Lyndsey Turner's Hamlet at The Barbican starring 

Benedict Cumberbatch

My earliest memory is being at the theatre. I remember being captivated by swirling fabric rippling pink, orange and sunset red twisting through the seemingly magic space of the proscenium arch. This was a production of The Mikado at my local theatre, The Everyman in Cheltenham when I was just past two years old. My mother recounts to people to this day how I sat on her lap enthralled at what was happening. She had complained to my father about how inappropriate it was to take a toddler to the theatre but was astounded by my fascination with the stage. Since then I have endeavoured to see as many plays and productions of all sorts; professional and otherwise, as possible. To this day, theatre is my passion.

The NT Live screening I watched on Thursday night  is one of the reasons I love the theatre. This is an impressive production and an interesting adaptation. Of course there was a massive amount of attention directed at Turner's production because of stellar star Benedict Cumberbatch's appearance as Hamlet and unlike The Guardian's reviewer Michael Billington I didn't find the play an anti-climax after the hype (http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/aug/25/hamlet-barbican-review-benedict-cumberbatch-imprisoned-prince). Whereas Billington thought that there was too much focus on special effects over textual investigation, I think that the 'visual conceits' highlighted the cast and crew's textual investigation.

This is particularly evident in the final fight scene between Laertes and Hamlet with its explosion of light at the crucial moment and another example of their use of 'slow-mo' very physical acting, which punctuated the performance. The acting really was quite brilliant and while there was concern that Cumberbatch would steal the show, this was not the case as Hamlet's mother played by Anastasia Hille was touchingly maternal whilst yet shown to have been easily manipulated by Ciaran Hinds' Claudius, her new husband and deceased first husband's brother. Hinds' performance is strong and powerful as Hamlet and Hinds' Claudius regularly butt heads. Hinds' Claudius even clearly manipulates Rosencrantz and Gildernstern and is a truly formidable opponent for Hamlet. Ophelia played by Sian Brooke is truly disturbing but not altogether convincing. The role of Ophelia is a gift for an actress as it offers such an opportunity for emotional creativity and artistic licence. Her portrayal of a mental breakdown was moving but it did not feel real and so it rather fell flat. The rest of the supporting cast are strong performers, particularly the Ghost (Karl Johnson).

I was surprised to see the infamous 'To be or not to be' soliloquy moved from the opening as was the case the first night of the premiere. The 'To be or not to be' scene is infamous for wandering. The Second Quarto of 1604 is the closest to the  one we use today and in this edition the scene is moved to Act Three Scene One from Act Two immediately after Polonius has set up the 'accidental' meeting between Hamlet and Ophelia to test his theory to Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet's madness was a result of his love for Ophelia. Having this transient scene move to the opening for the premiere was to get 'it' out of the way so that the audience could get past their excitement regarding Cumberbatch's appearance and then the rest of the play could commence but the backlash saw it quickly move back to its 'original' setting of Act Three Scene One (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/hamlet-solioquy-moved-back-after-backlash/).

I loved seeing this change, it's part of the joy going to see a production of any Shakeaspeare play for me. I love the omissions, alterations, insertions of invented characters or scenes. Shakespeare is the writer with whom the most artistic licence is possible because there are no lasting manuscripts that we know of written by him and because of the number of versions of the same play, such as Hamlet, which has a First Quarto (1603), Second Quarto (1604) and First Folio (1623). As such the joy of Shalespeare lies in its possibilities and Lyndsey Turner does everything possible with her Hamlet, flooding the stage with a hurricane of leaves, having Hamlet fire shits at the court from a toy fortress dressed up a soldier, the grim fairylike military palatial stronghold that they live in, Karl Johnson's comic, extremely uncouth gravedigger and the visualised corruption taking over the court in the second half with soil filling the rooms and corridors.

Turner's production with all its hype and expectation is as impressive as it was expected to be and the buzz will continue with NT Live encore screenings starting on 22nd October and the run ending on October 31st. If you haven't seen it already them definitely join in with the positively festive atmosphere at your local cinema where 5 year olds and 95 year olds alike sit with mouths agape captivated at the screen.

Votes for Women!

Blog Review of Sarah Gavron’s Suffragette

There are so many ‘feminist’ films and they all look at a wide range of women’s experiences, from motherhood, marriage, careers, sisterhood and also coming of age. Very few, however,  have charted the history of women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote, especially the events preceding the outbreak of the First World War. Emily Wilding Davison’s arguably heroic or insane act of throwing herself at the King’s horse during the race on Derby Day in June 1913 has been the subject of many documentaries, most recently by Claire Baldwin for Channel 4. But in Sarah Gavron's Suffragette it is central to the story and is shown through the eyes of poor, manipulated, working-class Maud Watts from London. It is her realisation of the importance of the right to vote and what that meant to women of all classes that is the heartbeat of the film. Gavron said that she had wanted to show the unsung working class heroes who had campaigned for the right to vote as the attention has usually been on the aristocratic or middle- to upper-class women in previous films. These working class women’s rights pioneers had so much more to lose than their more affluent counterparts. They already struggled to earn enough money to scrape by, with hard times and the possibility of starvation or living on the streets a very real, very near possibility. So to take on an additional risk that pushed those possibilities even closer to fruition shows how much they cared for and understood the significance of what they were asking for. Women who were publicly known to support the cause and be involved in the public demonstrations were shunned by society and even lost their jobs. The jobs that just about kept a leaky roof over their head and a stale crust of bread in the kitchen.

Maud (Carey Mulligan) experiences these eventualities but does not admit defeat. Her husband (Ben Whishaw) seemingly caring at first, has no sympathy or understanding of why women need the vote and turns out to be very impressionable to other people’s opinions. As such, he is the one who really breaks Maud’s heart. The relationships between men and women are not as often featured in the film as the relationships between women for obvious reasons, but when they are shown they are presented as relationships of heavy disparity between their positions in society both legally and physically. This highlights the real reason behind women's desire for the right to vote. It didn't just give them the right to expression and a right to have a say in electing political leaders, it meant that it would have been legally recognised that women had a different opinion and a voice entirely different to the men surrounding them. As such, it would also have meant that they were entirely separate beings from the men that they lived with and who controlled their lives. It was only in 1870 that the Married Women's Property Act ended the previously existing condition that on marriage any property, money, or more widely anything owned by a woman, earned or inherited, before or after the marriage became the husband's to dispose of, sell, keep as he saw fit. This included children; the father could do with them as he saw fit including preventing any access to the children from the mother.

Women's rights were slowly increasing through the nineteenth-century due to campaigners like Caroline Norton  and Josephine Butler  and so by 1912 the fact that women still did not have the vote despite over a hundred years of attention being brought to the fact that women were equal in every way really rankled. The Suffragists had been the first party to form and start raising public awareness to the issue but they used just their voices and their pens, dissatisfaction at the pace that this seemingly 'got things done' led to the break off movement of the Suffragettes. They were a more militant group who felt that enough talking had been done and that it was time to take action. They argued that because men were the ones who had been stereotypically seen as the gender capable of violence, that men would only respond to violent acts. They set about smashing windows, blowing up letter boxes and even bombing MPs homes. These are all documented in the film but what the film does not say is that these acts actually slowed down the process of passing the bill giving women the right to vote. For the men in power it was another reason to be used to argue that women were not capable of voting, they were too emotional, too hasty, too reckless, they needed men to control them. It was only in 1928 that women finally had the same voting rights as men despite the fact that in 1911 and 1912 there were many men in parliament who were actively supporting the women's movement. Interestingly Winston Churchill, Britain's hero, was not one of that number. He famously said

The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by fathers, brothers, and husbands.


This attitude is the one carried through the film (the quotation is even delivered at one point early on) and it is this belief that the women are trying to desperately overturn with their increasingly extreme actions.

The film features a truly star studded cast including Meryl Streep, Brendan Gleeson, Carey Mulligan, Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai. It is superbly performed and poignantly written. It is. It's definitely the film to watch this autumn. It is also a must watch for everyone being categorically universal and extremely relevant due to many of the themes being as relevant today as they were in the 1910s. Such as:



1. Due to the gap in pay, women essentially work for free for 57 days a year  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/equal-pay-day-women-now-working-for-free-for-the-rest-of-the-year-9837965.html
2. UKIP have been connected with proclaiming  wide range of anti-feminist messages. Here's a link to just a snapshot of some of their statements:  http://leftfootforward.org/2014/05/15-reasons-women-shouldnt-vote-for-ukip/
3. Malala Yousafzai is drawing attention to women's rights to the same level of education as men in Pakistan
4. In the UK, the Home Office has estimated that there are 170,000 girls and women who are survivors of the practice and that there are another 65,000 girls under the age of 13 still at risk
5. 77% of Britain's MPs are men - nuff said!
6. 80% of university professors are men (http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/07/15/gender-inequality-uk-women-feminism-young-foundation_n_7800388.html)
7. 80% of women are still doing more housework than their partners, invariably on top of working and childcare  (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
8. 89% of the accounts of domestic violence have female victims (http://www.newstatesman.com/v-spot/2013/05/five-main-issues-facing-modern-feminism)
9. Tim Hunt's outrageous comment regarding women in the lab (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-33099289)
10. Women are more likely to be victims of trolling   (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/15/dealing-with-trolls-make-young-women-sympathetic-hillary)

BBC's Lady Chatterley’s Lover review: A Lacklustre Reimagining of Lust and Love Across the Edwardian Classes

Mellors (Richard Madden) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger)

Jed Mercurio’s adaptation is so loose that it's really just a reimagining of D.H. Lawrence’s passionate, heated, earthy love story.  Mercurio has missed the mark on hitting the right fever pitch of emotion on so many occasions in this adaptation. The chemistry and fraught sexual tension between Lady Chatterley and Mellors just isn't achieved. The love story is certainly there but it simply doesn't capture the bestial nature of Lawrence’s presentation of their class defying relationship.

