ‘belonging would become destiny’.

628     Amy Jephta

An ongoing questioning around the politics of belonging in relation to space and place—on land and sea—is seen to be one of the key interrogations of ‘coloured’ female practitioners. Questions around place are asked not only to reiterate the social and political location of ‘coloured’ people in South Africa, but also to be critical of an internalisation of this forced identity. Restlessness, and grappling with that restlessness, means the identity can never settle, its positioning never be taken for granted.

Negotiating Representation: Embodying Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. (Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 1997, 347) Perceiving the body as speaking, there exists a conflation of author and performer. In using her body as a vessel that speaks, Abrahams’ Coloured, female, visceral body is posited as part of the text. (Noxolo Anele Malimba, ‘Writing Black Sisters’, 2012, 60)

Through performance, ‘coloured’ women can be seen to engage in an active resistance to and questioning of histories, identities and their own marginalisation. By writing ‘the self ’, they can begin to challenge the narratives around what their bodies represent and locate those bodies within the post-apartheid conversation—to write new stories and ways of representation for themselves, in their own words and gestures. This resistance and re-inscription is to be seen in the work of Abrahams and others. D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera (2006, 12) point to the difficulties and possibilities of performance as a means of negotiating identities: Performance is a contested concept because … we are confronted with the ambiguities of different spaces and places that are foreign, contentious and often under siege. We enter the everyday and the ordinary and interpret its symbolic universe to discover the complexity of its extraordinary meanings.

This ‘interpretation of the symbolic universe’ appears in Abrahams’ work, which foregrounds the body of the solo performer (the playwright) and transforms her into four characters. She uses ritualistic movement, chants and invocations to suggest notions of healing and transformation, for her community, from an oppressed and marginalised identity. The embodiment of ritual is seen here to be a transformative process aimed at reimagining

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     629

her own identity and the singular narrative in which that identity has been locked. Drawing on a ritualistic language that crosses cultural boundaries, from Yoruba chants to props associated with Indian culture and Javanese myths, Abrahams is able to navigate and create her own sense of an identity situated between a variety of diverse influences, claiming the body and making it visible. Gabeba Baderoon (2014, 101) highlights another theatrical performance by a ‘coloured’ woman practitioner which has attempted to shift the visibility of ‘coloured’ female bodies onstage: Mary Hames’ 2007 Reclaiming the P… Word. The play deals not only with making the ‘coloured’ female body visible, but vocal as well. Its central conceit is around reclaiming a word with a loaded political and cultural history. The word poes, a South African swear word used as a vulgar term for vagina, is commonly used within and by the ‘coloured’ community and often as a sort of verbal shorthand for a cultural positioning (for further reading on the etymology of this word and its cultural impact, see Gabeba Baderoon’s chapter ‘Sexual Geographies of the Cape’ in Regarding Muslims, 2014). Hames’ play enters into this conversation and grapples with claiming ownership of and reimagining a violent term often used to enact a form of sexual abuse on the bodies of ‘coloured’ women. By speaking it, shouting it, re-inflecting it and repeating it, the performance aims to disinvest the word of its original powerful positioning and upend notions of words that ‘can’ or ‘should’ be said by women. In Baderoon’s (2014, 105) analysis, the play ‘fashions new meanings for words that have been used to exclude women … [and] draws on silence … and on words spoken too often and with violent intent’. The play also breaks that silence, just as Nadia Davids’ At Her Feet does. In voicing the experiences and lives of Muslim women, voices that often remain silenced or suppressed, Davids offers an opportunity for these bodies to render themselves visible. The attempts of the practitioners mentioned here, to explore the ‘coloured’ identity in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, with all its contradictions and difficulties, continue to feed into a new breed of theatremakers, playwrights, directors and actors. New work continues to grapple with identity through the lens of race and includes the interrogation of gender, sexuality and class, broadening the landscape of what it means to be a ‘coloured’ woman in present-day South Africa. These new directions signal a profoundly more nuanced treatment of identity and potentially exciting new directions for South African performance. Acknowledgement   This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, reference: AH/M008096/1, African Women’s Playwright Network.

630     Amy Jephta

Bibliography Abrahams, Rehane. 2006. ‘What the Water Gave Me’. In New South African Plays 1, edited by Charles Fourie, 16–32. London: Aurora Metro Press. Adhikari, Mohamed. 2017. Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa. Cape Town: UCT Press. Attridge, Derek, and Rosemary Jolly, eds. 1998. Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baderoon, Gabeba. 2014. Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Baines, Gary. 1998. ‘The Rainbow Nation? Identity and Nation Building in PostApartheid South Africa’. Mots Pluriels 7: 1–10. Bose, Neilesh, ed. 2009. Beyond Bollywood and Broadway: Plays from the South Asian Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1997. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’. In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by Robyn Warhol and Diana Price Herndl, 347–62. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Conning, Lueen. 1999. ‘A Coloured Place’. In Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays, edited by Kathy A. Perkins, 13–32. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press. Davids, Leila. 2002. ‘At Her Feet: Interview with Nadia Davids’. Accessed June 15, 2018. http://www.cci.uct.ac.za/usr/cci/publications/aria/download_issues/ 2002/2002_A2_davids.pdf. Davids, Nadia. 2006. At Her Feet. Cape Town: Oshun Books. Davids, Nadia. 2007. ‘Inherited Memories: Performing the Archive’. PhD Diss., University of Cape Town. Davids, Nadia. 2008. Cissie. Cape Town: Junkets Publisher. Erasmus, Zimitri, and Edgar Pieterse. 1999. ‘Conceptualising Coloured Identities in the Western Cape Province of South Africa’. In National Identity and Democracy in Africa, edited by M. Palmberg, 167–87. Cape Town: Human Sciences Research Council. Glissant, Edouard. 1989. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Hames, Mary. 2007. ‘“Reclaiming the P… Word ”: A Reflection on an Original Feminist Drama Production at the University of the Western Cape’. In Feminist Africa 9: Rethinking Universities II, edited by Amina Mama, 93–101. Cape Town: African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town Press. Hammett, Daniel Patrick. 2007. ‘Constructing Ambiguous Identities: Negotiating Race, Respect and Social Change in ‘Coloured’ Schools in Cape Town, South Africa’. PhD Diss., University of Cape Town. Hauptfleisch, Temple. 1992. ‘Post-Colonial Criticism, Performance Theory and the Evolving Forms of South African Theatre’. South African Theatre Journal 6, no. 2: 64–83.

27  Negotiating Representations of Coloured Women, South Africa     631

Jaffer, Kay. 1998. ‘Notions of Coloured Identities in Cape Flats Theatre: A Look at Taliep Petersen’s District Six—The Musical’. South African Theatre Journal 12, no. 1–2: 91–107. Jephta, Amy. 2016. Kristalvlakte. Cape Town: Tafelberg Publishers. Kriger, Themba. 2017. Lyric Word Cloud: Dope Saint Jude. https://www.redbull. com/za-en/word-cloud-dope-saint-jude. Lekas, Amee. 2017. Dans van die Watermeid. Unpublished. Madison, D. Soyini, and Judith Hamera, eds. 2006. The Sage Handbook of Performance Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage. Malimba, Noxolo Anele. 2012. ‘Writing Black Sisters: Interrogating the Construction by Selected Black Female Playwrights of Performed Black Female Identities in Contemporary Post-Apartheid South African Theatre’. PhD Diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban. Martin, Denis-Constant. 1998. ‘What’s in the Name “Coloured”?’ Social Identities 4, no. 3: 523–40. Moser, Caroline N. O., and Fiona Clark, eds. 2001. Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict and Political Violence. London: Zed Books. Ndlovu, Malika [see Conning, Lueen]. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo J. 2013. Coloniality of Power in Postcolonial Africa: Myths of Decolonization. Dakar: CODESRIA. Ngoasheng, Asanda, and Daniela Gachago. 2017. ‘Dreaming Up a New Grid: Two Lecturers’ Reflections on Challenging Traditional Notions of Identity and Privilege in a South African Classroom’. Education as Change 21, no. 2: 187–207. Nyambi, Oliver, Tendai Mangena, and Charles Pfukwa, eds. 2016. The Postcolonial Condition of Names and Naming Practices in Southern Africa. Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars. Perkins, Kathy, ed. 2006. Black South African Women: An Anthology of Plays. London: Routledge. Putuma, Koleka. 2016. Water. http://pensouthafrica.co.za/water-by-koleka-putuma/. Robbe, Ksenia. 2017. ‘An Unfinished Homecoming: Postmemory, Place and New Practices of Politicisation in the Plays of Nadia Davids and Amy Jephta’. Unpublished paper. Schneider, Rebecca. 1997. The Explicit Body in Performance. London: Psychology Press. Stuart, Toni. 2015. Ma, I’m Coming Home. http://badilishapoetry.com/toni-stuart/. Thamm, Marianne. 2016. Written on the Soul: Sylvia Vollenhoven on Being Coloured and Listening to Ancestral Voices. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/201608-18-written-on-the-soul-sylvia-vollenhoven-on-being-coloured-and-listeningto-ancestral-voices/#.Wi9zo7RdKSM. Tobin, Fiona. 2001. ‘Negotiating the Ambivalent Construction of “Coloured” Identity, in Relation to the Work of Malika Ndlovu and the Cape Town-Based

632     Amy Jephta

Black Women’s Writers Collective, WEAVE’. PhD Diss., University of Cape Town. Tormena, Martina. 2013. ‘Coloureds, Griquas and the Body of the Non-White Subject in Zoë Wicomb’s Work’. MA Thesis, University of Padua. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 2006. ‘Belonging and the Politics of Belonging’. Patterns of Prejudice 40, no. 3: 97–214.

28 Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Their Negotiation of Celebrity in the Twenty-First Century Mary Luckhurst

The Stature and Proliferation of the Celebrity Actress As many theatre historians have argued (Braudy 1997; Luckhurst and Moody 2005; Roach 2007; Gale and Stokes 2007; Hindson 2016; Duncan 2016), actresses have been critical in driving forward the social and theoretical models of modern Western celebrity. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, actresses have generated particular and powerful celebrity discourses, deploying their performance skills in public arenas both to create stage and screen roles and also to construct media personae suggestive of their ‘private’ selves. In his impressive study The Invention of Celebrity, Antoine Lilti (2017, 31) observes that in the eighteenth century ‘the celebrity of actors and actresses rests on the interweaving of their person and the characters they play on stage’. Similarly, he notes, spectators of theatre and film today often ‘confuse performers with the characters they incarnate’. In the twenty-first century, actresses’ traversals between stage and screen and their multiple modes of publicity and self-fashioning render analysis more complex, and the disciplines of theatre and film criticism have yet to find shared theoretical languages to interrogate these intricacies adequately. Indeed, it is bemusing that, despite the importance of actresses in contemporary constructions of global celebrity, framings of their roles Mary Luckhurst (*)  University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_28

633

634     Mary Luckhurst

and their individual negotiations of their careers are often still subject to prescribed narratives, sexist prejudice, clinical pathology and odd social constraints. Even today, iconic actresses are all too frequently written about as though they have little or no agency, a poor head for business, and are artistically dependent on their sexual seductiveness, on their husbands, on their male collaborators, or on the ingenuity of male directors. These narrative trajectories can be seen from writings on Vivien Leigh (Edwards 1977), Elizabeth Taylor (Heymann 1996) and Marilyn Monroe (Spoto 1993) right through to the strange erasures of Nicole Kidman’s professional life story (Thomson 2006). Traditionally, dominant discourses about celebrity actresses have followed a convention that invokes genius, destiny and beauty, suppressing narratives about agency, business acumen, strategic decision-making, the articulation of acting as a craft and the judicious cultivation of a professional career— as though intellectual acuity, discussion of craft and resourcefulness might actually do harm to a famous actress’s profile. In a further twist, theorists in the discipline of celebrity studies have been reluctant to study the celebrity performer as a progenitor of celebrity discourses. This is because celebrity studies have tended to focus heavily on the politics of material production within film and the media and marginalises live performance. The result is that, unfortunately, the actress tends to be reduced to a semiotic, a body devoid of cognition who is mistakenly assumed to have little impact on creative politics and product (Marshall 2006; Redmond and Holmes 2007). Mature actresses suffer from even greater social and cultural prejudices connected with stigmas about the ageing female body, with reductive, stereotypical constructions of the older female in Western art forms and without the right to a choice of substantial and challenging roles. In this chapter, I examine the strategies that celebrity actresses have deployed to negotiate their ascendency and the nature of some of the problems that they have sought to overcome. The tendency to marginalise women’s acting expertise and downplay strategic career management is now being substantially challenged by actresses. This is particularly true of mature celebrity actresses who are taking the opportunity to speak more openly about their craft, involve themselves more in the creation of roles and insist on the development of more nuanced roles. Eileen Atkins, for example (quoted in Barber 2017), has been forceful about unapologetically privileging career and self and fighting English class and gender prejudice: ‘People look down their noses at the word “ambition”—and especially when applied to women. But I was ambitious and I don’t see anything wrong in that. I know some people who think that you’re not quite a woman if you’re

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     635

ambitious. Not me.’ Older actresses are also more vocal about industry attitudes to women, challenges they have overcome in their working and domestic lives and their reasons for selecting the roles they perform. The hinterland to this greater openness is complex. First, it is now accepted that the limited repertoire of substantial classical roles for women in theatre has generated a significant problem for all actresses—but especially mature actresses. Second, older generations of actors are less fearful that discussing their craft and the vicissitudes of their career might have negative repercussions on their employment prospects. This anxiety was a hangover from the days when conservatoires and drama schools were more of a rarity and were treated with a degree of suspicion by practitioners who had trained through an apprenticeship system (Sinden 2011). Thirdly, there is now significant intolerance of the failures to award celebrity actresses equal pay with their male co-stars and of the lack of industry commitment to diversity and gender inclusion. These issues have attracted conspicuous worldwide protest from actresses of all ages and brought about the foundation of influential websites such as Women and Hollywood (womenandhollywood.com). For Melissa Silverstein, the founder and publisher of Women and Hollywood and advocate for gender pay parity, it is clear that a new era of zero tolerance has been reached: women ‘are taking power into their own hands and saying, “You’re not going to get away with this”. […] I don’t think people want to be on the wrong side of this issue moving forward’ (quoted in Robehmed 2018). Kathleen Turner, Jennifer Lawrence, Uma Thurman, Nicole Kidman, Claire Foy, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep are among hundreds of actresses who have voiced sharp criticism of the inequitable power balance in the entertainment industries. Lawrence went public about her own experience of sexist pay politics and has stated that it was the advocacy of other high profile actresses which finally enabled her to have the confidence to insist on equal financial reward for her most recent roles (Robehmed 2018). Last but not least, the unprecedented global impact of the #MeToo movement since 2017 has empowered high profile actresses the world over to speak out vociferously against sexism, harassment and the institutionalised marginalisation of women in the theatre and screen industries. Significant numbers of mature actresses who did not identify with feminism and the equal rights movement of the 1970s and 1980s are now addressing the subject of women’s rights or seeking to share their negative career experiences for the benefit of other women. A prominent example of this phenomenon is the veteran political activist, Jane Fonda, who declared that it had taken her thirty years to understand feminism and that she has

636     Mary Luckhurst

moved from a position of ‘viewing women’s issues as a distraction to the realisation that women are the issue, the core issue’ (Perraudin 2016). Fonda has described how she began to identify herself publicly as a feminist, ‘although it would be many years before I would look within myself and locate the multiple ways in which I had internalised sexism and the profound damage that it had done to me. […] When I turned sixty and entered my third and final act, I decided that I needed to heal the wounds that patriarchy had dealt me’ (Perraudin 2016). I am not suggesting that mature actresses have all embraced feminism en masse or that they have become women’s rights activists, but many are using the phenomenon of their celebrity visibility to campaign for the need to recognise and respect actresses for being the serious, highly skilled professionals that they are, and they increasingly do so by elaborating on their own craft and career experiences. Nor am I suggesting that actresses have not hitherto talked or written about their craft. However, until relatively recently their labour was not ascribed the same cultural value as a male actor’s work. Eileen Atkins recognised this in her project to disseminate parts of Ellen Terry’s largely forgotten lectures on playing women’s roles in Shakespeare (Terry 1932). Atkins gave this much-acclaimed one-woman show, titled Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins, at London’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2016. Hailed as the greatest Shakespearean actress of her era (1847–1928), Dame Ellen Terry’s reflections on the craft of interpreting Shakespeare’s women were famous at the time but have not been accorded the same critical standing as the ruminations of her grandson John Gielgud, of Laurence Olivier or of Michael Redgrave—all of whose reflections have been promoted vigorously and are understood to form an important part of the legacy of the British heritage industry. In Britain, the recognition that certain mature actresses have assumed extraordinary cultural status is symbolised by the plethora of DBEs, damehoods for services to acting, that have been conferred since the late 1980s. In the hierarchy of the dames, currently overwhelmingly white, Judi Dench has a special place since she won The Stage ’s public and professional industry vote for the ‘greatest stage actor of all time’, Maggie Smith coming second, and between them beating Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud into fifth and seventh place respectively. The recent list of actress dames includes: Judi Dench 1988, Maggie Smith 1990, Diana Rigg 1994, Elizabeth Taylor 2000, Julie Andrews 2000, Eileen Atkins 2001, Helen Mirren 2003, Harriet Walter 2011, Angela Lansbury 2014, Penelope Keith 2014, Kristin Scott Thomas 2015, Sian Phillips 2016, Penelope Wilton 2016, Patricia Routledge 2017, June Whitfield 2017 and Julie Walters 2017; Vanessa Redgrave

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     637

famously refused her damehood because of her political beliefs. Of course, these damehoods have in themselves created an aristocracy of expert actresses in unprecedented numbers and are an important ideological component in ensuring that the craft of performing is explicitly connected to stage acting and celebrated as part of a British post-imperial theatrical heritage. Significantly, all on this list, except for Elizabeth Taylor, have strong profiles in stage acting even if their global celebrity is owed to their screen performances. Taylor desperately wanted the kudos of theatrical glory and her performances in film adaptations of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and of the adaptation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) suggested brilliance (Dorney and Gale 2018). But her later stage endeavours in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1981) and the closure of her own theatre company after only one production, Noel Coward’s Private Lives (1983), in which she was reunited with Richard Burton, were ultimately testament to a lack of the requisite stage experience needed for live performance and of a greater public interest in how the two stars’ private lives might play out on stage. One New York critic (Brenner 1983) praised Taylor’s ‘canny exploitation in bringing out the crowds’ but her lack of theatrical technique was exposed and the risk of further public humiliation too great following harsh reviews from London critics. She subsequently focused on screen appearances. Taylor’s desire to conquer stage as well as film audiences was a strategic recognition that theatrical success lends a distinctive prestige to the celebrity actress because it is regarded as a greater risk, requires a different range of virtuosic skills and because in London’s West End and on Broadway treading the boards is still associated with a more authentic proof of acting ability. Live performances also play on the illusionistic fetish of intimacy conjured by the celebrity performer and reignite the discourses of dazzling expertise, mesmerism and mystery which are a vital part of narratives of famous actresses (Goodall 2008; Dyer 2004; Dyer and McDonald 1998). British dames make an interesting study because the regard and elevation of these older stars is less to do with sexual voyeurism and the publicity around their private lives and more to do with the high esteem in which they are held for sustaining excellence in their craft, an appreciation of their unique skills, a fascination with certain performances and the versatility and inventiveness shown in their rendition of roles. They are loved and venerated and their status explodes the stigma surrounding ageing women and invisibility. It is also apparent that some dames have become increasingly conscious of their potential for communicating to other women. Roger Michell’s documentary Nothing Like a Dame, which was released

638     Mary Luckhurst

in cinemas as Tea with the Dames in 2018 and starred Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, Maggie Smith and Joan Plowright as themselves, conveys messages of stamina, courage, self-sufficiency, discipline and resilience in an era which still overwhelmingly silences and undervalues older women. The bawdy humour, battles with health, anger and amusement at their treatment as older women and their poignant recollections of difficult times in their careers make for gripping viewing. Staged as a chat over that most English institution, afternoon tea, these are shrewd and consummate performances which took critics by surprise. Tellingly, many reviewers, women and men, assumed that the outcome of such an endeavour would be embarrassing and dull. Their underestimation of the same women they frequently describe as national treasures underlines the insidious power of the mature female stereotype and of a widespread doublethink. Melanie Williams (2017) has argued that mature actresses speak to a demographic that has its origins in the 1960s baby-boom and stems from that generation’s desire to see itself represented less stereotypically on stage and screen. This is no doubt true but many mature actresses have also attracted younger generations of film and television fans who are ignorant of their celebrated stage prowess—as is the case with Judi Dench as M in the Bond film franchise, Maggie Smith as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, Penelope Wilton in Shaun of the Dead, Dr Who and Downton Abbey, and Joan Plowright who mischievously ironises her own classical acting past as Baroness Olivier in Last Action Hero, a film in which Arnold Schwarzenegger has a rather more contemporary solution to Hamlet’s dilemma than Plowright’s erstwhile husband. Tea with the Dames was not aimed at the younger demographic but that very fact exposed critical prejudice.

Maggie Smith: Strategies of Debunking Ageist Stereotypes In her book The Long Life, Helen Small (2017) has documented the historical bias against women in old age. In the twenty-first century, age has in fact liberated older celebrity actresses both in the ways in which they contractually negotiate roles and in their performances of their public profiles. Unlike male actors, they are frequently asked to address their age on public platforms and to account for it as though it is understood that their continued labour contradicts a natural law. The obsession with celebrity actresses’

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     639

age reflects the voyeuristic obsession with the supposed monstrosity of a woman’s face and body in old age (Beauvoir 1996; Greer 2018). Ageing, it is assumed, will destroy actresses because their art must depend on their youthful beauty as opposed to their intellectual and technical abilities. The ageing process, this myth dictates, can only lead to the actress’s despair and reclusivity in the manner of Sunset Boulevard’s Norma Desmond. Most actresses adopt an ironic or evasive strategy to expose and counter the prejudice. Diane Keaton (2014, 137) addresses it with characteristic wryness in her memoir, Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty: ‘For those of us separated from reality by fame, being old is a great levelling experience. I never understood the idea that you’re supposed to mellow as you grow older’. Keaton makes a point of celebrating her idiosyncrasy, humour, and vulnerability both in her roles and her public life. Despite high profile relationships with Woody Allen, Al Pacino and Warren Beatty, Keaton’s memoirs stress her economic and emotional self-sufficiency as well as the challenge of caring for her mother, an Alzheimer’s sufferer, for many years. Not surprisingly, Keaton is preoccupied by physical decline; she muses on appearance, originality and fashion and argues rather unpersuasively that beauty in age is about grace and self-knowing (Keaton 2012, 2014). Atkins, on the other hand, seems to have spent her life haunted by a lack of a sense of her own beauty and is nostalgic about sustained admiration for her theatre work: ‘When you get old, you desperately want to whip out a photograph and go, “Look at me, I was adored once. It’s true!” But even when I was younger I wasn’t known for my looks’ (Atkins 2014). Kristin Scott Thomas, on the other hand, has disparaged both the fetish of youthful appearance on stage and screen and the industry’s homogenised cosmeticisation of the ageing female body: ‘It’s expected that we will dye our hair and try to look younger than we are’ (Cornwell 2018). Maggie Smith has been dogged throughout her life by the question of age appropriateness and casting but has taken a slow-burning revenge through indulging in irreverent critique of the entertainment industry in her later years. Smith is now perceived as ‘a role model for ageing gracefully’ (Duff 2017), but ‘grace’ often seems to be attributed to older celebrity actresses and is accompanied by a questionable set of assumptions about the wisdom of appearing in public at all. Helen Mirren, according to an anonymous journalist in the Daily Mail (June 12, 2015) set an extraordinary example of ‘facing up to ageing’ by leaving her home ‘make-up free at 69’. And Telegraph reviewer, Charles Spencer (2009), publicised Judi Dench’s private epistolary put-down to him because he assumed its earthy colloquialism and raw hurt displayed a lack of grace that he seemed to feel humanised

640     Mary Luckhurst

her. Dench’s letter to Spencer was in response to his caustic tirade against her performance in Yukio Mishima’s play Madame de Sade. Her insult was delivered with vernacular clarity and a comedic refusal to play the stately dame as polite convention dictates: ‘I’ve always rather admired you, but now I realise you’re an absolute shit. […] I’m only sorry I didn’t get a chance to kick you when I fell over—maybe next time’ (Spencer 2009). Dench did not know the letter would be made public but her sense of liberation in, at last, confronting Spencer about his misogyny and ageism is palpable. On close scrutiny, Maggie Smith is a subtle champion of the rights of older actresses and of older women per se. Her stage and screen rendition of Alan Bennett’s insanitary, mad vagrant, Mary Shepherd, in The Lady in the Van has come to be understood as a haunting study of despair and loneliness that powerfully critiques English class and social structures (Byrnes 2016). In an interview with Michael Coveney (2015, 326–28), Smith characteristically highlights and ridicules the absurdities of industry attitudes towards mature actresses, sending up her supposed dotage with comedic panache. In the early part of her career, she observes, ‘Nobody minded if you were too old for a part. I’m too old for most things now. […] I’ve got no conversation. I do find I’m talking about the dead most of the time.’ In recent years, Smith has repeatedly used her age, her roles, and her status as a grande dame to play with stereotypes of decrepitude and senescence and to poke fun at the behavioural typecasting of older working women. ‘I’ve been playing old parts forever’ she opined at the age of 82, ‘I play 93 quite often—when you’ve done it more than once you take the hint’ (Duff 2017). Smith encourages the counterpointing of her own celebrity longevity with her irascible creation, Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, who owes not a little to Smith’s past incarnations of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell and Bennett’s Mary Shepherd. In public conversation and interview, Smith presents Crawley as a parody of preposterous old age, more corpse than family matriarch. Her prediction for Crawley’s plotline in the much anticipated feature film of Downton Abbey is that it might start with Crawley’s funeral: ‘I could croak it and it could just start with the body’ (quoted in The Telegraph, July 17, 2018). Yet, however she may choose to ironise Violet Crawley, Smith is well aware that her global reach has attained new heights because of the delight spectators express in her obdurate, dyspeptic and iron-willed creation. Smith’s public persona is deeply informed by her talent for clowning, which is unique to her and a renowned feature of her theatrical career. Director Robin Phillips echoes many others in describing this gift as ‘beyond imagining in skill and technique’ (Coveney 2015, 144). Ageism has

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     641

provided her with lethal comic weaponry in the honing of a public persona that forensically undercuts social expectation. Drawing on her roots in West End comedy, her genius for acidic, camp observation, and her impeccable physical timing, Smith presents the construct of herself as a mature celebrity actress still in employment as an object of ridicule, visibly relishing her performances of ironic self-deconstruction and inviting her audience to do the same. In her interviews and appearances on television programmes such as The Graham Norton Show, she plays up low status to make a curiosity of her high status and has perfected a facility to appear freshly astonished by the latest absurdity in the life of febrile antiquity she offers up for contemplation, as a typical one-liner demonstrates: ‘If I went to Los Angeles I think I’d frighten people – they don’t see older people’ (quoted in Duff 2017). Smith has constructed a persona as brilliantly entertaining as any of her stage and film roles and plays into type by playing against type, debunking hierarchies, and exposing the social farce of class and gender stereotypes. Importantly, it is a persona she plays as the straight comic performer, her deadpan mask also setting her a little apart from the persona she is always in the act of creating in a public setting. The creation of this reflective distance means that she avoids the harmful self-deprecation that came to imprison comediennes such as Joan Rivers. A favoured tactic is to chide her audience for falling into the social trap of treating her like a celebrity: ‘If you live long enough in England, they think you’re amazing anyway’ she once joked to journalist Helena de Bortodano (Krizanovich 2015). Smith’s complex pastiches of herself as celebrity actress are masterclasses in themselves but they are also fascinating and brutal commentaries on social attitudes and perceptions of older working celebrity women. Similarly, in her stage roles it is her facility to be saying one thing while doing another or saying one thing while using a particular voice inflection to suggest something entirely different that has made her famous. To borrow a phrase from photographer Zoe Dominic (quoted in Coveney 2015, 229): ‘She is the only actress who can walk in one direction and be acting with her head in the reverse direction’. The tactic of playing up contradiction both in her acting and in her public persona has done much to propel her global celebrity.

642     Mary Luckhurst

On the Scarcity of Great Roles and Strategies for Change It is a fact that Shakespearean, Greek and modern classical roles were early and mid career staples of most of the actresses discussed in this essay. Dench, Mirren and Plowright, in particular, exemplify the importance of Shakespearean roles in the establishment of their celebrity credentials. For some such roles were hard to win. Early in her career Maggie Smith recognised that her reputation as a brilliant comedienne was an obstacle to being considered, to use a telling phrase, ‘a serious actress’. Her strategy of career redress was radical and shrewd: to widespread consternation, she accepted an offer to play at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada from 1976 to 1980. She played Restoration and Shakespearean parts and excelled in plays by Chekhov and Coward, a repertoire of first-class dramatic pedigree. Her move created a stir in Britain and North America, she was an immediate box office hit, and she was able to balance her theatrical parts with roles in Hollywood movies. Furthermore, New York critics followed her progress with fascination and she reinforced an already powerful transatlantic profile. The Director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Robin Phillips (quoted in Coveney 2015, 139), noted that away from the pressured expectations of mainstream British theatre aficionados, Smith could reinvent both her art and her life: ‘I don’t believe that England has ever seen that Maggie, the one we had for six years. She found new muscles and toughness. Her voice became an incredible cello, no longer a violin.’ But as actresses mature, the traditional and modern classical repertoires have increasingly less to offer them. As Mirren has said, ‘There are few great roles for women in Shakespeare’ and they are not parts for older women (Gray 2013). The lack of substantial theatrical roles for mature actresses is the subject of public grievance by many celebrity actresses. Mirren was not alone in turning increasingly to the screen in the 1990s. Her weariness with ‘the usual girly role’ offered in dominant stage drama had precipitated a prolonged artistic self-dissatisfaction because she was always ‘at war with the character’ (Mirren 2008, 133). More candid than many actresses about prevailing attitudes at the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) since her debut in the 1960s, Mirren (2008, 106) has decried the damage done to her reputation by journalist Philip Oakes’s characterisation of her as ‘Stratford’s very own sex queen’ which dominated publicity at the expense of her acting skills for twenty years. Like Smith, Mirren honed her voice and physical techniques through playing the classical repertoire, particularly Shakespearean

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     643

parts. But in her memoir, Mirren (2008, 184) gives short shrift to the RSC’s failure to commission challenging, politically incisive roles for women which, for her, is symbolic of a greater set of institutionalised prejudices: ‘In my early days at Stratford there was sexism and a lot of a kind of racism. Black or Asian actors were not given the chances they deserved. It is much better now but still with some way to go. Not much has changed for the actresses.’ A clamour of voices agrees with Mirren. The Equal Representation for Actresses campaign group launched a high-profile protest at the British Academy Film and Television Awards in 2016, led by Phoebe WallerBridge and Olivia Colman. Sphinx Theatre and the Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators have urged the need for change since the 1980s. In her book Other People’s Shoes, Harriet Walter (2003, 188–91) points to the social, historical and political reasons that have conspired to make women the most likely to be playing ‘thankless supporting roles’ and vents her anger and disappointment at the all too common spectacle of ‘actresses of huge capacity squeezed into stereotypes’. Julie Walters’ observations that parts for women ‘disappear as you age’ and that the misogynistic debates about whether women can be comic have never abated, are widespread experiences for many women in live performance (Day 2010). At the age of 79, two years before she died, and having just won an Olivier award (2009) for her role as Mrs St Maugham in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden, Margaret Tyzack led a broadside against industry attitudes towards mature actresses. She expressed her astonishment at the rarity of any parts for ‘any woman over 70 who has control of brain and bladder’ and argued that existing roles often attracted labels such as ‘crone’ or ‘witchlike’ and are discussed in ways that are insulting to women (Gardner 2009). Harriet Walter’s (2003, 189) forensic analysis of the theatre industry portrays the ageing actress as a hostage in an ever-diminishing chicken run: Here and there, there are sparsely placed pyramids with at their pinnacle an Electra, a Blanche du Bois or a Joan of Arc. Below them and still quite near the top there are a few speciality niches that an ageing leading lady or a character actress can carve out for herself and cling to if she is lucky. At the half-way point just above the pyramid’s fat girth, the aspiring ingénues meet the ex-leads coming down, and from there onwards the slopes rush down to the enormous broad base of under-used and unemployed. I have so far been one of the survivors (who are tiny in number when seen in the context of the profession as a whole). […] These roles reduce rather than stretch us, particularly if we have tried our hands at Shakespeare we feel

644     Mary Luckhurst

the difference keenly. We may occasionally take on the great male roles but, like cross-racial casting, until the practice becomes widespread, it is bound to be more about the player than the play.

Walter’s graphic image of a nightmarish enclosure is recognisable from the frustration, anger and despair voiced by many actresses in interviews, letters, autobiographies and biographies. The limited repertoire of substantial roles for mature actresses in both classical and modern drama poses a distinct barrier but, in Walter’s view, the film industry offers ageing actresses even fewer opportunities of achieving lasting celebrity with ‘a narrow age bracket’ and ‘an even narrower definition of beauty’ (2003, 189). These are both issues that Annette Bening explored in the movie, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool (2017), based on Peter Turner’s memoir of the same name, in which Bening played real-life Academy award-winning actress Gloria Grahame, who is represented in two time frames, in one in character as Amanda, the faded, displaced southern belle in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, and in the other as herself, a forgotten former Hollywood star in a passionate relationship with a much younger man at the end of her life. Bening highlighted the stigmatised subject of the sexually active older woman, the bleeding of a tragic role into real life and the not uncommon trajectory of a 1940s/1950s female studio star who found herself an outcast when she lost her youth. Poignantly, Bening had encountered the story and the script 23 years earlier but her empathy for Grahame’s experiences as an actress and a lonely older woman grew as she herself aged (Keegan 2017). For a time, Mirren turned away from stage dramatists and towards the writers she felt were developing complex, hard-hitting, and inspirational female roles. In Lynda La Plante’s television creation of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, she found a unique model of female leadership and a flawed character that espoused a tough contemporary politics she recognised. Her relief was immense: We were sick of the characters we saw depicting our world. There was no recognition of where women were. Women had come out of college education in the sixties, the first generation to have that opportunity regardless of their background, and entered the workplace as doctors, lawyers, teachers, businesswomen, engineers or policewomen, and had encountered a great deal of resistance to their presence from male colleagues. […] There was a silent but angry mass of women out there. Successful professional women who wanted the world to see what they had had to put up with. (Mirren 2008, 205)

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     645

It is very apparent that Mirren identifies with the anger of ‘successful professional women’ from her own experience as an actress. Her turn towards creating a new role in collaboration with an experienced writer mirrors a strategy that has become something of a trend for mature actresses. As uncomfortable as it is for many theatre executives to acknowledge, the lack of contemporary theatrical parts for women is a failure of the operations of producers and artistic directors. The modern Western dramatic canon, such as it is, has tended to exclude women, especially non-Caucasian women. This is a point Harriet Walter (2003, 190) makes with furious passion. ‘It is no longer true,’ she writes, ‘that women’s function in the drama mirrors our function in life. Women have made giant strides in the real world and drama has not kept pace.’

Going It Alone: The One-Woman Show Taking the matter of repertoire into their own hands, actresses have increasingly created more challenging roles for themselves through staging one-woman shows. This is not a new strategy but has proliferated in the twenty-first century. Often political in function, the one-woman show allows for new and diverse women’s stories to be staged in mainstream theatres with relative speed, benefiting established, emergent, and unknown female voices (Sheldon 2018). For mature celebrity actresses the solo performance offers the ultimate challenge, has a low economic risk, guarantees prime billing and a substantial new part, and can be deployed to showcase an exceptional life-story (often their own) as well as specific virtuosities, qualities, and skill sets. It also necessitates a committed collaboration with writer and director and allows an actress a greater degree of artistic involvement and control in the development of the script, the character, and the dramaturgical aesthetic. The celebrity actress can often choose who she works with and thus rekindle productive working partnerships from the past or seek out collaborators who will challenge and encourage reinvention. The attraction of the onewoman show is thus often the opportunity to author a text or to edit and shape pre-existing material and to have a greater degree of agency in directorial and design decisions. It can also be a route to engineering a means of investigating and paying homage to the working techniques of another celebrity performer. It is not difficult to understand why one-woman shows have blossomed. Playwright and director Julia Pascal (2018) has stated the situation bluntly: ‘Half of our contemporary creative world is missing. […]

646     Mary Luckhurst

Theatre is devoted to male narratives and only a fifth of artistic directors are female. […] There is an absence of contemporary drama reflecting the complexity of women’s lives.’ An examination of one-woman shows by mature celebrity actresses since 2000 indicates a hungry market. These actresses focus on promoting their own untold stories or reprising roles and career moments for which for they are already famous. In many cases, they have written or put together these one-woman shows themselves. There is also a distinct interest in performing the life and art of other celebrities. Notable stars on the transatlantic axis include Elaine Stritch in Elaine Stritch at Liberty (2001), Vanessa Redgrave in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2007), Carrie Fisher in Wishful Drinking (2008), Lily Tomlin in Not Playing with a Full Deck (2009), Celia Imrie in Laughing Matters (2014), and Annette Bening in Ruth Draper’s Monologues (2014). Joanna Lumley’s It’s All About Me live tour was launched in 2018 and Fonda’s international tour, An Evening with Jane Fonda, also launched in 2018, celebrates the actress’s eightieth year. Since the 1990s, Anna Deavere Smith has carved a unique place for herself in American theatre politics through the meticulous crafting and performance of her pioneering documentary plays, developed from interviews. Her impersonations of the people she has interviewed often astonish and she has done much to foreground marginalised African American voices, both male and female. House Arrest (2000) and Let Me Down Easy (2008) built on her international acclaim for Fires in the Mirror (1992) and Twilight: Los Angeles (1993). All of the above shows, most of them award-winning, have reaped critical plaudits and secured high-profile media attention. Linda Marlowe has created a new career from her seven solo shows since playing a significant number of roles in Stephen Berkoff’s plays and acting for the RSC in the 1970s and 1980s. Her turn towards one-woman shows began with Berkoff’s Women in 2001, a showcase for a medley of characters from Berkoff’s plays which she is still performing in 2018. She was prompted to the change in career strategy by the offer of unexciting, small parts in mainstream theatre, roles she has argued she neither wanted nor needed. She had, however, made a conscious decision that theatre was the better place to learn the demands of the acting craft and to her agent’s frustration began to turn down screen roles as she felt they were inhibiting her development: I wanted to explore and show the range of my acting. I wanted a real challenge so I decided to create my own opportunity. […] I want to be in the West End as a tour de force in my own right. I don’t want to use up my talent

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     647

on minor roles. […] I was frustrated with limited acting roles and I gave myself the opportunity to show as many different aspects of my skills as possible, victims, tyrants and raucous and outrageous women. I played in naturalist and non-naturalist styles. And I brought a lot of myself to the show too. (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001, 84–86)

The one-woman show suits Marlowe’s predilection for innovation and multiple role-playing. Her latest performance in Mona Lisa Overdrive (2018), based on William Gibson’s science fiction novel of the same name, experiments with digital technology and Marlowe plays three real-world parts, one virtual character, and an in-betweener, who shifts between real and alternative realities. The show interrogates the potential impact of machines and artificial intelligence on female lives and allows Marlowe to investigate digital territories in her acting that are new to her. Marlowe’s artistic and personal satisfaction reached new heights with her solo performances and is a commonly reported experience by mature actresses. Audiences too are often dazzled by the virtuosity displayed. With Berkoff’s Women, Marlowe assessed herself as ‘consistently achieving my best work’ (quoted in Luckhurst and Veltman 2001, 86). Miriam Margolyes’s celebrity status reached new international dimensions through her show Dickens’ Women, which premiered in 1991 but has continued to tour well into the millennium. Margolyes brilliantly enacts 23 of Charles Dickens’ characters with extraordinary energy and relish. She is in no doubt that the show has been one of the high points of her career but also that it transformed her belief in her own ability to sustain and continue to develop excellence in her craft: I think I will be remembered for my own show Dickens’ Women […] It’s my interpretation of Dickens’s England, my view of the class system. Dickens’s world of excess meshes well with my own excess, and I think I can say without any modesty whatever that my Mrs Gamp is the best Mrs Gamp that has hit the modern stage. In that specific performance I can say that I transcended myself and that I achieved moments of great acting. All actors have to be realistic about commercial realities and parts as leading lady have not been offered many times in my life because of my looks […] With Dickens’ Women I know that I performed to my full potential and at points that I matched the best actors, and I therefore know that it’s possible to attain the same heights on other work in the future. (Luckhurst and Veltman 2001, 78)

648     Mary Luckhurst

Celebrity Actresses Playing Celebrities Performing the life of a real woman, especially an iconic woman, is another strategy deployed by celebrity actresses for creating powerful, challenging, and contradictory roles. Indeed, the playing of a real person has become the modern day equivalent of the great Shakespearean role, providing the opportunities for risk-taking, demonstrations of versatility and empowering women’s politics that so many experienced actresses crave. There is a long list of mature actresses who have played real women, and such roles are proliferating across theatre, film, and television. Before playing Ellen Terry, Eileen Atkins gave a celebrated and long-lasting stage rendition of Virginia Woolf in Patrick Garland’s adaptation of A Room of One’s Own. Woolf and other literary celebrities, such as the Brontës, Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter, Sylvia Plath, Agatha Christie, and Iris Murdoch, have proved favoured icons for performance by celebrity actresses. Politicians and activists are also popular, Julie Walters, Meryl Streep, and Sian Phillips having, respectively, performed Mo Mowlam, Margaret Thatcher, and Emmeline Pankhurst. And iconic performers from the past such as Sarah Bernhardt, Sarah Siddons, Mrs Patrick Campbell, and Vesta Tilley have offered particularly appealing challenges to contemporary actresses. Sian Phillips’ famous rendition of Marlene Dietrich reinvigorated her career and enabled her to reinvent herself as an international cabaret artiste, touring Pam Gems’ one-woman show Marlene (1996) for ten years. Phillips has described the painstaking and laborious physical process of creating Dietrich and her obsessive search for detailed information on Dietrich’s wig, dress, make-up, breathing habits and vocal idiosyncrasies. Eerily, her determination to reach a physical proximity with Dietrich included wearing the star’s false eye-lashes which had been preserved: ‘the external, the minute details didn’t feel at all useful and then gradually it came together and you realise you have become someone else’ (Cantrell and Luckhurst 2010, 140). In one sense, Phillips might be said to have been wearing someone else. But what of the blurring of identity boundaries between actress and role, the ‘interweaving’ as Lilti termed it? This interplay of identities is heightened and further complicated with the performance of real people and mature actresses have gained from it. In the twenty-first century, there is much that is compelling about a celebrity actress playing another celebrity and no more so when the role is a female monarch. Actresses cast as Elizabeth I, Victoria or Elizabeth II have had careers launched, rejuvenated or their existing renown boosted exponentially. Elizabeth I has famously been played by Cate

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     649

Blanchett, Dench, Mirren and Atkins; in Blanchett’s case, playing Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur’s two movies, Elizabeth and The Golden Age, proved critical in her quest for Hollywood stardom. Following her portrayals of Queen Victoria in the films Mrs Brown and Victoria and Abdul, Judi Dench’s celebrity is popularly framed to be at least a match with Queen Elizabeth II’s. In the words of the Telegraph journalist, Brian Viner (September 6, 2017), Dench’s long reign as a superlative actress is so unimaginably great that it rewrites our understanding of the symbolic power of monarchy: ‘We have passed through the stage where it would be fair to say that Dame Judi Dench was born to play Victoria. I think we may now venture that Queen Victoria was born to be played by Dame Judi Dench’. The performance of monarchical power with its extravagant settings, costumes, and role-play is its own form of theatrical spectacle [for further discussion of this, see Chapter 7 by Catherine Clifford, on Elizabeth I and the early Stuart Queens] and Elizabeth Windsor was rehearsed in her role from a young age. A nonagenarian, the Queen has herself proved to be a consummate and adaptable actress and politician, witnessing many traumatic events in a bloodthirsty age and the anticipation of a post-Elizabethan era has made her a role-model and the object of obsessive interest. Performing Elizabeth II, the most famous living monarch and the most powerful woman in the world, guarantees global media attention, as Peter Morgan’s play The Audience, his film The Queen and his television blockbuster, The Crown, have recently demonstrated. The world’s longest reigning monarch, Elizabeth II’s stardom only increases with age but does so because she has been seen to be capable of reinvention over the decades of her reign. Mature celebrity actresses know that this capacity to reinvent and surprise is an indispensable strategy in the sustenance of their status. Historically the iconic actress has been framed as thespian royalty and perceived as a national asset—as a jewel in the crown. Thus the combination of Helen Mirren’s star status with Elizabeth II’s iconicity, like Judi Dench’s and Queen Victoria’s individual stardom, has produced a heady conundrum in terms of who has the greater stature. To play Victoria’s or Elizabeth II’s symbolic global might is perhaps one of the great tests of an actress’s craft and both Dench and Mirren are known for the exquisite quality of their performances. For Mirren the clue to playing Elizabeth’s power lay in a line of The Audience, ‘“Never underestimate the value of a symbol”, she carries her history of Britain, a sense of continuity and an incredible sense of self discipline’ (quoted in Zakaria 2015). But only an actress of Mirren’s mettle and experience would know how to actually physicalise these qualities. Mirren likened her craft to painting a portrait: ‘She’s been painted a lot. I thought

650     Mary Luckhurst

I’m just another portraitist. My medium isn’t paint, it’s the spoken word but that liberated me. I could do my own version’ (Women in the World 2015). Mirren became the acknowledged expert on playing Elizabeth Windsor when she won Olivier and Tony awards for her stage portrayals in London and New York. She has written of the irresistible danger of reprising the role for film: To play a real person is very intimidating; you can never be as good as the real person […] Also this was the Queen with all the colossal interest and confused, contradictory emotions that the monarchy arouses in our nation’s hearts and minds. I thought I was headed for the most almighty embarrassing fall. So again I had to do it. (Mirren 2008, 220)

She has also spoken about the challenges of the role, including moments of despair when she first viewed the costumes—‘I can’t play anyone who’d wear these clothes’ (Miller 2016). Mirren’s acting persona is one that famously exudes a mysterious sexuality, carefully crafted through particular costuming, but her comments about her approach suggest she had to censor her usual codes of sexual expressiveness while playing the monarch. Mirren’s research allowed her to invent a rationale for herself and find a state of mind that was non-judgmental (Miller 2016). Despite her difficulties her own acting rationale for the part was frequently taken as factual insight on Elizabeth by journalists and the confusion only augmented Mirren’s celebrity royalty. Mirren played with that confusion to her advantage, using her age to convey an illusion of intimacy with the Queen—‘We have aged together’ (Women in the World 2015); ‘The Queen has been in my life longer than anyone apart from my elder sister’ (Miller 2016). There is, in truth, a profound desire to accord Mirren, Dench and other mature celebrity actresses the same status as a monarch. Journalist and editor Tina Brown, for example, is quite overcome by Mirren’s presence in interview (in much the same way as Mirren reported being in awe of the Queen) and saw the monarch as the loser in a competition: ‘You have become Elizabeth II. You’re the greatest ambassador the Royal Family has ever had. I think the Queen would like to play Helen Mirren’ (Women in the World 2015). In the ultimate blurring of boundaries, it was widely reported that Prince William jokingly referred to Mirren as ‘granny’ at a Buckingham Palace Party in 2014 at which Queen Elizabeth was present. Mirren’s encounter with the monarch that same evening afforded the opportunity to witness nuanced performances by both women (Perry 2014). The Royal Household is in no doubt about the cultural value of mature actresses

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     651

and the interesting interplay of celebrity identities; it was quick to release a twitter video of Dame Maggie Smith receiving her Companion of Honour and to pay tribute to the status of the actress and the monarch, both grandes dames on their respective world stages.

Conclusion There have been contained but significant shifts in the casting and profiling of mature celebrity actresses in the film and television industries, but these shifts have been expressed differently in theatre and are largely propelled by actresses themselves. The global success of one-woman shows and of the playing of female celebrities such as Virginia Woolf, Marlene Dietrich, and Elizabeth II have demonstrated the serious limitation of roles for mature women in the classical and contemporary canon, but showcased the worldclass versatility, superb skills, and comic brilliance of many of these icons. The momentum of the equal pay and #MeToo movements serves to highlight particular prejudices but the signs are that, while some progress is being made, racial equality is seriously lagging behind. For there to be lasting change, the activism of actresses needs to be matched by concrete demonstrations of a commitment to diversity and equality in mainstream production companies and culturally dominant theatres. In the meantime, as Pascal (2018) has pointed out, there is a heavy responsibility on the shoulders of older celebrity actresses to use their status to speak out and lead by example because of a fear of ‘blacklisting’ expressed by younger or less well-known actresses.

Bibliography Atkins, Eileen. 2014. ‘Ellen Terry Had Dench’s Charm and Redgrave’s Beauty’. The Telegraph, January 12, 2014. Barber, Richard. 2017. ‘Dame Eileen Atkins’. The Telegraph, September 26, 2017. Beauvoir, Simone de. 1996. The Coming of Age. Translated by Patrick O’Brian. New York: W. W. Norton. Braudy, Leo. 1997. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Vintage. Brenner, Marie. 1983. ‘The Liz and Dick Show’. New York Magazine, May 9, 1983. Brody, Caitlin. 2018. ‘Helen Mirren Is Done with Roles That Make Women “Feel Shitty”’. Glamour, September 20, 2018.

652     Mary Luckhurst

Byrnes, Paul. 2016. ‘The Lady in the Van: A Whiff of Darkness Beneath the Laughter’. The Sydney Morning Herald, March 2, 2016. Cantrell, Tom, and Mary Luckhurst. 2010. Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cornwell, Jane. 2018. ‘Kristin Scott Thomas: The Idea of Being a Mature Woman Isn’t Cool Anymore’. The Sydney Morning Herald, December 16, 2018. Coveney, Michael. 2015. Maggie Smith: A Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Day, Elizabeth. 2010. ‘Julie Walters: “Parts for Women Disappear as You Age”’. The Guardian, November 28, 2010. Dorney, Kate, and Maggie B. Gale, eds. 2018. Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Duff, Chelsea. 2017. ‘Maggie Smith Will Forever Be Our Role Model for Aging Gracefully’. Woman’s World, November 17, 2017. Duncan, Sophie. 2016. Shakespeare’s Women and the Fin de Siècle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dyer, Richard. 2004. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London and New York: Routledge. Dyer, Richard, and Paul McDonald. 1998. Stars. London: BFI Publishing. Edwards, Anne. 1977. Vivien Leigh. London: Virgin Books. Gale, Maggie B., and John Stokes, eds. 2007. The Cambridge Companion to the Actress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, Lyn. 2009. ‘What Happened to Great Stage Roles for Older Women?’ The Guardian, March 17, 2009. Goodall, Jane. 2008. Stage Presence: The Actor as Mesmerist. London and New York: Routledge. Gray, Louise. 2013. ‘“Few Great Roles in Shakespeare for Older Women” Says Helen Mirren’. The Telegraph, June 11, 2013. Greer, Germaine. 2018. The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause. London: Bloomsbury. Heymann, David C. 1996. Liz: An Intimate Biography of Elizabeth Taylor. New York: Citadel. Hindson, Catherine. 2016. West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920. Iowa City: Iowa University Press. Keaton, Diane. 2012. Then Again. New York: Random House. Keaton, Diane. 2014. Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty. New York: Random House. Keegan, Rebecca. 2017. ‘Annette Bening on Bringing a Former Femme Fatale to Life’. Vanity Fair, December 21, 2017. Krizanovich, Karen. 2015. ‘Why We Love Maggie Smith’. The Telegraph, November 12, 2015. Lilti, Antoine. 2017. The Invention of Celebrity. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

28  Great British Dames: Mature Actresses and Celebrity     653

Luckhurst, Mary, and Chloe Veltman. 2001. On Acting: Interviews with Actors. London: Faber & Faber. Luckhurst, Mary, and Jane Moody, eds. 2005. Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan. Malague, Rosemary. 2013. An Actress Prepares: Women and ‘the Method’. London: Routledge. Marshall, P.David. 2006. Celebrity Culture Reader. London: Routledge. Miller, Julie. 2016. ‘Helen Mirren Wept Upon Seeing the Clothes She’d Have to Wear as Queen Elizabeth’. Vanity Fair, April 29, 2016. Mirren, Helen. 2008. In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Pascal, Julia. 2018. ‘Women Are Being Excluded from the Stage: It’s Time for Quotas’. The Guardian, April 24, 2018. Perraudin, Frances. 2016. ‘Jane Fonda: It Took Me 30 Years to Get Feminism’. The Guardian, April 11, 2016. Perry, Keith. 2014. ‘Queen’s Salute for Dame Helen Mirren at Star-Studded Party at Buckingham Palace’. The Daily Telegraph, February 17, 2014. Redmond, Sean, and Su Holmes. 2007. Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader. London: Sage. Roach, Joseph. 2007. It. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press. Robehmed, Natalie. 2018. ‘How Time’s Up Could Help Close Hollywood’s Pay Gap’. Forbes Magazine, January 17, 2018. Rose, Charlie. 2015. ‘Dame Helen Mirren Reflects on the Challenges of Playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Audience ’. The Week, PBS, March 18, 2015. https:// charlierose.com/videos/28363. Sheldon, Naomi. 2018. ‘Female Voices Have Hit the Arts Mainstream Thanks to One-Woman Shows’. The Stage, March 26, 2018. Sinden, Donald. 2011. Public Interview. University of York, UK, November 2, 2011. Small, Helen. 2007. The Long Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spencer, Charles. 2009. ‘Judi Dench and Maureen Lipman Hit Back’. The Telegraph, May 4, 2009. Spoto, Donald. 1993. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography. London and New York: HarperCollins. Sternheimer, Karen. 2014. Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility. London and New York: Routledge. Terry, Ellen. 1932. Four Lectures on Shakespeare. Edited by Christopher St. John. London: Hopkinson. The Telegraph. 2018. ‘Maggie Smith Confirmed to Return for Downton Abbey Film’. The Telegraph, July 17, 2018. Thomson, David. 2006. Nicole Kidman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Turner, Peter. 2017. Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool. London: Picador. Walter, Harriet. 2003. Other People’s Shoes: Thoughts on Acting. London: Nick Hern.

654     Mary Luckhurst

Williams, Melanie. 2017. Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Women in the World Summit. 2015. ‘Helen Mirren Rules: Interview by Tina Brown with Helen Mirren, Women in the World Summit, New York’. April 24, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP5s0ukbjCk. Zakaria, Fareed. 2015. ‘Helen Mirren on Playing the Queen’. CNN, GPS, July 12, 2015.

29 Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: Lazarus Theatre Company’s Staging of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

Introduction In 2013, Lazarus Theatre Company staged the first professional London production of The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry by Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639). Cary’s play (henceforward referred to here as Mariam ) puts a collection of formidable, entitled and outspoken women onstage. Her hero, Mariam, defies her husband Herod, refuses even to smile for him and is, as a result, killed on his orders; Herod’s sister Salome schemes to secure the husband she wants (husband Number 3) and succeeds; in Mariam women speak out, persuade, seduce, insult and it is 324 lines into the play before Cary allows a male character to speak. Gavin Harrington-Odedra directed Lazarus’s production (henceforeward referred to here as The Tragedy of Mariam ) in a year that saw five productions marking the 400th anniversary of the publication of this remarkable play. In 1613 this act of publication constituted an important landmark as Mariam is the first known original play in English written, let alone published, by a woman. However, in stark

Sara Reimers (*) · Elizabeth Schafer  Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_29

655

656     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

contrast with the outpouring of events commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in 2016, or even the more modest quatercentenary commemorations that same year of the deaths of Francis Beaumont and Cervantes and the publication of Ben Jonson’s First Folio, the quatercentenary of Cary’s act of daring, in going public as a woman playwright, was low key. In addition to Lazarus’s production, mounted as part of the Camden Fringe, the year 2013 saw four other staged adaptations of Cary’s text. In the USA, Kirstin Bone directed a rehearsed reading for Improbable Fictions in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, while in the UK Rebecca McCutcheon directed three Mariam events: a site-specific, abridged, one-performance-only production of Mariam staged at Cary’s birthplace in Burford, Oxfordshire, as part of the Burford Festival; an installation inspired both by Mariam and Cary’s biography, that ran for two days in the Bussey Building, Peckham, London; and a fragment of Mariam which was performed on the Globe stage as part of a conference on Shakespeare. All these Mariams put women on stage in the sense of performing a pioneering woman playwright’s play, putting her characters on stage, and in employing predominantly women to perform Cary’s play. This essay will focus on Lazarus Theatre Company’s The Tragedy of Mariam in order to explore how staging and rehearsal choices might constitute a feminist dramaturgical practice. It will specifically examine notions of the canon, editing, casting, and collaboration. Taking The Tragedy of Mariam as a case study, the essay will analyse Lazarus’s production in detail, contextualize it, and assess its success enabling contemporary women performers to put Cary’s women on stage. The two writers of this essay have chosen to write together, to collaborate, but we approach the material from significantly different points of view, expertise, and knowledge. Sara Reimers was assistant director on The Tragedy of Mariam and thus privy to the production’s evolution during rehearsal, the processes used, how and when decisions were made. She has since collaborated with Lazarus on another twelve productions, in a variety of roles, and has an ongoing relationship with the company. Elizabeth Schafer has taught Mariam many times and directed an all-female, student production of the play in 1995 (Royal Holloway Drama 2016); however, she saw only one performance of Lazarus’s The Tragedy of Mariam (on a very hot night). In writing together we have interwoven our thoughts about and responses to The Tragedy of Mariam, using practitioner expertise alongside scholarship to layer our experiences of the production and complicate our analysis.

