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mentoring or apprenticeship process,

and its importance, are not really
highlighted. Nor is the decision to
employ male or female principal boys in
different years explored.
The title of the book implies there will
be a materialist framework based on the
costs, income and consequent value of
pantomime. I am aware that when I was
musical director for the 1987
pantomime, Salisbury Playhouse was
hugely successful and recorded a
phenomenally high box office. However,
this approach is not maintained in the
majority of the book, rendering the title
somewhat irrelevant. What does become
very clear, however, is that there was
a strong sense of family among
the performers a feeling perhaps
engendered by the cold, cramped and
difficult conditions in the old theatre
(which are repeatedly recalled). The
difference when the company moved to
the new building is mentioned, but no
detailed assessment offered of how that
affected the performance or performers.
As such, what I read here confirmed
many of my own memories, but I
was also frustrated by the missed
opportunity to draw more from the
wealth of material presented.
This is a useful book because it
documents a particular time and place
through the voices of the people who
experienced them and that is informative despite the repetitive structure. It
documents a very particular moment of
transition in British theatre and
pantomime history.
Millie Taylor

123

Theatre, Performance and Analogue

Technology: Historical Interfaces and
Intermedialities
Kara Reilly (ed.)
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
55, hb., xvii+269 pp., 46 b/w ill.
ISBN 9781137319661

In spite of its title, there is no overarching narrative to this book. Indeed, as

you read the chapters the possibilities
and implications of technology and
analogue within theatre and performance expand and diversify. The Greek
root techne is marvellously imprecise and
expansive and, as Adrian Curtin
paraphrases Philip Auslander, theatre
is always-already an intermedial art;
performance is itself a technology (227).
Such lack of precision is not necessarily a
bad thing, but, nevertheless, the twelve
chapters surprise with their diverse
interpretations. To some extent all have
been unified, as Reillys introduction
argues, by a desire to historicize
contemporary discourses of digital
performance.
The collection is organized into three
parts: Interrogating Historiography,
Industrial Bodies and Dance, and
Performing Science and Technology.
Part One opens with a well focused
essay by Richard Beacham on Heron of
Alexandrias Toy Theatre automaton
using extremely convincing computer
visualization as his research methodology. Odai Johnson reflects upon the
craft of making history as a technology
and considers the history constructed
around the making of a huge army of
artificial, mechanical elephants for the
Babylonian Queen Semiramis to do
battle against the real elephants of the
King of India. Victor Holtcamp
continues this approach by taking techne

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as meaning an art or craft employed to

exert control over the world (54), as he
considers issues of reality and truth in
the dramaturgy that Steele Mackaye
added to Buffolo Bills basic Wild West
Exhibition in The Drama of Civilization
shows of the 1890s. The fourth essay in
Part One, Forgotten Wizard by
Brandin Barn-Nusbaum, attempts an
introduction to Mariano Fortuny,
although this important early twentieth
century scenographer is not as forgotten
as Barn-Nusbaum thinks. Fortuny is
oddly contrasted with Adolphe Appia,
which is not useful and detracts from the
ambition of the chapter. The remarkable
technology of Fortunys lighting
equipment is not well served by the lack
of illustration.
Beginning Part Two, Katherine
Neweys Fairies and Sylphs: Femininity,
Technology and Technique is an essay
of considerable discernment that, whilst
focusing upon the technology of the
ballerinas blocked pointe shoe, skillfully
contextualize this micro-study within the
broader context of the nineteenth century
spectacular theatre. Kara Reillys essay
The Tiller Girls: Mass Ornament and
Modern Girl interestingly places their
dance and cultural significance within
the context of the Taylorism of factory
economy and production processes and
the militaristic routine and training
of mechanistic repetition. Johannes
Birringers Retro-Engineering: Wearable
Sound is a complex and somewhat
opaque essay that brings together his
own work of audible dance in UKIYO
(2010) and sets it within the context of the
evolution of audio, video and motion
capture technologies.
Part Three begins with Ciara
Murphys excellent examination of
Participatory Electrical Performances in