One of the real reasons for the book’s ban was the public’s disgust at Lady Chatterley’s relationship with the groundskeeper Mellors. It was considered to be extremely shocking for an aristocratic lady to be sexual attracted to and fall in love with a very lowly member of the working classes at that time. For over a hundred years the espoused images of femininity did not include having any sexual energy. It was commonly accepted that women did not experience sexual desire by doctors all over the world. Women who did experience this desire during the Victorian period could be diagnosed as mad and many unfortunate women were ‘treated’ for this disorder by having a clitirodectomy (surgical removal of the clitoris). The Edwardian period (the book was published in 1928 but is sent in the last years of the Edwardian era) was just beginning to move away from this belief but the strict class and racial barriers remained firmly in place, therefore it was permissible for a woman to experience desire but that would only  be for her husband, i.e., her social equal. Lust, or love, over the class barriers was considered perverse and was a transgression of the accepted hierarchy that kept the status quo of British middle- and upper-class power in place. It threatened the core of society and terrified the upper echelons. The Obscenity Ban on the book was really nothing to do with the florid language used by Lawrence. As such, that Mercurio fails to convey this integral theme is a massive failing in his retelling of the novel. It is the theme that the whole novel hinges on.

The issue with adapting a novel, or any story, is how to make it relevant to the audience today. Admittedly you could argue that Britain no longer permeates the same bizarre notions of female sexlessness, so retaining this theme would be meaningless for a contemporary audience but the lack of class mobility in this country still remains; Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world

(http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/22/social-mobility-data-charts). Anyone watching this adaptation, or reading the original novel, today would be able to relate to this feeling of entrapment.

The approach to the story that Mercurio has taken instead is to focus on the backstory of the characters. This worked well, making all of the characters relatable, especially Sir Clifford Chatterley (James Norton) whose struggles to come to terms with his disability are so poignant that they hit the very heart of the viewer. With the insertion of the invented scenes such as the opening with the explosion in the coal mine and the trench scene where we learn that in Mercurio’s adaptation, Mellors not only saves Sir Clifford’s life and also leads the charge over to the top into No Man’s Land that Sir Clifford should have done had he not been shot.

Mellors (Richard Madden) and Lady Chatterley (Holliday Grainger) are amiably performed but as I said the lustful magic just isn't there. The love story between them is evident, enforced by the adaptation’s conclusion where they waltz off into the sunset with each other after negotiating an agreement to divorce out of Sir Clifford. This dramatically opposes the ending of the original story. Mellors is still married to his wife Bertha (remember that woman who was flashing her naked bosom up against the window when Mellors returned from war at the beginning of the drama? Well, that was her!). He has to have his divorce from her granted so goes alone to work on a farm whilst he waits and Lady Chatterley goes to live with her sister until her divorce from Clifford is granted. Ultimately the novel ends on a massive cliffhanger, suggesting that while both of these “star-cross’d lovers” have the desire to oppose the accepted class barriers by being together, the system is too strong to break. There is hope, but it is very uncertain.

There are other crucial changes that Mercurio makes but they don't impact too much on the transplanting of the essence of the original story. The omission of some of the more marginal, but nonetheless important, characters, like Bertha Mellors is the most dramatic change but the trouble she wreaks in the novel is carried out by the Chatterley’s servant, Bolton instead.

Overall, it was a great night’s viewing but it's not a great adaptation. Mercurio does however show how much flexibility there is with adaptation as a genre. It's just a pity that he was so close to creating an extraordinary adaptation. It could have been up there with the likes of Andrew Davies’ 1995 Pride and Prejudice. In fact, I think a good adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover could become even more of a cultural phenomenon than Davies’ Pride and Prejudice because Lawrence is writing is so much more intimate, personal and emotive than Austen’s.

An interview with Justin Audibert- The Jew of Malta at the RSC

An interview with Justin Audibert

After being delighted and intrigued by Justin Audibert’s production of Marlowe’s The Jew if Malta (see my blog review of the production here http://amyeholley.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/review-of-rscs-jew-of-malta-this-is.html), I emailed the director Justin Audibert to ask some questions about his approach to this now problematic, even contentious show.

Here’s my emailed interview! And a big thanks to Justin Audibert again!

In terms of The Jew, what was your overarching directorial approach?

I wanted to keep the show as pacy as possible so that as events escalate the audience almost feel overwhelmed with the Marlovian mayhem.

And, in terms of your interpretation of Barabas' motivations what message(s) did you and Jasper Britton want to convey? 

It was very important to us that we make it clear that Barabas is wronged in the first place. I don't think either of us would argue that Barabas is a 'good' man but at the same time he is a highly capable survivor who is living in a fundamentally prejudiced and hypocritical society. Jasper is probably one of the most charming actors working today and it was delightful watching him make the audience complicit in all of Barabas' deeds.

I loved the companionship between Ithamore and Barabas and felt that it came over as a very close relationship, way above the kind of relationship that I've seen in other productions (their approach to Ithamore was that he was just doing what he was told whilst he waited for the perfect opportunity to escape his slavery and overthrow his master). The role of master and slave in your production seems minimal and instead there's a real emphasis on their similar social positions as marginalised, hated characters acting as an equalising bridge to open up a space for friendship. I was wondering if that was intentional, as I LOVED it! It felt very fresh. 

Yes it was intentional. We felt that Barabas sees in Ithamore a fellow victim of oppression. And he rescues him from a further beating from the guards, which also gives Ithamore further cause to hate the Christians. It also felt right that they should both delight in their villainy - there revenge is a dish best served boiling hot!

I was also wondering about your career in general, do you have a favourite playwright or a period from which to direct? 

Elizabethan and Jacobean work has such richness of language and imagery and such high stakes (heaven, hell, power, sex, etc) that it is difficult to top- plus I love the way comedy and tragedy sit side by side which is basically what I think happens in life.

Do you think that you have a directorial style? If so, what would you say it was?

I don't think I have a style really. I try and suit my thinking about the play to the specific needs of the text.

Is there a play you would love to direct given the opportunity? 

T'is Pity She's a Whore would be fun... So would The Changeling... and I hope when I am much older to get a crack at Lear...

And finally, I was wondering about your career path, how did you get into directing? I can see you're freelance and that you're also an Artistic Associate for a couple of companies and an Education Associate Practitioner for the RSC too! Did you study it at uni or did you find your own path? 

I studied History and Politics at Sheffield Uni but spent all of my time in the theatre there putting shows on with suTCO (Sheffield University Theatre Company). I then was a teacher for a couple of years and then I did the MFA in Theatre Directing at Birkbeck which was a brilliant course and really has stood me in good stead. I enjoy being a freelancer immensely and working with Young People and Community Groups is as fulfilling for me as working with professional actors.

As I'm off sick this week with an ear infection, also affecting my throat (!), this week's blog is the paper I delivered at the weekend for Sensational Influences: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Literary Legacy - 4-5 September 2015. Once I've recovered the blogs will go back go the usual adaptation reviews! The next one is the BBC's latest adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover! So keep your eyes peeled for some sauciness after the last two weeks of academic dryness!

Mad, Bad or Pretending? Analysing the Theatrical Approach to Lady Audley in Nineteenth-Century Stage Adaptations of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret

Whilst I've been listening to the papers today, I’ve also been noting all of the different words we use to describe Lady Audley:

Innocent
Girlbride
Villain
Pretty
Mad
Blonde
Childlike
Femme fatale
Actress

As you can see, she's a lot of things to people. This was also the case for the Victorians. So can she be just one of these things?  We’ve tended towards calling her bad, or a villain, today, but I argue that the uncertainty around deciding if she is bad or mad, or even if she is something other, for example, consciously acting mad,  was a deliberate decision made by Braddon in order to provoke a sensational response from the reader. This is why the authenticity of her madness remains as much of an issue today as when it was first published. But by studying the nineteenth-century adaptations of Lady Audley’s Secret we can identify how she was interpreted at the time by specific factions of society, not just by critics, other writers, royalty or other notable contemporary figures, but by real people. We’ll ultimately never be able to decide whether she is mad, or bad, or acting mad, but I think that that is the real secret of Lady Audley’s Secret, it’s nothing to do with her true identity.

The nineteenth-century adaptations present Lady Audley as either a transgressive woman, who was forced into making a bad decision about how to support herself after her husband abandoned her, as in William E. Suter’s 1863 and John Brougham’s 1866 adaptations. Whilst the others simply dismiss her as a madwoman, for example, George Roberts’ 1863 and C.H. Hazlewood’s 1863 plays.

