A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939

This book provides a new social history of British performance cultures in the early decades of the twentieth century, where performance across stage and screen was generated by dynamic and transformational industries. Exploring an era book-ended by wars and troubled by social unrest and political uncertainty, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939 makes use of the popular material cultures produced by and for the industries - autobiographies, fan magazines and trade journals, as well as archival holdings, popular sketches, plays and performances. Maggie B. Gale looks at how the performance industries operated, circulated their products and self-regulated their professional activities, in a period where enfranchisement, democratization, technological development and legislation shaped the experience of citizenship. Through close examination of material evidence and a theoretical underpinning, this book shows how performance industries reflected and challenged this experience, and explored the ways in which we construct our 'performance' as participants in the public realm. Suited not only to scholars and students of British theatre and theatre history, but to general readers as well, A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939 offers an original intervention into the construction of British theatre and performance histories, offering new readings of the relationship between the material cultures of performance, the social, professional and civic contexts from which they arise, and on which they reflect.

Maggie B. Gale is Chair in Drama at the University of Manchester, UK. Coeditor of the Women, Theatre and Performance series, her recent publications include: Vivien Leigh: Actress and Icon (2018) with Kate Dorney (eds), and The Routledge Drama Anthology and Sourcebook: From Modernism to Contemporary Performance (2nd edition, 2016) with John F. Deeney.

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: A Social History of British Performance Cultures 1900-1939: citizenship, surveillance and the body 1. Performance cultures and the expansion, operation and circulation of the performance industries 2. Legislating citizenship: regulating publics, regulating performance 3. Strangers and cultural transgressors on stage and screen: representing the outsider, the foreigner and the poor 4. Performing espionage: surveillance, the uncanny and theatrical spies 5. Performing conflict: beyond the First World War 6. Corporeality and the body in performance: agency and degeneration Bibliography Index