The Vapour Trail

Recently I wrote a post about kick-arse Victorian heroines in melodramatic productions on London’s East End. I’ve also written about the vogue for Circassian ladies in freak-shows in the late nineteenth century. Now I’ve stumbled across an undated playbill in the V&A Theatre Museum’s Enthoven Collection which neatly merges the two phenomena.

The playbill is for an East London melodrama featuring the derring-do of a Circassian heroine. Roll up, the poster declares, for an evening of Grand Equestiran and Dramatic Military Romantic Spectacle:

“The Conquest of Tartary; or the Eagle Rider of Circassia and Her Monarch Steed of the Desert, has surpassed the most sanguine expectations of the Management,… the general Acting, with the powerful Equestrian tablueax, Effects, Battles, Processions, and Gorgeous Scenery, with the strong interest created by the perilous adventures and feaful Escapes of the Circassian Prophetess, supported by Mrs R Buxton Taylor (the celebrated Female Equestrian), totally defies competition”.

This Eagle Rider of Circassia sounds even more like an exotic Lara Croft than the characters played by Amy Stirling at the Standard Theatre discussed in that recent post of mine. Picture her with bust rearing beneath beaded dress, diaphanous harem pants beneath, silver sword in hand, with her beer-frazzled hair abundant beneath a fetching helmet… All she needs is a Within Temptation goth-rock-style backing, and the Victorian heroine-does-World of Warcraft image is complete.

(NB above Circassian-beauty image from http://www.missioncreep.com/mundie/gallery/gallery5.htm)

Maggie Moore was one of the most popular women on the late-nineteenth century Australian stage. She came to the Australian colonies from America in 1874 with her husband and fellow actor, J C Williamson. This pair immediately made their names playing opposite each other in the hit American melodrama, Struck Oil. Maggie would later play alongside Williamson in one of his Gilbert & Sullivan standards, HMS Pinafore, in the perennially successful Dion Boucicault melodramas, The Colleen Bawn and Arrah-na-Pogue, and in numerous other productions.

During her career, Moore was often dubbed ‘the darling of the gods’. In other words, she was the special favorite of the rowdy members of the galleries in colonial theatres (the place where the larrikins would hang out). Her signature role, Lizzie Stofel in Struck Oil, was of the daughter of an immigrant shoemaker, who spoke in a  Dutch-Philadelphian accent. Any accent besides an educated Anglo one being a sure index of ‘lowness’ on the popular stage. To add to this impression of picturesque ‘lowness’, Moore’s character was given to exuberant song-and-dances, ‘full of… fun’ as the Australasian put it, dressed in servant-girl attire as she mopped her father’s floors.

Another likely reason that Moore enjoyed popularity with boisterous Australian audiences is that she was of Irish-American extraction, and often played on her Irishness. Her roles in The Colleen Bawn and Arrah-na-Pogue attest to this in a professional sense. And she also played on her tomboyishness. As the English opera-cum music hall actress, Emily Soldene, put it:

“I always thought Mrs Williamson was Irish, but she tells me she is Irish-American, born in ‘Frisco – a ‘Frisco girl who always wanted to be a ‘Frisco boy – stage-bitten from when, as a tiny tot, she used ‘to get inter’ [her brother] Jimmy’s pants and go ‘wid Jimmy’ into the ‘cullered pusson’s Paradise’ – the top gallery of the theatre. And when she first played parts, she wore ‘Jimmy’s pants’ till ‘Jimmy’s pants’ fitted too snug’, and she had to have a pair of her own’.

In the late-1880s and mid-90s, Maggie Moore was indeed renowned for playing a role in snug-fitting pants: that is, the English apprentice and criminal, Jack Sheppard, in a burlesque called Little Jack Sheppard. As Sheppard, she was knowingly playful with her patrons, all rakish swagger and winks to the gallery. She sang a Cockney song, ‘Me and ‘Er, ‘Er and Me’ – surely a rip-off of Gus Elen’s music-hall hit in England - to the apparent delight of the audience.

Moore was not a beautiful actress by any stretch of the imagination. She was always inclined to roundness – very round, by today’s actressly standards, and even the Bulletin made a passing quip about her stoutness in her Little Jack Sheppard breeches-role. She also had a sort of vacuous plainness of face in most photographs which give little sense of her charisma on stage. This photograph from the National LIbrary of Australia’s collection perhaps comes closest to capturing her appeal: in it, she impersonates Trilby for the eponymous hit play of the 1890s, cigarette in hand; conveying some of the sassy mischievousness which endeared her to her fans.