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     657

Lazarus Theatre Company: Staging Classical Drama Today Lazarus Theatre Company states its purpose is ‘reimagining and revisiting classic work in visual, visceral and vibrant productions’ (Lazarus Theatre Company 2018). Established in 2007 by Artistic Director Ricky Dukes, Lazarus has become one of the most prolific producers of classical, canonical theatre on the London fringe. A key aspect of Lazarus’s work is its commitment to putting female performers centre stage. From staging all-female productions—for example Henry V (dir. Ricky Dukes, Union Theatre, 2014)—to regendering major roles—for example, the title role in King Lear (dir. Ricky Dukes, The Space, 2011/Greenwich Theatre 2012), Lazarus has a history of exploring and expanding the depiction of femininity within the classical canon. Dukes observes that it was the gender politics of Mariam that particularly excited him: It was exhilarating that we had found a play with a female lead! […] Presenting Mariam gave us the opportunity to do a play with a real female presence, a strong female character and in addition the rare opportunity to do a play written by a woman, something we had never done before. (Email to the authors, November 26, 2017)

It was Associate Director Gavin Harrington-Odedra who first proposed Lazarus mount a production of Mariam and who edited the script and directed the production; again, the play’s remarkable gender politics were a draw for him. For Harrington-Odedra, the crucial questions posed by Cary are ‘why [do] men have all the power, and why that same power is refused women’, questions that ‘are still being asked today’ (quoted in Jameson 2013a). This relating of the early modern to the contemporary is a feature of Lazarus’s work and The Tragedy of Mariam, in particular, offered the opportunity to simultaneously explore both early modern and twenty-first-century constructions of gender and power.

Context: Androcentric Performance Then and Now When Cary wrote Mariam—c.1605—the English professional stage was an all-male performance environment and this cultural context has influenced the approach of scholars to Cary’s work, which has been dogged by

658     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

the rather dismissive label ‘closet drama’. This anachronistic term originated in the late eighteenth century, with A. W. Schlegel’s (1815, Lecture 15) unprovable argument that Seneca—tutor to the theatre-loving Nero—wrote plays that were not intended to be performed. This label has bedevilled discussion of Mariam, and Ramona Wray (2015, 149) rightly points out the danger that current critical approaches mean that ‘a play designated “closet drama”, no matter how historically significant, fails to fit into the “early modern drama” canon’. The risk then is that ‘we regard early modern drama as constituting a wholly male-authored preserve’ (150). Yet, as Findlay et al. have argued (1999), just because there is no documentation of a performance of Mariam that does not constitute proof that one never took place. The question of whether Cary was ever ‘on stage’ in a private theatrical performance of Mariam in an elite early modern aristocratic household is unanswerable but worth posing. Did Cary not only write lines but rehearse them? Learn them? Deliver them? And if she did, what did that do to her? It is unfashionable now to link Mariam with Cary’s extraordinary 1640s biography, to link the unruliness of her women characters with Cary’s own career in unruliness and specifically her refusal to toe the line in marriage (see Luckyi and Sneyd 2016). However, if Cary ever spoke Mariam’s lines on stage, or Salome’s, the play could be seen as a self-scripted training manual for disobedience to patriarchal rule (see Schafer 2017). In the early modern period, boys prepared for public life, and speechifying, by performing plays, often Senecan plays, at grammar schools, universities and the Inns of Court. It is entirely possible that writing, staging, and publishing Mariam prepared Cary for her later public performance of resistance to her husband and to Charles I. The ‘closet drama’ label applied to Mariam has undoubtedly affected the play’s afterlife; the suggestion that the play was not written to be performed has seen it neglected by professional theatre practitioners. However, Harrington-Odedra embraced the concept of Mariam as ‘closet drama’ arguing this made the play potentially more radical than works written for the public stage: The exciting thing about The Tragedy of Mariam being a ‘closet drama’ is that Elizabeth Cary gets to blatantly ask these questions, where her male counterparts who were writing for the public stage couldn’t get away with asking such overtly political questions due to the censor … Closet dramas were less likely to be edited by censors because they weren’t performance texts … so the language used is much more direct, and dangerous. Political and social criticism isn’t hidden behind metaphor or allegory. This can make them much more

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     659

accessible and the questions that the play asks cut much closer to the bone. This for me is the exciting opportunity of bringing a closet drama to life on the stage: especially one that asks the questions that The Tragedy of Mariam does. (Harrington-Odedra, quoted in Jameson 2013a)

This is a sentiment echoed by Dukes who observed that the play presents ‘not only a strong lead but a play full of strong female characters’ (Email to the authors, November 26, 2017). The gender politics of Mariam are not only anomalous in the early modern canon—Cary’s play stands out as remarkable even in a modern performance setting: the multiplicity of female voices and the role that women characters play in shaping and defining the action make Mariam unusual in a twenty-first-century performance ­context. Staging Mariam represented an important intervention in the cultural moment of 2013. Dukes established Lazarus Theatre Company in 2007, and by the end of 2017 the company had staged 37 full-scale productions across five different venues on the London fringe. Its repertoire includes Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, early modern drama, musicals, and Brecht. Despite producing so many plays written for all-male performance contexts, in its first ten years Lazarus averaged a 50–50% male-to-female ratio across all of its productions, having cast 252 men and 251 women in the last decade (see Table 29.1). In comparison, data collected by Sara Reimers from the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre indicate that, between the millennium and 2014, women made up an average of just 28% of company members in productions staged at these venues (Reimers 2017, 84). Setting the 28% average of women on stage in the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe productions alongside Lazarus’s 50% needs to take into account that, despite the three companies’ similar repertoire, Lazarus’s fringe identity has an impact on their representation of gender. Furthermore, Lazarus stages significantly fewer productions each year, compared with the RSC and the Globe, and the gender ratio in Lazarus productions varies significantly from production to production; they have staged three all-female productions—Electra, Women of Troy, and Henry V—but they have also staged male-dominated productions of plays such as Julius Caesar, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Edward II. Nonetheless, the similarity in repertoire between this fringe theatre company and the classical heavyweights of the RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe make the gender parity of its casting worthy of closer scrutiny. Scholarship has often neglected fringe theatre except in relation to rarely performed plays; productions mounted in London’s numerous pub theatres,

660     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer Table 29.1  Gender Ratios across Lazarus Theatre Company’s 34 Productions 2007– 2016. Compiled by Sara Reimers

found spaces and reclaimed spaces tend to receive relatively little critical attention. In part, this is because of the significantly shorter production runs and much smaller audience capacity at these venues. However, data collected in 2014 reveal that, while fringe theatres only accounted for 3.6% of the capacity of London’s theatre performance spaces at the time, the percentage of performers engaged was significantly higher at 12%, which means that one in ten performers in London was working on the fringe at the time (London Theatre Report 2014, 13–32). In the Women in Theatre Survey 2006, commissioned by Sphinx Theatre Company (previously known as Women’s Theatre Group), the average percentage of roles played by women was 36%, with men outnumbering women in all performance contexts but one: fringe theatre. In fringe performance contexts, women played 52% of roles (Sphinx Theatre Company 2006, 3). The survey aimed to capture a snapshot of women’s involvement in professional theatre in England by looking at the gender of artists involved in productions staged across the country in a single week in January. The results produce an impressionistic picture and may have been distorted by, for example, seasonal shows—but that impressionistic picture is telling. The definition and nature of fringe performance is ever changing, and the term itself is somewhat fraught. In 2015, theatre critic Lyn Gardner suggested that there is ‘no such thing’ as fringe theatre and that the category ‘leads to segregated audiences and funding inequalities’ (Gardner

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     661

2015). While Gardner makes an important point, the category of fringe remains useful. Operating on the margins of the mainstream can be a powerful position; the fringe offers a space for experimental, alternative and unexpected approaches to the depiction of gender on stage, especially in the staging of classical drama, though more research is needed into the intersectionality of this approach in terms of race and age. The fringe is associated with risk, the offbeat, the non-mainstream. It also offers unique collaborative models, with artists often choosing to work together for little or no pay, to develop their career or create work that would not be commercially viable. The precarious financial context of fringe companies is something that has been under increasing scrutiny: research for the Society of London Theatres in 2014 found that only one in five actors on the fringe were being paid the National Minimum Wage (London Theatre Report 2014, 8). Equity’s Professionally Made/Professionally Paid Campaign aimed to address the low pay/no pay status of London’s fringe theatres (Equity n.d., 3). However, the campaign was criticised for not recognising the financial reality of staging work on the fringe and the costs involved in mounting a production in this context (Willmott 2015). Part of the reason for this is that the exorbitant cost of venue hire for rehearsal and performance in London— sometimes several thousand pounds a week (Gardner 2015)—can make it hard to cover basic production costs in small houses and almost impossible to make enough to pay actors (Willmott 2015). Classical works present a particular financial challenge because they tend to have larger casts than new writing. Despite the challenges, London has a vibrant fringe scene that often offers innovative and progressive approaches to gender in performance but, in part, this is likely to be pragmatic; there tend to be more unemployed female performers than male willing to accept little or no pay. Like many companies working on the fringe, Lazarus for many years operated on a profit-share model. In this financial set-up any money from ticket sales which remains after the costs of the production have been covered—venue hire, design costs, marketing, etc.—is divided equally between the company members. While there are dangers of this model being exploited by unscrupulous producers, it is an approach that has launched many careers and that, following the decline of repertory theatre, plays an important training and development role in professional theatre, though, like a lot of drama school training, it is an opportunity only available to those with an additional income.

662     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

Canon: Broadening the Picture The classical canon is dominated by white men—as writers, directors, and performers—and for Lazarus the prospect of staging a play by an early modern female playwright was an exciting break from tradition (Dukes, email to the authors, November 26, 2017). Lazarus’s repertoire has predominantly focused on early modern drama, but its track record in staging classical Greek drama also significantly inflected their production of The Tragedy of Mariam. Because Cary’s act of writing and then publishing a play was unconventional for a woman, it was strategic of her to write in the neo-classical tradition; this would give her decorum, gravitas, an aura of learning. The title page of Mariam suggests what is at stake in terms of reputation; the play is advertised as being ‘by that learned, vertuous and truly noble Ladie, E.C.’; Cary keeps her identity semi-anonymous and by placing ‘learned’ as first in the list of adjectives, she emphasises Mariam as a product of learning as well as virtue and nobility. Indeed, Mariam is resolutely neo-classical, observing the unities of time, place and action; utilising a Roman-style chorus; keeping most physical violence—except a duel—off stage. More specifically, Mariam evokes Seneca’s Phaedra, particularly in its structuring: both plays open with the king absent/presumed dead (Theseus/ Herod); women characters then speak out in a way they have never done; the king returns from ‘death’ at the beginning of Act 3 and reimposes patriarchal rule; this results in the death of the heroine; the play ends with the king lamenting the death of loved one (Hippolytus/Mariam) he has killed in anger (see Schafer 2017). The influence of Phaedra might also be detected in the enunciation of taboo-breaking female lust (Phaedra/Salome); the queen’s dilemma as to whether or not she should break the rules and speak out about her feelings (Phaedra/Mariam); the queen’s lack of love for her husband, a husband who has killed her brother (the Minotaur/Aristobolus); the Senecan closing of each act with a chorus. While there were many translations of Seneca available around the time Cary was writing Mariam (c.1605), the 1640s biography of Cary states that she learnt Latin ‘without being taught’; that she ‘understood it perfectly when she was young’ and that she ‘translated the Epistles of Seneca out of it into English’ (Ferguson and Weller 1994, 186). If Cary was translating Seneca’s Epistles, there is no reason why she should not be reading his plays in Latin. The biography of Cary, the first to be written about an English woman writer, is partial and partisan: it was written by one of her four daughters who became nuns at the convent at Cambrai—Anne (born

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     663

1615), Elizabeth (born 1617), Lucy (born 1619), Mary (born 1621/1622). Ferguson and Weller (1994, 1–2) argue that the likeliest author is either Anne or Lucy. However, because the biography was written between 1643 and 1649, that is around 4 years after Cary’s death in 1639, some parts (the anecdotes relating to events from the 1590s, Cary’s childhood, and her early thirst for learning) must derive from informal but self-fashioning, autobiographical ‘performances’ by Cary herself to her children. The biography constructs Cary as learned, maverick, unruly, risking punishment to read books. The Cary persona—scholarly but unruly—is attractive from the point of view of modern feminism and modern academia. But it is precisely Cary’s dedication to learning, her enthusiasm for Seneca and her deployment of neo-classical dramaturgy that makes Mariam hard to sell to modern British audiences; in the context of contemporary British theatre, neo-classicism tends to be perceived as difficult, declamatory, and statuesque. Classical—as opposed to neo-classical—plays were spectacular when they were originally staged and would have included music, dance and a chorus that would have been impossible to ignore. Seneca’s Phaedra certainly includes spectacle—stage doors open to reveal Phaedra on two occasions. And Mariam ’s long speeches could be embraced—for example, as grand arias, or, as Laurie Maguire (2002, 95–98) has proposed, a Talking Heads style of dramaturgy could provide a useful comparison at least for Mariam’s long opening speech. However, the feature of Cary’s dramaturgy that makes her play hardest to sell in the market place of contemporary theatre is precisely these long, rhetorically complex speeches. Given Lazarus Theatre Company’s history of successful revivals of classical plays, of using movement, music and ensemble to discover physicality in rhetorically grounded plays, the company was particularly well placed to unleash Cary’s women onstage. However, Harrington-Odedra’s application of this technique to the work of a female playwright gave the dramaturgy a feminist dimension. In his interventionist dramaturgy, Harrington-Odedra was levelling the playing field for Cary. For over 400 years, the challenges of staging Shakespeare have been explored in performance by theatre practitioners at the top of their game; many have been able to convert impossible demands into the possible and to create successful theatre. Enormous resources have been made available and theatrical first aid has been applied to challenging sections of Shakespeare’s plays. Songs have been added; jokes intelligible only with the help of footnotes have been cut; production has morphed into adaptation without this being explicitly acknowledged. It is standard practice in relation to

664     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

Shakespeare, for example, to modernise archaic words; consequently, it is appropriate to ‘script doctor’ Mariam using the same approach applied over and over again to most Shakespeare plays. Lazarus paid Mariam the compliment of treating it in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays are treated, making Mariam speak to the current moment of performance.

Cut: Feminist Editing Practice In many ways, it is appropriate that Lazarus’s The Tragedy of Mariam played at the Tristan Bates Theatre, a 60-seat black box studio theatre in London’s West End, which is best known for staging new writing. On the one hand, this programming decision reflects the fact that Cary’s play in many ways could be seen to constitute new writing, having never been staged professionally in London before; on the other hand, Harrington-Odedra’s radical edit of the play transformed Cary’s original text. Harrington-Odedra’s edit was arguably the most significant element of The Tragedy of Mariam ’s feminist dramaturgy. He cut drastically in adapting the text for a company of ten actors—nine women and one man—but did not shy away from the more challenging aspects of Cary’s text; for example, he kept all 78 lines of Mariam’s opening speech. The edited version predominantly followed Cary’s chronology, starting and ending with key speeches from the play, although some dialogue was reordered. Significantly, Harrington-Odedra cut the male roles of Silleus, Constabarus, Pheroras, and Baba’s sons, which ensured an even greater focus on the play’s female roles. Some characters were regendered and made female; meanwhile Graphina, the near-silent beloved of Herod’s brother Pheroras, spoke out and took over many of Pheroras’ lines. However, Harrington-Odedra’s text was loyal to Cary’s play in, for example, retaining the emphasis on the female voice, keeping the extended scenes between Mariam, her mother, Alexandra, and her sister-in-law, Salome. One reviewer (Gurtler 2013) commented that ‘[t]he play is almost like a stream of conscience [sic ], performed mainly as monologues’; however, the crucial point is that Harrington-Odedra’s edit ensured women’s voices were heard again and again, something that is completely true to Cary’s own feminocentric dramaturgy. Harrington-Odedra’s edit significantly shortened Cary’s play: reducing its playing time from approximately three hours to just sixty minutes, which was a requirement of the production’s Camden Fringe performance context. The text itself was cut even more drastically as at just twenty-five pages long Harrington-Odedra’s edit allowed music and movement to be incorporated

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     665

into the staging to contribute to the storytelling. For many reviewers, the ‘fantastic usage of movement and imagery’ (Jameson 2013b) was the defining aspect of Lazarus’s The Tragedy of Mariam. However, some reviewers felt this evocative staging came at the cost of the narrative: ‘a lot of the storyline is lost and spectators with no background knowledge on the piece will probably struggle to follow the exact events presented’ (Hart 2013). Harrington-Odedra’s production focused on creating an atmospheric evocation of Mariam ’s mood and setting. For example, the stage design was based around a square of red rose petals in the centre of the performance space: this became confetti at a wedding; ticker-tape for Herod’s return; and blood for the play’s numerous deaths. As the performance progressed, the clear outline of the square of petals became blurred and the mess reflected the increasingly bloody and chaotic action of the play. Rachel Smith’s lighting design was brooding and sultry, adding to the production’s sense of scale and evoking the public spaces and shadowy corners of Cary’s ancient Judea (see Fig. 29.1). These design choices created a tangible location for Cary’s play; one reviewer (Gurtler 2013) remarked that ‘the production design is so stunning that you sometimes forget it’s a play and believe you are in a painting by a remarkable artist’. Furthermore, performed in the small studio space of the Tristan Bates Theatre in the middle of August, the performance space itself contributed to the evocation of Cary’s hot and oppressive ancient Judea.

Collaboration: Creating a Collective Harrington-Odedra’s focus was on the sensory aspects of performance rather than a respectful staging of the play-text. The powerful focus on the sensory began as soon as the audience entered the performance space. The production opened with a rolling start: the nine female members stood upstage, lit in silhouette. Each woman was touching the woman either side of her, but all adopted different postures and physicalities to represent the character that they would become when the play began. As a company the women performed a series of repeated movements in slow motion; the physicality of this female ensemble foregrounded a sense of community among the women performers, who were united as a chorus in the opening moments. The company incorporated a song into the rolling start with text taken from Constabarus’s misogynist tirade in 1.6. Constabarus’s shocked hope that Salome is ‘the first and will, I hope, be last / That ever sought her husband to divorce’ (1.6.77–8) was staged as a chorus. Sung by nine women, representing characters freed from patriarchal oppression by the absence of

666     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

Fig. 29.1  Celine Abrahams as Mariam in the Lazarus Theatre Company production of The Tragedy of Mariam, by Elizabeth Cary, directed by Gavin Harrington-Odedra, 2013 (Photograph by Scott Rylander. ©Lazarus Theatre Company)

the male figurehead, Herod, these words found new meaning. Gay Gibson Cima has argued that ‘vocal arias such as echolalic repetitions of select words or phrases can […] subvert a script in performance’ (1993, 99); certainly having Constabarus’s voice echo through the voices of the female ensemble, with his words alienated and out of context, subverted his patriarchal fury; after all, the audience know Salome will not be the last woman to divorce her husband. The dreamlike element of the rolling start generated a sense of Constabarus’s sentiments echoing through time, but the dramatic irony of

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     667

his words allowed a critique of patriarchal control, whilst still acknowledging its force. The potential multiplicity of readings of this chorus helped to position the opening scenes of the play, in which a number of women express a wide variety of responses to Herod’s death. Harrington-Odedra’s process in devising the song in some ways might be seen to reflect Cary’s focus on a variety of female voices; each cast member was assigned a line of Constabarus’s 1.6 speech and asked to create a melody for it. In rehearsal ‘[e]very company member sang their respective lines and then we joined them together to make a song from the speech’ (Lazarus Theatre Company 2013c). The resulting melody was therefore a combination of musical styles, but, honed in rehearsal by the company and sung in unison, it managed to convey a collective of women, whilst still affording the individual female cast members their own individual voice and contribution to the performance. As a company, this kind of ensemble work is key to Lazarus’s process, and devising music and movement is a particular characteristic of Harrington-Odedra’s directorial style. This approach requires a close collaboration in the company and a directorial style that focuses on facilitation rather than authoritarianism. The practicalities of the rehearsal room—and the impact they may have on staging choices—are often overlooked in analyses of performance, and yet these practicalities are central to shaping the production. Fiona Shaw, reflecting on her experience of playing Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew for the RSC, observed that as an actress in a Shakespeare production: You are often alone. You are often the only woman in the room. It’s an old refrain but it goes on being a relevant state that affects the performances we ultimately give. Men don’t experience it, so they never have to deal with it. The Kate I played in The Shrew was a direct product of the rehearsal process. I was conscious of wanting to radiate the sense of terribly clouded confusion that overwhelms you when you are the only woman around. That was Kate’s position, and it was mine: she in that mad marriage, me in rehearsal. Men, together, sometimes speak a funny language. You don’t know what’s happening, and you get so confused that you can no longer see. You become one frown. I get like that sometimes; so did my Kate. (Fiona Shaw, quoted in Rutter 1988, xvii)

By contrast, the all-female company of Shakespeare’s Globe’s The Taming of the Shrew, directed by Joe Murphy in 2013, cite a remarkable moment which occurred when Kate Lamb, playing Katherina, spoke her final speech ‘out loud for the first time’:

668     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

[This] was a very special moment in the rehearsal room for all of us, as eight women. We all came together at the end of it and just spontaneously got into a huddle and reassured everybody that it was okay and it was right and that what we’re doing as eight women on the stage – telling this story and presenting this character and her journey and her, sort of, tragedy – is a really empowering thing to do. And it’s painful and it’s difficult but it’s really important. So, that was quite a special moment. (Shakespeare’s Globe n.d.)

Like The Taming of the Shrew, Mariam is a play about a woman who is punished for speaking her mind. Working on a play about the silencing of an unruly woman with a company of artists dominated by women, a company who were all sensitive to the play’s troubling gender politics, contributed significantly to the feminist dramaturgy that characterised Lazarus’s staging of Cary’s play. An example of the way in which Lazarus’s female-majority company influenced the staging is in its handling of Mariam ’s Chorus. Cary’s Chorus is referred to as ‘a company of Jews’ (Cary 2012, 74) and the play’s choruses often criticise female behaviour, voicing misogynist sentiments and reinforcing patriarchal values. Writing of the impact of staging Cary’s Chorus, Ramona Wray highlights the fact that: ‘the Chorus is a grouping or body of opinion that would be visibly striking in stage productions because comprised of several players’ (Cary 2012, 81). Also significant in performance terms is that the Chorus inevitably becomes gendered, depending on the casting of the roles, whereas in Cary’s text no gender is assigned. In Lazarus’s staging, Cary’s Chorus was played by just one actor, Tara Cowley, but in many ways the ever-present female ensemble took on the physical presence of Cary’s Chorus. Harrington-Odedra used the ensemble to interact variously with the characters on stage and with the audience. This gave the scope for interpreting the individual role of the Chorus as a character in her own right and the company adopted a psychologically realist approach to staging the role. The company viewed the Chorus as a mediator between the audience and the world of the play and, seeking a contemporary reference point for this role, lighted on the figure of the journalist. The rehearsal report from July 30 states: ‘[we are] exploring her as a news reporter dealing in cliches [sic ] who has to mature quickly. Final couplet as summing up of news ­bulletin’ (Lazarus Theatre Company 2013b). Approaching the text in this anachronistic way helped to make sense of the misogynies of the Chorus, as they became instances of hack journalism rather than statements of truth. Harrington-Odedra’s staging incorporated the Chorus into all the key events in the play: she was a bridesmaid at Graphina’s wedding, she helped Salome

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     669

to dress for her brother’s return, and she became one of Herod’s servants. Often present in scenes in which she had no lines, Cowley’s Chorus developed a relationship with the play’s characters and her response to the lines she had to speak became increasingly troubled. For example, her delivery of the lines ’Tis not enough for one that is a wife To keep her spotless from an act of ill: But from suspicion she should free her life, And bare herself of power as well as will. (3 Chorus, 1–4)

became a critique of the impossible standard of behaviour expected of women, rather than an endorsement of it. This point was emphasised by the staging of this chorus, as the lines ‘When she hath spacious ground to walk upon, / Why on the ridge should she desire to go?’ (3 Chorus, 7–8), were delivered by the Chorus as if walking a tightrope along the outside of the petals—the square of petals reflecting the ‘spacious ground’ and the line she was walking reflecting ‘the ridge’—showing her own desire for adventure and experience. The growing sympathy of the Chorus for Mariam’s plight reflected a journey from innocence to experience: the misogynies of the text rang increasingly hollow as the performance continued. This creative approach to staging misogynist text demonstrates the potential for feminist revision through feminist textual critique and innovative casting and staging choices.

Casting: All-Female Space and the Critique of Patriarchy The gender dynamics of The Tragedy of Mariam ’s rehearsal room were inevitably impacted by the fact that it was a female-dominated space: the nine female company members were joined by a female assistant director, female stage manager, and female lighting designer, while just three of the company were male, although all three occupied positions of significant power—the director, artistic director, and the actor playing Herod. Choosing to cast so many women actively contributed to the feminist dramaturgy of The Tragedy of Mariam, further emphasizing the focus on women’s stories and women’s voices. Casting is an important tool for theatre companies wanting to re-imagine the gender politics of classical plays. Indeed, in ‘Strategies for Subverting the Canon’, Gay Gibson Cima argues that ‘[c]ross-gender,

670     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

cross-racial, and cross-generational casting tactics’ are vital to a feminist approach to performance (1993, 99). Four traditionally male roles were played by female performers: Rosanna Lambe played Sohemus, Esme Lowe played Ananell, Emily-Rose Hurdiss played Nuntio, and Tara Cowley played the Chorus, as discussed above. Significantly, these roles were regendered, meaning that the pronouns in the text were changed so that the characters were depicted as female. While regendering early modern characters is a strategy that has achieved a high profile in recent years, with notable examples being Helen Mirren’s bigscreen Prospera (2010) and Tamsin Greig’s Malvolia at the National Theatre (2017), Lazarus has a history of regendering a range of early modern roles including the King of Spain in The Spanish Tragedy (2013); Ambitioso in The Revenger’s Tragedy (2015); and Donado in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (2016). In part, these casting decisions were pragmatic, reflecting the fact that casting calls receive far more responses from female applicants than male; however, as a company Lazarus is also committed to exploring the new meanings generated by casting women in roles that have power and agency. In the case of The Tragedy of Mariam, the regendering of four roles contributed to the sense of a female community that, despite incorporating a variety of voices and perspectives, lives in relative harmony until the figure of the patriarch returns. Harrington-Odedra originally intended to stage the production with an all-female cast: In honour of the piece being the first play written by a women to publish under her own name, we wanted to make it an all-female production. But we thought that the return of Herod was a very pivotal moment, and would lose its effect if it was played by a woman. Or rather, that a man invading the space where nine women have been telling us a story would hopefully create friction for the audience. (Email to the authors, January 4, 2018)

Harrington-Odedra is here referring to the fact that, as part of their focus on ensemble storytelling, Lazarus stagings generally feature the whole company on stage throughout a performance. Critically in Lazarus’s The Tragedy of Mariam, Harrington-Odedra decided to keep Stephen McNeice, who played Herod, out of the ensemble, off-stage, while the rest of the company—all women—held the stage. Because Herod did not enter until nearly two-thirds of the way through the script, the patriarch stepped onto a stage that until that point had been an all-female space. Cary keeps her stage all-female for 324 lines but Lazarus’s casting and regendering

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     671

of characters made the stage all-female for a far longer period, until the moment of Herod’s return from the dead. Thus the dynamic was of the male, the patriarchal soldier, returning from war, invading a female space. Discussing these choices at the time with Paula James, who played Salome, Assistant Director Sara Reimers suggested that ‘[t]his device gave us the space to create a world that had been freed from the oppressive rule of a tyrannical King, exploring how these women existed without the fear and weight of male domination, only to have that freedom taken away when Herod returned’ (James and Reimers, n.d.). Writing of this staging choice, Ramona Wray (2015, 158) observes that ‘[b]ecause only one male role remains […] his place takes on a particularly patriarchal force’. She continues that ‘[j]udged against the production’s opening stress on carnival release, the appearance of Herod, when it does take place, is all the more devastating and dramatic’ (2015, 158–59). The context of a tyrannical, patriarchal dictatorship was foregrounded through the use of costume. Harrington-Odedra relocated the play to 1940s Italy and McNeice’s Herod was fashioned as a Mussolini-esque dictator. In the first half of the play, the majority of the female members of the cast wore their hair down and had bare feet, a styling that contrasted with the stylish knee-length dresses and suggested an informal but elite social context. When Herod returned, sporting full military garb, his appearance heralded the imposition of a more rigid and authoritarian regime. The impression of scale afforded by the production’s design choices—particularly Smith’s lighting—contributed to the sense of the political as well as the personal; one reviewer commented that ‘[t]he use of the space and lighting is done to such a brilliant effect that we forget that we are watching this production in a small fringe theatre and get the impression that it is taking place on a much larger stage’ (Hart 2013). Thus, the staging emphasized the idea that Mariam’s choices are not concerned with wifely duty alone, but with her role as queen and monarch of a country. Where male characters were crucial to the plotline of Mariam, Harrington-Odedra used masks and physicality to represent them on stage. For example, in Salome’s first soliloquy, the company’s female ensemble represented the men referenced in the speech. The rehearsal report notes: In the second run four actors took on the physical presence of Constabarus, Silleus, Herod and Josephus in the four corners of the space. This added focus had a powerful impact on the scene, seeming to isolate Salome in a world of unsupportive men, it also foregrounded her relationships with each man, making her references to them more grounded in emotion. (Lazarus 2013b)

672     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

The physical manifestation of the men in Salome’s speech also helped to clarify its meaning: positioning each ‘man’ at a different corner of the square of petals, Salome, centre stage, addressed them in turn. The blocking foregrounded the fact that Salome is speaking about several different people at this point in Cary’s rich text and also emphasized Salome’s emotional conflict as she moved from man to man. The regendering of roles also generated new readings of Mariam. Early in rehearsals, Harrington-Odedra discussed the gender of Sohemus with actor Rosanna Lambe and the rest of the company. Two options for the gendering of the role were discussed—Lambe could play Sohemus as male, or the role could be regendered to Sohema and the pronouns changed accordingly. The company collectively took the decision to regender Sohemus to Sohema: it was felt that by altering the character’s name and gender the relationship between Celine Abrahams’ Mariam and Lambe’s Sohema became clearer (Lazarus Theatre Company 2013a). Furthermore, it clarified the storytelling, ensuring that spectators would not be confused or distracted by the gender of the character and actor not aligning in this unfamiliar play. In Cary’s text, Sohemus is a loyal and trusty servant, but when regendered the character took on new significances: Sohema became a friend and an ally. Sohema’s decision not to put Mariam to death—which is what Herod had ordered ‘her’ to do in the event of his own death—read very differently: on the one hand it might be read as an act of female defiance, a woman p ­ rotecting another woman from a vicious patriarchal demand; but the decision might also read as reflecting the intensity of the women’s relationship. Played by actors who were a decade or so younger than the actor playing Herod, Sohema and Mariam appeared to be young women conspiring against the old patriarchal order. A potentially queer reading of the relationship between Mariam and Sohema was also made possible: united by the cruel behaviour of Herod, the pair shared an intensity that went beyond friendship, perhaps to a bond of sisterhood or to a romantic attachment. This romantic bond was discussed in rehearsals. Harrington-Odedra’s edit kept Cary’s reference to the love between Mariam and Sohemus—‘Then you’ll no more remember what hath passed, / Sohemus’ love and hers shall be forgot?’ (4.7.113–4)— which, when changed to Sohema, highlighted the potential to read their relationship as romantic. Harrington-Odedra reordered the text so that Herod’s response to this news was taken from earlier in Cary’s text: ‘Oh Heaven! Sohemus false! Go, let him die, / Stay not to suffer him to speak a word’ (4.4.13–4). That just two lines later Herod called for Mariam’s death gave a stronger sense of the two female characters’ lives being intertwined

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     673

and that his decision to put both women to death stemmed from an anxiety about female unity and perhaps represented a desire to control female sexuality. Lazarus’s creative approach to casting facilitated not only a consideration of female sexuality and political alliances, but also of the relationship between gender and race. This was achieved through the casting of the three central women, who were played by actors of different ethnicities. Lazarus has a record of using casting to explore race. For example, their 2014 production of Coriolanus was the first professional production of the play in the UK to have featured an actor of colour in the title role (BBA Shakespeare Database n.d.). Consequently, it made sense for them to confront Cary’s elite, aristocratic, early modern racialised notions of beauty. Herod tells his sister Salome: Yourself are held a goodly creature here, Yet so unlike my Mariam in your shape That, when to her you have approached near, Myself hath often ta’en you for an ape. And yet you prate of beauty! Go your ways. You are to her a sunburnt blackamoor. (4.7.101–105)

While the production’s casting was ostensibly colour-blind—Herod and his sister were played by actors of different ethnicities—the retention of specific reference to race in the edited text rendered race, and the racial diversity in the Lazarus company, particularly important and visible in performance. The company discussed Herod’s racist reference to Salome’s beauty in rehearsal and it was decided that the reference should remain to further foreground Herod’s villainy. As well as adding a new dynamic to the relationship between the brother and sister, the retention of Herod’s line allowed a critique of Cary’s politics and foregrounded Herod’s racialised construction of feminine beauty (for a discussion of the racial politics of Mariam see Callaghan 1994). Intersectionality is an integral quality of feminist staging practice and the casting of Lazarus’s The Tragedy of Mariam put three women of colour centre stage, with Paula James’s Salome joined by Celine Abrahams’s Mariam and Melissa Ramadan’s Doris. This casting choice actively engaged with socially constructed definitions of beauty, highlighting the way in which race is used within patriarchy to divide women, and perhaps most significantly in a performance context that uniquely discriminates against women of colour (see Reimers 2017), afforded visibility and agency to female

674     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

performers of a variety of ethnicities. Feminist casting practices can also contribute to discussions of beauty and ableism, something with which Harrington-Odedra’s production also engaged. The role of Graphina was played by Kerrian Burton, an actor who has muscular dystrophy (Burton n.d.). While Burton’s disability was not central to her performance, it is significant that the ingénue role in the production was played by a disabled actor and again highlights the important role that casting can play in engaging with, challenging and shaping normative notions of beauty, which are generally racist and ableist. [See also Chapters 25 and 31 for more detailed discussion of these issues by Jenny Sealey and Anna Kamaralli, respectively.] Looking at the definition of desirable femininity and its relationship with race and disability afforded an intersectional approach to feminism that could highlight a range of possible ways in which misogyny may operate.

Conclusion Programming Mariam is an important intervention in a performance context in which the classical canon is marked by androcentrism. The feminist approach to dramaturgy in the sense of editing, casting, and collaboration only serves to amplify Cary’s already remarkably feminist voice. Given Lazarus Theatre Company’s history of successful revivals of rhetorically grounded classical plays, their injection of music, of physicality, of movement and their commitment to ensemble, the company were particularly well placed to release Cary’s women onto the London stage with vigour, energy, and panache. With no one pretending—as directors of Shakespeare often will—that they were being ‘faithful’ to the playwright’s ‘intentions’, Lazarus were free to bring theatrical intelligence to bear on Cary’s Senecan text. They were producing, staging, and adapting Cary’s play for a new context, one she never dreamed of; they were creative, inventive, and the play sang (literally in places). The marketing of the production focused on the centrality of a female story to the play, stating: ‘A woman’s pride, strength and voice is central to this ensemble production’ (Lazarus Theatre Company n.d.). That statement could be true of Mariam, Salome, Cary or any one of the women who were onstage speaking Cary’s words.

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     675

Bibliography BBA (British Black and Asian) Shakespeare Database. n.d. ‘Coriolanus’. Accessed June 18, 2018. https://bbashakespeare.warwick.ac.uk/plays/coriolanus. Burton, Kerrian. n.d. ‘Home Page’. Accessed June 18, 2018. http://kerrianburton. weebly.com. Callaghan, Dympna. 1994. ‘Re-Reading Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedie of Mariam, Faire Queene of Jewry ’. In Women, ‘Race’, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, edited by Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, 163–77. London and New York: Routledge. Cary, Elizabeth. 2012. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry. Edited by Ramona Wray. Arden Early Modern Drama. London: Methuen. Cima, Gay Gibson. 1993. ‘Strategies for Subverting the Canon’. In Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Gender and Race Matter, edited by Ellen Donkin and Susan Clement, 91–105. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Equity. n.d. ‘Professionally Made, Professionally Paid: Equity’s Guide to Combating Low Pay and No Pay Work in the Entertainment Industry’. Accessed July 8, 2018. https://www.equity.org.uk/media/1670/pmpp-booklet.pdf. Ferguson, Margaret W., and Barry Weller, eds. 1994. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry by Elizabeth Cary with the Lady Falkland: Her Life by One of Her Daughters. Berkeley: University of California Press. Findlay, Alison, Gweno Williams, and Stephanie J. Hodgson-Wright. 1999. ‘“The Play Is Ready to Be Acted”: Women and Dramatic Production, 1570–1670’. Women Writing 6, no. 1: 129–48. Gardner, Lyn. 2015. ‘Fringe Theatre? There’s No Such Thing’. The Guardian, April 16, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2015/apr/16/ fring-arts-theres-no-such-thing-as-fringe-theatre-funding-theatre-in-manchester. Gurtler, Camilla. 2013. ‘Camden Fringe Review: The Tragedy of Mariam  ’. A Younger Theatre. August 14, 2013. http://www.ayoungertheatre.com/ camden-fringe-review-the-tragedy-of-mariam-tristan-bates-theatre/. Hart, Tessa. 2013. ‘Review of The Tragedy of Mariam ’. Remote Goat. August 15, 2013. http://www.remotegoat.com/uk/review/10121/a-visually-stunning-undiscoveredclassic/. James, Paula, and Sara Reimers. n.d. ‘Discovering the First Female English Playwright; or, Why We Should Care About Cary’. Women’s Room. Accessed October 29, 2018. http://www.thewomensroom.org.uk/showpage.php?blogpage=4&blogtitle= Discovering+the+First+Female+English+Playwright%3B+or%2C+Why+ We+Should+Care+About+Cary#bloglink_151. Jameson, Greg. 2013a. ‘Gavin Harrington-Odedra Interview’. July 23, 2013. http://www.entertainment-focus.com/theatre-section/theatre-interviews/ gavin-harrington-odedra-interview/.

676     Sara Reimers and Elizabeth Schafer

Jameson, Greg. 2013b. ‘The Tragedy of Mariam Review’. Entertainment Focus. August 14, 2013. http://www.entertainment-focus.com/theatre-section/theatrereviews/the-tragedy-of-mariam-review/. Lazarus Theatre Company. n.d. ‘Lazarus Theatre Company Past Productions (pre-2016)’. Accessed July 8, 2018. http://www.lazarustheatrecompany.com/ pre-2016. Lazarus Theatre Company. 2013a. Rehearsal Report, July 24, 2013. Private Company Archive. Lazarus Theatre Company. 2013b. Rehearsal Report, July 30, 2013. Private Company Archive. Lazarus Theatre Company. 2013c. Rehearsal Report, August 5, 2013. Private Company Archive. Lazarus Theatre Company. 2018. ‘Lazarus Theatre Company’. Accessed July 8, 2018. http://www.lazarustheatrecompany.com/lazarus. London Theatre Report. 2014. https://www.londontheatre1.com/londontheatrereportv7.pdf. Luckyi, Christina, and Rose Sneyd. 2016. ‘Recent Studies in Elizabeth Cary (1994– 2014, with Additional Items from 2015)’. English Literary Renaissance 46, no. 3: 456–73. Maguire, Laurie. 2002. ‘Teaching Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam Through Performance’. In Approaches to Teaching English Renaissance Drama, edited by Karen Bamford and Alexander Leggatt, 95–98. New York: Modern Language Association. Reimers, Sara. 2017. ‘Casting and the Construction of Femininity in Contemporary Stagings of Shakespeare’s Plays’. PhD Diss., Royal Holloway, University of London. Royal Holloway Drama. 2016. ‘Elizabeth Schafer’s 1995 Production of The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry, by Elizabeth Carey [sic ]’. Accessed July 8, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOYsjNcG93w. Rutter, Carol. 1988. Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today. London: Women’s Press. Schafer, Elizabeth. 2015. ‘Introduction: Attending to Early Modern Women as Theatre Makers’. Early Theatre 18, no. 2: 125–33. Schafer, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘Unsilencing Elizabeth Cary: World-Making in The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry ’. In Worldmaking: Literature, Language, Culture, edited by T. Clark, E. Finlayson, and P. Kelly, 41–53. FILLM Studies in Literatures and Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schlegel, August Wilhelm von. 1815. Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (Lecture 15). Translated by John Black. Project Gutenberg (2004). www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7148. Shakespeare’s Globe. n.d. ‘Adopt an Actor: Katherina Played by Kate Lamb. Rehearsal One’. Accessed July 8, 2018. http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

29  Feminist Dramaturgy in Practice: The Tragedy of Mariam     677

discovery-space/adopt-an-actor/archive/katherina-played-by-kate-lamb/ rehearsal-1. Sphinx Theatre Company. 2006. Women in Theatre 2006 Survey. London: Sphinx Theatre. Willmott, Phil. 2015. ‘Phil Willmott: Here’s Why a New Generation of Directors Is Too Scared to Make Theatre’. The Stage, July 21, 2015. Accessed 24 October 2017. https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2015/philwillmott-new-generation-directors-scared-make-theatre/. Wray, Ramona. 2015. ‘Performing The Tragedy of Mariam and Constructing Stage History’. Early Theatre 18, no. 2: 149–66.

Productions Cited A Fragment of Mariam. Dir. Rebecca McCutcheon. Shakespeare’s Globe. Conference. December 7, 2013. The Tragedy of Mariam, Fair Queen of Jewry. Dir. Elizabeth Schafer. Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey. October 1995. The Tragedy of Mariam. Dir. Kirstin Bone. Improbable Fictions, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. March 14, 2013. The Tragedy of Mariam. Dir. Gavin Harrington Odedra. Lazarus Theatre Company. Tristan Bates Theatre, London. August 12–17, 2013. The Mariam Project–Youth and Young Girlhood. Dir. Rebecca McCutcheon. St. John the Baptist Church, Burford, Oxfordshire. June 12, 2013. The Mariam Pop Up. Dir. Rebecca McCutcheon. Designed Talulah Mason. The Gretchen Day Gallery, Peckham, London. August 13, 2013.

30 Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, Milan Susan Marshall

In 1764 Cesare Beccaria wrote: ‘Liberty is at an end, whenever the laws permit, that [a person] may cease to be a person, and become a thing’ (4th edition 1985, 79). Over 200 years later, in 1975, penitentiary reform in Italy introduced the concept of social rehabilitation into prisons. Individualised programmes of education, work, sport and recreational activities aim to facilitate the reintegration of prisoners into society on their release by offering them life skills and contact with the outside world. Today, many prisons in Italy run theatre programmes, recognizing the importance of theatre in allowing prisoners to express themselves. This chapter looks at the work of the San Vittore Globe Theatre, the women’s theatre company run by professional director Donatella Massimilla and CETEC, the Centro Europeo Teatro e Carcere Dentro/Fuori San Vittore (European Centre of Theatre in Prison Inside/Outside San Vittore), in San Vittore Prison in Milan, placing it in the context of wider theoretical discussions of theatre within prisons. This account draws on my own experience of working with them as costume designer since 2015. Following the normal practice used by CETEC, only the first names of the prisoners are used in this chapter in order to protect their anonymity. All comments by Donatella Massimilla reported without a reference come from undated private conversations, 2015–2018.

Susan Marshall (*)  Fashion Institute of Technology, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_30

679

680     Susan Marshall

Donatella Massimilla, artistic director and dramaturg of CETEC, studied under Jerzy Grotowski, both at university in Rome and at the International Theatre Festival at Santarcangelo di Romagna, and with theatre historian and professor of dramaturgy Claudio Meldolesi at DAMS (Drama, Art and Music Studies, University of Bologna). This background in ‘poor theatre’ and improvisation, as well as commedia dell’arte, has strongly influenced her work, which she defines as ‘Teatro d’Arte Sociale’—neither Social Theatre nor Art Theatre but a combination of both. Massimilla has worked in prisons in Italy and across Europe since 1989, and, in 1999, founded CETEC Dentro/Fuori San Vittore, a social cooperative that works with people both inside and outside San Vittore Prison to aid the difficult transition period from inside to outside, and help reintegrate ex-prisoners back into society and everyday life. The San Vittore Globe Theatre Company itself includes prisoners, ex-prisoners, professional actors and musicians. Onstage the audience never knows who is incarcerated, who is an ex-prisoner and who is a professional actor—and only first names appear on the theatre programme. I have worked with Donatella Massimilla and the actresses of the San Vittore Globe Theatre since the summer of 2015, creating a ‘dressing up box’ with costume elements that can be mixed and matched in different ways in the tradition of travelling theatre. Made from recycled clothing and remnants of fabric and trimmings, the costumes are not faithful reproductions of actual garments, but ‘fashion quotes’ such as a ruff made of bubble wrap or folded newspapers, while items such as a lace cuff, a corset, a hat or a waistcoat recall the Elizabethan period. Flexibility is necessary as the clothes need to be easily adaptable to fit different people in different productions, but this flexibility offers creative opportunities in which a crinoline turns into a huge shell or Ariel’s wings and a simple piece of rope becomes the thread of a story (see Fig. 30.1). Teatro ‘fa parte di noi, come una mano, o mangiare o bere o dormire. Unità primarie dell’essere umano’

Theatre ‘is part of us, like a hand, or eating, drinking or sleeping. A primary element of being human.’ Giorgio Strehler (quoted in CETEC 2017b, 7)

Theatre has existed in prisons for many years with ‘considerable evidence of prison theatre and artwork during the Second World War, of performances in concentration camps, in ghettos, in internment camps and in the communist Gulags’ (Balfour 2009, 1). In 1931, psychodrama as group therapy was introduced into Sing Sing Prison by Jacob Moreno who described it as ‘the science that explores truth through dramatic methods’

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     681

Fig. 30.1  Carolyne as Ariel, in the San Vittore Globe Theatre production of Le Tempeste, after William Shakespeare, directed by Donatella Massimilla, costume by Susan Marshall, Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Photograph by Marica Moretti. ©Marica Moretti)

(Moreno 1987, 13) although, as noted by Ceppellini and Pozzi (2009, 18), ‘psychodrama is not a theatrical representation. It is group psychotherapy with a para-theatrical presentation’. Since these early experiments, the practice of theatre in prisons throughout the world has expanded to include many institutions. Methodologies change from country to country and from prison to prison encompassing an array of projects, organised by drama therapists, social workers, theatre directors, amateurs and experts. The different strategies place greater or lesser importance on the therapeutic, aesthetic and artistic aspects of theatre in prison but as Bridget Keehan (2015, 391–94) writes: ‘concerns have been raised over the extent to which some theatre and drama practice in prisons might simply be serving institutional needs. Michael Balfour warns […] against theatre in prison becoming simply a means by which to fulfil institutional objectives, rather, it should aim to maintain a critical distance and not merge as part of an array of interventions designed to correct behaviour’. Theatre in prison can be a powerful

682     Susan Marshall

tool, ‘a non-traditional training practice, which helps to rediscover personal skills and feelings, but is also a positive way to express negative or distressing emotions; being part of a theatrical group allows [prisoners] to experience roles and dynamics other than those of their own, by replacing relational mechanisms based on strength, control and defiance with those related to collaboration, exchange and sharing’ (Ministero della giustizia 2017). Donatella Massimilla maintains that if theatre is done well, it can be therapeutic and cathartic in itself. There is a general agreement among practitioners that theatre in prison helps reduce recidivism as the ‘arts work on affective, cognitive and behavioural, as well as neurological, levels [offering] a non-judgmental and un-authoritarian model of engagement, as well as a non-traditional, noninstitutional social and emotional environment. Engagement in the arts assumes and requires respect and responsibility, cooperation and collaboration–factors which are vital in stimulating lasting change’ (Hughes 2005, 70). Ron Jenkins (2011b, 5; see also 2011a, 18), who has directed theatre workshops in prisons in Italy, Indonesia and America, is convinced that: the skills required for theater and the skills required for transforming one’s life are not incompatible: Dedication. Determination. Discipline. Focus. Careful Listening. Clear Speaking. Mastering Emotions. Awareness of an action’s consequences. Decoding the multiple meanings in the subtext of a conversation. Defining an objective as precisely as possible and working persistently to achieve it.

Both Keehan (2015, 391–94) and Jenny Hughes note, however, that, although there is a wealth of evidence to suggest that there is a link between the arts and desistence, much of this is anecdotal and that more in-depth research is needed to adequately illustrate the connection ‘between participation in an arts programme and re-offending, demonstrating which interventions work for whom, when and in what circumstances’ (Hughes 2005, 70). It would also be interesting to investigate whether theatre instigates change or whether prisoners choose to participate in a theatre workshop because they are already predisposed to change. After nearly thirty years of leading theatre workshops in prison, Donatella Massimilla says only one workshop participant has reoffended and returned behind bars. When asked why she thinks it is important to do theatre in prison, Massimilla replies that she doesn’t think it is particularly important to do theatre in prison … it is important to do theatre full stop, but she believes that theatre permits the prisoners to discover/rediscover themselves

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     683

and envisage a future without bars. In the words of James Thompson (1998, 40), ‘Theatre in prison can be a powerful place … to reinvent the present and to imagine a new future’. Le sbarre del carcere in ogni momento The bars of the prison are a permanent ci ricordano chi siamo e dove siamo. Ci reminder of who we are and where riportano con la mente alla nostra pena we are. They remind us of our prison e alla privazione di tutte le più piccole sentence and the deprivation of every libertà little freedom Ma quando recitiamo succede qualcosa But something magical happens when di magico: la mente si libera rompendo we are acting: the mind breaks through queste sbarre: la mente vola, oltre the bars and is set free, flying beyond questo muro, questo cemento, vola these walls, this cement, it flies towards verso la libertà freedom Questa è la grandezza di fare teatro qui This is the wonder of doing theatre here in carcere. È un gruppo così piccolo ma in prison. It is a group that is so small grande, così umile ma così prezioso, per yet so big, so humble yet so precious tutti noi che non abbiamo più niente, for all of us that don’t have anything che abbiamo perso la libertà ma che a any more, who have lost our freefatica cerchiamo di ritrovare noi stesse dom but are struggling to rediscover ourselves (Martina 2017)

In 1975, penitentiary reform in Italy implemented Article 27 of the Italian Constitution which states: ‘Punishments may not be inhuman and shall aim at re-educating the convicted’ (Senato della Repubblica 1947). According to the 1975 Penal Code, ‘rehabilitative treatment must be implemented through contacts with the external environment, to aid social reintegration. The treatment is carried out according to a criterion of individualization in relation to the individuals’ specific needs’ (Governo Italiano 1975). Statistics show that the rate of recidivism in Italy is around 70%, while it drops to 30% when prisoners adhere to a programme of training and work to help them become autonomous when they regain their freedom (Le Due Città 2017). Rehabilitation is seen to be the key to desistence so, alongside interventions by a team of psychologists, educators and social workers, the law states that prisoners should be given access to education, from literacy classes to university courses, and a choice of cultural, recreational and sports activities, in addition to working either inside or outside of the prison. However, as noted by the Council of Europe’s Anti-Torture Committee, which examines conditions in police stations, prisons and psychiatric establishments in Italy (CPT 2016), and Associazione Antigone, which monitors conditions in Italian prisons (Antigone 2017), overcrowding is a constant problem in Italian prisons which frequently impedes the

684     Susan Marshall

implementation of these recommendations. Almost non-existent before the 1980s, theatre in prison in Italy has since flourished, inspired partly by Rick Cluchey and the San Quentin Drama Workshop who toured Italy performing ‘Beckett Directs Beckett’ in 1984. Around 50% of prisons have theatre groups at present with the emphasis on creative production rather than applied theatre and drama therapy. San Vittore Prison is a large prison in the centre of Milan which opened in 1879. The design was inspired by Bentham’s Panopticon: six spokes, radiating from a central rotunda, house the men’s section over three floors, whereas the women’s section is in a separate, smaller building. The total prison population fluctuates from around 900 to 1000 prisoners with women prisoners numbering between 60 and 90. It is a ‘Casa Circondariale’ which is a type of prison that accommodates people awaiting trial or with sentences of less than five years. This causes obvious difficulties when trying to organise a permanent theatre company in San Vittore although there is a small group of prisoners in the women’s section who have longer sentences to serve and who are not subject to the same turnover as the men’s section. Unlike many prisons in Italy, there is no theatre space in San Vittore and workshops are held in corridors or the library. Performances are often staged in the rotunda of San Vittore which was originally the prison chapel and Massimilla considers this unusual space to be an integral part of the productions. The round space recalls Shakespeare’s Globe in London or the Piccolo Teatro Studio Melato in Milan where the San Vittore Globe Theatre Company has performed several times. Luigi Pagano, who was prison governor of San Vittore from 1989 to 2004, believes that it is of the utmost importance for prisoners to have contact with the outside world and that activities that aren’t necessarily therapeutic but encourage commitment should be introduced into prison. He admitted in an interview with Emanuela Maffi that he was a little sceptical at first in 1989 when Donatella Massimilla suggested running a theatre workshop in the women’s section of San Vittore but he was soon convinced of the validity of the project and the extraordinary effect it had on the prisoners’ cultural and personal growth. Impressed by the multiple positive aspects of the theatre workshop and the quality of the actors’ performances, he noted that the artistic aspects were as important as the indirectly therapeutic ones: Thinking about theatre purely as therapy risks confusing a transformation with what is actually a return to normality. Experiencing the magical transformation that theatre brings helps them rediscover themselves, without their crime

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     685

defining their identity, without being seen as a prisoner. In that moment you are a person engaging in an activity, a person rather than an inmate. (quoted in Maffi 2014, 25)

Many years later, Donatella Massimilla and CETEC continue to run theatre workshops in San Vittore with an ‘artistic and pedagogical approach that is inspired by women’s issues, situations of discomfort, marginality and diversity’ (CETEC 2017b). Massimilla has dedicated her life to theatre in prison, wanting to work on real-life stories in a community and citing as a major influence the community spirit she witnessed in her grandmother’s kitchen in Calabria, where all the local women congregated to prepare food together. She considers prison to be a community even if it is one usually invisible to the outside world. A prisoner quoted by Jenkins (2011b, 6) would agree: ‘For me it matters that our voices are heard on the outside, because lots of times when you are incarcerated you feel like you no longer have a voice, and nobody hears you, and that’s a hopeless situation to find yourself in’. The theatre workshop has created a bridge between ‘dentro’ and ‘fuori’, inside and outside, a bridge that links the prison and the city. One example of this is the close relationship between CETEC, the prison and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano that began with the visit of legendary director Giorgio Strehler to the prison in 1996 to give a lecture and watch a performance of The Tempest by La Nave dei Folli, the theatre group run by Massimilla in the men’s section of San Vittore. Both Francesca Masini, Criminal Justice Case Manager at San Vittore, and Donatella Massimilla acknowledge that working with women in prison is very different from working with men, the relationship is ‘more complicated … almost visceral … with moments of great intensity’ (Masini quoted in Maffi 2014, 55). Women in the women’s section often feel really alone, away from their families and especially from their children. Many of the women come from other countries and spend years in prison with the added difficulty of having to learn the language. In Italy, it is ‘usually the woman who holds the family together more, so [at visiting time] there are a lot of wives, mothers, companions, grandmothers, aunts who come to talk to their men. When a woman is in prison, it is unusual for a husband to prepare a parcel and bring it in. If a woman has children she’s lucky if she has someone to help look after them, lucky if she has a mum. When there is no mother, loneliness becomes difficult to bear’ (Masini quoted in Maffi 2014, 58–59). The theatre workshop is not part of an organised programme of rehabilitation: the women are free to choose whether or not they want to

686     Susan Marshall

participate, although participation needs to be sanctioned by the prison authorities. In prison, time stops. The women who are permanently in the women’s section all have long sentences and, even if the initial motivation to join the workshop is usually the wish to find an activity that will help pass the days and combat the boredom, Massimilla believes that theatre can become a sort of necessity to the women as they begin to understand the positive changes in themselves. Through creative exercises in writing, acting, singing and movement, the women gradually rediscover themselves, regain their self-esteem, acquire confidence and learn the mechanisms of working together in a heterogeneous group (CETEC 2017a). Francesca Masini believes that prison will always leave its mark but each prisoner has the choice whether to acquiesce passively or contribute proactively to their present situation and their future (Maffi 2014, 57). As Magnaghi (2014, 155) observes, ‘In prison, the construction of a biography is almost compulsory for those who do not give up existing: do not let the environment adapt/ modify them, but try to understand and search for a way to metamorphose into the desired identity’. Essere o non essere: da 400 anni ripetiamo questo grande dilemma esistenziale e cerchiamo spiegazioni cerebrali o sapienti Essere o non essere, qui a San Vittore, non c’è tempo o meglio il tempo c’è, ma non per interrogarci Ogni mattina ci confrontiamo con i quesiti più elementari e allo stesso tempo essenziali. Che faccio? Mi alzo o non mi alzo? Sto in piedi o distesa nel mio letto? Sto da sola o socializzo con qualcuno? Mi preparo da mangiare o mi accontento della razione del vitto? Mi lavo i panni o li rimando a domani?

