Category Archives: Production

In Conversation: The Late Victorian World of the Music Hall

Posted on by under Production, Vital Spark

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: I think it’s kind of hard to get one’s head around music halls today, we just don’t have anything like it. We don’t have different theatres for different socio-economic classes. Theatre is generally thought of as a middle and upper class thing now, because of prices, and the theatre of the common, for everybody, is television and film, so we don’t have relationship with the idea that there could actually be separate theatres based on who you are.

 

Lola Wingrove: It’s quite interesting because things like film was basically what killed music halls, film and then television, and television is blamed a lot for the downfall of film nowadays, because if you’ve got it in your front room why would you bother going out. Most people seem to be staying in their houses and aren’t really interacting in the same kind of way. One of the biggest draws in music halls was their sense of community spirit and bringing everyone together and making everyone feel like they’re sort of mucking in together, so to speak. Yes, I think it’s something that’s quite foreign to us now, when we think about it, it doesn’t quite work out. It’s a really interesting theatre format, but people can’t quite understand it so much now.

 

LR: Do we have anything analogous? I feel like there are different programmes that are aimed at different groups, but it’s not quite the same in live performance.

 

LW: No. I know people [have compared] the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent” to the variety performance, because it’s the same sort of set-up of having people doing different kinds of performance, and you’ve still got that interactive quality, with people ringing in and voting and people talking about it in the street, and they’ll chat to eachother about it and read about it in the paper, so you’ve got that kind of weird community, in that it draws everybody in to talk about something in common. But one of the really great things that music halls did was actually reflect everyday life, a bit like soap operas do today, only the live format made it all even more immediate. They would have performers on stage that were performing for the people as the people you’d see selling stuff on the markets, or in the coffee shops. So although the kind of classed analogy is sort of there, it doesn’t totally work in that same sort of way. That’s why I think people have a difficulty understanding music hall.

 

LR: And the idea of variety, in a performance, because you don’t go to something where you’re going to see seven or eight different things, on potentially completely different themes in one night, we just don’t really have that anymore.

 

LW: That’s the thing, [there were] professionals going around and doing these different acts, and they would perform all across the country, so you’ve got professionals- animal trainers, acrobats, dancers, singers, comedians. And on the bills, quite often, especially towards the late Victorian period, the music halls would normally include a section from a ballet or an opera or something, so we tend to think of music halls as being these sort of rowdy, working-class kind of thing, and [we often think they were] a suppression, a way of keeping the working class away from the fine arts, but it wasn’t that at all. I mean, they were much better versed in ballet and opera and things like that than a lot of us probably are today, because of the fact that they would see it on a regular basis and get all these different acts. And we tend to think of the halls as being quite xenophobic because of the amount of patriotism and stuff like that, but for a lot of the halls, they actually employed lots of different acts from all over Europe, and there was a cultural exchange happening through the halls, which is quite often neglected and ignored as well, so it was quite a sort of novel and interesting experience. There are some acts that are just a little bit weird. Like, there was one guy and his whole act was just jumping up and down on the spot. No one has quite worked out why that was so popular, but he apparently just jumped up and down and everyone thought it was wonderful. But that’s the problem with performance history and archives, you can’t quite see how he did it in a way that was so hilarious.

 

LR: Where do their performers fit into the bigger arts picture of the times, and into society on the whole? I assume Jenny Hill wasn’t someone Queen Victoria was going to invite over for coffee, but maybe she would, I don’t know!

 

LW: Well, not Hill, but [her contemporary] Bessie Bellwood, she was invited by Princess Louise, by royal appointment, to sing one of her songs, because she’d heard the servants singing it and enjoyed it, so she invited Bessie Bellwood to go and sing to her. That’s how far it could go, if you had a really good, catchy song! Even royalty could invite you to perform.

