Theatre & Protest by Lara Shalson

Author:Lara Shalson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Theatre protests

Rallying the audience

If the theatre productions discussed in the previous section incited protests against them, this is because they were themselves political performances that explicitly addressed problematic social matters and aimed to challenge their audiences’ assumptions. Nevertheless, they each struggled to reconcile themselves with the political actions of audiences in response to them. In this section, I explore attempts by theatre-makers themselves to harness theatre’s capacity to inspire protest. What happens when protest is enacted by the theatre? Can it have any efficacy? Can it be good art?

I turn to another protest taking place in a theatre the same year as the ‘Playboy Riots’. This protest was part of Elizabeth Robins’ Votes for Women! A Dramatic Tract in Three Acts (1907), staged at London’s Royal Court Theatre (then, the Court Theatre). Described by the title as a political treatise in dramatic form, Votes for Women! was the first suffragette play, and it is credited with having inspired the development of the Actresses’ Franchise League the following year. The play depicts the political awakening of a young heiress, Beatrice Dunbarton, after she meets the independent suffragette Vida Levering at a party. The major turning point in the narrative comes in Act II, when Beatrice goes to hear Vida speak at a suffragette rally in London’s Trafalgar Square. Beatrice is so moved by the experience that she is persuaded to join the cause, and she subsequently helps to convince her fiancé, a Conservative Member of Parliament, to support the suffrage campaign as well.

Votes for Women! was criticized by some for its use of melodramatic plot conventions at a time when realism was taking hold as the most respected stage form (something Robins herself was well aware of and played an important part in as the first English Hedda Gabler and a champion of Ibsen’s work). However, the Trafalgar Square rally, which comprised the second act, was widely acclaimed as both a triumph of stage realism and a tour de force of political theatre. It was lauded by the Sunday Times as the ‘most brilliant piece of stage-management we have ever had in an English playhouse’ (quoted in McDonald, 1995, p. 139). The Sketch described it as ‘the finest stage crowd scene that has been seen for years’ (quoted in Ellis, 2003). The Observer called it ‘a marvel of verisimilitude’ (ibid.). In addition, the scene was attributed real political power: ‘The second act may have an influence on social and political life such as no other play has had in this generation,’ one reviewer wrote (quoted in McDonald, p. 141).

What was so exciting about Act II was the way it turned the performance in the Court Theatre into a genuine suffrage rally. As an active member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Robins had attended many political rallies, and she had given her first speech at one in 1906. As a talented writer, she also wrote many persuasive letters in support of the cause. The speeches in Act II, by

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