My PhD thesis focuses on an examination of the Victorian approaches to some of the most contentious figures in nineteenth-century literature when they were adapted to the stage. The plays I examine in the Lady Audley’s Secret chapter of  my thesis are William E. Suter’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), George Roberts’ Lady Audley’s Secret (1863), C. H. Hazlewood’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Brougham’s 1866 play The Mystery of Audley Court. Whilst they are all London based adaptations, they were written for and appeared in a range of theatres across the city as such they do cover a wide spectrum of society. The theatres that the plays were written for appealed to different social classes to make up their audiences and as such different approaches to the complex central character, Lady Audley, can be recognised.

I need to explain a crucial term before my comparison of the plays begins to provide some context of nineteenth-century theatre. All of the plays discussed here are examples of theatrical melodrama. The literal translation of melodrama is ‘music drama’. Music was played during performances of plays in this genre and this has a direct impact on the manner in which the actors performed. Patsy Stoneman in Jane Eyre on Stage; 1848-1898 refers to both Taylor and Booth, who have suggested that this “inevitably led to a heightened, deliberate and passionate mode of delivery’, with many pauses to allow the words to carry; actors emphasised their words by facial and bodily gestures (Stoneman 2007: 6 citing Taylor 1989: 125 – 129 and Booth (a) 1964: 31-36). Melodrama was the dominant theatrical form in the nineteenth-century (John 2009: 1). Melodrama arose from The Theatre Regulating Acts as prior to 1843, there were only two ‘legal’ theatres in England, The Covent Garden and Drury Lane. These theatres were the only ones that were licensed to produce ‘legitimate’ drama, therefore, the ‘minor’ theatres, such as the New Surrey Theatre and the Adelphi Theatre, had to adapt the manner in which they produced plays in order to meet the public’s demand for entertainment in order to  evade the law.  This meant that theatre houses had to use music as an accompaniment to their productions as the legitimate theatres were the only ones permitted to produce spoken drama.

I'm looking at one key scene in all of the plays to demonstrate my point today given the time limit. The scene examined in the adaptations is where Lady Audley is reunited with her husband George Talboys, who believes her to be dead when she has actually assumed a false identity and married again. Interestingly this scene is only described by other characters in the novel and does not actually feature, whereas it us a key scene in the plays. The reasons for the omission of the scene in the original source but the invention of and insertion of it into the plays are multiple so I do not have time to discuss that here today.

William E. Suter’s play is the first adaptation to appear that we know of from the Lord Chamberlain’s archives. It is also the most famous due to the high profile court case surrounding it, which arose because the play was published in paperback by Thomas Lacy at a time when it was illegal to do so because of the copyright laws of the age. A dramatist could only adapt and produce a novel without permission or payment, they could not print it. In order to have rights over a play adaptation of their novel, the author must have written, staged and registered the play before anyone else. Mary Elizabeth Braddon went on to do this herself years later when she wrote Like and Unlike in 1887.

William Edmund Souter was an actor and playwright appearing largely at Sadler’s Wells in London. He was a successful playwright most known for writing melodramas and comedies for minor theatres in London. His success was such that his plays continued to be performed in provincial theatres for decades. The Queen’s Theatre, London was where this production of Lady Audley’s Secret was staged. It was the only theatre in the borough of St. Pancras. In its early days, the theatre did not attract a very illustrious audience, members mainly coming from the skilled working class trades, for example, shoemakers, carpenters, tailors, bricklayers, etc. and the popular occupations for women being domestic servants, cooks, charwomen, milliners, seamstresses, etc. (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 149). This is evident in the play’s shared focus between the invented servant characters and Lady Audley and Robert Audley. It even opens with comedic business between the servant characters Bibbles and Bubbles. These characters occupy the sub-plot of Suter’s play and interject the novel’s original plot at various points for comedic effect. As such the play is highly melodramatic. This might explain why Suter’s approach to Lady Audley is that she is a bad woman. One reviewer from The Era described Adelaide Calvert “playing”  Lady Audley “with a thrilling intensity” (The Era, Sunday 14 June 1863: p12). At all times there is a high level of emotion in Suter’s play and this is particularly the case in the key scene I will look at today.

LADY A: Listen to me. After your departure, I vainly sought employment – a wife whom her husband had deserted could not be innocent of all fault – and no one would receive me as the instructress of their children. I was penniless – helpless – hopeless; before me was starvation or a repulsive life of infamy! I shrunk from both and resolved to live anew, and for myself alone. I ceased to be Mrs. George Talboys, forgot even that I had ever been Helen Maldon, and became Miss Lucy Graham... I became Sir Michael’s wife... (Suter 1863: 34)

The line “a wife whom her husband had deserted could not be innocent of all fault” reveals how strict the Victorian image of femininity could be as it indicates the mode of thinking that even abandoned wives were suspected of committing actions that has driven him away. Today that can be hard to swallow. We look at Lady Audley with pity, knowing that George abandoned her and their child, left her with little money or anything of worth whilst knowing her to be incapable of earning a decent living, and yet she is the one saddled with the blame, with aspersions cast on her character and none on George’s.

No one condemns George for leaving his wife and child as he recounts his tale in either the novel or the adapted plays, so in this section Lady Audley raises the hypocrisy of this double standard. Deciding if Lady Audley is mad can be answered with the line “I shrunk from both and resolved to live anew, and for myself alone” (Suter 1863: 34) which indicates that thought and calculation went into her assumption of a false identity. As with Braddon’s portrayal of Lady Audley’s assumed life, it was not the act of a lunatic. It was the illegal act of a trapped woman left with few options to support herself.

Because the play was written for a poor working class audience it is no wonder that Suter shows Lady Audley to be a trapped woman who simply does what she can to earn a living to support herself and her child not knowing when, or even if, her husband would return. Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians reveals that prostitution was a flexible occupation in the Victorian period with women turning to it as and when they needed to find extra money to support themselves and their children (Marcus 1964: 6). As such the audience of The Queen’s Theatre in London would no doubt have had housed former and current prostitutes, who would have a very different notion on what was acceptable to do to support your family than the more middle-class theatre houses.

John Brougham’s approach to this scene in his 1866’s production for Astley’s Theatre, also supports that Lady Audley acted in a calculated manner when she assumed her false identity and ran away leaving her child with her  father:

Lady A: You left not letter, but fled like a dastard, leaving me penniless, friendless, - hopeless! – The abandoned wife finds little pity from the charitable world, in vain I sought for employment, - there was nothing before me but starvation, or a life of infamy. – I shrunk from both, determined to blot out the past for ever, and under a new name began the world again as Lucy Graham. – I went into a family as Governess, and toiled there for a miserable stipend; Sir Michael Audley saw, admired and married me, you now know everything; and to all this, let me add that I will never give up the wealth and splendour I have obtained; therefore, if you are wise you will forget me and go!- (Brougham 1866: 61 - 62)

Again, the image of the abandoned wife is conjured showing the pity that Brougham was attempting to evoke for this transgressive woman forced to make bad decisions by a restrictive patriarchal society. It also reveals that for Brougham, Lady Audley had thoroughly considered her options before taking on her new name and starting her new life. John Brougham’s poignant depiction of a transgressive Lady Audley may be a consequence of his own background and opinions as the theatre that this was written for used to attract a respectable middle class audience who you’d expect to find a mad Lady Audley depicted for as I shall explain later. Brougham was a very popular and successful playwright specialising in adaptations. I examine his 1848 adaptation of Jane Eyre in Chapter One of my thesis. Brougham was originally from a wealthy Irish family in Dublin but due to a series of family deaths he was left destitute and impoverished, when he had originally planned to become a surgeon. He turned to acting as a means of supporting himself and later due to his success, he moved to America. As Brougham had, like Lady Audley, been forced to seek any means to make money he might well have sympathised with her plight. He might also have been able to sympathise with Lady Audley’s battle against a prejudiced society, as during this period there were some anti-Irish movements due to the huge waves of migrants arriving in England fleeing Ireland because of the Great Famine of 1845 to 1852. This criminal, woman pushed to the edge version of Lady Audley as presented by Brougham and Suter, is contrasted with the dismissive approach that she was just mad and therefore her actions should be regarded as such. Both George Roberts 1863 and C.H. Hazlewood 1863 take this approach to the character.

George Roberts actually worked with Braddon on the creation of this production. As Braddon had publicly complained about the large number of unauthorised stage versions of her novel which were appearing, Roberts was very keen to gain her approval and therefore invited Braddon to the rehearsals. Braddon responded to Roberts’ invitation saying that she was “flattered and gratified” and that she “would not for a moment dream of offering any suggestions” (Robert Lee Wolff, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York and London: Garland, 1979: p143) cited in Roberts (1863: 8). George Roberts was born Robert Walters in 1832 in London, the son of a barrister. He followed into the family profession and worked as a barrister in Oxfordshire before moving to London to pursue his career as a playwright. He pursued his second career whilst living in chambers with five other barristers (cited in Roberts 1863: 5). This dramatisation of Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret was Roberts’ greatest success with productions continuing regularly in Britain throughout the century. In order to avoid a court case similar to that which Braddon experienced over the lack of appropriate copyrighting for her novel, Roberts protected his play by personally overseeing the printed edition of his work.