As Moore grew older, her star slowly waned – an old old feminine/theatrical story. She continued to act in Australian theatres and on overseas tours into the 1920s, and had a stint as a theatrical manager early in the century, but her heyday had really ended with the close of the Victorian era. Nonetheless, the fact that a fiftieth anniversary of her first theatrical appearance in Australia was celebrated in Her Majesty’s Theatre, Sydney, in 1924, is testimony to a remarkably long-running career – particularly given that by the twentieth century, female actors were routinely expected to exude youthful charm. And her popularity before the end of the century is also testimony to the extent to which popular Australian audiences at that time valued high-spirited mischievousness as a more alluring attribute for an actress than conventional beauty.

References

Bulletin, 13 April 1895, p 8.

Josie Fantasia, ‘Considering gender in nineteenth-century Australian theatre: the case of Maggie Moore’. Australasian Drama Studies 21 (Oct 1992): 154-168.

Richard Refshauge, ‘Moore, Maggie (1851 – 1926)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 5, Melbourne University Press, 1974, pp 279-280 (avaiable online).

Emily Soldene, cited in Nellie Stewart, My Life’s Story (Sydney: John Sands,1923), 36.

John West, Theatre in Australia (Stanmore: Cassell Australia, 1978), 52-53.

Note:

In 1891, Moore and J C Williamson split nastily, as celebrity actor-couples are wont to do. Williamson would later punish her for this by omitting her entirely from his autobiography. How could he have imagined it possible to write a credible story of his life, one wonders, while not even making a passing mention of her name? Nonetheless, J C Williamson’s own fame and the influence of his autobiography has meant Moore’s abilities and her own celebrity have been underplayed in the historical memory of late-Victorian theatrical history. It was for this reason that the (wonderfully-named) Josie Fantasia wrote her above article on Moore.

Kick-arse female characters like Jennifer Garner in Alias or the Charlie’s Angels are often seen as distinctively late twentieth-century creations – a product of feminist or post-feminist gender politics. But in the reviews of late-Victorian melodramas I’ve been reading lately, it appears that such go-grrrl characters have a longer lineage.

Before Walter and Frederick Melville began producing their bad-girl melodramas at East London’s Standard Theatre (the subject of my last post), that theatre was home to a series of plays featuring late-nineteenth century versions of Lara Croft. These plays starred an actress called Amy Steinberg, who was given top billing in Standard playbills and posters during the late 1880s.

Standard Theate productions were no small affairs. They attracted nightly audiences well in excess of 3000 and (unusually, for an East End theatre) a smattering of flattering commentary in the London press. In the last half of the eighties, many thousands of London theatregoers would thus have seen Steinberg star in what were sometimes called ‘comic heroine’ roles. In plays such as The Lucky Shilling, The Silver Wedding and The Royal Mail, she appeared as the vivacious sidekick to the more traditional heroine, and in each case her character ended up saving this heroine through feminine derring-do.

In A Dark Secret, Steinberg played May Joyce, the energetic sister of the lily-white female lead. During one febrile scene, a French villainness took a horse-whip to this slender sister, reducing her to screams for mercy. Moments later, Steinberg’s character burst onto the stage and knocked the Frenchwoman to the ground. ‘Give it to her well!’ was shouted from the audience during the fisticuffs which followed. In The Lucky Shilling, she leapt onto a balloon before it took off to the skies and beat off the villains within. In the final scene, she shot one of the villains in the leg and extorted a written confession from him of his dastardly deeds.

In The Royal Mail, Amy Steinberg played a divorcee called Catherine Wade who took control of a mail-cart (a real one, with real horses) before tracking down the bad-uns and giving them what they deserved. ‘What will they say? A female is driving the mail!’ called out one of the male characters after Steingberg seized the cart. ‘Don’t they always?’ Steinberg retorted as the cart careered by.

The popularity of dashing women in late-Victorian productions may also be found in places other than the Standard Theatre. There were plenty of female highwaymen plays produced during this period – and not just in East London, either (indeed, one was playing in Melbourne a couple of weeks after the Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly, was executed on 11 November 1880). And there were also plays featuring highwaymen or attractive thieves played by female actors in drag. The perennial popularity of Jack Sheppard as a role for women could be seen in Mrs East Robertson’s portrayal of the rascal prison-breaker at the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton in 1898. In 1874, too, James Greenwood described a play at a Whitechapel penny gaff called Gentleman Jack, or the Game of High Toby (a ‘toby’ being flash cant for highwayman). It featured a woman dressed in regulation tight breeches and thigh-high leather boots, brandishing pistols and striking swashbuckling poses. This character, who also received top-billing on posters outside the gaff, was received with approving roars from the crowd. And she too ended up saving the heroine before marrying her at the end of the play.

