Category Archives: News

Director’s Notes: New Year’s Resolutions

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I’ve always loved the New Year. While I know that it’s a somewhat arbitrary construct, and every day is a new year from that day 365 days ago, it still gives me a pleasant feeling of both a fresh beginning and the satisfaction of completion. It’s a time to give pause for reflection on seasons past, and, for many people, a time when they deliberately contemplate things in their life that they want to change or improve upon.

I don’t go in much for resolutions; I don’t want to lose weight or run a marathon next year. Still, for anyone who works in a creative field, finding ways to keep growing and expanding, keeping the old grey cells humming away in new directions, is sort of a de facto New Year’s resolution, one you renew every year. (Hopefully it’s also one you manage to keep every year, too.)

Most years recently, my chief ambition for a new year has been “do more theatre”. Any fallow period where I’m not actively working on a production (even if I have other things on) is most uncongenial, so I always hope to keep busier with shows. Another one has been to read more plays, especially those outside my usual niche and comfort zones. It’s easy, especially if you have one foot in the academic world, to specialise too much; staying in familiar territory may be comforting, but it’s not really best practice as far as creative and intellectual growth are concerned.

On both fronts, 2015 was a more successful year than the previous one, and I’m hoping that 2016 will continue on that path. This year, though, my “resolution” reaches further: it’s not just do more or read more, but also see more. It’s very easy, when you work on productions frequently, to forget to make time to go to see theatre that isn’t your own – it can also be difficult to schedule. But there is so much out there, so much that’s really good, incredibly inspiring, and one needs those external creative jolts on a periodic basis.

I’ve always thought that one resolution that should be universal is to make an effort to simply keep learning. Maybe that sounds dull, especially if you’re enjoying some non-school time between terms, but new discoveries need never be reduced to something that might appear on a test. I always hope that people come away from our productions, or even from reading these essays, with some new nugget of understanding. I hope that will continue in the year ahead, and I also hope that the incredible amounts of learning that happen behind the scenes will as well. One of the best things about the past year has been seeing how much we have grown, changed, and learned from one another as a team; as we ring in the new year, I resolve to continue to be inspired and challenged by my colleagues at HIDden and our work together, and to do my best to pass that spirit on to you as our audience.

I hope we have the chance to see you at a production in 2016, and whatever your resolutions are, I wish you a joyful beginning to the New Year.

In Memoriam: Remembering Charles Hunt

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Theatre can be a strange social world. As often as not, due to the off-kilter hours, the particular demands, and the immense dedication it takes, it becomes one’s life, not just one’s work. Friends within that world matter especially, because they understand it. But friendships within theatre are also sometimes peculiar. It creates intimacy rapidly, but its usually transient nature means that those friendships frequently don’t remain close. The ones that do manage to stick, however, become precious. So the loss of those people is keenly felt.

On the morning when we were waking up for the day of the Mankind performance, we were greeted with the sad news of the death of Charles Hunt, an actor with whom the HIDden team has worked for several shows. We were looking forward to seeing him at the performance, and so it came as quite a shock. Our last communications were his offer to loan us costumes if we needed them, and his good wishes for the show; which he hoped to attend. That, right there, summed up Charles. He was always supportive, always encouraging, and enthusiastic about medieval drama in a way that is somewhat uncommon outside of the academic community.

The comments which poured onto his Facebook page, maintained by his family, all seemed to speak of the two most profound qualities with which we too remember him: Charles was a true gentleman, and a devoted theatre person. It always seemed fitting that, at Christmastime, he annually portrayed Charles Dickens for evenings of dramatic readings; for Charles was the modern-day embodiment of the courtly Victorian Gentleman: a soft-spoken, kindly individual, who carried himself with a quiet grace.

We first met him as an actor who played Joseph in our London debut production. While the Nativity play we had chosen did not include the comical Joseph’s trouble about Mary, there’s no doubt he could have handled it. Charles had a good sense of the comic turn, but was also totally convincing as the protective and devoted Joseph who would be the infant Jesus’ Earthly father figure. When The Baptism came around in 2014, the decision to include God had already been made, and he was really our only choice for the part.

