Theatre History and Historiography This page intentionally left blank Theatre History and Historiography Ethics, Evidence and Truth Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson 2016 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2016 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-4 -57271 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-57879-5 ISBN 978-1-137-45728-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137457288 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Theatre history and historiography : ethics, evidence and truth / Claire Cochrane, Joanna Robinson [Introduction, selection and editorial matter]. pages cm Based on essays presented at the a meeting of the TaPRA History and Historiography Working Group convened on the topic of “Ethics and Evidence” at Birmingham University in 2007. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Theater—Historiography—Congresses. 2. Historiography—Moral and ethical aspects—Congresses. I. Cochrane, Claire, editor. II. Robinson, Joanna, 1967–editor. PN2115.T45 2015 792.09—dc23 2015023519 Claire For John Jo For Nick and in memory of Judy T. This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Figures ix Acknowledgements x Notes on Contributors xi 1 Introduction 1 Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson Part I Re-Writing (Master) Narratives 2 Writing the Ethical Life: Theatrical Biography and the Case of Thomas Betterton 33 David Roberts 3 Ethics and Bias: Historiography and Anti-Theatrical Prejudice in Nineteenth-Century America 48 Rosemarie K. Bank 4 In the Eye of the Beholder: Recognising and Renegotiating the Scenario in Writing Performance Histories 60 Viv Gardner Part II ‘Other’ Histories 5 Feminist Historiography and Ethics: A Case Study from Victorian Britain 85 Katherine Newey 6 Garrison Theatre in Colonial India: Issues of Valuation 103 Poonam Trivedi 7 Facing the Face of the Other: The Case of the Nia Centre 121 Claire Cochrane Part III The Ethics of Evidence 8 Recollecting and Re-Collecting: The Ethical Challenges of Social Archiving in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland 147 Alison Jeffers vii viii Contents 9 Mind the Gaps: Evidencing Performance and Performing Evidence in Performance Art History 163 Heike Roms Bibliography 182 Index 197 Figures 4.1 The 5th Marquis of Anglesey as Pekoe in Aladdin, 1902–3. Archives and Special Collections, Pryfysgol Bangor/Bangor University 62 4.2 An audience arriving at Anglesey Castle. The Bystander, 22 March 1905. Author’s collection 69 4.3 The 5th Marquis as ‘director’ on tour. Daily Mirror,6April 1904. Author’s collection 72 4.4 ‘The Powder Puff’: the 5th Marquis as narcissist. Archives and Special Collections, Pryfysgol Bangor/Bangor University 76 4.5 ‘Absorbed by and with the fur’: the 5th Marquis in his 1000-guinea fur coat and Marc Rees in ‘Gloria Days’ (images by Roy Campbell Moore). Archives and Special Collections, Pryfysgol Bangor/Bangor University and Marc Rees 78 7.1 The site of the Nia Centre, 2014. Author’s photograph 128 8.1 The mural of two hooded gunmen with the logos of the north Belfast paramilitary organisations clearly on display. Photograph by Ian Jeffers 148 8.2 Two smaller murals on the side of a block of flats at the entrance to Mount Vernon. The ‘Prepared for Peace Ready for War’ mural can be seen in the background. Photograph by Ian Jeffers 153 9.1 Ivor Davies in conversation with Heike Roms, ‘An Oral History of Performance Art in Wales’, 2006. Photograph by Phil Babot 164 9.2 ‘Mapping Performance Art in Cardiff’, 2008. Photograph by Daniel Ladnar 171 9.3 Aberystwyth in Flux — re-enacting the Aberystwyth Fluxconcert 1968, 2008. Photograph by Daniel Ladnar 178 ix Acknowledgements This collection of essays began with a meeting of the TaPRA History and Historiography Working Group which convened on the topic of ‘Ethics and Evidence’ at Birmingham University in 2007. We thus owe a debt of gratitude to those who helped initiate this project and whose work contributed to what has been a very lengthy development pro- cess: in particular we would like to thank Helen Brooks, Ian Brown, Jim Davis, Jane Milling, Miriam Murtin and Katie Normington. Kate Dorney offered invaluable expertise both as a Senior Curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and as an editor during a substantial period of the book’s development, and we owe her many thanks. Paula Kennedy, who commissioned the book for Palgrave, remained a tower of strength and encouragement throughout the challenges offered by the anonymous readers of our much revised proposals; those readers, too, are thanked for their contributions to the process. We also thank Peter Cary for his practical editorial assistance and Tom Cochrane for some helpful obser- vations on the task of thinking through the complexity of philosophical ethics. x Notes on Contributors Editors Claire Cochrane is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Worcester. She is the author of two books on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Shakespeare and the Birmingham Repertory 1913–1929 (1993) and Birmingham Rep: A City’s Theatre 1962–2002 (2003). Her most recent book, Twentieth-Century British Theatre : Industry, Art and Empire, was pub- lished in 2011. In addition to work on the history and contemporary practice of Shakespeare in performance, she has published widely on regional British theatre with a particular focus on developments in black British and British Asian theatre. Jo Robinson is Associate Professor in Drama and Performance at the University of Nottingham. Her broad research interests in theatre and performance focus on the relationships between performance, place, community and region. She led the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project ‘Mapping the Moment: Performance Culture in Nottingham 1857–1867’, outputs from which were published in Performance Research and Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film.Hercur- rent research, ‘Changing Communities: Performance, Engagement and Place’, is a major project on theatre and community in the East Midlands from the 1970s onwards: one output will be a book, Theatre & the Rural, to be published as part of the Palgrave series ‘Theatre &’ in 2016. Contributors Rosemarie K. Bank is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre and is Professor of Theatre at Kent State University in the USA. Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal, Nineteenth-Century Theatre, Theatre History Studies, Essays in Theatre, Modern Drama and oth- ers, and in a number of edited collections including The American Stage (ed. Ron Engle and Tice L. Miller, 1993), Performing America: Cultural Nationalism in American Theater (ed. Jeffery D. Mason and J. Ellen Gainor, 1999) and Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor (ed. Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, 2015). She is the author of Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (1997) and xi xii Notes on Contributors co-editor (with Michal Kobialka) of Theatre/Performance Historiography: Time, Space, Matter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Viv Gardner is Professor Emerita in Theatre Studies at the University of Manchester. A theatre and performance historian, she focuses on gender, sexuality and spectatorship at the fin de siècle, particularly the exchange between the radical and the popular. Her book on the 5th Marquis of Anglesey is in preparation. Her recent publications include ‘The Image of a Well-Ordered City: Nineteenth Century Manchester Theatre Archi- tecture and the Urban Spectator’ (in Culture in Manchester: Institutions and Urban Change since 1850, ed. Janet Wolff with Mike Savage, 2013), ‘The Sandow Girl and her Sisters: Edwardian Musical Comedy, Cultural Transfer and the Staging of the Healthy Female Body’ (in Popular Musical Theatre in London and Berlin: 1890 to 1939, ed. Len Platt, Tobias Becker and David Linton, 2014) and ‘The Theatre of the Flappers? Gender, Spectatorship and the “Womanisation” of Theatre 1914–1918’ (in British Theatre and the Great War, 1914–1919: New Perspectives, ed. Andrew Maunder, 1915). Alison Jeffers is a lecturer in Applied Theatre and Contemporary Performance at the University of Manchester. Her published work includes Refugees, Theatre and Crisis: Performing Global Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) as well as articles concerning the theatrical rep- resentation of narratives of asylum, citizenship and spectatorship in participatory refugee theatre. She is continuing this work through the Hospitality Project in Bristol, which is funded by the AHRC ‘Connected Communities’ scheme.