Theatre History and Historiography
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Theatre History and Historiography Ethics, Evidence and Truth Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson
Introduction, selection and editorial matter Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson 2016 Individual chapters Respective authors 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-45727-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57879-5 ISBN 978-1-137-45728-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137457288 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theatre history and historiography : ethics, evidence and truth / Claire Cochrane, Joanna Robinson [Introduction, selection and editorial matter]. pages cm Based on essays presented at the a meeting of the TaPRA History and Historiography Working Group convened on the topic of Ethics and Evidence at Birmingham University in 2007. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Theater Historiography Congresses. 2. Historiography Moral and ethical aspects Congresses. I. Cochrane, Claire, editor. II. Robinson, Joanna, 1967 editor. PN2115.T45 2015 792.09 dc23 2015023519
Claire For John Jo For Nick and in memory of Judy T.
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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors ix x xi 1 Introduction 1 Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson Part I Re-Writing (Master) Narratives 2 Writing the Ethical Life: Theatrical Biography and the Case of Thomas Betterton 33 David Roberts 3 Ethics and Bias: Historiography and Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century America 48 Rosemarie K. Bank 4 In the Eye of the Beholder: Recognising and Renegotiating the Scenario in Writing Performance Histories 60 Viv Gardner Part II Other Histories 5 Feminist Historiography and Ethics: A Case Study from Victorian Britain 85 Katherine Newey 6 Garrison Theatre in Colonial India: Issues of Valuation 103 Poonam Trivedi 7 Facing the Face of the Other: The Case of the Nia Centre 121 Claire Cochrane Part III The Ethics of Evidence 8 Recollecting and Re-Collecting: The Ethical Challenges of Social Archiving in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland 147 Alison Jeffers vii
viii Contents 9 Mind the Gaps: Evidencing Performance and Performing Evidence in Performance Art History 163 Heike Roms Bibliography 182 Index 197
Figures 4.1 The 5th Marquis of Anglesey as Pekoe in Aladdin, 1902 3. Archives and Special Collections, Pryfysgol Bangor/Bangor University 62 4.2 An audience arriving at Anglesey Castle. The Bystander, 22 March 1905. Author s collection 69 4.3 The 5th Marquis as director on tour. Daily Mirror, 6April 1904. Author s collection 72 4.4 The Powder Puff : the 5th Marquis as narcissist. Archives and Special Collections, Pryfysgol Bangor/Bangor University 76 4.5 Absorbed by and with the fur : the 5th Marquis in his 1000-guinea fur coat and Marc Rees in Gloria Days (images by Roy Campbell Moore). Archives and Special Collections, Pryfysgol Bangor/Bangor University and Marc Rees 78 7.1 The site of the Nia Centre, 2014. Author s photograph 128 8.1 The mural of two hooded gunmen with the logos of the north Belfast paramilitary organisations clearly on display. Photograph by Ian Jeffers 148 8.2 Two smaller murals on the side of a block of flats at the entrance to Mount Vernon. The Prepared for Peace Ready for War mural can be seen in the background. Photograph by Ian Jeffers 153 9.1 Ivor Davies in conversation with Heike Roms, An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales, 2006. Photograph by Phil Babot 164 9.2 Mapping Performance Art in Cardiff, 2008. Photograph by Daniel Ladnar 171 9.3 Aberystwyth in Flux re-enacting the Aberystwyth Fluxconcert 1968, 2008. Photograph by Daniel Ladnar 178 ix
Acknowledgements This collection of essays began with a meeting of the TaPRA History and Historiography Working Group which convened on the topic of Ethics and Evidence at Birmingham University in 2007. We thus owe a debt of gratitude to those who helped initiate this project and whose work contributed to what has been a very lengthy development process: in particular we would like to thank Helen Brooks, Ian Brown, Jim Davis, Jane Milling, Miriam Murtin and Katie Normington. Kate Dorney offered invaluable expertise both as a Senior Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and as an editor during a substantial period of the book s development, and we owe her many thanks. Paula Kennedy, who commissioned the book for Palgrave, remained a tower of strength and encouragement throughout the challenges offered by the anonymous readers of our much revised proposals; those readers, too, are thanked for their contributions to the process. We also thank Peter Cary for his practical editorial assistance and Tom Cochrane for some helpful observations on the task of thinking through the complexity of philosophical ethics. x
