Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 3, December 2013
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Poore, Benjamin, Heritage, Nostalgia and Modern British Theatre: Staging the Victorians, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, ix + 232 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0230298897, £50 hb.
Reviewed by
Aberystwyth University
Benjamin Poore’s book examines the enduring fascination of the British stage with Victorian settings, motifs, novels and writers’ lives; this in turn reflects, he argues, a recurrent contestation of social and ethical issues in English history and culture, most readily identified with (though not restricted to) Margaret Thatcher’s invocation of ‘Victorian values’ as a touchstone for forms of social development. Poore aptly notes the persistent physical presence of ‘Victorian building and infrastructure in the everyday lives of British people’ (4), and of attempts to supplant it (extending to an analysis of the reconfigurations of London’s St Pancras rail station). Thereafter, in terms of theatre, he identifies the frequent dramatic materializations of ‘angry ghosts’ from the Victorian period: gleeful, mournful or accusing revenants which incarnate and seek to activate forms of social memory. He argues that British drama and theatre of the 1960s tends to present the Victorian heritage in (frequently dreamlike or nightmarish) terms of a ‘dead hand’ preventing social progress (22), where the nostalgic impulse is a ‘social emollient’, in Hewison’s terms (quoted on 23). However, Poore thoughtfully complicates this thesis by noting critical reactions against modernity, such as that playfully or ironically expressed in 1960s British fashion: expressed as ‘pure dressing up – boys as toy soldiers, girls as fairy princesses: the upper class nursery laid out for all to enjoy’ (39) in an idealistic spirit of availability. Edward Bond’s plays Early Morning and The Narrow Road to the Deep North provide dramatic analyses of historically situated or inflected psychic and political enclosure, and the hypocrisies of imperialism, as does Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine; and it is a strength of Poore’s study that he achieves freshly provocative examinations of these works, as well as considerations of highly original and troubling plays all too frequently neglected in studies of British theatre, such as Peter Barnes’s The Ruling Class and Charles Wood’s H. Poore attentively notes the recurrences of imagery of self-consumption and sexual repression, emergent in predatory animal terms, in British drama of the 1960s and 70s, and persuasively links this with the concept of the ‘folk devil’, developed by Cohen, Hall and others: the taunting negation who calls into question social promises of virtue, success and security.
Poore goes on to examine explicit and implicit concepts of ‘community’ as raised by various stage adaptations of Dickens’s novels, principally (but not exclusively) David Edgar’s 1980 adaptation of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Poore’s focus on this adaptation and production - its theatrical styles, political questions and social resonances - constitutes one of the high points of the book. It then turns to forms of ‘biodrama’ – biographical plays based on Victorian writers and artists (such as Kipling and Marie Lloyd) – as offering entries in the cultural field of identity politics; and to various forms of ‘Staging the Brontës’, the compulsive redramatizations of novels by, and lives of, the Brontë sisters (extending to the implicated re-presentations of the character of Bertha in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea). Poore then considers various other forms of cultural preoccupations and compulsions, manifested in terms of hauntings, of places, by the spirits of dead people returning to question, terrify or converse with modern characters (involving attention to plays by Moira Buffini, Charlotte Jones, Kate Atkinson and Mike Leigh), importantly involving questions of modes and terms of “success”, and the renegotiation of time and value. The study concludes with glances at recent theatrical productions which explore twentieth-century film classics for the stage (Kneehigh Theatre’s A Matter of Life and Death, Brief Encounter and Patrick Barlow’s The Thirty-Nine Steps), serialization by television of Sarah Waters’s novels and Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White; and recent plays, such as Elizabeth Kuti’s The Sugar Wife and Jimmy McGovern’s King Cotton, which use a Victorian setting, crucially prior to modern digital technology, to make ‘connections between public and private life visible and explicit’ (179). This touches on another characteristic of the Victorian age: an inquisitive spirit regarding ‘the meaningfulness of the visible’ and even a ‘post-visible world’ (178), which leads into a final glance at Anthony Neilson’s appropriately resonant and artfully meta-theatrical play, Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness.
Most of Poore’s theoretical references and paradigms are thought-provoking and useful in furthering his distinctive analysis: occasionally they suggest a diligence of reference and demonstration of informed conversancy more appropriate to a PhD thesis than a monograph, and slightly hinder the study’s momentum; however, this criticism is a minor one. Poore’s ranges of reference and argument are both thorough and enliveningly unpredictable, refocussing terms of analysis and context for the works and cultural icons in question. It constitutes a highly promising arrival by a new historical and cultural analyst of modern British theatre, and provides an important basis for future investigations, by the author and by others.