I think at that particular time, because this is long before the royal command performance occurred, a lot of the middle and upper classes just tended to think of the performers as low and just weren’t particularly interested in them. They’d almost be sort of our idea of the reality show stars today, where if you were middle or upper class you’d probably have heard of Jenny Hill, and there are certain songs that you might even buy to play on your piano by her, but you wouldn’t exactly think of her in particularly high esteem. However, amongst the working classes… That is arguably a much wider base, because most of the classes would go to the halls, that was their main source of entertainment. Especially in the winter time when at home it would be very dark or you wouldn’t have enough money to get a fire going, you could go to these halls which were all beautiful and glittery and well-heated, so people would often go to the halls several times a week.

[With] that kind of audience base, performers like Jenny Hill were exceptionally well known, I mean they were really, really hugely famous, to the extent that when they died, in the funeral procession, they would have ten thousand people lining the street for them, these sorts of amounts. Definitely for Hill. Marie Lloyd was a very famous, she had twenty or thirty thousand lined up, lining the streets for her. So they were hugely popular and influential, with women in particularly. [Women would be] waiting for them backstage to give them presents. They had a lot of groupies, a lot of people were really sort of obsessed with them, and they were the stars who were used the most for advertising. They were the ones who were put onto cigarette cards or used to advertise [other things], in Vesta Tilley’s case it was clothes. And advertising gives you some power as well, so they were enormously famous, probably just because of that wide base, probably even better known that some of the legitimate performers, who arguably had the smaller audience base really.

 

LR: Is there any permeability between those two worlds theatrically?

 

LW: There was. Each year for pantomime the legitimate theatres stole a lot of the music hall and variety performers for their pantomimes, in order to get quite a lot more people in, and so even the middle and upper classes would have seen Jenny Hill in her numerous amounts of pantomime, so they did cross over to the mainstream theatres there, and there’s a lot of evidence of music hall performers being asked to perform, because even the legitimate theatres, they’d have a main play, but they’d quite often have a little bit of variety warm-up stuff before the main event happened, so they’d get performers like Jenny Hill to perform there. So there were definitely cases of that. And also, both amongst opera and ballet stars, there’s a lot of them finishing performing, and then going around to a hall around the corner and deciding to have a sort of knees-up but still perform again, and so there was quite a lot of moving across in that way. I don’t think there were so many legitimate actress who’d want to be seen on the music hall stage, so there’s a bit less in terms of cases of it going that way, but definitely in the other way it did work, and in fact I know they often said with Jenny Hill, that she was good enough and had been invited to perform in legitimate theatres as an actress.

 

 

The Vital Spark: A New Project

Posted on by under News, Uncategorized, Vital Spark

We’ve hinted at new things on the HIDden horizon. One of them is, on the surface, a big departure for us- but it’s very exciting. This is a new piece of drama, tentatively titled The Vital Spark. It’s the story of the life of Jenny Hill, the first woman to be recognised as a “comedienne”. Hill was a star of the late-Victorian music hall, who, like many performers since, combined humour, interesting characters, and a certain degree of social commentary.

Hill is the thesis subject of Lola Wingrove, a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol. I first heard Lola speak about women’s performance in music halls last year, and right away I knew there was a play in there waiting to happen. We chatted after her lecture about the idea of using her work on reviving Hill’s repertoire to create the basis for a play about the life of this remarkable Victorian performer. And now, in collaboration, we’re doing just that.

A new play… Victorians… on the surface, it’s quite different from what HIDden has done thus far. This project goes to the heart of our interests: a fascinating personality, and interesting story, and one that speaks to a specific aspect of the past, one that you might not know very well. Certainly it’s quite new to us! Moreover, it’s taking us all right back to the archives; there are no scripts left of Jenny Hill’s performances, and of course there is no film, so the challenge, to Lola as the writer and to the HIDden team in putting the production together, is to use original material to try to imagine what happened. As with our medieval productions, we know we’re not going to “authentically” “recreate” anything. What we’re hoping to do is to use the evidence that history has left us to create something new, something that will show you a bit of theatre history that you haven’t had the chance to see before.