To be or not to be: for 400 years we have been repeating this great existential dilemma and seeking cerebral or intelligent explanations To be or not to be, here in San Vittore, there is no time, or rather there is time, but not to ask ourselves questions Every morning we face the most elementary and, at the same time, essential questions What shall I do? Shall I get up or not get up? Shall I stand or lie in bed? Remain alone or socialise with someone? Shall I prepare something to eat or shall I put up with the food rations? Shall I wash my clothes or put it off until tomorrow? Scrivo a qualcuno lá fuori o mi chiudo Shall I write to someone out there or nella mia solitudine e nel mio dolore? shut myself in my solitude and in my sorrow? Aiuto le mie compagne o decido che non Shall I help my companions or decide it’s ne vale la pena? not worth it? Ascolto i problemi delle altre o penso che Shall I listen to the problems of others or i miei sono più gravi e importanti? do I think mine are more serious and important?

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     687 Ogni giorno qui è una sfida contro il tempo, contro le accuse, contro i pregiudizi della gente, contro la convivenza forzata, contro le numerose regole E allora inizi a pensare, allora sei finita, ecco che il tempo non passa mai, inizia contare le ore, i minuti, gli anni ancora incerti che ti rimangono da scontare e la giornata non finisce.

Every day here is a challenge against time, against accusations, against the prejudices of people, against enforced coexistence, against the numerous rules And then you start thinking, then you are finished, then the time never passes, you start counting the hours, minutes, the years, still uncertain, that remain to be served and the day never ends. Ma ora che rileggo questo mio pensiero, But now that I’m rereading my thoughts, scritto di getto, written down quickly, mi accorgo che per il solo fatto di scrivere I realize that for the plain fact that I am e pensare writing and thinking sono la prova vivente che sono viva I am living proof that I am alive Che sono qui, ancora viva That I’m here, still alive E allora mi alzo ancora, vado avanti. And so I get up again, I go on Con questi piccoli grandi quesiti di With these small big questions of sursopravvivenza che scandiscono le mie vival that mark my days without time giornate senza tempo A voi, seduti qui al Piccolo Teatro Studio To you, sitting here at the Piccolo Teatro Melato, chiedo e lascio il quesito più Studio Melato, I’ll leave you with grande, quello di William Shakespeare: the biggest question, that of William ‘Siamo o non siamo?’ perché a noi, qui Shakespeare: ‘Are we or are not we?’ dentro, non e dato filosofeggiare because, here on the inside, we are not allowed to philosophise Martina (CETEC 2016, 26)

The relationship with the prisoners is based exclusively on theatrical work, without the psychological analysis of drama therapy, but personal experiences often emerge spontaneously during the workshop as a sense of complicity is established: ‘When you share the same suffering, in my opinion, a special bond is created that can’t be forgotten, and it’s something unique which can’t be cultivated outside because you are too busy with life and maybe a bit with yourself ’ (Stefania 2017, 2). The collective dimension of the theatre workshop is fundamental; rules of coexistence and sharing need to be found as it is imperative that the group is united in order for the production to work. The women acquire linguistic and corporeal skills, learning how to modulate the voice and develop spatial awareness. You can see their passion and participation, immersed in the work and committed to the theatre group, they collaborate with each other, practice movements and go over their lines together between one workshop and the next. Prisoners with a long sentence have time: time to reflect, to write, to study their parts. Actor Elisabetta Spaini, who often works with Massimilla, explains that having to concentrate on the art and techniques of the theatre ‘removes all other thoughts from the mind

688     Susan Marshall

and puts you in touch with yourself, at least for a while, worries and sadness are swept away. This goes for everyone but is particularly effective for those with too many worries’ (quoted in Maffi 2014, 32). The San Vittore Globe Theatre Company performs both inside and outside the prison, both for inmates and the general public. Massimilla believes that it is important for the women to present their work to an audience, although this is not the primary focus of the workshop. The productions are almost always studies and work-in-progress as there are too many variables in a prison like San Vittore where prisoners are usually only held until after their trial and appeal. There needs to be a degree of flexibility in the organisation of a production as there is always the possibility that someone might be transferred to another prison or not be granted permission to perform, meaning that a last-minute substitution may be necessary. Not all the women who participate in the theatre workshops are allowed to leave the prison as they are still waiting for their final sentence, so the texts they have written are read by someone else. The company includes prisoners, ex-prisoners and professional actors but, as ex-prisoners are not allowed back into San Vittore to rehearse with the inmates, those outside and those inside work separately and only rehearse together just before the performance. There is an element of surprise as the various pieces are brought together, but Massimilla always has a precise plan in her head and knows what she wants from each actor. Professional actors assist with the production and improvise if necessary in case a line is forgotten, but the audience never knows who is incarcerated, who is an ex-prisoner and who is a professional actor as only first names appear on the theatre programme. Working together with a professional director and professional actors the women gain confidence and learn intonation and gesture by example. Massimilla has devised a method of working she calls ‘autodrammaturgia’ (self-dramaturgy) to develop the script. This ‘approach involves the gradual creation of a text inspired by a great play or on a theme chosen by us, but then the main material comes from recollections, cultural memories, poems, songs, nursery rhymes, each element equally important for the creation of a new script’ (Massimilla 2009, 122–23). Simple improvisation exercises stimulate the narration of memories and thoughts such as the example below where cupping a hand over an ear like a shell brought to mind waves on an empty beach: Sono un granello di sabbia Mettimi in tasca E portami via da questa gabbia

I am a grain of sand Put me in your pocket and take me away from this cage (Cinzia 2016)

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     689

These memories are then woven into the main text as the women choose a character that they can identify with and rewrite parts in their own words that seem to tell their own story. Playwright and academic Margaret Rose (2017) observes: ‘The beautiful writing [by the women] illustrates the quality of the work and is a witness to the high standards achieved in the theatre workshop’. Massimilla fuses the original text with fragments of the women’s life stories and pieces they have written and improvised during workshops, pulling the threads together to produce the final script. The original text may be invisible after it has been rewritten but it is always there as a subtext. The roles are personalised so a symbiosis between character and person is created. ‘Donatella sews all of us prisoner/actresses into a role, knowing each and every one of us so well’, says Violetta (2017). There is always a part of themselves in the text so there is a fluid exchange between the role being acted and the actor reciting it which makes the actors seem ‘at home’ in the play that ‘vibrates with the lives of all the people involved’ (Maffi 2014, 36). Bill McDonnell (2005, 67–84) writes that ‘communities are telling us that what they need are not more theatre exercises, but a dialogue based on respect for the authority of their experience’. Massimilla’s approach respects the experience of the prisoners while helping to ‘enable a possible “re-scripting of self ” and contribute to a broader sense of narrative identity beyond that of “prisoner”’ (Keehan 2015, 391–94). A range of very different texts are used as a starting point for productions; these have included The House of Bernarda Alba by Federico García Lorca, Macbetto by Giovanni Testori, poems by Alda Merini, The Puppet Show of Miracles by Miguel de Cervantes and works by Shakespeare. ‘“I never knew that Shakespeare was about me”, was one incarcerated woman’s response to [a] performance of The Tempest at the York Correctional Institute’ (Jenkins 2011b, 5; see also 2011a, 18). Shakespeare texts are often used by Massimilla as a starting point for theatre workshops and productions in prison as his themes of love, jealousy, war and politics are timeless problems that are so universal that everyone can find some aspect of themselves mirrored in the characters and stories. Jenkins (2011b, 5) comments that ‘hearing these classic texts spoken by incarcerated men and women behind prison walls is like encountering them for the first time’. Shakespeare’s The Tempest was used as the structure of San Vittore Globe Theatre Part II Le Tempeste (The Tempests ) which was first performed by the San Vittore Globe Theatre Company at the Piccolo Teatro Studio Melato in 2016. The play includes texts written by the women about their own personal tempests: ‘Le Tempeste are our tempests’ explains Massimilla (2017). The message is one of survival: sometimes tempests interrupt our lives but they can also bring about

690     Susan Marshall

positive change, we have survived, life goes on. ‘Le Tempeste are the stories, storms and shipwrecks that are mirrored in the lives of each individual … art, theatre and writing become the means to save oneself ’ (CETEC 2017b). In a reversal of Shakespeare’s all-male company, here Prospero, Caliban and three Ariels are played by women. Prospera’s speech was written by an inmate who has since been transferred to another prison. Prospera Sono una giornata di luna e una notte di sole Sono una carezza che cura il dolore Sono la bora Il maestrale Il libeccio Sono un soffio stanco su uno straccio lercio Sono un luogo comune di un comune luogo Esiliato Condannato Emarginato Sono il mago innamorato Il funambolo sul tetto dell’illusione sono galera sono evasione Sono di stoffa o di cartone Sono il filo di un aquilone Sono un seme un bottone nelle mani dei miei piccoli bambini che mi accompagnano al mare ai giardini o nel paese dei balocchi Posso essere tutto basta chiudere gli occhi La vita è un gioco di prestigio una magia Sono Prospero o chiunque vuoi che sia

I am a day of moon and a night of sun I am a caress that heals the pain I am the Bora the Mistral the Levante I am a tired breath on a filthy rag I am commonplace from a common place Exiled Condemned Outcast I am an enamoured magician The tightrope walker on the roof of illusion I am prison I am evasion I am made of cloth or of cardboard I am the string of a kite I am a seed A button in the hands of my little children who come with me to the sea to the park or to pleasure island I can be anything just need to close my eyes Life is a conjuring trick something magic I am Prospero or whoever you want me to be Cinzia (CETEC 2016, 3)

In the epilogue of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s final words are: ‘As you from crimes would pardoned be, / Let your indulgence set me free’ (Epilogue, lines 19–20). Onstage in Le Tempeste, at this point, there is a crescendo of voices, first whispered then getting louder and louder

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     691

‘Mette me in libertá … Mette me in libertá … Mette me in libertá … libertá … LIBERTÁ! Set me free … Set me free … Set me free … freedom … FREEDOM!’ (CETEC 2016, 24). As Jenkins (2011b, 5) writes: ‘[An] incarcerated [person] pronouncing the word freedom instils it with an emotion that few actors could match’. Massimilla believes that theatre is freedom for the prisoners and, just as Prospero asks the audience for indulgence to set him free, the audience’s indulgence sets the prisoners free. Onstage at the Piccolo Teatro, the chorus of ‘Set me free’ is poignant but it gains even greater significance when performed inside prison and the audience of inmates joins in the chorus. Freedom, the lack of freedom and how to feel free even in the context of prison are subjects that often arise in the women’s work. Here are just a few of their comments: Betsy: In the few hours of the workshop I did when I was inside, it was like I could breathe again, I forgot about everything else that was going on and my mind wandered, I felt free. Betsy: I had the freedom to choose what I wanted to do and in prison you cannot do this. Francesca: Theatre liberates you and makes you feel free inside—where you are isn’t important. Martina: When we are acting: the mind breaks through the bars and is set free. Dana: I would do any activity just to get out of prison for a while.

When the company performs outside the walls of the prison, some of the women have the opportunity of experiencing physical, and not just psychological, freedom, if only for a few hours. Over the last few years, there has been a notable change in the freedom granted to the actors who have permission to leave the confines of the prison for the performance. The first play I worked on with the company in 2015 was Il Teatrino delle Meraviglie (The Puppet Show of Miracles ) by Miguel de Cervantes, performed in the courtyard of Milan’s Castello Sforzesco. The women arrived in a large penitentiary van with an escort of three or four prison guards in civilian dress who surveyed the surrounding area before allowing the women to leave the van. Over time, the women in the theatre company have gained the trust of the prison authorities and gradually the mechanism has changed: at first, the women were allowed out without an escort if a member of CETEC picked them up from the prison, now they travel on their own to the theatre. As Bridget Keehan (2015, 391) comments, ‘the purpose of applied theatre and drama in prisons can be to facilitate change on an institutional as well as individual level’.

692     Susan Marshall

Massimilla has clear directional ideas that accentuate the texts and unite the whole production: ‘Every text is a new journey, a new adventure, an original work method’ (Detenzioni Press 2001). The concept for The House of Bernarda Alba was inspired by Lorca’s note for the play, printed below the list of characters: ‘The poet advises that these three acts are intended as a photographic documentary’ (1993, 191). Portraits and family photographs by Italian photojournalist Gin Angri were chosen and given to each of the women during the preparation of the play to help them with characterisation. The different scenes were composed like large black-and-white family portraits immersed in photographic emulsion, gradually revealing the story as they develop. Many elements of design as well as props and visual effects are used in productions because they are imbued with particular significance for the theatre group: these include mirrors, paper boats and ropes. In 1989, when Massimilla first entered San Vittore prison with Spanish actress and director Olga Vinyals Martori, she took a mirror and make-up with her as the women only had access to pieces of shiny metal. Over the years, rules have changed—the women now have access to mirrors, makeup and a hairdresser—but onstage the image of a woman looking at her reflection recalls the first workshop experience as well as being a symbol of self-awareness and change. Objects frequently have symbolic meaning: little paper boats symbolise the fragile nature of travel and navigation as a metaphor for life, a wedding dress is both a poignant reminder of lost love and symbolic of hoping and waiting for a future love, vertical ropes represent the bars of the prison but, when seats are attached, metamorphose into swings symbolising change and freedom. Italian is not their first language for roughly 65% of all prisoners in San Vittore Prison (Associazione Antigone 2017), and this percentage is also reflected in the theatre company, which includes women from Poland, Bolivia, Kenya, Philippines and Brazil as well as from different parts of Italy. Massimilla (quoted in Montorfano 2015, 133) embraces this heterogeneous aspect, noting: ‘Prison is an intersection of races and cultures, different religions and traditions: in the forced coexistence of a cell, new friendships and stories are woven that often find their way into the scenic material’. The theatre workshop is innately inclusive and aims to enhance all aspects of multiculturalism and diversity: ‘Freedom to use one’s own mother tongue is immediately perceived as freedom of expression’ (Montorfano 2015, 77). Language barriers are surmounted as the women share their personal experiences, past and present. Different languages are integrated into the productions with some lines and songs spoken or sung in the actors’ own languages

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     693

or dialects, placed in a context where they can be easily understood or repeated in Italian. The script is embroidered with personal experiences, and there is often a fluidity of identity during performances where one character becomes another or an actor recounts part of their own story or that of another inmate: ‘The eradication of fixed identities makes the transformation from one role to another possible’ (Montorfano 2015, 125). Gilberta Crispino, who has worked with Massimilla for many years, plays Prospera in Le Tempeste. At one point, she unties her skirt and turns it inside-out to become Sabine. Sabine was an ex-inmate, Gilberta a professional actor reciting part of Sabine’s life story, but, every time she repeats the words, there are tears in Gilberta’s eyes as she remembers her own father, which leaves the audience wondering whether Gilberta is really Sabine. Sabine, rom, di origine slava, ma da tanti anni sono qui in ltalia: Napoli, Roma, Milano Ho sempre viaggiato. Da piccolina vivevamo tutti insieme, eravamo una grande famiglia Quando mia madre usciva, andava a lavorare, rimanevo dentro al caravan Mi divertivo un sacco da sola, giocavo, facevo le voci, quelle delle bambole Lei aveva una collezione: messe tutte in ordine sui cuscini del letto Viola, con una grande gonna a ruota Jasmine con un vestito da flamenco di pizzo nero e rosso Sabine, era vestita da sposa, l’avevo chiamata io così, mi sembrava bellissima, con i capelli biondi, la faccia chiara, un po’come sarebbe piaciuto a me diventare da grande Sai io mi chiamavo Angelo. un giorno mia madre torna e mi trova in piedi davanti allo specchio, con le sue scarpe e i suoi vestiti addosso Lo dice a mio padre. Sono scappata via Dopo l’operazione a Casablanca sono andata insieme a tutte le mie amiche in Piazza del Vaticano a Roma dal Papa. Volevamo che almeno lui ci riconoscesse, sai per la questione del nome, del cognome. Lo, dopo l’operazione, ho il documento nuovo

Sabine, Roma of Slavic origin, but for many years I have been here in Italy: Naples, Rome, Milan I have always travelled. As a child we all lived together, we were a big family When my mother went out, went to work, I stayed in the caravan I had a lot of fun by myself, I played, I made up voices for the dolls She had a collection, laid out on the pillows on the bed: Viola, with a big full skirt Jasmine in a black and red lace flamenco dress Sabine, dressed as a bride, I called her that, I thought she was beautiful, with blond hair, pale face, a bit like I would have liked to be when I grew up You know, I was called Angelo. One day my mother came home and found me standing in front of the mirror, with her shoes and her clothes on She told my father. I ran away After the operation in Casablanca, I went with all my friends to the Piazza del Vaticano in Rome to see the Pope. We wanted him to at least acknowledge us, you know for the question of the name, the surname. After the operation, I have a new identity card

694     Susan Marshall Sabine c’è scritto Ma anche le altre volevano il loro nome Urlavamo tutte insieme i nostri nomi da donna, io mi sono sempre sentita così fin da piccola. Urlavamo, ma non è servito a niente. La mia famiglia vive ancora vicino a Napoli. Quando sono tornata a casa mia madre ha fatto finta di non riconoscermi Ha detto che suo figlio era morto Io allora le ho detto che lo avevo conosciuto e che ero una sua amica intima Si chiamava Angelo, io ero Sabine. Mi ha detto che anche mio padre era morto’ Si è messa a piangere e io con lei Poi mi ha dato da mangiare ma non mi parlava Ho preso la mia bambola preferita, quella vestita da sposa, poi sono andata via

With Sabine written on it But the others also wanted their name known Together we all screamed out our female names, I have felt this way since I was a child. We screamed, but it didn’t help. My family still lives near Naples. When I went home my mother pretended not to recognize me She said her son was dead So, I told her that I had met him and that I was a very good friend of his His name was Angelo, I was Sabine. She told me that my father was also dead She started crying and I cried with her Then she fed me, but she did not speak to me I took my favourite doll, the one dressed as a bride, then I left Sabine (CETEC 2016, 23)

Most of the women had never acted before and originally joined the theatre workshop for different, seemingly simple reasons: after seeing a theatre production in prison, to pass the time, to learn Italian, to forget: ‘Theatre was one of the courses I started to pass the time, to forget where I was, to not see the bars. I think we all have the same idea: we want to forget what happened, where we are, and why we are here’ (anonymous prisoner quoted in Maffi 2014, 47). Over time, the women develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their motives and are conscious of the changes that theatre has made in their lives: Dana: I like the theatre because I’m not me. Theatre serves to hide your fears. It has helped me beat my shyness—before I could never fulfil my ideas, I always thought it was impossible—now I think everything is possible … it’s just a matter of time. Violetta: Theatre means outlet, it means expressing myself in different contexts, which I can’t do in my life in prison. I put a mask on in prison that I take off with theatre. It has changed my character so much in my relationships with other people, being a particularly closed person, I acquired self-confidence with theatre. I’m telling you, theatre for me is life: it’s wanting to do something, to live the past, the present and the uncertain future in each of the characters I represent. Betsy: With theatre I discovered a lot of things. Inside was not a good experience, I don’t think it is for anyone, so I took refuge in the theatre.

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     695

The prison authorities in San Vittore also note the positive benefits that the theatre workshop has brought. Teresa Mazzotta, Vice Director Casa Circondariale San Vittore Milano, states: The theatre project has an artistic value beyond that of being considered an element of treatment. It helps to acquire skills, it is a challenge to oneself, to one’s interpretive and linguistic abilities, ability to externalise and interpret gestures and emotions. […] It imposes rules that can become […] rules for life. Theatre can train people to acquire skills and professionalism which they can later invest in the workplace. (CETEC 2017b)

Discovering theatre during their time in prison has been a life-changing opportunity for some: ‘Many people have discovered a hidden talent and have continued to practice theatre after their release’ (Maffi 2014, 23). Naturally, things do not always run smoothly: besides more practical problems such as an inmate being denied permission to leave prison for a performance, there is the ever-present problem of funding since projects which involve a larger number of inmates are more likely to receive government funding in Italy. The theatre workshop in San Vittore works with small numbers of women over a long period of time establishing a close relationship with the group and preferring to aim for quality rather than quantity. In an interview, Massimilla affirms: ‘for us it has always been important not to sell dreams but to create small utopias’ (Corriere dello Spettacolo 2016). Once the women join the group, ‘a privileged relationship is formed between themselves and with us, made of hours and hours of shared work and the rewritings of their experiences. Those who only joined to pass the time realize that, over time, a transformation has occurred, and a special bond has been created. When they leave prison, they know that we are there for them, and if possible, we offer them employment’ (Corriere dello Spettacolo 2016). In a further interview, she adds, ‘It is outside prison that the difficulties begin and you face a society without compassion for those who have made a mistake and have been hardened by the experience. Hopes for employment and reintegration are few’ (Vita.it 2014). Elisabetta Spaini (Maffi 2014, 32) notes that leaving prison is a delicate moment for the women, as returning to the old way of life and old friendships, together with lack of work and social stigma, is a major factor in recidivism. She believes that continuing to collaborate with the same people on the outside can support the women in this transition period towards a new life. In conjunction with the San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, CETEC Dentro/Fuori San Vittore organises seminars and workshops in schools, universities and the local community to create a bridge between inside and outside prison, as

696     Susan Marshall

well as running ApeShakespeare ‘To bee or not to bee’, a three-wheeler Ape Van providing a unique combination of Street Food and Street Theatre. This initiative, whose name plays on the word ‘ape’ which means ‘bee’ in Italian, helps reintegrate ex-prisoners back into society by offering them employment as actors and chefs. One ex-prisoner, Dana, helps drive ApeShakespeare from venue to venue, runs the day-to-day organisation of a small refugee camp near Milan and creates origami and paper-art books which she exhibits and which are used as props and scenery in productions. Dana joined the theatre company while she was an inmate in San Vittore Prison and is an example of one of the many success stories to have come out of the group. Although artistic, she had never done any theatre before and admits joining the workshop to pass the time and to try to forget the bars of the prison for a while. She proved to be a natural comedian onstage, and this, together with her gymnastic abilities, have led to her playing earthy parts that require a lot of movement, such as Puck or Caliban. In Dana/Caliban’s speech from Le Tempeste, the island is a metaphor for prison: Un mostro rinchiusa in un isola E’ vero … sono stata in prigione diverso tempo … Hotel San Vittore ma non sono mai stata un traditore tutta più ho guidato spericolatamente, andavo in velocità, vita spericolata, belle macchine, Audi, Mercedes, Volvo poi prigione, sbagliato, pagato, cambiato Non sono più un mostro ho sempre ascoltato con il cuore e in prigione ho scoperto libri, teatro, poesia e tanto tanto amore ora lavoro, porto a volte una piccola macchina, sai un’ape car l’ApeShakespeare, faccio teatro, libri d’arte (vedi questi libri li ho fatti io) e poi lavoro in una casa di rifugiati è una storia bella la mia, l’isola per me è stata la mia salvezza, la tempesta il mio possibile ritorno … il viaggio continua

A monster imprisoned on an island It’s true … I’ve been to prison for a while … Hotel San Vittore but I was never a traitor more than anything I drove recklessly, speeding, a reckless life, beautiful cars, Audi, Mercedes, Volvo then prison, I made a mistake, I paid for it, I changed I’m no longer a monster I’ve always listened with my heart and in prison I discovered books, theatre, poetry and lots and lots of love now I work, sometimes I drive a small car, you know an Apecar, ApeShakespeare, I practise theatre, I make art books (see these books I did them) and I also work in a home for refugees My story is beautiful, the island was my salvation, the tempest made my return possible … the journey continues Dana (CETEC 2016, 21)

Dana continues to act with the company as a free woman and believes Massimilla and the theatre workshop gave her a push in the right direction and the confidence to achieve her goals. She told me recently that: ‘you

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     697

are never free from prison; the thought is always there in your dreams and nightmares, it’s lost time’ but she works hard to forget. Le Sedie (The Chairs ) is, at the time of writing, the latest theatre project run by CETEC and the San Vittore Globe Theatre Company in collaboration with the Equal Opportunities and Rights Committee in Milan. It is a databank of true stories about murdered women and victims of violence, intertwining news stories with personal experiences collected from prisoners, ex-prisoners, journalists, lawyers, refugees, deaf women and members of the public. ‘Le Sedie is a concert of voices, a theatrical work in progress against gender violence, stories torn from newspapers, stories collected in homes for battered women, stories of violence sometimes suffered silently, sometimes reported’ (Repubblica 2017) but always with a glimmer of hope for the future. Donatella Massimilla (Vita.it 2014) believes that the success of The San Vittore Globe Theatre Company over the years has ‘fully demonstrated that art forms part of metamorphosis to change life’ and that theatre helps reduce the possibility of recurrent crime. As Beatrice Montorfano (2015, 129) notes in Shakespeare nel Teatro in Carcere: the prisoners are given ‘the right to express themselves, to define themselves and their own reality through theatre […] By reinventing their own stories and staging part of themselves the actors react to their imprisonment and the invisibility to which they are relegated’. ‘Theatre is an expressive tool that fosters communication in everyday life’ (Montorfano 2015, 35): it sets in motion the actors’ self-awareness and helps the women discover that both radical transformations and small changes are possible. Alda Merini, the Italian poet who spent many years of her life institutionalized for mental illness, dedicated a poem to the prisoners of San Vittore which illustrates how beauty can be found in even the most unexpected places (2007): ‘…forse la durezza delle leggi potrà nulla ‘… perhaps the harshness of the law can do nothing against the hope that there contro la speranza che c’è in ognuno di is in each of us … there are beautiful noi … ci sono bellissimi fiori che vivono flowers that live clinging to a bar …’ avvinghiati ad una sbarra …’

‘Theatre brings new meaning to prison: freedom’ (Massimilla, quoted in Corriere dello Spettacolo 2016): freedom of speech, freedom to be seen and heard, freedom to change. ‘Boundaries are very important because they teach us more about ourselves. Whenever we approach a boundary, physically, emotionally or intellectually, we see the boundaries expand slightly, allowing us increased freedom and greater self-knowledge’ (Dana 2017).

698     Susan Marshall

Bibliography Associazione Antigone. 2017. ‘Casa circondariale di Milano San Vittore’. Accessed November 8, 2017. http://www.antigone.it/osservatorio_detenzione/ lombardia/98-casa-circondariale-di-milano-san-vittore. Balfour, Michael. 2009. ‘The Politics of Intention: Looking for a Theatre of Little Changes’. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14, no. 3: 347–59. Beccaria, Cesare. 1764. An Essay on Crimes and Punishments. [1985. 4th edn. Translator uncredited.] Accessed October 10, 2017. https://archive.org/stream/ essayoncrimespun00becc_0#page/78/mode/2up. Ceppellini, Vincenzo, and Emilio Pozzi. 2009. ‘Da Prometeo a Moreno, E Oltre Breve Storia Del Teatro in Carcere’. In Recito, Dunque So(g)no. Teatro E Carcere, edited by V. Minoia and E. Pozzi, 17–20. Urbino: Edizioni Nuove Catarsi. CETEC. 2016. ‘San Vittore Globe Part II Le Tempeste ’. CETEC. 2017a. ‘Centro Europeo Teatro E Carcere’. Accessed December 17, 2017. http://www.cetec-edge.org/dev/. CETEC. 2017b. ‘Libretto Di Scena “Le Tempeste”’. Accessed December 17, 2017. http://www.cetec-edge.org/wordpress/libretto-di-scena-le-tempeste/. Corriere dello Spettacolo. 2016. ‘Intervista a Donatella Massimilla. “Re-Esistere, re-Inventare un teatro apparentemente povero ma ricchissimo e assolutamente necessario.”’ Accessed November 8, 2017. http://www.corrieredellospettacolo. net/2016/08/02/2951/. CPT. 2016. ‘Report to the Italian Government on the Visit to Italy Carried Out by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment’. Accessed November 20, 2017. https:// rm.coe.int/pdf/16807412c2. Dana. 2017. Comment after the public performance of Le Tempeste. San Vittore Globe Theatre, Piccolo Teatro, Milan, December 10. Detenzioni Press. 2001. ‘Detenzioni | Lindro.it–Intervista a Donatella Massimilla’. Accessed December 2, 2017. http://www.detenzioni.eu/carcere_prison_press_ rewiev.php?content_type=27&content_id=9171. Governo Italiano. 1975. ‘Norme sull’ordinamento penitenziario e sull’esecuzione delle misure privative e limitative della libertà. L. Vol. 26’. Accessed November 8, 2015. http://presidenza.governo.it/USRI/ufficio_studi/normativa/L.26luglio1975,n.354.pdf. Hughes, Jenny. 2005. ‘Doing the Arts Justice: A Review of Research Literature, Practice and Theory’. Accessed November 3, 2017. https://www.issuelab.org/ resource/doing-the-arts-justice-a-review-of-research-literature-practice-and-theory.html. Jenkins, Ron. 2011a. ‘Dante Dietro Le Sbarre’. Catarsi - Teatri Della Diversità, no. 58: 18–19. Accessed November 28, 2017. http://www.redattoresociale.it/ Notiziario/Articolo/366092/Dante-dietro-le-sbarre-una-via-d-uscita-dall-inferno.

30  Theatre Inside/Outside Prison: San Vittore Globe, Milan     699

Jenkins, Ron. 2011b. ‘Dreams and Transformations: “This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”’ (Unpublished Paper). Keehan, Bridget. 2015. ‘Theatre, Prison and Rehabilitation: New Narratives of Purpose?’ Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20, no. 3: 391–94. Le Due Città. 2017. ‘Tornare in Libertà’. Accessed November 14, 2017. www. leduecitta.it/index.php/622-archivio/2012/ottobre-2012/2900-tornare-in-liberta. Lorca, Federico García. 1993. Three Plays: Blood Wedding, Yerma, The House of Bernarda Alba. Translated by Michael. Dewell and Carmen Zapata. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Maffi, Emanuela. 2014. L’ordine Della Legge E L’ordine Dell’arte: La Funzione Riabilitativa della Pena e l’esperienza Teatrale di San Vittore Globe Theatre. MA Thesis, Università degli Studi Roma Tre. Magnaghi, Alberto. 2014. Un’idea Di Libertà. San Vittore ’79 – Rebibbia ’82. Rome: Derive Approdi. Massimilla, Donatella. 2009. ‘CETEC Centro Europeo Teatro E Carcere’. In Recito, Dunque So(g)no. Teatro E Carcere, edited by E. Minoia and V. Pozzi. Urbino: Edizioni Nuovo Catarsi. Massimilla, Donatella. 2017. ‘Presentation on Le Tempeste ’. San Vittore Globe Theatre Conference, Piccolo Teatro, Milan, November 16, 2017. McDonnell, Bill. 2005. ‘Viewpoints’. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 10, no. 1: 67–84. Merini, Alda. 2007. ‘Per Le Donne Del Laboratorio Di Teatro Di San Vittore’. In Princese. Diario Di Bordo. Memorie Di Teatro E Carcere Sezione Femminile. Accessed October 8, 2017. http://www.cetec-edge.org/wordpress/147-2/. Ministero della giustizia. 2017. ‘Teatro in Carcere’. Accessed October 1, 2017. https://www.giustizia.it/giustizia/it/mg_2_3_0_6.page. Montorfano, Beatrice. 2015. Shakespeare nel Teatro in Carcere. MA Thesis, Università di Pisa. Accessed November 8, 2017. https://etd.adm.unipi.it/theses/ available/etd-05042015-004822/unrestricted/Autore_attori_personaggi.pdf. Moreno, Jacob Levy. 1987. The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity. Edited by Jonathan Fox. New York: Springer. Repubblica. 2017. ‘Al Castello Sforzesco Le Sedie’–La Repubblica Milano.it’. Accessed November 18, 2017. http://libero/teatro/evento/al_castello_sforzesco_ le_sedie-172496.html. Rose, Margaret. 2017. ‘Presentation on Le Tempeste ’. San Vittore Globe Theatre Conference, Piccolo Teatro, Milan, November 16, 2017. Senato della Repubblica. 1947. Constitution of the Italian Republic. Accessed December 11, 2017. Available at: https://www.senato.it/application/xmanager/ projects/leg18/file/repository/relazioni/libreria/novita/XVII/COST_INGLESE. pdf. Stefania. 2017. ‘Amiche Di Sventura’. In Oltre gli occhi, il giornale delle detenute della casa circondariale di San Vittore [Out of Sight: Journal of Those Imprisoned at San Vittore ].

700     Susan Marshall

Thompson, James, ed. 1998. Prison Theatre: Perspectives and Practices. London and Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley. Violetta. 2017. Contribution to public discussion on Le Tempeste. San Vittore Globe Theatre Conference, Piccolo Teatro, Milan, November 16, 2017. Vita.it. 2014. ‘Teatro È Libertà. Così San Vittore Ha Conquistato Il Piccolo (21/11/2014)’. Accessed November 22, 2017. http://www.vita.it/it/article/2014/ 11/21/teatro-e-liberta-cosi-san-vittore-ha-conquistato-il-piccolo/128529/.

31 Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare Anna Kamaralli

A bookish, wordy girl growing up in an English-speaking country will ­eventually hear about Hamlet. At some point, his eloquence while grappling with personal, internal struggle will be presented to her as an important landmark in our understanding of ourselves as human through the medium of words. She will know immediately that he is the centre of his story— after all, the play is named after him. Then, if she is inclined to try embodying those words through performance, someone will point out to her that Hamlet is a man: that these words are not for her to speak. Becoming more familiar with Shakespeare is to live through this process over and over, to experience a connection, the expression of a feeling that fits, a spark to a passion built from words, and then to be perpetually edged away from the centre where those words are spoken aloud, to an audience. This girl may find some instances where Shakespeare gives centre stage to a female character, but then be deflected again from claiming even that role if her race marks her as deviating from the theatre industry’s collective idea of what a Shakespearean heroine looks like. It is a mark of failure in our cultural systems if such a process of denying the centre to talent and passion remains inevitable. Anything that lessens the certainty of this process is valuable. Any kind of claiming of this centre for those who are pushed away from it is radical. American poet Maya Angelou

Anna Kamaralli (*)  University of Notre Dame Sydney, Coogee, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_31

701

702     Anna Kamaralli

found a need and a use for Shakespeare in her radical art, which she spoke of in an address to the National Assembly of Local Art Agencies in 1985: I found myself, and still find myself, whenever I like stepping back into Shakespeare. Whenever I like, I pull him to me. He wrote it for me. ‘When in disgrace with fortune in [sic ] men’s eyes/ I all alone beweep my outcast state…’ Of course he wrote it for me; that is a condition of the black woman. Of course, he was a black woman. I understand that. Nobody else understands it, but I know that William Shakespeare was a black woman.

As a poet, Angelou did not need to be handed permission to incorporate Shakespeare into her artistic life. It can be harder for an actress who needs the apparatus of a theatre company and an audience, and harder again for one working in countries with smaller theatre industries, where there may only be one shot at being cast in a key role in the course of years. The performance of Shakespeare in Australia has a continuous history since European arrival here, but sparse centres of population and high production costs contribute to a landscape where there is a high-rotation list of the most popular of his plays, with few opportunities to see those that are less well known. Therefore there will very likely be a Romeo and Juliet and probably an As You Like It and a Merchant of Venice staged somewhere in any given year, but an audience member can go five or even ten years between productions of Antony and Cleopatra or All’s Well That Ends Well and may not see a Cymbeline in their lifetime. New Zealand has an even smaller population, but a healthy appetite for Shakespeare, such that there are several ‘Summer Shakespeare’ festivals in the larger cities and three seasons so far of the Pop-Up Globe. There has been an intriguing history of experiment with translation of Shakespeare into Te Reo Māori, including a film, The Māori Merchant of Venice (2002) a production of Troilus and Cressida that toured as part of the Globe to Globe festival (2012), and portions of the Pop-Up Globe’s 2017 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Privilege and power in Anglophone theatre reside strongly in a few names and images. The default type associated with Shakespeare continues to be a white man, and not solely the playwright himself: an actor like Garrick, Olivier, or Branagh, a director like Peter Brook or John Barton, or a character like Hamlet reinforces the stereotype. There have always been people who did not fit this template, who have loved and used and animated Shakespeare, but they have not been thought of first or prominently in discourse surrounding these plays; they have always had to insist upon their claim on these texts, rather than have it assumed. And yet it is only through their contribution that Shakespeare can continue to live.

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     703

An insular, racially nostalgic vision of performance will be an atrophied one, registered by its audiences as unconnected to their lived reality and the world they see around them. This matters because of the people working in theatre, but even more because of the people watching it. Nicole Chung (2017) writes of growing up Asian in North America, ‘Thanks to the books I read and the shows I watched as a kid, I was convinced that whiteness was practically a prerequisite for agency, adulation, protagonism in a story’. For her, it was encountering the right vision of a Shakespearean heroine that unlocked a world of new possibilities about where to locate herself in storytelling: I was nine or ten years old when I saw Twelfth Night – my first Shakespeare play – at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. By then I knew what a protagonist looked like (white, thin, conventionally attractive) … But the actor playing Olivia happened to be Asian – the first Asian actor I had ever seen on stage, and one of precious few I’d noticed anywhere. Regal and beautiful in her long black dress, I watched her sweep across the stage with a sense of wonder and expanding, exciting possibility I didn’t yet know how to name.

As Shakespeare has far too much momentum as a cultural force to ever be discarded, casting in a way that reflects the world becomes simultaneously a social justice issue and an artistic decision. The strength in Shakespearean performance will come from engendering the kind of joyful recognition Chung experienced. Shakespeare’s heroines occupy a unique role in Anglophone culture as objects of fantasy, idealisation and iconic representation of the possibilities for womanhood. Nobody working as an actress has the luxury of being unaware how and where she differs from the idealised romantic lead; actresses have no choice but to consider where they fit and how they are measured by where an audience expects to see them cast. The doubly marginalised situation of women from racial minority groups means even the best actresses have an absurdly small chance of being offered a protagonist’s role as a vehicle to display their talents at their fullest stretch. These performers all have their personal sense of why it matters to them as artists that they have these opportunities to extend themselves, but some have articulated positions on why it also matters to audiences that they see such a representation. For actors trying to do their job, there will always be an ambivalence between weariness with the significance of race and awareness that it is inevitable that race will signify something, so it is better if that is acknowledged and used positively. The first is articulated by Josette Simon (quoted in Jays 2017), ‘I’m black, which I’m proud of, but it doesn’t mean anything. You’re

704     Anna Kamaralli

an actor, full stop’, while Deborah Mailman (quoted in McDonnell 2008, 135) gives voice to the second: As black actors it’s a balance between social concern and personal development. Hopefully we are past the days where we do roles as token blackfellas. The fact is, when we walk on to the stage it’s still a political statement, whether the intention is there or not. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for people to simply see us as actors.

Jamaican-born Australian actress Zahra Newman is very aware of these competing instincts in response to her place in the industry, as she explained (interview with the author, March 5, 2018): On the one hand I don’t want to be politicised, I do not want my race, my culture, my background – I don’t want those things to be the defining factors about me as a performer. In all of the shows that I’ve done as a professional my race has absolutely played a part in my casting, even when the intent was to colourblind cast, or not to focus on my race. We live in a culture, particularly in Australia, where there is not enough visibility, there are not enough people who look like me, who are mixed race (perhaps you can’t tell where they’re from), who are black, who are Asian – there aren’t enough of those people represented on screen and on stage for me not to be politicised when I walk out on stage. My difficulty with politicisation is when it’s not inside my autonomy as an artist. If I am being politicised regardless of my choice, that is a problem. There is a part of me that really wants what I do as an actor to be about my capacity, rather than what I represent for people, or that I might represent change, but at the same time I completely acknowledge that it’s important when I am on stage that I am visible, and claim my ‘blackness’ in that space. It’s a constant negotiation. For me, I think the most important thing, as an artist of colour or if you are in the minority, is that you are in charge of your politicisation, that you are driving it, you’re aware of it, and you are making the decisions about it. Finding ways to maintain some of that autonomy is really important.

This politicisation takes multiple, and often imprecise forms. The instability of the relationship between artist and audience disbars any casting from communicating only one possible interpretation. Rather, as Sujata Iyengar (2006, 48) puts it, ‘the skin colour of an actor functions as a floating signifier, leaving audience and reviewers unsure how or whether to interpret it’. The conventions of theatre give productions the opportunity to be unmoored from the more literal forms of worldbuilding. Given that Shakespearean actors are already speaking patterns of language that were never spoken in ordinary life,

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     705

moving through imagined locales, it makes perfect sense to have performers of any combination of gender or race at all sharing a space. Coupled with a powerful wish to campaign for the ability of Shakespeare’s work to speak to everyone, this attitude gave rise to the concept of ‘colourblind’ casting. Joseph Papp, when setting up the New York Shakespeare Festival in the 1950s, was an early champion of this philosophy, which in this instance meant assuming all stagings of Shakespeare are non-naturalistic already, and that this should be extended to dispensing with filmic requirements for actors to give visual cues that they originate from the same family or community, or look as if they come from a generalised conception of the nominated place and time of the story (Renaissance Verona, for instance). Crucially, Ayanna Thompson’s (2011, 71) critique of the assumptions and limits of this approach identifies the way theatre companies use this ‘colourblind casting’ policy as a tool to ‘describe and justify their multiculturalism … in terms of the universality of Shakespeare’s plays, themes and characters’, rather than as a genuine means to overturn structural racial inequality in casting. While this approach has done much to move theatre practice forward, casting is never truly colourblind, and all the published discourse surrounding race and representation in Shakespeare centres on the many ways it can never be that simple. There are, however, different ways to ask the audience to see race, and different ways of envisioning a production as not defaulting to white, and unknotting ‘an understanding about if and how an actor’s race is endowed with any meaning within a performance—whether realistic, symbolic, or otherwise’ (Thompson 2011, 99). A production like the RSC’s 2017 Hamlet with an almost entirely black cast, invoking African cultural framing not specific to one country, expects the audience to read race differently from their 2012 Much Ado About Nothing set in a comparatively realistic India, with a Director (Iqbal Khan) and full cast who were ethnically Indian British and seemed to be exploring the cultural legacy that had been passed on to them. This is different again from Tom E. Lewis and Michael Kantor’s 2014 Aboriginal adaptation of King Lear, Shadow King (whose listed languages included Yolngu Matha, forms of ‘Torres Strait Creole’ and ‘Baard’), which wrestled with whether Shakespeare is of use as a way to tell Aboriginal stories, which differs from the more explicit political message of the Antony and Cleopatra set in Haiti (a 2013 co-production between the Public Theater, New York, GableStage, Miami and the Royal Shakespeare Company), where a colonised people fighting back was opposed to white actors characterised as imperialist oppressors, which is a very different prospect indeed from Bell Shakespeare’s fanciful As You Like It (2015) which was clearly taking place in an imaginary location and no historic time period,

706     Anna Kamaralli

and therefore with no reason why any mix of ethnicities should not be represented. This chapter looks specifically at instances where companies dominated by white male actors briefly cede centre stage to a woman who usually finds herself pushed to the margins of her profession. In other situations, casts entirely composed of non-white actors are doing their job every day, across a multitude of countries and languages. Native Shakespeares (Dionne and Kapadia 2016) gives a variety of examples of Shakespeare being used as source material within cultural groups around the world to generate their own versions, and Alexa Joubin has compiled a thorough analysis of the phenomenon of ‘Global Shakespeares’ (2013) as both theatrical practice and academic methodology. Sandra Young (2016, 135) adds a note of caution beside one of optimism: The constitution of a global Shakespeare risks repeating earlier occlusions if it becomes simply an opportunity to affirm, uncritically, the extraordinary reach of Stratford’s Shakespeare. Rather, openness to nontraditional Shakespeares has the potential to unsettle normative cultural practices and to bring into view the racisms that have structured global relations since early modernity.

The conversation is necessarily ongoing, and it is only by talking about race that the flaws of the status quo are exposed. A powerful tool in doing this has been the BBA (British Black and Asian) Shakespeare project, whose website includes a database listing all identifiable examples of BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) actors and directors who have worked on Shakespeare in Britain (https://bbashakespeare.warwick.ac.uk/). This database acts as a permanent, searchable archive with a clearly articulated mission: This database was originally conceived as an historical record, acknowledging, documenting and celebrating the contribution of Black and Asian artists–especially performers–to the development of Shakespearean production in modern Britain … it has developed into an ongoing record of contemporary casting practices … The database documents developing casting patterns as they affect BAME performers. Its construction has coincided with increasingly urgent calls for greater diversity within Britain’s entertainment industries.

By tracking casting in the UK, Jami Rogers and her colleagues have been able to establish not only the disproportionate exclusion of non-white actors, but a phenomenon Rogers describes as the ‘black canon’. This

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     707

includes a suite of interlinked practices, such as functioning to an unstated ‘quota’ of one or two BAME actors in a predominantly white cast, and directors casting black actors in a cluster of substantial but peripheral roles, while reserving the central parts for white actors (Rogers 2013). Only a handful of Shakespeare’s plays give a female character the largest role, none of them Histories or Tragedies. The six largest parts for a woman in Shakespeare, without gender cross-casting, are Rosalind, Cleopatra, Innogen (Imogen), Portia, Juliet and Helena (in descending order by number of lines). However, only four of these have the largest speaking role in their respective plays: Rosalind in As You Like It, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Innogen in Cymbeline and Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well. Cleopatra and Juliet speak less than the male characters with whom they share a title, but are the only female characters from this list to achieve titular status. This chapter will focus on the two largest female roles in Shakespeare: Rosalind in As You Like It and Cleopatra (second to Antony in number of lines, but with the whole of Act 5 to hold the stage alone, after his death) in Antony and Cleopatra. However, it is worth considering briefly the meaning that permeates the casting of racially marginalised women in Shakespeare’s four other substantial female roles.

Innogen The third largest female part by number of lines is the comparatively unknown Innogen (until recent years rendered as ‘Imogen’, following the Folio) in Cymbeline; she also (like Rosalind, but unlike Cleopatra) speaks the largest portion of her play, making her truly the centre of her story. The traditional idealisation of Innogen as the archetype of a perfect princess makes her a very significant figure to inscribe with ‘otherness’. Canada’s Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival is the most prominent producer of Shakespeare in that country, so when Cara Ricketts played Innogen in 2012 it marked a change in assumptions about what cultural power looks like. In a setting indeterminately medieval/Elizabethan, and therefore registering as a classic storybook world, a visibly multi-racial cast communicated something about how best to tell the kind of folkloric tale that has been criticised for remaining stubbornly white in many performative incarnations. Ricketts was able to disrupt the stereotype of the fairytale princess by slotting seamlessly into it, whether in voluminous pale blue silk or her romantically puff-sleeved boy disguise. Taking into account Innogen’s potential to play a symbolic role as the embodiment of Britain within a story from a mythologised pre-Saxon

708     Anna Kamaralli

British history, it was an even bigger statement for Bill Alexander to cast black British actress Naomi Wirthner in the role on the RSC mainstage in 1989. A visibly non-Celtic Innogen like Wirthner makes an explicit claim for a pluralist vision of Britain in keeping with the broader casting philosophy Alexander spent his career agitating for (Rogers 2017, 116–21).

Portia Even when a woman has been written as a play’s central figure, her role can be cut down or upstaged; although Portia speaks 22% of the full text in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock so dominates discussion of this play that it tends to be a neglected fact that Portia is the fourth largest female role in Shakespeare, and one of only four female characters to speak the largest portion of her play. Her scene in the courtroom, however, is a showpiece passage, so an ethnic minority Portia makes a strong claim for the right of typically silenced women to hold the floor. Within the context of the play Portia is a woman usurping a male privilege: as audiences are well aware who she really is, the consciousness of a female performer holding the stage is a factor in their response. The film of Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēniti, The Merchant of Venice translated into Te Reo Māori, challenges expectations from multiple directions, with lavish seventeenth-century costuming embedded in New Zealand landscape, while Ngarimu Daniels as Pohia (Portia), in glamorous silks and corsetry, is prominent and central in the publicity images. In Australia, Larisa Chen, who played Portia for the Brisbane company Grin and Tonic in 1995, directed by Bryan Nason, is the only instance I have been able to establish of an Asian woman taking the lead role in a Shakespeare production. Since an Asian presence in Australia has existed almost as long as a British one and Asian actors are trained, working and available, this is clearly an issue of casting practice. East Asian actresses have to contend with stereotypes that cast them as submissive, silent and deferential, so the highly verbal, confident, challenging Portia is an especially satisfying disruption to the cliché.

Juliet The idealised Juliet, who ‘doth teach the torches to burn bright’ (1.4.161), can easily tempt directors to cast the girl in the room who most conforms to commercial conventions of attractiveness. It indicates how much these conventions may be shifting that in recent years non-white Juliets have

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     709

become increasingly common, with 22 listed in the BBA Shakespeare database between 1988 and 2018 (though the possibility exists that directors are using cross-racial love as an easy shorthand to invoke forbidden love). Nikki M. James played the role at Stratford Ontario in 2008, while in Australia a 1999 co-production between Brisbane’s La Boite Theatre and Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts featured a very young Maria Tusa as Juliet, first seen in her pyjamas, emphasising how little she was looking for the very adult calamities that engulfed her. Directed by Sue Rider, the production cast the Capulets as Indigenous, feuding with the white Montagues, making the final scene a very explicit message about reconciliation. Aboriginal actress Kylie Farmer was, similarly, a novice when she played Juliet in 2008 for the Australian Shakespeare Company in Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens. The first black Juliet on Broadway was Regina Taylor in 1986, so it is quite significant that the next Broadway production, after a gap of nearly thirty years, also cast a black actress in the role. The casting of the virtually unknown Condola Rashad in 2013 in such a high-profile commercial production and opposite Orlando Bloom, with his following as a movie star, made a statement about recognising talent where it is often overlooked. Karu Daniels interviewed both Taylor and Rashad for Playbill (November 13, 2013) inviting each to talk about what the role of Juliet meant to them. For Rashad, it was about storytelling at the most personal level: When you’re acting in a role, in order to stay honest, you have to leave all of the ego out of it. You can’t look at it too hard. You have to do what you do and tell the story of a young girl who doesn’t know she’s an icon; she’s just a little teenager who’s in love. She doesn’t know that the world knows her.

In contrast, Taylor saw herself as a part of a breakthrough in artistic philosophy that came from Joseph Papp and his determination to cast across race: Romeo and Juliet was my Broadway debut. At that point, when I landed in New York, it was the beginning of the discussion of diversity, of colorblind casting as it were. So I reaped the benefits of that. I think, as with any change, some people are resistant to it but for the most part, it was people welcoming it with opened arms.

The bodily presence of such a woman occupying a space as Juliet is radical in itself, but once she is in possession of this space she also has a voice. Shakespeare’s feminine prizes are not silent trophies. Juliet speaks less than Romeo, but is the fifth largest female role in Shakespeare and viewed by many as the emotional centre of the play.

710     Anna Kamaralli

Helena By contrast with all the other, highly privileged and valued heroines mentioned so far, Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well permits for commentary on class, exclusion and marginalisation, and thoughts on what makes a woman desirable, valuable or acceptable to a society obsessed with rank and status. When Shakespeare’s Globe in London cast Ellora Torchia as Helena in 2017 it was in the indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, their smaller theatre built to an Inigo Jones design and lit by candlelight. An actress playing this role in that particular space is poised within a unique tension where she is playing Helena, the simple doctor’s daughter too lowly for a count to favour, but at the same time playing the role of a performer in a highly exclusive space: a replica of a Jacobean indoor theatre. Torchia found the challenge enriching, and seems to have learned as much from the character as from the process. She generously shared her thoughts on this in detail (pers. comm., March 14, 2018): The greatest thing I learnt from [Helena] was that courage cannot lie in believing in oneself alone. Helena had her belief in her love from the start, but what is wonderful about her was that through her misery she remained open-hearted. In theatre, there is an ‘arc’, a journey, for each character to go on, and so often characters’ potentials remain unfulfilled, a depressing yet true reflection of real life (in my opinion). Yet, occasionally, and it just so happens that these are our favourite stories, there is a hero. A hero’s story. Where their potential is fulfilled at some point during their story. It’s a hugely satisfying thing to witness, to read, to act. Playing Helena was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life so far, for this precise reason. Her plight is heroic; she becomes a healer of the world, having started as only the daughter of a physician. Having started out as a virgin orphan, she gains a family. Starting out poor she metaphorically becomes the next reigning leader, and most importantly having started out navel gazing, she ends the play looking forward and out – a journey of a longing girl to conquering woman. Now all this, how does it hark back to me? Well, you’re right, I’m brown, I’m a girl, I’m young, I’m an unknown actor – why should I have ever been given the opportunity to play such a great part? Fortunately, Caroline Byrne, the director saw past all this, or perhaps saw it all and embraced it as an asset. What Helena doesn’t have, she makes up for in determination and resilience. I suppose I would have argued the same for myself prior to playing her, but what I realised so clearly when put up and paired with the greatest female Shakespearean part is how often I in fact have fallen short of being these things. It’s hard to say ‘no’, to stand up for yourself and fight what you believe to be right, fight for your integrity, fight for what you believe to be true. To say

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     711

‘I disagree with you, I think you’re wrong’ to someone far more ‘important’, ‘powerful’ is hard work, and it is indeed, much easier to constantly apologise for yourself, take up no room and not step on anyone’s toes, but it’s unsatisfying and it’s unjust when you know in your heart you are right, or at least have something worth sharing, that should–in fairness–be listened to. Helena taught me that it is ok to fail in a big way to get somewhere. I always felt at the end of the play, that even though she would be disappointed and upset if Bertram refused her, she would be ok … she did all she could, and so, I always felt that she felt she could end her own journey to him with peace, with her head held high, the new beginning being her child. My free relationship with my director allowed me to go to those extremes, to challenge the status quo in the room, to not roll over, to rally up and be bold, even if the outcome was ‘wrong’. You asked what it’s like to be the central force of a play, and I think more than anything, in my opinion, it just feels like you are an organ of one body. By that I mean that every night, when you perform you do not perform alone, you are out there with a team of dedicated, talented individuals who are giving themselves to the piece with you and they are the body of the play. Without them there is no play. Without me there is no play. But I used the word ‘organ’ because I feel when playing a lead, one has a responsibility to embody the nestled in and ingrained heart of the group, the feeling of the piece, the air of the energy created in the rehearsal room, and uphold a strong standard of work ethic and morale throughout. As it was my first time, I can’t say I was successful all the time, I guess like Helena, I was growing within the working of all this too, but it’s what I felt, a responsibility to plough through the realms of safe, together, with everyone, and plunge into the depths of risk, so that each choice made on stage is life or death. This work has to mean something, or there is no point.

To return to Rosalind and Cleopatra then, and return to Australasia, the field of productions is small enough to consider all the recent examples in professional theatre in which either of these roles has been played by a woman from a racial or ethnic minority, and examine the differences it made in how her presence was expected to be ‘read’ by the audience, given the varied contexts of fellow actors and mise-en-scène.

Rosalind Rosalind has always been viewed as Shakespeare’s showpiece role for women. Speaking a quarter of As You Like It ’s text, she owns the greatest portion of her play of any of Shakespeare’s female characters, as well as the most lines.

712     Anna Kamaralli

Her virtue lies in challenging everyone and everything, including the audience. The one long scene (4.1) in which she (as Ganymede) and Orlando have all the time they wish to flirt and jest challenges ideas about where truth is located, as she works toward a truer form of love by lying in just about every way possible. With her mercurial blurring of gender boundaries, she calls into question everything that people think they know about how attraction works and what to expect of love. The part is an uncontested star vehicle, but there are multiple hurdles for women on the way to making themselves stars, contending with fewer roles, consistently smaller roles, and specious historicising that insists on making more opportunities for men (Cheek By Jowl gave an As You Like It in 1991 with a widely celebrated black Rosalind—but ‘she’ was Adrian Lester). Add marginalisation by race on top of that, and an actress’s chances of securing the role become even more slender. The Royal Shakespeare Company has only had one black Rosalind so far, Nina Sosanya in 2003, and the BBA Shakespeare database lists only five other examples of BAME women in the UK playing Rosalind. The many smaller regional theatres in the USA allow for scattered examples, like Tessa Thompson playing Rosalind for the Shakespeare Center of LA in 2012, but in Canada there appears never to have been a minority actress in the role at Stratford Ontario. With this in mind, Australasian stage history offers much to consider. Actress, singer and comedian Candy Bowers has long been vocal both about her love of Shakespeare and her frustration at the pervasive racism of the Australian theatre industry, which puts severe limits on work opportunities for women from racial minorities. She does not regard Shakespeare as something a woman of the African diaspora, like herself, should reject, but as something she should be given her fair chance to claim, in her own way. She comments (quoted in Blake 2016): I am a Shakespeare nerd and I love the classical theatre canon, but my cultural heritage comes from music and poetry. What I’m seeing in Australia is a growing underground movement of artists working in a range of theatrical styles.