Our Artistic Director, Laura Elizabeth Rice, notes:

From a director’s standpoint, Charles was delightful to work with because he always had ideas and suggestions, but he wasn’t a backseat driver. He’d mention them after rehearsal, and if you wanted to try them out, he was happy to do so; if they didn’t fit in with a production, he didn’t push the matter. You could also always count on him to try what was asked and to be enthusiastic about any new project. When I remember him it will always be with the gentle smile he bestowed upon Jesus as he blessed him from Heaven in The Baptism.

The sense of history and performance that turned him into a remarkable impersonation of Charles Dickens every winter is probably what made Charles such a good fit with HIDden, but he also seemed to believe in supporting young companies as they found their way forward; in this respect we are not the only ones indebted to his kindness. It meant a lot that someone well established in the local theatre community shared our idea that the past is a rich field to mine for performance in the present.

Charles was that friend in theatre who stayed – a true character of the theatre, a fantastic actor, and an unconditional source of support – we will miss him very much.

How It Translates, Our Artistic Director’s Approach

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When people find out that I’m working on a medieval play, almost always the first question is, “Are you doing it in modern or Middle English?” These days the answer is almost always modern, because despite enjoying it myself, I’ve come to recognise that Middle English is really challenging for audiences, and, unfortunately, often cuts them off from really getting to grips with the play they’re seeing. The next question tends, from academics, to be “Which edition did you use?”, and from non-academics, “How did you translate it?”

Despite how different it looks on the page, Middle English is not actually that difficult to get your head or tongue around. In fact, sounding words out aloud, the way kids learn to read, is a good way to make sense of it on occasion; the spellings will be peculiar, but once you hear it spoken, you’ll usually know what it means. So I’m never entirely sure that it’s really a “translation” proper. But, if you’ve been curious, here is how it happens.

First I go through the script and change any archaic letters into their modern equivalent. (For example: something that looks rather like the modern lower-case “y” is actually a “th”- it’s where we get “ye olde” from; it would have been pronounced as “the”.) Then I change all the really obvious words into modern spelling, which will usually be about three quarters of the text. Next come the words that are definitely in Middle English but whose meanings I have come to know over the years of working with it. I usually spend the better part of a day with a thesaurus, trying to find the closest word in meaning and colour, that also keeps any rhyme schemes and meters that might be present. About half the time, I can find a good translation that keeps the poetry and alliteration intact. When I can’t, I have to make some executive decisions. Will the audience make sense of an unfamiliar word from the context? How important is that particular word, or is the primary meaning conveyed elsewhere in the line? In some instances, I’ll leave the Middle English word in, feeling pretty sure that it won’t be detrimental to conveying the story or characters. In others, I’ll have to make the decision to disturb the carefully wrought meter or alliteration for the sake of clarity.

The biggest challenge is tracking down the words that I don’t know. Middle English can be difficult to look up (absent having a university library’s resources at your fingertips, and I usually work at home) because the spellings are so capricious; in some cases the word’s definition might actually be speculative and uncertain, and in others there might have been a clerical error which muddles the picture. There’ll usually be one or two that completely stymie me, which warrants a call to medievalist friends to pick their brains. In the end, it’s pretty rare not to track down some idea of what a word should mean. With that done, I repeat the process of trying to decide if I can keep the ancient word, or wrestling through trying to find an appropriate substitute if I can’t.

Invariably, there will be a bit of Latin. This is one area where I suffer as a medievalist: my Latin is virtually non-existent. That’s more time with dictionaries, Latin translation webpages, and usually some phone calls to colleagues who don’t mind helping me with tricky bits. (The up side to this is that I’ve picked up a bit more of the language than I would probably know otherwise.)

Only when I’ve got it pretty much solidified will I pull the editions off the shelf. My purpose in doing so is simply self-editing: I want to check that I haven’t misunderstood anything, that their glosses on words match my translations. I always look at as many as I have or can get my hands on, because sometimes they don’t agree on specific words, and sometimes one will have a more precise meaning that I need to contemplate. A lot of editions will also have commentary on parts of the play, which might clue me in about why a particular scene is written in a specific way.

It’s only after the script has been brought into the twentieth century that I start contemplating any necessary changes or cuts. I know that to some people this is anathema, and it may seem to go against my earlier assertion to trust the text with which I’m working. That trust doesn’t mean a play is perfect, though, or that as it has come down to us it is perfect for what we’re doing. It does mean, however, that I can tell you exactly why I’m changing things, and how I’ve done it; I don’t just go in and start chopping. Our rearrangement of the Vices in our current production of Mankind is a good example of this: it may be unorthodox, but I think that it helps make the play a little bit neater for this production. (If “re-creation” or “authenticity” were our intent, I would not have made that sort of change.)