Melodrama characters such as Steinberg and the penny-gaff toby had the versatile benefit of appealing to male members of the audience as feisty women with sex-appeal, and to female members as embodiments of what we now call grrl-power. What a shame that so many of those first-wave feminists regarded East End theatres and gaffs as snake-pits of iniquity, don’t you think - for surely here was a form of proto-feminism being offered in melodramatic guise?

(Okay, so this isn’t an image of the highwaywoman from 1874 … I stole it from Helena Love’s flickr site)

References

John M East, ‘Neath the Mask: The Story of the East Family (London: Allen & UNwin, 1967), p 203

James Greenwood, cited in Paul Sheridan, Penny Theatres of Victorian London (London: Dennis Dobson, 1981)

Royal Standard Theatre, Bound book of programmes and clippings, Enthoven Collection, V&A Theatre Archives

A. E. Wilson, East End Entertainment (London: Arthur Burker, 1954), p 130

Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1886, p6 (reference to The Female Highwayman, a two-act drama, playing at the Opera House, a then down-at-heel venue not far from the Rocks).

NB see Jim Davis’ discussion of the characters played by Sarah Lane at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton, for references to similar dashing female roles in the 1860-70s: Jim Davis, ‘The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia, 1863-74′, New Theatre Quarterly, 7.28 (November 1991), pp385-6

Waiting for a train to Oxford not so long ago, I wandered into a bookshop on the platform and noted the array of ‘naughty girl’ novels on sale. They had titles such as Confessions of a Call-Girl or Good Girl Comes Undone, accompanied by photographs of femmes fatales in red underwear, or cartoon glamour-girls done up in lipstick pink and dayglo lime – the general idea being that one gets to revel in what it might be like to live life on the wild side, or stories of ‘nice girls like us’ going bad.

In the early twentieth century, the Standard Theatre in Shoreditch and the Pavilion Theatre in Whitechapel specialised in a series of melodramas on very similar themes. Under the management of Walter and Frederick Melville, the Standard staged a seemingly endless run of plays with names such as The Girl Who Took the Wrong Turning, The Girl Who Wrecked His Home, The Worst Woman in London and A Girl’s Cross Roads. Just down the road, the Pavilion regularly featured a similar fare, with numbers such as Midnight Paris, The World’s Way and The Dangers of London.

In most of the melodramas just mentioned, the most important character was a wealthy villainess. With overblown foreign names such as Vesta de Clere (shades of 101 Dalmations’ Cruella de Ville), these villainesses would parade the stage in furs and diamonds. Habitually, they would ruin a pretty girl from a bucolic village by bearing her off to enjoy city pleasures and plying her with wealth and booze.

Most often, these risqué characters were played by Mrs East Robertson, an actress who became a household name in East London during the early 1900s. Garish theatre posters were slathered over hoardings around Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Stepney Green, in each case giving top billing to East Robertson. As a promotional stunt for the Pavilion Theatre’s A Past Redeemed, she rode the streets in an open carriage, a bloodhound at her side, swathed in red velvet, a scarlet parasol in hand. Crowds gathered to cheer or hiss or gape as she went by. ‘I bet you are a bitch off as well as on!’, a woman apparently yelled from the audience when she appeared that night.

Edwardian melodramas of the Worst Woman in London stripe had important differences from latter-day books a la A Good Girl Comes Undone. They were invariably cast as morality plays, in which virtue was confirmed and vice lavishly reviled. The villainess always got her comeuppance – indeed, she was often shot at the end of the play, as happened to the wicked Princess Vladovski in A Past Redeemed. But still, before that fatal denouement took place, audience members had plenty of opportunities to luxuriate in feminine debauchery, and to admire the rococo glamour of the evil adventuress. In this sense, they provided an enjoyment not altogether dissimilar from those books I saw in that bookstore on Paddington station.

References

Jim Davis, ‘The East End’, in Michael R Booth and Joel H Kaplan, eds, The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Performance and the Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp210-14

John M East, ‘Neath the Mask: The Story of the East Family (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967), pp 233-38

Heidi J Holder, ‘East End Theatre’, in Kerry Powell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp273-4

A E Wilson, East End Entertainment (London: Arthur Burker, 1954), pp 134-38

Royal Standard Theatre, Bound book of programmes and clippings, Enthoven Collection, V&A Theatre Archives

NB a great amount of info on the Melville’s bad girl dramas is held in the University of Kent’s Melville Collection – I hope to visit it sometime…