Research News
Debating the West End musical
The first-ever conference devoted to the cultural significance of the early musical comedy and review in the West End was hosted by the Centre for Lifelong Learning and Community Engagement, part of the Professional and Community Education (PACE). Attracting some 80 delegates, including representatives from Canada, Germany, Hungary and the USA, the conference concentrated on shows from the years 1880-1930.
Peter Bailey was the keynote speaker for the review, whose seminal studies 'Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control' (1978; new edition 1987) and 'Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City' (1998), included some of the earliest and most influential work on late Victorian and Edwardian West End music theatre.
While Jacky Bratton (Royal Holloway) and Viv Gardner (Manchester), two eminent academics in the field, gave papers on the possible Victorian origins of the West End musical and its significance on the commoditisation of the female image. New scholars working in the area, including Tobias Becker who spoke on modernity in West End and Berlin musical theatre, and David Linton who delivered a paper on politics, performance and revue, provided a strong indication of how early West End musical theatre is becoming of major interest, not only to theatre academics but for a wider historical and cultural studies constituency.
Len Platt, conference convenor and Head of Department for PACE, is proposing to promote further research into the area through a project aimed at digitising and annotating the play texts of early musical comedy and review, almost all of which remain unpublished. He says: "Early West End musical theatre is a hugely significant part of late-modern popular culture and it remains seriously under researched. Scholars interested in formations of popular versions of the modern; the performance of race and gender; the technology of cultural reproduction and so on - and from perspectives ranging from the musicological to culture studies - are just beginning to realise the opportunities here."