George Rowell

Seventy years old (1956), Rowell's long Victorian era (1792-1914) is justified. This was not a period of many great works of theatre until the 1890s but it was a period where theatre was popular and reflective of wider social claims and attitudes.

It is a survey rather than an in-depth analysis but it remains valuable despite its great age. Its publication is closer to the period of which it writes than it is to our time. Perhaps some of the judgments indicate this but enough time had passed show more for relative objectivity.

It has an excellent bibliography and a very useful list of plays performed in the period, many, perhaps most and maybe all, of which can be recovered today through the Internet Archive. There are also some interesting illustrations to show how staging changed over time.

Where the book has great value is not only in taking theatre through time for us but in setting this art against the type of audience and commercial factors that created and then dismissed the great actor managers.

The shift towards a fashionable and upper middle class audience seeking to be entertained within its prejudices in an atmosphere of low level implicit moral censorship was not ever going to be conducive to greatness but society drama could still give us Wilde, Pinero and Shaw.

The theatre of the last three decades was lively and commercially viable with earlier melodrama for the wider public merging into musical comedy and music hall. However, cinema would remove the mass audience after the First World War turning theatre into the minority art it is today.

Much today is retrospectively made of Ibsen but it is clear that even where he was an influence (as with Shaw very late in the day) it was not a fully understood one. The main continental influence from the start of the period appears to have been French theatre which was genially ripped off.

The romantic poets all seem to have had a crack at the theatre (no doubt for money-making reasons) right up to and including Tennyson and Browning but none of their works, except perhaps Shelley's 'Cenci' and some of Byron at a stretch, can be called dramatic successes.

Indeed, other than Boucicault (at a pinch), it is only the Gilbert & Sullivan duo who shine by the 1870s and 1880s and who have lasted. To enjoy 'Victorian Theatre', one must have a taste for melodrama and for complicated situations resolved in the last act or 'moral dilemma' of a conventional sort.

Where popular (as opposed to minority art) theatre becomes interesting is as source material for the dialectic betweeen audience approval and expectation on the one side and actor-manager desire to meet that approval and expectation - what 'the they' hive-like thought they had to think.

What the dramatist thought privately or the audience thought privately is of far less consequence than the publicly expressed presentation of thoughts and attitudes, especially resolutions of duty and desire, that 'drama' provides at the mass level.

This aspect of drama goes back to the Greeks where dramatists were undertaking the same role, affirming unified shared cultural values and testing them, sometimes to destruction in the case of the surviving great tragedians. Perhaps the genius of Shakespeare is that he appeared to rise above this.

If I am right, then what is most noticeable about Victorian Theatre is its lack of interest in rocking any boats or testing the total culture too much. When Shaw did so with 'Mrs Warren's Profession', the invective he received was staggering but his plays were for a minority interest by a public persona.

Wilde, in this context, comes across as quite a conservative figure, providing us with dramatic complicated plot frameworks for his never-ending run of epigrams - as if a stand-up literate comedian today learned how to work and triumph in the conventions of the rom-com.

It is idle to speculate on how drama would have developed further if technology had not created its cinematic rival. Probably mass popular theatre and minority art theatre would have operated in parallel fertilising each other with talent and ideas as happens in cinema and streaming today.

Certainly an intelligent and educated audience ready to be challenged was beginning to emerge before the First World War. We can speculate on the effects of the emergence of provincial theatrical movements such as that in Lancashire which gave us Houghton's 'Hindle Wakes' (1912).

Throughout the book, Rowell gives us samples of dialogue which show that, although it would be hard to revive any of the plays that are not Gilbert and Sullivan, Wilde, Pinero, Shaw and perhaps selectively some others, they would have been genuinely entertaining in the hands of good actors.

Our problem may be that we have lost the cultural contexts of the Regency and Victorian periods. No doubt, in the 22nd century, our descendants will have lost the cultural context of our drama, our liberal middle class obsessions to be as 'samey' as we see melodrama and society drama today.

Each iteration of the human cultural 'hive' either is unable to critique itself or too frightened to do so. To have critiqued the assumptions within Victorian drama would have been scandalous, to critique those of the bulk of (say) BBC production today equally so.

Informal moral control is at the very heart of drama today as amongst the Greeks and Victorians albeit that its very existence creates opportunities for testing the boundaries of the moral - but not too far, of course, never too far because if you go too far, you will not get financed or a grant or a showing. show less

Monograph Library - shelved at: 52 - Theatres