THEATRE NOTEBOOK

the Enlightenment Period Shocks and

Sparks. Like Neweys essay, this offers
a micro-study, but here the history
of electrical demonstrations are framed
within much broader enlightenment
issues of religion, useful knowledge and
rational pursuits (scientific practice as a
necessary addendum to religious
worship (176)) and the commercialization of culture. Naomi J. Stubbs
introduces early American pleasure
gardens where the presentation of the
rural idyll was facilitated by new
technologies of light and fire. Beth A.
Kattelman ably takes us through the
better-known paths of Peppers Ghost,
but her essay would have been
enhanced by locating this technology
within a broader framework of period
spectacle and illusion. Adrian Curtin
describes the phenomenon of the
theatre phone whereby during the
first decades of the twentieth century
subscribers could listen in to theatre and
opera from the comfort of their homes.
Michael M. Chemers writes perceptively
in his Lyke Unto a Lively Thing:
Theatre History and Social Robotics
about early forms of artificial
intelligence manifest in the animated
rood screens, automata and mechanical
avatars, created mainly in sixteenth
century churches, to perform miracles
of prayer and emotional display. His
discussion of human empathy gets to the
heart of our relationship with
technology and illusion: Theatre artists
generate artificial intelligences, societies,
and entire worlds . . . Imaginative
anthropomorphic projection is, it
appears, a highly favoured evolutionary
trait, and empathy is its most important
ingredient (243-44). While overall,
something of a curates egg, the best of
this book contextualizes, expands and

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reflects upon the social implications of

linking theatre, performance and
technology and in so doing offers
exciting glimpses of future lines of
thinking.
Christopher Baugh

British Avant-Garde Theatre

Claire Warden
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
53, hb., 232 pp., 7 b/w ill.
ISBN 9780230285781

Claire Wardens book opens with an

account of a visit made to the first UK
performance of T. S. Eliots Sweeney
Agonistes in 1934. We learn that a
distinguished and elite audience
climbed the precipitous and unsavoury
stairs to see it at the time, amongst
whom was W. B. Yeats . . . and Virginia
Woolf, brought by Eliot and a party of
friends. Bertolt Brecht also saw the
production and declared that it was the
best thing he had seen for a long time
and by far the best thing in London (2).
In 1935, the play formed half of a doublebill with W.H. Audens The Dance of
Death. Wardens comment on this event
is both sharp and indicative of her
overall methodology: The juxtaposition
of these two plays must have been a
remarkable if somewhat perplexing
affair, connecting Eliots experimental
poetic drama with Audens innovative,
politically conscious play (2).
Although the terms do not exactly fit
in this instance particularly in the case
of Audens play what she is offering to
construct is a model of theatrical
innovation between roughly 1914 and
1956 that both separates and connects
what I and others have labelled, with

125

reference to the later period, avantgarde and agit-prop. Warden initially

limits herself to talking of the poetic
and the political, but immediately
further particularises the divide: there
are two distinguishable genealogies
involved: the university-educated poets
and their affiliates composing theatrical
poetry, and the working-class companies
searching for a form that would further
their political ideas (9). In revisiting this
historical period she is arguing for
a new way of looking at the connections
and distinctions that she finds in a
British avant-garde. That she is aware
of the possible objections to such a
construction is apparent throughout her
introduction as she writes of her aim to
create a workable, versatile category,
and argues that a pliable understanding of the avant-garde as
concerned with leading, challenging and
changing . . . allows us to bring together
disparate groups and figures and create
a real sense of a British avant-garde (5).
The entire book is a re-imagining of
British theatrical history (8). This
intellectual re-imagining is paralleled
by a series of graphic designs by Beth
Fletcher that cleverly evoke both the
period and its potential as a site for
avant-garde experience.
Warden is acutely aware from the
outset that the concept of British avantgarde theatre is not one that offers either
a homogeneous model, or even discrete
and defined if only in manifesto form
groupings. The matter is further
complicated by the fact that it is, in
practice, impossible to separate evidence
of a specifically British avant-garde
from other, contemporaneous and
near-contemporaneous, avant-gardes:
something that, again, Warden is not only
well aware of, but which provides her