In 2009, the Bell Shakespeare Company commissioned Bowers, her sister Kim Bowers (aka Busty Beatz), and Laura Scrivano (who is Australian of Italian background) to develop and perform in workshop format a hip hop version of As You Like It. These three women were the creatives at the centre of the project, summarised as follows on the Bell Shakespeare website (bellshakespeare.com.au/mindseyepast/arden):

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     713

Including hip hop artists/performers Teila Watson from Brisbane and Omar Musa from Canberra; dramaturge Leonie Tillman and the three founding members of the creative team, the group focused on the relationship between Orlando and Rosalind and presented a 20 minute excerpt that fused text, hip hop and popular music, specially created rap poetry, composed music and sung text.

Although the project did not go on to a full-scale production, it is an excellent demonstration both of the way Australian artists use Shakespeare freely and without reverence, and the passion of frequently excluded performers for this material. Summer Shakespeare is a beloved tradition over much of New Zealand, usually performed outdoors with casts that mix veteran professional actors with students and novices. Jess Hong (pers. comm., February 23, 2018) grew straight into the part of Rosalind via her involvement in local, co-operative theatre in her home town as she describes: Firstly, I want to say a little about community theatre in Palmerston North. This is my hometown. We’re provincial, we’re conservative, we’re surrounded by farmland, we have one decent theatre and a few other spaces. I got to year 12 in high school before I even knew Palmy had a theatre. The result of this is a small, tight crowd of quirky fun-loving thespians, sometimes shy or anxious, often with day jobs. In the three years I spent within this crowd, I always had a place to belong. We were all outsiders, therefore we were all family. So it didn’t really faze me that I was the only Asian in a pool of white faces, it’s just how it was. And because of my passion and commitment, I got cast regardless of who I [my character] was supposed to be related to. I suppose it was nice to have such a meaty role in As You Like It, and be on stage all the time. It was fun to do a scene, run around the back of some trees, quickly change costume and then run back for the next scene. It was also great to be juggling multiple relationships actively on stage; it felt more athletic and I really enjoyed being challenged in that way. Rosalind is one of my favourite characters and it was an absolute privilege to portray someone so smart and sharp and bold, yet with such humour and kindness in her heart. She taught me about the importance in staying light of spirit, regardless of one’s circumstances. This is true of my acting and of my life. I’d say the most freeing part of my experience was cross-dressing as Ganymede and outwitting every other character, and being the centre of such joyful mischief. Rosalind is a powerful mastermind but never takes herself too seriously. I am still trying to take on a bit of that spirit. I commit my whole self to things and work very hard, but I am constantly having to remind myself to stay light both in the rehearsal room and in day-to-day life.

714     Anna Kamaralli

Perhaps the most adored Australian Rosalind of the twentieth century was Deborah Mailman, in a production for Belvoir Street Theatre in 1999 that constructed a play world expressly referencing her race. The strategic casting of several Aboriginal actors gave thematic weight to their placement in a story about usurpation, and made Rosalind’s race visible within the context. When she retorted to her uncle that she was no traitor, and reminded him that he had expelled her father, the audience could not help but see a person who had been deprived of their birthright. She was ‘designated a representative function in relation to her Indigenous Australian identity’ (Flaherty 2011, 150), which Mailman (quoted in McDonnell 2008, 126) showed herself to be aware of, and yet cautious about: At the moment, when we walk on the stage it’s political because of where we are as a country in terms of race relations and reconciliation … It places a lot of weight on us as Indigenous artists.

Although the Forest of Arden here was not idyllically pastoral, but suburban, it was a place where the artificialities of court could be shed. All the actors wore heavy white make-up for Act 1, which they removed for the remainder of the play, and Mailman’s Rosalind delighted in the chance to exchange her tight-fitting, high-collared, silk jacket for loose cotton shirt and trousers, which set free her physicality. Maureen McDonnell (2008, 129) saw Mailman as teasing out the range of meanings of Rosalind as a character in all its complexity: ‘Amalgamated in the presence of this female, Aboriginal actor, Mailman demonstrates the variety – and permeability – of identity positions that Rosalind inhabits’. Kate Flaherty (2011, 144–45) felt that what the audience understood about this well-known and popular actress could not be unwound from how they read the performance, with ‘Mailman’s height, her rambunctious energy, and her Aboriginality … evincing a beguiling mixture of self-assurance and generous-spirited self-irony’. Mailman had played other Shakespearean leads, Cordelia in King Lear and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, but this was her opportunity to command the stage. Flaherty (2011, 150) observed that: Her prominence as an assertively outspoken and orchestrating female figure in the play, combined with the presence of a number of other Indigenous Australians in the cast, made the play a conduit for questioning and revising beliefs about both cultural and gender identity.

Rosalind as a character is marginalised not by lowly birth, but by social upheaval which denies her her proper status. Casting an Aboriginal actress

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     715

as the rightful heir to the kingdom at some level symbolically restores that status, although the reconciliations of the final scene are much too easy to sustain the comparison. More recently, director Kate Gaul’s 2011 production of As You Like It, for her own independent company, Siren Theatre, was refreshingly direct, open and gimmick-free, treading that artful, tricky line between being neither romanticised nor cynical. It took place in a purely theatrical setting, neither present day nor a specific, discernible past time or place, but a clownish, dusty, warehouse-boxes world (see Fig. 31.1). Shauntelle Benjamin (pers. comm., January 10, 2018) was only just out of actor training, and astonished to find herself the pivot of the show: I was cast in As You Like It the year after I finished drama school. I came out and I expected nothing, and I was originally auditioning to play Phoebe. As a black woman completing a drama course in Australia, I was fairly sure that I would never be cast as the lead in such a large show. It’s … not really how Australia works, or worked. Particularly in 2011. I was a 21-year-old BritishAustralian with a lot of words in my mouth that needed to be shaped, and AYLI began to teach me how to form entire worlds and stories with one word and cut out the rest.

Fig. 31.1  Shauntelle Benjamin as Rosalind in the Siren Theatre production of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, directed by Kate Gaul, 2011 (Photograph by Alex Vaughn. ©Siren Theatre)

716     Anna Kamaralli

Benjamin found this an opportunity to build on her understanding not only of acting, but of people: I learned so much (as well as acting, I’m also completing a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology) about the human condition from that show. On stage and off, the conversations I had with my fellow actors–particularly Jane Phegan (Celia) and Anthony Weir (Jacques) embodied concepts and aspects of craft that I had only understood in theory until now. The moment that I realised what my race had to bring to performance happened in this show. We had a lot of school audiences, but one stood out for me. Kate came into the dressing room a few minutes before we were called to stage and said that she had been mingling with our audience. A boy had come up to her and said, ‘Who’s that on the poster?’ She said it was the actor playing Rosalind. This Indigenous boy said ‘a black Rosalind? Cool’. Looking back, it actually brings tears to my eyes. Black people, all POC are so rarely the centre of stories (of any era) that it genuinely gave this boy pause. He wasn’t just coming to watch Caucasian people tell a Caucasian story. He was coming to watch People tell a story that transcends time and place. He could connect with that. I was flattered, and have, since then, done my best to keep everything as real as possible. I have frequently chosen to use my race to educate. People seem to assume that a difference in skin colour means an individual is ‘other’–that they don’t have the same needs, intentions, drives, motivations as another person. Through my everyday interactions, and through the stories I choose to tell on stage, often I choose to audition for the roles that prove how untrue that is. I love roles that focus on the human, rather than the colour, of the actor. Of course I’ve played roles (and will continue to play roles) where the point of the role is my race. And I will continue to play those roles as a human, rather than a black woman. Intersectionality. It is time.

Mailman’s scruffy urchin, caring nothing for the niceties that court dress imposed, and Benjamin’s Beckettian clown could not have been more distant from the dapper, stylish Zahra Newman, who used Janelle Monáe as her model. Commenting in an interview with the author in 2015 (February 6), she observed: It’s a question about women who play men in Shakespeare in general. What is that disguise? Especially in a contemporary context. I feel like it’s not satisfying enough to just say ‘well, men have more power, therefore if I just pretend to be a man then I’ll have more power’. I’m thinking ‘what do I represent?’, but that is not an actable question. It’s not a question that I can play in the

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     717

telling of the story. One thing I said very early on was I don’t want her to go into the forest and have her not be sexy, and not be attractive, because people are charmed by her, a​ nd I feel like androgyny has always been attractive. The reason androgynous figures have generally been so attractive is that they’re not conforming to society – they are challenging expectations (visually). I looked a lot at image and attitude – Grace Jones, Janelle Monáe, Katherine Hepburn – women (mostly) who assume an androgynous feel, or who take on what has traditionally been seen as a masculine energy and make that run parallel with their femininity. I don’t want it to feel like two people. The biggest thing physically is that she becomes very free (as the play progresses) and the text allows for that, the text becomes so much more playful. I’m noticing how smart this person is and the pace with which she moves and thinks is quite challenging. The way that she finds herself … the way that she will set up a situation, get tangled in it but then wriggle her way out of it. I’m trying to get fit for the speed of thought. What I’ve discovered this week is that the verse is supporting you, so trust it. I think there is a tendency to try to contemporise the scene or the moment to play emotion, to pull it apart too much. I think that’s a trap because then you start breaking up the ideas, and you don’t hear the music, you don’t hear how all these ideas compounding upon one another form this very specific, precise thing. It seems so clear to me that this is a contemporary woman, absolutely, with contemporary anxieties, hopes, dreams and conflicts. What is it to love? What is it to be someone’s partner? What are the challenges, and do you make that choice? All of those things.

With time to reflect on the experience, Newman still feels there is no simple solution to how Rosalind represents gender. She knows that her Rosalind was always a woman, and while that brought playfulness to her time in the forest with Orlando, it left many possibilities still to be explored. Reviewer Andrew Fuhrmann (2015) intended it as a criticism when he wrote: the distinction between Rosalind and her cross-dressing alter-ego Ganymede is here made uncertain. The clothes change, but Newman’s performance doesn’t: there is something a little masculine in her before the change, and something more than a little effeminate after.

However, this actually pinpoints a genuinely original and positive discovery Newman made about the role through immersing herself in the complexities of gender presentation. She explored the historic attractiveness of andro­ gyny, along with the question of what falling in love looks like if the people

718     Anna Kamaralli

involved do not care overly whether the person they are with can be easily confined by a gender binary. Performing Rosalind as the same person as Ganymede, but trying out a different means of self-expression, explores the perspective of people whose sexuality is less governed by the gender of their object of desire than by their personality. If we as an audience are truly comfortable with the idea of Orlando being attracted to this person, whether man or woman, then there is no comedy to be milked from watching a man who fell in love at first sight with a woman going on to find himself building an erotic connection with a man. Which is not to say that there is no comedy to be found, only that the possibility of same-sex attraction no longer functions in the theatre as inherently funny, so the humour will be generated out of other things. Newman found her Rosalind’s disguise to be a path to asking more provocative questions about who an audience is expecting to see telling a story about a romance in an imaginary forest: ‘I’m much more interested in playing and investigating the politics and challenging the audience’s politics about what they see when they look at me on stage’ (interview with the author, June 9, 2018). She saw nothing productive in dated easy ‘gay’ jokes that derive their humour from watching two men be intimate or fall for each other: I think we’re past that societally and culturally, and although it may not have been successful, I wanted us to at least try to find another, smarter way. Women have the capacity for all of these things – wit, humour, vulnerability. I wanted to be able to investigate and portray a modern woman, but that did not mean pretending to be a man. There’s something much more profound here. We know that she’s a woman, and she’s a woman having those conversations about gender roles and gender codes with Orlando. How can we forget that this is a woman playing a​ t being​a man, and just watch two people falling in love intellectually?

Newman was very aware that this was an exercise in sharing ideas with the audience, and asking them to consider the actors’ position. My favourite part of the show, always, was the Epilogue. It always felt like the first ‘in breath’ after a marathon. It acknowledges the space that we share with an audience, and that we tried to tell our story, and there is something very humbling and vulnerable about that, it always felt very grounded.

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     719

Cleopatra There was a queen of Egypt, when Egypt was a huge international power. She was of at least partly Macedonian descent, but she spoke Egyptian, and has become profoundly identified with that country. She was also written by this particular poet to be played by an English boy, not necessarily because that was what he imagined, but because it was what he had. To show how he imagined the character, this writer gave her the lines, ‘Think on me / That am with Phoebus’ amorous pinches black’ (1.5.28–29). Shakespeare’s Egypt is a place of English imagination that requires a defining exceptionality in its queen, that may now be seized by an actress as an opportunity to confront the imposition of an English imagination on herself. The history of domination by white actresses of the role, and of its gradual erosion, has been documented in depth (Daileader 2006; Iyengar 2006; MacDonald 2002; Rutter 2001). Black actresses have played Cleopatra in productions which have opposed white Romans to black Egyptians (Francelle Dorn in 1988 for the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC; Joaquina Kalukango in 2013 as part of the previously mentioned ‘Haitian’ production), or employed a broadly racially mixed cast (Cathy Tyson in 1998 for the English Shakespeare Company; Yanna McIntosh in 2014 for Stratford Ontario), or positioned Cleopatra as the sole black presence (Paula Arundell for Bell Shakespeare in 2001; Claire Benedict when she went on as understudy for Clare Higgins at the RSC in 1992 (Rutter 2001, 82, 190; MacMillan 2017, 128–29)) or within an entirely black cast (Doña Croll in 1991 for Talawa Theatre). At times, as when Josette Bushell-Mingo played her for the Manchester Royal Exchange in 2005, there has even been a cast that might genuinely be thought of as mixed race. However, it has been with Josette Simon’s return to the Royal Shakespeare Company to play the role in 2017 and Sophie Okonedo’s performance at the National Theatre in 2018 that a role long used as a showpiece by white actresses is finally being claimed as such by BAME actresses recognised for their senior status in the theatre industry. People will continue to argue about both Cleopatra’s race and her appearance as a bearer of that race, and there will be many competing perspectives on the assumptions Shakespeare made about her race and how he depicted it. Sunata Iyengar (2006, 48) shows how fluid the reasoning can be: Although I have elsewhere suggested that Shakespeare’s Cleopatra was played as black, and therefore ought to be played by an actress of color on our stages

720     Anna Kamaralli

today, I now think that Cleopatra can and should be played as both black and white and by an actor of ‘whatever colour it please God’… But it has taken a performance by a black actress to bring me to this conclusion … the casting of the black British actress Josette Bushell-Mingo.

Within the theatrical conventions operating in Australasian theatre, where attempting an accurate historic setting for any production of Shakespeare is almost unheard of, Cleopatra’s race exists in fictional realms, and therefore can arguably be whatever the production needs. Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company, named after its founder, actor and director John Bell, has a mission statement to be inclusive, diverse and accessible, with extensive touring and education programmes built into all their seasons. Productions are usually in modern dress, and often make an effort to connect themes of the plays to current events and social concerns. Hence, the 2001 Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Bell himself, was set in a casino to emphasise the glamour and excess of Cleopatra’s Egypt and the eponymous couple’s addiction to high-stakes risk. Asked now to reflect on a character she created nearly two decades ago while still in her twenties, Bell’s Cleopatra, Paula Arundell, is left with conflicting, visceral memories of an emotionally taxing time (pers. comm., June 5, 2018): I am a woman of colour. This I know. This I knew at the time I was offered to play Cleopatra. This I knew to be the reason I was offered to play Cleopatra. This I was at first ashamed of. When rehearsals began for Antony and Cleopatra I was playing Masha, the middle, grief stricken, sister in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and my two sisters in that production with me were white. I was very happy not feeling like the ‘other’. Happy playing with my friends on stage each night with no reference to my outward difference. For my outward difference, my colour, my skin, came and still comes with certain expectations. Expectations I was not willing to live down to. In the Three Sisters I was experiencing and relishing my goal to not be singled out for my skin colour but for my artistic ability. And here was proof. My sisters on stage were white. But then during the day in rehearsals I was to be ‘the woman of colour’. A queen, yes, but a woman of colour. The other. I was an obvious choice in my mind. And I was a hard worker. A hard worker because I was a woman of colour. But … I knew. I knew Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. I knew Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to be radiant. I knew Shakespeare’s Cleopatra to be feared. I also knew she loved deeply and to those who looked on, insanely. She had a passion in the true sense of the word. A suffering. For Antony. A suffering I understood, because I am a woman of colour. A suffering I thrust myself into. Which was also easy to do

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     721

with Bill Zappa as Antony. He had a fire and I forged every bit of my less experienced artistic ability in it. To this day I am grateful for what I learned from him. There is no Cleopatra without Antony in this play. None. And not many of the other characters in the play approve of Cleopatra or her choices, so her road when Antony is not there is lonely. In real life I understood that loneliness. So I worked hard. In our production I was the only woman of colour. So at times Cleopatra’s loneliness weighed down on me heavily. Shakespeare again had written the experience of love through a woman who was ‘other’ and looking around the stage and seeing no other person of dark skin was at times terrifying. Shakespeare wrote an exotic woman, one whom he eroticised. Oh, how I knew that too. But Shakespeare gave her voice strength, intelligence, a full heart and an audience, encapsulating in poetic form the myriad soul maladies of a lover. I was scared. But I reached. And I grew. And grew. However, many a time I wanted to run and run, because I felt I shared too many trials with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. At times it was too close to the bone. Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is not a queen as we understand a queen. She is a woman who rails against the pain and vulnerability that comes with loving one soul. A woman who at times detests her own desire, who detests her all too human imperfections, who spites expectations, who aches to be different so to be closer but hates her difference for its all too real exclusion, who is galled by her inability to be in control, who swings from childhood to womanhood in a tremble of a heartbeat and who hungers to be in the arms of the soul who understands all that is her. All of this I knew. And a lot of this I knew because I was a woman of colour. Cleopatra’s words no longer swill in my memory and at that time on stage playing her I do remember, dare I say it, that her words were still too weak to carry what I felt. But so many things conspire to make this a truth. I was young, Shakespeare is neither a woman nor black and poetry, as I have heard said before, is a suppressed scream. But dear Shakespeare was so, so close … and his attempt is what I value.

Arundell’s Cleopatra projected a magnificence that seemed larger than the rather confining modern dress and set had space for, much as this queen’s presence in history continues to outstrip her written record. In New Zealand, there seems to have been only one Māori Cleopatra: Waimarie Stone performed the role as a student at Auckland vocational college Unitec in 2015. Productions for final year acting studies casts tend to be chosen to suit what the teachers know of the students they will be showcasing, so there is a good chance that the director had Stone in mind when planning Antony and Cleopatra. There are some circumstances when questions of gender and sexual politics will rise more insistently than issues of race. Such was the case in this production, due in large part to the female

722     Anna Kamaralli

director, Vanessa Byrnes, who was interested enough in the stories of women to interpolate a scene drawn from Dryden’s re-write, All For Love, which invents a meeting between Cleopatra and Octavia, but possibly also the result of a young cast who found it easier to connect to issues of the power dynamics in romantic relationships, than questions of aging and empire. Waimarie Stone (pers. comm., February 3, 2018) was aware that there were aspects of Cleopatra’s life she was not yet prepared for, but her sympathy was sparked by love that could not be separated from conflict: Cleopatra was quite difficult for me to get a grasp on. The intensity of the romance between her and Antony was too mature for myself to understand at the time. But a lot of her characteristics that made her human, or more so a woman, really connected with me as a female myself. I found myself enjoying the dialogue between her and Antony in their many passionate arguments and their electrifying attraction because it reminded me of situations between myself and my own partner. We would be having similar interactions but just with modern-time language. It fascinated me. Also, our director had written in a scene from another play about Octavia’s side of the story and that scene also stood out to me because of the points of view from both women being portrayed.

Lexie Matheson (2015), in what appears to be the production’s only review, wrote that, ‘Stone managed this with an arrogant (in a good way) assurance. At times child-like and tender, at others haughty and aloof, she presents us with a queen who is both believable and human’. When Camilla Ah Kin accepted Damien Ryan’s offer to play Cleopatra in his company Sport for Jove’s summer season of 2016 she did so only once he had made her two guarantees: that she would be given the space to perform a feminist interpretation, and that the cast as a whole, including the Julius Caesar that would be performed alongside, in repertory, would incorporate gender cross-casting to even up the numbers of women employed to perform. This insistence grew from a big-picture conviction that Shakespeare needs to be made available to both actors and audiences in a much more radically egalitarian way. It’s not until you get an opportunity to apply yourself to these poetic mountains (Lear, etc.) that you realise how spending the majority of your career saying ‘Yes My Lord/No My Lord’ impacts your ability to grow as performer and always as a human. By the time I came to play Cleopatra I hadn’t performed Shakespeare for five years. That is unthinkable for a male actor for whom there are always significant roles to explore and keep your muscles tuned.

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     723

But for women (this one) there was a period where the roles just stopped– because there aren’t any. Unless we begin to think and cast more deeply across humanity and let that inform the casting process. So that human qualities are explored by casting rather than this old-fashioned and limited assumption that I only experience the world as Juliet or Gertrude, rather than Caesar or Lear or Shylock.

Once she was into the role, her understanding of just how feminist Cleopatra’s story was became an obsession. For Ah Kin, the idea of Cleopatra as a real woman who once wielded phenomenal influence in the world was the impetus for her performance, and she tackled this by looking in two directions, historic and current: My first question was: who might Cleopatra be today? My decision to look to [Arabic Egyptian feminist] Mona Eltahawy was informed by her largeness of being, her intelligence, her outspoken, loud feminism. She is fierce, vulgar, inclusive, intelligent and colourful! All the time, maintaining a strong identity as an Arab woman.

Then, to locate her character in history, Ah Kin drew on Stacy Schiff’s 2011 biography, Cleopatra: A Life and in particular her assessment that, ‘Cleopatra unsettles more as a sage than as a seductress; it is less threatening to believe her fatally attractive than fatally intelligent’ (320). As a scholar, as a politician, as a leader without anyone to impose regulations on her actions, the Cleopatra of history helped this actress shape Shakespeare’s queen, as a guide to what was compelling about her. She had glasses, she had papers, she had a baby, she had a knife. Ah Kin experienced her research as a connection that took her by surprise: She needs to be Middle Eastern, and not exoticised. She was actually Macedonian. My background is Lebanese/Middle Eastern, so that goes back to the Phoenicians. What I discovered was that the pictures they do have of her are a coin head, and she looks like me. She didn’t look like Elizabeth Taylor, she looked like me.

She grew to be more and more in awe of her subject: She spoke eight to twelve languages, she ruled from the time she was eighteen, she brought the surrounding areas that she inherited back from the brink economically. It’s really important to me that people get a sense of this woman actually running a country, that that’s still going on in the middle of this, so

724     Anna Kamaralli

she’s got glasses, she’s signing papers, she’s still functioning, running the biggest chock of land in the Middle East at the time under one ruler. What they talk about more than anything is her charisma. (Interview February 6, 2018)

The production was undeniably shaped by director Damien Ryan’s eagerness to follow his Cleopatra’s lead, and experiment with bold staging choices that influenced the telling of the story. Ah Kin (interview February 6, 2018) shares some of the stage business they devised to expand on the richness of the story: We opened the play with Mark Antony and Cleopatra making love, drunk after an all-night party. They orgasm. It was a moment of perfection from which everything after was inevitably a decline. Then we opened the second half with Cleopatra entering pregnant. My research found that they actually had four children together. There is reference to the children in the play. So she was visibly pregnant in the second half of the play, and I gave birth on stage while Marc Antony was losing his first battle so by the time he comes back there’s a babe in arms. It gives us something to hide when the soldiers come up. Yes, they’ve come up for Cleopatra, but there’s also this hidden baby there, at the end. Damien and I have such a great, precious working relationship, because we just sort of set each other off in the rehearsal room. I said to him, ‘This will be my attempt at a feminist Cleopatra, are you OK with that?’ I wanted a knife on my leg because I wanted to have the ability to kiss or kill at any moment, and to have everyone in her court not know which one it will be.

Ryan (pers. comm., January 9, 2018) is completely confident with how much this dynamic contributed to the performance: I often think it would be a great relief for Shakespeare were he to see women embodying it today. Camilla Ah Kin was an immediate choice for me, an actor of supreme intelligence and technique, and such daring impulses–and one that I knew would look well beyond the traditional pigeonholes that even Cleo has managed to be squeezed into. Cleo, played well, is ever-surprising variety– the comedy, the jealousy, the incandescent rages, the neuroses about age and failure, the cruelty, the delusions of godliness, the sex and sensuality, the terrible vulnerability, the sheer rhetorical power, the loyalty–she is all of this and more. And sure enough, in my first conversations with her, Cam was immediately studying a politician, a mother, a woman running one of the richest and most strategically sought after countries on earth, a mistress deeply in love with the husband of another woman, and one who will eventually, even as the mother of young children, take her own life. In other words, Camilla’s

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     725

approach is profoundly direct and engaged with the human questions, not an ounce of traditional cliché, and that was what drew me to working with her on this role. Alongside that was her passion for diversity in casting and a chance for a woman of Middle Eastern descent to take on this iconic figure (Cam is of Lebanese descent on her father’s side of the family) and we spoke at length about the role of women in Middle Eastern cultures, then and now, in the characterisation of her Cleopatra. Every day she challenged the play in rehearsal and every night the audience with an extraordinary performance and it was thrilling to see a cherished Australian artist play such a powerful, unique and awe-inspiring figure as Cleopatra.

In turn, Ah Kin (interview February 6, 2018) found Ryan’s commitment to simple production values supported by a strong spine of textual understanding gave her exactly the platform she needed: There is something really ancient about his relaxed unprecious presentation (outdoor, family, picnic setting) to mounting these works met with a profound sense of what this poetry might be saying to us now.

This all combined into a voracious appreciation for the creative process that Ah Kin knew would be unique to this opportunity: That was what was so thrilling for me to have that amount of text, because I had this universe of poetry to exist in. There were times in rehearsal that I was really conscious that I had to expand myself to this. It just enthralled me to be trying every day, every performance. That’s what I discovered in rehearsal, because I was out of my mind with excitement and research and energy for it. That this was really precious. This poetic universe that I was inhabiting was incredibly demanding, all the time: constant uncovering of what I could learn, but also what I could reveal about this leader.

The driving force for her performance was a determination to show these things about the character: Her intellect, she was a philosopher, it was before the libraries were burnt, how freely women could exist at that time, I wanted to incorporate a notion of that as well. They had such incredible equality compared to Rome, and that’s why Alexandria was distasteful to the Romans. There was no impediment, they could be educated. She was tutored by philosophers. This was also because Cleopatra was ‘curious’. She had a curious intellect, so she had science, maths, philosophy, all of those subjects, and I was so impacted by that idea, because it gave me a sense of how alive she was, and how rich her interior was.

726     Anna Kamaralli

Conclusion Shakespeare is made according to our choosing. There are no reasons to not cast in a way that reflects the society producing the performance. There are no reasons to make assumptions about what setting is needed to tell these stories, or what categories of people are best to populate them. What is needed is an active will on the part of those with casting power to challenge critics’ and audiences’ assumptions, and sometimes their own. All the actors I spoke to emphasised that the support of their director enabled them to do what they were striving for. What came through from all the artists I spoke to for this piece was a sense of eagerness to the point of urgency. It went beyond a love of the characters, to a need for the theatre to do better by these plays, to allow for the largeness of spirit that women long to bring to these performances, to show them as all that they deserve to be.

Bibliography Akhimie, Patricia. 2018. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference. London: Routledge. Angelou, Maya. 1985. ‘The Role of Art in Life: Address Given to the National Assembly of Local Arts Agencies Convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 12 June, 1985’. Connections Quarterly, September 1985: 14, 28. AusStage. n.d. ‘Events Database’. Accessed April 26, 2018. https://www.ausstage. edu.au/pages/browse/events. Bell Shakespeare Company. n.d. ‘Arden’. Accessed April 26, 2018. https://www. bellshakespeare.com.au/mindseyepast/arden. Blake, Elissa. 2016. ‘Sisters Behind Black Honey Company Push for Theatrical Diversity’. Sydney Morning Herald, October 27, 2016. British Black and Asian Shakespeare. n.d. ‘British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database’. Accessed April 26, 2018. https://bbashakespeare.warwick.ac.uk/. British Black and Asian Shakespeare. n.d. ‘Home Page’. Accessed April 26, 2018. https:// warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/research/currentprojects/multiculturalshakespeare. Chung, Nicole. 2017. ‘Magic Can Be Normal’. Hazlitt, July 18, 2017. https:// hazlitt.net/feature/magic-can-be-normal. Crystal, David, and Ben Crystal. 2018. ‘Shakespeare’s Words: Characters by Part Sizes’. https://shakespeareswords.com/Public/LanguageCompanion/CharactersParts.aspx. Daileader, Celia. 2006. ‘The Cleopatra Complex: White Actresses on the InterRacial Classic Stage’. In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, edited by Ayanna Thompson, 205–20. New York: Routledge.

31  Race and the Female Star in Australasian Shakespeare     727

Daniels, Karu F. 2013. ‘Is She a Capulet? Regina Taylor and Condola Rashad Talk About Playing Juliet 30 Years Apart’. Playbill, November 13, 2013. Dionne, Craig, and Parmita Kapadia. 2016. Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Abingdon: Routledge. Flaherty, Kate. 2011. Ours As We Play It: Australia Plays Shakespeare. Crawley: UWA. Fuhrmann, Andrew. 2015. ‘As You Like It—Review’. Daily Review, Melbourne, April 25, 2015. Golder, John, and Richard Madelaine. 2001. O Brave New World: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage. Sydney: Currency. He Taonga Films. 2002. Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēniti: The Māori Merchant of Venice. By William Shakespeare. Translated by Pei Te Hurinui Jones. Directed by Don Selwyn. Iyengar, Sujata. 2006. ‘Colorblind Casting in Single-Sex Shakespeare’. In Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance, edited by Ayanna Thompson, 47–66. New York: Routledge. Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. 2017. Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard. London: Routledge. Jays, David. 2017. ‘Josette Simon: “Powerful Women Are Reduced to Being Dishonourable”’. The Guardian, March 22, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2017/mar/21/josette-simon-cleopatra-rsc-shakespeare. Joubin, Alexa Alice. 2013. ‘Global Shakespeares as Methodology’. Shakespeare: Journal of the British Shakespeare Association 9, no. 3: 273–90. Loomba, Ania. 2002. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacDonald, Joyce Green. 2002. Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacMillan, Michael. 2017. ‘The Black Body and Shakespeare: Conversations with Black Actors’. In Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard, edited by Delia Jarett-Macauley, 122–34. London: Routledge. Matheson, Lexie. 2015. ‘A Sensual Feast for Eyes, Ears and Heart’. Theatreview, June 19, 2015. https://www.theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=8262. McDonnell, Maureen. 2008. ‘An Aboriginal As You Like It: Staging Reconciliation in a Drama of Desire’. In Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, edited by Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia, 123–52. London: Ashgate. Rogers, Jami. 2013. ‘The Shakespearean Glass Ceiling: The State of Colorblind Casting in Contemporary British Theatre’. Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 3: 405–30. Rogers, Jami. 2017. ‘David Thacker and Bill Alexander: Mainstream Directors and the Development of Multicultural Shakespeare’. In Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard, edited by Delia Jarett-Macauley, 110–21. London: Routledge.

728     Anna Kamaralli

Royster, Francesca T. 2003. Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rutter, Carol Chillington. 2001. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London: Routledge. Schiff, Stacy. 2011. Cleopatra: A Life. New York: Little Brown. Shakespeare, William. 2007. The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Talawa Theatre Company. n.d. ‘Antony and Cleopatra: A Theatre First’. Accessed April 26, 2018. http://www.talawa.com/articles/antony-cleopatra-a-theatre-first. Thompson, Ayanna. 2006. Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. New York: Routledge. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Young, Sandra. 2016. ‘Race and the Global South in Early Modern Studies’. Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1: 125–35.

32 Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality on the Twenty-First Century British Stage Jami Rogers

In 1992 at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), the innovative practice of casting women in traditionally male roles was thrust upon director Hugh Morrison, the result of an overabundance of women in the cohort of aspiring performers. While its sister production, Antony and Cleopatra, followed traditional gender casting patterns, Titus Andronicus had an all-female cast (including myself playing Quintus, Young Lucius and the Nurse). The production is a footnote in LAMDA history, but it makes a useful reference point because all-female productions were practically non-existent at that time. One difficulty with LAMDA’s production was that although Deborah Warner had revitalized Titus with a modern dress production for the RSC in 1987, Hugh Morrison’s was staunchly reactionary. The characters were placed in Elizabethan doublet and hose, a style that was at the time arguably out of fashion in theatrical production. The lack of discussion of gender politics in the rehearsal room—or, indeed, outside it—also hindered the actresses tasked with playing Shakespeare’s men; this was uncharted territory. The expectation was that we would behave as ‘men’ but without defining what that meant. As Kevin Fitzmaurice, our deputy stage manager—now a producer at the Royal Shakespeare Company—recalls, ‘The idea of an allfemale Titus Andronicus was bold, but misjudged. Of course there are opportunities to re-gender in Titus but it needed more thinking through. Given Jami Rogers (*)  London, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_32

729

730     Jami Rogers

the circumstances it was probably asking too much of a company of actors who were only part way through their training to do it, without giving them a solid framework to explore their roles within it’ (pers. comm. March 10, 2018). As we will see, twenty-first-century productions with women playing Shakespeare’s men now use a number of frameworks that are often thought about in minute detail, something Morrison failed to encourage. LAMDA’s casting of Titus was clearly ahead of its time, but the novelty value also meant that the lack of detailed thought about how to use women in men’s roles had a detrimental effect. As another contemporary at LAMDA, Lucas Hare, recalled, ‘in terms of identity, it raised laughs because it impersonated a broad version of gender, like pantomime’ (pers. comm. October 21, 2011). We, as women dressed up as men, were without guidance from our director imitating—badly!—male behaviour. The attempt at being ‘men’ raised laughs because Morrison’s direction lacked attention to the emotional lives of the play’s characters; the cast was not believable either as men or as human beings. Women have, of course, played Shakespeare’s men before, as the Hamlets of Sarah Bernhardt (1899) and Frances de la Tour (1979) exemplify. Since Morrison’s LAMDA Titus, there has been an enormous shift in Shakespearean production, with women regularly playing roles originally envisioned as male. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, audiences have become much more likely to encounter women playing Shakespeare’s male parts. For example, several recent productions of Hamlet—including two out of the three most recent RSC productions, the 2010 version at the National Theatre directed by Nicholas Hytner and David Thacker’s 2018 production for the Octagon Theatre, Bolton—have had women playing Cornelius, re-gendered as ‘Cornelia’. What makes current theatrical practice much more vibrant is the sheer volume of women on the Shakespearean stage in roles ranging from this small role of Cornelius to some of the great tragic leads. In 2016, women played the major roles of Henry V (Michelle Terry at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park), King Lear (Glenda Jackson at the Old Vic), Brutus, Henry IV and Prospero (Harriet Walter for the Donmar Warehouse at King’s Cross), Petruchio (Martina Laird for Custom/Practice) and Cymbeline (Gillian Bevan at the RSC) as well as other roles as varied as Guiderius, Guildenstern, Cassius and Hotspur. Although fewer women played the largest male roles in the canon in 2017, substantial male roles continued to be fertile ground as actresses were cast as Kent in King Lear, the two tribunes in Coriolanus and Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing.

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     731

The growth (or lack of it) in gender equality on the British Shakespearean stage is tied to the lack of a female classical canon. As Harriet Walter observes in an open letter to Shakespeare, ‘Apart from the puking infant’s nurse and the mistress’s eyebrow, we women don’t get a look-in. In most of your plays you seem to run out of women’s ages once we have got our man’ while by contrast male characters such as Brutus’s ‘main concerns [are] freedom, power, morality and mortality’ at all stages of life (2016, 203–5). The paucity of opportunity for women in Shakespeare has a profound impact on classical actresses’ careers. Polly Kemp describes the status quo as one in which a male actor’s opportunities include ‘a tier of parts that simply doesn’t exist for women’ (interview with author, October 30, 2017). What Kemp refers to is a middle tier of roles that sit in between the younger male parts and the leads. Much Ado about Nothing, for example, has four women—Beatrice, Hero and two servants. Only Beatrice has agency within the context of the play, while the rest of the women speak comparatively few lines. The male parts, by contrast, consist of Benedick—the play’s lead and largest part, male or female—and underneath him on the cast list the personification of Kemp’s argument. In Leonato, Don Pedro and Claudio, male actors have three large supporting roles that allow them to both hone their craft and climb the classical casting ladder. Perhaps most importantly, these four characters all drive the plot at various points in the play and they each have control over Hero’s destiny, and, arguably, Beatrice’s. This lack of parts for women in classical theatre is compounded by the fact that opportunity in the acting profession also goes hand-in-hand with economic reality. As Polly Kemp explained, the tier of parts that exists in the canon for men both allows actors to build their CVs and—crucially—enables them to gain the pay increases that accompany experience. As a male actor gains more experience, his agent is able to negotiate higher wages commensurate with that experience. As parts for actresses begin to dry up once they reach their thirties, so, too does the experience and, along with that, the ability to broker higher wages (interview with author, October 30, 2017). This has profound effects not just on an actress’s ability to maintain a career in her chosen profession, but also on her economic well-being. Without women performing a wider range of Shakespeare’s parts, audiences are also deprived of a full and nuanced representation of humanity. In an op-ed piece in The Guardian Mark Rylance notes, ‘Each actor, male or female, will bring different strengths of life experience and theatrical skill to bear on their parts’ (May 7, 2003). Although Rylance was arguably pre-empting an onslaught of criticism from purists appalled that all-female casts were being introduced alongside ‘traditional’ all-male productions at

732     Jami Rogers

Shakespeare’s Globe, his point is an important one. Rylance observed how ‘different strengths’ of individuals add to the collective work of staging a play, bringing new insights to oft-revived classics. This chapter investigates the growing phenomenon of women cast in Shakespeare’s traditionally male roles in twenty-first-century British theatre. For clarity, ‘female’ roles are defined here as characters primarily played by women since the Restoration (when actresses were finally ‘allowed’ on the stage in England) while ‘traditionally male’ roles are the male characters of the canon. There is not space to provide a comprehensive history of women playing Shakespeare’s male parts and, therefore, this investigation is, of necessity, selective. This essay begins with an attempt to answer the paramount question of why women were still confined to Shakespeare’s female roles as late as the early 1990s, delving into the priorities of feminist theatre as one possible factor for this lack of equality. The chapter then concentrates on providing a voice to the women involved in tackling Shakespeare’s male roles in the twenty-first century, engaging with the difficulties and rewards that expanding their Shakespearean canon has provided. The chapter concludes by confronting press reaction to the growing presence of women on the Shakespearean stage, rebutting particularly virulent arguments that attempt to maintain the status quo of a white, male normative Shakespearean canon untouched by societal advances in women’s equality. Persistent inequality within the workplace and elsewhere underpins this chapter, as does what Imogen Stubbs referred to as ‘Hamlet envy’. Stubbs was playing Gertrude in Hamlet at the Old Vic when she reflected, ‘I am in a wonderful production … and I’ve got a very nice part, but Hamlet’s is better’ (Daily Telegraph, May 29, 2004). The chapter is also heavily indebted to the personal reflections of Polly Kemp, Martina Laird and Michelle Terry, who generously provided extensive interviews specifically for this chapter, without which it would have inevitably been incomplete.

Feminist Theatre and Shakespeare It is important to consider why, two decades after the feminist movement emerged, LAMDA’s 1992 all-female Titus Andronicus was an outlier in British theatre. Given that ethnic minority-led companies such as Temba and Talawa began staging Shakespeare in the 1980s and early 1990s to provide black and Asian artists with the work that was being denied them by mainstream companies, why wasn’t Shakespeare one of the contested sites in feminist theatre’s bid for parity? The answer arguably lies within the

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     733

movement’s responses to systemic gender discrimination in the industry. Instead of challenging the white male norms of classical theatre as minority-led companies were, feminist theatre largely eschewed the male canonical playwrights in favour of placing experiences by and for women on stage. There were excellent reasons for adopting this stance and in her monograph Feminism and Theatre Sue-Ellen Case makes a compelling ­argument that the classical canon itself is inherently sexist. Case focuses on the fact that from ancient Greek to Elizabethan theatre women were not allowed on the stage as performers. The consequence of this, she contends, was the ­ representation of women ‘derived from the male point of view’, compounded by the practice of men playing women created by male writers. These practices, Case argues, ‘encouraged the creation of female roles which lent themselves to generalisation and stereotype’ because they were written by men (2008, 11). Case suggested that Shakespeare and the rest of the Western classical canon should be performed only by all-male companies because ‘the values of a patriarchal society are embedded in the texts of these periods’ (2008, 12). Women, in other words, collude with the forces of their oppression by performing the classics. Twentieth-century feminist theatre largely assimilated Case’s argument and concentrated on developing work that was dedicated to putting women’s lives on the stage. In carving out a space for women, feminist theatre companies preferred collective devised work and/or commissioning female playwrights like Caryl Churchill rather than tackling gender disparity in the classical canon. The one documented attempt to challenge the status quo in a major company came with the foundation of the RSC Women’s Group, which had its origins with the 1985 RSC / W. H. Smith Festival. The weekend—curated by Fiona Shaw and Juliet Stevenson—was viewed as a way to counteract the company’s male-dominated work (Werner 2001, 50–51). Genista McIntosh recalled that the Group had sprung out of a meeting ‘at which … women [in the company] challenged Terry Hands, Artistic Director, about there being so little work and provision for women in the company … in terms of insufficient positive discrimination’ across the organisation (Goodman 1993, 217). What ensued, according to Sarah Werner, was a struggle for the ownership of Shakespeare. In Werner’s detailed and absorbing account of the RSC Women’s Group, there is a clear indication that levels of resistance to women playing roles outside the prescribed female canon were high within the cultural organisation. Instead of greater participation across the canon, the RSC’s actresses were expected to create work that was akin to other feminist theatre offerings: new stories that put women’s lives at the forefront. What was proposed

734     Jami Rogers

by the Women’s Group, however, was an all-female production of Macbeth; Hands unequivocally rejected the suggestion. Genista McIntosh explained that his objections were largely about ownership of Shakespeare and thus, sub-textually, what parts are appropriate for women to play. Hands told Werner in an interview for her monograph that an all-female Macbeth was ‘silly’ (Werner 2001, 59–61). What Hands’ attitude suggests was the entrenchment of fixed ideas about Shakespeare that would take decades to break down. With the high level of sustained resistance to providing women with equal opportunities in classical theatre, as epitomized by Hands, progress has been slow. Pictured as a graph, the casting of women in traditionally male Shakespeare roles is a virtually flat line throughout the 1990s—and for the next twenty years. This line has an occasional surging peak indicating a high-profile actress cast as a Shakespearean ruler, such as Fiona Shaw’s 1995 Richard II or Vanessa Redgrave’s 2000 Prospero. However, only as recently as the early twenty-first century has the graph increased its arc, rapidly and exponentially and—perhaps—finally with sustainability.

‘They’d Never Let Me Do It In England. A Woman Playing Lear?’ Greater sustainability for women playing Shakespeare’s traditionally male roles has emerged in the twenty-first century in the context of conversations within the entertainment industry itself. Advocacy groups such as The Act For Change Project and Equal Representation For Actresses—along with individual performers and associated organizations—continue to shape the diversity and equality dialogue within the performing arts. Marking a dramatic shift from the feminist theatre arguments, these conversations have focused on numerical data and the dominant 75–25% gender split in favour of men that is almost universal in all forms of the dramatic arts. Coupled with gender parity commitments on the part of the two most recent artistic directors of Shakespeare’s Globe, Emma Rice and Michelle Terry, these conversations have ensured that women are playing major roles on one of the UK’s most high-profile Shakespeare stages. This rapid increase of women playing Shakespeare’s traditionally male roles in the second decade of the twenty-first century has been fraught with challenges, but also abundant rewards for the women whose careers are being re-shaped through greater inclusion in Shakespearean production.

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     735

The recent surge towards gender parity in Shakespeare arguably began in 2012 with two high-profile productions: Maria Åberg’s King John for the RSC and Phyllida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar at the Donmar Warehouse. Åberg boldly re-gendered the major roles of the Bastard (conflated with Hubert) and Cardinal Pandulph, casting Pippa Nixon and Paola Dionisotti, respectively, in a modern dress production that made it clear these characters were women. By contrast, Phyllida Lloyd’s Caesar was an all-female production set in a women’s prison with Harriet Walter playing Brutus. Its ethos was that the female prison characters were playing the male Shakespearean characters as men. King John and Julius Caesar were performed in the year London hosted the 2012 Summer Olympics, the capital’s bid for the Games partly won by using rhetoric that positioned London as a diverse and inclusive city. The Cultural Olympiad and its associated World Shakespeare Festival provided a platform for landmark productions that pushed the boundaries of Shakespeare away from a white, male normative view, however slightly, and opened up space for other forms of diversity, including gender, with Lloyd’s production announced in September 2012. The first hurdles to performing the male classical canon have often been internalizations by the women contemplating playing one of Shakespeare’s male leads. The idea of playing King Lear had been mooted to Glenda Jackson by the Catalan actress, Núria Espert, who had played the role in Spain at the age of 79 in 2015. ‘Don’t be ridiculous’, Jackson initially responded to Espert’s floating of the idea, ‘They’d never let me do it in England. A woman playing Lear?’ (BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour interview, December 16, 2016). Similarly, in embarking on her series of ­traditionally male leads for Phyllida Lloyd, Harriet Walter reflected that playing these was a matter of ‘permission’ (2016, 157–58). What these reflections highlight is the vestige of an age-old debate about who is allowed to play Shakespeare’s roles, which can be seen in Walter’s description of the way she wrestled with ‘permission from the public and permission from myself ’ to perform Shakespeare’s male roles. Given Walter’s classical pedigree, it is surprising that she initially asked herself ‘What could I as a performer bring to any male role that a male could not do better?’. The insecurity manifested in Jackson’s ‘They’d never let me’ and Walter’s ‘What could I bring to a male role?’ mirrors societal indifference to women’s voices. Stories that place women in positions of power are rare and it is men’s voices that have been privileged; women by and large have been treated as secondary to men, on stage and off. Within this societal image of women is a problem that Glenda Jackson believes has remained significantly

736     Jami Rogers

unchanged over the course of her long career, which has spanned over sixty years: It’s one of the things I have seen absolutely no movement in at all, either during my period when my only job was hopefully being asked to act to now, is creative writers don’t find women interesting. And I just find that utterly bewildering. They are rarely, if ever, the central driving dramatic engine. They’re still the adjunct. I mean, there was a period, certainly when I was doing quite a bit of filming where you felt the only reason there was a female in the film was to show that the hero wasn’t gay. I don’t think we’re stuck in that particular crack, but nonetheless it is astonishing that we are still deemed to be uninteresting. (BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour interview, December 16, 2016)

The long-term effect of this has been to cement into the live and recorded arts the trope that Glenda Jackson identifies: men as the focus of any story with women propping up male exploits in the public sphere, on the periphery in the private ‘uninteresting’ realm. Two millennia of marginalizing women’s stories have made it difficult for twenty-first-century female pioneers in this new era of playing Shakespeare’s traditionally male roles. Certainly Maria Åberg and Pippa Nixon met with resistance during rehearsals of King John as they found they had to spend ‘quite a lot of time just convincing the rest of the cast that “No, this is a woman. This isn’t a woman playing a boy; this is completely inverting the gender”’ (Marcus 2016). This unwillingness to view Shakespeare’s character as anything but male was deeply entrenched, sometimes to the point that Nixon recalled, ‘People would still refer to me as “him”’ (Trueman 2016). It is unclear from public interviews how widespread this lack of respect for director and actress was within the RSC, but it nevertheless indicates some resistance to opening the canon up to women at Britain’s premier classical theatre. While the company itself was taking a significant step towards gender parity in staging King John with both a female Bastard and Pandulph, the reaction in the rehearsal room was a reminder of the attitude prevalent in 1985 when Terry Hands had dismissed the RSC Women’s Group’s request to stage an all-female Macbeth. This unwillingness to shift gender role perceptions was also potentially present within a section of its audience. When Pippa Nixon’s Bastard appeared, brandishing a ukulele and rousing the mostly congenial onlookers into a patriotic chorus of Land of Hope and Glory, one man placed his hands over his eyes and audibly uttered ‘Jesus Christ!’; he proceeded to shield his vision from the sight of Nixon at each of

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     737

her next appearances—indicating that this was not simply about the way the play opened, but a deep-seated discomfort with Nixon’s presence on stage in a major male role—and left the theatre at the interval (Rogers 2013b, 95). These responses to casting women in key male roles in King John were clearly not universal as many reviews of the production were positive, but they are illustrative of adverse reactions that accompany any seismic social shift. In his monograph Innovation and Its Enemies, Calestous Juma lays out the patterns society takes in first resisting technological innovation before accepting them. Technology, Juma observes, moves at such a rapid pace that the speed ‘creates intense anxiety leading to efforts to slow down the adoption of technology’ and there is tension ‘between the need to innovate and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order, and stability’ (2016, 5). When you put misogyny into this mix, the results can be toxic and personal in this perennial struggle between continuity and innovation, as the reaction to casting Jodie Whittaker to play the lead in the BBC’s iconic science fiction series, Doctor Who illustrates. As Lindy West noted in The New York Times (July 19, 2017), the news ‘plunged the more cootie-phobic corners of the internet into a tempest’ primarily because ‘the Doctor, they seem to believe, is yet another white male birth-right, like the American presidency, like the planet’. While the voices of the status quo are virulent, the jubilation of those for whom representation—seeing someone like themselves in positions of cultural, political and social power—matters is notable, including the reaction from Whittaker herself: ‘It feels completely overwhelming, as a feminist, as a woman, as an actor, as a human, as someone who wants to continually push themselves and challenge themselves, and not be boxed in by what you’re told you can and can’t be’ (BBC News, July 13, 2017). These same patterns of innovation and resistance are at play within classical theatre and the need to maintain what has been the status quo of the white, male-dominated canon has clashed with forces that have been pushing for race and gender equality—artistic innovation—since at least the 1960s. The visceral reaction some have had to the high-profile castings of women also shows that we are currently at a very early stage of artistic innovation in twenty-first-century Shakespeare.

Playing Shakespeare’s ‘Men’ As this current trend towards greater gender parity within Shakespearean theatre remains in its infancy, the way women portray male characters within the confines of specific productions is in a state of flux. While there

738     Jami Rogers

are no absolutes in theatre, there have been some commonalities across Shakespearean productions since 2012 that are worth exploring. The first is how productions tackle the gender question, specifically whether the actress plays her character as a man or a woman. Potentially much more interesting is how twenty-first-century productions negotiate the inherently male political structures within these plays when women play those parts. The ways in which women negotiate these theatrical innovations begin with making decisions about gender. The richness of the responses to this aspect of opening up the canon reveals both the instability of the concept as well as a wide variety of choices available to performers. In King John, for example, Pippa Nixon and Paola Dionisotti were clearly playing male characters that had been re-gendered from men to women in the context of a modern-dress production. Rae McKen’s 2016 production of The Taming of the Shrew for Custom/Practice at the Arts Theatre in London also re-gendered the play’s male roles. Unlike Åberg’s King John, however, the swop was a near-wholesale change with most male characters being played as women while the female roles were played as men. Martina Laird, who played Petruchio, described the production’s rationale for this alteration, stating they were ‘imagining a world where women were in charge’. (All quotations from Laird come from an interview with the author, December 8, 2017.) Actresses have also played Shakespeare’s male characters as men, as Glenda Jackson did in Deborah Warner’s 2017 production of King Lear. To make this choice clear, Jackson’s eponymous hero dressed in a loose male suit, with her hair cut short while the other characters referred to her Lear as ‘he’. In terms of the character’s gender, Jackson believes that at ‘the extremes of age, be it very young or very old, the gender barriers begin to crack, begin to fray, certainly the older we get, they become mistier’ and the ‘absolutes’ of male and female roles break down (2016). While Jackson may have blurred gender boundaries through the extreme of old age (she herself had turned 80 when she tackled Lear), Maxine Peake’s 2014 Hamlet at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester was more culturally progressive. Peake had always envisioned playing Hamlet as a man. She found, however, that there was a divergence of opinion between herself and her director, Sarah Franckom, as the latter felt Hamlet should be played as a woman. For Peake, the idea of re-gendering Hamlet as female did not sit comfortably, but with ‘a big transgender community in Manchester’ the idea of providing ‘representation’ for their local audience unlocked the character’s gender for her. With transgender identity becoming more relevant, Peake’s Hamlet took on a dimension that provided a bridge between Hamlet’s male identity and the actress’s gender (Peake 2016).

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     739

Framing devices also provide keys to a production’s approach to gender, as with Phyllida Lloyd’s trilogy of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest with all-female casts, staged between 2012 and 2016 for the Donmar Warehouse. Harriet Walter writes of her discussions with Lloyd about how to ‘justify’ the decision to stage the plays with an ensemble of women, stating that the ‘advantages’ of setting it in a women’s prison included being ‘de-sexed’ by the uniforms (2016, 159). Lloyd’s setting also explained ‘why there were no male actors’ and Walter also felt that ‘the violence and aggression would be more convincing in a prison context’. To facilitate the framing device, each performer was asked to create a female prison character that would effectively be performing Shakespeare’s male characters. It was a precarious balance that meant the actresses were still playing Shakespeare’s characters as men, even though their prison characters were female. Shakespeare’s roles had essentially not been re-gendered, even though they were presented by a company of women. Lloyd’s productions continually called attention to this dynamic by sporadically interrupting the action with visions of the female characters’ prison lives, ranging from a loudspeaker braying ‘Paula – meds!’ to Harriet Walter’s ‘Hannah’ breaking character as Brutus and shouting at those ‘backstage’, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake. What the fuck’s going on? Shut the fuck up!’ (Rogers 2013a, 552). By contrast, the framing device for Rob Hastie’s production of Henry V at the Open Air Theatre in 2016, with Michelle Terry playing the titular lead, was used as a one-off set-up. A group of actors dressed in casual clothes followed Charlotte Cornwell’s Chorus onto the stage with each man—and woman—vying to be cast as Henry V. Cornwell overlooked what Michael Billington (2016) described as a group of ‘several male actors, who preen with a sense of entitlement’ and handed the crown to one of the women in the group, Michelle Terry, who nervously took the symbol of a monarch. This set-up was, as Terry explained, meant to ‘address the gender question and then never have to refer to it again’. (All quotations from Terry come from an interview with author, October 30, 2017.) Like Lloyd’s framing device, Hastie’s induction provided a justification for a female lead, but unlike Lloyd’s his production did not seem to this viewer to be concerned with gender identity. This clear difference in approach within Hastie’s Henry V may have more to do with the leading actress herself. Michelle Terry reflected that she did not approach creating her character consciously as a woman; ‘that is too binary’, she told me. This is not to say that conversations about gender did not take place within the context of rehearsals, but her reflection upon them is illuminative of her approach. Hastie’s production had a near 50-50 gender

740     Jami Rogers

split and, in addition to Charlotte Cornwell’s Chorus, Henry’s brothers and the four Captains were also played by—and as—women. Terry recalled a conversation with one colleague, who had mentioned the discovery from other work playing Shakespeare’s male characters that ‘men take up more space’. This is one of the aspects of playing Shakespeare’s men that Terry finds too clear-cut in terms of gender differences between men and women because the stereotype is not universally true. As she explained, ‘I have a husband who takes up very little space. Does that make him less of a man?’ The answer is obviously no, but the anecdote helps to illustrate that there are no simple answers to questions of gender within the context of this emerging practice of women playing Shakespeare’s men. Terry’s approach to character relied not on re-creating a gender stereotype, but in finding Henry’s individual humanity by playing the person, not the gender. Although there is clearly a danger in one-size-fits-all thinking in terms of physicality, the ‘men take up more space’ idea of physicality became a useful exploration of gender politics in Rae McKen’s 2016 production of The Taming of the Shrew for Custom/Practice. In rehearsals, the acting company investigated this idea of gendered spatial use, combined with what Martina Laird described as its corresponding ‘verbal characterization’. (All quotations from Laird come from an interview with author, October 30, 2017.) Laird elaborated, stating that the exercises were ‘about switching not just a gender, but an agenda’, which meant that the social power balance between men and women was shifted. Laird described this exploration as one in which the women would use their bodies in ways that took up more space while male actors playing female characters would move in ways that were more confined and physically took up less room. While bearing in mind that, as Michelle Terry points out, there are men who genuinely take up less space, this particular issue has become colloquially known as ‘manspreading’ and plays its part in contemporary feminist discourse. The growing awareness that men’s use of their bodies can be about power is seen in the sometimes violent reactions some men have had when asked to make room for those around them (Rosenberg 2017). As one feminist author noted, ‘manspreading’ is not ‘a miniscule thing at all; it’s an act of dominance that is the result of deep-rooted societal privilege borne of our patriarchal society’ (Khan 2016). What the Custom/Practice cast discovered in exploring the contours of male versus female notions of spatial use was a greater awareness of contemporary societal attitudes towards women. What made the Custom/Practice movement exercises more poignant were the stereotypically gendered uses of bodies combined with the ‘verbal

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     741

characterization’ mentioned by Martina Laird. What this phrase describes, she explained, is a further exercise in stereotyping that, as she recalled, ‘introduced language that accompanies how we are expected to be seen. The women shared phrases or statements that we’re used to hearing throughout our lives about ourselves, about our bodies, in the street, derogatory ones’. According to Laird, the combination of these exercises—essentially an upending of gendered power relationships—had the effect of unsettling the male actors: The men expressed that even when they were walking as women – in the sense of taking up space in a stereotypically female way, which is less – and then having this terminology thrown at them, they said not only did they hate when the derogatory language was used, but they actually hated the compliments, because they said, ‘That doesn’t even mean anything, that means nothing about me, I don’t feel lifted by that compliment at all’.