Notes on Contributors Editors Claire Cochrane is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Worcester. She is the author of two books on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare and the Birmingham Repertory 1913 1929 (1993) and Birmingham Rep: A City s Theatre 1962 2002 (2003). Her most recent book, Twentieth-Century British Theatr e: Industry, Art and Empire, was published in 2011. In addition to work on the history and contemporary practice of Shakespeare in performance, she has published widely on regional British theatre with a particular focus on developments in black British and British Asian theatre. Jo Robinson is Associate Professor in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. Her broad research interests in theatre and performance focus on the relationships between performance, place, community and region. She led the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham 1857 1867, outputs from which were published in Performance Research and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film. Hercurrent research, Changing Communities: Performance, Engagement and Place, is a major project on theatre and community in the East Midlands from the 1970s onwards: one output will be a book, Theatre & the Rural, to be published as part of the Palgrave series Theatre & in 2016. Contributors Rosemarie K. Bank is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and is Professor of Theatre at Kent State University in the USA. Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Essays in Theatre, Modern Drama and others, and in a number of edited collections including The American Stage (ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller, 1993), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (ed. Jeffery D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, 1999) and Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor (ed. Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, 2015). She is the author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825 1860 (1997) and xi
xii Notes on Contributors co-editor (with Michal Kobialka) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Viv Gardner is Professor Emerita in Theatre Studies at the University of Manchester. A theatre and performance historian, she focuses on gender, sexuality and spectatorship at the fin de siècle, particularly the exchange between the radical and the popular. Her book on the 5th Marquis of Anglesey is in preparation. Her recent publications include The Image of a Well-Ordered City: Nineteenth Century Manchester Theatre Architecture and the Urban Spectator (in Culture in Manchester: Institutions and Urban Change since 1850, ed. Janet Wolff with Mike Savage, 2013), The Sandow Girl and her Sisters: Edwardian Musical Comedy, Cultural Transfer and the Staging of the Healthy Female Body (in Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin: 1890 to 1939, ed. Len Platt, Tobias Becker and David Linton, 2014) and The Theatre of the Flappers? Gender, Spectatorship and the Womanisation of Theatre 1914 1918 (in British Theatre and the Great War, 1914 1919: New Perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 1915). Alison Jeffers is a lecturer in Applied Theatre and Contemporary Performance at the University of Manchester. Her published work includes Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) as well as articles concerning the theatrical representation of narratives of asylum, citizenship and spectatorship in participatory refugee theatre. She is continuing this work through the Hospitality Project in Bristol, which is funded by the AHRC Connected Communities scheme. Her recent research into community arts and theatre work in Northern Ireland connects with her next publication on the pioneering community artists of the 1970s and 1980s and the legacy of that work in applied theatre and participatory arts. Katherine Newey is Professor of Theatre History at the University of Exeter and the director of the AHRC-funded project on Victorian pantomime, for which she has co-edited Politics, Performance and Popular Culture: Theatre and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain. She has published widely on nineteenth-century theatre, visual culture and women s writing, most recently on John Ruskin and the theatre (with Jeffrey Richards). Her books include Women s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and a volume on Fanny Kemble in Pickering and Chatto s series Lives of Shakespearean Actors (2012).
Notes on Contributors xiii David Roberts is Professor of English and Dean of the Arts, Design and Media at Birmingham City University. His recent books include Thomas Betterton, Restoration Plays and Players and an edition of the sale catalogue of Betterton s books. He has also published a novel, TheLifeofHarristhe Actor, and writes programme essays for the Royal Opera House. Heike Roms is Professor in Performance Studies at Aberystwyth University. She has published on contemporary performance, the history of performance art in a British context, performance historiography, documentation and archiving for publications such as Performance Research, Contemporary Theatre Review, Inter, Maska, Frakcija, Cyfrwng, Live Art Magazine, Ballett/Tanz and a number of collections. Her volume Contesting Performance: Global Sites of Research (with Jon McKenzie and C.J.W.-L. Wee) was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010. Heike is director of the project What s Welsh for Performance? Locating the Early History of Performance Art (www.performance-wales.org), which was funded by a large research grant from the AHRC (2009 11) and won the David Bradby TaPRA Award for Outstanding Research in International Theatre and Performance in 2011. She is currently working on a monograph with the working title When Yoko Ono did not Come to Wales: Locating the Early History of Performance Art. Poonam Trivedi was until recently Associate Professor in English at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, and is currently the Vice-Chair of the Asian Shakespeare Association. A graduate of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, she has co-edited Re-Playing Shakespeare in Asia (with Minami Ryuta, 2010) and India s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (with Dennis Bartholomeusz, 2005). In addition to the production of a CD-ROM, King Lear in India (2006), she has published widely on Shakespeare in India in theatre and film, on women in Shakespeare and on Indian theatre.