{"id":221,"date":"2014-02-27T17:37:54","date_gmt":"2014-02-27T17:37:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=221"},"modified":"2014-02-27T18:36:19","modified_gmt":"2014-02-27T18:36:19","slug":"five-questions-judith-hawley-on-amateur-theatricals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"Five Questions: Judith Hawley on Amateur Theatricals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"shipboard-theatricals-480w\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Judith Hawley is Professor\u00a0of English at Royal Holloway, University of London<\/a>.\u00a0 Her doctoral work at Oxford was on Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy<\/i><\/em>, which remains one of her major interests, but she has also published widely on science and literature, eighteenth-century women writers, and coteries, groups and sociability.\u00a0\u00a0Her current projects include a\u00a0group biography of the Scriblerus Club and a new edition of Tristram Shandy<\/em>.\u00a0 In this interview, though, we discuss her ongoing collaborative work on amateur theatricals: approaches and\u00a0publications;\u00a0the series of conferences organised under the ‘What Signifies A Theatre?’ rubric; and the new Research into Amateur Performance and Private Theatricals network<\/a>, which she co-directs with Mary Isbell<\/a>.<\/p>\n

1) How did you first become interested in amateur performance and private\u00a0theatricals?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My interest came initially from personal experience.\u00a0 As a teenager and then as a student at Cambridge, I was very involved in amateur dramatics as a performer, director and producer.\u00a0 As well as the opportunities to explore different selves, I loved the collaborative aspect of theatre making.\u00a0 As an undergraduate writing an essay a week, I also enjoyed the rhythm of spending a whole term working towards a production.\u00a0 When I became a lecturer, I had no time for recreational activities and the only opportunity I had to perform was showing off in lectures.\u00a0 A conference held at the wonderful setting of Chawton House<\/a> in 2008 enabled me to turn my former activities into an academic project and to reflect on the pleasures available to the amateur.\u00a0 Prof Marian Wynne Davis<\/a> organised a conference on women and drama called \u2018Her Make is Perfect\u2019.\u00a0 The conference mingled performances and presentations and made use of the domestic spaces of Chawton House.\u00a0 I realised that women had more scope for dramatic activities in the domestic sphere than in the public and professional sphere.\u00a0 I researched two case histories: the respectable Elizabeth Yorke, Countess of Hardwicke, and the scandalous Elizabeth Craven, Margravine of Anspach.\u00a0 As my research has progressed, I am discovering what an enormous range of types of non-professional performance has taken place and still takes place.<\/p>\n

2) How did you go about putting together the network of scholars and practitioners you assembled for the ‘What Signifies A Theatre?’ project?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My first contact was my colleague, Dr Elaine McGirr<\/a>, who alerted me to the CFP for \u2018Her Make is Perfect\u2019.\u00a0 At this conference I made numerous useful contacts, including theatre practitioners such as Kate Napier<\/a> and Liz Kuti<\/a>.\u00a0 Realising what a rich topic it was, Elaine and I organised a conference at Chawton House in 2010.\u00a0 Our starting point was a question posed in\u00a0Mansfield Park<\/i>: \u2018What signifies a theatre?\u2019\u00a0 We thought it appropriate on a number of levels: Chawton House is such an important centre for Austen studies and the failed theatricals in Mansfield Park<\/i>\u00a0are the main impression most people have of private theatricals.\u00a0 Furthermore, we were interested in what happens when drama moves out of the designated performance space of a theatre.\u00a0 This was the first of three conferences under this title.\u00a0 With each call for papers, we made contact with a widening circle of academics at different stages of their careers including, for example David Coates<\/a> who is working on a PhD on country house theatricals at the University of Warwick and the specialist on nineteenth-century theatre history, Professor Kate Newey (Exeter)<\/a>.\u00a0 Another significant contact was made when I saw a CFP for a Northeast Modern Language Association panel on amateur performance in the long nineteenth century posted by Mary Isbell who was then completing a PhD at the University of Connecticut.\u00a0 For a very brief moment I saw her research as a potential rival to my own.\u00a0 But I quickly realised that the topic is so large that it is necessarily collaborative, not least because records of performance are patchy and scattered.\u00a0 I alerted her to the first WSAT? conference, and we are now working together on a conference to be held in June 2014.\u00a0 A further key collaborator is the director Abigail Anderson<\/a>.\u00a0 I first met Abigail through a totally different route and admired her inventive productions.\u00a0 She worked at the lamentably underfunded but exquisite Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmunds where, with Colin Blumenau, she presented a restored Georgian repertoire.\u00a0 I can\u2019t list everyone I have had the pleasure to work with on this project, but I would also like to mention the architectural historian Jeremy Musson<\/a>, whom I know through mutual friends and who has kindly put me in touch with people who work in historic houses.<\/p>\n