The play was under the management of Frank Matthews, who played Luke Marks in Roberts’ adaptation, when it opened on 28th February 1863. When the play opened, the novel was at the peak of its success. Jennifer Carnell describes it as “the current hit of the circulating libraries” in her introduction to George Roberts’ play (Roberts 1863: 6). Lady Audley’s Secret was the St. James’ Theatre’s biggest hit to date, running for over one hundred performances before starting a tour of the country. Ian Henderson cites a review in the Illustrated London News which describes Lady Audley as “prompted to crime by hereditary insanity and untoward circumstances, and therefore impelled by both external and internal motives” (2006: 15). In the key scene that we are examining today,  where she is reunited with George Talboys, she details the trials and tribulations that led her to assume a false identity and marry bigamously conjuring enormous sympathy from the audience:

LADY A: Wrong! have not you wronged me? You prate to me of toil and suffering. You do not know the labour that has been my lot for many a weary day. What was my life when you were gone? No helping hand held out to me by your proud family; I, your wife, left to choose ‘twixt death and drudgery. I chose the latter, bitter though that choice was... I argued, I reasoned, and last I justified myself. I have a right to think that he is no more to me, nor I to him, and why should I let his shadow stand between me and prosperity? (Roberts 1863: 39-40).

This makes her sound like a very rational woman especially with her comments that she ‘argued’, ‘reasoned’ and ‘justified’ the decision, but nineteenth-century medical studies of madness, identified ‘moral madness’ as a specific type of insanity. This was a concept introduced by James Cowles Pritchard in 1835 in Treatise on insanity and other disorders affecting the mind to describe a particular kind of mental disorder where the madness consisted of “a morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, (and importantly for Lady Audley) moral dispositions, and natural impulses, without any remarkable disorder or defect of the interest or knowing and reasoning faculties, and particularly without any insane illusion or hallucinations” (1837: 16). If Lady Audley did suffer from moral insanity was she then not culpable for her crimes? Moreover, was moral insanity the excuse used by nineteenth-century society to refer to the criminal behaviour that was actually just unpalatable for them? Lady Audley’s reasoning of her bad decisions for the Victorians was a symptom of her madness. As the play goes on, Roberts’ characterisation of becomes progressively and more obviously unhinged.  Roberts’ final scene indicates his overall interpretation to Lady Audley’s ‘madness’, as she collapses into a trance-like state because of the mental strain with Robert Audley saying over her that “the soul still lingers, but the mind, the mind is gone! CURTAIN” (Roberts 1863: 63-64).

The impact of the area and the class composition of the audience who would have lived in the surrounding area of the theatre, on Roberts’ approach to Lady Audley is interesting because the theatre was said to be respectable and to attract a more middle-class audiences. As such by  making Lady Audley mad, he aligns himself with the traditional, conservative, patriarchal view of women as weak and degenerate. Mental illness was considered to be a female condition with women being more susceptible to it.

In Hazlewood’s play, Lady Audley goes into even more detail describing the situation that George Talboys left her and their newborn baby in when he abandoned them. She explains how believing herself to have been deserted she changed her name and became a governess:


LADY Audley. ... not one letter reached my hands; I thought myself deserted, and determined to make reprisals on you; I changed my name; I entered the family of a gentleman as governess to his daughters; became the patient drudge for a miserable stipend, that I might carry my point--that point was to gain Sir Michael Audley's affections; I did so, I devoted all my energies, all my cunning, to that end! and now I have gained the summit of my ambition, do you think I will be cast down by you, George Talboys? No, I will conquer you or I will die! ... I have fought too hard for my position to yield it up tamely. Take every jewel, every penny I have and leave me! ... I am no longer the weak confiding girl you first knew me no, I am a resolute woman--and where I cannot remove an obstacle I will crush it (Hazlewood 1863: Act 1: Scene 1 no page numbers).


This Lady Audley is trapped, frightened, and emotional. The scene reaches such a tense pitch that she even tries to bribe the now equally rich George reminding him pointlessly of her newly obtained wealth. It is only when her bribe fails that she realises that she will have to get rid of George another way and they fight before she eventually pushes him down the well after stabbing him:

It is indeed--die! [Pushes him down the well, the ruined stones fall with him.] He is gone--gone! and no one was a witness to the deed! ... [exulting]. Dead men tell no tales! I am free! I am free! I am free!--Ha, ha, ha! [Raises her arms in triumph, laughing exultingly falls (Hazlewood 1863: Act One: Scene One no page numbers).

The stage directions here so obviously cast Lady Audley as mad here by describing her as exulting, triumphant, hands raised in the air. The climax scene of Hazlewood’s adaptation, shows Lady Audley entirely succumbing to madness

Robert. Do you not see she is mad?
Omnes [retreating from her]. mad!
LADY Audley. Aye--aye! [Laughs wildly.] mad, mad, that is the word. I feel it here--here! [Places her hands on her temples.] Do not touch me do not come near me--let me claim your silence--your pity--and let the grave, the cold grave, close over Lady Audley and her Secret.
[Falls--dies--Music tableau of sympathy--GEORGE
TALBOYS kneels over her. CURTAIN (Hazlewood 1863: Act II: Scene Five no page numbers)

Here Lady Audley has a moment of psychosis seeing the, by then, deceased Sir Michael in front of her before she eventually collapses and dies. When Robert tells everyone that she has gone ‘mad’, they ‘retreat’ from her as though her diagnosis was contagious, indicating the extent of the fear that Victorian society had of ‘madness’. The language is noticeably very melodramatic and tense, but the manner in which it was acted is not confirmed by any surviving reviews of the production or the actresses, sadly. The moment of mania or psychosis that is shown in this scene belongs to a different aspect of mental health that is more severe than hysteria, as is indicated in Andrew Scull’s Hysteria (2009: 35). As such, this implies that Hazlewood did genuinely consider Lady Audley to be certifiably mad. Delusions were a key element for the legal defense of insanity in the period as per the, still used, 1842 McNaughton rules. The reason for this approach to Lady Audley might be a consequence of the theatre for which he was writing as they thrived on extremely emotive, suspenseful, high pitched entertainment. This adaptation was first produced at the Royal Victoria Theatre, London on 25 May 1863. The Victoria Theatre was built in 1818 as a result of the dramatic expansion in the population of London in the eighteenth-century due to the Industrial Revolution, which was particularly felt south of the River Thames in the Southwark and Lambeth areas were the Victoria was located. As the areas expanded, the Victoria and the nearby Surrey Theatre became vital for providing entertainment to the people living in the area. The Victoria was dependent on the “patronage of a class unable to get far from the immediate scene of their daily labors” for its audience (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 8). The audience was even described as “the lowest and vilest in London, the very scum of Lambeth” (H. Barton Baker, The London Stage: Its History and Traditions from 1576 to 1888 (London: Allen, 1889) cited in Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 9). The low working class audience of the Victoria Theatre received “Melodramas, Domestic Melodramas of 3 Acts, Burlettas, Comic Interludes, Pantomime” as their entertainment (Davis and Emeljanow 2005: 24).

In conclusion, while the dramatists differ on whether Lady Audley was mad, bad or  acting mad, they all agree that what became of her was as a consequence of the desperate position she had been forced into and from which she had few options to release herself. This is very important trope in Victorian literature. Look at Jane Eyre when the same struggles also result in a near mental collapse in the Red Room, or Lady Isabel Vane who disguises herself as a governess and moves back in with her husband and his new wife just to be able to see her children again.

Lady Audley as a lower-middle-class woman who marries a wealthy officer,  grew to expect a certain lifestyle which was suddenly not going to be provided for her anymore, and more than that, they did not know how they would survive. Her husband abandons her and her child and then, because of the unfairness of the marriage laws of the day, she was prevented from releasing herself from the husband who abandoned her and their child without further contact. Is this injustice enough to make her ‘mad’?

For Roberts and Hazlewood, it was. Lady Audley is ‘mad’. Whereas, for Suter and Brougham, Lady Audley is a bad woman or, more pertinently in Brougham’s case, a woman who made bad choices. In A Literature of their Own, Elaine Showalter states that the worry for many was that “Lady Audley’s real secret is that she is sane and, moreover, representative” (Showalter 1984: 167). This explains the more obviously mad stage versions of Lady Audley. By portraying Lady Audley as mad, her actions were dismissed as abnormal and then the traditional image of the good, ‘angel in the house’, middle-class woman could be permeated without further disturbance and other equally transgressive acts in life and literature could be dismissed as evidence of female mental weakness. As madness was considered to be a feminine illness, her behaviour was only deemed ‘mad’ because she was seen to be acting in what was considered to be a recognisably unfeminine manner.  She was meant to be a moral instructress to her children whilst her husband was allowed to occupy the world, existing in the public sphere surrounded by temptations but at the thought of his chaste, Christian wife waiting at home, he was able to conquer all temptations and return home to her to be saved over and over again. Lady Audley doesn't do this. She does not submit to peaceful poverty in her husband’s absence. Brougham highlights this hypocrisy in his conclusion  by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her for goading her to ‘madness’. But Suter, Roberts and Hazlewood all include the scene where Lady Audley explains to George Talboys that she assumed a false identity because of the impossible position she had been put in. And, therefore in all of the plays, Lady Audley’s actions, whether they are  rooted in madness or not, stems from the restrictions placed on her gender during the nineteenth-century. That she tried to escape those restrictions, made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of nineteenth-century society.

