Middlesex University Research Repository An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk Beale, Samantha ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3533-644X (2018) Gagging for it: irony, innuendo and the politics of subversion in women’s comic performance on the post-1880 London music-hall stage and its resonance in contemporary practice. PhD thesis, Middlesex University. [Thesis] Final accepted version (with author’s formatting) This version is available at: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/23853/ Copyright: Middlesex University Research Repository makes the University’s research available electronically. Copyright and moral rights to this work are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners unless otherwise stated. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. 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See also repository copyright: re-use policy: http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/policies.html#copy Gagging for it: irony, innuendo and the politics of subversion in women’s comic performance on the post-1880 London music-hall stage and its resonance in contemporary practice A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Samantha Beale Department of Performing Arts Faculty of Arts & Creative Industries Middlesex University October 2017 Abstract This thesis focuses on women performing comedy on the London music-hall stage after 1880, examining performers including Bessie Bellwood, Marie Lloyd, Marie Loftus, Maidie Scott, Vesta Victoria and Nellie Wallace. The work of these women as comedy has been neglected in theatre and performance histories, and their influence on the evolution of popular forms and the development of twentieth and twenty-first century comic traditions has received little scholarly attention. I argue that performing comic material offered them unique opportunities to connect directly with popular audiences, resist censorship and to challenge gender stereotypes and common perceptions of and restrictions on women and women’s roles in Britain during the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries. As part of their performances they developed comic approaches and techniques that remain identifiable in contemporary comedy, engaging in a range of strategies, from playful and disruptive ironic representations of familiar female types, to deliberately transgressive acts of crossing the line of decency through the embodiment of comic innuendo. Their knowing interpretations of coded references in the written texts of the material performed and jokes shared with their audiences during performances frequently served as ironic socio-political commentary on their lives and experiences. Making use of a range of critical approaches from areas as diverse as performance history and historiography, contemporary approaches to gender and comedy, performance theory, humour theory and feminist literary theory, I engage in analysis of extensive archive material. Throughout the thesis I also draw direct comparisons with the work of women who use comedy in late twentieth and twenty-first century forms, including stand-up comedy and performance art, to demonstrate a continuum of comic practice existing between these female music- hall artists and their counterparts performing comedy today. Acknowledgements Thanks to my all my supervisors, my colleagues and students at Middlesex University, past and present; to the brilliant Dr. Josephine Machon, my Director of Studies, who so expertly encouraged me to finally get on and write the thing; to Jez and the boys for your tolerance and support, and all the cups of tea (and sympathy) through the caravan window; and to all of you who make me laugh…the women and the men. Gagging for it: irony, innuendo and the politics of subversion in women’s comic performance on the post-1880 London music-hall stage and its resonance in contemporary practice Contents Introduction ‘Reweaving’ women’s comic performance history 1 Chapter 1 31 ‘Sentiments unwomanly and unnatural’: moral ambiguity, censorship and public perceptions of the serio-comic performer Chapter 2 62 ‘A Comfort and Blessing To Man’: performed irony, self-deprecation and comic subversions of gender stereotypes Chapter 3 104 ‘Can we talk?’: intimacy, ‘gagging’ and comic licence in performer-audience relationships Chapter 4 132 ‘I mustn’t tell you what I mean’: knowing, not knowing and comic innuendo as performed (self)censorship Chapter 5 159 ‘Every Little Movement Has A Meaning of Its Own’: comic gestus and the ironic embodiment of gender Conclusion 190 Bibliography 212 Gagging for it: irony, innuendo and the politics of subversion in women’s comic performance on the post-1880 London music-hall stage and its resonance in contemporary practice Make the doors upon a woman’s wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and ‘twill out at the keyhole; stop that, ‘twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. (Rosalind, As You Like It. Act 4, Scene 1, 154-156) ‘Fuck them if they can’t take a joke.’ (Mae West, quoted in Sochen, 1991, p.155) Introduction: ‘reweaving’ women’s comic performance history All history is, as Lisa Jardine has suggested, ‘constructed narrative’, and central to the task of uncovering women’s performance history is what she describes as ‘weaving, unweaving and reweaving – the slender residue of ‘evidence’ which time has carried down to us’ (Jardine, 1998, p.33). This research has been a process of ‘unweaving’ some of the existing history of London’s late nineteenth and early twentieth-century popular stage and – notwithstanding the obvious limits to the reconstruction of historical performance – ‘reweaving’ the available residue so the narrative centres on the performances and professional lives of the women who are the focus of this study. Though many of these women had long careers and some were hugely successful and very well paid public figures, their contributions as comedians have been, to call upon a frequently repeated phrase and the title of Sheila Rowbotham’s 1973 study of women in Britain, ‘hidden from history’. Despite a number of feminist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s stating the importance of including popular forms in feminist histories of women performers, for example Susan Bassnett (1989, p.108) and Elaine Aston (1995, p.33), women working as comedians on the pop- ular stage in the UK during this period have, with a few exceptions, been neglected in both theatre and performance histories, and their influence on the evolution of the music-hall form and on the development of British comedy in the twentieth century have received very limited scholarly attention.1 Over the last few decades, 1 much research concerned with women’s contributions to theatre and performance has been devoted to text-based theatre, or feminist, post-structuralist or post- modernist readings of the work of performance artists of the 1960s and after.2 Music-hall performances by women have been included in a number of histories of popular culture, but frequently their contributions are not interpreted as comedy or as making any significant contribution to the evolution of popular comic forms. Certainly in popular histories, women performing comedy over the last century have most commonly been affectionately appreciated as useful foils for male comics – giggling, flirtatious eye candy, or the complaisant butts of suggestive jokes – rather than as actively funny women, creating their own jokes about their own experiences. Lana Rakow has argued that women’s popular forms were a critical blind spot for twentieth-century researchers believing that: ‘The disdain with which both men and women critics have tended to view women’s popular culture has prevented them from seeing how it speaks to the real problems and tensions in women’s lives.’ (Rakow, 1986, p.32) This research is a consequence of my frustration both with mainstream histories of British twentieth-century comedy, which have perpetuated perceptions of women’s absence from the comic tradition, and with women’s continuing under- representation and recognition in live comedy.3 While opportunities are increasing and there are a number of extremely successful women at the top of the industry in the US and the UK, the comedy gender gap remains significant. The career-making Edinburgh Comedy Awards main prize has had only three solo female winners since its inception in 1981.4 Furthermore, women