Although we’re still in the early stages of this project, we’ve already learned quite a lot. In the weeks ahead we’ll have more interesting things to share with you: a bit about Jenny Hill and her life and times; the Victorian theatre; and just how we’re approaching the challenges of creating a new piece from historic documents. I can’t wait to see how it all comes together- it’s going to be an exciting journey!

Director’s Notes: The Missing Hell-mouth

Posted on by under Mankind, Production

There’s something about medieval hell-mouths. I think it may be the fact that, in so many manuscript illustrations, they look a little like confused puppies. Evil puppies, eating the souls of the damned, but you still want to scratch their ears and say, “Good hell-mouth. Who wants a soul-cookie?”

When initially planning for this production of Mankind, we imagined some form of a medieval hell-mouth, from which Titivillus and his minions could appear. Although we don’t know that there would have been one during any fifteenth-century productions fo the play, there are certainly modern-day precedents for such staging. This is not without logic: Mercy has his church; to give the demons something equal and opposite would seem to create a balance, and a spatial vocabulary for the forces of good and its antithesis. A hell-mouth evokes the medieval iconography, giving a sense of the era, and there is something charming and comical about the sort of demonic creature that is often pictured in manuscripts. It seems to fit well with the amusing evil of the Vice characters.

Choosing to stage the play in a modern idiom, however, a medieval hell-mouth felt out of place. Moreover, the more we thought about the play, the less sense it made. The Vices who dominate the play- Nowadays, New-guise, and Nought- may be demons, but they are, importantly, worldly demons. They aren’t lurking about in a nether world with pitchforks at the ready, they are the temptations of man’s everyday life. Though they speak of mayhem and murder, what we see of the Vices is their enjoyment of a kind of childish annoyance, at worse a distinct penchant for blasphemy. Most importantly, they are easy for Mankind to fall into because they are all around, constantly: daily irritations, pleasures out of reach. They can’t seem too overtly evil, or Mankind would, we presume, see through their games. (This is why the Vices only stay masked amongst those who are ‘in the know’- their own kind and Mercy. Mankind only sees them as people.) They need to be a bit sneaky, not announce their arrival from the fiery depths.

Additionally, Mercy is well outnumbered. The fact that Mankind includes one holy person and five evil ones has often been discussed, and is one of the reasons that early scholarship considered it a ‘corrupt’ play- surely something was missing, for the virtue to stand solitary against such overwhelming odds. There isn’t much need to balance the demons against Mercy with a hell-mouth when they are already, numerically, in the majority. Giving Mercy a specific location- a church, a lectern- lets him argue from a position of strength, while the Vices come and go, unmoored. There may be more of them, but Mercy is the stonger character. The Vices, without a ‘home’ of their own, may try to usurp Mercy’s position, in Mankind’s life and physically, but they do not succeed. Even Titivillus, the strongest of the demonic characters, must go invisible, be everywhere and nowhere- and Mankind still returns to faith, to Mercy and his church. Mankind, too, needs a place to return; we trust that the demons will go off and find others to torment.

So- no hell-mouth. I still want to build one someday, but I’ll have to listen to Mercy’s advise, exercise patience, and wait for the day when we get to do a Last Judgement from one of the medieval mystery cycles.

Director’s Notes: Performing Allegory

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I’m often surprised by the general perception, even among medievalists, that there must be a very different and particular approach taken to directing or acting in dramas of the period. Apart from getting used to the language, I’ve tended to treat medieval plays in pretty much the same manner I would any modern drama. To do anything else, I’ve felt, is to subscribe to the long-outdated notion that they are somehow radically different and “inferior”.

Allegory would seem to challenge that. How do you tell an actor that he is playing a concept rather than a character… and how does an actor go about doing so? After all, there are still lines, still action; symbolic or representational, the virtues and vices of the play are still embodied beings, and have to be dealt with accordingly. To quote Jon Whitman in his introduction to Allegory, “the more personal attributes we give our personification, the more we turn it first into a mere character type…” We can adhere to a strict interpretation of the personified virtue, leaving an interpretive challenge to the audience and a rather tedious process for the actor, or we can let the character flourish, but lose the strict allegorical correspondence.