Laird recalls that the majority-female company responded to these revelatory comments by recounting to the production’s male cast members that women have these reactions on a daily basis, including the feeling that compliments were also frequently sexualised rather than genuine. What these exercises in the Custom/Practice rehearsal room emphasized—in conjunction with the gender-swapped characters—was the double-standard women experience within a patriarchal society, which was the precise dynamic the production wished to explore. Laird poses the relevant question: ‘If it’s so ridiculous to see a man [playing Kate in Shrew ] being objectified, why do we accept it at all when women are objectified?’ The Custom/Practice Taming of the Shrew highlights both the objectification of women and the inequality that stubbornly remains part of contemporary Britain. Productions of Shakespeare that have women playing prominent roles can also illuminate aspects of women’s equality where imbalance remains, both in society and within the collective imagination. In the United Kingdom women make up more than half the population, yet only one in every ten members of the armed forces is a woman (Brice 2017) and only 30% of the country’s elected Parliamentary representatives are female (Elgot 2017). Despite their presence in government—including, at the time of writing, Britain’s second female Prime Minister—women are subjected to often overwhelming abuse. An Amnesty International study investigating the level of misogyny women face in politics found that:

742     Jami Rogers

deep rooted and negative gender stereotypes against women also influence the way some individuals communicate online. This means that online abuse against women is often sexist or misogynistic in nature, and online threats of violence against women can be sexualized and usually include specific references to women’s bodies (Dhrodia, September 3, 2017).

Harriet Walter (2016, 158) also references the misogynistic reaction to women in positions of power, which illustrates both the ordinariness of women doing a particular job and also the extraordinary reactions by some to women achieving a status that is far from the Greco-Roman tradition that led to the separation of men into the public sphere and women into the private realm (or ‘home’): A woman CEO or police commander or politician not only has to do a demanding job but in addition she must be armed against a mass of prejudice and personal dislike that will inevitably come her way. You only have to look at the vile, personal, sexist attacks in the media during Hillary Clinton’s election campaigns in 2008 and 2016, to see that irrational antagonism against a woman is somehow deemed an acceptable form of public discussion.

One relevant question for women playing Shakespeare’s men is how these antagonisms and perceptions of women’s realms are negotiated by the actresses playing traditionally male roles. As Michelle Terry observed, despite her casting as Henry V and the ­interest that garnered, her gender was not a driving factor of the p ­ roduction. In fact, Terry felt that the production was more reflective of current events, as it was rehearsed and staged within both the context of the release of the Chilcot enquiry into the Iraq War and the referendum that saw Britain vote itself out of the European Union. From a performance perspective, the modern dress setting and its portrayal of women in the army was also helpful in terms of the battle scenes because of the modern weaponry. As Terry recalled, ‘With hand-to-hand combat, surrounded by these big men, I would lose the battle, but with a gun that brings equality into the situation’. This detail is indicative of how much more sophisticated Shakespearean productions have become in casting women. As recently as 2003, the word ‘pantomime’ was used to describe Barry Kyle’s all-female Richard III at the Globe (Gardner 2003), which was staged in doublet and hose. While it may seem ridiculous to have women undertaking violent acts in traditional Elizabethan male attire, with women now in the British army the sight of a woman in uniform has become more accepted. Terry as Henry V

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     743

in camouflage was more believable to contemporary critics than a woman dressed in doublet and hose on the battlefield. Modern dress was also a feature of Angus Jackson’s 2017 production of Coriolanus for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which included two women as the tribunes Junius Brutus and Sicinius Veletus, Martina Laird and Jackie Morrison respectively (Fig. 32.1). They were played as two contemporary politicians, with Junius Brutus in a skirt and heels and Sicinius Veletus in a black power suit. This was not the original image that the production had in mind, according to Laird. They had instead rehearsed the tribunes as having risen from within the ranks of the mob itself, the design reflecting this aesthetic through a uniformity in casual clothing: jeans, sweatshirts and trainers for all of Rome’s citizens. This shift of the tribunes from equal members of the mob to visually encoded politicians occurred in previews. Within that decision is an assumption about the characters that, as leaders of the people, the tribunes could not also be the equals of the working class, an attitude that brought in clothing as social signifier. Cultural, social and political preconceptions shaped the way these female tribunes appeared on the RSC stage and secular female leaders on stage had to look like real-life contemporary politicians.

Fig. 32.1  Martina Laird as Junius Brutus (l.) and Jackie Morrison as Sicinius Velutus (r.) in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by Angus Jackson, 2017 (Photograph by Helen Maybank. ©RSC)

744     Jami Rogers

There is little doubt that re-gendering the two tribunes had a profound effect on the perception of Jackson’s Coriolanus as a whole. In productions that do not play with character genders, one (female) character often gets the blame: Volumnia. Coriolanus’s mother is frequently viewed as a monster, but in Jackson’s production she was no longer the sole female antagonist. With Brutus and Sicinius as two extra female characters, the production played with power relationships that confronted gender stereotypes. At times, this meant that the male characters on stage were frustrated by the actions of the female tribunes, as when Coriolanus comes to the Capitol to receive his consulship. As Cominius is invited to speak in Coriolanus’s favour, Sicinius rushes to the platform and motions the general to wait; a moment that was breath-taking for its upending cultural gender norms and one that was often greeted with nervous laughter from some in the audience. This simple action turned the gender role on its head because women are usually silenced by men, not the other way around. At other points in the production, the female tribunes were intimidated by men, as when Sope Dirisu’s Coriolanus physically threatened Sicinius by encroaching threateningly on her personal space and—at another point—grabbing her hand and throwing his cap in her face, enraged at the denial of his consulship. While I both overheard and participated in positive discussions about the presence of two women tribunes in Coriolanus, the choice also reinforced negative stereotypes in subtle ways. Women have been repeatedly silenced throughout history and Menenius’s relationship with the two tribunes includes his suppression of their speech. In Jackson’s production, this included a gesture from Paul Jesson’s Menenius, who placed his finger on his lips when addressing the two female tribunes. As Martina Laird described, Menenius ‘then just mocks [Sicinius and Junius] and we have no evidence at this point that they deserve this mocking’. The difficulty in this scenario in Laird’s experience is that audiences frequently ‘assume that they deserve it because they like Menenius’. My own observations of this ­production included audiences laughing at the characters of Laird and Morrison when Menenius silences them, an intensely frustrating moment because an innate sexism often rears its head regularly in Shakespearean theatre when women are silenced; Albany’s order to Goneril in King Lear to ‘Shut your mouth, dame’ (5.3.166) is another moment that also tends to elicit audience laughter. Martina Laird also spoke of disconcerting events in the auditorium when the tribunes were booed as they entered, as if the audience felt Coriolanus’s demise was their fault, rather than a situation of his own making through his innate arrogance. While it is not uncommon for the tribunes in productions

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     745

of Coriolanus to elicit strong reactions from the audience, other experiences during the run highlight the gendered reaction to the two female tribunes from audience members. Laird was also unsettled by encounters she had post-show: [People—primarily men—would] say to me, ‘Oh hi! I hate you’ or ‘I hated you’. And I find that amazing. I was amazed how titillating it was for people to see these two women as villains, as the villains of the piece when Coriolanus starts the play by saying he wants to cut up the plebeians’ bodies into little pieces and make a mountain out of them.

While these were extraordinary encounters, they precisely parallel real female politicians’ experiences of the visceral abuse that is directed at them, primarily because they are women. From exploring the idea of power in Custom/Practice’s Shrew through character gender-swapping to portraying women in combat situations in Henry V to presenting women as politicians in Coriolanus, what runs through many of these productions is the presentation of what could potentially be a new normal, challenging perceptions of who can credibly play Shakespeare’s men. As a woman of colour, Martina Laird is perhaps more attuned to these socio-political stereotypes that permeate both theatre and society and the resultant backlash when these ingrained attitudes are contested. Yet the observations of Martina Laird present us also with the recognition that some cultural norms—the silencing of women—run deep within society and a level of awareness is needed to avoid re-creating these on the Shakespearean stage. One lesson in diverse casting that has not been learned—and something directors casting women in Shakespeare should take note of—is that casting actors from black and Asian heritage in Shakespeare has frequently been based on the racial stereotypes that pervade society, notably as servants, prostitutes, the best friend of the white lead or in productions using a non-UK setting (Rogers, September 6, 2017). While Martina Laird could not avoid the animosity that accompanied playing a fictional politician, her choice of which of the two tribunes she would play was predicated on avoiding negative potential reactions that reinforced systemic cultural racism and sexism: I thought it was better for me to play Brutus because Sicinius talks more and pushes the point more. I felt that, being a black woman, that aspect would disappear into the angry black woman stereotype. Because Sicinius considers less and gets in there and stirs and agitates directly and is in your face … It’s about

746     Jami Rogers

the argument and the face-off. And I was concerned that if an audience saw a black woman of substantial size doing that, that’s all that they would see. They would not see the argument.

What Laird’s choice highlights is that ingrained cultural and social stereotypes need to be addressed in terms of Shakespeare production. Women should be cast in ways that break these impressions and not thoughtlessly reinforce a perception of women as unfit for public office, the battlefield or any other ordinary job for which they are hired in our society today.

‘Get Their Mitts Off Male Actors’ Parts!’ Two comments—made more than two decades apart—bring the issues of gender parity in classical theatre to the forefront. In 1992, Sue Parrish— then directing an all-female Hamlet for Sphinx Theatre—told Plays and Players, ‘Everyone in the world knows Hamlet. Women have no equivalent character [in the Shakespeare canon]’ (Morgan 1992, 16–17). [For more on Parrish and the work of Sphinx, see Chapter 24.] Fast forward to 2016 and Pippa Nixon’s remark to The Stage that actresses can now have a Shakespeare ‘canon of [their] own’ that encompasses not just Rosalind, Beatrice and Lady Macbeth but also Hamlet, Puck and Hal/Henry V illustrates the current sea change in casting (Trueman, February 26, 2016). Yet as Calestous Juma’s 2016 work on innovation shows, any transformation of the status quo results in a powerful resistance to change. This demonstrable opposition to any shift in social norms is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the British press. For the self-appointed guardians of culture, resistance to women’s progress is not new. Even at a time when women were not in the numerical ascendancy on the stage, James Agate complained about one of Tyrone Guthrie’s castings for his 1941 production of King John at London’s Old Vic. ‘And why must Prince Henry be given to a young woman?’, Agate opined about Ann Casson’s portrayal of one of Shakespeare’s minor male roles. While there are numerous examples of positive reactions to women taking on traditionally male roles—Michael Billington’s 2016 review of Michelle Terry’s Henry V, for example—vitriolic remarks from critics have also been a constant feature of the discourse, indicating the strength of both the movement towards equality as well as those forces resistant to change. In 2012, the Daily Telegraph ’s Charles Spencer was so disgruntled that he resorted to a critique of Phyllida Lloyd’s production that was laced with thinly disguised

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     747

misogyny: ‘Before seeing this women-only Julius Caesar I vowed that I wouldn’t resort to Dr. Johnson’s notorious line in which he compared a woman’s preaching to a “dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all”’ (December 5, 2012). Spencer does not develop his argument, but leaves Johnson’s quotation to do his work for him. The fact that he admits ‘some of the acting is excellent’ does not negate his deployment of Johnson’s words, effectively the subtext for his two-star review. The sexist nature of Samuel Johnson’s oft-repeated tenet was beautifully highlighted in Steven Spielberg’s 2017 film The Post. It follows legendary Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (played by Meryl Streep) as she flowers from society hostess to one of the most powerful women in Washington. Through the course of the action, she grows into a confident woman ready to make her own decisions as publisher. In her autobiography, Graham reflected on her upbringing and marriage, before the feminist movement emerged: I adopted the assumption of many of my generation that women were intellectually inferior to men, that we were not capable of governing, leading, managing anything but our homes and our children. Once married, we were confined to running houses, providing a smooth atmosphere, dealing with children, supporting our husbands. Pretty soon this kind of thinking—indeed, this kind of life—took its toll: most of us became somehow inferior. (quoted in Remnick January 20, 1997)

In The Post, as Streep’s Graham is making the agonizing decision whether to defy a court order and publish the ‘Pentagon Papers’, the screenplay deploys Johnson’s words to illustrate Graham’s internalization of women’s alleged inferiority to men. It is a moment that crystallises the toxic nature of ingrained male attitudes towards women. Charles Spencer’s utilization of Johnson’s ‘woman’s preaching’ quotation in his 2012 review of Phyllida Lloyd’s Julius Caesar shows that these attitudes remain firmly entrenched in the twenty-first century. A similar refrain to Spencer’s can be found in Christopher Hart’s 2017 review of Jonathan Munby’s Chichester Festival Theatre production of King Lear. Hart dismissed Munby’s casting of Sinead Cusack as an ‘achingly trendy bit of gender-blind casting that adds nothing at all … She’s no match for the loyal, bluff, soldierly and thoroughly masculine Kent of the play’ (Sunday Times, October 8, 2017). In reality, Cusack played Kent as a government Minister—like Martina Laird’s Coriolanus tribune in a skirted

748     Jami Rogers

suit—and her disguise as Caius transformed her into a bluff Irish gamekeeper or gardener, androgynously attired in trousers and oversized coat. It was a brilliant inversion of traditional ‘breeches’ parts like Viola, who also disguises herself as a man. Hart’s comment perfectly illustrates the stereotypically masculine image he has of Kent, as well as an inability to look beyond gender and see character. Reviews are only one piece of the arts media landscape, but these sentiments are echoed with perhaps more frequency than is comfortable fifty years after modern feminism began. Misleading headlines are also part of the subtle undermining of the women’s equality movement in contemporary theatre. A 2017 Daily Telegraph profile of actor David Troughton placed in the headline a quotation—‘Women playing men’s roles is just not for me’—that was largely irrelevant to the content of the interview (Lawrence 2017). It was presumably a sub-editor’s choice to foreground this gendered comment, while the profile was actually about Troughton’s forthcoming portrayal of Titus in Titus Andronicus in Blanche McIntyre’s RSC production. The Daily Telegraph also published an opinion piece by its theatre critic Dominic Cavendish that fully encapsulates the white, male critical establishment’s attempt to subvert the movement towards female equality in Shakespearean production. Cavendish was responding to the latest in a string of high profile women in major male Shakespearean roles (Tamsin Greig as Malvolio (‘Malvolia’) in Twelfth Night) with his piece, entitled ‘The thought police’s rush for gender equality on stage risks the death of the great male actor’ (February 23, 2017). Given that Cavendish’s—or his paper’s— apparent intention was to ensure that the growing gender parity in theatre be stemmed as soon as possible, it is worth critiquing his arguments. One of Cavendish’s stated ‘concerns’ was that ‘men are being elbowed aside’ in terms of opportunities to play significant male leads. It is worth recalling that the star system remains overwhelmingly skewed in favour of the white male lead and in the months leading up to Cavendish’s article, several high profile male actors had played Shakespearean leads: Antony Sher (King Lear), Simon Russell Beale (Prospero), Kenneth Branagh (Leontes) and Ralph Fiennes (Richard III). When this chapter was submitted for publication in 2018, there was still no shortage of male leads in major theatres: Sher was poised to reprise King Lear at the RSC, Fiennes was preparing to star in Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre and two white male actors were scheduled to play Macbeth: Rory Kinnear and Christopher Eccleston at the National Theatre and RSC respectively. This is in itself a factual refutation of Cavendish’s assertion that men are being ‘elbowed aside’ for women. Cavendish’s argument also falls apart with one of his

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     749

gender-swapping examples from the RSC’s 2016 production of Cymbeline in which Gillian Bevan played the eponymous character. What Cavendish fails to report is that Cymbeline’s consort—the Queen—also switched gender, played by a man. Cavendish’s argument was also undermined by his assumption that the title character is the lead, but in Cymbeline the largest male role is that of Posthumus and played at the RSC by a man. It is the sheer scale of Cavendish’s exaggeration that men are being ‘elbowed aside’ in favour of women that was breath-taking. Even using anecdotal evidence from my own voracious theatregoing as a sample, there were statistically few women playing male Shakespearean leads in 2016 and 2017. These are laid out below (Table 32.1) with leads defined here using the RSC Complete Works edition as the largest male role in the play. (The exception is Othello, as he is the play’s protagonist despite Iago’s—the antagonist— importance as the largest speaking role; this does not change the statistics below, as Iago was played by a male actor in the production sample.) Where women were cast as those leads, they appear in bold and relevant gender inversions are also noted. Table 32.1  Casting of ‘male’ Shakespearean leads in major UK productions, 2016 and 2017. Compiled by Jami Rogers Hamlet The Tempest

Winter’s Tale

King Lear Twelfth Night Taming of the Shrew Cymbeline King John Midsummer Night’s Dream Macbeth Henry V Romeo and Juliet Midsummer Night’s Dream Richard III

RSC Shakespeare’s Globe, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Shakespeare’s Globe, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Talawa Theatre Company Filter Custom/Practice RSC Rose Theatre, Kingston Shakespeare’s Globe

Paapa Essiedu Tim McMullan

Hamlet Prospero

John Light

Leontes

Don Warrington

King Lear

Dan Poole Martina Lairda Hiran Abeysekera Howard Charles

Sir Toby Belch Petruchio Posthumus Bastard

Ewan Wardrop

Bottom

Shakespeare’s Globe Open Air Theatre Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich Almeida Theatre

Ray Fearon Michelle Terry Richard Madden

Macbeth Henry V Romeo

Kulvinder Ghir

Bottom

Ralph Fiennes

Richard III (continued)

750     Jami Rogers Table 32.1  (continued) Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing King Lear Winter’s Tale King Lear Hamlet Henry IV

The Tempest

Julius Caesar

Hamlet Love’s Labour’s Lost Much Ado About Nothing Twelfth Night Winter’s Tale Antony and Cleopatra Julius Caesar Othello Romeo and Juliet Hamlet Richard III Othello Julius Caesar Titus Andronicus Much Ado About Nothing Coriolanus King Lear Twelfth Night aKate

Theatre Royal, Bath

Phill Jupitus

Bottom

Faction Theatre Company RSC Octagon Theatre, Bolton Old Vic Theatre Black Theatre Live Donmar Warehouse at King’s Cross Theatre Donmar Warehouse at King’s Cross Theatre Donmar Warehouse at King’s Cross Theatre Flute Theatre at Trafalgar Studios RSC RSC

Daniel Boyd

Benedick

Antony Sher Rob Edwards

King Lear Leontes

Glenda Jackson Raphael Sowole Sophie Stanton

King Lear Hamlet Falstaff

Harriet Walter

Prospero

Harriet Walter

Brutus

Mark Arends

Hamlet

Edward Bennett Edward Bennett

Berowne Benedick

National Theatre Cheek by Jowl RSC

Tim McMullan Orlando James Antony Byrne

Sir Toby Belch Leontes Antony

RSC Shakespeare’s Globe Shakespeare’s Globe Almeida Theatre Arcola Theatre English Touring Theatre Crucible Theatre, Sheffield RSC Shakespeare’s Globe

Alex Waldmann Kurt Egyiawan Edward Hogg Andrew Scott Greg Hicks Abraham Popoola

Brutus Othello Romeo Hamlet Richard III Othello

Samuel West

Brutus

David Troughton Matthew Needham

Titus Benedick

RSC Minerva, Chichester Festival Theatre RSC

Sope Dirisu Ian McKellen

Coriolanus King Lear

John Hodgkinson

Sir Toby Belch

was played by a man

Cavendish’s apparent perception that women are dominating the Shakespearean stage in ‘men’s parts’ is obviously unfounded. Out of the 41 plays listed in Table 32.1, only five actresses across six productions played

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     751

male leads, which means that only 14% of the leading male roles in this sample were played by women, while a whopping majority of 86% of these roles were played by men. This is a far cry from female dominance in Shakespearean production and it does not come close to reflecting the female to male gender split in Britain. While it may seem to Cavendish that women are getting all the juicy roles, this perception is skewed by the over-abundance of press attention that Glenda Jackson, Harriet Walter and Michelle Terry have received in playing Shakespeare’s male leads. As he should be aware, the press is interested in stories about the 14% precisely because they are an anomaly, despite Cavendish’s equation of press coverage with reality. To borrow the parlance of his own industry, a handful of women playing male Shakespearean leads is news because ‘man (or woman) bites dog’ is a story due to the rarity of the occurrence, whereas the norm of ‘dog bites man’—or in this case ‘man plays male lead’—is not. In seeking a solution to his complaint that women have been playing too many of Shakespeare’s male leads, Dominic Cavendish also employs an argument that has been used for decades to marginalize the work of female, black and Asian performers. He posits the idea that the male Shakespearean canon should remain male while companies whose ‘programme is, as a matter of historical course, male-dominated [e.g., Shakespeare]’ should commission ‘compensating work’ to achieve gender balance. Cavendish is advocating that the RSC, for example, should support female-centric new writing in order that the Shakespearean canon can remain predominantly male. As shown above, these initiatives are not a replacement for equality at the top of the classical roles tree; in fact, these schemes have prevented women from achieving parity with their male peers in classical theatre. By contrast, what has worked was the approach that ethnic minority performers took in challenging these same attitudes several decades ago: generating their own Shakespearean work. As its co-founder Yvonne Brewster stated, ‘[Talawa’s] policy was to give black actors work they weren’t being offered – and nobody was offering them the chance to do Shakespeare’; the company thus began staging Shakespeare’s plays (Jays 2016). Companies like Talawa, Tara Arts and Temba recognized that representation matters and provided their own solution to the inequality at the top of the profession. While equal access to all of Shakespeare’s canon has yet to be achieved (Rogers 2016), there has been far more ethnic minority than female representation in the traditionally male Shakespearean roles. This occurred in part because black and Asian companies did not cede the classical canon and produce only new work that catered to a narrow representation of themselves, as feminist theatre had done.

752     Jami Rogers

Ignoring the statistics that illustrate how far most plays are from equal representation, Cavendish (2017) also opined that plays from Euripides to Ibsen have ‘great roles galore for women’. The statement is technically true, but neglects to also acknowledge recent arguments about the huge imbalance in most plays—even new writing—that preserves a 2:1 gender ratio in favour of men in the cast lists. Cavendish’s conclusion is even more indicative of a sentiment that insists on keeping Shakespeare as the almost solely male preserve his plays have been, telling women ‘to get their mitts off male actors’ parts!’. If Cavendish was writing about ethnic minorities taking leading roles (and my sample above includes Paapa Essiedu, Don Warrington, Kulvinder Ghir, Martina Laird, Raphael Sowole and Ray Fearon playing leads) in the same way he talks about women (‘mitts off’); this sentiment could not have been expressed with such blatant discrimination at its core. While Cavendish’s piece is symptomatic of the misogyny that permeates contemporary society, it also reflects a powerful viewpoint. A 2016 YouGov survey poll found that 48% of respondents ‘did not like the idea’ of a female Hamlet with only 15% in favour and 28% ‘neutral’. What is revealing is the fact that of the same sample, only 20% of respondents expressed disapproval at the thought of a black and minority ethnic Hamlet (Hutchison 2016). This figure is potentially more positive because ethnic minority actors have been far more prevalent on the Shakespearean stage than women since the early 1980s. The passage of time indicates that the more people are exposed to artistic innovations, the more willing they are to accept them, as with a black Hamlet. What is also significant is the effect that women on the Shakespearean stage can have on the generations that follow them. When I was at drama school, dreaming of a career in classical theatre playing the ‘great’ roles, it never crossed my mind that a woman could play Hamlet or Lear, despite (or perhaps because of ) rehearsing and performing in the all-female Titus Andronicus at LAMDA. Michelle Terry, on the other hand, views it as a ‘failure of imagination’ to not be able to envisage women playing these roles. The vindication of this emerging attitude is both the plethora of women playing Shakespeare’s ‘men’ now and—crucially—the effect this has on the imagination of an even younger generation. In 2016, Grasmere [Primary] School in Cumbria tweeted: ‘Inspired by Michelle Terry @The_Globe [sic ] we have staged our own version of Henry V with two female leads’. What is more precious than showing a little girl that she, too, can grow up to play Henry V?

32  Women Playing Shakespeare’s Men: Achieving Equality     753

Bibliography Agate, James. 1941. Sunday Times, July 13, 1941. BBC News. 2017. ‘Jodie Whittaker: Doctor Who ’s 13th Time Lord to Be a Woman’. July 16, 2017. Billington, Michael. 2016. ‘Shakespeare’s Great Tub-Thumper Revitalised in Gender-Swapping Triumph’. The Guardian, June 24, 2016. Brice, Hannah. 2017. ‘Could More Women Soldiers Make the Army Stronger?’ BBC News, November 27, 2017. Case, Sue-Ellen. 2008. Feminism and Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavendish, Dominic. 2017. ‘The Thought Polices Rush for Gender Equality on Stage Risks the Death of the Great Male Actor’. Daily Telegraph, February 23, 2017. Dhrodia, Azmina. 2017. ‘Unsocial Media: Tracking Twitter Abuse Against Women MPs’. Amnesty Global Insights, September 3. https://medium.com/@ AmnestyInsights/unsocial-media-tracking-twitter-abuse-against-women-mpsfc28aeca498a. Elgot, Jessica. 2017. ‘Proposals to Increase Number of Female MPs in Commons Rejected’. The Guardian, September 7, 2017. Gardner, Lyn. 2003. ‘Richard III ’. The Guardian, June 13, 2003. Goodman, Lizbeth. 1993. ‘Women’s Alternative Shakespeares and Women’s Alternatives to Shakespeare in Contemporary British Theatre’. In CrossCultural Performances: Differences in Women’s Re-Visions of Shakespeare, edited by Marianne Novy, 206–26. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Hart, Christopher. 2017. ‘Theatre Review: Ian McKellen Stars as King Lear’. The Sunday Times, October 8, 2017. Hutchison, David. 2016. ‘Half of Brits Don’t Want Female Hamlets, Claims Research’. The Stage, April 6, 2016. Jackson, Glenda. 2016. ‘Interview on Woman’s Hour ’. BBC Radio 4, December 16, 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b084thry. Jays, David. 2016. ‘Yvonne Brewster: Nobody Was Offering Black Actors Shakespeare So We Staged Our King Lear ’. The Guardian, February 1, 2016. Juma, Calestous. 2016. Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kemp, Polly. 2017. Interview with the author. October 30, 2017. Khan, Sarah. 2016. ‘Manspreading Is an Important Feminist Issue, Not Just Bad Social Etiquette’. Gender Focus, February 13, 2016. http://www.gender-focus. com/2016/02/13/manspreading/. Laird, Martina. 2017. Interview with the author. December 8, 2017. Lawrence, Ben. 2017. ‘Shakespearean Actor David Troughton: “Women Playing Men’s Roles Is Just Not for Me”’. Daily Telegraph, June 22, 2017.

754     Jami Rogers

Marcus, Rafaella. 2016. ‘Pippa Nixon: “There Are So Many More Mouthwatering Parts That I Think Women Would Smash”’. Exeunt Magazine, March 10, 2016. Morgan, Gwyn. 1992. ‘The Britches Parts’. Plays and Players, February. Peake, Maxine. 2016. ‘Interview with 21st Century Folio Podcast’. May 2, 2017. http://pod21stfolio.wpengine.com/2016/05/02/maxine-peake/. Remnick, David. 1997. ‘Citizen Kay’. The New Yorker, January 20, 1997. Rogers, Jami. 2013a. ‘Julius Caesar’. Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 3: 405–30. Rogers, Jami. 2013b. ‘King John ’. Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 1: 95–99. Rogers, Jami. 2016. ‘Is the Door Really Open for Black Actors to Star in Shakespeare?’ The Stage, October 6, 2016. Rogers, Jami. 2017. ‘Jami Rogers: Recent Reporting on Diversity Is Bad, but the Reality Is Even Worse’. The Stage, September 6, 2017. Rosenberg, Eli. 2017. ‘She Asked Him to Stop Manspreading on the Subway: Instead He Punched Her, She Said’. The Washington Post, November 17, 2017. Rylance, Mark. 2003. ‘Unsex Me Here’. The Guardian, May 7, 2003. Spencer, Charles. 2012. Daily Telegraph, December 5, 2012. Stubbs, Imogen. 2004. ‘“Lest We Forget” When Women Stepped into Men’s Shoes’. Daily Telegraph, May 29, 2004. Terry, Michelle. 2017. Interview with the author. October 30, 2017. Trueman, Matt. 2016. ‘Pippa Nixon: Actresses Can Now Have a Shakespeare Canon of Their Own’. The Stage, February 26, 2016. Walter, Harriet. 2016. Brutus and Other Heroines: Playing Shakespeare’s Roles for Women. London: Nick Hern. Werner, Sarah. 2001. Shakespeare and Feminist Performance: Ideology on Stage. London and New York: Routledge. West, Lindy. 2017. ‘Doctor Who Breaks Its Alien Last Ceiling’. The New York Times, July 19, 2017.

33 Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition: Young Women in a Changing World Tracy Irish

While much of this book considers the history of women in the ­theatre, their past and present achievements, this chapter considers how theatre practice in education can take us forward. Young women today are born into a world shaped by more influences than ever before, with access to local, national and international ideas, beliefs and traditions. Many take for granted rights to education, to reproductive choice, to votes, which have transformed the role of women across the world. Yet, even in countries considered progressive, clear inequalities remain. For example, despite findings by the Confederation of British Industries that diversity in the workplace is a strong indicator of a company’s success, the average EU gender pay gap persists at 16%; in the UK, it is 21% (European Commission 2017). In the muddy world of cultural attitudes, women continue to suffer behaviours that make them feel threatened or uncomfortable. Since 2012, the Everyday Sexism Project has been encouraging women from across the world to recognise and challenge cultural assumptions that this is ‘just the way things are’; in 2016, the project worked with the UK’s Trades Union Congress on a report which found that more than half of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace. The year 2017 saw a critical mass of such voices with the #MeToo campaign sweeping through 85 countries in its first week. The strength of the movement was noted by Time

Tracy Irish (*)  Stratford-upon-Avon, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_33

755

756     Tracy Irish

magazine with their accolade of ‘Person of the Year’ status awarded to those breaking the silence over sexism and sexual harassment (Zacharek et al. 2017). How do young women negotiate this world, shoring up their identities amongst shifting values and the often confusing mixed messages surrounding them from social and other media? To what extent can their experiences of formal education support them in understanding what has changed and what needs to change? Actors have become the celebrity faces of protest against the abuse of power in gender dynamics. In 2017, the UK actors’ union Equity set up an inquiry into the extent of the entertainment industry’s problem, and in the same year The Women in Cinema Collective was set up in India to combat what is seen as endemic sexual harassment (Safi 2017). That sexism and sexual harassment exist to such an extent in the supposedly liberal film and theatre industry is not only disturbing but exposes tensions around the continuing purpose of theatre in our society: Should it reflect or challenge, entertain or provoke, encourage a plurality of perspectives or reinforce reactionary views? In this chapter, I examine how theatre can provide a site of cultural exploration for young people and offer examples of responses from different countries. Gender equality in the theatre industry will not be achieved overnight, but theatre practice in formal education can be a means to explore the shifting cultural metaphors through which we interpret the literary heritage handed down to us, and that can support young people in trying to make sense of, and progress, their shifting cultural identities. My focus is on classical dramas prescribed by school curricula. These dramas can provide comparisons which link us with universal human stories and situations, but can also allow space to question what is universal, why, and what can and should be different. Employing actors’ techniques developed to explore not only what but how a play means in a moment of contemporary performance can enrich young people’s appreciation of the nuance and complexity of classical dramas and address the perennial questions they raise: How might the variety of unique individuals acting and watching these situations have felt then? How do the variety of unique individuals acting and watching these situations feel now? Through the prism of classical dramas, we can consider our similarities and differences, engage critically and creatively with the inheritance they offer, and develop responses for ways to progress culture in the present. Building on such knowledge can inspire creativity: new interpretations, new writing and devised responses that help young people, as writers, actors and audiences, ask questions of the world around them in order to challenge what is accepted as normal.

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     757

In providing an art form that makes conscious the continuous unconscious human processes of social interaction, theatre offers a dynamic site for the dialogue at the heart of progressive education. As compulsory education was taking hold in the early twentieth century, John Dewey’s influential ideas welcomed in pupils’ current knowledge and experiences as the foundation on which to build and develop further knowledge. Dewey advocated dialogue with inherited culture rather than the traditional transmissive approaches he observed as commonplace, such as the principle that the study of classical literature should free us from the cultural vicissitudes of our own age and connect us instead to ‘what is fixed and enduring’ (Maurice 1840, quoted by Barry 2002, 13). Rather than learning about the past as an end in itself, Dewey (1938, 78) proposed making ‘acquaintance with the past a means of understanding the present’. He viewed art as integral to the human experience but observed that ‘When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human condition under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience’ (Dewey 1934, 1). Richard Schechner (1992, 8) questioned the continuing relevance of theatre with his metaphor of the ‘staging of written dramas’ as ‘the string quartet of the twenty-first century: a beloved but extremely limited genre’. It is easy to recognise how the staging of classical dramas can become limited in the ways Schechner and Dewey describe: delighted in for their spectacle, for provoking academic curiosity, or for conferring a sense of cultural capital, but divorced from any sustained emotional connection; perhaps reflecting, but not challenging cultural norms, and in any case, too often inaccessible for everyone to join the conversation they might provoke. The writings of Rabindranath Tagore reflect his passion for a dialogic pedagogy which challenges received ideas. Tagore devoted the funds from his 1913 Nobel Prize to founding a school and university in his native Bengal, set up on progressive principles similar to those promoted by Dewey. Martha Nussbaum (2010, 69) believes Dewey’s ideas may, in fact, have been influenced by Tagore, and notes how ‘Tagore’s novels, stories and dramas are obsessed with the need to challenge the past, to be alive to a wide range of possibilities’. By way of illustration, Nussbaum recounts Tagore’s allegory of traditional education ‘The Parrot’s Training’ in which wise men argue over the best methods and textbooks to use to educate a parrot sitting in a gilded cage. In their zeal, they barely notice when the parrot expires. The bird’s body, stuffed with inanimate book-leaves, is contrasted with the animated ‘murmur of the spring breeze amongst the newly budded asoka leaves’ (Nussbaum 2010, 70).

758     Tracy Irish

Tagore’s focus on pedagogies that foreground a student’s own experiences and sensory connections with their learning are embraced by artist and educator Dana Roy, based in Kolkata (interview with the author, December 19, 2017). Nussbaum (2010, 71) notes how Tagore was ‘particularly sensitive to the unequal burden dead customs imposed upon women’ and his consequent tendency to make those most likely to question the status quo in his stories women, who have most reason to be dissatisfied with the way things are. Roy notes this same tendency to challenge amongst the girls she works with. She explained to me how the dramas of Hindu classical stories are intimately woven into minds and behaviours in India because they tell stories of gods still present in daily life; but also how the characters and situations of these well-known stories provide metaphors interpreted and challenged by modern young women who ask: Why should Sita wait for Rama just because he tells her to? Why shouldn’t goddesses like Durga, Lakshmi and Saraswati, celebrated for their strength, power and knowledge, inspire us to challenge rather than accept cultural norms? A seminal moment of Indian theatre, described to me by Dana Roy, happened when experimental theatre company Kalakshetra Manipur staged a production of Draupadi in 2000. Draupadi is a central character of the Mahābhārata, married to the five Pandava brothers who struggle for power with the Kaurava kin. The eldest Pandava brother loses everything to the Kaurava in a dice game and finally stakes Draupadi in one last bet. When she too is lost, she is dragged in by her hair. The Kaurava attempt to disrobe her but Krishna steps in and ensures her sari unfolds in never-ending material. In the production by Kalakshetra Manipur, there was no supernatural intervention, and Heisnam Sabitri, a highly respected actor, was left naked on stage. In this moment, she embodied not only the humiliation of Draupadi, but through the metaphor of her character the humiliation and violence regularly caused to contemporary women living in Manipur. A strong military presence in the region, responding to social unrest, had resulted in sexual abuse of women in the villages and women began protesting by marching naked through the streets. Heisnam Sabitri’s nakedness was recognised as a symbol of solidarity with those protests. Audiences were shocked but also recognised and respected the stark reference to women caught up in the continuing violence of the region also suffering abuse at the hands of men who should have been protecting them. Kalakshetra Manipur made the classical Hindu story of Draupadi living art which, as Jonothan Neelands (2015, 410) describes, becomes ‘a form of public engagement, an act of dialogue and a means of making expressive interventions into the public sphere’. Neelands finds close links, as did

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     759

Dewey and Tagore, between expression through art and social democracy. He argues for the arts in education as offering a ‘powerful means of representation, experience and expression that are necessary both for the human spirit and human co-existence’ (2015, 412). Through the global stories of classical dramas, readers can consider other points of view. They can temporarily inhabit the complex mix of intentions and cultural conditioning that affect another human being’s agency and attempt to interpret the human condition using the metaphors of other lives to understand more about their own. Jerome Bruner (1996, xiv) finds a dominance of narrative in every aspect of how we learn and communicate, explaining: ‘It is through our own narratives that we principally construct a version of ourselves in the world, and it is through its narrative that a culture provides models of identity and agency to its members’. For Bruner, narrative becomes ‘a communal tool’ for sense-making (1990, 45) and a way of ‘trafficking in human possibilities rather than settled certainties’ (1986, 26). He found such narratives to be judged for their success in describing not what is ‘true of life’ but what is ‘true to life’ (1996, 122). The 2000 production of Draupadi reinterpreted a classical narrative as true to modern life and in so doing challenged the perceptions of those who saw it or heard about it. As Roy pointed out, however, such an iconic moment of theatre is ignored by curriculum textbooks. Conversations through classical dramas that find genuine relevance for modern life can be all too rare in schools, and even viewed with suspicion by some literary experts and education professionals. Russ McDonald (2009, 31) speaks for those who assert the value of the arts and humanities as useless, ‘but not worthless’, arguing for the value of pleasure over utility in reading Shakespeare. Considering the value of theatre practice, Peter Brook (1968, 45) contends that while pleasure and, indeed, frivolity are important, there is the potential in theatre for so much more. Formal schooling is seen by many as the passing on of knowledge and culture, a system by which the young can imbibe the wisdom of their elders before taking up the mantle of adulthood themselves. Bruner (1996, 118) summarises the purpose of education more broadly as to make people ‘more effective, less alienated, and better human beings’, and Nussbaum (2010, 7) argues for the essential role the humanities and the arts play in developing not only ‘the ability to think critically’ but also ‘the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person’. The 2016 OECD report on ‘Teaching Excellence’, authored by Andreas Schleicher, promotes ideas that formal education should produce students capable of dealing responsibly with an interdependent world. Schleicher (2016, 9) argues that today’s

760     Tracy Irish

teachers need to ‘do more than transmit educational content: they have to cultivate students’ ability to be creative, think critically, solve problems and make decisions’ and in order to do this they need to ‘nurture the character qualities that help people to live and work together’. The report emphasises that today’s teachers are preparing today’s students for unknown tomorrows and therefore need to develop the skills, not only of responding critically and creatively to received knowledge but also of working collaboratively. If education is to achieve Bruner’s ideal of making us better human beings, able to respond effectively and compassionately to an increasingly globalised world peopled by individual needs and experiences, conversations with other human beings across cultures become essential. Engaging with classical dramas through constructivist dialogue, as Dewey and Tagore proposed, provides sites for such conversations that can develop understanding of the present and challenge what the future can be. During the process of rehearsing a play, actors investigate potential turning points in order to discover intentions and motivations: when could something have changed; how could someone have acted differently and why didn’t they; summarised in the foundational inquiry of theatre practice, ‘what if?’ Speculation around how and why characters behave in certain ways provides metaphors for how and why people behave as they do outside the container of a drama. Creative responses within the world of the container can, as Augusto Boal (1985) proposed, test and rehearse revolutionary responses outside it. For young women, in India or Europe, this can shine a light on what they take for granted in their world, the habitus (Bourdieu 1977) they inhabit, largely created, as it has been, by men. A world where women are discriminated against is not an eternal universal truth of how it is, but how it is at the moment. In her classroom practice, Roy regularly devises plays with the girls she teaches which build on their knowledge of classical dramas and dance to explore issues of contemporary concern. She explained the concept of I Am Strong, the first of these plays, as depicting ‘various situations where women can choose but traditionally have not chosen’, citing examples such as: a teenage girl accepting a man standing uncomfortably close on the bus; a young woman not walking alone at night; or a young wife being told by her husband’s family that she cannot work outside the home. Roy described how the devising process became a turning point for many of the girls, ‘and empowering for them as well because so many of them had never expressed the fear that they felt standing in a bus—and to be able to get that moment to express it, suddenly means that it’s not okay and not something you will take—and many of them had been taking it’ (interview with the author, December 19, 2017). The theatre practice Roy uses with her students is not

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     761

just about opening up discussion and sharing experiences, but about crafting a performance in order to communicate with others. The I Am Strong company were initially fearful about sharing their work with an audience of peers, teachers, and especially family, but they wanted to express their thoughts and feelings. The metaphors of theatre practice gave them a vehicle which felt less directly confrontational but stimulated both them and their audience to question contemporary values around sexuality, gender and social politics that affect their daily lives. After that initial show, subsequent companies of girls felt more emboldened to express their ideas. Unfortunately, in formal education across the world, the value of art in our lives is often commodified into a checklist of curriculum knowledge to ensure students have attained an understanding of what are often still regarded as ‘fixed and enduring’ values. While countries like Singapore and China are looking to expand the educational outlook of their ­academically successful schools with better arts provision, the contemporary picture of reforms to the school curriculum in England has seen reductions in the take up of arts subjects at age 14–16 as they remain outside the list of academic subjects considered of most value (Johnes 2017). The current UK government claim that improving social mobility is ‘at the heart’ of their policies (DfE 2017) and practical study of the arts is expected to form part of a ‘broad and balanced curriculum’. The cuts and accountability measures dominating state-funded schools, however, often mean curricular and extracurricular provision is less accessible for more disadvantaged pupils. Classical dramas remain the province of reading tests, perhaps building cultural capital but otherwise often isolated from the human condition of young people’s lives—and none more so than the classical dramas of Shakespeare. The connection between Shakespeare as a text of high cultural status and the struggles of identity for young people is a perennial motif of my discussions with teachers around the world. A teacher in Los Angeles provided a useful summary: ‘Shakespeare’s work can be a source of intellectual empowerment, or insecurity, or a weapon used against them’ (Irish 2012, 18). In this statement can be found the problematic influence of E. D. Hirsch’s arguments for Cultural Literacy (1988), in which he argues that to achieve social equality young people from disadvantaged backgrounds need to have the same knowledge base as their advantaged peers. Hirsch’s ideas have been co-opted by the current UK government. Long-serving Minister of State for Schools Nick Gibb explained in 2012: ‘The essence of what Hirsch is talking about is: it’s not just any knowledge, it’s only that knowledge which constitutes the shared intellectual currency of the society’ (quoted in Abrams 2012). White, male, middle-class Gibb, however, seems to disregard the

762     Tracy Irish

question of who constructs the received knowledge of this allegedly shared intellectual currency. Helen Fraser (2015), former CEO of the Girls’ Day School Trust, has commented on how exam syllabi seem ‘hard-wired to default to men’ rather than celebrate pioneering women. Olivia Eaton (2016), an English teacher at The Forest Academy in East London, put her concerns into action by leading a campaign to highlight what she describes as ‘reading lists unfairly weighted in favour of white, male writers which has, in turn, muted the voices of an integral part of our society, sending a message to students that these voices and narratives are not as valid’. Hirsch’s ideas support policymakers in setting a curriculum that entails prescribing certain authors for study as a matter of entitlement to what Matthew Arnold (1869, viii) described as ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’. This approach can be seen as an illustration of democracy, in that all young people then have access to the knowledge most readily available to the dominant class. Others, however, as Fraser and Eaton illustrate, recognise the potential in this prescription for a superficial democracy that masks social control. That the areas of study on a school curriculum are selected according to cultural priorities, reflecting the power dynamics of that culture, is now widely recognised (Bernstein 1977; Hirsch et al. 1988; Sleeter 1991; Bourdieu 1992). Bernstein (1977, 85) describes how a curriculum legitimising certain areas of culture, deliberately or by default, marginalises others. Robin Alexander (2008, 123) explains how ‘education may empower and liberate, or it may disempower and confuse. It may be genuinely universal in aspiration, or it may use the claim of universality to disguise and reinforce the sectional interests of wealth, class, race, gender or religion’. Anne Phillips (1993, 9) challenges how assumptions of sexual equality often prefer to disregard difference, observing how: ‘When men and women are treated the same, it means women being treated as if they were men; when men and women are treated differently, the man remains the norm against which the woman is peculiar, lacking, different’. For lovers of literature, there is a very clear appeal and recognition in Maya Angelou’s declaration that ‘The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you—black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight’ (quoted in Swallow-Price 2013). Angelou felt that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (‘When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes’) spoke directly to her experience as a young girl suffering racism, sexism, poverty and abuse, believing ‘Shakespeare must have been a black girl’ (quoted in SwallowPrice 2013). And indeed, another young black girl living in deprivation in South Africa told me Shakespeare ‘must have come and lived here for a while, because I could relate to so many things’ (Irish 2012, 22). Umberto

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     763

Eco (1992, 25) describes how each of us as empirical readers can find ourselves reflected in a work of art if we pay attention to the intention of the art rather than the intention of the artist. We should, however, remain aware in our conversations with that art that it was written within the cultural limitations of its author and we have a right and, as teachers, a responsibility, to acknowledge and question those limitations, testing the texts to give better voice to the intersectional experiences of all. Classical dramas can help us understand who we are, but only if we take them off their pedestals, and breathe our own lives into them. A study by teacher of English Rachel Manders (2015, 9) explores how the girls in her single-sex school construct their female identity with regard to Shakespeare’s characters in Othello. She notes their sympathetic interest in Iago as clever and manipulative, in contrast to their antipathy towards Desdemona who they describe as ‘annoying’, ‘weak’, ‘a bit of a pushover’. Whilst admiring Emilia’s ‘more feminist’ attitude, the girls blame both women for not standing up to their husbands, and Desdemona especially for accepting Othello’s increasingly abusive behaviour towards her. Nobulali Dangazele (interview with the author, December 22, 2017) runs a theatre company called ShakeXperience in South Africa and recalls schools’ workshops exploring Othello which also resulted in most sympathy and respect, from female and male students, directed towards Iago. The students Dangazele worked with, brought up in an era of black empowerment, noticed Othello’s mistreatment of others as much as the racist mistreatment of others towards him. Like the English girls, they admired Iago’s cunning and condemned Desdemona for not standing up for herself. Their contemporary truth can be seen as progress from my own youthful experience of studying Othello in the 1980s and being told I had completely misunderstood the play for suggesting Othello was a misogynist. My teacher refuted any personal experience I might bring to the play and insisted on the essential truth of Othello as a tragic hero, ‘who loved not wisely but too well’ (Othello, 5.2.387). Dismissing Desdemona either as collateral damage, as I was encouraged to do, or as weak-willed and untrue for modern women, as the English and South African students initially found her, can side-step the potential contemporary questions about gender relationships raised through the play. Manders’ central concern is why her students found a young girl around their own age so much more difficult to relate to than the male characters and, after interviewing the girls, she notes that they do not reference gender when identifying traits of the male characters they recognised in themselves. Perhaps they have internalised the ways in which men are regarded as the norm, in line with Phillips’ analysis outlined above, or perhaps the

764     Tracy Irish

behaviour of the male characters seems more culturally normal from the perspective of their own life experiences. In any case, they tend to critique Desdemona’s weakness and Emilia’s strength as women, but regard the men as people. Manders concludes that use of critical theory combined with active approaches would benefit her students, helping them to analyse Desdemona’s responses through knowledge of the social circumstances of women in that time. Desdemona then becomes a personalised case of womanhood, providing a comparison of how things were then and how they are now; what Manders (2015, 44) describes as ‘a relative comparison considering the contextual features at play in the “lives” of those characters’ in order to develop ‘not only their understanding of Shakespeare’s work, but also their understanding of themselves’. Considering dramatic characters as metaphors true to life in the given circumstances of the text can release the play from its pedestal, taking critical theory into four-dimensional play and inviting young people to make sense of a human relationship from the inside. Embodying the text requires young people to bring their own imagination and experiences to bear when interpreting why characters might say what they do. They may still find a Desdemona who is overly naïve, but they may also find a more personal understanding of how her life has resulted in her naivety and exposed her to a coercive and violent relationship at the hands of a deeply damaged man, who, as with Draupadi’s husbands, should have been protecting her. They may then be enabled to question the implicit suggestion behind the interpretation of Desdemona as weak-willed—that if abuse happens to you, it must be your fault; and just maybe the culturally inflected metaphor of her situation could lead to more confidence in recognising and challenging the continuing abuse of women by men, and of other abuses that slip past us as cultural norms. Stephen Greenblatt (2005, 34) notes Shakespeare’s understanding that ‘the spectacle of human destiny was, in fact, vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstraction [as it was in morality plays] but to particular named people’, as it is in Greek and Indian dramas. In my own practice, I have found understanding and sympathy for both sides of a dramatic conflict become significantly deeper and more nuanced when young people, and their teachers, inhabit those characters, exploring objectives and motivations through theatre-based activities designed to open up possibilities of interpretation and allow each actor to find their own connection with the relationship. Following such activities, I have heard many teachers express with delight their own new understanding of familiar lines, as well as listening to rich conversations between young people about whether Hermia

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     765

should do as Egeus tells her, whether Prospero’s behaviour towards Caliban is justified, or the extent to which Macbeth’s actions are controlled by himself, his wife or the Witches. Such conversations, stimulated by finding embodied meaning about specific relationships through classical text, lead inevitably to contemporary comparisons about the simultaneously protective and controlling instincts of parents towards teenage girls; the power dynamics of class and race; or ageold conflicts of loyalty and ambition. One particularly poignant experience for me was working with a group of teenage boys from the slum areas of Kolkata, regarded as ‘at risk’ by the local police mainly because their fathers were in prison. These boys might be expected to relate to Caliban’s outsider status but the thoughtfulness and sensitivity of their discussion about the feelings of both Miranda and Prospero after embodying their words made me hopeful of what good fathers to their daughters they might one day be. If, as Bruner and others suggest, narrative is fundamental to our cognition, using classical drama as a story that we have explored and embodied together allows us to share ideas that can connect to our own experiences. The embodied metaphors of Hermia and Egeus, Prospero, Miranda and Caliban, Othello, Iago and Desdemona, encourage in vivo analogies, true to life. Working with teachers and students in Oman, a country that can feel quite culturally different, particularly in attitudes to women, has perhaps given me my most interesting experiences of how theatre practice can provide a site for intercultural dialogue. From the start of his reign in 1970, Sultan Qaboos bin Said has encouraged both the arts and equality for women, and director Aileen Gonsalves and I found the best supporters of our practice were often the young women who acted as translators, not just of the words we spoke but the ideas we were trying to express. These women took leadership, debating readily and easily with the men. Other women, however, were more circumspect, notably uncomfortable working with men and even of speaking in front of them. Once Aileen and I had accepted certain cultural norms, such as how men and women naturally separate from each other and keep a physical distance, we found a wide spectrum of behaviours and willingness to question just as we would in any culture, and we encountered some interesting challenges to our own cultural beliefs. The starkest example of difference was when one of the male teachers we were working with insisted we visit his home after watching student performances at local schools. Although pressed for time, we accepted his invitation in the spirit of kindness in which it was offered, expecting to talk more about the students we had worked with. At the house, our host went

766     Tracy Irish

through one door with our male driver, and we were led to another door with our female guide and translator. We were greeted warmly by our host’s wife, led into a dining room and offered refreshments and did not see our host again until we left the house. We exchanged pleasantries and our hostess told us her name and about her children. We learned that her name had changed and was now composed of a prefix meaning ‘mother of ’ added to the name of her eldest son. For our hostess, this change of name was a matter of great pride. We tried to cover the shock evident on our faces as our translator, and by now good friend, tried to suppress her amusement at our response. For us, this separation of the sexes and patriarchal suppression of personal identity into motherhood felt wrong, but how could we question our hostess without appearing rude? How could we challenge her cultural assumptions, and our own, without being personal? After all there we were, two women who had both chosen neither to become mothers nor take our husbands’ names, but conscious that such choices made us unusual within our own culture, and quite alien for the Omanis. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 231– 32) describe how using ‘metaphorical imagination’ creates rapport: ‘When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision’ in a journey towards mutual understanding. We could share with this woman experiences of love and pride, talking of the children we were close to, we could admire the beautiful objects in her house, but we could not discuss our very different senses of female identity without feeling rude. In our workshop spaces, however, we could raise such questions, engaging metaphorical imagination through the texts of drama. In one workshop with a mixed group of male and female teachers, we explored ideas of interpretation and intention by challenging received views of Goneril and Regan as ‘evil’ sisters. We began with a discussion stimulus around a father overstaying his welcome at his daughter’s home. Previous stimuli around parent–child relationships had proved interesting and enjoyable to debate; the restrictions Juliet faces, for example, seemed more directly real and relevant in Omani culture. However, whilst Western cultural values can consider that a daughter might resent her father for carelessly creating extra noise and work in her household, Omani culture is far more sensitive to any sign of disrespect towards a father. Several teachers, men and women, flared quickly in defence of their cultural expectations of the relationship between father and daughter. Our desire to provoke thoughts as a precursor to exploring the text then strayed towards simplified translation as we told

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     767

the story of the escalation of confrontation between Goneril and Lear, but when we described how the father curses his daughter with sterility, sympathies perceptibly shifted and a shared vision began to emerge allowing us to return to the multiple potential perspectives of the text. The nuanced complexities of the text provided a site for using our ‘metaphorical imagination’ to communicate unshared experience. We could acknowledge that within the world of the play, Lear expects unconditional respect as any Omani father might, but that Shakespeare complicates the relationship, offering a complexity of intentions on both sides that provide space to consider and explore different interpretations. Using Lear and Goneril as a metaphorical case study, we were able to open up a discussion about the role of women. Our own cultural assumptions had led us to the brink of a breakdown in rapport as, despite our awareness of difference, we had not expected such resistance to the suggestion of equality in how a father and grown-up daughter might respect each other, but the distance offered by the classical drama meant that a shared vision was re-established through characters true to life rather than true of life as Bruner put it, and our personal ideals were protected in a way that conversations during our visit to the Omani home could never have been. All schools in Oman are single-sex and while there are sometimes restrictions on girls performing in front of boys, they are free to take on male roles. It is not acceptable, however, for boys to take on female roles. This was interesting to observe in light of Western cultural traditions that have seen the renewed popularity of all-male productions of Shakespeare on stage. Male actors are occasionally recorded describing how playing classical female roles has encouraged them to understand the individuality of the woman in question rather than playing women in general, but it would seem odd for the now steadily increasing number of women playing male roles to comment on discovering that Hamlet or Brutus are individuals rather than general stereotypes of men. Reviewers still seem to find the need to comment on how a woman’s femininity affects or even infects a role. The words of a London critic in response to Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet from 1899, that ‘a woman is positively no more capable of beating out the music of Hamlet than is a man of expressing the plaintive and half-accomplished surrender of Ophelia’ (quoted in McManus 2016), express an opinion one can only hope will be more widely accepted as old-fashioned once Michelle Terry’s new principle of 50-50 gender casting takes hold at Shakespeare’s Globe in London (Brown 2017). When Michael Billington praised Terry in role as Shakespeare’s Henry V in 2016, it was partly for highlighting monarchy as a performance, implying

768     Tracy Irish

that her casting brought out a sense of Brechtian alienation about the role. As we increasingly understand gender as performative and culturally constructed (Butler 1990) it should be inevitable that more women take on male roles, re-examining classical dramas for our times. [For further discussion of this trend, see the discussion by Jami Rogers in Chapter 32.] Lyn Gardner (2016) heralds ‘a growing critical mass of gender blind casting’ and points out that all-female productions, such as Phyllida Lloyd’s highly acclaimed Shakespeare trilogy, lead to genuine diversity with a stage full of women who all look, sound and move differently. In schools across the world, girls readily take on the roles of men, often out of necessity because of single-sex schools or due to fewer boys taking an interest in drama, but increasingly because they are recognised as the best actor for the role. In Oman, the girls’ sense of freedom in donning male attire and attitudes like modern-day Violas and Rosalinds was tangible; in giving themselves male clothing and false beards, they seemed to find a previously hidden gravitas. A world away in Los Angeles I was privileged to watch a scene from an all-female High School production of Julius Caesar, not long before Lloyd’s all-female production at the Donmar Warehouse began rehearsals. The girls told me how they had chosen to play ‘tough women’ rather than pretend to be men, informed by the women they knew in their own lives struggling with daily social inequities. As they performed, the sweet polite girls I had spoken to became violent politicians, ruthless in the knowledge of their own vulnerabilities. Their teacher told me how important she thought it was for these girls to own the ‘language of power’ (Irish 2012). Their knowledge of Shakespeare gave them the cultural capital of intellectual currency but their familiarity with the text through play gave them a stake in that currency, testing their own voices against patriarchal norms. An increase in women writing about, as well as playing, Shakespeare has challenged the ways in which the texts have been given meaning by generations of male critics. Ann Thompson (1988, 84) suggests it was the rise of feminist criticism that shifted critical opinion towards an appreciation of the ‘many ways of discussing Shakespeare … pointing out both that the meanings are different when women are reading the texts and that the meanings are in any case not “timeless” or “universal” as is sometimes glibly supposed but historically and culturally constructed, both in Shakespeare’s time and also in all subsequent times’. Emily Wilson (2017) has noted the recent flowering of women in the traditionally white male world of classicists and the different perspectives on our shared intellectual currency that they bring in their approaches to authors ‘who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     769

belonging to men’. Her own version of The Odyssey is the first in English by a woman and in reviewing it Charlotte Higgins (2017) notes the nuanced differences to meaning Wilson makes. A rare Greek word kunopis, for example, meaning ‘dog-face’ or ‘dog-eye’, has previously been given a submissive negative connotation in a declaration by Helen of Troy. Remembering the beginning of the war, Higgins notes that Wilson has Helen say ‘They made my face the cause that hounded them’ rather than following previous translations of this line: ‘shameless whore that I was’, or ‘bitch that I was’. Wilson herself (2017) calls for more new translations of the stories and plays of Ancient Greece and Rome, including by ‘people who are neither “ladies” nor white’, in order to widen the appeal and access of these human dramas, and explore ‘how this alien, alienated encounter can help reshape our own language’. Translations of Shakespeare and other classical dramas performed across the world are often created to suit the purpose and moment of production. Beyond translating the poetry of words from one language to another, theatre practice also requires embodied translation of meaning from one time and place to another. An actor, whatever their age, ethnicity, cultural background or gender, inhabits the words and translates them through the paralinguistic inclinations of their own empirical bodies. The language of classical dramas communicates in action and in a moment, its words incomplete until brought to life through the living breathing body of an actor bringing their own unique experiences to bear on the words they speak; heard and seen by the living minds of each unique audience member. When classical dramas are taught as literary heritage, the ‘best that has been thought and said’, through normalised readings to convey ‘universal’ or ‘fixed and enduring’ values, we pin down meanings and metaphors and lose what Brook (1996, 65) describes as ‘that living, endlessly intangible quality that one calls truth’. Reviewing advances in our understanding of how our brains work, neuroscientist Michael Trimble (2007, 204–5) asserts as a ‘neurological fact’ that we only have access to representations of reality, so that it follows we can only have ‘perspectives on truth’. Our increasing understanding of cognition is confirming that ‘truth’ is ‘not some independent unconditioned universal’ but is ‘inextricably entwined with the life and experiences of the living individual and the world he or she has constructed’ (Trimble 2007, 205). We examine and understand our world through analogies, comparing new experiences with what is familiar in order to accommodate them to our personal mental schema. Each individual’s understanding is contingent on a symbiosis or blending of their own experiences with the structures

770     Tracy Irish

and concepts of the culture around them (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). In Bruner’s words: ‘Interpretations of meaning reflect not only the idiosyncratic histories of individuals, but also the culture’s canonical ways of constructing reality’ (1996, 14). Interdisciplinary studies across science and linguistics are building evidence that truth is an experiential concept, a personal translation of reality shaped by where we focus our attention and what we compare. Personal priorities, cultural assumptions and prior experiences are constantly reshaping our perceptions of the world around us, even as we seek stability and consistency to make sense of our realities. This contingency of truth means that we continually accommodate new experiences within our existing understanding, knowledge and cultural references. When we hear someone else’s ideas or experiences, for example, we paraphrase them in our own words both to understand them internally and to share them with others. In our continuing attempts to communicate, we search out the right words to express how we feel and what we believe. Literature often gives us those words, carefully crafted by another human’s knowledge and experience through which we find an expression of our own feelings and beliefs that feels right; perhaps ‘desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope’ (Shakespeare, Sonnet 29). Classical dramas offer us the opportunity to speak aloud text resonant with the voices of others across time and space, but to speak those words for ourselves in response to another specific human being and find our own visceral emotional meaning in words that feel right in that moment with that person. This equality of interpretation, however, can be unbalanced by inequality of access to diverse authors. The dominance of male writers in the curriculum effectively means girls have ample opportunity to understand and absorb the perspectives of men. They become used to inhabiting the words of men as individual humans, but girls and boys have less access to the voices of women, and to the overlapping intersectional needs, perspectives and interests of different ethnic and cultural groups. The educational value of classical dramas can be seen as not just building cultural capital through knowledge of the dominant intellectual currency of a society, but in offering us embodied metaphors, seasoned by generations, to be challenged and re-interpreted in a search for continually evolving cultural truths. The world’s canon of plays and stories offers four-dimensional thought experiments which actively generate and test ideas proposed by human culture, shining a light on what has and should change as well as what connects us. As a situation investigated through a plurality of voices, a play can create analogies for the political questions that compare human

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     771

needs and responses across contexts of time, geography and cultures, and can help us think about what we can do differently. ‘The culture of links’ is a phrase coined by Peter Brook in defining a purpose for theatre, and in doing so it echoes what Tagore, Dewey, Nussbaum, Schleicher and others regard as a key purpose of education. Brook (1996, 64) describes human culture as dividing into three broad areas: ‘the culture of the state’, ‘the culture of the individual’ and ‘the culture of links’, where the latter digs beneath the first two in a search for how we exist together in our individualities and shared humanity. His conviction that truth is contingent and ephemeral because: ‘the moment a society wishes to give an official version of itself it becomes a lie, because it can be pinned down’ (Brook 1996, 65) summarises the value of continually re-examining classical dramas. Brook (1998, 169) describes how an action in the theatre can ‘ring true at the moment of execution’, and when it does, whether it is Prospero’s protection of his daughter, or Draupadi’s lack of protection from her husbands, it makes theatre immediate, true to life. Too often, however, as Brook explores in The Empty Space (1968), classical dramas become ‘deadly theatre’, theatre which audiences may admire and enjoy but which falls short of stimulating an emotional connection that makes them review and question their lives. Brook asserts that ‘Truth in the theatre is always on the move’ (1968, 157) and cognitive science is now finding that truth in any human culture is always on the move. New generations have new experiences; individuals have their own unique experiences within the more wide-spread influences on their own generation. Since truth is contingent, young women, armed with knowledge and supported to question, can inhabit the roles created for both men and women in classical dramas and test the limits of those male-dominated texts until they break—and when they break, gather up the pieces and create new work in their own gloriously multiple images. Using theatre practice to study the literary heritage demanded by school curricula provides ways not only to acknowledge the canon of intellectual currency, but to embrace change, plurality and interdisciplinarity in assessing that currency. Engaging with classical dramas, young people can build cultural capital. Engaging with theatre practice as language in action in a search for the culture of links, they can build their understanding of how different people view the world, how they create meaning, and how we can work towards intercultural understanding of the present. For young women, this can be a powerful way to question the truth of the cultural assumptions they inhabit, and change their future.