NAVSA 2015 Annual Conference – Victorians and the World

Surreal Foliage: Banang Trees

I have just come back from an extremely informative and rewarding conference at this year's NAVSA annual conference, Victorians and the World, held in Honolulu, Hawaii. I delivered a paper inspired by certain aspects that have popped up whilst I've been conducting the research for my thesis. Over the course of my study, I have noticed that as the century approached it's close, the style of the plays became progressively more realistic. However, in my paper I attribute this solely to the work of Henrik Ibsen. However, it is possible to identify elements of realism which predate Ibsen’s popular years by twenty or even thirty years in some of the plays. As such, whilst my paper for NAVSA posed that it was Ibsen’s influence that was changing the style of the plays so dramatically from one another (and the original sources), I now seek to identify the pre-Ibsen stage adaptations, which are ‘realistic’.

At the conference, a recently finished PhD student from the University of South Florida, Dan Brown, delivered a paper, which was appropriately (and somewhat embarrassingly) right before mine. In it, he refuted Ibsen's title as the father of the realism and rightly so. I then had to awkwardly stand up and follow Dan’s paper, which had thoroughly denied Ibsen his commonly accepted title, and lay the full stylistic changes I had recognised in my studies at Ibsen’s feet along, as such before I started speaking I had to nod to the fact that in that paper I was accepting Ibsen as the sole father of realism, but that there is plenty of evidence to show that he is not. I added that, what's more his crown needs to be re-evaluated in the light of new evidence. 

Certainly as the century reaches the fin-de-siècle, elements of realism became more frequent and more noticeable in the adaptations. In James Willings’ (1879) and Wills’ (1882) productions of Jane Eyre. They both focus on character development and show Jane struggling with her inner desire to be with Rochester despite his existing marriage. A vital element of the theatrical style of realism is the presentation of controversial issues. Both Wills and Willings present a discussion of delicate social issues. Willings’ goes so far as to present the burgeoning women’s movement with the ‘female sisterhood’ frequently invoked (Stoneman 2007: 330-331 and 336). Pre-dating both Wills and Willings, Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer's adaptation of Jane Eyre from 1870 contains many elements that are recognisable as realism. Her production, and she herself, was German. This is particularly revealing regarding the state of European literature and Art in the nineteenth-century, as Ibsen himself was from Norway of course. On a separate note, it would be very interesting to chart specific plays in date order on a map to see whether the theatrical style of realism did originate in Northern and Central Europe before reaching Britain.

Birch Pfeiffer’s ‘realistic’ German adaptation is marked by the fact that it was the first one to entirely cut the novel’s telepathy scene between Jane and Rochester. The only British adaptation to do so was Willing’s in 1879. The omission of this scene in both plays indicates a definite move away from not only the sensationalism and Gothic aspects of the original source, but also a move away from the theatrical style employed by the earlier adaptations. The scene does re-appear in Wills’ production in 1882, however it is not shown directly on the stage and is only referred to by Jane on her arrival at Ferndean as a ‘vision’ to explain her return to Rochester. Evidently by 1870 the sensation of this scene had lost its charm for the Victorian audiences.

Examples of pre-Ibsen realism also extend to the stage adaptations of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. In John Brougham’s adaptation of Lady Audley’s Secret (1866) the focus of the play is on social responsibility. A key aspect of realism is the presentation of taboo subjects and Lady Audley is shown being pushed to the edge by a restrictive patriarchal society as she is not given the much needed support she requires as an abandoned wife with a child to feed. This is the message that Brougham ultimately presents. He also indicates that Lady Audley may well have committed bad acts, but that ultimately she was not a bad woman. He lays the blame of Lady Audley’s ‘madness’ firmly at the audience’s feet by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her in the play’s climax for goading her to ‘madness’. You can easily see her stood on the stage in this scene, not just pointing at the characters gathered around her but at the audience too. For Brougham, crucially it was that Lady Audley tried to escape the restrictions imposed on her by a cruel, patriarchal society that made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of society. Or more succinctly, she was mad because she refused to conform. 

The stage adaptations of Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne (1863) also presents evidence of the move towards more realistic theatre. Hamilton Hume’s adaptation from 1863 is the most sensational as a result of its use of dramatic, emotive language, asides and soliloquies and tableaux; key elements of the style. However as the nineteenth-century progressed the use of these dramatic devices declines as the chart below shows.

Number of Tableaux/Pictures

Author	No. of Tableaux / Pictures
Hamilton Hume 1863	7
Spencer 1865	2
Palmer 1874	1 1
Dick 1879	0

Whilst Dick’s production takes place on the edge of Ibsen’s most popular period starting, what this chart shows is that the style of the works performed in, what are dismissively called, minor theatres was changing before Ibsen became really successful.

As a final note, the most significant thing I took away from this year’s NAVSA conference was not an organised event or a planned meeting, it was something completely organic deriving from the pooling of all of our areas of research and the resulting discussions. Every year people will leave NAVSA with a completely new thought that will lead them on to a new path of enquiry or make them completely re-evaluate their whole research. This will largely be for the better, as was my personal experience. NAVSA has enriched my already significant research to date, not just by informing me of new authors or events, but by just encouraging deeper thought and greater probing. 

Review of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell BBC Adaptation

Susannah Clarke’s 2004 breakthrough novel has been beautifully adapted to the small screen, albeit very loosely! But that's the joy of adaptation, you don't have to be strict. The adaptor has complete control over his or her vision of the story. The only problem is that readers are very protective over their own interpretations of the story, confusing their individual, very personal reading experiences with the hard and fast and only true interpretation of the story.

In terms of the key differences between the original source and the adapted series, both the opening and the conclusion sequences are dramatically different. I won't say how here; no spoilers! However, it is important to recognise that they are different, and to understand that the differences derive from the difficulty in transferring a story from one medium to the other.

This means that some elements of the story may be lost due to either the practicalities of filming some particularly fantastical scenes, and also the confines of the time allotted to either the episodes in the series or the running length of the film. The events are also sped up to fill the time. For this BBC mini-series this means that the story moves along at a speedy but pleasant pace making it highly enjoyable to watch. The Napoleonic war scenes are particularly tense and emotive because of this.

What works really well is the characterisation of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, played by Bertie Carvel and Eddie Marsan respectively. They are more believable and likeable in this series than in the book. Even at their lowest moments they are endearing and captivating. The gentleman with the thistledown hair, played by Marc Warren, was eery and dangerous, presenting not just a threat to Lady Pole and Jonathan Strange, but a very real threat to humanity itself.

The costumes and set are brilliant with real continuity to the past. And the special effects are truly magical!

The unexpected unhappy ending left me wanting another series, I also experienced this when I was reading the original. The date for the sequel is still to be confirmed. In 2004 Susannah Clarke stated that she was writing the sequel but that it instead follows Vinculus and Childermass so maybe I won't get the closure I desire for Jonathan, Arabella and Mr Norrell.

All in all, this is an adaptation to watch but try to just sit back, relax and enjoy the show and celebrate the director’s interpretation by not getting caught up in your own interpretation of the story.

The RSC’s The Merchant of Venice - August 1st 2015

Over the weekend, I pottered up to Stratford for yet another expedition to the RSC. This excursion was a very gratefully received Christmas present from my boyfriend’s sister and it ended up being the most innovative stocking filler ever! (Thanks again Cat!)

The director, Polly Findlay, took her production in a completely different direction to any I've ever seen before, and possibly of any I think I'll likely ever see again. Her, as far as I'm aware, completely original interpretation of Antonio’s motivation for agreeing to the heavy terms of  Shylock’s loan, was rooted in the gay love affair between the much younger Bassiano and Antonio. Bassiano’s marriage to Portia therefore became a kind of cover marriage. Making Portia’s later frustration with Bassiano having discovered he had given away her ring (albeit to her in disguise) even more relatable. Because disguised as the young but ingenious doctor, she had witnessed the aftermath of Antonio and Bassiano celebrating the success of defeating Shylock, by publicly kissing … a lot.

This approach is one I’d never considered, or even heard of before, but for me it makes complete sense in the context of the play. It had always seemed strange that Antonio had been willing to risk so much for a friend, but when the potential ‘win’ is a cover marriage so that they can carry on their love affair undisturbed, it seems a lot more comprehensible that Antonio accepted the terms of the loan.  It might seem very unsympathetic to the original context of the play, you might assume that the Elizabethans were very conservative. There is a trend of assuming our ancestors, like the Victorians, were very conservative. This is not the case in either the Elizabethan or the Jacobean periods. Male love was for more accepted in these periods than in many other. This is largely due to the Renaissance, anything classically Greek or Roman was admired and emulated. Today one of those lesser discussed elements , was homo-erotica and male love. The mighty warrior Alexander the Great was a homosexual. And so for the Tudors homosexuality was not as shameful as it became for us in later centuries. We now know that there were many male courtiers in King James I’s court who were as queer as queer can be! King James I of England and VI of Scotland was widely rumoured to be homosexual.