Translating is a rather tedious and fiddly process, but it has the definite benefit that, while I may not have it memorised, I do know the script really well by the time we get into rehearsals, not just conceptually, but in a structural sense, how it is put together as well as what it is saying. And it’s easier to sort out any confusion the actors have with what is still a pre-modern verse piece. In the end, we have a script I’m happy with, which stays fairly close to the original.

Mankind and the Work-Life Balance

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There’s a lot of talk these days about the “work-life balance”. It’s the idea that your job shouldn’t take up every working hour of the day, so that you can have things like a family and hobbies. And talking about it, being aware of it, is a pretty new. For most of history, the idea that your job wasn’t the definition of who you were would have made no sense. There’s a reason we have last names like Smith or Tanner: what you did actually did define who you were.

It’s too easy, though, to fall into envisioning the lives of earlier people as being nothing but drudgery. Life in the Middle Ages wasn’t just “nasty, brutish and short”. The very existence of plays from the period tells us that people had their diversions. We know they had games, music, dancing, festivals, celebrations. And consider Mankind.

In a sense, the entire play is a question of finding work-life balance- or any balance, really. While it has (pretty decisively) been argued that the play is an exhortation against the sin of sloth, Mercy’s argument for moderation is not the same thing as moratorium. Mankind is allowed to have fun, he’s just not allowed to neglect his work. Balance. We’re all trying to find it, he’s just unusually bad at it.

And Mankind would not be so easily led astray by the Vices if he didn’t have a sense that life should be about more than just plowing one’s field. He just isn’t very good at finding a balance- for Mankind, it seems to be all work or all play. I’m sure we all still know some people who struggle, as he does, to find a happy medium. Like Mankind, when your day job is not something near and dear to your heart, it can be very easy to prefer to do something- anything- else. (Conversely, if you really love what you do, it’s very easy to forget how to do anything else.)

What’s different for Mankind is that, in a pre-secular society, he not only believes that he has to find a work-life balance, but a work-life-afterlife balance: his religious beliefs mean that he needs to find significant time to invest in acts of faith, as well. This is maybe the hardest part of his thinking to grasp in the modern world, where even those who are sincere in their beliefs tend to slot that part of life into specific, proscribed times- church on Sunday morning, maybe a choir rehearsal or volunteer group on a weekday evening. It can be pigeonholed, scheduled, and worked around, and most people would probably lump it in with “other stuff you do outside of work”. For Mankind it holds a much higher priority… until, of course, the Vices convince him otherwise.

The end of the play leaves us with the impression that the great sin is not so much that the neglect of one’s day job, the work that puts food on his table, but the neglected of spiritual things. Mercy only uses the word ‘measure’ twice, and the Vices once; but that is what the play is really about. We don’t expect that Mankind is going to rush off to join a monastery after the curtain comes down, and devote all of his time to thoughts of God and Heaven. He’s going to back to plowing his field, bringing in his crops, praying in church regularly, and, yes, having the odd drink at the pub.

And he- and Mercy- and therefore, presumably, God- can live with that, because it’s a life in balance.

 

From The Director’s Desk: Auditions From Another Angle

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The song “I Hope I Get It” from A Chorus Line is the inner workings of the mind of actors as they approach an audition. Though the characters in that story are hoping to get roles as dancers on Broadway, their thoughts, about how badly they each want the part, and their fears about whether or not they will be good enough for it, are things that flit through any actor’s head as they go into an audition.

The show doesn’t really deal much with what’s going on in the director’s head, however. Perhaps it’s because there are a lot more actors than directors, or because the director is presumed to be coming to an audition from a place of power. After all, they’re the ones who get to decide on the casting. But as we’re getting ready for auditions for Mankind in a few days, I wanted to share some thoughts from the other side of the desk. If you’re thinking about auditioning (and I really hope some of you are!), maybe it will help to know some of the things that might go through a director’s head during the process.

There’s a very fine line between excited and nervous, and I’m probably walking it just as much as you are. I absolutely love seeing the way that different people approach a part, and a lot of ideas get generated in seeing what actors bring to different roles. But I’m also nervous because I want to make sure that the right people end up in the right parts, that the cast will work well together as a group and complement one another’s talents, and that each actor will be challenged throughout the production. It’s possible to get it wrong, and that fact is always in the back of my mind.