As with many projects, the primary means of assembling a network are the internet and face-to-face encounters at conferences or cafes. \u00a0Wordpress sites have been our primary way to share details about these projects on the web:\u00a0http:\/\/whatsignifiesatheatre.wordpress.com\/<\/a> and rappt.org<\/a>, which Mary maintains.\u00a0 These sites and distributing our CFPs through the usual channels have brought out numerous individuals who had previously thought that they were alone in their interest in the amateur and gradually, our network grew.\u00a0 We were also fortunate enough to connect with other networks, including a wonderful group based at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway and researchers at the University of Southampton working on music in country houses.\u00a0 At the third WSAT? Conference held at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2011, we decided that we would consciously organise a network and plan out next stage of activity.\u00a0 RAPPT emerged. The name \u2013 Research into Amateur Performance and Private Theatricals \u2013 was devised by Viv Gardner<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A further stimulus has been grant applications.\u00a0 Awards advertised by the AHRC and Leverhulme led me to form interdisciplinary teams to put together grant proposals.\u00a0 Sadly, the applications were not successful, but the process of drawing up the proposals and planning the projects was almost as useful as it was depressing.\u00a0 Discussing common interests with colleagues in Drama, Geography and Media Arts was a pleasure in itself.<\/p>\n

3)<\/strong> What common themes emerged from the research and the\u00a0amateur performances presented\u00a0at the three WSAT? conferences?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of my principal themes is the value of the amateur.\u00a0 The value of artistic endeavor is usually measured by a range of incompatible calculators: aesthetic value; the potential for income generation; or the authority conferred by institutional recognition.\u00a0 However, such judgments are not calibrated to register the value of most of the drama that is staged in Britain: it is non-professional, not for profit, or to use a term that makes most people cringe: \u2018amateur\u2019.\u00a0 The history of the professional stage is well known; the West End and the subsidized theatres get plenty of coverage in the media.\u00a0 But what about all those hundreds of am dram groups who meet in scout huts and community halls up and down the country?\u00a0 At the last count (December 2010) more than two and a half thousand am dram groups were signed up to NODA, the National Association of Operatic and Dramatic Associations.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 What do they get out of it?\u00a0 Perhaps more to the point, what do their audiences get from watching a bunch of amateurs put on a show?\u00a0 The little that is known about the history of amateur dramatics has been written by professionals: by journalists, theatre historians and practitioners with a stake in maintaining the prestige of the professional stage.\u00a0 One question usually asked about am dram is: \u2018Is it any good?\u2019\u00a0 Understandably, the assumption is that professional theatre is bound to be better.\u00a0 But we can ask that question in different ways.\u00a0 We can ask: \u2018What is am dram good at?\u00a0 What is it good for?\u00a0 What kinds of pleasures and benefits does it bring to its participants and audience?\u2019\u00a0 Moreover, I want to find out whether we can we disrupt the current obsession with the professional and the profitable by revaluing the amateur.<\/p>\n

My starting point was that the private nature of amateur performance provided women with more opportunities than the professional stage.\u00a0 It also emerges that performance in private spaces can transform and disrupt the home.\u00a0 Family relations are tested through performance and through the unusually intimate relations between performers and audience.\u00a0 Other discoveries include the temporal and social dimensions of the phenomenon.\u00a0 According to the only published survey of private theatricals, Sybil Rosenfeld\u2019s\u00a0Temples of Thespis<\/i>\u00a0(1978), they were an elite craze that started around 1780 but went out of fashion in the 1820s.\u00a0 However, in papers presented at our conferences, scholars demonstrated that not only did social elites continue to perform for pleasure rather than profit well into the twentieth century (think of the Bloomsbury set), but that all classes enjoyed amateur theatricals from the Spouters Clubs \u2013 artisans who met in taverns around the turn of the nineteenth century \u2013 to the Victorian parlour drama that was popular\u00a0among the middle classes.\u00a0 As well as crossing social boundaries, the phenomenon crossed and tested boundaries between professional and not-for-profit performers.\u00a0 Professional performers \u2013 musicians, actors and dancers and some production staff \u2013 were employed by the upper classes for their private theatricals and the amateur stage increasingly became a route into the profession.\u00a0 Some of our discoveries are presented in a collection of essays I co-edited with Mary Isbell:\u00a0Amateur Theatre Studies<\/i>, a\u00a0<\/i>Special Issue of\u00a0Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film<\/i>\u00a038 (2011)<\/a> and in my own forthcoming chapter: \u2018Elizabeth and Keppel Craven and The Domestic Drama of Mother-Son Relations\u2019, in\u00a0Stage Mothers: Women, Work and the Theatre 1660-1830<\/i>, eds Elaine McGirr and Laura Engell (Bucknell University Press, forthcoming).<\/p>\n

