The events of June 1848: the Monte Cristo riots and the politics of protest

Theatrical riots are usually dismissed as occasions during which aesthetic reactionaries battled reformers over stylistic issues of little relevance to pressing and immediate social concerns. Yet how true is this? What were the real issues which boiled over at such apparently confined and innocuous occasions as the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1809, the Paris Ernani riot of 1830, the visit of a celebrated English actor which sparked the New York Astor Place riot in 1849, or the first night of a play which brought about the Playboy riots in Dublin in 1907? The complex social and cultural tensions on such occasions clearly operated during the two days of disturbance which came to be known as the Monte Cristo riots in London in 1848, and there are curious modern parallels

Popular entertainments as survival strategies in prisoner-of-war camps during World War II

This chapter discusses the measures taken by prisoners of war to cope with the humiliation of capture and incarceration, with particular examples drawn from the experiences of British and Commonwealth troops in German camps. For members of the armed forces, whether professional soldiers or volunteers, the process of humiliation began at the moment of capture. It was after all an admission of failure whether in the face of overwhelming enemy numbers, failed lines of communication, or simply running out of ammunition. Suddenly they found themselves deracinated and individually helpless as they began the long marches to prisoner-of-war camps or were loaded into overcrowded cattle trucks for a journey that might take several days. At least, however, there was a sense of eventual destination. Yet arrival marked the beginning of a very different kind of humiliation, as personal belongings were stripped away and as they were reduced to undifferentiated members of a herd: it reinforced the sense of pointlessness and loss of temporality. Time now stood still. Many succumbed, overwhelmed by being cut off from the past and facing a future that seemed to have no end in sight. Yet others developed strategies of mutual reinforcement. Typically, these involved the creation of communities of interest within which memory, both in its collective and public manifestations, played a key role. Of these the most significant and enduring were the concert parties and theatrical organisations which flourished in all prisoner-of-war camps

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Staging the pirate: the ambiguities of representation and the significance of convention

The tradition of nineteenth-century pirate representation demonstrates a complex intertwining of the strands of popular literature and theatre. Popular theatrical performances included the latest technological developments, and their scripts appropriated fictional narratives and scenes from contemporary painting. Equally, novelists and painters used the theatrical staging of situation and character as modes of representation. As Martin Meisel points out, 'the shared structures in the representational arts constitute not just a common style but a popular style'. At the same time, Meisel argues, nineteenth-century arts and entertainment aspired 'to a union of inward signification, moral and teleological as well as affective, with a weighty, vivid, detailed and documented rendering of reality'. It is within this context that the pirate becomes a key figure in the complex discourse of performance conventions, which themselves embody outward signification and the desire for verisimilitude

Victorian theatre posters

In 1996 the Department of Drama, assisted by a generous subvention from the University, was able to acquire the unique theatrical collection of Professor Michael Booth. The collection takes the form of posters, playbills, paintings and costume designs spanning the history of British theatre from the 18th century to the Edwardian period