Revue in the Modern World: Possibilities and Perils—West End Identities

Linton, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-75209-5_3

David Linton⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre ((PSBMT))

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Abstract

‘Revue in the Modern World: Possibilities and Perils -West End Identities’, will begin to highlight the contradictions and significance of a London identification in revue, especially in its dramatic and cultural form, where revue consciously played with linear narrative and performance frameworks and challenged, musical comedy’s utopian vision by offering opposing critiques of social and cultural change.

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Notes

1.
See Michael S. Foldy, The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality and Late-Victorian Society (London: Yale University Press, 1997), Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Chapters 1, 6, 7 and 8, and also Clive Barker and Maggie Gale, British Theatre Between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See also later chapter ‘Degeneration/Regeneration—The Remaking of Nation in Wartime West End Spectacular Revue.’
2.
See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman Ltd, 1981).
3.
Bailey, Popular Culture, 18.
4.
Bailey, Popular Culture, 13.
5.
Bailey, Popular Culture, 21.
6.
John Clement Ball, Imagining London (London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 7.
7.
David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualising American Theater (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 15.
8.
Bailey, Popular Culture, 21.
9.
Michael Sidnell, Dances of Death: The Group Theatre of London in the Thirties (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 33.
10.
Albert de Courville, Joy-Bells, London Hippodrome programme, No. 102, May 1919.
11.
Splinters (London: British Library, Lord’s Chamberlain’s Plays, 1919), np.
12.
Mica Nava, Alan O’Shea, (eds), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (Abington: Routledge, 1996), 4.
13.
Cathy Ross, Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age (London: Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, 2003), 11.
14.
Eric A. Nordlinger, The Working Class Tories: Authority, Deference and Stable Democracy (Oakland: University of California Press, 1967), 210.
15.
John Hastings Turner, Jumble Sale (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1920), np.
16.
Georg Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, in On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1971), 24.
17.
Jumble Sale, np. See also Pot Luck (1921) an ‘advertisement drama’ that satirically comments on the consumerism of the modern products made available through the practice of easy payment methods. The pitfalls of consumerism are also depicted in a comedy sketch ‘Bluffers’ in You’d Be Surprised (1923), a scene that revolves around a bailiff coming to take back all the items bought on credit.
18.
Arthur Wimperis, As You Were (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1918), np.
19.
‘Pictorial Politics’, The Tatler 897 (4 September 1918), 259.
20.
Margaret Werry, ‘‘The Greatest Show on Earth’: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific’, Theatre Journal 57 (2005), 356.
21.
Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2002), 119.
22.
Huntly Carter, The New Spirit in the European Theatre 1914–1924 (London: Ernest Benn Ltd, 1925), 82.
23.
Carter, The New Spirit, 81.
24.
League of Notions (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1921), np.
25.
League of Notions, np.
26.
The Peep Show (1921) programme, The Mander and Mitchenson Archives, Bristol University, Bristol.
27.
The Peep Show File, The Mander and Mitchenson Archives, Bristol University, Bristol.
28.
The Peep Show File.
29.
Len Platt, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Platt, Musical Comedy, 1890–1939), 134.
30.
Robert Baral, Revue: The Great Broadway Period (New York: Fleet Press, 1962), 232.
31.
Albert de Courville, Wal Pink and Edgar Wallace,The Whirligig (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1919), np.
32.
Nava and O'Shea (eds), Modern Times, 15.
33.
Nava and O'Shea (eds), Modern Times, 15.
34.
Ronald Jeans, Writing for the Theatre (London: Edward Arnold & Co, 1949), 175.
35.
The Whirligig, np.
36.
Nigel Playfair and A.P. Herbert, Riverside Nights (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1926), np.
37.
Nava and O'Shea (eds), Modern Times, 53.
38.
Nava and O’Shea (eds), Modern Times, 64.
39.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), in William McNeil and Karen S. Feldman (eds), Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 245.
40.
The Follies (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1919), np.
41.
The Follies (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1919), np.
42.
Encore, 18 November 1920, Charles Cochran Scrapbooks, (London: Theatre Museum), np.
43.
Huntly Carter, ‘Stage Influence on Dress and Fashion. The Theatre as a Driving Force’, in The Drapers Organiser (1919), 131, Charles Cochran Scrapbooks, Theatre Museum, London.
44.
Carter, The New Spirit, 85.
45.
Carter, The New Spirit, 84.
46.
Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl and Stuart Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Plc, 1985), 33.
47.
The Workers’ Theatre Movement (1926–35) belonged to the Communist rather than the Labour wing of the Socialist movement. It was concerned with agitation rather than moral uplift or entertainment. It saw itself as a theatre of action, dealing with immediate issues. See Samuel, MacColl and Cosgrove (eds), Theatres of the Left, 3.
48.
Carter, The New Spirit, 85.
49.
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Methuen: London, 1986), 5.
50.
Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5.
51.
Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5.
52.
Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994), 66.
53.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (London, Yale University Press, 1990).
54.
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 4.
55.
Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 413.
56.
McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, 386.
57.
Howard Rye and Jeffrey Green, ‘Black Musical Internationalism in England in the 1920s’, Black Music Research Journal 15, (1995), 94.
58.
See also Matthew D. Morrison’s “Race, Blacksound, the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse”, which appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 72/3 (fall 2019) https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2019.72.3.781.
59.
Dion Titheradge, Kenneth Duffield, Ronald Jeans, Nat, D. Ayer, Snap (London: British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, 1922), np.
60.
Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951, 415.
61.
See James J. Nott, Music for the People, Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University press, 2002).
62.
Ramsey Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 1989), 5.
63.
Nott, Music for the People, 3.
64.
Nott, Music for the People, 3.
65.
Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 15.
66.
Nava and O'Shea (eds), Modern Times, 189.
67.
Nava and O’Shea (eds), Modern Times, 10.

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Kingston University, London, UK
David Linton

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Linton, D. (2021). Revue in the Modern World: Possibilities and Perils—West End Identities. In: Nation and Race in West End Revue. Palgrave Studies in British Musical Theatre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75209-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75209-5_3
Published: 01 August 2021
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-75208-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-75209-5
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