So maybe Polly Findlay’s idea wasn't too far from the mark after all! Maybe we, and our conservative  theatrical forefathers, have completely missed latent homosexuality as we have utterly wrongly assumed that Shakespeare was a prude. Any students of Shakespeare past GCSE level know just how bawdy Shakespeare was. Look at Hotspur in Henry IV and even Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet who thinks that if Romeo could just get his end away he’d get over Rosalind straight away… and he was right of course! The problem is we’ve allowed the Bowdlerisation(footnote) of Shakespeare to enter public consciousness. Shakespeare, like Chaucer hundreds of years beforehand, was filthy! He loved a cheap laugh. So maybe Antonio and Bassiano were meant to be camp stereotypes so that the audience could laugh at the witless Portia being cuckolded by the man who made her marriage possible … I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

The anti-semitic elements are not as prominent as in The Jew of Malta which I saw a few weeks beforehand and that I studied during my MA. I confess that I've not read The Merchant of Venice so I do not know if Findlay cut a lot of the anti-Semitic language. The beginning scenes contain the most anti-semitism with Shylock even being spat in the face. Jessica, Shylock’s daughter, is called an ‘infidel’ by her husband’s friends upon meeting them, but really the instances are few and far between in the play, however The Jew was full of references from beginning to end. Polly Findlay’s focus is not on Shylock and Jessica’s strained relationship, rather the audience’s attention is firmly on Portia and Bassiano’s relationship.  This makes a real contrast from The Jew of Malta where it's on Barabas and his daughter Abigail.

Further surprises came in the style of the play. There were some very Brechtian elements such as the actors waiting just off stage to feature, and even a tableau where the costume change was done on stage as Portia and Nerissa adopted their male alter-egos. The costumes were modern dress but had an Elizabethan air about them, for example, long to mid-length full coats being worn by several of the male characters, but in very bright and even neon colours.

The set was also unusual. It felt like we were inside a giant Newton’s cradle; gently nodding to the typical ‘80s American Wall Street production.

Makram J. Khoury was a brilliant Shylock, with plenty of gravitas. Tim Samuels as Launcelot Gobbo, the fool, was hilarious and surprising! Nerissa was played by the disabled actress Nadia Albina, whose right arm finishes at the elbow. She kept her arm visible at all times not attempting to hide or disguise it at all. Something I admire deeply after she received negative reviews for being cast as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire last year
(http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jun/02/disabled-actor-plays-blanche-dubois-streetcar-named-desire). Although she had one of the smallest parts in the play, she was active, engaging and captivating.

My final thought is that this was a truly innovative, breath of fresh air that really encapsulates the RSC’s objective to keep Shakespeare alive by making it relevant for us today.

Review of  Far from the Madding Crowd (2015) starring Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen

Gordon Bennett, that was good! I love a good period drama over and above any other type of adaptation. I love the romance, the sensation, the costumes, the nods to history (which are sometimes somewhat tongue in cheek!) and, of course, the dashing hero or handsome, but villainous cad who puts the reputation and morality of the helpless, and often hopeless, heroine in jeopardy. 

When period dramas are good they can be really good, case in point is Andrew Davies’ 1995 Pride and Prejudice. That's partly because the dramatist already has an amazing springboard to bounce off. The original source novel has been chosen because it tells a fascinating story and with the help of clever scriptwriting and appropriate casting, the nineteenth-century novel can leap into action on our screens bringing some of our most loved fictional characters to life.

Thomas Vinterberg’s adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd is one of these brilliantly executed adaptations. It is at once humorous and full of pathos. He represents some of the key proto-feminist (before the feminist movement of  the ‘60s) issues in the book, such as a desire for independence and the female experience, by showing the places that women are allowed to go and the things that women were allowed to do and as the film explains business was not one of those arenas. 

As an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s book, it's very good. Vinterberg has taken a bit of an Andrew Davies approach, i.e., sexing up the novel’s central characters by choosing rugged handsome actors (Matthias Schoenaerts) who smoulder and brood over their secret, unrequited love. It was a narrow escape that Schoenaerts doesn't get the full on Mr Darcy Colin Firth wet shirt moment!

The chemistry between Bathsheba Everdene and impoverished farmer Gabriel Oak is sweetly and tactly navigated in this adaptation. As is Bathsheba’s tense relationship with the wealthy, aristocratic and obsessed William Boldwood (Michael Sheen). Vinterberg has not completely abandoned the issue of class division between Bathsheba and Gabriel Oak, but it has been downplayed. This may be because Vinterberg felt that it was no longer relevant to us as we apparently now live in a classless society? I certainly feel that it is still a relevant topic to us today and even if it weren't, it would still be understandable as it’s in living memory. In the novel, Bathsheba was also revolutionary for the period because of her rejection of Gabriel Oak’s proposal as she valued her independence too much to marry. We’ll always love a social maverick so maybe this theme could  have been more evident too.

Ultimately this is a great film. As an adaptation it’s not perhaps the strictest but that's the joy of an adaptation. It doesn't have to be faithful to the original. Adaptation is a space for experimentation (look at the successes of teen films 10 Things I Hate About You and Clueless) and Vinterberg has experimented with the key themes and central characters of Far from the Madding Crowd but it has worked really well because of the strong cast and brilliant filming. I'll definitely be watching it again!  Do check it out when you have the chance! 

Review of the RSC's The Jew of Malta 

This is Justin Audibert’s directorial debut at the RSC and boy it’s good! Christopher Marlowe’s dark comedic tale of anti-semitism has not been reinvented nor transplanted to the modern day; it has just been directed and acted really, really well. It's a feisty, energetic couple of hours full of twisted delight!

This is a fascinating and fantastic production of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and I hope it indicates that there will be more Marlowe productions to come at the RSC, especially if they're all as dazzling as this one. Marlowe has long been overlooked in favour of Shakespeare but this play proves that we may have had misplaced favourites for a long time.

Nothing has been done in an innovative, shocking way but because Audibert’s take was evidently just to do it well, the play leaps off the stage. The already present humour in Marlowe’s writing shines through illuminating the anti-semitism and anti-Islam messages therein. And by ridiculing the Christian priests who also feature, Audibert shows that all religions have their flawed advocates and that none is superior to the other. A real equalizer which is a pleasure to watch in action and an approach which I have not witnessed in any of the productions I've seen before.

The Machiavellian elements of Barabas’ approach to life appear particularly keenly but I'm not sure why they stand out so much here. The play’s prologue delivered by Machiavelli is included but nothing unusual can be said of the delivery for me to attribute the prominence of this theme in this production of the play. Maybe it's because no one is left unridiculed for their faults that the play seems so savage and, as such, so Machiavellian? They all seem to get their just desserts in the most repugnant, gruesome, violent and hilarious of ways. Making you feel at once sympathetic for their plight as well as delighted to see them fail one by one. You are also so wrapped up in Barabas’ story that you hope for his success even when he commits the most horrid of deeds.

The set is simple but effective, at all times involving the use of stone effect steps which dominate the back of the stage. They are used to particularly humorous effect as the play reaches its conclusion when the body of a dead priest is propped sitting upright in order to trick another character.  

The use of traditional Jewish music is a very effective framework focusing the audience’s attention on the anti-semitism that dominates the play as well as the sixteenth-century.

Barabas, as played by Jasper Britton, is wicked, dark, clever, and also seductive. You're on his side no matter how much you don't want to be as you see each of his cruel acts unfold. Ithamore, his slave and later companion in mischief, is brilliant. He matches Britton’s energy and excitement tenfold and the pair seem to be stuck in a vicious never ending spiral of revenge and murder. To counter Barabas’ malevolence, there is the sweetness of his daughter Abigail, played by Catrin Stewart. She converts to Christianity after learning of the wickedness of her father. She is ultimately just, fair, good and principled (in her own way) but she is treated as wicked, dirty scum by the other Christian characters in the play revealing the hypocrisy of their religion as well as the shallowness. Love thy neighbour apparently does not extend to the members of other religions.

As a final note, whilst no new ground is trod here, the effect is of a new light being shone on Christopher Marlowe. Let's hope that with the success and popularity of this play new theatregoers will be introduced to the genius of his writing and that some of Shakespeare’s limelight will be re-directed on to poor, nearly forgotten Kit.

After a long break due to extreme business caused by both my thesis, holidays and also the excitement of presenting a paper on an aspect of my thesis in Honolulu at the 2015 NAVSA conference, I bring you my return blog which is my paper for NAVSA convenir toy touching on the theory and history of adaptation as well as mainly looking Henrik Ibsen's influence on the London stage.