I really do want to see every actor who auditions do well. I’m rooting for each one of you. I know that audition nerves can really trip you up, and I know that just because maybe you stumble on a part on that particular day, it’s not necessarily something that will be a problem in the long run. It’s my job to try to see the bigger picture, and the little bobble that you’ll beat yourself up about on the way home is probably not the most important moment of your audition ‘performance’.

I know that auditions are, in many respects, a flawed way of testing people’s acting skills and suitability. There are actors who are horrible in auditions routinely but fantastic throughout rehearsals and performance; there are those in the reverse. It’s one day- one moment- of your life, it’s only a tiny sliver of your abilities on display, and it’s only what you can do at that exact moment. It’s a mirror, but an imperfect one.

There are a couple of things that I hope I get to see from actors. One is a genuine enjoyment of performing. Whether it’s a serious play or part or not, there is an energy to creating a role that makes a difference. Creating theatre is hard work, but it should also have an element of fun, too. I look for creativity, for people who are willing to stretch themselves, rather than being locked into a specific idea of a character or part. I want to know if actors can take a suggestion, run with it, and mold it into something uniquely their own.

The best part of auditions is that it’s our first chance to work with actors in the roles, and seeing the play start to come alive beyond the ideas in our own heads. It’s the first baby steps towards what the full production will become.

So if you’ve had thoughts of getting involved, know that we will be really thrilled to have you along, and that we’ll do everything we can to make it a chance for you to shine. And know that if you’re nervous and excited, you’re not alone.

Bawdy Morality

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“Nothing in the canon of English drama sounds more dreary or uninviting than the ‘morality play’.” So writes Ron Tanner. (‘Humour in Everymand and the Middle English Morality Play’, Philological Quarterly, Spring 1991, p. 149). I’m hard-pressed to argue with him. The word ‘morality’ has all the sparkle and excitement of unsalted porridge. We associate it with something preached at us, generally from a place of judgement rather than suggestion; morality is what your elderly grandmother wanted you to have. On the whole, modern society has come to view the word ‘morality’ as the antithesis of ‘fun’.

Up to a point, the character of Mercy would agree with that. His argument- which Mankind misses or ignores for the majority of the play- is that there are more important things than amusement and instant gratification. But Mercy isn’t really an old fuddy-duddy, intent on making everyone miserable in the name of seeking virtue. “Distemper not your brain with good ale nor wine wine,” he says before adding, “I forbid you not the use. Measure yourself ever.” It’s okay to have a good time, to drink and be merry. Just don’t let that be the thing that drives you. Quite apart from theological implications, Mercy’s recommended pattern of living- moderation in all things- is entirely sensible.

Particularly for those who don’t make a study of history, it can be hard to remember what has come in between the writing of Mankind and today. The writer, performers, and audiences who saw it originally didn’t have the Puritans and the Victorians standing between them and the material. We do. In the Victorian and Puritan worlds, ‘morality’ was a rigid code of behaviour, thou shalts and shalt nots, in a completely different sense than existed for medieval people. Our notions of the dullness of ‘moral’ behaviour have been coloured by those intermediary lenses. So while it’s true that, even by medieval standards, Mankind had its share of bawdiness, that wasn’t at all incompatible with a moral lesson.

Thus we get a play full of the kind of jokes that would today earn it at least a rating of ‘parental guidance suggested’… and it’s still about how a man finds his way to faith and goodness. Perhaps it succeeds even better than a dull sermon (which it parodies in Mercy’s opening speech) because it is willing to embrace the reality that people like a good off-colour joke now and then. By drawing the audience in and engaging them through humour, however “inappropriate”, it entertains us long enough to stick around for the ending.

Mankind is the “unporridgey” morality play. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a very good starting point, and it might just surprise you.

Revisiting Mankind

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Programming upcoming shows is often a challenge; there are a lot of factors that go into the decision of what we’ll be working on (and there are always a lot more ideas in the works than you see at any given moment). We want to find plays that will be interesting for our audience, and which give us new challenges. Particularly given this latter consideration, it may seem counterintuitive to revisit old ground, but on occasion it feels like the right decision.