772     Tracy Irish

Bibliography Abrams, Fran. 2012. ‘Cultural Literacy: Michael Gove’s School of Hard Facts’. BBC News, October 25, 2012. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20041597. Alexander, Robin. 2008. Essays on Pedagogy. London: Routledge. Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. London: Smith, Elder. Barry, Peter. 2002. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bernstein, Basil. 1977. Class, Codes and Control. London: Routledge. Billington, Michael. 2016. ‘Henry V Review—Astonishing Gender-Switched Reinvigoration’. The Guardian, June 23, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2016/jun/23/henry-v-review-open-air-theatre-regents-park. Boal, Augusto. 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. ‘Thinking About Limits’. Theory, Culture and Society 9: 37–49. Brook, Peter. 1968. The Empty Space. London: Penguin Books. Brook, Peter. 1996. ‘The Culture of Links’. In The Intercultural Performance Reader, edited by Patrice Pavis. London: Routledge. Brook, Peter. 1998. Threads of Time: A Memoir. London: Methuen. Brown, Mark. 2017. ‘New Shakespeare’s Globe Chief Promises Far More Diverse Casting’. The Guardian, August 18, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2017/aug/18/new-shakespeares-globe-chief-promises-far-more-diverse-casting-michelle-terry. Bruner, Jerome. 1986. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1990. Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, Jerome. 1996. The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Abingdon: Routledge. Confederation of British Industries (CBI). 2017. ‘Time for Action: The Business Case for Inclusive Workplaces’. Accessed July 3, 2018. http://www.cbi.org.uk/ time-for-action-/Introduction.html. Department for Education (DfE). 2017. ‘Unlocking Talent, Fulfilling Potential: A Plan for Improving Social Mobility Through Education’. https://www.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/667690/Social_ Mobility_Action_Plan_-_for_printing.pdf. Dewey, John. 1934 [2004]. Art as Experience. London: Perigree. Dewey, John. 1938 [1997]. Experience & Education. New York: Touchstone. Eaton, Olivia. 2016. ‘Ensure Women and Ethnic Minorities Are Fairly Represented on the UK’s Curriculum’. Accessed July 25, 2018. https://www.change.org/p/ justine-greening-mp-ensure-women-and-ethnic-minorities-are-fairly-represented-on-the-uk-s-curriculum.

33  Theatre, Education and Embodied Cognition     773

Eco, Umberto. 1992. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. European Commission. 2017. ‘Gender Equality Reports, 2005–2017’. Accessed July 3, 2018. http://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= 52696#annual_reports. Everyday Sexism Project. n.d. Accessed July 3, 2018. https://everydaysexism.com/ about. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Fraser, Helen. 2015. ‘Britain’s Exam Boards Must Stop Writing Famous Women Out of the Curriculum. Now’. The Telegraph, September 4, 2015. http://www. telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11841976/Britain-schools-Exam-boardsmust-stop-writing-women-out-of-curriculum.html. Gardner, Lyn. 2016. ‘Shakespeare Trilogy Review—Donmar’s Phenomenal All-Female Triumph’. The Guardian, November 23, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/nov/23/shakespeare-trilogy-five-star-review-donmarkings-cross-harriet-walter. Gibb, Nick. 2015. ‘The Purpose of Education’. Accessed July 3, 2018. https://www. gov.uk/government/speeches/the-purpose-of-education. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2005. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico. Higgins, Charlotte. 2017. ‘The Odyssey Translated by Emily Wilson Review—A New Cultural Landmark’. The Guardian, December 8, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/08/the-odyssey-translated-emily-wilson-review. Hirsch, E. D., Jr., J. F. Kett, and J. S. Trefil. 1988. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. London: Vintage Books. Irish, Tracy. 2012. ‘Shakespeare: A Worldwide Classroom’. Stratford-uponAvon: RSC. http://www.academia.edu/23423997/Shakespeare_a_worldwide_ classroom. Johnes, Rebecca. 2017. ‘Entries to Arts Subjects at Key Stage 4’. Education Policy Institute, September 21, 2017. https://epi.org.uk/report/entries-arts-subjects/. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. London: Chicago University Press. Manders, Rachel. 2015. ‘“I Don’t Want to Be Like Desdemona, I Want to Be Clever Like Iago.” Constructing Female Identify Through Shakespeare’s Characters in the All-Girl Classroom’. MA Diss., University of Warwick. McDonald, Russ. 2009. ‘Planned Obsolescence or Working at the Words’. In Teaching Shakespeare: Passing It On, edited by G. B. Shand. Chichester: Blackwell. McManus, C. 2016. ‘Shakespeare and Gender: The “Woman’s Part”’. The British Library.  https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/shakespeare-and-gender-thewomans-part.

774     Tracy Irish

Neelands, Jonothan. 2015. ‘Art Makes Children Powerful: Art for the Many Not the Few’. In The Routledge International Handbook of the Arts and Education, edited by Mike Fleming, Liora Bresla, and John O’Toole, 410–18. Abingdon: Routledge. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Woodstock: Princeton University Press. Phillips, Anne. 1993. Democracy & Difference. Cambridge: Polity Press. Safi, Michael. 2017. ‘Bollywood Sexual Harassment: Actors Speak Out on Indian Cinema’s Open Secret’. The Guardian, December 13, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/dec/13/bollywood-sexual-harassment-actors-speak-outindian-cinema-open-secret. Schechner, Richard. 1992. ‘A New Paradigm for Theatre in the Academy’. TDR 36, no. 4: 7–10. Schleicher, Andreas. 2016. Teaching Excellence Through Professional Learning and Policy Reform: Lessons from Around the World. International Summit on the Teaching Profession. Paris: OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/978926 4252059-en. Sleeter, Christine, ed. 1991. Empowerment Through Multicultural Education. Albany: State University of New York Press. Swallow-Price, Karen. 2013. ‘What Maya Angelou Means When She Says “Shakespeare Must Have Been a Black Girl”’. The Atlantic, January 2013. http:// www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/what-maya-angelou-means-whenshe-says-shakespeare-must-be-a-black-girl/272667/. Thompson, Ann. 1988. ‘“The Warrant of Womanhood”: Shakespeare and Feminist Criticism’. In The Shakespeare Myth, edited by Graham Holderness. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Trades Union Congress (TUC). 2016. ‘Still Just a Bit of Banter? Sexual Harassment in the Workplace in 2016’. Accessed July 3, 2018. https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/ default/files/SexualHarassmentreport2016.pdf. Trimble, Michael. 2007. The Soul in the Brain. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Wilson, Emily. 2017. ‘Found in Translation: How Women Are Making the Classics Their Own’. The Guardian, July 7, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2017/jul/07/women-classics-translation-female-scholars-translators. Zacharek, Stephanie, Eliana Dockterman, and Haley Sweetland Edwards. ‘The Silence Breakers’. Time, December, 2017. http://time.com/time-person-of-theyear-2017-silence-breakers/.

34 Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate Emma Frankland

There is a current trend in the UK media to suggest that transgender (including non-binary) people are a modern phenomenon—that we are a fad and our existence something to be debated or dealt with. At best, to be integrated into society and understood; at worst, a threat to mainstream values and dangerous. Of course, this is nonsense. Trans people have existed forever—in all parts of the world. What has not always existed is acceptance of trans people, nor does this exist now in many places. [For further discussion of non-binary approaches to gender definition, see Clare Foster’s examination of gender in the ancient Greek and Roman world in Chapter 4, above.] This chapter argues the urgent need for authentic representations of trans women on stage and will look at the use of performance as a tool for political change. As well as asking what defines a trans woman, I also question what might be construed as ‘a stage’ with many cited performances taking place outside of mainstream theatre venues or using radical performance language. The chapter will also trace a brief history of trans women on stage because, despite the difficulties in doing so, I do not feel we can ethically look at the work of trans women on stage today without attempting to frame it in relation to what has gone before. And we cannot do that without briefly examining the history of trans women in general and how the terms that we use today have come about. Emma Frankland (*) Brighton, UK © The Author(s) 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5_34

775

776     Emma Frankland

During my investigation for this paper, I have frequently felt frustrated by how much one is forced to rely on supposition due to systematic erasure or refusal to acknowledge trans identities. I am not alone in this frustration, when researching the under-represented lives of transgender people in the past, where so much has been suppressed and can, of course, never really be proven. If being trans is simply a facet of human diversity (rather than a socially constructed identity), one must assume that there have always been trans people throughout history and across the globe and we therefore can safely say that there have probably always been trans women on our stages— although perhaps we would not recognise them as such—what Annalisa Adams (2013, 37) terms ‘the ghosts of trans embodiment’. There will certainly have been trans women on stage who were read as cisgender women or as cisgender men performing as female impersonators. For example, I am certain that in modern terminology, for example, some of the ‘boy players’ who specialised in female roles in Elizabethan England would have identified as trans, and I make the same informed assumption with regards to some ‘female impersonators’ of the twentieth century. While examining the when of trans visibility and the history of trans women, we must also consider the where. My personal experience as a white, able-bodied, trans woman comes from a UK viewpoint, largely informed by the queer theories and politics of Europe and the English speaking world, most notably North America. In recent years, however, my performance practice has also taken me to South America and South-East Asia where I have met and collaborated with trans women from different cultural backgrounds. Although we discovered many shared experiences, observing the differences between these women’s experiences and my own as well as the impact of different ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds has demonstrated that it is vital to be specific when we talk about the experience of trans women. For example, last year I led a discussion with trans and queer people in Brazil who described to me in their own words a ‘genocide’ of trans people that is played out with extreme violence, particularly against the travesti section of the community. [‘Travesti’ is a term for a trans identity that is unique to South America—a reclaimed slur most often used by female identified people who were assigned male at birth and who often are (or have been) sex workers.] ‘We must bury our knowledge until the apocalypse passes’, said one person. This local political context brings a different urgency to the theatre and performances presented by trans women in this country, which I will examine later in more depth. Soon I will be returning to Indonesia to collaborate with a trans woman, Tamarra, who is a multi-disciplinary performance artist, and to

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     777

visit with her the Bissu of Sulawesi, shamans who, it is claimed, still acknowledge five traditionally defined genders. ‘Well, of course God speaks through the Bissu … because God has no gender. Allah is not a man and not a woman’ (Pisani 2014, 50). However, the fact that the long-standing existence of more than two gender identities here is widely celebrated within certain Western dialogues does not mean that Indonesian trans women experience a greater degree of mainstream understanding or acceptance than their trans sisters elsewhere and Tamarra’s highly political performances reflect this, often taking place outdoors in public spaces rather than within theatre buildings. Wherever indigenous culture survives in some way, despite corruption by colonialism and outside influences, we still tend to see a broader understanding of gender identity than the binary of male and female. And this therefore should inform our understanding of trans history and existence. It is widely supposed that in pre-monotheistic cultures, trans people were held in high regard and this is evidenced by the high proportion of images of gods and goddesses who are depicted as gender non-conforming or intersex. The prominent musician and trans woman, Anohni, drew attention to this in the Future Feminism speech that forms part of her 2012 album, Cut the World: I’m a witch. I actually de-baptised myself. And what’s great about being transgender is you’re born with a natural religion. It applies almost across the board no matter what culture or economic group or nation that you’re from — you’re almost automatically a witch. None of the patriarchal monotheisms will have you. It’s very clear that in most of those religions you’d be put to death. In many parts of the world you still are put to death.

Trans people were your clerics; your witches; your healers and, in the long tradition of societally non-conforming people, we were your performers. For many trans artists, the lines between performance and ritual action are still very close. My own 2015 production Rituals for Change was exactly that, a collection of ritual actions, and in a 2010 interview, Canadian performance artist Nina Arsenault (quoted in Rankin 2010) says of her own work: It’s performance. I’ll continue to use autobiographical material, but I’m interested in exploring experiences that I’d only be able to describe as mystical. The theatre artists that really, really excite me have done work that you can’t really even call plays. They’re experiences that seem mystical. They’re rituals.

778     Emma Frankland

Much of this ancient understanding has been occluded by our comparatively recent colonial history, but in contemporary Western culture we are at a point of great re-discovery and potential healing—what Time Magazine named as ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’ (Steinmetz 2014) and what Paul Preciado (2018) calls a gender revolution: The gender binary regime is undergoing a major crisis … some of our lives are the material proof of this gender revolution. So at the same time that we are really in a moment of epistemic crisis, we are also living a moment of counter revolution.

In this moment of revolution, it is unsurprising that trans women are once more fulfilling our traditional roles and that trans feminine bodies can be seen on stage again.

What Defines a Trans Woman? Or: Why Our Existence Should Not Be Up for Debate To be a trans woman is a political act. Because this book is about the experiences of women, in particular, I am focusing this chapter on trans women specifically and in this limited space will not be centring examples of non-binary, trans feminine performers (although inevitably I shall cite them since much of our history and politics intersect). I identify as a trans woman but do not presume to represent the complexities of other trans feminine identities. I am also a white woman and want to avoid any appearance of presenting my experience as some sort of universal standard: As many black feminists — like [Dr] Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term intersectionality — have been pointing out for decades, race and class divisions create such a variety of life experiences that we can only come to view the idea of a singular experience of girlhood and womanhood as a myth. No one is actually saying trans women and cis women’s experiences are exactly the same — and that’s because no two women’s experiences are exactly the same. There is not one womanhood, but many. (Page 2017)

I want to focus on trans women in this chapter because sometimes our experiences can be ignored or marginalised even within trans rhetoric, and I believe it’s important to celebrate and acknowledge the existence of trans women and girls and the specific issues that we experience. I am not

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     779

suggesting that other trans (including non-binary) or gender non-conforming people do not share some of these experiences or do not experience other discrimination or difficulties because of their gender, because they absolutely do. Another disclaimer. In parts of this chapter, I will deal in supposition, where historical facts are unsupported by documentation. It is of course therefore possible that I will mistakenly suggest that someone was a trans woman who would perhaps have been more comfortable being referred to as non-binary (or, indeed, cisgender) if given access to modern terminology. Such are the limitations of applying a contemporary understanding of trans identity to the past, coupled with the poor historical records we have. I apologise for any incorrect assumptions; they are made with love and good intention. When describing the gender that somebody appears to be presenting, I prefer to use the terminology ‘being read as’ (Bergman 2010, 105) to the more commonly used ‘passing as’. This is because it places the responsibility to be correct or incorrect on the viewer rather than the subject. For example, if I fail to ‘pass’ as a woman in someone’s eyes then the implication is that I have in some way failed whereas if the onlooker fails to ‘read’ me as a woman—which I am, regardless of their opinion of my appearance—then it is their failure to have an understanding of what might constitute a woman. The whole notion of ‘passing’ is inherently problematic, for cis people as well as trans, as we often live in cultures where certain ideals of beauty are held higher than others. And so here are my terms—the way that I interpret commonly used language around trans issues—many thanks to the brilliant people who coined or helped shape these words and my understanding of them (in particular Sadie Crabtree, Griffyn Gilligan, Felix Lane, Rachel Mars, Julia Serrano and Leo Skilbeck). Transgender (sometimes abbreviated as trans) is a word used to describe anyone who does not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. A transgender person may identify as male or female, or they may identify as neither or both (see non-binary). Cisgender is a word used to describe a person whose gender identity matches the gender they were assigned at birth. ‘Cis’ is a Latin prefix meaning ‘on this side of ’ whereas the Latin prefix ‘trans’ means ‘to cross over’ or ‘to go beyond’… to transcend. Pronouns are commonly used in language to indicate a person’s gender (e.g. he/him/his, she/her/hers, they/them/theirs). A common experience of

780     Emma Frankland

trans people is that the pronoun they prefer is not the pronoun that other people may decide to use in reference to them. This is something that can cause anxiety and distress. Instead of making an assumption, asking (and then consistently using) someone’s correct pronoun is respectful. Assigned Female/Male at Birth refers to the sex a person is officially recorded as on their birth certificate, usually shortly after birth and by the visual prognosis of one doctor. Sometimes abbreviated to AFAB or AMAB (or with the addition of a C standing for ‘coercively’). This is a term that is used within trans discourse for clarity on certain intersecting characteristics. It should not be used outside the trans community to describe someone. Non-Binary refers to ‘a spectrum of gender identities and expressions, often based on the rejection of the binary assumption that gender is strictly an either/ or option of male/man/masculine or female/woman/feminine’ (Green 2017). Intersex refers to a wide range of people who are born with a body that (for a variety of reasons) doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male. Intersexuality is very common and approximately one in 100 babies will be born with indeterminate sex (www.isna.org), which seems a very good reason for changing the fallible system of assigning a sex at birth to one of waiting until an individual can state what might feel most real for them. Gender Non-Conforming means a person whose gender expression is perceived as being inconsistent with the local cultural norms expected for that gender. This person may be cisgender or transgender. Finally, a transsexual is a person who does not identify with their sex assigned at birth. If age / culture / financial stability allows, they may use bio-chemical or surgical means to physically alter the sexual characteristics of their body—usually permanently and for the purpose of aligning it with their gender identity and alleviating gender dysphoria which is a potentially debilitating sense that one’s body does not reflect the gender one’s mind suggests it ought.

A trans woman’s appearance may differ greatly from person to person (as with all women) and it should go without saying that a trans woman may dress however she likes. A trans woman may have chosen to medically transition to some degree, taking hormones which may change her appearance and the operation of her endocrine system and body, and/or she may have accessed gender-affirming surgeries. These medical or cosmetic actions may be undertaken to ease gender dysphoria or to experience less hassle from the world around them. Equally, a trans woman may not have done any of these things—perhaps she lives in part of the world where healthcare is very expensive or unavailable for reasons of political oppression or ideology. Or perhaps she does not feel her body requires physical change. Personally, I reject the frequently cited notion that a trans person is ‘born in the wrong body’. As the character Ofelia states in Helena Viera’s

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     781

one-woman show Ofelia, the Fat Travesti: ‘A transgender body always fits well on a transgender person’. There are no parts of the human body that are innately gendered—breasts, penis, uterus, testicles can all be male, female, neither or both (just as hands, feet and belly buttons can be); it depends upon the identity of the person that they belong to. So a trans woman may meet one’s personal expectations of what a ‘woman’ should look like, or she may not—and either is unimportant. The only important consideration should be whether she meets her own expectation and is able to feel content. We must stop expecting trans women to be read correctly in an onlooker’s gaze in order to feel validation. The more that we allow each other to dress in ways that make us feel real, the more we will begin to undo the centuries of shaming that have caused huge damage to trans (and cis) people alike. In 2018, many trans women are living with the double threat of both misogyny and trans misogyny—we are accountable to the double standards affecting all women, whilst also forced to defend ourselves to those who suggest we are not actually women. This was summed up in a tweet by the Hollywood actress and prominent trans activist Laverne Cox (@LaverneCox, March 12, 2017): ‘Patriarchy and cis-sexism punished my femininity and gender nonconformity. The irony of my life is prior to transition I was called a girl and after I am often called a man’. It is only really since 1952, when Christine Jorgensen became the first celebrity trans woman in Western culture (Mitchell 2018), that trans people have received increasing amounts of visibility, persecution and legal rights. The World Health Organisation recently declassified gender dysphoria as a mental illness yet in the UK, at the time of writing, it is still pathologised as such. Meaning that I find myself in a similar paradox to the one described by Paul Preciado in his 2018 lecture Testo Junkie: Hormones, Power, and Resistance in the Pharmacopornographic Regime: I speak today as a sick person, a monster, a consumer of testosterone. Someone who, in order to have access to these molecules, legally, has accepted to define himself/herself as mentally ill. So this is one of the main issues and paradoxes. How to be able to speak from a position of someone who has been denied the right to speak, who has been denied the right to reason. It is from this impossible position that I will try to speak today.

The official systems for the medical treatment and support of trans people in the UK still feature many gatekeepers who can delay or deny access to treatment and it can take years to navigate—to many observers it is cruel and unusual. Despite the lack of cohesive governmental support, with the

782     Emma Frankland

invention and widespread access to the internet it has become easier for trans people to find each other, seek advice and see ourselves reflected, our identities validated. This has also made collectivising and organising activism easier as well as facilitating conversations between large groups of trans people online that have led to the exciting developments in language and understanding that exist today. This comparatively recent history may explain why in most modern instances openly trans women are omitted from theatre productions or only permitted to perform about our specific trans experience. I wrote a piece for The Guardian newspaper (Frankland 2015a) that was given the clickbait title ‘I’m a Transgender Woman, Why Shouldn’t I Play Hamlet?’. My intention with the article was to ask, as someone who society had viewed previously as the ‘default’, a white, cisgender, able-bodied, heterosexual man (although in reality I never was one), what theatre roles would be available to me as I became something other? I chose Hamlet as a generically iconic role although the headline skewed the discourse with many reader comments along the lines of ‘stop whining and go do it already’ which was problematic as I wasn’t seeking permission to play Hamlet (being fully aware that any body could portray this part) but asking the question, ‘Would a mainstream venue/company ever cast a trans woman in that role?’ But let’s strip the question right back. Hamlet is a distracting example because it also carries connotations of fame, celebrity and status. As a trans woman who sometimes works as an actor in the contemporary UK theatre scene, the question is not ‘Will I be cast as Hamlet?’ It is ‘will I be cast in anything that is not explicitly a trans role?!’ And this is a problem with contemporary representation of trans women, that most narratives in performance often use a trans character only as a plot point or use the identity of a trans actor as a sensational reveal. In a recent interview, the brilliant Brazilian actress Renata Carvalho (quoted in Ludemir 2018) said: ‘Trans art is not yet in a place to be consumed by those people who patronise the theatre. Most talk more about the controversy itself. My gender identity is always the first question. It is very marked’. In performance not written or directed by trans women, we are frequently shown as manipulative abusers or brave survivors and portrayed as either unattractive and pitiful or hyper-sexual and fetishised. These stereotypes do not demonstrate a broad representation of trans women and the danger of this overexposure of a very limited picture, is that it begins to shape reality. If we are only shown trans women who are unlovable then that is how trans women will see ourselves—likewise, if we only see trans women who are not

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     783

parents; trans women who are estranged from their families; trans women who are heteronormative and so on. If the only romantic narratives featuring trans women focus on the destruction of relationships and the struggle for a cisgender partner to adapt or cope then we are writing a road map for partners or families to refer to in real life. In other words, if cisgender people continue to shape the narrative of trans stories then our reality will never shift. And it must shift, because many trans people are living hard lives and the stakes are high. It is not hyperbole when I say that this question of representation represents a matter of life or death to many, many trans people around the world. This is also why I do not believe in the benefit of visibility at all costs. Trans women used to be targets but we were targeted in a fairly indiscriminate way and often in the name of fun (for the abuser). Now that there is more visibility, trans people are seen as a credible threat and as well as collecting allies we have also gained forceful opponents. As I stated in Rituals for Change (2015b, 2018a): ‘The radical act is to exist, the radical act is to be seen, to choose to allow others to see these radical bodies. To allow ourselves to heal is the radical act’. Trans women are radical. To be a trans woman is a political act.

Historical Performance: Supposition and Presumption; Boy Players and Lyly’s Galatea When you cannot live as yourself, you find the occasions when you can. As a young Boy Scout I consistently played the female roles in our yearly productions—a fairy, Scrooge’s wife, ugly sisters—anything that allowed me a moment to explore the gender identity that somewhere I sensed was mine. Others share this experience and I don’t see any reason why trans women would not have also done this in the past—using the liminal space that theatre creates to be transgressive in the face of society’s strict rules and the harsh punishments for gender non-conformity. Whilst our experiences are very different, one unifying feature of trans people is that we mostly begin our understanding of our gender identity alone. Hopefully at some point after this, we find a community of others (and for those of us alive in the post-internet era this has been made a lot easier). But, as with most LGBTQ people, we are not born with an expectation that we will be transgender. Popular culture has much to do with

784     Emma Frankland

this—the damaging creation of the aforementioned ‘default human’ myth (who is a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man) means that for most children assigned male at birth, the expectation is that they will grow up to be men who are sexually attracted to women. Therefore a shared experience of the LGBTQ community is that of ‘coming out’—first to one’s self and then (perhaps) to one’s friends, family and the world in general. And this can be safe or dangerous according to one’s situation or the time one finds oneself alive in. So for a young trans woman in Elizabethan England (acknowledging again that it is undoubtedly a misnomer to use modern parlance with reference to the past) perhaps another answer would have been to join a theatre company and be granted the permission and legal space to dress and perform as a woman—something that could have offered a way to explore gender and help feelings of dysphoria. It has been frequently claimed that, in Elizabethan England (as in many other countries), women were not permitted to perform on stage, resulting in a theatre ecology where for the most part actors were people who had been assigned male at birth (AMAB). Of course in the context of this chapter, it is reductive to say ‘women did not perform’ as I question whether some of these AMAB actors were in fact trans women. Similarly, it is unthinkable that there were not some examples of AFAB actors who were read as men (or boys) who would also have found their way on stage. Trans history is full of people who quietly transgressed the rules and got away with it. The young boy players were exceptionally talented, as reports on their performances from the time attest, and much has been written of the quality of Shakespeare’s female characters (although sadly far less about their limitations and the misogyny of his plays). Evidence indicates they were not performed as a drag caricature. Of course, this still comes with the caveat that it is couched in supposition and that times and definitions have evolved— in the late sixteenth century it is entirely probable that the identity of ‘boy’ was different to how we see it today—with young AMAB and AFAB people earning a living as sex workers and a fluid understanding of the difference between them. Whether one allowed oneself to be penetrated during sex or not was as much of a gender signifier as anything else. As Frances Dolan (2003, 17) asks, ‘Was one’s manhood really at risk by desiring a boy, being ravished by spectacles, finding oneself leaky and penetrable?’ As I mentioned at the start, the modern insistence on a fixed gender binary is really a very recent concept as well as being far from the global norm. Moreover, there is textual evidence that trans identities were being explored at this time. Trans identities and individuals experimenting with

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     785

gender can be encountered in many Early Modern and Renaissance theatre texts, Adams’ aforementioned ‘ghosts of trans embodiment’. They linger, like fossils, awaiting re-discovery. We bury our knowledge until the apocalypse passes. I have been working closely with one such text for a while now: Galatea by John Lyly is an extraordinary sixteenth-century play from the period just before Shakespeare began writing. Like Lyly’s other dramas, Galatea was written for a playing company consisting of boy actors only. Over the past few years, in close collaboration with Andy Kesson and his Before Shakespeare project, I have led several periods of research and development, working with a diverse group of artists and performers to mount scenes and rehearse the text, gaining a closer understanding of a play that is not only extremely feminist and queer positive, but also contains a trans narrative: Venus. Then shall it be seen that I can turn one of them to be a man, and that I will. Diana. Is it possible? (5.3.151–52)

The more time I have spent with Galatea, the more I have discovered what it contains about gender fluidity and trans identities in this period and I resonate with how Adams (2013, 37) describes a way of reading trans bodies in seventeenth-century playtexts, by examining the relationship between language and the body: [W]e begin to see here where the ghosts of trans embodiment lie in this play because to be trans is to be constantly confronted with the abstractness of bodies and their complex relationships with linguistic representation.

Adams’ study of William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy The Country Wife and Aphra Behn’s 1677 play The Rover offers ‘carefully staged and meta-theatrical glimpses into the ways in which seventeenth-century people were thinking, talking, and writing about gender and embodiment’ (Adams 2013, 17). The importance of these discoveries must not be understated. As LGBTQ people our histories are often erased or confounded to fit the narrative of a cis-normative, patriarchal society. The presence of such a high profile story as Galatea, a play well known and performed in front of Elizabeth I, should radically alter our attitude towards queer identity today. Lyly’s Galatea tells the story of a community that worships the God of the Sea, Neptune. Every five years they must sacrifice the ‘fairest and chastest virgin’ (1.1.47) to the monster Agar in order to appease Neptune. The play

786     Emma Frankland

opens with a boy and his father onstage, the father explaining this custom— as the scene progresses, we learn that the boy is, in fact, a girl, Galatea, and her father has disguised her in order for her to escape this fate and hide in the woods. A few scenes later, a second father and daughter, Phillida, are introduced to us with the same plan—to disguise her as a boy and send her into the woods. The two girls meet in the woods (disguised as boys) but fall in love, gradually relating to the audience their understanding of each other’s gender identity until, eventually, they consummate their queer relationship: ‘Come, let us into the grove, and make much of one another, that cannot tell what to think of one another’ (3.264–66). When they return to their community they are confronted by their fathers and by the gods Venus, Diana and Neptune—the gods are charged by the mortals to comment on the situation, leading to this wonderful exchange between Neptune and Venus, the goddess of love. Neptune.  How like you this, Venus? Venus.    I like well, and allow it. They shall both be possessed of their wishes, for never shall it be said that Nature or Fortune shall overthrow Love and Faith. (5.3.141–45)

A fairly conclusive endorsement of queer love! The goddess of love then goes on to offer one of the lovers the chance to change gender (although it is never specified which of them will transition). This conclusion has historically been used to denounce the play’s queer credentials—supposing that Venus is undermining the lesbian love story by forcing them to become a heteronormative couple. But this opinion ignores the possibility of these lovers having trans identities—which is in turn, a classic example of trans erasure. As soon as we abandon the idea that the lovers must only identify as cisgender women then the entire situation and narrative are transformed. A three-day workshop that took place at the University of Roehampton in August 2017 provided major insights into the trans identities in the play. What we discovered was that when the performers were trans identified but also fluid in their gender identities, the script began to make a lot of sense. We explored an interpretation of the characters Galatea and Phillida in which they have been forced into binary gender roles by their community and family but find a freedom in each other as non-binary or genderqueer individuals. Then the key moment where Venus proposes to make one of them into ‘a man’ became clearer. What if Venus cannot literally transform them (a god-induced gender reassignment surgery) and is merely bluffing? But by making this offer she creates a space for them to be together that

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     787

is acceptable to their society. The characters can continue being themselves and anyone can speculate as to who is which gender, but they have been awarded the labels of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ so they are allowed to remain a couple in their heteronormative society—the labels are figurative rather than physical. And how much more exciting is that?! That, rather than supposing this offer of being ‘turn[ed] … to be a man’ (5.3.151–52) could only possibly refer to a magically created penis ‘necessary for a happy ending’ (Dolan 2003, 19), is more transgressive. Venus offers one of them the social status of a man, with no physical compromise required. This is something that I personally, as a woman who also identifies as her child’s father (arguably the ultimate position of traditionally male social status), find extremely radical. And at a time wherein many places in the world a trans person is only permitted to change their official gender marker if they have undergone certain body modifications (or in some places sterilisation) it shows a more humane approach. That a person should be free to self-determine their own gender identity, regardless of their sex assigned at birth. Using the gender identities of our three actors as our guide, Chiron Sib Stamp (pronouns: they/them), Griffyn Gilligan (pronouns: he/him) and Emily Joh Miller (pronouns: she/her), we first explored Galatea as a trans masculine (AFAB) person and we looked at the possibility of Phillida as a trans woman. Exploring Galatea as trans masculine felt fairly obvious— the character appears comfortable with their masculine disguise throughout the play. Therefore, when Venus offers to make one of the lovers a man, it seems fairly obvious that she could mean Galatea. But, as mentioned above, the drawback to this reading is that it does erase the lesbian narrative, which is of course also historically important—that these are two women falling in love—and therefore our interpretation falls into the common trap of making a very queer text become heteronormative to fit our narrative of Galatea as trans masculine. What though, if Phillida were a trans woman and Galatea were trans masculine, but perhaps non-binary? Suddenly the text made sense. In this interpretation, here is a trans girl being forced to present as a man for her ‘safety’ (something that is very common in reality) who upon meeting Galatea recognises them not as male or female, but as another trans person with a fluid identity. As we tracked this reading through the show with Chiron and Emily taking the roles of the lovers, we began to find an exciting series of subtle shifts in the lovers’ identity and behaviour that made total sense. It is no small thing to acknowledge my own internal sense of transphobia that made it difficult for me to see the casting of Emily as Phillida as a possibility,

788     Emma Frankland

to see a trans woman as a valid object of romantic love and to see her exploring her masculinity and cross-dressing as a man without this undermining her female identity. As people who live and grew up in gender-normative society we are often as complicit in re-enforcing these invisible rules, even when we identify as trans ourselves. Could this reading possibly be correct? And if so, perhaps John Lyly was a trans woman? Why not?! The play, like many of Lyly’s plays, seems to have a close understanding of queerness and female identity. Or perhaps he was writing for boy players he knew who had fluid gender identities—upon whom the story of two young ‘girls’ disguised as ‘boys’ falling in love would find some truth. If you permit me the licence to entertain these possibilities, then almost certainly the character of Phillida in Galatea is the earliest known trans woman character in the English-speaking theatre!

Drag and Female Impersonation—Pubs, Clubs and the Cis Gaze Continuing with the search for ‘ghosts of trans embodiment’ and evidence of trans women on stage, I bring us towards the twentieth century. Although by the 1900s, both men and women were permitted to perform on the English stage, the practice of cross-dressing was still prevalent—with women performing as men and vice versa. From the music hall tradition and then carrying on into clubs and public houses, the female impersonator became a staple character. As in the previous section, I propose here the argument that a proportion of AMAB entertainers who performed as female interpreters or drag queens would have (in modern terminology) identified as trans. I spoke about this with Mzz Kimberley, a singer, actress and former club performer with whom I have worked on several productions, including the Galatea project mentioned in the previous section, where she took part in our workshops as the goddess Venus. I asked her what it was like to be in the club scene as a young trans woman: I look at myself as a queer performer. When I was younger I thought I was drag, but many told me I was in between. I was never a drag queen at heart. I did drag, but it was more than being a man in a dress. If you were black and trans you either sold your ass or you were in drag—there was no other option. (Mzz Kimberley, pers. comm. August 29, 2018)

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     789

In recent years, the question of whether a trans woman can be a drag queen has been unpleasantly debated on the popular American reality TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, which now also screens in the UK. In later series of the show, however, trans women have achieved great things—showing categorically that there is no conflict between some trans women’s personal identity and their ability to perform a drag character on stage, achieving the same subversive and playful effect without undermining their own identity. Caroline Framke (2018) comments: For those trans people who do find a way to express themselves and their gender through performance, drag can be a lifeline, a space to be a version of themselves they can’t be anywhere else. In fact, the very concept of drag has long been thought to be born of trans experiences; as trans actress Alexandra Billings put it in a blunt note to RuPaul, ‘you did not invent drag; we did’.

At its most subversive, the function of female impersonation and drag can serve a similar purpose to the ancient role of trans people which I touched upon at the start of this chapter and which is still found in parts of the world today: Their ‘neither quite one thing nor quite the other’ status once afforded them a political role. Not unlike the fool in Shakespeare’s plays, the waria [waria is a somewhat outdated term for trans feminine people in Indonesia, a literal conflation of the Javanese words for ‘man’ and ‘woman’–many contemporary Indonesians prefer the term ‘trans’] sometimes spoke truth to power when no one else was allowed to … These were things that no one else talked about openly at the time. The audience shrieked with laughter, they clapped perfectly manicured claws in delighted recognition. (Pisani 2014, 50–51)

The feminine trans performer is afforded a space to say things or transgress norms that would be unthinkable coming from a cisgender or gender-conforming body. I’m not suggesting that all drag is driven by political motivation, in fact, there is much that is problematic by modern standards, even as the form continues to be wildly popular. Drag is frequently clever and subversive, but can also be offensive in a reductive way. For some cis people, their accusation that trans women disrespect or misunderstand what it means to be treated as a woman originates from over-sexualised or disrespectful caricatures of women in drag context. And even when the performer is queer themselves—a cisgender gay man for example—the form can be offensive

790     Emma Frankland

towards others from within the LGBTQ community and it can be argued that the appropriation of femininity is used to take up even more male space within an environment, literally, with enormous wigs, costumes and personalities. These conflicts are something that many of the contemporary generations of queer drag performers are working hard to avoid, as Mzz Kimberley explains (pers. comm. August 29, 2018): Today it’s more like art—back then it was more of a performance. In the 1990s on the club scene, people didn’t take it so serious. The pub performers were more serious than the club performers (on the East London side, they were more serious). But with the scene at [the nightclub] Heaven, everyone was having a laugh and having fun. Madame Jo Jo’s was a drag show—Ruby Venezuela was the main act, I was a showgirl. But at Heaven we were more creative, we would do full on stage shows. Like a musical; without the singing—we’d take off Janet Jackson or Diana Ross. It wasn’t just one performer onstage—there was always backing dancers and confetti going off. Things are darker and more political now. I think the black community have to let off their frustrations. They need to tell their story. The people of colour and the lesbians have always been the underdogs on the scene. If you look at any type of queer scene you don’t see gay men out there—it’s queer performers.

There is a different contract at play between a performer and the audience when the gender identity of an AMAB performer playing a woman is congruent or incongruent with the character’s gender identity. In the latter, there is a game being played where we are invited to enjoy a person mimicking or parodying a gender that is not their own—however, when we understand the performer’s identity as congruent this humour could become inappropriate. There must be ways in which we can make clear these differences, because the existence of trans people does not mean that we can no longer enjoy cross-casting or being irreverent and subversive with gender—just because we take it seriously, does not mean we cannot also have fun with it! But how do we communicate this subtlety? In the play Summer in London, written and directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair, which premiered in 2017 at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East in London, I played a trans woman, Justine, who falls in love with another trans woman, played by Mzz Kimberley. In one scene Justine is preparing for a date and has dressed disastrously—in high heels and a short skirt that are different from her usual, more assertive, punk style. As a trans woman performing this role, I

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     791

encountered difficulty on the first night when I walked on stage in the disastrous costume and the audience laughed. Was the laugh ‘with’ Justine? Was it recognition that here was a woman trying to be something she is not (high femme) to please her date? Or was the laugh at her expense? ‘Look at the trans woman who does not know how to dress in a feminine manner’. It’s an important distinction that would not ever be an issue for a cisgender character or actor. Am I being read as a woman in this moment? And, an important distinction for the actor, is this laughter kind or unkind? Are the audience with me (the performer)? Will I be safe walking home after this performance? As Travis Alabanza says of their groundbreaking spoken-word performance Before I (You) Step Outside. (Love) (Me): ‘On stage is the only place I am celebrated for what I’m punished for in the street’ (quoted in Fields 2018). After the first night of Summer in London, I developed a response to the inevitable laugh when I walked onstage—a break of the fourth wall and a confrontational ‘What?’ addressed directly to the audience—this would generate another laugh, and I would feel I had taken the control back in the situation. But only by borrowing a language of performance found commonly in pubs and clubs—breaking the fourth wall and taking charge. Saying to the audience ‘I see you looking at me’—but still unable to know who they feel they are looking at. I also felt pressure to ensure that I looked good in my costume and walked well on the heels—a sad necessity but one that feels important, even offstage, as trans feminine people are constantly held to higher beauty standards than our cis counterparts, whilst also being punished for them. An anecdote by Travis Alabanza (2018, 27) provides a telling example of this: The worst violence I received from a women [sic ] was when she tripped me over as I was walking towards the tube. She swore it was an accident but I saw her pre-empt it. I nearly fell into the train and when she could see I nearly died she reached out a hand to help me and said ‘shouldn’t be walking in those heels eh?’ And I had never seen such a perfect analogy for cis feminism.

This ‘cis gaze’ is an inevitable factor for any trans performer on stage and when applied to trans women, relates also to misogyny. When I make decisions in my work about how I show my body, naked or clothed, it is often in relation to this question—will this simply satisfy a cis audience with their curiosity about my trans body? Am I being objectified or am I in control? Something that I learnt from Summer in London, which featured a cast of seven performers who were all transgender, was that with trans performers,

792     Emma Frankland

there are extra access needs that a company must provide to ensure the emotional wellbeing and physical safety of trans performers. These can vary from involvement in costume choices and the way that performance is marketed to an audience, to physical safety and considering how a performer makes it home at the end of an evening. Alabanza has begun to collect funds after performances and online via travisalabanza.co.uk specifically to provide safer taxi transport home for trans and gender non-conforming artists after latenight gigs. In my conversation with Mzz Kimberley we discussed the Stonewall Riots which took place in New York City in 1969 and are credited with being a catalyst for the Gay Power and modern LGBTQ Rights movements. We discussed the fact that the riots were led by trans women of colour, some of whom were working as drag performers: In the Stonewall Tavern it was all the people in the LGBT community who did not go into the outside world and pass as straight people. The drag queens, the butch lesbians, the non-binary folks, the effeminate gay men and their allies. They started the riots. When gay pride began they didn’t want the drag queens in the parade. It’s about passing—certain people wanted to blend into society, they don’t want the backlash—they want to fit in. (Mzz Kimberley, pers. comm August 29, 2018)

Then, as now, trans performers may bring life to shows in pubs, clubs and art galleries, they even on occasion bring the revolution. But where lies the responsibility for their safety afterwards? Particularly gender non-conforming trans feminine people of colour, whose style is often appropriated by the mainstream and yet who face a significantly higher threat of violence.

Contemporary Queer Performance and Radical Acts: The Trans Body as a Political Object I lay claim to the irreducible plurality of my living body, not to my body as ‘bare life’ but to the very materiality of my body as political site for agency and resistance. (Paul Preciado. Testo Junkie. Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, 2013, 250)

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     793

• A trans woman sits at a table in a public square in Indonesia. She is wearing male clothes and no make-up. Casually smoking a cigarette, she begins to apply her make-up and changes her clothes to female. A large crowd gathers and watches with disbelief (Tamarra 2014). • A trans woman stands on a pile of earth within a circle of salt. She wears a black skirt and a bra. She makes a mixture of salt, water and ink which she then places inside her bra and she begins to shake. At first, the movements are small but they grow larger and larger until she is violently throwing herself up and down. The black ink runs down her body (Frankland 2015b, 2018a; see Fig. 34.1). • While a supercut of scenes from popular films and television, such as The Crying Game, Ace Ventura, and Family Guy, depicting men vomiting at the sight of trans women’s bodies, plays, the artist quickly eats a bowl of jell-o and (successfully) attempts to force herself to throw up (Page [Odofemi] 2015). So, finally, to the more recent history of theatre and live performance where one can at last find self-identified trans women openly performing in theatre, but often only when the production is explicitly about trans issues and

Fig. 34.1  Emma Frankland in Rituals for Change, Festival Mix Brasil, Sao Paolo, 2017 (Photograph by Dani Villar. ©Emma Frankland)

794     Emma Frankland

usually when it’s a self-devised piece. That most examples are written and/or directed by the trans woman performer and often contain autobiographical content makes the contemporary work of trans women comparable to the records of the women’s theatre movement of the 1980s which often focused on the lives of cis women and AFAB trans people. In Beatrix Taumann’s Strange Orphans: Contemporary African American Women Playwrights (quoted in Mondshein 2014, 87) she writes that: Women’s theatre drew heavily from the performers’ lives, rendering the subject matter important by disallowing the audience the stance of ‘voyeur’ and denying the viewer the comfort of separating the onstage action from the subject matter.

From Kate Bornstein, to Jamie Fletcher, to Nina Arsenault, to Morgan M [sic ] Page, to Renata Carvalho, to Jo Clifford, to Kate O’Donnell, to Tamarra to myself and many more—we perform our stories as a way of understanding and sharing information—often as a way of claiming validation and self-identification in response to a skewed mainstream view. And often our bodies become somato-political sites of performative action and remembered violence—the reality of which (as Taumann writes above) does not allow the audience to separate what they are witnessing in performance from the realities of life outside. Thanks to an episode of the brilliant podcast Woodland Secrets several years ago (April 9, 2016), my attention was drawn by a guest—the novelist Imogen Binnie—to a concept first put forward by Elaine Showalter, which I have found extremely useful in articulating the ways in which trans performance is evolving. In A Literature of Their Own (1977, 11), Showalter identifies women as ‘a subculture within the framework of a larger society’ and sets out ‘to show how the development of [the female literary tradition in the English novel] is similar to the development of any literary subculture’. She argues that minorities or subcultures within a society begin to make art about themselves in three separate stages. ‘First, there is a prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition and internalization of its standards of art, and its views on social roles’ (Showalter 1977, 13). This stage could be paraphrased as ‘We are just like you’. A community creates performance that seeks to find a common ground between them and the majority culture—‘Look at all the ways in which we are the same. Please don’t hurt us’. One of the problems is that although work like this can be brilliant for building bridges and understanding (a way of communicating to a cisgender audience on

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     795

their terms) it can also be outright damaging. Most often the reason for the failure is that there is not a trans woman in a position of artistic control. When the content is about trans women, but the author or director is not, the message can become confused, however well-intentioned. And there is a danger that in the message ‘We are just like you’ that something is surrendered, or some people forgotten, in the rush to appease the hegemony. ‘Second, there is a phase of protest against these standards and values, and advocacy of minority rights and values, including a demand for autonomy’ (Showalter 1977, 13). This period of ‘We are NOTHING like you’ is where a lot of radical performance work by trans women exists—we reject the ways in which we are oppressed and will create our own systems that work for us and the complexities of our identities. A recent anthology of speculative fiction by trans authors, Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Authors, includes many submissions by trans women who use the genre to imagine realities in which our lives are more understood or our power exists differently. ‘Finally, there is a phase of self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity’ (Showalter 1977, 13). And perhaps this stage is the holy grail? What the speakers on the Woodland Secrets podcast (2016) term ‘YOU don’t matter’. When a trans woman performance artist is able to make work that is important to her without requiring consideration of whether a cisgender audience will understand or approve, work that is made with a trans audience in mind and connected to our history, as Morgan M Page (quoted in Bobadilla 2016) says: I think all of my work as an artist, as an activist, and even as a social worker is about preserving and disseminating trans culture on a variety of levels. Most of my work as an artist is really engaged in a lineage of other trans artists who have come before me. Many of my works are in direct conversations with the work that inspires me. As an activist, I feel like my work is directly in conversation with 150 years of people working before me to make it possible for me to do what I do now. To me, it’s all about pushing an agenda of trans as culture rather than trans as a strictly medical phenomenon.

One unsurprising characteristic of trans women artists working in theatre and performance is that we often work outside the commercial mainstream. I say this is unsurprising because to be an out trans woman is to be outside the mainstream—a political act—and because of who controls the mainstream theatres and therefore their programmes. Many of the performances cited in this section were described by the makers as ‘performance art’ or ‘live art’.

796     Emma Frankland

This question of what type of performance belongs inside a theatre became controversial when I was invited to make a performance response to a UK theatre’s decision to programme a widely known transphobic speaker as part of their 2017 International Women’s Day events. Understandably this decision was very upsetting to the local trans community and although the venue refused to cancel the speaker, I was invited to take the main performance space and given 45 minutes to respond to the speaker’s views. Although much of my work is overtly political, I refrain from referring to myself as an ‘activist’ preferring to take the position (borrowed from Kate Bornstein) of being an ‘artist in service of activism’—seeing my work as something that can support the hard work that trans activists are doing. With trans exclusionary arguments, I am of the firm opinion that there is no debate to be had—we should not be debating whether or not trans women exist, because we clearly do and have done throughout history. I will talk with anyone who is interested in respectfully knowing more about trans issues and I am a huge proponent of the aforementioned theory of intersectionality, which affords space for me to discuss my experience as a trans woman without taking anything away from the specific experiences of cisgender women. These experiences are different from my own because, of course, no two experiences of womanhood can be the same, but there can also be very many similarities including, sadly, experience of sexual violence or abuse. The idea that this is only something cis women and girls should be defended from is hateful. We should be defending all women and girls. The anti-trans movement is insidious, well-funded and media-supported. Its members are not being denied free speech or a platform to spread their views: these appear on the front pages of newspapers and in the main news bulletins whilst at the same time trans women and our allies are painted as violent bullies for not wanting to engage. Taking the position of #notadebate I used my 45 minutes to sit in silence, in front of a banner which read ‘Trans Women Exist, This is Not a Debate’. I was joined onstage by Kai Harrison Moore, a BSL interpreter who rested their hands in their lap throughout—an action which I felt made the silence even more palpable. My intention by using silence (a form of protest that has a long history) and by visibly placing my body onstage for a long period of time was that when the transphobic speaker took the same platform immediately afterwards, the image of my body—the presence and reality of a trans woman, existing, would render ridiculous any arguments against us. I was accused later of presenting something that was not ‘performance’, an opinion I disagree with given the history of theatre and art as protest. I cite this as an example that, as with our understanding of what constitutes

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     797

a woman, so too our understanding of what is ‘theatre’ perhaps needs to also be stretched to accommodate the narratives of non-normative identities. One trans woman who flourishes on both sides of this cultural divide is writer and performer Jo Clifford, whose more than 80 plays have been performed all over the world, from major theatres to fringe venues. [For more on Jo Clifford’s work, see page 572 in Chapter 25, above, by Jenny Sealey with Clare Smout.] The title alone of Clifford’s play The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven has been enough to see it banned in several countries and censored. Only a few weeks ago, as I write, in the summer of 2018, an entire festival in Rio de Janeiro was cancelled when the state censor refused to allow the play to go on. The performance was relocated to a public space and queues formed around the block to see the show, which was then performed twice because of the demand. On another occasion, the venue was dismantled during the show in an attempt to disrupt the performance, as producer Natalia Mallo (Facebook post, July 28, 2018) describes: You have hours when you live or you shoot. At halftime, a bang and a lot of smoke. Then, after releasing bombs in the space, there arrives a judicial injunction asking for another cancellation, and we decided to disobey. The contracted security turns against us, and forbids the public’s entry. Well friend, Renata Carvalho said ‘enough’. She broke everything (it’s not a metaphor), exposed the cowards and screamed all truths. The Force was so much that an entire battalion did not have the courage to act. ‘Calm her down!’ They yelled at me, and I thought: ‘No. Listen, and hold!’ It was quite cathartic. Renata opens the gates by force and asks for the invasion of the public, which occupies the space to the screams of ‘Fascists!’ We tear the injunction, and we begin the show. They cut the sound, so we sang the soundtrack. They cut the lights. They took the awning that protected the audience from the rain, and the play didn’t stop. The public stayed until the end, and was our protection. Now, when we think it’s over, a new decision calls again for inclusion in the festival’s schedule asking for it to be presented tomorrow. Scenes for the next chapter. What a phase.

First performed by Jo herself in churches across the UK, the play has found new life overseas, notably in Brazil where the title role has been played by Renata Carvalho, a travesti performer who brings a very different energy and dynamic to the piece. It is one of the only instances in my life where I have had the privilege of seeing two versions of the same show that are radically different and where the performer’s identity impacts hugely on the experience.