Victorians in the World -  Ibsen and the London theatre

Reflections of Ibsen’s Realism on the Victorian Stage

Ibsen got everywhere. He really was in everyone’s hair by the end of the nineteenth-century. He is known today as the father of realism. And this paper analyses the significant impact of realism as a dramatic genre on the Victorian stage as a consequence of his work.  My PhD examines nineteenth-century stage adaptations of three nineteenth-century novels; Jane Eyre, East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret. My study of these often ignored stage adaptations has revealed that they provide a wealth of information about how real people, not critics and other authors, responded to some of the most controversial and taboo literary characters. The plays have been ignored because some academics have dismissed them as ephemeral, or considered them as popular theatre and therefore lacking in literary significance. However, the changes that the dramatists made when approaching the transformation of these characters reveal a lot about the issues that affected people at the time and what they liked or disliked about these characters. The adaptations also reveal important cultural changes, and most importantly to this paper the impact of new theatrical styles.
A change in attitudes towards these rejected plays is happening, albeit very slowly. Patsy Stoneman’s, for me revolutionary, book Jane Eyre on Stage: 1848-1898 revealed the potential that these plays provide. And she has opened these adaptations up to the world by publishing them in her kind of anthology providing additional staging and contextual information.

one of the most obvious changes I noticed whilst conducting my research was the dramatic change in style as the century approached its conclusion, or shall we say it's final curtain? I attribute this change in theatrical taste to Ibsen’s enormous popularity.

In this paper I will demonstrate how the fashion for Ibsen’s realism changed the meaning of some of the most contentious and sensational characters in nineteenth-century literature. This paper explores not just the impact of Ibsen’s work on the stage adaptations of Jane Eyre, East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret but also on other dramatists, like George Bernard Shaw, to the present time. I will first look at Ibsen’s realism as an influence on the stage adaptations examined during my PhD thesis before moving on to an examination of Shaw and twentieth- and twenty-first century playwrights.

On analysis, it is possible to see the effect of Ibsen’s work on the nineteenth-century stage adaptations of all of the novels I studied. The most obvious is  W.G. Wills’ 1882 stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, which I'm devoting a significant chunk of the time here to examining. It has a significantly different dramatic style compared to the other nineteenth-century adaptations of Jane Eyre. It is important to state at this point that all of the novel-to-stage adaptations I examined are clear examples of the theatrical genre of melodrama. But Wills’ play develops the characters rather than having stock villains and heroines and he forefronts Jane’s passage to maturity over the usual comedic business and slapstick that were features of the majority of the earlier adaptations. As such Wills’ Jane does not provoke the audience’s sympathy for her situation as either an orphan nor a woman alone in a prejudiced patriarchal society. The other stage adaptations of Jane Eyre make frequent attempts to garner the audience’s sympathy for Jane, by alternately making her beautiful and pretty, rather than pitiful plain Jane from the original novel, and having other poorer servant characters describing their pity for her. As such Wills’ presents a Jane who is viewed as a very vocal messenger for female rights and human rights on a wider scale but the manner in which this is done implies that it might not be a good thing.This could however be a subversion of the argument. Whatever your opinion on this, it is evident that the play discusses  ‘real life’ social issues.

With Wills’ I also noticed some similarities to Ibsen’s Ghosts, one of Ibsen’s most popular plays. Appearing in 1881, it is another pointed commentary on the skewed morality of society. In it a widow, Helene Alving, reveals that she has kept hidden all of the negative aspects of her marriage, primarily the philandering of her late husband, Captain Alving, to  her pastor. In Wills’ adaptation of Jane Eyre, Jane has the support of the clergyman Mr Prior who is both locum parentis and stand in St John Rivers. She is the least vulnerable of all of the portrayals of Jane, with people constantly offering support and advice, or even their homes. Despite this Jane ignores Mr Prior’s advice to leave Rochester whereas Helene accepted the pastor’s advice to marry Captain Alving in order to reform him.  She confesses her husband’s lifelong vices when she is in the process of dedicating an orphanage to the memory of her late husband. An act she is doing in order to spend all of her late husband’s money so that their son does not inherit anything from him, even money. Here, as with Wills’ Jane, is a clear example of a woman taking control of her own destiny, and also her son’s as she refuses to allow him to inherit anything from his father. The play was shocking because of its very public mention of venereal disease and also it's depiction of how accepted male behaviour was destroying families. So much so that the play achieved only a single private London performance on 13 March 1891 at the Royalty Theatre.

The issue of Lord Chamberlain's Office censorship, because of the subject matter of illegitimate children and sexually transmitted disease, was avoided by the formation of a subscription-only Independent Theatre Society to produce the play. Its members included playwright George Bernard Shaw and authors Thomas Hardy and Henry James.

 The play also touches on incest as Oswald is beginning to fall in love with his mother’s maid, who is his father’s illegitimate daughter. Ghosts makes a strong criticism of male philandering directly in the play given the physical evidence of Captain Alving’s sins in the shape of syphilitic Oswald and in Wills’ Jane Eyre the criticism of male philandering is also very obvious as Jane is warned on frequent occasions to leave Rochester’s home and employ. Mrs Fairfax even tells her after Rochester’s wife’s death that she is in just as much danger even now from Rochester. Jane refuses to listen to all the advice that she is given in the play, even female advice warning her about Rochester:

Jane: Lady Ingram468 – I see your mistake469 – I can explain it 470– I’ve learnt from Mrs Fairfax’s own lips 471– there is a poor patient 472– a half sister473 –
Lady Ingram: Mrs Fairfax has been deceived among the rest57.
Jane (surely): You have made a monstrous charge474. What’s your evidence475?
Blanche: Give me that letter, Mama136.
Blanche: This patient, as you call it, has a brother 137– the news reached him of my engagement and he considerately wrote to me to tell me of the state of the case138. Should you like to read it139?
Lady Ingram: The first few lines will explain all58. (Jane snatches letter and staggers toward window.) Most suspicious agitation59.
Blanche: Why should we concern ourselves any farther about her, Mama140?
Mary: Poor thing31! Poor thing32!
Jane (returning): What is this letter476? Who is this Mr Mason477! I’d sooner believe a word from Mr Rochester’s lips than the cry of a whole slanderous world478. I don’t believe479 – (tears letter in two) some lying enemy480.


Here Jane is not just dismissing the female sisterhood but she is also rebelling against the social hierarchy by refusing to submit to the will of Lady Ingram and Blanche; her social superiors. Wills’ Jane is a very strong independent woman shaping her own destiny. She tears the evidence up and does exactly what she wants after confronting Rochester personally. Wills’ has taken Bronte’s original rebellious Jane and pushed her to an extreme. Despite the sensation of the very dramatic Jane, the play remains firmly realistic because of the change in dramatic style and because of the reasoning process that Jane goes through as she makes up her mind to leave Rochester. Gone are the earlier scenes of comic business, slapstick and fight scenes against vicious moustachioed villains. The focus is purely on Jane’s Bildungsroman reimagined on the stage.

The path to find one’s own destiny is a key theme in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, published in 1890. Hedda, the lead character is considered to be one of greatest dramatic roles of the nineteenth-century. The play is sometimes considered an analysis of mental illness and we now know that Ibsen was interested in the then-embryonic science of mental illness. Coincidentally Sigmund Freud’s first work on psychoanalysis appeared roughly a decade later. The critic Bernard Paris interprets Gabler's actions as stemming from her "need for freedom [which is] as compensatory as her craving for power... her desire to shape a man's destiny” ( Paris 1997: 59). Examples of mentally ill nineteenth-century women included what we now see as oppressed, but mentally normal, wilful characters, such as Lady Audley or Jane Eyre; women reacting to abuse, sexual or otherwise or sexually expressive women like Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason and East Lynne’s Lady Isabel Vane, as well as those with brain disease. Ibsen poured all of the permeating images of female madness into this one character. Most obvious is Hedda’s desire for freedom and it is interesting that Hedda's married name is Hedda Tesman and Gabler her maiden name. On the subject of the title, Ibsen wrote: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife” (Sanders 2006). So whilst Ibsen denied making a conscious alignment with women’s rights when writing A Doll’s House during his speech for the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights in 1898, at this point he seemed happy to support a woman’s decision to find her own identity and not to be defined by that of her husband’s.

Evidently Ibsen’s work had a far reaching impact on Victorian drama, influencing productions appearing in even minor theatres. All of the adaptations I examine were produced in a minor theatre, i.e., those theatre houses, which lay on the fringes of civilised society and were largely on the wrong side of the River Thames. That even they were influenced by Ibsen is remarkable. These were theatres where polite society would not, on the whole, be caught dead and yet it is precisely because they existed outside respectable, high class society that they were able to find influence in Ibsen’s work. The very territory of melodrama opens up a space for experimentation because they require high drama, suspense, emotion, villains, heroines and slapstick. This is why so many of the melodramas performed in the nineteenth-century were adaptations. The dramatists and theatre managers were able to grab hold of an already popular novel especially those already containing some of those aforementioned elements, knowing that interested parties, lovers, or even despisers, of the book would come to see it. The dramatists then ran with it. The goal of getting as many bums on seats over the run as possible. And nothing was off limits as they “adapted” the novel. They experimented with characters, structure and plot to varying degrees. Sometimes the final adaptation was nothing like the original source. And sometimes the adaptation was so popular that the changes which were made became intrinsically linked with the original source forever more. Such as T. A. Palmer’s 1874 East Lynne where the invented line of ‘Dead… and never called me mother!’ comes from. This is a  heart wrenching phrase which never actually  appears in the original.