Our autumn production in York, “Mankind”, is one we’ve played with before. Last February we staged a reading of it for an academic conference in Bristol. (You can read some of our thoughts on that in earlier entries on this page.) After completing that project, we agreed that it would be nice to stage it as a full production. We had a lot of fun with it last winter, and we had a terrific cast who really put a lot into it, but the same circumstances which made it a reading rather than a full performance meant that we felt there was a lot more to be got out of the play. “Mankind” is a pretty physical show- after all, the dichotomy between the desires of one’s earthly being and man’s higher ideals is what it’s about. The demons should really get a chance to interact with the audience, to put into physical being the sense of fun that is so seductive to Mankind.

The nice thing about re-exploring a familiar show is that you have the chance to look at different parts of it, to emphasize different things, and to use what you’ve learned previously. I remain convinced that a sympathetic, approachable, and above all human Mercy is really the linchpin of the play. Without that, Mankind’s despair has no remedy, but moreover, he has no concrete reason to return to Mercy’s precepts. A more restrained set of demons, however, allows for a quieter interpretation of Mercy; with the demons really let off the hook to play, Mercy will have to possess a greater strength, and on occasion anger, to balance them. This is not to suggest that any of the characters should tip over into becoming caricatures; on the contrary, their ability to remain real is maybe even more important, particularly if, good or evil, they are making an attempt on the souls of the audience as much as Mankind.

A second look at a show is another chance to tease out new things. After all, with historic drama, every time a show is revived, it’s getting a new life, a new look, and adding a new layer to its own history. And every show comes with a new cast, and each new group of people bring something different to the table. I’m looking forward to taking another look at “Mankind”, and see what turns up. Chances are, it’s something I haven’t even imagined yet.

Everything Live

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It’s a truism of working with historic drama that you can never really recreate the experiences of the past, for performers or audiences. In recent readings for The Vital Spark, I came across a comment about the way that encores used to involve a performer singing a favourite song over and over again, because there were no other chances to hear it. As someone who plays songs on loop for hours, or days, while I’m working on a project, or to learn the lyrics, as someone who used to hit rewind and play on cassettes dozens of times in a row, this struck me as a window into how truly foreign the past is. Leaving aside the philosophical questions of performative ephemerality, this is one of those vastly profound differences between the experience of the modern world and that of the past. I cannot conceive of life without my recordings or videos, yet for most of history, every performance happened once, and never again.

For the actors, this might not have mattered tremendously; if they were performing the same show for several nights or weeks at a run, the experience probably closely resembled that of today: each one is different, but in an ideal world they are as close to identical as possible. Perhaps for musicians it offered a different challenge: every song would have to ‘stick’ from the very beginning; there would be no room for a piece to grow on you over time or through replaying. Certainly for the audience it must have been very different from today. The only chances you ever had to experience a performer’s gifts were right there, for that little space of time. No recording to take home at the end of the night, no album to learn before going to the gig, no television special where you might pick up some familiarity with the material. And if you particularly loved some aspect of a performance, it could only ever live in your memory. Moreover, the experience could only be shared with those who were also there; you couldn’t simply pass over the earphones and say, “you’ve got to hear this.” Maybe you’d take home favourite songs to sing with your family, or some of a comic’s jokes would make it into your own conversation. I have to wonder if this created a different kind of memory- not just of the thing itself, but the actual human mechanism for mental recording, a capability that we, with our ability to record the entire world electronically, have lost. (Could anyone today repeat the feats of Homer, reciting his epics?)

I wonder if it created a secondary, private round of performances. Did people go home to friends and family who hadn’t been there and, in trying to explain what they’d seen, end up acting out their favourite parts of the performance? Did they ever do it as a way of keeping that memory alive? Most recordings, audio or film, are not made as a document for posterity. They are made because we understand that someone who has experienced a performance might like to see or hear it again, or because we know that there are those who would like to be there in person but can’t. But before the twentieth century, to miss a performance was to miss it forever, and to see it again you had to be there again- and could only do so for the length of the run. Surely that must have created a unique emotional connection, for we hold in different value those things which are limited.

And surely, too, something has been lost to us with the illusion, however inaccurate, that we can capture a performance forever, to be replayed as many times as we choose. This is one aspect of historic drama that we can’t even approach recreating, because we know that the world is full of options for ‘capturing’ the event for infinite encores. This is the opposite of the side of me that obsessively records, photographs, and collects. I’m not sure I could give that up. But these thoughts will certainly give me pause the next time a show is about to go up and a find myself setting up the tripod.