Upon first reading it, Mankind seems to be largely impersonal: Mercy is good, the demons are bad; Mankind, the only fully human character in the play, is also the only one to seem conflicted. But the more we played with the characters, the more we found. For example, Mercy can never stray too far from being capable of forgiving Mankind’s transgressions, but he can be, and is, thoroughly devastated by them. Mercy, we decided, thinks like a parent: his love and forgiveness is unconditional, but he certainly doesn’t have to be happy about what Mankind has done, nor do those offerings come without a certain pain. By the same token, the three N’s, though thoroughly amoral, still find themselves seeking the comfort and approval of Mischief and Titivillus, actions which place them firmly within the context they embody (the world): no matter how much havoc they wreak, some of their emotional reactions remain human, as is true of even the worst person.

Staging allegory, then, is all about finding a balance. The play itself seems to acknowledge this: Mankind doesn’t take to a lengthy sermon, but he does respond to the humanity of Mercy. Layers of meaning are what make allegory work, and staging that complexity doesn’t undercut it; instead, dramatising that complexity is what makes the meanings accessible.

Mankind: a Very Brief Annotated Bibliography

Posted on by under Mankind, Production

A lot of reading and research goes into our productions! This is just a fraction of the books and articles we’ve looked over in working on Mankind, but if you’re curious to know more about the play and its history, here are some places to start.

Adams, John Quincy, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, pp. 304-324
From 1924, this book gives an interesting perspective on how scholars used to consider Mankind- the vices’ song is missing, for example, cut for being too obscene for print.

Carpenter, Sarah, ‘Morality-Play Characters’, Medieval English Theatre 5:1, p. 18-28

Cawsey, Kathy, “Tutivillus and the ‘Kyrkchaterars’: Strategies of Control in the Middle
Ages”, Studies in Philology, v. 102, No. 4 (Autumn 2005), pp. 434-451
A consideration of the traditions of the character Titivillus and his role as the collector of idle gossip or chatting during church, this article really brings home another reason why the power of language is at the heart of Mankind.

Coogan, Mary Philippa, An Interpretation of the Moral Play Mankind.
One of the only full-length studies of the play, Sr. Coogan’s monograph has been very influential on study of the play, and she makes a convincing argument for Mercy being interpreted as a friar.

Diller, Hans-Jurgen, “Laughter in Medieval English Drama: a Critique of Modernizing and
Historical Analyses”, Comparative Drama, v. 36, iss. 1:2 (Spring 2002), pp. 1-19
Diller considers the comedy in Mankind and what it would have meant to medieval audiences, an important consideration in trying to determine how to approach the play even with a modern audience.

Heap, Carl, ‘On Performing Mankind’, Medieval English Theatre 4:2, pp. 93-103
Reflecting on one of the earlier twentieth-century revivals, this article gives insight into some of the issues that you have to face in producing Mankind. It makes an interesting contrast to our very different production.

King, Pamela, ‘Morality Plays’ in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre,
ed. Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, pp. 235-264
This is a really good starting point for morality plays, and the entire volume is a great point of departure if you’re just starting to get your head around medieval drama.

Marshall, John, “ ‘O Ye Souerens That Sytt and Ye Brothern That Stonde Ryght Wppe’:
Addressing the Audience of Mankind”, European Medieval Drama, v. 1, p. 189-202
Looking at the moments when the play specifically acknowledges the audience’s presence, the article also looks at who the audience might have been, and where.

Stock, Lorraine Kockhanske, “The Thematic and structural Unity of ‘Mankind’, Studies in
Philology v. 72, No. 4 (Oct. 1975), pp.386-406
Considers the many potential sources and influences in Mankind, arguing that it is very deliberate in its choices; good for considering what information a medieval audience member might have had to influence how he understood the play.