In respect of Jane Eyre, which had attracted so much interest on its publication due to its controversial rebellious heroine, this probably explains why the book is now a cultural phenomenon. The Lord Chamberlain’s Archives at the British Museum reveal that eight adaptations were registered between 1848-1898. We will never know how many illegal productions appeared as they were never submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. As the book already contained so many melodramatic elements because of its link to Gothic and sensational literature, it was ripe for transformation to the stage. And transform it, they did. The first adaptation to appear in 1848 by John Courtney creates not just an entirely different plot but also invents several new characters, i.e., the amusingly named Betty Bunce and Sally Suds. Courtney’s theatre, The Royal Victoria Theatre, London was in a poorer area where many of the local inhabitants were employed as servants as the census shows so of course these invented characters were servants too. Given that these dramatists felt comfortable enough to create entirely new characters who compete heavily with Jane for the audience’s attention, it is no wonder that Ibsen influence can be seen on the minor theatres towards the end of the century because of his popularity.

It would have been yet another way to appeal to the audience who were growing tired of seeing the same silly slapstick, comedic business and two dimensional characters. Whilst Ibsen’s realism had an impact on the style of the shows appearing at the theatres, there was a limit to his influence. The plays being performed by the end of the century should not technically be categorised as melodrama as the style had changed so much, but some melodramatic elements refused to be shaken off like long pathos filled soliloquies. Melodrama is defined by its focus on sensation, emotion and providing entertainment. Realism is concerned with reflecting real life and depicting real social conflicts, it has to be believable. Maybe this limit in Ibsen’s influence was because the poor Victorian audiences were desperate for relief and entertainment as an escape from the already grim reality of their day-to-day lives? The harsh reality of the full Ibsen style may have been just too much frustration, depression and sadness for them to cope with on top of their own emotional baggage.

 It is also possible to see Ibsen’s desire to reflect ‘real life’ and social issues as an influence on the Victorian stage adaptations of East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret. John Dicks’ 1879 stage adaptation of East Lynne focuses more on the feelings of the middle-class Barbara Hare as she navigates her clandestine love of Archibald Carlyle and her brother Richard’s quest to clear his name of a murder charge than on Lady Isabel’s sensational story. Barbara not only opens the play with a monologue but has more soliloquies and asides than Lady Isabel in this version. And in John Brougham’s adaptation of Lady Audley’s Secret from 1866, Lady Audley is shown being pushed to the edge by a restrictive patriarchal society as she is not given the much needed support she requires as an abandoned wife with a child to feed. And this is the message that he ultimately presents. He also indicates that Lady Audley may well have committed bad acts, but ultimately she was not a bad woman and he lays the blame of Lady Audley’s ‘madness’ firmly at our feet by having Lady Audley accuse everyone gathered around her in the play’s climax for goading her to ‘madness’. You can imagine her not just pointing at the characters gathered around her but at the audience too. For Brougham, crucially it was that Lady Audley tried to escape the restrictions imposed on her by a cruel, patriarchal society that made her ‘mad’ in the eyes of society. Or more succinctly, she was mad because she refused to conform.

Henrik Ibsen is arguably the most important playwright of the last five hundred years. He ranks alongside William Shakespeare in terms of the influence of his work and renown. He was born in 1828 to a wealthy, well-respected merchant family who could trace their roots to all of the local patrician families in Skien, a small port town. Ibsen’s upbringing had an enormous impact on his plays as they largely reflect the concerns of the urban middle to upper-classes in the nineteenth-century. Even the very subject matters of Ibsen’s work marked a change from the theatre that had dominated the stages in the centuries past. Ibsen’s plays, like Bertholt Brecht’s in the century to come,  had a clear social message commenting on the events of the day. For example, one of Ibsen’s most well known plays, A Doll’s House 1879, criticises the accepted marital roles for men and women. It was considered extremely controversial due to the play’s finale where the protagonist Nora leaves her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Strangely, despite Ibsen confirming that he was inspired by the belief that “a woman cannot be herself in modern society” as it is “an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint” (Meyer 1967: 467), he gave a speech at the Norwegian Association for Women’s Rights in 1898, confessing that he “must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement,” as he wrote “without any conscious thought of making propaganda”. He stated that rather his task was “the description of humanity” (Dukore 1974: 563).

We turn now to look at Ibsen’s influence on other nineteenth-century playwrights as well as twentieth-century playwrights.

Over his career, Ibsen entirely redefined the rules of drama with a notion of realism that was adopted by Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw and Bertholt Brecht, to name just a few and which we can see in the theatre to this very day. One of the greatest changes  is that since Ibsen’s heyday, the challenging of commonly accepted assumptions and speaking directly about ‘unsayable’, taboo issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play ART rather than merely entertainment.

A discussion of Ibsen’s influence on contemporary dramatists writing in London during the period would not be complete without reference to the greatly respected playwright, George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was greatly affected by Ibsen and some of his most famous plays, Mrs Warren’s Profession, Widowers’ Houses, Arms and the Man, all deal with very delicate social matters. Interest in and praise for Shaw’s work continues today with a production of Shaw’s Man and Superman having just finished its run starring Ralph Fiennes at the National Theatre. Man and Superman is an interesting mix of realism and surrealism with the often waylaid ‘Don Juan in hell’ scene suggesting that it does not have such a firm footing in the realism genre however it has a clear socio-political message regarding the purpose of life; contemplation. There are some other more striking similarities between Shaw and Ibsen particularly when you examine the leading characters’ motivations in Hedda Gabler and Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession.  Hedda is not afraid to do exactly what she wants to get what she wants and Mrs Warren is very much the same. Mrs Warren exploits the patriarchal society’s reliance on prostitutes to her own ends, making a fortune and raising her social position dramatically, although realistically she will always remain on the fringes due to the aspersions that her connection with prostitution has on her moral countenance. The difference between the two writers is that Shaw’s work seems to promote female independence and entrepreneurship suggesting a proto-feminist stance, however we know that Ibsen did not consciously align himself with the feminist cause as he pointed that out at the Women’s Rights Association meeting! You’d think that a place where you had been invited to speak about women’s rights would surely be entirely the wrong place to even hint that you’re not as much of an advocate as people had assumed! So maybe Ibsen was not as forward thinking regarding women’s rights as we assume. So with that in mind if we look again at Hedda Gabler and Ibsen’s comment that he wanted to identify her as her father’s daughter not as her husband’s wife. Is that good? Is that better than being identified as your husband’s wife? Isn't being owned by your father the same as being owned by your husband? Ibsen later presented a woman who truly sets out to define her own identity in A Doll’s House with Nora leaving her husband and children and slamming the door on her past life not knowing what her future holds but knowing that she will shape it by herself. In the case of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen’s seemingly political stance on women’s rights was an accident; however Shaw deliberately aligned himself with politics. Even Shaw’s wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, was a lifelong advocate for women’s education. donating £1000 to the London School of Economics for the endowment of a woman’s scholarship.

Ibsen’s impact was far wider reaching than the Victorian stage in London, he was also a massive influence on Bertholt Brecht as we can see from Mother Courage, The Caucasian Chalk Circle and The Threepenny Opera, all of which have serious socio-political messages. In Russia, the father of modern acting Konstantin Stanislavsky used the techniques of realism and naturalism to lay down a new style of acting which was then a key influence on Arthur Miller in America. It is well known that the story for All My Sons was inspired by Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. And then to 1950s Britain, there’s John Osborne with his angry young man in Look Back in Anger. .

In conclusion, Ibsen is still influencing drama today. His plays are still being performed all over the world and in 2006, the centennial of Ibsen’s death, A Doll’s House was the most performed play of the year.  Additionally UNESCO inscribed Ibsen's autographed manuscripts of A Doll's House on the Memory of the World Register in 2001, in recognition of their historical value. Modern emerging playwrights continue to be inspired by Ibsen. One of The RSC’s leading lights Tom Morton-Smith who wrote the box office buster Oppenheimer which premiered this Easter has clearly been influenced by Ibsen as he shows the tension surrounding Robert Oppenheimer in the build up to the invention of the atomic bomb and how he dealt with the after effects of the guilt weighing heavily on his conscience.

In Britain, we’re currently experiencing a George Bernard Shaw revival. My local theatre has put on a number of Shaw plays this year with Mrs Warren’s Profession finishing last week there so maybe we’ll have an Ibsen revival next year, or the year after.

Bibliography

Cunningham, Lawrence S.; Reich, John J. (2009). Culture & Values, Volume II: A Survey of the Humanities with Readings. Cengage Learning. p. 492.

Dukore, Bernard F., ed. 1974. Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks to Grotowski. Florence, KY: Heinle & Heinle.

Meyer, Michael. 1967. Ibsen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
 Paris, Bernard. Imagined Human Beings: A Psychological Approach to Character and Conflict in Literature, New York University Press: New York City, 1997, p. 59.

Sanders, Tracy (2006). "Lecture Notes: Hedda Gabler — Fiend or Heroine". Australian Catholic University. Retrieved 2008-10-05.

Showalter, Elaine, ‘Feminine Heroines’ in Bloom, Harold, The Victorian Novel (New York: Chelsea House, 2004).