DIRECTOR’S NOTES: Trusting The Text

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Every now and then there is a moment which shifts the way you look at things. Sometimes it’s something you read, or an image, or a conversation. We all have a lot of these, and hopefully they stay with us, so that we don’t lose the wisdom contained in them.

I can’t remember where it was, or even when, but somewhere in the earlier years of my career with medieval drama, I heard a phrase that has stuck with me ever since.  Alexandra Johnston, one of the driving forces behind the Records of Early English Drama (REED) and Toronto’s legendary Poculi Ludique Societas, has on many occasions reiterated a mantra about performance: “Trust the text”. It’s such a simple thing, but in its simplicity, also a “lightbulb” moment.

In approaching a script, there is sometimes a tendency to trim a bit here, to cut a bit there, to rearrange, because of a fundamental belief that there is something wrong, that a section is too long, too boring, misplaced. This tends to be particularly true in medieval drama, the result, I’m sure, of the centuries during which it was reviled and degraded as “uninteresting” and “unplayable”, a naïve dramatic tradition which only served to highlight the brilliance of the drama which subsumed it. But that brilliant drama- Shakespeare’s- is also frequently subject to the pruning shears. (How often does anyone do Hamlet in its entirety?)

I’m not suggesting that you can or should never do any editorial work; and sometimes it’s not even a choice so much as a necessity (if you have to fit a production into 2 ½ hours, you’re stuck with it). But those words still ring true to me. Trust the text. Assume that the person who wrote the play knew what they were doing, and that those words- all of them– are there for a reason. After all, these aren’t Victorian magazine serials; no one is being paid by the word. If they’re there, they’re serving a purpose, and it’s your job as a director or actor to parse out what that purpose is.

That way, even if you do have to alter the script in any way, you know why you’re doing it. You haven’t just dismissed the play as being faulty, a thing waiting around for your adjustments to make it perfect. Not only is that a bit of hubris, it’s also a bit of laziness. It’s your job to work with the play, to serve its needs in a way that presents its story and themes best, using it to bring out points that you find relevant and interesting, but not doing violence to its essence. If you don’t believe that and trust it, why did you choose to work on it in the first place?

Trusting the text can be challenging, especially if you’re working on an unfamiliar genre or within a historic context that is unfamiliar. This is why historically informed drama emphasizes that second word. If you’ve done your homework, the unfamiliar will become less so, and the text will seem less foreign. And sometimes that study can make a play that might, on an initial reading, seem dull or unplayable, take on a whole new and interesting colour. I defy anyone to see “Creation” from the York Mystery Plays in 2014 or 2010 to think it boring, but I can understand why, without that foundational knowledge, anyone who stumbles onto the script would wonder how it could ever be made performable.

Of course, you don’t always have a finished text in front of you. With a project like “The Vital Spark”, it’s not immediately about trusting the text per se, but trusting the writer and the collaborative process, with faith that in the end, the text will be as it ought. The words might not be there yet, but the structure and story and themes and characters will emerge as they do, and the resulting production will require the same belief in it.

In the heel of the hunt, theatre is about communication. It’s about ideas, expressed through words, actions, and images. There are a lot of acts of trust which transpire in any performance- between performers, between the people on and behind the stage, between all of them and the audience. But first you have to believe in the play itself, and give it as much support and opportunity to thrive as possible. If you trust the text, you might not create a brilliant production, but at least you’ll know that you gave it the best foundation you could.

IN CONVERSATION: WOMEN AND THE MUSIC HALL

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I recently had a long chat with Lola Wingrove, our collaborator on ‘The Vital Spark’ and an expert on women in Victorian music-hall performance. Many interesting issues were raised in this conversation, which we hope will come through in the finished work. We’ll be posting some of this discussion here, to give you some background, and also as a window into some of the things we think about when putting together a play about the past.

 

Laura Rice: Are there a lot of women in music halls at this point? Obviously we’ve mostly talked about Jenny, but you’ve mentioned Vesta Tilley, Bessie Bellwood, Marie Lloyd… are there a fair number of women doing the same thing?