Each of our WSAT? conferences has included a performance.\u00a0 The first was a piece devised by Elaine with her students in the Drama Department at Royal Holloway. \u00a0It was designed as a recreation of a particular night at a private theatrical: a performance of\u00a0Nourjad<\/i>\u00a0written by and starring Elizabeth Craven in 1803.\u00a0 One of the aims was to transform the space and to provide conference delegates with a view of the function of private theatricals in the social life of the participants.\u00a0 This was achieved by the students\u2019 imaginative staging of a play within a play: their production took the audience behind the scenes to witness power struggles between the performers.\u00a0 The second was a rehearsed reading of Frances Burney\u2019s\u00a0The Witlings<\/i>, directed by\u00a0Anna Kretschmer<\/a>, significant not least because of Burney\u2019s trying experiences in both private and professional spheres.\u00a0 At the third WSAT? conference, we explored further the intimate relationship between the audience and the performers.\u00a0 A professional group with extensive experience of performing in historic houses, Artifice<\/a> directed by Kate Napier, staged Arthur Murphy\u2019s popular farce,\u00a0The Way to Keep Him<\/i>.\u00a0 The play was performed at the famous Richmond House theatricals in 1787.\u00a0 One of the forceful arguments against the idea of recreations of historic performances is the fact that while the actors\u2019 performances might be historically accurate, the audience is undeniably modern and brings contemporary expectations to the venue.\u00a0 While that factor cannot be overcome, I wanted to create a historical dimension by give the delegates an insight into the frisson caused by the celebrity of both the original performers and audience.\u00a0 So I provided actors and audience with accounts of the original cast (e.g. Lord Derby played Lovemore and Mrs Damer Mrs Lovemore) and assigned roles to the actual audience (including the Prince of Wales and Horace Walpole).\u00a0 We need to develop methodologies to assess what we have learnt from these productions.<\/p>\n

4) How are you and Mary Isbell hoping to build on this with the Research into Amateur Performance and Private Theatricals network (RAPPT)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of our most significant realisations was that we needed to extend our remit from theatricals to performance more generally.\u00a0 Most theatrical performances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries involved music and dance as well as acting.\u00a0 Hence the adoption of the name RAPPT for the next phase of the project.\u00a0 We encourage specialists in musical and other modes of performance to get involved.\u00a0 In 2014 we are launching a research project and conference modelled on the Pic Nic Society, arguably the first amateur dramatic society in England.\u00a0 This group, which performed in the Tottenham Street Theatre, London, only survived for a few years at the turn of the nineteenth century; it was motivated by a desire for cooperative endeavour, mutual pleasure – and a fair amount of elitism.\u00a0 Of course, we want to imitate their spirit of collaboration, not their snobbery.\u00a0 Although in British English a picnic is now usually an informal meal eaten out of doors, it used to mean something like a potluck supper in American English, that is, a meal to which everyone brings a dish. \u00a0The Pic Nic journal explained in 1803, \u2018The title of Pic Nic, given to this Paper, is used in the sense applied to it by a neighbouring Nation, signifying a Repast supplied by Contribution; and to this Miscellany all persons of genius and talent are invited to contribute.\u2019\u00a0 It was ridiculed for a variety of reasons, as depicted in\u00a0James Gillray\u2019s famous etching, \u2018Blowing up the Pic Nics’<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"Gillray<\/a><\/p>\n

The conference \u2013 entitled \u2018Paying the Piper: Economies of Amateur Performance\u2019 – will showcase the results of two RAPPT projects currently underway: 1) a collaboratively curated digital archive of the Pic Nic Society, which will serve as a digital dramaturgy site for 2) an amateur production of one of the plays that members of the society performed at\u00a0the Tottenham Street Theatre. We are taking some risks here.\u00a0 Abigail Anderson is going to direct a group of motely academics in a Pic Nic production.\u00a0 As well as making fools of ourselves, we are hoping that this practice-based research will teach us something about the value of amateur performance and, borrowing from rehearsal studies, we will learn about the workings of the Georgian repertoire too.<\/p>\n

Our goal with RAPPT this year is to promote conversations about the economies of non-professional performance across periods and locations. \u00a0In drafty church halls and lavish ballrooms, on board ships, in parlours and in purpose-built spaces, lovers of the performing arts have long collaborated creatively without the sanction of academic or professional recognition. Yet not-for-profit performance still has a cost.\u00a0 The extravagance of the Earl of Barrymore\u2019s theatricals at Wargrave practically bankrupted him and, as the Pic Nic controversy demonstrates, the fashion for private performance was, at the very least, perceived as a financial threat to London\u2019s patent theatres.\u00a0 The conference will address such themes as the cost and funding of amateur performance; the role of commercial publishers and theatrical suppliers in feeding the craze for amateur theatricals; the involvement of professional performers in amateur productions; rivalries and tensions between professionals and amateurs; amateur performance in the context of a funding crisis in the humanities.<\/p>\n

Please submit proposals of 250-500 words electronically (doc or pdf) by\u00a0March 7, 2014\u00a0to\u00a0rappt2014@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

5) How can interested researchers get involved?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You are welcome to email me (j.hawley@rhul.ac.uk<\/a>) and to visit the website:\u00a0www.rappt.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judith Hawley is Professor\u00a0of English at Royal Holloway, University of London.\u00a0 Her doctoral work at Oxford was on Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, which remains one… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}