798     Emma Frankland

When I spoke with Jo about the process of writing Queen Jesus, she remembered that in the 1990s she felt aware of a total absence of trans women in theatre. In her own words, she was ‘in the teeth of my own denial, trying to come to grips with being trans, so I started writing about it’ (pers. comm. July 29, 2018). This is an experience that is very similar to those of the other trans performers I have mentioned. Jo started writing characters who were trans women in her plays, which all suddenly began to be turned down for performance. After an illustrious career as a playwright, her change of identity coincided with her style becoming ‘unfashionable’. She comments (pers. comm. July 29, 2018), ‘I realised that if I wanted to write about it, I was going to have to self-fund it—so I did’. This economic censorship is a massive problem for trans women making performance and for marginalised groups in general. Self-funding requires a level of financial security and privilege which can limit the diversity of voices being heard. Despite this, in 2002, Jo performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in her play God’s New Frock, which imagined Jehovah as a closeted trans woman. This formed the basis for Jesus, Queen of Heaven which was first performed in 2009. I asked Jo what the response was to that first run. Massive hatred. Protests—I had no idea it would happen. I wrote it because I was sincerely impressed by the gospel and how inclusive and loving the message was, and I wanted to celebrate that. All the church people were furious and I was traumatised and shocked and stressed by it. My producer had hate mail and death threats and the box office staff received a lot of abuse. Nobody wanted to touch it … but I knew I was onto something. (Jo Clifford, pers. comm. July 29, 2018)

Slowly the show was revived in different cities, performed often in churches by Jo herself, until in 2014 it was seen during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival by Natalia Mallo, a producer from Brazil who has directed and reworked the piece for a Brazilian audience and, after an extensive search for the right performer, with Renata Carvalho in the title role. Since appearing as Queen Jesus, Carvalho has become a vocal activist for trans rights in Brazil, founding Movimento Nacional de Artistas Trans (MONART) who are campaigning to end the representation of trans people by cisgender actors. Speaking in a 2018 article about her role as Queen Jesus, Renata says:

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     799

I do not put myself as a person who speaks for all trans people. I use my work as an instrument to reach the great mass. When you are a militant, you feel the responsibility of being the first to arrive in one place, making room for other people not to go through it. But sometimes I just want to buy bread. The issue of transphobia is very strong in our country. And it is a country that calls itself secular, but it is extremely religious. People who want to kill me are doing so in the name of God… and many propagate speeches that reinforce the killing of travesti. (quoted in Ludemir 2018)

In this instance, Clifford has written a show for herself as performer and another trans woman now performs it. It is rare to find a text explicitly written to be performed by a trans woman that receives more than one incarnation. There are many productions of Hamlet, but most shows by trans women only get to have one run. In June 2018, I directed the short play Ofelia, the Fat Travesti, at Theatre 503, London, as part of a festival called Brasil Diversity. The play was written by Brazilian writer and political activist Helena Viera and performed by Mzz Kimberley, making it surely one of very few occasions where the character of a trans woman is played by a trans woman in a play written by a trans woman and directed by a trans woman. I myself trained as a ‘classical actor’, but for the past ten years my practice has been as a devising performer and theatre artist, creating work that has a messy, DIY and often playfully destructive aesthetic. More recently I have been experimenting with the places that visual art connects to performance and the materiality of bodies and materials with transformative properties such as salt, ink, water, earth and clay. In my 2015 blog for The Guardian (Frankland 2015a) I defined my artistic rationale in a statement that still carries significant weight for me: I do have a platform and, as an artist, I feel a strong duty of care to explore topics that are relevant to my lived experience. When I was younger, I worked as a lifeguard and was always really excited by the notion of a ‘duty of care’ that meant even if I wasn’t at work I had a moral responsibility to rescue anyone I saw drowning (I never did). I apply this as a moral obligation to confront the issues that are important in my life through the work that I make, despite the difficulties of doing so.

My work currently falls into several strands—the work I do as an actor (performing in other people’s productions or as a dramaturg/director for other artists’ work) and my core artistic practice, which consists of performances devised and written by myself in collaboration with others.

800     Emma Frankland

In 2012, coinciding with the birth of my child, I began to work on what has become called the ‘None of Us Is Yet a Robot’ project, so called in rejection of the phrase ‘non-biological’ that many trans exclusionary groups use to describe trans women. In Language (2013) I say, ‘We are all biological— none of us is yet a robot’ and the phrase stuck. To date, the project consists of five performance pieces made in response to my own transition, my body and the politics surrounding it. The first piece was Language (2013), a sort of ‘Trans 101’ manifesto that used music and graffiti art to illustrate its message. I can now reflect that the piece was very geared towards a cis audience, unpacking ideas of gender and the evolving language that was appearing at the time. Alongside this, I made a durational performance Doodle (2013) that placed me in a public location with a giant board to annotate and draw conversations I had with passers-by. The third piece, e g g / b o x (2014) was, in part, a collage of quotations and ideas around gender fluidity (and sea cucumbers) that was performed for one person at a time, inside two giant cardboard boxes. I think it represented my period of peak ‘trans euphoria’ and reflected a brief moment of positive media attitude towards trans people in the UK at that time (around Steinmetz’ ‘Trans Tipping Point’ article for Time Magazine ). Following on from this I made the most celebrated piece of the project, Rituals for Change (2015b), which grew from my fascination with my changing body and hormone therapy and a desire to talk to a trans audience about this without permitting a cis gaze or apologising, explaining or shaming. The work was messy and destructive—a series of rituals using ink, clay, earth and water alongside actions such as chopping wood with an axe and constructing and scaling a tall scaffold. In 2018 we reimagined this production as a film, which can be viewed in full online at http://bit.ly/ritualsforchange (Frankland 2018a). My final performance, Hearty, is still evolving. In this production, (first presented at The Yard Theatre, London in February 2018) I wear a long prosthetic rat tail and metal wings constructed from knives, as well as a slogan t-shirt that reads ‘Lop Your Dick Off’ (an appropriation of one of Germaine Greer’s trans-exclusionary hate speeches). It is a performance that represents many conversations with other trans women and the global situation for us in 2018… They said ‘lopping your dick off doesn’t change what you are’. It doesn’t change what I am, it changes EVERYTHING else. Whether we do it or not. The potential changes everything. (Frankland 2018b)

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     801

Casting Practices: Nothing About Us Without Us Whilst in clubs and experimental performance venues, trans women are performing our experiences in increasingly celebrated and exciting ways, on our mainstream commercial stages (as in the majority of film and television) our identities are barely seen and, on the rare occasion they are, they are frequently represented by cisgender actors—usually cisgender men. In a strange echo of the ‘all male’ stages of Elizabethan theatre we live in a time when although, in Western culture, women are now permitted to perform onstage—trans women are often still forbidden. Where a cisgender male can still be seen performing female impersonation yet we are still denied (as in Elizabethan times) the ability to see a woman playing herself. And often in mainstream venues, the trans representation that we do see is also filtered through a cisgender lens—directed by, written by, commissioned by cisgender people. It is important that trans women’s lives begin to be portrayed. But our many stories should be authentically told and not through translation. This is vital. I want to state right here and now that I do not believe there are any circumstances where it is appropriate for a cisgender actor to be portraying a trans character. Further, I demand an end to the practice of fêteing these portrayals as incredible acting challenges. Renata Carvalho (quoted in Ludemir 2018) sums this up from her point of view as a travesti: Art is a space of power and therefore is a place of exclusion. First, white cis men excluded white cis females. Later white men and white cis women excluded—and still exclude—black bodies. The trans body is still beginning to talk about inclusion. Even with the issue of quotas and the criminalisation of racism, people of colour are not in arts spaces as they should be. They are serving coffee on sets, doing the cleaning. We travesti, we have not yet entered the set nor serve the coffee. We are talking about a historical exclusion in the theatre. Our identity is not professionally validated because it is not even considered human. People do not want us around. When I take my travesti identity, it’s over. That is why we are not in day-to-day living. There is not a travesti receptionist. There is not a travesti waitress. And in art, it’s the same thing. Collectives do not have travesti actresses. But cis artists want to play trans characters. They succeed and, if well-done, win prizes. Trans characters leverage cis people’s careers.

Transgender actors exist—and when we are hard to find, it is the industry’s responsibility to create training and opportunities for us to be easier to

802     Emma Frankland

find in the future. And of course, a big part of this is improving, in general, the lives of trans women, especially those who are not from privileged backgrounds, so that the arts industry can include voices and bodies from as many backgrounds as possible. It is not only trans women who do not see ourselves reflected on most stages—the same could be said for cis women, black women, queer women, disabled women… (which is why, in this chapter heading I borrow the ‘nothing about us without us’ slogan, coined in English by disability activists in the 1990s). We only see ourselves in storylines where a character is defined by whatever their prevailing visible characteristic might be. This needs to stop—we live with an assumption that a character is white, cisgender, heteronormative, able-bodied unless we are told different and there is a further assumption that this ‘default’ is inoffensive and inert. The opposite is true. It is not only queer stories that inform or shift attitudes in an audience—all stories do—and when there are a thousand cis women on stage for every trans woman the belief that we do not exist is reinforced. We urgently need updated casting practices that begin to de-gender roles and really question whether a part calls for a specific body or experience or whether it could, in fact, be played by anyone. Aside from the obvious discrimination, lack of imagination and also closing down of the possibility that a trans performer might offer an authentic insight into the lived experience of a trans character, there is a real-world price to be paid for this lack of representation. Every time we see a cisgender man playing a trans woman it re-inforces the opinion that trans women are men in disguise, that we are REALLY men underneath—wearing a costume, playing a part. And it is this opinion that leads to the idea that it is ok to inflict violence on a trans woman as if she were a man. I am not suggesting that cisgender women are not also the victims of violence and abuse from men but for trans women that violence is often justified by a belief that we are not ‘really’ women. We must stop this outdated practice. I mentioned earlier how damaging the creation of the myth of a ‘default human’ is to all who do not identify as such; it is only with the death of this as an idea that we will begin to see trans women more truthfully in theatre and perhaps then a chapter like this will begin to be able to reflect on what that means rather than highlight an (in)conspicuous absence. There are actually very few roles where the distinction would be relevant. If we were living in a world where trans people were allowed to be seen as parents, romantic partners, heroes rather than victims, people in authority rather than people controlled by bureaucracy, doctors and lawyers rather than people defined by surgical procedures and legal battles. If we were in this world,

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     803

then casting would be far more open. I was told in a recent audition (for a famous theatre company) that the character of a bartender would be a ‘good role for a trans woman because women who work in pubs often have deep voices’. I pointed out that not only are trans women incredibly varied in their vocal pitch and other attributes, but that there was also not a single character in the play that might not have been trans. When casting begins to take this into account, then we may also see trans people reaching their full potential and an end to some of the common misconceptions and persecution that surround us and surround trans women in particular.

Conclusion I apologise if this chapter is unfulfilling. If my recourse to supposition undermines my argument (as indeed it must) and leaves me open to criticism and accusations of fantasy and supposition. But I blame the systematic erasure of trans history and suppression of trans women for the past two thousand years, fuelled by religious extremism and colonialism. By a political imperative to create a mythical gender binary and heterosexual norm in order to encourage supremacist repopulation, and by all of these things creating a society of rigid cultural norms using techniques of shame and violence to police them. Yet recently, we can see that there are many trans women who are performing on stage, using this as a way of finding a voice. A duty of care to redefine the radical space that theatre has been, and should always be—to speak truth through performance. Creating the relative safety of an environment we control, that falls away the second we step outside the theatre and into the street, I want to see trans women in more roles (on and offstage) and represented in all theatres and productions. Because a job of art is to imagine the future and, once imagined, that future can exist. I would like our future to contain an end to the stigma and persecution of trans women and a place where that can begin, today, is on our stages.

Bibliography Adams, Annalisa. 2013. ‘‘His Play Shan’t Ask Your Leave to Live’: Following the Ghosts of Trans Embodiment in Restoration Drama’. MA Thesis, Georgetown University. Alabanza, Travis. 2018. Before I (You) Step Outside. (Love) (Me). London: Chapbook.

804     Emma Frankland

Anohni. ‘Future Feminism’. 2012. Accessed August 28, 2018. http://www.metrolyrics.com/future-feminism-lyrics-antony-and-the-johnsons.html. Beadle-Blair, Rikki. 2017. Summer in London. London: Team Angelica Publishing. Bergman, S. Bear. 2010. The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Binnie, Imogen. 2016. Woodland Secrets. April 9, 2016. https://podfanatic.com/ podcast/woodland-secrets/episode/51-imogen-binnie. Bobadilla, Suzanna. 2016. ‘The Feministing Five: Morgan M Page’. Feministing. Accessed October 9, 2018. http://feministing.com/2016/01/11/ feministing-five-morgan-m-page/. Clifford, Jo. n.d. The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven. Edinburgh: Stewed Rhubarb Press. Dolan, Frances E. 2003. ‘Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern England’. In Gender, Power and Privilege in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jessica Munns and Penny Richards, 7–20. London: Pearson Education. Fields, Noa/h. 2018. ‘Trans Feminist Killjoys Just Wanna Have Fun’. Medium, June 13, 2018. https://medium.com/anomalyblog/trans-feminist-killjoys-justwanna-have-fun-d626c38375b0. Fitzpatrick, Cat, and Casey Plett, eds. 2017. Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers. New York: Topside Press. Framke, Caroline. 2018. ‘How Ru Paul’s Comments on Trans Women Led to a Drag Race Revolt—And a Rare Apology’. Vox, March 7, 2018. https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/3/6/17085244/rupaul-trans-womendrag-queens-interview-controversy. Frankland, Emma. 2015a. ‘I’m a Transgender Woman, Why Shouldn’t I Play Hamlet?’ The Guardian, March 25, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ theatreblog/2015/mar/25/transgender-woman-play-hamlet-language-camdenpeoples-theatre. Frankland, Emma. 2015b. Rituals for Change. Forest Fringe, Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Edinburgh, August 23–28, 2015. Frankland, Emma. 2018a. Rituals for Change (2015): Re-imagined for Film. https:// www.facebook.com/noneofusisyetarobot/videos/1807282455962106/. Frankland, Emma. 2018b. Hearty. Performed at The Yard Theatre, London, February 2018. Unpublished. Frankland, Emma. 2019. None of Us is Yet a Robot: Five Performances on Gender Identity and the Politics of Transition. London: Oberon. Green, Eli. R. 2017. ‘Redefining Gender’. National Geographic, January 2017. https://on.natgeo.com/2PfX9EM. Intersex Society of North America. n.d. ‘How Common Is Intersex?’ Accessed August 31, 2018. https://www.isna.org/faq/frequency. Ludemir, Chico. 2018. ‘They Want to Kill Me in the Name of God’. Revisite Continente, June 5, 2018. http://revistacontinente.com.br/secoes/entrevista/ rquem-quer-me-matar-esta-em-nome-de-deusr.

34  Trans Women on Stage: Erasure, Resurgence and #notadebate     805

Lyly, John. 2012. Galatea. Edited by Leah Scragg. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, Bea. 2018. ‘Meet Christine Jorgensen: America’s First Transgender Celebrity’. Pink News, April 19, 2018. https://www.pinknews. co.uk/2018/04/19/meet-christine-jorgensen-americas-first-transgender-celebrity/. Mondshein, Elissa. 2014. ‘Tuesday Night at 6:30: The WOW Cafe Through the Eyes of Nineteen Artists’. MA Thesis, San Jose State University. Page, Morgan M. [‘Odofemi’]. 2015. You Make Me Sick. La MaMa Experimental Theatre, New York City, February 1, 2015. http://odofemi.tumblr.com/ post/109774392661/photo-documentation-from-you-make-me-sick-morgan-m. Page, Morgan M. 2017. ‘Trans Women Shouldn’t Have to Constantly Defend Their Own Womanhood’. BuzzFeed, March 16, 2017. https://www.buzzfeed.com/ morganmpage/there-is-no-universal-experience-of-womanhood?utm_term=. vwrOgOwvRo#.vpn0n0NXlJ. Pisani, Elizabeth. 2014. Indonesia Etc. Exploring the Improbable Nation. New York: W.W. Norton. Preciado, Paul. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: The Feminist Press. Preciado, Paul. 2018. ‘Testo Junkie—Hormones, Power and Resistance in the Pharmacopornographic Regime’. Lecture, Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science, London, June 5, 2018. Rankin, Jim. 2010. ‘Sexy Transsexual Nina Arsenault on Life, Art and Her Penis’. The Star, June 11, 2010. https://www.thestar.com/life/2010/06/11/sexy_transsexual_nina_arsenault_on_life_art_and_her_penis.html. Serano, Julia. 2007. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1977. A Literature of Their Own. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Steinmetz, Katy. 2014. ‘The Transgender Tipping Point’. Time Magazine, May 29, 2014. http://time.com/135480/transgender-tipping-point/. Tamarra. 2014. Pests. Kota Tua, Jakarta, June 15, 2014. https://youtu. be/6_ZWr9o3JvQ. Viera, Helena. 2018. Ofelia, the Fat Travesti. Performed by Mzz Kimberley. Directed by Emma Frankland. Brazil Diversity, Theatre 503, London, June 2018.

Index

Our intention in this index has been to provide comprehensive coverage of all performers, creative artists, playwrights, plays, films, theatre venues and theatrical organizations mentioned. We have chosen to include all the performers discussed— regardless of whether they are simply a name on a Roman tombstone, a semianonymous ‘sister to Anita Bush’ whose first name is lost, or a prison inmate known here by her forename only—with the intention that the index should serve also as a record of all the women considered in the volume. Where appropriate, we have included genres and theatrical styles, such as Roman mime, convent drama, commedia dell’arte, kutiyattam, Japanese revue, tragi-farce. On the whole, we have not included political personages and events, nor critics. However, we have made exceptions such as queens who are discussed as performers, feminist movements and key campaigners, and pre-twentieth-century commentators on theatre. In references to E ­ nglish-language items, any leading article in the name is listed at the end of the entry (e.g. Way of the World, The); in non-English works the order is left unchanged (e.g. La pazzia d’Isabella). We have not listed individual roles, but entered references to these under play titles, so discussion of Rosalind, for example, can be found under ‘Shakespeare, William, As You Like It’ and of Marguerite Gautier under ‘Dumas, Alexandre (the Younger), La dame aux camélias’. References to illustrations are given in italic type. 0–9

A

14–18 NOW (World War I Centenary Arts Projects umbrella) 564 Processions (June 10, 2018) 564 7.84 509

Abacush 522 Abbott, George, and Ann Preston Coquette 433, 434 Åberg, Maria 735, 736–737, 738

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 Jan Sewell and Clare Smout (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Women on Stage, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23828-5

807

808     Index

Abeysekera, Hiran 749 Abington, Frances 178, 186, 207, 208, 210, 211 Abrahams, Celine 666, 672, 673 Abrahams, Rehane 621, 623, 626–629 What the Water Gave Me 623, 626, 627 Abramovic, Marina 499 Accademia degli Intenti, Pavia 115 ‘Accesa’. See Andreini, Isabella Accesi troupe 113 Acconci, Vito 466 ACE. See Arts Council England (ACE) Ace Ventura [film] 793 Act For Change Project 734 Actors’ Company (1695) 195 Actors’ Orphanage Fund (later The Actors’ Charitable Trust) 385 Actresses’ Franchise League 2, 384 Adam, Ronald 386 Adashev, Alexander 400, 401 Addison, Thomas 186 Adrianou, Kyveli 353, 358, 361, 362–368 Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble 528 Aeschylus 11 Agamemnon 13 Oresteia, The 70 Suppliant Maidens 13 Afinogenov, Alexander Crank 406 Agate, James 746 Ah Kin, Camilla 722–725 AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) 502, 503 Aigido 10 Aiken, George Uncle Tom’s Cabin 262–266, 274 Aitken, Maria 517 Ajayan, Radhika 611 Akademia Ruchu, Poland 496 Alabanza, Travis 791, 792

Before I (You) Step Outside. (Love) (Me) 791 Albee, Edward Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 637 Alberghini, Angelica 107, 182 Alcman 10 Alderson, Jude 523, 525 Aldwych Theatre, London 508 Alexander, Bill 708 Allen, Woody 639 Almeida Theatre, London 749, 750 Almost Free, London 509 Amatsu Otome 336 Amazonia 44 Ambassador Theatre Group 511 American Academy of Dramatic Art 435 American Actors Equity 441 American Negro Theatre 440 American Theatrical Types Comic Spinster, The 247–248, 253, 261, 267–276 Indian Maiden, The 247, 253–261, 268, 275, 276 Tragic Mulatta, The 247, 252, 253, 267, 268, 275, 276 Tragic Mulatto, The 264, 433, 439, 440, 441 Ammannur Chachu Chakyar Smaraka Gurukulam 593, 596, 598, 601, 604 Anderson, Ida (Mrs Charles Anderson) 429 Andreadi, Katerina 367, 369 Andreini, Francesco 114, 116 Andreini, Giovan Battista 109, 114 Andreini, Isabella 82, 107, 111, 113–115, 116, 119, 120–122, 165, 182 Contrasti 114 Lettere di Isabella Andreini 114 Mirtilla 114 sonnets 120

Index    809

Andrews, Julie 636 Andrews, Regina 437 Andreyeva, Maria 397, 398 Androvskaya, Olga 414 Anemogiannis, Giorgos 363 Angelis, April de 498, 510, 517, 518 Playhouse Creatures 513, 515 Angelou, Maya 701, 762 Angika 603 Angri, Gin 692 Anita Bush All-Colored Stock Company. See Bush, Anita Anna of Denmark (Queen Consort to James I) 4, 82, 83, 128, 129, 139–143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 154 Anohni Cut the World 777 Anthesteria Festival (Basilinna) 14–15 ApeShakespeare (‘To bee or not to bee’) 696 Apuleius 30 Golden Ass 24, 28 Arbuscula 33–34 Archibald, William Carib Song 441 ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana) 493 Arcola Theatre, London 750 Arends, Mark 750 Ariosto, Ludovico Orlando furioso 111, 112 Aristophanes 67 Assemblywomen 13 Frogs, The 56 Lysistrata 13, 441 Aristotle 308 Poetics, The 1, 11, 61 Ariya Opera 521 Armani, Vincenza 107, 110–112, 116 Arnau, Brenda 523 Arsenault, Nina 777, 794 Artaud, Antonin 477

Artichoke 564 Artists of Dionysus (BCE actors’ union) 41 Arts Council England (ACE) 354, 377, 498, 501, 507, 512, 513, 514, 515, 518, 521, 533, 535, 542, 576 Arts Theatre, London 738 Arundell, Paula 719, 720–721 Asakusa Casino Follies 337 Asakusa Opera 249, 331, 332, 335, 337, 342, 347 Asche, Oscar 388–389 Chu Chin Chow 388, 391 Ashcroft, Peggy 382, 511 Ashton, Frederick 490 Ashwell, Hilda 384 Ashwell, Lena 382, 383, 384–385, 391 ‘Acting as a Profession for Women’ 382 Association of Artists of Merry Aphrodite 40 Astymeloisa 10 Atellan farce 15, 16 Atkins, Eileen 517, 582, 634, 636, 638, 639, 648, 649 Atkins, Eileen, and Ellen Terry Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins 636 Atomi-gakuen 331 Atwood, Margaret 528 Australian Shakespeare Company 709 Azama, Michael Crossfire 498 Azarin, Azary 409 B

Bagnold, Enid Chalk Garden, The 643 Bainbridge, Beryl 510 Baker, Thomas Hampstead Heath 193 Baliev, Nikita 421

810     Index

Bandaranaike, Sunethra 576 Banim, John Damon and Pythias 445 Bankhead, Tallulah 387, 433 Bantu Dramatic Society 618 Barker, Harley Granville 386, 388 Barker, Howard Wrestling School, The 498 Barker, James Nelson Indian Princess, or, La Belle Sauvage, The 251, 258–259 Barking Abbey 82, 89–94 Depositio 91–94 De Sanctis Innocentibus 82, 90 Descensus/Elevatio 91–94 Ordinale 90, 93, 94 Visitatio Sepulchri 82, 89, 91–94, 161 Barnard, Charles, and Neil Burgess County Fair, The 275 Barnard’s Playhouse Bill (1735) 195 Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford 247, 259–260 Forest Princess, The 259–260 Barnett, Helen 516 Barras, Charles Black Crook, The 268–273 Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan 391 Barrière, Théodore, and Henry Murger La vie de bohème 297–299 Barry, Elizabeth 185, 190, 195, 212, 214, 219 Bartal, Leah 524 Bartholomew Fair 195 Barton, John 702 Basle Augustine Monastery Zacheus 162 ‘Basilinna’. See Anthesteria Festival (Basilinna) Bassilla 40, 41 Bathyllus 42 Battersea Arts Centre, London 522

Bausch, Pina 495 BBA (British Black and Asian) Shakespeare Database 673, 706, 709, 712 BBC TV Doctor Who 638, 737 Graham Norton Show, The 641 Making Babies 499–500 Beadle-Blair, Rikki Summer in London 790–792 Beale, Simon Russell 748 Beatty, Warren 639 Beaumarchais, Pierre Marriage of Figaro, The 414 Beaumont, Francis 656 Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Loyal Subject, The 192 Beauvoir, Simone de 477, 639 Second Sex, The 489, 507 Bechdel Test 453, 515 Bechimerin, Anna 162 Beckett, Samuel 570, 684 Before Shakespeare project 785–788 Behaim, Magdalena 162 Behn, Aphra 184, 187, 514 Feign’d Curtezans, The 187 Lucky Chance, The 511 Rover, The 184, 785 Belasco, David 429 Belgrade Theatre, Coventry 532 Coventry Belgrade TIE Company 534 Bell, John 720–721 Bell Shakespeare Company 705, 712, 719, 720 Belt and Braces 509 Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney 714–715 Benedict, Claire 719 Bening, Annette 644, 646 Benjamin, Jonny Stranger on the Bridge 545 Benjamin, Shauntelle 715–716, 715 Bennett, Alan Lady in the Van, The 640

Index    811

Bennett, Arnold 387 Bennett, Edward 750 Benson, Constance 386 One Hundred Practical Hints for the Amateur 386 Benson, Constance, and Frank Benson Pembroke Hall Dramatic School, London 386 Benson, Frank 386 Ben Tovim, Ruth 541, 548 Beowulf 55 Berger, Henning Deluge, The 418, 419 Berkoff, Stephen 646 Berkoff’s Women 646, 647 Berliner Ensemble 508 Berman, Ed 509 Bernhardt, Sarah 248, 294–297, 296, 301, 307–308, 310, 318, 320, 321, 324, 325, 353, 359, 360, 433, 648, 730, 767 Bersenyev, Ivan 400, 403, 406, 409, 410 Beryl and the Perils 510 Beswick, Lavinia 178, 211–212, 215 Betsy (San Vittore Globe performer) 691, 694 Betterton, Mary 195 Betterton, Thomas 189, 190 Bevan, Gillian 730, 749 Billings, Alexandra 789 Binnie, Imogen 794 Birman, Serafima 354, 355, 398, 399, 400–405, 406–409, 421 Actor and the Role, The 400 Actor’s Labour, The 400 Encounters Gifted by Destiny 400 Path of the Actress, The 400 Birmingham Hippodrome 553, 554 Birmingham Repertory Theatre 496, 554, 575 Bishop, Andrew 429, 430 Bishop Players. See Lafayette Players

Bisson, Alexandre Madame X 433 Black Consciousness Movement 618 Black Mime Theatre 521 Black Patti. See Jones, Sissieretta Black Patti’s Troubadours. See Jones, Sissieretta Black Theatre Co-op 521, 525 Blackfriars Theatre, London 182 Blanchett, Cate 635, 648, 649 Blaq Pearl (aka Janine Van Rooy) 621, 624 Bledsoe, Jules 439 BloodGroup 487, 489, 494, 495, 523 Barricade of Flowers, A 494, 496 Cold Wars 495–496 Dirt: The Theatre of Sex and the Sex of Theatre 487, 494–495 Magdalena Project 490 Bloolips 508 Bloom, Orlando 709 Bloomers 508, 510 Boal, Augusto 491, 549, 550, 760 Forum Theatre 538, 549 Rainbow of Desires 544, 549 Theatre of the Oppressed 549 Body and Soul [film] 440 Bokshanskaya, Olga 413 Boleslavsky, Richard 421 Bone, Kirstin 656 Booth, Barton 195 Booth, Edwin 308, 321 Booth, Laurie 493 Bordoni, Faustina 190, 191 Borkowski, Andrej 496 Bornstein, Kate 794, 796 Botarga, Stefanelo 111 Bottoms, Stephen 513 Boucicault, Dion 388, 429 Octoroon, The 262–266 Boutell, Elizabeth 178, 207, 210–211, 214, 219 Bowers, Candy 712–713

812     Index

Bowers, Kim (aka Busty Beatz) 712–713 Bowman, Elizabeth 190 Bowman, Laura 430 Box, Muriel 390 Boyd, Daniel 750 Boyle, Danny 528, 574 Bracegirdle, Anne 190, 195, 214 Brakhage, Stan 476, 477 Branagh, Kenneth 702, 748 Brayton, Lily 388–389, 391 Brecht, Bertolt 508, 523, 659, 768 Arturo Ui 508 Breval, John Strolers [sic], The 199 Brewster, Yvonne 524, 751 Bristol Theatre Collection 387 British Academy 502 British Asian Theatre 521 British Council 489, 498, 499 Brixton Black Women’s Centre, London 524 Broadside Mobile Workers’ Theatre 493 Broadwood, Jo 453, 531–545, 534, 549–552 Brome, Richard Jovial Crew, The 199 Bromley, Nadezhda 398 Brontë, Charlotte 286–288, 290, 293, 299 Villette 286–287, 290–291, 293 Brontë, Emily 293 Brontë sisters 648 Brook, Peter 452, 491, 494, 497, 508, 523, 584, 702, 759, 769, 771 Empty Space, The 771 Ik, The 523 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 491, 508 Brown, Ann 443 Brown, Mrs 199 Brown, William Wells The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom 263–266

Brownell, John Charles Brainsweat 436 Bruce, Angela 523 Buatier, Françoise 162 Bughwan, Devi 618 Bulgakov, Mikhail Days of the Turbins, The 414 Flight, The 414 Bull-Dogger, The [film] 430 Bungei Kyōkai 341 Bungeiza Theatre 341 Bunraku (Japanese puppet theatre) 329, 334 Otome Bunraku (the Maidens’ Puppet Theatre) 334 Bunyan, John 222 Burgess, Neil 275 Burke, Billie Girl at the Fort, The 429 Burney, Frances 207 Evelina 205–208, 211, 215, 217, 220 Wanderer, The 211 Burris, Andrew You Must Be Bo’n Again 438 Burton, Kerrian 674 Burton, Richard 637 Bush, Anita 355, 427, 428–431, 435, 448 Anita Bush All-Colored Stock Company 428 Anita Bush and Her 8 Shimmy Babies 428 Bush (sister to Anita Bush, first name unknown) 5, 428 Bush Theatre, London 516 Bushell-Mingo, Josette 719, 720 Butler Davenport’s Free Theatre, New York 438 Butoh 501 ‘By Moonlight on the Green’ (Anon.) 194 Byrne, Antony 750 Byrne, Caroline 710 Byrnes, Vanessa 722

Index    813 C

Callas, Maria 364 Callil, Carmen 511 Call of His People, The [film] 440 Callow, Simon 508 Campbell, Beatrix 514, 515 Campbell, Dick 436, 438, 439, 443, 447 Campbell, Mrs Patrick 648 Cankarev Dom, Ljubljana 499 Cantieri Culturali Zisa, Palermo 503 Cardiff Laboratory Theatre 493 Carey, Hazel 523 Carey, Joyce 386 Carib Theatre 521 Carlton, Carl Lace Petticoat 440 Carolyne (San Vittore Globe Performer) 681 Carson, Kitty (born Emily ­Courtier-Dutton) 385 Carter, Angela 510 Carter, Jack 430 Cartoucherie de Vincennes 492 Carvalho, Renata 782, 794, 797, 798–799, 801 Cary, Elizabeth 583, 655–674, 666 Tragedy of Mariam, The 583, 655–674, 666 Cash, Lucy 501, 503 Casino de Paris 343 Casson, Ann 746 Casson, Lewis 388 Castledine, Annie 496, 515, 517 Castle of Perseverance, The (Anon.) 85 Catherine Brown, The Converted Cherokee (by ‘A Lady’) 257– 258, 260 Catley, Ann 213 Cavalcade of America [radio] ‘Experiment in Humanity’ 446 ‘Uncle Eury’s Dollar’ 446 Cavendish, Dominic 748–752 Cavendish, Margaret 82, 83, 151–172

Apocriphal [sic] Ladies, The 168 Convent of Pleasure, The 161, 167 Female Academy, The 168 Humourous [sic] Lovers, The (published under the name of William Cavendish) 151 New Blazing World, A 153, 158 Sociable Letters 151–172 ‘Letter 195’ 83, 155 Youth’s Glory and Death’s Banquet 168 Cecchini, Orsola Posmoni 107, 113 Cecchini, Pier Maria 113, 121 Fruits of Modern Comedy, The 121 Centlivre, Susannah 198 Basset Table, The 194 Busy Body, The 193 Love at a Venture 198 Central School of Art, London 490 Central School of Speech and Drama, London 386 Century Theatre, London 383 Cervantes, Miguel de 656 Il Teatrino delle Meraviglie (The Puppet Show of Miracles) 689, 691 CETEC (Centro Europeo Teatro e Carcere Dentro/Fuori San Vittore–European Centre of Theatre in Prison Inside/ Outside San Vittore) 679–697 Chakiar, Anjana S. 612 Chakyar, Ammannur Madhava 591, 595, 596, 598–601 Chakyar, Kuttan 593, 596 Chakyar, Mani Madhava 591 Chakyar, Painkulam Rama 590–594, 595, 596, 599, 602, 604, 605 Chakyar, Parameswara 591 Chakyar, Sangeet 603 Chapter Arts, Cardiff 493, 501 Charke, Charlotte 187, 191, 196, 199 Narrative 199 Charles, Howard 749

814     Index

Chase, Pauline 391 Chatzidakis, Manos 363, 367 Chatzikyriakos-Gikas, Nikos 363 Cheek by Jowl 712, 750 Cheeseman, Peter 536 Chekhov, Anton 397, 406, 642 Cherry Orchard, The 409, 413, 419 Ivanov 413 Seagull, The 413 Three Sisters, The 413, 416, 720 Uncle Vanya 413 Chekhov, Mikhail 398, 401, 403, 406, 408, 409, 411, 413, 418, 420, 421 Chelmis, Giorgos 364 Chen, Larisa 708 Chenault, Lawrence 430, 436 Chéry, Jules Mademoiselle Rachel en Amérique 287 Chiaureli, Mikhail Vow, The 410 Chichester Festival Theatre 747, 750 Child, Lydia Mary Quadroon, The 263 Childress, Alice 446 Childress, Alvin 445, 446 Chitose Beiha 339 Christie, Agatha 648 Arsenic and Old Lace 433 Christomanos, Constantinos 358, 363, 364 Christou, Giorgia 518 Church, Jonathan 560 Church, Marielaine 560 Churchill, Caryl 510, 523, 733 Cibber, Colley 193, 198 Careless Husband, The 194 Cibber, Susannah 191, 195 Cibber, Theophilus 196 Cinzia (San Vittore Globe performer) 688, 690

CITR (International Centre for Theatrical Research), Paris 491 Cixous, Hélène 511, 514, 517, 628 Claid, Emilyn 493 Claretie, Jules 297–299 Profils de théâtre 297 Clay, Bertha M. Beyond Pardon 445 Clifford, Jo 572, 794, 797–799, 798 God’s New Frock 798 Gospel according to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, The 797–799 Clive, Kitty 186, 191, 192 Clough, Inez 430 Cluchey, Rick 684 Cochrane Theatre, London 576 Coffee, Lenore J., and William Joyce Cowan Family Portrait 445, 446 Cole, Bob, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson Red Moon, The 432 Coleman, George 218 Coleman, Mrs 206 Collier, Constance 382, 388, 389 Collier, Constance, and Ivor Novello Rat, The 388 Collier, Jeremy 219, 222, 224 Colman, Olivia 643 Colored Actors and Performers Association 444 Colville, Billy Mozzle 508 Colville, Sue 524 Comédie de Caen 498 Comédie-Française, Paris 297, 299, 508 Comic Spinster. See American Theatrical Types Commedia dell’arte 81, 82, 83, 107– 122, 156, 159–160, 162–164, 168–172, 182, 188, 406, 680 Il teatro delle favole rappresentative 116

Index    815

L’Abbattimento di Zani (The Defeat of the Zany) 116 La fortunata Isabella (The Fortunate Isabella) 117 L’amante ingrate (The Ungrateful Lover) 116 La pazzia d’Isabella (Isabella’s Madness) 114, 121 La schiava (The Slave) 117 Li due finti zingari (The Two Disguised Gypsies) 117 Li due Trappolini (The Two Trappolini) 116 Principe tirreno (The Tyrant Prince) 112 Recueil Fossard 117 Common Ground Sign Dance Company 558 Compton, Edward 385 Compton, Fay 382, 384–386 Compton, Fay, and Viola Compton 386 Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art 386 Compton, Viola 386 Compton, Virginia 385 Compton Comedy Company 385 Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators (CWTDA) 510, 512, 643 CWTDA Conference Survey (1983) 512 Congreve, William Love for Love 178, 205–212, 208, 211, 217, 218, 220 Way of the World, The 178, 207–225, 219, 248 Connelly, Marc Green Pastures 440 Conning, Lueen. See Ndlovu, Malika Connolly, Janice 454, 531–545, 534, 550, 552–555 Convent drama 82, 86–94, 160–162

Cook, Will Marion 433–436, 447 Bandana Land 432 Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk 431 Jes Lak White Folks 431 Cooper, Gladys 382, 383, 388, 389 Copeau, Jacques 363 Cornwell, Charlotte 739, 740 Coronation Street (ITV) 523 Corpus Christi pageant cycles 82, 85–86, 95–101 Chester Cycle 85 Assumption of the Virgin Mary, The 95, 161 Coventry Cycle 97 Massacre of the Innocents, The 90 N-Town Cycle Announcement to the Three Maries 98 Appearance to Mary Magdalen, The 98 Assumption of the Virgin Mary, The 95 York Cycle 85, 100 Assumption of the Virgin Mary, The 95 Coryat, Thomas 119 Council of Castile (1587) 181 Court masques (England) 4, 128–129, 133–134, 139–143, 153–154, 211 Courtneidge, Cicely 387, 390–391 Courtneidge, Robert 390 Covent Garden Theatre, London 195 Coventry Margaret of Anjou’s Entry Pageant 98–99 Coward, Noel 642 ‘Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington’ 380 Private Lives 637 Cowley, Hannah 206, 207 Belle’s Stratagem, The 205

816     Index

Cowley, Tara 668–670 Cox, Laverne 781 Coysh, John 189 Coysh, Mrs 196 Cricke, Mathieu 163 Crimson Skull, The [film] 430 Crispino, Gilberta 693 Croll, Doña 719 Cross, Merry 559, 562, 563 Cross, Mrs 193 Crown, Cheryl 539 Crowne, John Sir Courtly Nice 198 Crucible Theatre, Sheffield 750 Crutchley, Kate 496 Crying Game, The [film] 793 Cuka, Frances 517 Cultural Olympiad, London 2012 735 Cunning Stunts 508, 510 Curtis, Jess 524 Cusack, Sinead 747–748 Custis, George Washington Parke Pocahontas 259–260 Custom/Practice 730, 738, 740–741, 745, 749 Cuzzoni, Francesca 190, 191 CWTDA. See Conference of Women Theatre Directors and Administrators (CWTDA) Cytheris. See Volumnia Cytheris (‘Cytheris’) D

DAH Teatar, Belgrade 502, 503 Daly, Augustin 248, 305–325 Daly, Joseph 311 Daly’s Theatre Company 248, 305–325 Daly’s Theatre, Covent Garden, London 307 Daly’s Theatre, New York 306, 313, 314, 321, 323 Damer, Anne 179, 233–234, 241–243

Dana (San Vittore Globe performer) 691, 694, 696–697 Danceteria, New York 467 Dane, Clemence 383, 384 Dangazele, Nobulali 763 Daniel, Samuel Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, The 139–143 Daniels, Ngarimu 708 Daniels, Sarah Masterpieces 511 Dare, Phyllis 387 Dare, Zena 391 Darnley, Lyn 523 Daubeny, Peter 508 Davenant, William 177, 183, 189, 206 Siege of Rhodes, The 206 Davenport, Butler Justice 436 Davids, Nadia 620, 621, 626, 627, 629 At Her Feet 620, 629 Cissie 626 Davis, Henrietta Vinton 427 Davis, Ossie 439 Dediet, Mlle 161 Dee, Ruby 433 Deffebach, Lewis Oolaita, Or, The Indian Heroine 256, 257 Deikun, Lidiya 398, 405, 408, 409 Dekker, Thomas, and Thomas Middleton Roaring Girl, The 513 Delysia, Alice 384 Dench, Judi 582, 636, 638, 639–640, 642, 649, 650 Dennis, John 184 Derby Playhouse 496, 497 Desiosi troupe 113 Diana, Antonella 503 Dickens, Charles 647 Cricket on the Hearth, The 406 Dickinson, Emily 648

Index    817

Didion, Joan Year of Magical Thinking, The 646 Dietrich, Marlene 648, 651 Digby Mary Magdalene (Anon.) 99–100 Dike, Fatima 618 Dikii, A.D. 403, 405, 421 Dionisotti, Paola 496, 735, 738 Dionysia (Athenian festival) 11, 12 Dionysia (Roman performer) 31, 41 Dionysus 8, 11, 12, 14–15, 31, 41, 42, 53, 55, 56, 66, 67 ‘Dionysus’ wife’ 14–15 Dirisu, Sope 744, 750 Dixon, James 224 Doche, Eugénie 294 Doctor Who. See BBC TV Doggett, Thomas 195 Dominic, Zoe 641 Donmar Warehouse, London 511, 513, 730, 735, 739, 750, 768 Donoghue, D. Malinda 440 Doo Cot puppet theatre company UltraViolet 499 Dope St Jude 621, 623 Dorn, Francelle 719 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Brothers Karamazov, The 413 Humiliated and Insulted 406 Double-Edge 521 Douglas, Lewis 435 Douglas, Marion 435 Downs, Marie 429 Downton Abbey. See Fellowes, Julian Drama Studio, London 498 Draper, Ruth 443 Ruth Draper’s Monologues 646 Drew, John 313, 321 Drew, Mrs John 321, 323 Dreyfus, James 497 Drill Hall, London 493, 496, 571

Drury Lane Theatre, London 193, 195, 200, 307 Drury Lane theatre company 192, 193, 195, 198 Dryden, John All For Love 722 Du Bois, W.E.B. 425, 426 Duchess of Portsmouth’s Players 196 Duke of York’s Company 177 Dukes, Ricky 655, 657, 659, 662 Dumas, Alexandre (the Elder) Memoirs 283 Dumas, Alexandre (the Younger) 300, 301, 359, 360 Camille 433 La dame aux camélias 248, 281–283, 289–291, 294, 300–302, 310, 359, 360 Du Maurier, Gerald 388 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 427 Duncan, Isadora 306 Dunderdale, Sue 511, 512, 523 Dunham, Katharine 441 Duplessis, Marie 289, 294 Dury, Ian ‘Spasticus Autisticus’ 574 Duse, Eleonora 248, 307–308, 310, 324, 414, 433 Duval, Georges Prayer for Life 406, 408, 409 E

Early, Fergus 493 Ebrahim, Vinette 621 Eccleston, Christopher 748 Ecloga 39–40 Edgar, David 541 Edinburgh Festival 496, 798 Edwards, Rob 750 Eggonopoulos, Nikos 363 Egyiawan, Kurt 750

818     Index

Eisenstein, Sergei 402, 404–405, 405 Ivan the Terrible 400, 404–405 Elefthera Skini (Free Stage), Athens 363 Elizabeth I 4, 82, 83, 127–138, 139, 141–145, 148, 182, 487 Ellinikon Odeon 368 Ellinikos Dramatikos Thiassos Athinon 359 Ellis, Evelyn 430 Elrington, Mrs 191 Eltahawy, Mona 723 Emeh, Lizzie 574 Emperor Jones, The [film] 442 Emphasis 31 English, Rose 493 English National Opera 528 English Shakespeare Company 719 English Touring Theatre 750 Ensler, Eve Vagina Monologues, The 576 Epiphany plays 161, 162 Equal Representation for Actresses (ERA) vi, 643, 734 Equity (UK Actors’ Union) 382, 384, 661, 756 Professionally Made/Professionally Paid Campaign 661 ERA. See Equal Representation for Actresses (ERA) Ermler, Fridrikh 410 Great Citizen, The 410 Esguerra, Diane 517 Sweet Dreams 517 Esperonnière, Antoine de l’ 163 Espert, Núria 735 Essiedu, Paapa 749, 752 Etherege, George Man of Mode, The 177 Etlinger Dramatic School, London 386 Eucharis 38–39 Euripides Bacchae, The 55, 67 Cyclops 26

Electra 659 Helen 26 Hippolytus 55, 67 Iphigenia among the Taurians 26 Medea 13 Trojan Women, The 13, 568–570, 659 Eva Jessye Choir 443 Evaristo, Bernardine 452, 453, 521–528 Girl, Woman, Other 528 Moving Through 524 Tiger Teeth Clenched Not to Bite 525 Evaristo, Bernardine, and Patricia St. Hilaire Pyeyucca 525 Silhouette 525 Evaristo, Bernardine, Patricia St. Hilaire, Paulette Randall, Barbara Robinson, and Joan Williams Coping 524 Evelyn, John 155, 158 Evelyn Preer/Edward Thompson Company. See Lafayette Players Everyday Sexism Project 755 Explore, Bristol 500 F

Fabian Society Women’s Group 382 Fabre, Jan 495 Faction Theatre Company 750 Factory of the Eccentric Actor 402 Faiko, Alexei Man with a Briefcase, A 420 Fairbanks, Tash Foreign Correspondence, A 565–566 Private View, A 489, 558–559, 562–564, 565 Fairbrother, Sydney 389 Family Guy [film] 793 Farmer, Kylie 709

Index    819

Farquhar, George Beaux’ Stratagem, The 236 Recruiting Officer, The 192, 193 Sir Harry Wildair 194 Farr, Florence 379 Farren, Eliza 179, 233–234, 237–239, 240–243, 242 Fearon, Ray 749, 752 Fedeli troupe 114 Federal Theatre Project (FTP) 430, 441, 447, 448 Negro Units 239, 440, 445, 448 Negro Youth Theatre 445–446 FeEast Festival (London, 2008) 502 Feinstein, Elaine Lear’s Daughters 513 Feldenkrais, Moshé 491 Feldenkrais Method 524 Félix, Élisabeth Rachel (‘Mlle Rachel’) 248, 285–299, 289, 301 Fellowes, Julian Downton Abbey 638, 640 Felton, Sibille, Abbess of Barking 90 Female Wits, The (by ‘F. M.’) 194 Ferré, Marie 162 Festival Mix Brasil (2017) 793 Festival of Free Expression, Paris (May 1964) 479 Ffrangcon-Davies, Gwen 389 Ffrangcon-Davies Marda Vanne Shakespeare Company 389 Fielding, Henry 196 Fiennes, Ralph 748, 749 Filippi, Rosina 386 Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool [film] 644 Filter Theatre Company 749 Fine, Nic 549 Finley, Karen 452, 455–456, 457, 464–473, 471, 482 ‘chocolate-smeared woman’ 464, 466, 469, 472 Constant State of Desire, The 467, 467–469

‘Hate Yellow’ 468 Lamb of God Hotel 472 Reality Shows, The (incl. The Jackie Look) 472 Shock Treatment 467, 468 Theory of Total Blame, The 470–471, 471 ‘Refrigerator’ 468 We Keep Our Victims Ready 467, 469–470, 470 ‘St. Valentine’s Massacre’ 469 Fiorillo, Silvio 113 Fishel, Simon 500 Fisher, Carrie 646 Wishful Drinking 646 Fisher, Margaret 476 Fisher, Rick 495 Fitzmaurice, Kevin 729 Flaminia, Barbara (‘Ortensia’) 107, 110–112 Flanagan, Hallie 439 Fleck, John 465 Flemish actresses 160, 163, 168 Fletcher, Jamie 794 Fletcher, John 167. See also Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher Spanish Priest, The 406, 409 Flood, Mik 501 Flute Theatre, Trafalgar Studios, London 750 Fo, Dario 508 Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay 508 Woman Alone, A 561 Fokas, Antonis 363 Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Washington DC 719 Fonda, Jane 635–636, 646 Evening with Jane Fonda, An 646 Ford, John ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore 670 Forrest, Edwin 254 Forum Theatre. See Boal, Augusto Fost, Elizabeth 560 Foy, Claire 635

820     Index

Francesca (San Vittore Globe performer) 691 Franceschild, Donna 510 Franckom, Sarah 738 Franco, Veronica 110 Frankland, Emma 68, 247–248, 581–582, 584, 775–803, 793 ‘I’m a Transgender Woman, Why Shouldn’t I Play Hamlet?’ 782, 799 ‘None of Us is Yet a Robot’ project 793, 800 Doodle 800 e g g / b o x 800 Hearty 800 Language 800 Rituals for Change 777, 783, 793, 800 Franklin, Aretha 571 Frederick Douglass Players 434 Freeman, Carlotta 429, 445 French, Marilyn 511, 513, 517 French actresses (16th century) 162, 181, 182 French actresses (17th century) 168 Freud, Sigmund 517 ‘Dora’ 517 Frölichin, Barbara 162 Fuji Yōko 334 Fuller, Loie 339–340, 344 Furse, Anna, and Jack Klaff UltraViolet 499 Furse, Anna 451–453, 487–504, 488, 523, 558, 561, 582 Anna Furse Performs an Anatomy Act 487–488, 488, 504 Art of A.R.T., The 500 Athletes of the Heart 500 Augustine (Big Hysteria) 496–498 Don Juan. Who?/Don Juan. Kdo? 501–502 Glass Body: Reflecting on Becoming Transparent 501 Gorgeous 499

Helen Jives 494 Kaspar: Speech Torture 499 Magdalena Project 493 Making Babies (BBC TV) 500 My Glass Body (radio) 501 Sea/Woman 503 Strokes 496 Theatre of Our Bodies 488 When We Were Birds 503 Yerma’s Eggs 500 Fürst, Edmondos 363 G

GableStage, Miami 705 Galeria Copiola 42 Gallus, Cornelius 32, 36 Garland, Patrick 648 Garrick, David 187, 195, 199, 200, 239, 702 Katherine and Petruchio 321 Gaskell, Elizabeth Life of Charlotte Brontë, The 293 Gaul, Kate 715–716, 715 Gautier, Théophile 286 Gay, John 191, 198 Beggar’s Opera, The 178, 191, 198, 207, 212, 214–219, 215 Polly 178, 207, 214, 218–219 Gay Sweatshop 494, 508, 513, 524 Gearing, Nigel Down and Out in Paris and London 498 Geijtustuza 341 geisha 330, 333, 337, 339, 340, 342, 345, 346 Gellendré, Herbert V. 438 Gelosi troupe 114, 116, 120, 182 Gems, Pam 511, 517, 523 Danton Affair, The 517 Marlene 648 Snow Palace, The 517 Genet, Jean Maids, The 494

Index    821

German actresses (17th century) 183 Germanova, Maria 414 German Princess, The (Anon.) 184 Gershwin, George 433 Porgy and Bess 433 Summertime 433 Ghir, Kulvinder 749, 752 Giatsintova, Sofia 354, 355, 398, 399–411, 418, 421 Alone with Memory 406 Life of the Theatre, The 406 Gibson, William Mona Lisa Overdrive 647 Gielgud, John 636 Gilbert, Mercedes 355, 427, 433, 440–444 Ma Johnson’s Rooming House [radio serial] 441 One Woman Theatre 442–443, 448 ‘Excursion Day’ 442 ‘Guest of Honor’ 442 ‘Harlem Street Scene, A’ 442 ‘Harlem Street Scenes’ 442 ‘In a Courtroom’ 442 ‘I’m Glad I ain’t no Hand to Talk’ 442 ‘Morning in the Country’ 442 ‘Sally’s First Letter Home’ 442 ‘Three Women in His Life’ 442 ‘Who Was Dat Fust Monkey’s Ma?’ 442 Songs ‘Decatur Street Blues’ 440 ‘Got the World in a Jug’ 440 ‘They Also Ran Blues’ 440 Gilbert, Mrs G.H. 321 Gill, Maud 383 Gilligan, Griffyn 787–788 Gilmour, Suzy 494, 496, 498 Gilpin, Charles 428, 430, 436, 439 Gippius, Zinaida Green Ring, The 412 GITIS (Russian Academy of Theatre Arts) 399, 420

Glaspell, Susan Woman’s Honor, A 445 Glass, David 570 Gleave, Jo 554 Glebov, Anatoly Inga 420 Glennie, Evelyn 569 Globe to Globe Project 702 Gluck, Christoph Orfeo ed Euridice 332, 342 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von Faust 433 Gogol, Nikolai 402 Goldoni, Carlo 406 Mistress of the Inn, The 307, 411, 417, 419 Goldschmidt, Miriam 491, 523 Goldsmith, Oliver 206, 207 She Stoops to Conquer 205 Gone with the Wind [film] 383 Gonsalves, Aileen 765–768 Goodbody, Buzz 492 Gopalakrishnan, K.K. 587, 590, 591, 601–604 Gopalakrishnan, Sudha 597 Gorky, Maxim 404 Baby (The Women) 406, 409 Vassa Zheleznova 400, 404, 406 Gotovtsev, Vladimir 409 Govender, Ronnie 618 Graeae 454, 489, 557–576 Grahame, Gloria 644 Great Citizen, The [film]. See Ermler, Fridrikh Greater London Arts 521, 528 Greater London Council 521 Greek Actors’ Union 363, 370, 371 Greek drama (classical) 3–5, 11, 15, 16 Greek New Comedy 14, 16 Greek tragedy 659 Green, Paul 434 House of Connelly 436 In Abraham’s Bosom 433, 434, 436 Roll, Sweet Chariot 436

822     Index

Greenhalgh, Jill 493 Green Pastures [film] 442 Greenwich+Docklands International Festival 573 Greenwich Company (1710) 193 Greenwich Theatre, London 657 Greenwich Village Theatre, New York 436 Greenwich Young People’s Theatre, London 522 Greer, Germaine 511, 514, 515, 639, 800 Greet, Ben Academy of Acting 386 Greig, Noël 494 Greig, Tamsin 670, 748 Greville, Fulke Mustapha 155 Griboyedov, Alexander Woe from Wit 405 Grin and Tonic 708 Grotowski, Jerzy 452, 492–493, 493, 494, 680 Group Theatre, New York 436, 438 Guthrie, Tyrone 746 Gwynn, Nell 185–187, 213–214 Gzovskaya, Olga 397, 417, 419 H

Hagesichora 10 Haig, Mark 569 Halévy, Ludovic 299 Half Moon Theatre, London 508, 514 Hall, Adelaide 433 Hallet, Sylvia 495 Hames, Mary 629 Reclaiming the P… Word 629 Hamilton, Cicely 391 Hamilton, Harry, and Norman Foster Savage Rhythm 445 Hammerstein, Oscar 431

Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, New York 431 Hammond, Lisa 570 Hampstead Theatre, London 518 Hanako 249, 339, 342, 347 Handel, George Alessandro 190 Handke, Peter Kaspar 491, 499 Hands, Terry 733, 734, 736 Happy Girls [vaudeville act] 427 Hara Nobuko 335 Hara Seiko 335 Hardy, Sara 523 Hare, Lucas 730 Hare, Walter Ben Dream of Queen Esther, A 445 Hariharan, Athira 612 Harlem Experimental Theatre (HET) 437 Harlem People’s Art Group 434 Harlem School of the Arts, Children’s Theater 435 Harlem Suitcase Theatre 444 Harrington-Odedra, Gavin 655–674, 666 Harris, Edna Mae 443 Harris, Ruth Children, The 526 Cripple, The 526 Hart, David 532, 536, 537 Hastie, Rob 739–740 Hatoum, Mona 494 Hauptmann, Gerhardt Festival of Peace, The 406 Hawking, Stephen 574 Hayes, Helen 433 Hearth Centre, The 545, 545–546, 548 Heart n Soul 574 Heijermans, Herman Wreck of the Hope, The 406, 408 Helen Jives. See Furse, Anna Helen of Troy 769

Index    823

Heliodorus Aethiopian Story 28 Helladia 31, 43 Hellas 43 Hellman, Lillian Little Foxes, The 433, 434, 441, 637 Searching Wind, The 441 Watch on the Rhine 406 Hemmings, Bradley 558, 573–574 Henrietta Maria (Queen Consort to Charles I) 82, 83, 128, 142, 143–148, 153, 154, 166, 167, 211 Hentschel, Irene 383 Hepburn, Katherine 717 Hepp, Alexandre 300 Herakleides 40 Hernandez, Juano 436, 445 Herne, Crystal 436 Herodas Mimiamb 5 28 Herschfield, Harry 441 Hesitate and Demonstrate 494 Heyward, DuBose Porgy 433, 436, 437, 445 Heywood, Donald How Come Lawd? 441 Heywood, Thomas Apology for Actors 164 Hibiya Concert Hall 343 Hicks, Greg 750 Hicks, Seymour 388 Higgins, Clare 719 Hildegard of Bingen 82, 86, 88–89, 161 Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) 88–89, 161 Scivias 89 Hildreth, Richard Slave, The, or Memoirs of Archy Moore 263 Himid, Lubaina 522 Hitchcock, Alfred Downhill 388

