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.