The range of Victorian theatre was as wide as that of
Victorian society, for it was the principal medium of entertainment available
to literate and illiterate alike.’1 Two social classes are
represented in the novel Mary Barton, the working-class which could be seen as
the illiterate audience (unless they were self-educated) and the middle-class
as the literate which showed their difference in the Victorian society. When
Mary Barton was adapted for the Victorian stage, two adaptions stood out, the
Victoria theatre’s adaptation in 1851 and the Lyceum’ version in1866. The novel’s representation of how the two
classes were separate became emphasised in these adaptions because of how the audiences
being of one specific class in each theatre.
As People immigrated to the cities, it became immensely popular
for the people to seek the theatrical experience. This created a higher need
for theatres and as a natural consequence the result to this high need where rebuilding,
expansions and refurbishments. There could also be another reason for how the
theatres became so wanted and it was probably because of the fact that the most
important figure in the country; the Queen Victoria was encouraging the people
to appreciate the theatrical plays by showing her own love for entertainment.
It is stated in the book Theatre in the
Victorian Age; ‘Victoria was, then, as representative an audience of one as
she could be, and she stood at the apex of that vaster audience, her people’. So
her choices of entertainment could have had an influence on the people in the
cities, regardless of their class.
Research for this blog was gathered by visiting the V&A
museum. It portrayed a visual timeline of the Victorian theatre’s high points
like puppeteers, costumes, music and small models of how the theatres were.
Though the idea of walking through time is exciting because of the nostalgic
feelings one can receive from looking at old items, it did not display so much of how the audience perceived these
items in real life and the theatre’s way of creating a response to the
economic, social and cultural parts of the society. That is why the rest of the
research showed itself more promising, because it being based on books found in
the Roehampton University’s library; Victorian
theatre, Theatre in the Victorian Age
and an journal called The Gaskell
Journal, which turned out to have a relevant article by Andrew Maunder on
the subject of how the audience perceived adaptions differently depending on
what was categorised as appropriate or interesting for their social class.
The theatres were supposed to create a
response to the economically, socially and culturally parts of the society into
their display of a play or melodrama. The article “Mary Barton goes to London: Elizabeth Gaskell, Stage Adaption and
Working Class Audience.” Shows how
the theatres did this by emphasising how those elements affected each social
class. It was firstly adapted for the working-class audiences in the Victoria
theatre by John Courtney as a melodrama, their cultural experience meant that
most of them had not read Gaskell’s novel. Therefore the use of a melodramatic
play was not only a way to avoid the theatrical patents which had been introduced
in to the society through the Licencing Act in 1737.
It meant that theatres like The Victorian could not create theatrical
plays without consent from the Lord Chamberlain, they would rather adapt the fictional
novels into what could have been categorised as a simpler ‘play’. A melodrama
was not considered a proper ‘play’, because of its use of music and by using
this form they eluded some of the controlling patent specified by the
government.
The Victoria theatre
version of the novel emphasised the political difference in the novel’s representation
of middle class as wealthy and ignorant people, which also showed how this
aspect was removed in the Lyceum’s version. The Victoria’s focus was on the
audiences own ‘personal experience’3, just by stepping outside the
theatre there were ‘men desperate for work, whose families face being sucked
down by forces of poverty rampant in the city’3. This was a part of
the social society; someone had to be at the bottom, which is who John Barton
talked for in this play.
The play begins with John Barton being in London on the
Union march. His distance and the loss of her mother leave room for the
melodrama to depicted Mary as a sort of independent heroine. Though this
feministic view of Mary is important as to how heroine’s where often used in a
way to show how those who are depicted as less than the man, now showed the
opposite. She became a bit hidden by the focus on the political aspect of a
relationship between a middle-class employer and his workers, ‘there is one
that crosses our purpose – who poisons the minds of those to whom we appeal,
who learn to scorn & derision our wrongs & sufferings, who even this
day has added fuel to that fire that burns between the master and the man’ (pp.