Hodgkinson, John 750 Hogan, Ernest 431 Hogg, Edward 750 Holman, David Peacemaker 567 Holt, Thelma 498 Homer Iliad, The 10, 64, 67 Odyssey, The 10, 26, 67, 769 Hong, Jess 713 Honoré, Livret d’ Match Between Two Fires, A 418 Hopkins, Edwin 446 Back from the Wars 445, 446 Hopkins, Pauline Out of Bondage 427 Urlina the African Princess 427 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 30, 33–34, 38 Satires 33–34 Hormone Imbalance 523 Hôtel de Bourgogne Playhouse, Paris 181 Houseman, John 439 Hoxton Hall 522 Hrotsvit of Gandersheim 82, 86–88, 89, 161 Abraham 86, 88 Calimachus 86, 87 Dulcitius 86, 87 Gallicanus 86, 88 Paphnutius 86–88 Sapientia 86–88 Hrs, Zeljko 501–502 Hughes, Holly 465, 472, 473 Hughes, Langston For This We Fight 443 Mulatto 433, 436, 439–441 Hughes, Margaret v, 206 Hughes, Ted Conference of the Birds, The 491 Hugo, Victor Man Who Laughs, The 403, 404 Hulbert, Jack 390

824     Index

Hummert, Frank, and Anne Hummert Our Gal Sunday [radio] 446 Hunt, Ava 567 Hunter, Kathryn 570, 571–572 Hurdiss, Emily-Rose 670 Huret, Jules 298, 299 Hutt, Rosamunde 499 Hyers, Anna, and Emma Hyers 427 Hytner, Nicholas 730

Irving, Henry 310, 324, 388 Isidorus 32, 33 Ivanov, Vlesovod Armoured Train 14–69 414 Ivan the Terrible [film]. See Eisenstein, Sergei Iyer, Rama 601 J

I

Ibsen, Henrik 360, 397 Doll’s House, A 310, 341, 401, 408 Hedda Gabler 310 John Gabriel Borkman 310 Lady from the Sea, The 502–503 Rosmersholm 310 ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), London 494, 495, 496, 511, 522 Ichikawa Kumehachi 332 ILEA. See Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Impact 494 Imperial Art Players 445 Imperial Theatre, Tokyo 335, 337, 340, 342 Improbable Fictions 656 Imrie, Celia 646 Laughing Matters 646 Incontroazzionne Festival, Sicily 496 Indian Emperor, The (Anon.) 196 Indian Maiden. See American Theatrical Types Ingram, Rex 441 Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) 490 International Women’s Theatre, Melkweg 525 Internet Movie Database (IMDB) 430 Interplay Theatre, Leeds 558 Ira Aldridge Guild 434

Jackman, Isaac All the World’s a Stage 217–218, 223–224 Jackson, Angus 743, 743 Jackson, Glenda 390, 511, 730, 735–736, 738, 750, 751 Jackson, Janet 790 Jacobs, Harriet Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 266–267 Jacobs, Sally 491, 497 James, Nikki M. 709 James, Orlando 750 James, Paula 671, 673 James Bond film franchise 638 Janin, Jules 294, 300 Janney, Leon 441, 442 Japanese Revue 249, 331–332, 335– 338, 347. See also Takarazuka Revue Miyako Odori 337 Jayanthi, C.K. 594 Jeck, Phil 493 Jefferson, Joseph 309 Jeffreys, Stephen Clink, The 496 Jenkins, Ron 682, 685, 689, 691 Jennings, Gertrude 383, 389, 390 Jephta, Amy 582, 617–629 Kristalvlakte 624 Jerome, Jerome K. 312 Jesson, Paul 744 Jissen-jogakkō 331

Index    825

John Henry, Black River Giant [radio series] 436 John of Ephesus Lives of Eastern Saints 31 Johnson, J. Rosamond 432 Mr. Lode of Koal 428 Johnson, James Weldon 432 Johnson, Samuel 187, 746–747 Jolly, George 183 Jones, George Tecumseh 256 Jones, Grace 717 Jones, Inigo 140, 710 Jones, Martin 442 Jones, Sissieretta Black Patti Musical Comedy Company 427 Black Patti’s Troubadours 427 Jones, Venezuela, Venezuella, or Vanzella. See Jones, Venzella Jones, Venzella, and Alvin Childress Child of the King, A 445 Jones, Venzella 355, 427, 444–446 ‘Songs of Valor’ 444 Venzella Jones Repertory Group 445, 446, 448 Jonson, Ben 137, 167 Bartholomew Fair 194 Every Man out of His Humour 137 First Folio 656 Masque of Beauty, The 140 Masque of Blackness, The 140, 141 Jordan, Dora 179, 187, 200, 239 Judith (Anon.) 161 Julia Nemesis 41 Junction 88 [film] 433 Junction Avenue 618 Jupitus, Phill 750 K

Kabuki 249, 329, 332–333, 336, 338, 339, 348

Onnagata 513 Onna Kabuki 249, 331, 332–333, 334, 338, 346 Kabuki Theatre, Tokyo 343 Kachalov Group 413 Kajiwara Kajō 334 Kalakshetra Manipur 758–759 Draupadi 758–759 Kalamandalam Girija 582, 587, 588, 589, 592–595, 598, 600, 603, 604–605, 611 Kalamandalam Gopi 612 Kalamandalam Haritha 601 Kalamandalam Krishnendu 589, 592, 599–601, 603, 603–604, 604 Kalamandalam Prasanthi 601, 604 Kalamandalam Rama Chakyar 590, 591, 594, 595, 600 Kalamandalam Rateesh Bhas 589 Kalamandalam Resmi 604 Kalamandalam Sailaja 592, 594, 600, 603 Kalamandalam Sangeetha 598, 599, 601, 602, 604 Kalamandalam Sindhu 598, 600, 604, 612 Kalamandalam V.K.K. Hariharan 596, 598, 612 Kalukango, Joaquina 719 Kanda Theatre, Tokyo 332, 333 Kane, Sarah 514, 575 4.48 Psychosis 575 Kantor, Tadeusz Dead Class 495 Kapetanakis, Elias, and Nikolaos Laskaris Open-Air Athens 361 Kaprow, Allan 477 Kapur, Shekhar Elizabeth 649 Golden Age, The 649 Karezi, Tzeni 372 Kartyayani 607

826     Index

Kasugano Yachiyo 336 Kathakali 582, 585–612 Balivadham (The Killing of Bali) 606 Dakshayagam (Daksha’s Sacrifice) 608 Kalyanasaugandhikam (The Flower of Good Fortune) 606 Kiratam (The Hunter) 611 Toranayuddham (The Battle at the Garden Gate) 606 Katherine of Sutton, Abbess of Barking 82, 89, 90–94, 161 Kawai Dance 337 Kawai Kōichirō 337 Kawai Sumiko 335 Kawakami Jidōgekidan (Children’s Theatre) 340 Kawakami Otojirō 339–340, 342 Kawakami Sadayakko 249, 339–340, 342, 343, 345, 347 Kawakami Theatre, Tokyo 340 Kay, Jackie 522 Chiaroscura 526 Every Bit of It 513 Kaye, Letty 559, 562 Kaylan, Mine 496 Keaton, Diane 639 Let’s Just Say it Wasn’t Pretty 639 Keith, Penelope 636 Kelly, Jude 514 Kemble, Roger 199 Kemble, Sarah 199 Kemp, Polly 731, 732 Kendal, Madge 384 Kennedy, Helena 514 Kennedy, Peter Other than Art’s Sake 460 Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company 749 Kenward, Allan Cry Havoc 434 Kerala Kalamandalam 587, 590–594, 595, 596, 598, 599–602, 604, 612

Keskidee 522 Khan, Iqbal 705 Kidman, Nicole 634, 635 Killigrew, Thomas 177, 183 Parson’s Wedding, The 166–167 Kimura Tokiko 335 Kingston, Gertrude 383, 386 Kingsway Theatre, London 383 King’s Company 177, 195, 196, 206 Kinnear, Rory 748 Kirkland, Jack 441 Tobacco Road 441 Kirkpatrick, Sidney 430 Kirshon, Vladimir Bread 414 Kishida Kunio 340 Kitchen, The, New York 467, 470 Klaff, Jack 499 Klonis, Kleovoulos 363 Knebel, Maria 398, 399 Knepp, Mary 185 Knight, Beverley 574 ‘I am What I Am’ 574 Knight, Frances Maria 193 Knipper-Chekhova, Olga 397, 413, 414 Knowles, Alison 477 Knox, John 134–135 First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, The 134–135 Koch, Ulrich Susanna 162 Kommissarzhevskaya, Vera 412 Komsomol Theatre, Moscow 400, 406, 409 Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts 709 Koonen, Alisa 407 Koopman, Kelly-Eve 621 Kotopouli, Chryssoula 362 Kotopouli, Eleni 362 Kotopouli, Fotini 362

Index    827

Kotopouli, Marika 353, 358, 361, 362–369 Drama School 363 Kotopoulis, Dimitrios 359, 362 Koun, Karolos 358, 363 Kozintsev, Grigori 402 Krishnattam 605 Kumar, Anil 604 Kutiyattam 582, 585–612 Ascharyachudamani (The Wondrous Crest Jewel) 598 Asokavanikankam (The Act of the Asoka Garden) 598, 600 Balivadham (The Killing of Bali) 594, 604, 606 Jatayuvadham (The Killing of Jatayu) 594 Parnasalankam (The Act of the Leafy Hut) 598 Surpanakhankam (The Surpanakha Act) 593, 594, 598 Bhagavadajjukam (The Farce of the Saint/Courtesan) 594, 600, 604 Naganamdam (Joy of the Serpents) 594 Subhadra-Dhananjayam (The Love Story of Subhadra and Arjuna) 590, 593, 594, 601 Svapna-Vasavadatta (The Dream of Vasavadatta) 594 Tapati-Samvaranam (The Love Story of Tapati and Samvarana) 588, 589, 601 Toranayuddham (The Battle at the Garden Gate) 594, 600, 606 Venisamharam (Tying the Hair in a Braid) 604 Kutiyattam (nangiar kuttu) 585–612 Lord Ganesha’s Story 597 Lord Krishna’s Story 591, 592, 594–597, 600, 603, 604

‘Kamsashapam’ (‘The Curse on Kamsa’) 595 ‘Kamsavadham’ (‘The Killing of Kamsa’) 604, 612 ‘Vrindavanavarnanam’ (‘Entry into Vrindavana’) 594, 595 Nangiar kuttu acting manuals Kannakicharitham (Kannaki’s Story) 597 Srikrishnacharitham Nangyarammakkoothu (A Nangiar’s ‘Playing’ of Lord Krishna’s Story) 591, 593, 594, 598 Sriramacharitham (Lord Rama’s Story) 597 Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy, The 670 Kyle, Barry 742 Kyveli. See Adrianou, Kyveli L

Laberius, Decimus 17–18, 25, 28–30 Alexandrian Woman, The 29 Anna Perenna 29–30 Colourer, The 29 Etruscan Woman, The 29 Festival at the Crossroads, The 29 Fireman, The 29 Lake Avernus 29 Maiden, The 29 Salt-Dealer, The 29 Seamstress, The 29 Sisters, The 29 Weavers, The 29 Woman of Cythera, The 29 La Boite Theatre, Brisbane 709 LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) 470 Lady Gaga 119 Lafayette Players 429–431, 432, 433, 447, 448

828     Index

Lafayette Stock Company. See Lafayette Players Lafayette Theatre, Harlem 429, 431, 436 Lahr, John, and Elaine Stritch Elaine Stritch At Liberty 646 Laird, Martina 732, 738, 740–741, 743–746, 743, 747, 749, 752 Lamb, Kate 667 Lambe, Rosanna 670, 672 LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art) 729–730, 732, 752 La Nave dei Folli (San Vittore men’s company) 685 Langtry, Lillie 295–296, 296 Lansbury, Angela 636 Lansley, Jacky 493 La Plante, Lynda Prime Suspect 644 Lapotaire, Jane 511 Lapper, Alison 574 Last Action Hero [film] 638 Lavery, Bryony 510, 515, 517, 537 Female Trouble 537 Goliath 515–517 Her Aching Heart 513 Lawrence, Jennifer 635 Lazarus Theatre Company 583, 655–674, 666 Tragedy of Mariam, The 583, 655–674, 666 Learwood, Sue 534, 535, 537, 538, 550 le Brocq, Sara 498 Lecoq, Jacques Tension States method 548 Lee, Auriol 383 Lee, Canada 433, 439, 443 Lee, Hannah 195–196 Lee, Nathaniel Rival Queens, The 190 Legouvé, Ernest, and Eugène Scribe Adrienne Lecouvreur 288, 360

Lehmann, Lilli 342 Leigh, Antony 224 Leigh, Elinor 224 Leigh, Elizabeth 195 Leigh, Mike 537 Leigh, Vivien 382, 383, 387, 388, 634 Lekas, Amee 620, 621, 624, 625 Dans van die Watermeid (Dance of the Water Nymph) 620, 624, 625 Lekatsas, Nikolaos 358, 359, 361 Lepeniotis, Telemachos 363 Lepusculus sisters 162 Les Musiques Bizarres La Ghéisha et le Samurai (The Geisha and the Warrior) 339 Lester, Adrian 712 Levy, Deborah 510 Clam 496 Heresies 496 Pax 496 Lewes, George Henry 286 Lewis, James 321 Lewis, Tom E., and Michael Kantor King Lear, Shadow King 705 Licensing Act (1737) 196 Life of Aesop 28 Light, John 749 Lilian Baylis Studio Theatre, London 496 Lilina (Maria Alekseyeva) 397, 413, 416 Lincoln Assumption play for Feast of St. Anne 96 St. Anne’s Day pageants 97–98 Lincoln Center, New York 469, 470 Lincoln Theatre, Harlem 428, 429 Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, London 215 Lincoln’s Inn Fields troupe 188 Linley, Esther 503 Little Theatre, Haymarket, London 196 Liverpool Everyman 516

Index    829

Lloyd, Phyllida Donmar Warehouse Shakespeare trilogy 513, 735, 739, 746, 747, 750, 768 London 2012 Paralympic Opening Ceremony 454, 558, 573–575 London Bubble Theatre Company 523, 544, 549 London Disability Arts Forum 558 London Film-Makers’ Co-op 493 London Musicians Collective 493 London Theatre Report (2014). See Society of London Theatres Loose Change Theatre Company 521, 523 Lorca, Federico García 523 House of Bernarda Alba, The 571– 572, 689, 692 Yerma 500 Lowe, Esme 670 Lowe, Stephen 502 Lucas, Jane 193–194 Luckham, Claire 513 Lucrezia of Siena 110 Ludwig, Jeanne 248, 297–300, 301 Lumiere and Son 494 Lumley, Joanna It’s All About Me 646 Lunacharsky, Anatoly (People’s Commissar of Enlightenment) 421 Lyceum Theatre, London 307, 310 Lyly, John 167 Galatea 584, 785–788 Lyubimov-Lanskoi, Yevsei 409 M

McAuliffe, Nichola 516, 517 Macbeth, Fi 549 McCarthy, Lillah 380, 383, 387, 388 McClendon, Rose 355, 427, 430, 433, 435–440, 437, 440

McClendon, Rose, and Bruce Nugent Taxi Fare 437 McCullough, John 308 McCutcheon, Rebecca 656 McDaniel, Hattie 426 McIntosh, Genista 733, 734 McIntosh, Yanna 719 McIntyre, Blanche 748 McIntyre, Clare My Heart’s a Suitcase 511 Mack, Cecil Swing It 430 McKellen, Ian 574, 750 McKen, Rae 738, 740 Mackenzie, Compton 385 Mackenzie, Ruth 497 McKinley Square Theatre, New York 433 McLaughlin, Robert H. Eternal Magdalene, The 434 MacLeish, Archibald Panic 438 McMullan, Tim 749, 750 McNeice, Stephen 670, 671 McQueen, Thelma (‘Butterfly McQueen’) 433, 445 Madden, Richard 749 Maeterlinck, Maurice Bluebird, The 405 Mahābhārata 55, 604, 758 Draupadi sequence 604, 758–759, 759, 764, 771 Maiko 337 Mailman, Deborah 704, 714–715, 716 Mall, Hassan 618 Mallo, Natalia 797, 798 Manchester Royal Exchange 571, 719 Manhattan Opera House 439 Mani Madhava Chakiar Smaraka Gurukulam 598 Manolidou, Vasso 369 Marcus, Frank D., and Bernard Maltin Bamboola 440

830     Index

Marcuson, Ann 517 Margi Amritha 612 Margi Arts Institution 592, 596, 597, 598, 601, 612 Margi Madhu Chakyar 598 Margi Sathi 592, 595, 596–597, 600, 601, 603 acting manuals Kannakicharitham (Kannaki’s Story) 597 Sriramacharitham (Lord Rama’s Story) 597 Margi Visishta 612 Margolyes, Miriam 647 Dickens’ Women 647 Marion, Kitty 380 Market Theatre, Johannesburg 618 Markham, Kika 517 Marlowe, Christopher Edward II 659 Marlowe, Linda 646–647 Marriage, Helen 564 Marshall, Susan 583, 679–697, 681 Martina (San Vittore Globe performer) 683, 686–687, 691 Martinelli, Angelica 113 Martinelli, Drusiano 112, 113, 182 Martinelli, Tristano 113 Martinelli troupe 112–113, 182 Martin Power’s Company, aka the Duke of Grafton’s Players 198 Mason, Libby 524, 565 Massalsky, Pavel 416 Massimilla, Donatella 583, 679–697, 681 Massine, Léonide 490 MAT. See Moscow Art Theatre Matsui Sumako 249, 339, 341–342, 343, 345, 347 May, Edna 391 Maynard, Joan-Ann 526 Mchedelov, Vakhtang 412 Meckler, Nancy 511

Meer, Fathima 618 Melas, Spyros 363, 367 Meldolesi, Claudio 680 Memphis Students Company. See Mitchell, Abbie Menander 61 Arbitration, The 14 Grouch, The (Dyskolos) 14 Woman from Samos, The 14 Menon, Hari 588 Menon, K.P.S. Kathakalirangam (The Kathakali Scene) 607 Menon, Parvathi 611 Menon, Vallathol Narayana 590 Merian, Margareta 162 Merini, Alda 689, 697 Merkouri, Melina 372 Methethwe Lucky Stars 618 #MeToo 3, 493, 554, 635, 651, 755, 756 Metz Mystère de Sainte Catherine 162 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 398, 402, 403, 419, 420 Mhlope, Gcina 618 Michell, Roger Nothing Like a Dame, aka Tea with the Dames 637, 638 Middleton, Thomas Revenger’s Tragedy, The 659, 670 Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham 554 Miles-Wildin, Nicola 574 Millar, Gertie 391 Miller, Emily Joh 787–788 Miller, Graeme 501, 503 Miller, Ruby 382 Miller, Tim 465 Millet, Kate 510 Mirren, Helen 582, 636, 639, 642–643, 644–645, 649–650, 649, 670 Mishima, Yukio Madame de Sade 640

Index    831

Mitchell, Abbie 355, 427, 429, 430, 431–435, 435, 436, 441, 447 Abbie Mitchell Players 434, 448 Abbie Mitchell’s Memphis Students 432 One-woman show about Harriet Tubman 434 Mitchell, Loften 439 Mitic, Maja 502–503 Miura Tamaki 249, 339, 342–343, 347 Mizhavu Kalari 598 Mizunoe Takiko 336 Mladinsko Gledalisce, Ljubljana 501–502 Mnouchkine, Ariane 511 Théâtre Du Soleil 1789 509 Mock, Ed 492 Moders, Mary, aka ‘the German Princess’ 184–185 Mohun, Michael 183 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) Don Juan 490 Moll Cutpurse (Mary Frith) 513 Molloy, Molly 492 Monáe, Janelle 716, 717 Mona Lisa Overdrive 647 MONART (Movimento Nacional de Artistas Trans), Brazil 798 Monckton, Lionel 391 Monroe, Marilyn 634 Monstrous Regiment 509, 510, 537 Montagu, Walter Shepherd’s Paradise, The 147, 154, 166 Montano, Linda 466 Moon Over Harlem [film] 440 Moore, Eva 384 Moore, Kai Harrison 796 Moorehead, Henry Clay Tan-Gó-Ru-A 256, 257 Moreland, Mantan 440 Morgan, Peter

Audience, The 649 Crown, The 649 Queen, The 649 Morgan Dramatic Club 445 Mori Ritsuko 249, 339, 341, 347 Morris, Shona 497 Morrison, Hugh 729–730 Morrison, Jackie 743, 743, 744 Moryson, Fynnes 168 Moscow Art Theatre 354, 397–422, 508 Moscow Art Theatre First Studio (later known as Second Moscow Art Theatre/MAT-2) 397–422 Moscow Art Theatre Studios 397–422 Moscow School for Dramatic Arts 400, 411, 412 Moskvin, Andrei 404 Moskvin, Ivan 411 Mosley, Thomas 430 Moss, Carlton 437 Careless Love 436 Mossoviet (Theatre of Moscow City Council) 400, 404, 409 Moten, Etta 433 Mountfort, Susannah 188 Moving Being 493 Mowatt, Anna Cora Fashion 268–269, 272 Mozeen, Thomas Young Scarron 197 Mrs Brown [film] 649 Mrs Worthington’s Daughters 510 Mrunmaya Centre for Theatrical Research 604 Msomi, Welcome Umubatha 508 Mud Club, New York 494 Mukunda Raja, Manakkulam 590 Munby, Jonathan 747 Munirah 521, 527 Murat, Dimitris 370–371 Murat, Mitsos 363, 365

832     Index

Murdoch, Iris 648 Murphy, Arthur Way to Keep Him, The 242 Murphy, Joe 667 Murray, Lavinia 498 Wax 498 Musa, Omar 712–713 Muse, Clarence 429, 430 Musset, Alfred de 295 Musume-gidayū 249, 331, 332, 333– 334, 347 Myers, Tanya 502 Mynns, Mrs Anne 194, 195 Mystery Plays. See Corpus Christi pageant cycles Mzz Kimberley 788, 790, 792, 799 N

NAG. See Negro Actors Guild Naidoo, Muthal 618 Nair, Appukuttan 596, 597, 601 Nair, Vijayan 605 Nakamura Kasen 332–333, 338 Nakano Hiroko 334 Nambiar, Chathakkudam Krishnan 595 Nambiar, P.K.G. 591 Nambiar, P.K. Narayanan 591, 594, 595 Srikrishnacharitham Nangyarammakkoothu (A Nangiar’s ‘Playing’ of Lord Krishna’s Story) 591, 593, 594, 598 Namboothiri, Sivan. See Padma Shri Kalamandalam Sivan Nambudiri, Haripriya 611 Nambudiri, Kaplingattu 606 Nancy, France St. Barbe 162 Nangiar, Aparna 593, 599 Nangiar, Rukmini 592

Nangiar, Usha 595–596, 597, 598, 599, 601, 603, 612 Nangiaramma, Sarojini 592 Nangiar kuttu. See Kutiyattam (nangiar kuttu) Naselli, Alberto (‘Zan Ganassa’) 111 Naselli troupe 110–112 Nashe, Thomas 119, 163 Nason, Bryan 708 Nasrin, Taslima 514 National Theatre, Athens 358, 363, 366, 367–369, 370 National Theatre, London 514, 518, 523, 527, 670, 719, 730, 748, 750 National Theatre of Northern Greece, Thessaloniki 368 National Urban League 443 ‘Heroines in Bronze’ [radio] 443 Natyavedi Ottapalam 603 Ndlovu, Malika 621, 622, 622–623 A Coloured Place 622–623 NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) 469, 482 ‘NEA Four’ - Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, John Fleck 465, 468, 472 Neal, Alice B. Widow Bedott Papers, The 275 Nea Skini (New Stage), Athens [1901– 1906] 357, 358, 364, 365 Nea Skini (New Stage), Athens [1908– 1911] 363 Needham, Matthew 750 Negro Actors Guild (NAG) 430, 434, 444, 448 Negro Drama Group 441 Negro People’s Theatre (NPT) 438– 439, 448 Negro Repertory Company, New York 438 Negro Repertory Theatre 437 Negro Theatre Guild 441

Index    833

‘Negro Theatre’ Project 806 445 Nemirovich-Danchenko, Vladimir 397, 407, 411, 412, 413, 414, 416, 417 Nepathya 598 Nerle, de le, Waudru 162 Netungati, Sasikala 610 New Conservatory Theater, San Francisco 499 New Dance 493 New Dance Magazine Collective 493 Newman, Zahra 704, 716–718 New Theatre, New York 438 New Theatre League 438, 446 New York Shakespeare Festival 705 Nichigeki Theatre [Nihon Theatre] Dancing Team 337 Nihon-joshi-daigaku 331 Nixon, Pippa 735, 736–737, 738, 746 Norford, George 439 Norton, Thomas 163 Norwich Lord Mayor’s show (1556) 99 Nō theatre 329, 334, 338 Novello, Ivor 388 King’s Rhapsody 391 NPT. See Negro People’s Theatre (NPT) O

Octagon Theatre, Bolton 730, 750 Odets, Clifford Remember 439 Waiting for Lefty 438 Odofemi. See Page, Morgan M (‘Odofemi’) O’Donnell, Kate 794 Ōe Michiko 334 Oikonomou, Thomas 358, 363, 364 Okonedo, Sophie 719 Okuni 329

Oldfield, Anne 186, 192, 194, 195, 198 Old Joint Stock Theatre, Birmingham 545 Old Vic Theatre, London 390, 730, 732, 746, 750 Oliver, Jonathan 517 Olivier, Laurence 388, 636, 638, 702 O’Neal, Frederick 439 Onna Kengeki 248–249, 331, 332, 334–335, 346 Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, London 730, 739, 749 Options 521, 527 O’Reilly, Kaite 559, 563 peeling 563, 568–570 Origny-Sainte-Benoite Ludus paschalis 161 Origo 34, 36 Orpheus Centre 574 Osanai Kaoru 345 Ostrovsky, Alexander 406 Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man 407 Profitable Position, A 407 Talents and Admirers 414 Thunderstorm, The 416 Otikkan, Bali 607 Ouspenskaya, Maria 398, 399, 421 Oval House, London 496 Overmyer, Eric The Verge 496 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) 51, 53–54, 55–56, 62–67 Amores 53, 54, 62 Ars Amatoria 53–54, 62–64 Fasti 29 Heroides 54, 64 Medea 56 Metamorphoses 67 Tristia 66 Owen, Kate 494

834     Index P

Pacino, Al 639 Padma Shri Kalamandalam Sivan 591, 594, 595 Padma Shri Kochukuttan Chakyar 597 Page, Morgan M (‘Odofemi’) 793, 794, 795 Paines Plough 496–498 Papadaki, Eleni 353, 358, 367, 368–372 Papadouka, Olympia 371 Papp, Joseph 705, 709 Paradissos (Paradise) Theatre, Athens 359 Paraskevopoulou, Evangelia 353, 358, 359–362, 362, 364, 367, 369 Parker, Caroline 561, 565, 570, 571, 574 Parrish, Sue 452, 453, 507–519, 523, 565, 746 Partridge, Sophie 570 Parukutty, Charvara 611 Pascal, Julia 645 Passionate Stranger, The [film] 390 Passion plays Bozen Passion 162 Chateaudun-sur-Loire Passion 162 Grenoble Passion 162 Lucerne Passion 161 Mons Passion 162 Valenciennes Passion 162 Paupers Carnival 493 Paxinou, Katina 358, 367, 369, 372 Payne, Gina 466 Peake, Maxine 738 Pearse, Gabriela, and Jean Pearse Miss Quashie and the Tiger’s Tail 526 Pearse, Gabriela 522 Pearson, Jess 554 Peele, George Arraignment of Paris, The 137–138 Pelagia 37 Pepys, Elizabeth 156, 184 Pepys, Samuel 152, 156, 166, 184, 185

Performance Art 455–482 Perin, John 189 Perrucci, Andrea A Treatise on Acting from Memory and by Improvisation 118 Perry, Edward Harlem Beauty Shoppe 437 Peters, Paul Bivouac Alabama 439 Peters, Paul, and George Sklar Stevedore 433, 438 Peterson, Dorothy Randolph 437 Petherbridge, Jonathan 496 Petrov, Vladimir Guilty Without Guilt 416 Philips, Rosalind 515, 516 Phillips, Arlene 492 Phillips, Robin 640, 642 Phillips, Sian 636, 648 Phoebe Vocontia 42 Piccolo Teatro Studio Melato, Milan 583, 681, 684, 689 Piissimi, Vittoria 107, 109–110, 111, 116, 118–120 Pinero, Arthur Wing 308 Pinkethman, William 193 Pinnock, Winsome 510, 518 Pioneer Players 2 Piper, Adrian 452, 455–464, 462, 466, 482 Calling Card project 463–464 Catalysis series 458–459 Food for the Spirit 459 Mythic Being, The 458, 460, 462, 462 Plath, Sylvia 648 Plato Symposium, The 67 Platter, Felix 162 Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus) 21, 56, 61, 66 Amphitryo 56, 66 Asinaria 56 Menaechmi 56

Index    835

Mostellaria 56 Playhouse Theatre, London (1920s) 388 Plowright, Joan 638, 642 Pocahontas 247, 251–252, 257, 258–260 Pogson, Kathryn 517 Politis, Fotos 363, 369 Polverigi Festival, Italy 496 Ponti, Diana (‘Lavinia’) 107, 113, 182 Poole, Dan 749 Popoola, Abraham 750 Popov, Alexei 420 Popov, Ivan Ulyanov Family, The 409, 410 Pop-Up Globe, Australia and New Zealand 702 Porto Rico Girls [vaudeville act] 427 Potter, Beatrix 648 Potter, Sally 493 Powell, Jane 239 Powell, William 195 Pratap, Jishnu 604 Preciado, Paul 778, 781, 792 Preer, Evelyn 430 Prestige, Mary 493 Primus, Pearl 443 Prince 464 Procopius Secret History, The 7, 23, 30, 35–37, 38 Project Arts Centre, Dublin 487 Prynne, William 147, 154, 165–166, 222 Histrio-Mastix 147, 154, 165–166 Przybyszewska, Stanislawa Danton 517 Public Theater, New York 705 Puccini, Giacomo Madame Butterfly 342–343 Puppet Theatre, London (run by Charke) 196

Putuma, Koleka 627 Water 627 Pyramid Arts Center, Rochester 470 Pyzhova, Olga 354, 355, 398, 399, 411, 417–420, 421 Q

Quarles, Francis 222 Queen’s Theatre, London 192 Quick, Diana 511 Quinisextine Council, 692 164 Quintilia 35 Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus) Institutio Oratoria 56, 60 R

Raber, Vigil Bozen Passion 162 Racan, Honorat de Bueil, seigneur de Racan L’Artenice 143–147 Rachel (‘Mlle Rachel’). See Félix, Élisabeth Rachel (‘Mlle Rachel’) RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) 386, 387, 497 Rahn, Muriel 439, 443 Rainer, Yvonne 476 Ramadan, Melissa 673 Ramanattam 606 Ramponi, Virginia 107 Randall, Paulette 453, 521–528 Chameleon 525 Collaborative Work. See Evaristo, Bernardine Fishing 524 Rangadhwani 604 Ranous, Dora Knowlton 310 RAPP Art Center, New York 470 Rashad, Condola 709

836     Index

Rational Theatre 494 Ratushinskaya, Irina 514 Redgrave, Michael 636 Redgrave, Vanessa 636, 646, 734 Red Ladder 451, 509, 558, 564–565, 565, 566–567 Reeve, Ada 381–382, 387, 389, 390 Reflex Action, Wales 493 Rehan, Ada 248, 305–325, 316 Reid, Mayne Quadroon, The 263 Reimers, Sara 583, 655–674 Reinhardt, Max 414 Repertory Playhouse Associates (Negro Unit) 437 Rex Theatre, Athens 368 Reynolds, Anna 498 Rice, Elmer 439 Rice, Emma 498, 734 Rich, Christopher 190 Rich, John 188 Richmond House Theatricals 242 Ricketts, Cara 707 Rickman, Alan 511 Rider, Sue 709 Ridings, Stephanie 518 Rigg, Diana 636 Rivers, Joan 641 Riverside Studios, London 500, 502 Robertson, Agnes 263 Robeson, Paul 439, 443 Robinson, Barbara 522 Robinson, Mary 232, 235, 240 Rocket, London 499 Rogante, Giovanna 502 Rogers, Jami 583, 706–707, 729–752 Rogers, Jane 185 Roman Mime 7, 16–18, 21–45 Roman Mime Scenarii 23. See also Laberius, Decimus ‘adultery mime’ 23–24, 25 ‘Charition mime’ (P.Oxy.413) 26, 28 ‘jealous mistress mime’ (P.Oxy.413) 26, 27–28

‘Laureolus mime’ 25 Mime travestying Christian rituals 25 Roman performers (excluding mime) 41–45 Roman theatrical genres 16 Fabula crepidata 16 Fabula palliata 16, 21 Fabula praetexta 16 Fabula togata 16 Rondiris, Dimitris 363, 369 Rorke, Kate 386 Roscius 42 Rose, Karen 501 Rose, Margaret 689 Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama 453, 489, 494, 522, 523–524, 525 Rose McClendon Players 439, 448 Rose Theatre, Kingston 749 Roshchin, Mikhail Valentin and Valentina 417 Ross, Diana 790 Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac 309 Rotie, Marie Gabrielle 501, 502 Rouland, Albert 364 Roundhouse Theatre, London 508 Routh, Brian 466–467 Routledge, Patricia 636 Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter books and films 638 Roxborough, Elsie Wanting 434 Roy, Dana 758, 759, 760–761 I Am Strong 760–761 Royal Albert Hall, London 342 Royal Ballet School 490, 503 Royal Court Theatre, London 511, 524, 525 Royal Court Black Writers Festival 524 Royal Court Young Writers Festival 524

Index    837

Royal Shakespeare Company. See RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) Royal Theatre, Athens 357, 358, 360, 362, 363, 364 Royalty Theatre, London 526 RSC (Royal Shakespeare Company) 496, 508, 511, 517, 523, 642–643, 646, 659, 667, 705, 708, 712, 719, 729, 730, 733–734, 735, 736, 743–745, 748–751 RSC Women’s Group 733, 736 RuPaul’s Drag Race (TV) 789 Ryan, Damien 722–725 Rylance, Mark 731, 732 S

Sabine (San Vittore Globe performer) 693, 694 Sabitri, Heisnam 758 Sackville, Thomas (‘John Posset’) 171 Sagior, Constantinos 363 Sakthibhadra Ascharyachudamani (The Wondrous Crest Jewel) 598 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. See Shakespeare’s Globe, London Sanders, Margaret 192 Sanders of the River [film] 442 Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) Kutiyattam Kendra, Thiruvanantapuram 591, 593, 598, 601, 603 San Quentin Drama Workshop Beckett Directs Beckett 684 Santlow, Mrs 193 San Vittore Globe Theatre Company, Milan 679–697, 681 Le Sedie (The Chairs) 697 Le Tempeste (The Tempests) 681, 689–691, 693, 696

See also La Nave dei Folli (San Vittore men’s company) San Vittore Prison, Milan 583, 679–697 Sappho 10–11 Sapsford, Elizabeth 192–193 Sarantides, Giannoulis 363 Sardou, Victorien 308 La Tosca 310 Sargent, Franklin 435 Sathi, Margi 597 Savary, Jérôme Le Grand Magic Circus 508 Sawa Morino 335 Scala, Flaminio 113, 116, 120 Scenes D’Outre Manche Festival 498 Schiller, Friedrich 427 Mary Stuart 367 Schiller Theater, Berlin 508 Schneemann, Carolee 452, 455–457, 466, 473–482, 474 Fuses 478, 480 Infinity Kisses 481 Interior Scroll 452, 473, 474, 480–481 Meat Joy 479 More Than Meat Joy 479 Round House 479–480 Schönathan, Franz von 312 Countess Gucki, The 318 Schubert, Franz Winterreise 343 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 638 Scott, Andrew 750 Scott Thomas, Kristin 636, 639 Scrivano, Laura 712–713 Sealey, Jenny 452, 454, 489, 557–576 Searle, Bernie 621 Second Sight Video 532 Seiler, Conrad Sweet Land 445 Selznick, David 383

838     Index

Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) 21, 658, 662, 663, 674 Epistles 662 Phaedra 662, 663 Settle, Elkannah 195 Shah Theatre Academy, Durban 618 Shakespeare, William vi, 56, 85, 167, 306–307, 308, 310–312, 318–320, 325, 359, 360, 367, 388, 389, 405, 427, 511, 513, 514, 523, 582, 583, 636, 642, 643, 648, 656, 659, 663, 664, 667, 674, 684, 687, 689, 701–726, 729–752, 759, 761, 762–765, 766–768, 769, 784, 789 All’s Well that Ends Well 702, 707, 710–711 Antony and Cleopatra 428, 583, 702, 705, 707, 711, 719–725, 729, 748, 750 As You Like It 56, 306, 311, 314, 319, 320, 583, 702, 705, 707, 711–718, 715, 746, 768 Comedy of Errors, The 56, 196 Coriolanus 673, 730, 743–746, 743, 750 Cymbeline 320, 702, 707–708, 730, 749 Hamlet 115, 165, 200, 299, 310, 341, 359, 361, 390, 408, 413, 513, 638, 687, 696, 701, 702, 705, 723, 730, 732, 738, 746, 749, 750, 752, 767, 782, 799 Henry IV, Part 1 730 Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 730, 739, 746, 750 Henry V 657, 659, 730, 739–740, 742, 745, 746, 749, 752, 767 Henry VIII 310 Julius Caesar 659, 722, 723, 730, 731, 735, 739, 747, 750, 767, 768

King John 735, 736–737, 738, 746, 749 King Lear 390, 513, 657, 705, 714, 722, 723, 730, 734–736, 738, 744, 747, 748, 749, 750, 766–767 Love’s Labour’s Lost 306, 750 Macbeth 310, 508, 734, 736, 746, 748, 749, 765 Measure for Measure 320 Merchant of Venice, The 306, 312, 359, 702, 707, 708, 723 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 306, 311 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 56, 306, 311, 319, 445, 491, 508, 696, 702, 746, 749, 750, 764, 765 Much Ado about Nothing 705, 730, 731, 746, 750 Othello 206, 217–218, 310, 359, 361, 367, 414, 749, 750, 763–764, 765 Richard II 734 Richard III 742, 748, 749, 750 Romeo and Juliet 420, 702, 707, 708–709, 723, 749, 750, 766 ‘Sonnet 29’ 702, 762, 770 Taming of the Shrew, The 248, 306– 307, 308, 313–318, 316, 320, 322, 325, 406, 409, 667–668, 714, 730, 738, 740–741, 745, 749 Tempest, The 344, 574, 670, 680, 681, 685, 689–691, 693, 696, 730, 734, 739, 748, 749, 750, 765, 771 Titus Andronicus 729–730, 732, 748, 750, 752 Troilus and Cressida 702 Twelfth Night 306, 314, 318–320, 401, 406, 409, 418, 419, 670, 703, 748, 749, 750, 768

Index    839

Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 306, 312, 523 Winter’s Tale, The 749, 750 Shakespeare Center, Los Angeles 712 Shakespeare travesty (19th century) 390 Shakespeare’s Globe, London vi, 498, 656, 659, 667, 668, 684, 731, 734, 742, 749–752, 767 Sam Wanamaker Playhouse 636, 710, 749 ShakeXperience 763 Shange, Ntozake For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide /When the Rainbow is Enuf 526 Spell No.7 511 Sharp, Arabella 239 Shaun of the Dead [film] 638 Shaw, Fiona 511, 514, 667, 733, 734 Shaw, George Bernard 307, 309, 320–321 Shepherd, Mary 640 Shepphard, Nona 571 Signs of a Diva 571 Sher, Antony 508, 748, 750 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 207, 312, 318 School for Scandal, The 205 Sherman, Martin Bent 568–569 Shimamura Hōgetsu 341–342 Shinjuku Moulin Rouge 337 Shinpa 339 Shipp, Jesse A. 428 In Dahomey 431 Shirasu Masako 334 Shivaji, Bharati 604 Shōchiku Revue 335, 347 Shōkyokusai Tenichi 343 Shōkyokusai Tenkatsu 249, 339, 343–345, 344, 347 Shostakovich, Dmitri 569 Showalter, Elaine 498

Shunt Vaults, London 502 Siddons, Henry 241 Siddons, Sarah 187, 199, 200, 239, 240, 241, 242, 648 Sidney, Philip Four Foster-Children of Desire, The 133 Silbert, Roxana 498, 575 Simon, Josette 703, 719 Simone, Nina 571 Sinclair, Jo Long Moment, The 446 Singh, Ansuyah 618 Sinitsyn, Vladimir 414 Siren Theatre, Sydney 715–716, 715 Sisters in Song 522 Sisters of Frida 564 Skinner, Cornelia Otis 443 Skinner, Otis 315, 323 Skipwith, Thomas 190 Slowacki, Juliusz Balladyna 406, 418 Smith, Anna Deavere 646 Fires in the Mirror 646 House Arrest 646 Let Me Down Easy 646 Twilight: Los Angeles 646 Smith, Bessie 513 Smith, Dodie 383, 390 Smith, Maggie 582, 637–642, 651 Smith, Rachel 665, 671 Smith, William Henry Drunkard, The, or, The Fallen Saved 251, 252–253, 267–273, 274–275 Smolin, Dmitry Elizaveta Petrovna 414 Snape, Rachel 554 SNA. See Sangeet Natak Akademi Society of London Theatres London Theatre Report (2014) 660, 661 Sokolova, Vera 414

840     Index

Sommi, Leone De’ Le tre sorelle (The Three Sisters) 113 Sontag, Susan 283 Illness as Metaphor 283 Sophe Theorobathylliana 42 Sophocles 11 Antigone 13 Electra 643 Women of Trachis 13 Sosanya, Nina 712 South African theatre 389, 582, 617–632, 763–764 Southerne, Thomas 188 Oroonoko 193 Sir Anthony Love or, The Rambling Lady 188 Southwark Fair 195 Sowole, Raphael 750, 752 Space, The, Cape Town 618 Space, The, London 657 Spaini, Elisabetta 687, 695 Spanish actresses (16th century) 181–182 Spanoudi, Sofia 371 ‘Spasticus Autisticus’. See Dury, Ian Spencer, Charles 639–640, 746 Sphinx Theatre Company (formerly Women’s Theatre Group) 453, 507, 509–519, 523, 643, 660, 746 Glass Ceiling meetings (1991–2005) 514, 518 Sphinx Test 453, 515, 516 Vamps, Vixens and Feminists Conferences 514, 518 Women Centre Stage project 453, 517 Heroines Festival 517 Power Play 518 Women Centre Stage: Eight Short Plays by and about Women 518 Women in Theatre Survey (2006) 660

Spielberg, Steven The Post 747 Sport for Jove 722 Spychalski, Teo 493 Squire, Rosemary 511 St. George Convent, Prague Visitatio Sepulchri 161 St. Hilaire, Patricia 453, 521–528 Collaborative Work. See Evaristo, Bernardine Hey Brown Girl 525 Just Another Day 524 St. James Literary Society, New York, Dramatic Club 445 St. Martin’s community theatre, Harlem 442 St. Serfe, Thomas Tarugo’s Wiles 209 Stafford-Clark, Max 497, 525 Stallings, Laurence Deep River 436 Stamp, Chiron Sib 787 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 354, 397–422 Stanislavsky System 354, 398–399, 400–402, 407–409, 412, 415, 418, 419, 421 Stanislavsky Drama Theatre, Moscow 406 Stanton, Sophie 750 Stapylton, Robert Slighted Maid, The 209 Steed, Maggie 534–535 Steele, Richard 186 Tender Husband, The 192, 217, 223 Stefania (San Vittore Globe performer) 687 Stephens, Nan Bagby Roseanne 436 Stevenson, Juliet 496, 511, 733 Stomu Yamash’ta Man from the East, The 509 Stone, John Augustus Metamora 254

Index    841

Stone, Waimarie 721–722 Stonewall Riots, New York 792 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 262 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 262, 263 Strange Fruit 573 Stratford Ontario Shakespeare Festival, Canada 642, 707, 709, 712, 719 Streep, Meryl 635, 648, 747 Strehler, Giorgio 680, 685 Strindberg, August Erik XIV 401 Stritch, Elaine 646 Stuart, Toni 621, 626, 627 Ma Ek Kom Huistoe (Ma I’m Coming Home) 626 Stubbs, Imogen 732 ‘Studebaker Songbird’. See Mitchell, Abbie Sukhotin, Pavel Darkness of the Liberator 406 Sulerzhitsky, Leopold 398, 401, 402, 403, 408, 409, 412, 417, 418 Summers, Sarah 621 Sunera Foundation 576 Sunset Boulevard [film] 639 Suresh, Rengini 608, 610 Sushkevich, Boris 408 Sutton, Susie 430 Suzman, Janet 514, 517 Sweet Honey in the Rock 522 Sylvestre, Cleo 523 Synodinou, Anna 364, 367, 372 T

Tagore, Rabindranath 757–758, 759, 760, 771 Takagi Tokuko 335 Takarazuka Music School 332 Takarazuka Revue 332, 334, 335, 347, 348. See also Japanese Revue Takarazuka Shōjo Kageki (Takarazuka Girls’ Opera) 332

Takemoto Ayanosuke 333 Takemoto Kotosa 334 Takemoto Kyōko 334 Talawa 521, 524, 719, 732, 749, 751 Tamarra 776–777, 793, 794 Tamasha 521 Tara Arts 521, 751 Tarasova, Alla 354, 355, 399, 411–417, 421 Tasso, Torquato Aminta 114 Taunton ‘Mary Magdaleyn play’ (Visitatio Sepulchri) 97 Tavoularis, Dionysios 358, 361 Taylor, Elizabeth 634, 636, 637, 723 Taylor, Regina 709 TBW. See Theatre of Black Women Teatret OM, Denmark 503 Teatr Moskovskogo Soveta, Moscow. See Mossoviet (Theatre of Moscow City Council) Teatro d’Arte Sociale 680 Teikoku Joyū Yōseijo (Imperial Actress Training Institute) 340 Temba 521, 732, 751 Tenichi-ichiza magic troupe 343 Tenkatsu-ichiza 343 Tenney, James 477–479 Tennyson, Alfred 308 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) 21, 56, 86, 161 Terentia 41 Terriss, Ellaline 388 Terry, Ellen 248, 295, 307–308, 310, 312, 318, 321, 324, 325, 388, 583, 636, 648 Ellen Terry with Eileen Atkins 636 ‘Lectures on Shakespeare’ 636 Terry, Michelle 730, 732, 734, 739– 740, 742, 746, 749, 751, 752, 767 Tertia 32–33, 36 Testori, Giovanni

842     Index

Macbetto 689 Te Tangata Whai Rawa o Wēniti, The Merchant of Venice [film] 702, 708 Thacker, David 730 Thatcher, Molly Day (Mrs. Elia Kazan) 446 Theatre 503, London 799 Theatre Centre, London 451, 499, 524, 558, 564, 565–566, 567 Théâtre de Fuller, Paris 339 Théâtre de Gennevilliers, Paris 498 Théâtre de la Metaphore, Lille 498 Théâtre du Soleil. See Mnouchkine, Ariane Theatre for the World Festival (1981), Germany 467 Theatre Girls Club 385 Theatre Guild (1918–1996, America) 437 Theatre in Education (TIE) 489, 526, 532, 534–536, 543, 567 Theatre in Health Education Trust, West Midlands 542 Theatre of Black Women (TBW) 453, 521–528 Theatre of the Oppressed. See Boal, Augusto Theatre of the Revolution, Moscow 411, 419–420, 421 Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) Circuit 436 Theatre Royal, Bath 750 Theatre Royal, Stratford East, London 790 Theatre Union, New York 433, 438, 439 Theatrical Ladies’ Guild 385 Theatro Technis (‘Art Theatre’), Athens 358 Theodora, Empress 7, 23, 24, 30, 35–37 Theodorides, Costas 364, 365

Thévenot, François Mystère des Trois Doms, Le 162 Thomas, A.E., and George Agnew Chamberlain Lost 440 Thomas, Edna 430 Thompson, Alexander M., and Mark Ambient Arcadians, The 390 Thompson, Alexander M., and Robert Courtneidge Dairymaids, The 390 Thompson, Edward 430 Thompson, Tessa 712 Thorndike, Eileen 386 Thorndike, Eileen, and Ronald Adam Embassy School of Acting 386 Thorndike, Sybil 382, 386, 388 Thorne, Sarah Sarah Thorne’s School of Acting, Margate 386 Three Arts Club, London 384–385 Thurman, Uma 635 Thurman, Wallace Jeremiah the Magnificent 438 Thyas 41 Thymele 31 TIE. See Theatre in Education (TIE) Tilley, Vesta 648 Tillman, Leonie 712–713 TOBA. See Theatre Owners Booking Association (TOBA) Circuit Tobin, John Curfew, The 239 Tokyo-joshi-kōtō-shihan-gakkō (now Ochanomizu Women’s College) 331 Tokyo Music School (Tokyo University of the Arts) 331, 342 Tolstoy, Alexei Love is the Book of Gold 403, 406 Tolstoy, Leo 401, 406, 412 Anna Karenina 416, 421

Index    843

Resurrection 341 Tomlin, Lily 646 Not Playing with a Full Deck 646 Topham, Edward 240 Torchia, Ellora 710–711 Torr, Diane 494, 513 Torrence, Ridgely Ryder of Dreams 437 Tour, Frances de la 508, 730 Toyotake Roshō 334 Toyotake Shōgiku 334 Toyotake Shōnosuke 334 Tragic Mulatta. See American Theatrical Types Tragic Mulatto. See American Theatrical Types Tragi-farce 402 Trauberg, Leonid 402 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 386, 388 Tree, Maud 387, 388 Tree, Viola 384, 388 Dancers, The 388 Swallow, The 388 Treplin, Agnes 501 Tripunithura Kathakali Kendra (TKK). See Tripunithura Vanitha Kathakali Sangam (Women’s Troupe) Tripunithura Vanitha Kathakali Sangam (Women’s Troupe) 586, 595, 607, 608, 610–612 Tristan Bates Theatre, London 664, 665 Troughton, David 748, 750 Tsarouchis, Giannis 363 Tucker, Lorenzo 439 Tur, A., and P. Tur 406 Turgenev, Ivan 406, 419 Lieutenant Ergunov’s Notes 419 Month in the Country, A 406, 409 On the Eve 291–293, 301 Turner, Kathleen 635 Turner, Peter

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool 644 Turner, Tina 571 Tusa, Maria 709 Tyrer, Sarah (later Mrs Liston) 239 Tyson, Cathy 719 Tyzack, Margaret 643 U

Ugwu, Catherine 574 Ulyanov Family, The [film]. See Popov, Ivan Uncle Remus’s First Visit to New York [film] 433 Union Theatre, London 657 United Company, London 190 Uniti troupe 109 Unlimited 2012 558 Unnunilisandesam (A Message to Unnunili) 588 Upsom, Ruth 443 Urslerin, Barbara (Barbara van Beck) 83, 155–158, 157, 172 V

Vakhtangov, Evgenii 398, 400, 401, 403, 408, 417, 418–419, 420 Valerini, Adriano 111 Vallins, Gordon 532 van Beck, Barbara. See Urslerin, Barbara (Barbara van Beck) van Beck, Johann Michael 156 Vanbrugh, Irene 380, 382, 386, 388 Vanbrugh, John 308 Relapse, The 193 Vanbrugh, Violet 380, 386 van der Hoeven, Maria 163 Vanne, Marda 389 Van Rooy, Janine. See Blaq Pearl Varma, Aarcha Gowri 611

844     Index

Varma, Geetha 582, 587, 589, 607– 611, 609 Varma, Radhika 607, 610, 611 Venezuela, Ruby 790 Venkstern, Alexei 405 Venkstern, Natalya In 1825 406 Venu, Kapila 604 Verbruggen, Susanna 198 Verdi, Giuseppe La Traviata 248, 291–293 Vernardakis, Dimitrios 357, 359 Fausta 360 Merope 360 Veroni, Aikaterini 353, 358, 359–362, 364, 367, 369 VGIK (State Institute of Cinematography) 420 Victoria and Abdul [film] 649 Victoria and Albert Museum, Department of Theatre & Performance 387 Viera, Helena Ofelia, the Fat Travesti 781, 799 Vijayan, Sajith 588 Vinyals Martori, Olga 692 Violetta (San Vittore Globe performer) 689, 694 Virago publishing company 511 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 64 Aeneid 54 Eclogues 32 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio) De Architectura 57 Vollenhoven, Sylvia 621, 622 Vollmöller, Karl Miracle, The 414 Volumnia Cytheris (‘Cytheris’) 31–33, 34, 36 Vonassera, Pipina 358 Vougiouklaki, Aliki 372 Vow, The [film]. See Chiaureli, Mikhail

W

Wajda, Andrez Danton 517 Waldmann, Alex 750 Walker, Aida Overton 427–428 Aida Walker and her Abyssinia Girls 427 Walker, George F. 427, 428, 431, 435, 447 Walker and Williams. See Walker, George F.; Williams, Bert Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 469 Waller-Bridge, Phoebe 643 Walter, Harriet 511, 636, 643–644, 645, 730, 731, 735, 739, 742, 750, 751 Other People’s Shoes 643 Walters, Julie 636, 643, 648 Waltz, Sasha 494 Wandor, Michelene 510 Wapping Pump House, London 511 Warbeck, Stephen 497 Wardrop, Ewan 749 Warner, Deborah 514, 729, 738 Warrington, Don 749, 752 Washington, Fredericka Carolyn (‘Fredi’) 433, 443 Watson, Teila 712–713 WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) 533 Webster, Margaret 383 Weigel, Helene 508 Weinstein, Harvey 493 Wellcome Trust 156, 500, 501 Wells, Mary 236, 240 Wells Cathedral ‘Three Marys play’ (Visitatio Sepulchri) 97 Wertenbaker, Timberlake 510, 518 West, Samuel 750 West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds 514 Whipper, Leigh 441 ‘White Mule’ (vaudeville sketch) 436

Index    845

Whitfield, June 636 Whitman Sisters’ New Orleans Troubadours (Alberta, Mabel, Essie, and Alice Whitman) 427 Whittaker, Jodie (‘Dr Who’) 737 Wickham, Glynne 492 Wigglesworth, Catherine From This Day Forward 543–544 Wilde, Oscar 306 Importance of Being Earnest, The 640 Lady Windermere’s Fan 306 Salome 344, 345 Wild Iris 521 Wilkinson, Julie Caught 566 Williams, Bert 427, 428, 431, 435, 447 Williams, Joan 522 Williams, Tennessee Cat on a Hot Tin Roof 637 Glass Menagerie, The 644 Streetcar Named Desire, A 643 Suddenly Last Summer 637 Wilmot, Mrs 252 Wilson, Dooley 429, 430, 439 Wilson, Emily 768 Wilson, Frank 429, 437 Pa Williams’ Gal 436 Wilton, Penelope 636, 638 Winnemucca, Sarah 260, 261 Wirthner, Naomi 708 Witty, May 386 Witty Combat, A, or, The Female Victor (by T.P.) 184–185 Woffington, Peg 186 Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich 749 Women and Theatre, Birmingham 452, 453, 531–555, 534 All the Way Home 536, 537, 537– 538, 542, 551 Bad One, The 553 Christine 543–544, 546 For the Past 30 Years 554

From This Day Forward 543–544 Gay Birmingham—Back to Backs 553 Glass Ceiling, The 540–541, 543, 548 Putting it About 539–540 Rocking the Wire 554 Saving of Erutan, The 539 Someone Like You 543 Starting Out 554 Swings and Roundabouts 538–539 Women of Longbridge 553 Word Lounge 553 Women Centre Stage. See Sphinx Theatre Company (formerly Women’s Theatre Group) Women Free Arts Alliance 494 Women in Cinema Collective, India 756 Women in Theatre Survey (2006). See Sphinx Theatre Company (formerly Women’s Theatre Group) Women’s Festival (London, 1973) 509 Women’s Liberation Conference 509 Women’s Liberation Movement 509 Four Demands 509 Seven Demands 510 Women’s Playhouse Trust (WPT) 509–512, 514, 517 Women’s Theatre Group (WTG), later Sphinx Theatre Company 453, 496, 509–510, 512–519, 523, 524, 525, 537, 565 Wood, Maxine On Whitman Avenue 433 Wooding, Sam Alabama Fantasies 434 Woodland Secrets podcast series 794, 795 Woolf, Virginia 637, 648, 651 Room of One’s Own, A 86, 648

846     Index

World Health Organization (WHO) 283 World Shakespeare Festival (London, 2012) 735 World Theatre Festival 508 WOW (Women of the World) Festival 514 Wrestling School. See Barker, Howard Wright, Jules 511, 512 Wright, Polly 453, 531–549, 534, 550, 551–552 Alum Rocks—Representing Hodgehill 548 Revolving Door 545–546 When Time Collapses 545 Wycherley, William 308 Country Wife, The 178, 206–220, 785 Plain Dealer, The 210 Wynette, Tammy 571

X

X6 493 Xenophon Ephesian Tale 28 Xenopoulos, Grigorios 364 Y

Yard Theatre, London 800 York Theatre Royal 496 Yosano Akiko 341 Young, Marie 439 Young Vic Theatre, London 510, 514 Z

Zola, Émile Thérèse Raquin 310