The Edwardian Theatre Essays on Performance and the Stage

This 1996 book presents Edwardian entertainment and the Edwardian entertainment industry as parts of a vital, turbulent era whose preoccupations and paranoias echo those of our own day. Responding to recent shifts of attitude towards the Edwardians and their world, the essays in this collection take as their provenance broad patterns of theatrical production and consumption, focusing upon the economics of theatre management, the creation of new audiences, the politics of playgoing, and the meteoric rise of popular forms of mass entertainment, including musical comedy, variety theatre, and the cinema. Individual chapters also offer fresh insights into key aspects of the Edwardian stage such as a definition of the theatre of the time, gender play and role reversal in the Edwardian music hall, as well as issues related to politics and the suffrage movement.