Director’s Notes: Mankind in the Audience

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It’s obvious, from the way the characters address them to the eponymous lead character, that the audience is as much ‘mankind’ as Mankind is himself. Mankind’s plight, his indecision between the pleasures of the world and matters of the spirit, crosses boundaries of circumstance and time. The play tells its audiences that they are as at risk of making evil decisions as he is- and that the forgiveness Mercy offers him is more universally available, too.

We decided it would be interesting to not just imply the audience’s complicity in Mankind’s fall and redemption, but to make his journey theirs explicitly. Having the audience reading Mankind’s lines puts them squarely in his shoes, and makes his decisions theirs. To do this, we’ve tried to put as few boundaries between this corporate ‘Mankind’ and the actors as possible. The physical borders of the acting space are completely permeable, and the cast still looks like a part of the twenty-first century. Very non-traditionally, the actors will have scripts in hand, just as the audience will, to make sure that everyone seems to be in the same place. The demons may sometimes look like demons, but they walk among us.

This is quite a departure for HIDden, which has heretofore staged medieval dramas quite traditionally. Performing for an academic conference gives us a unique opportunity to explore the play in ways that might not be possible with a different audience, and we expect that a group of medievalists will bring specialist insight into their participation. Thus far, the cast has been having a lot of fun getting their heads inside of the medieval characters and their writer. Now we’re all looking forward to hearing what revelations might be brought out by our audience/actors.

Mankind Auditions

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Auditions this past weekend were great, but we still have a few parts to cast! We’ll be holding another round of auditions this Thursday, 22 January. They’ll be held in the Arts Complex on Woodland Road in Bristol from 2-6 p.m. Please email us for detailed information, readings, and to book an audition spot: auditions@hiddentheatre.com and see https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3amvuzl7g4n0qbx/AAAGjjnviSOaFXITUHdryZpja?dl=0 for the auditions information pack.

Upcoming Production: “Mankind” (Bristol, February 28th 2015)

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HIDden Theatre will be staging the medieval morality play Mankind for the Bristol Centre for Medieval Studies Postgraduate Conference, ‘Rule and Recreation’ on 28 February, 2015.

This weekend we will be holding auditions for this upcoming production in Bristol. We’re looking for enthusiastic actors to participate. For details about auditions and readings, please see: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3amvuzl7g4n0qbx/AAAGjjnviSOaFXITUHdryZpja?dl=0

The Final Day, York Mystery Plays 2014

Posted on by under Production, York Mystery Plays 2014

After two busy weekends of performance, the Mystery Plays for 2014 have come to an end. Our set has been dismantled, the costumes are back in storage, and the waggons have returned to their respective owners. It’s been a hectic period for the HIDden team, but were blessed with a most extraordinary cast and an incredibly dedicated crew, and we could not be more proud of “The Baptism”. A big thanks also to the people who organised the entire thing, and to the York Festival Trust for giving us this opportunity. HIDden began its life in York, on the heels of the last mystery play cycle in 2010, and it means everything to have been invited back. Thank you to the audiences who braved the inclement weather to experience this remarkable, unique-to-York experience, and we hope to see you again in the years ahead!

Week Two of York Mystery Plays 2014

Posted on by under Production, York Mystery Plays 2014

We’ve now completed our second weekend with the York Mystery Plays, and we’re all rather sad to see it end. It’s been a whirlwind of preparation and performance; everyone’s hard work has really paid off. In fact, we can’t think of a single thing we’d want to change! This week’s performance sites were Dean’s Park, St William’s College, St Sampson Square, and the Museum Gardens. St Sampson’s was a particularly appropriate experience for a medieval drama: it has the hustle and bustle of cities both now and then, and is a real litmus test for actors. It was delightful to see how our cast rose to the occasion, and how passers-by stopped to watch them perform. We really could not be more proud of them, and would like to send everyone involved a very big round of applause.