Lola Wingrove: When Jenny Hill started her career, it was still a little bit rarer and she was quite pioneering in her performance style of doing a lot of political performance, but it became a really big thing. In fact, in 1891, there was a report in the Theatre and Music Hall Journal that stated in the run-up week to Christmas, out of all the sketches that were on in London at the time, there were 76 female comics starring in them, and only 74 men. There were actually more women, although not by much, it was pretty much 50-50, but a little bit more women. And when you look through the newspapers (although at that time, the male and female adverts are separated) and you look through the lists of the female comics and serio-comics, it’s huge numbers, really massive numbers. People don’t think [of them], but there actually were an awful lot of women.

LR: We have such an image of Victorians being anti women in general, but on stage in particular. I know there’s a number of really famous “legitimate”, quote, actresses around from the same period, but you don’t think of them as being an equal number, in professional performance, at all.

LW: I think the thing is, there were a lot more legitimate actresses, but they were still always thought of as being a bit loose moralled. But I think the difference with the music hall performers is about class. There are quotes at the time about platform women and suffragettes, about how it was unwomanly to be seen to be speaking in public, and this sort of idea, but a lot of the music hall performers were working class and were very poor when they started off their careers, and so in a weird sort of way, I guess they probably didn’t mind losing their reputations, they made up for it with the ammount of travel, money, and independence they could get from the music hall stage. A report from 1981 says that on average an actress in the legitimate theatre would get about two or three pounds a week, to live off, to buy costumes for the shows they were in, all that sort of thing, whereas around the same time, Jenny Hill would get about 80 pounds for twelve nights’ work, and would get lots of benefits thrown for her. She’d be given diamond jewellery, and be given all sorts of presents and things. I think women started to see that if they went on the hall stage, they could earn a ridiculous amount of money, and they had a really good say in what material they did, so although they were still looked on as being loose moralled, and having that sort of reputation, they were earning so much money and getting to travel around so much, I think they said, ‘well,  screw it.’

Again, we don’t tend to think of [women onstage], I think partially because of the fact that these women were belittled quite a bit by the press or weren’t  reported on as much by the press, and theatre historians since then haven’t really looked at them too much. But actually there were huge numbers of them doing really interesting work.

LR: And a woman was actually better off, financially at least, making a career in music hall than as a ‘legitimate’ actress?

LW: If you were good enough- Jenny Hill  got asked to perform as a ‘legitimate’ actress but she always turned those offers down, because the pay wasn’t good enough. That was the main reason she wouldn’t perform in “proper” theatre, it just didn’t meet her pay criteria.

LR: That’s fascinating, because you’d really expect that the kind of theatre higher up the social ladder would come with a better paycheque.

LW: In legitimate theatre, the women were normally just a supporting cast, there weren’t a huge amount of fantastic roles for women at that time, they were normally weak or portrayed as being hysterical. In terms of casting, [music hall] was much better- you could show off your talents. It’s Fanny Lesley, I think, who was talked about how, in the music halls, she actually got to dictate exactly what material she sang, what she did, so if she made any failures she only had herself to blame. But it’s that kind of idea, that the music hall stars didn’t want to go into the legitimate theatre, because they’d just be cast in these plays which didn’t really have any good roles for women in particular. You didn’t have that many options in legitimate theatre, while in music halls they could dictate their own material, get lots of money, and do whatever they wanted.

LR: It’s interesting, given how narrow our usual view of Victorian women and their world is, to realise that it’s both a financial decision and an artistic one, where playing music halls gives women more artistic flexibility and autonomy, and that was definitely something they wanted.

LW: That’s one of the things about Jenny Hill. It’s always made out [in the newspapers] like she had to perform because there was nothing else she could do, and it’s overlooked a lot that, actually, she always wanted to perform and it was her sort of obsession, and it was definitely her talent. She did actively look to do it. And the press tried to undermine her in lots of ways; they kept trying to pretend it was really bad for her health, and they would always call her a ‘clever little thing’, and they tried to imply that her farm in Stretham was bought for her by someone else, a secret male lover, or something like that. And therefore she would counteract it with all these adverts where she would put in exactly how much she was earning, to show people that although she was being framed in this sort of way, she wasn’t really like that, she was earning this money.

LR: So she’s really savvy about PR, and about making this a financially very rewarding career, and she’s also stubborn about having her autonomy and making sure people know about it. Such an interesting person, and she seems to go against so much of what we think is true about Victorian women. I can’t wait to get Jenny ‘back’ on the stage again!