511-2)3/4. The ‘brutal economic system’ through Barton’s side of the
dialogue becomes true as a ‘testimony’ that shows the starvation and struggle
in the society. The frustration in his dialogue is directed to the audience as
much as to the character on stage, he is the voice of working-class. Therefore this
adaption sort of forgets the romantic relationship of Jem and Mary by altering
the focus on the political experiences of the characters in the play that represent
issues in the experience of the audience and society.
Earlier in this semester we had a lecture about Gaskell’s
novel, Mary Barton. In one of the slides it said; ‘The novel is concerned with how writing and image is
re-interpreted and re-read according to different points of view’ which is sort
of what is happening in these stage adaptions of Gaskell’s novel in this era.
This emphasizes the idea that one person could write something that only one
individual group or person could understand and when spectated by an outsider completely
misunderstood. That might also be the reason for why they had different
adaptions in this period.
The second theatre that is introduced in the Maunder’s article
is the Lyceum Theatre, which had the same issue with the need of an
approval from the Lord Chamberlain. The Lyceum theatre addressed its adaptation
to a middle-class audience. That might be why ‘[t]he Lyceum’s licensee, Charles
Fechter, worried that the story of Northern workers would be too alien for his
metropolitan audience.’3 By creating an adaption where
the play became more concerned with the murder plot than the working-class’s
struggles, Dion Boucicault’s version of Mary Barton left out important elements
from the original text. That is why the main difference between the Victoria
theatre and the Lyceum theatre’s version is how the adaptions directly display
or not display political problems in the Victorian society. Political problems in the Victorian period
had a high connection with the problematic lifestyle of the working-class
within the novel. By not focusing on bad economy, lack of work, starvation and frustration
that lead Gaskell’s character John Barton to the idea of committing murder in
her novel, Boucicault alters the ‘play’ into a thriller about some sort of
revenge for the employer’s choice of refusing to marry Jane (new name of Mary
Mary).The political aspects of the working-class, such as Chartism and their
march to London disappeared along with the names of the characters in this
version of the play also, which makes the adaptation more concerned with the
romantic relationship between Jane Learoy (Mary Barton) and Jem. By not using the political desire which in the
novel leads to the murder of young Carson seemed to depict John Barton as mad.
Mary’s feminism and heroism is gone and she becomes a conventional character
who as so many other women of the society was culturally supressed.
‘The range of Victorian theatre[s]’ in the Victorian society
was wide, yes, but it did not mean that the ‘principal medium of entertainment’
meant the same to those who were literate or not. Through the two adaptions of the Victoria and
Lyceum it has been shown that the culture made the political differences in the
social classes a part of the ‘plays’. This supports the idea that each theatre
made adaptions of fictional novels for a specific audience. So yes, in a way
every one could enjoy the theatrical experience, which was apparently popular
in this period.
Sources;
1. Jackson.
R. Victorian theatre (part I theatres for audiences [p. 9]). A
& C Black. 1989. Print.
2. Booth.
M.R. Theatre in the Victorian Age (chapter
1, p.3). Cambridge University Press.1991. Print.
3. “Mary
Barton goes to London: Elizabeth Gaskell, Stage Adaption and Working Class
Audience.” The Gaskell Journal. 25
ed. 2011. Print.
4. Courtney.
J. Mary Barton; or, A Tale of Manchester Life (1850) British Library. Lord
Chamberlain’s Collection of Plays Add. Mss 43028 p.475.
5. Mary
Barton Lecture PowerPoint. Nicki Humble & Louise Lee. Moodle. 2013
Web sources and pictures;
V&A Museum; Exhibition of Theatre and Performance.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/page/t/theatre-and-performance/ http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/0-9/19th-century-theatre/ http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1140842/h-beard-print-collection-print-fowles-j/
Mentions the Royal Victoria Theatre and Mary Barton
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