News
Tuesday 15 April 2008
Pantomime a form of cultural enlightenment? Oh yes it was!
It may be the preserve of the Christmas holiday season today – but pantomime became the main stage for lower-class enlightenment in Britain following a landmark act of theatre censorship in the 18th Century, according to a leading expert from Nottingham Trent University.
In his latest book – Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment – Professor David Worrall reveals how the 1737 Theatrical Licensing Act prevented many theatres from producing drama, signalling the emergence of an illegitimate stage of pantomimes, harlequinades, spectacles and melodrama.
“These plays became the site for lower-class enlightenment, with endless productions about natural and civil rights, voyage and discovery, and Britain’s relationship with other cultures,” said Professor Worrall, Professor of English in Nottingham Trent University’s School of Arts and Humanities.
In 1816, many years after the Act was passed, a wayward account of the infamous tale of HMS Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian was being played out in Pitcairn’s Island, a Melodramatic Ballet performed at Drury Lane Theatre. Audiences looked on as Christian grew old as the paternal head of the island, recuperated as a British patriot and weepy and nostalgic about good old England.
This is a very different version of events to the one which secured Christian’s place in history for leading the 1789 mutiny against the Bounty’s captain, William Bligh. There was no sign of his reputed death during the conflict between the mutineers and Tahitian men; instead we find him in old age, with his two mixed-race daughters who have been brought up to share in his love of England.
In 1801, a pantomime about Jean-Francois de la Perouse – widely regarded as the French Captain Cook – was performed at Covent Garden after a spoken version was rejected from the stage by the Lord Chamberlain. The production sees La Perouse shipwrecked, washed ashore and marrying a native woman who bears him a child, before his wife and son in France turn up on the island to rescue him – with the tale ending happily with the two wives agreeing to a shared husband settlement.
Bizarrely, in the pantomime version, La Perouse is rescued by a chimpanzee, played by an actor in costume.
Professor Worrall said: “The whole set of things is anti-French, extremely risqué with a shared husband story and quite outrageous with the introduction of a chimpanzee. The presentation of foreign cultures and ethnicities on the popular British stage at this time is fascinating, and existed because only the patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, were allowed to present high culture plays.”
The book, which looks at the years 1750-1840, was recently shortlisted for a national Theatre Book Prize, presented by the Society for Theatre Research, which aims to encourage the writing and publication of books on theatre history and practice.
Professor Jeffrey Richards, one of the judges for the prize, said: “Only recently has pantomime become the subject of serious, sustained scholarly research, yet it is a dramatic vehicle which can reflect the ideas, attitudes and preoccupations of the age in which it was performed. This largely unexplored hinterland Professor Worrall investigates in his stimulating and groundbreaking study. He assesses the various ways the subjects of race, empire, colonisation, exploration, slavery, civil and natural rights were depicted and debated in this realm of illegitimate theatre.”
He added: “This book marks a distinct and important step forward in the serious study of pantomime.”
ENDS
Notes for editors: Harlequin Empire: Race, Ethnicity and the Drama of the Popular Enlightenment, is published by Pickering and Chatto.
For information on The Theatre Book Prize visit http://www.str.org.uk/book.html
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