British alternative theatre in the post-World War Two period was, in part, a reaction to ‘mainstream theatre’. Of course the ‘mainstream’ evolved during those turbulent decades, so that the types of theatre that might be counted as part of it varied, but overall it consisted of West End commercial theatre and commercial venues of the regional touring circuits, subsidised regional repertory theatres and other municipal theatres, and the national theatres (Royal National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company). Yet the contrast between ‘alternative’ and ‘mainstream’, in practice, has rarely been that straightforward.

For example, when the National Theatre staged Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain in 1980 it produced a significant ‘alternative’ in relation to both mainstream and alternative theatre repertoires of the time. Aesthetically, no alternative company could have matched its scenographic scale and complexity; politically, few other mainstream theatres would have dared to take the legal risks involved in its explicit portrayal of buggery as a metaphor for the British occupation of Northern Ireland. The example underlines the fact that relativity, in art as much as in physics, gradually became a condition of twentieth-century global culture, so that contesting binary opposites – male–female, centre–margins, mainstream–alternative and more – gave way to a plethora of possible performance practices and analytical perspectives. Accordingly, between World War Two and the turn of the millennium British theatre as a whole increasingly became pluralistic and fragmented. So as well as considering the complexities of a growing variety of alternative theatres in the second half of the twentieth century, this chapter aims to suggest the historiographic difficulties in such a task.

The late eighteenth century witnessed a revolution both in dramatic genres and in theatrical institutions. In 1776, the year in which David Garrick retired from the stage, the patent theatres – Drury Lane and Covent Garden – still stood unchallenged as England’s national theatres, the cultural Parliament of the nation. The stock dramatic repertoire performed each season at these houses represented a collection of plays which would have been utterly familiar to many of their leisured and aristocratic patrons: Shakespearean tragedies such as Richard III and Macbeth, John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife, Goldsmith’s comedy of class and mistaken identity, She Stoops to Conquer, and Jane Shore, Nicholas Rowe’s pathetic tragedy of female suffering. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the monopoly over ‘legitimate’ plays enjoyed by Drury Lane and Covent Garden had been abolished; according to the provisions of the Theatre Regulation Act (1843), all theatres licensed for the public performance of plays were now permitted to stage any dramatic genre. The intervening period was an age of extraordinary institutional change that saw the commercial disintegration and ideological collapse of legitimate drama, the emergence of an influential cultural sphere – the so-called minor playhouses – and, most important of all for the history of British theatre, the irresistible rise of illegitimate dramatic forms such as extravaganza, burlesque and melodrama. This was an age, too, of sparkling dramatic celebrity. Newspapers, journals and grand dinner tables alike delighted in performers, playwrights and dramatic gossip. In John Philip Kemble’s lofty, grandiloquent Coriolanus, Sarah Siddons’s unforgettable representation of Lady Macbeth (‘Power was seated on her brow’, remembered William Hazlitt; ‘she was tragedy personified’), and Edmund Kean’s dignified Shylock or his playful, disconcertingly jocular Iago, critics and spectators acknowledged that they were witnessing a transformation in Shakespearean performance. But celebrity was by no means confined to the representation of Shakespeare.

That a play of no great merit, carried almost entirely by one actor in the leading role, should have a chapter to itself in what is otherwise a broad examination of the nineteenth-century stage is not altogether remarkable. The Bells invites consideration as a stand-alone ‘exhibit’ or ‘case study’ because it is one of the few nineteenth-century plays where so many elements of its production and reception by the public in Britain and abroad survive. In addition, this play is an index to the career of a remarkable actor. The Bells was a play in which Henry Irving, its leading actor, passed in the space of a few days from comparative obscurity to celebrity and fame, enabling him to establish himself as Britain’s leading interpreter of serious and classical roles. Beginning with the role of Mathias, Irving became known as an actor in possession of a singular gift for enacting characters, intellectually superior and somewhat aloof, who are secretly tormented by suppurating guilt for hideous hidden crimes, by anguish, regret and remorse. In his lifetime and for years beyond, Irving’s performance in The Bells was so well known that his voice and mannerisms were imitated by numerous variety artistes.

Between 1871 and 1905 The Bells was seen by audiences in Britain and North America, receiving critical reviews by a range of British, American and Canadian journalists. Their press notices, supplemented by eye-witness accounts from a range of spectators, provide valuable insights into the drama’s appearance on the stage and offer valuable information about Irving’s approach to his role and its popular and critical reception.

Metaphysics, first philosophy, or divine science has always been a subject of controversy. Too often medieval Arabic metaphysics is regarded as either simply a paraphrase of or a commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or a curious and rather unsuccessful blend of Aristotelian metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Cristina D'Ancona has shown the superficiality of this latter approach by highlighting how carefully and creatively the “falāsifa” or Hellenizing philosophers used the various Greek sources, such as the works of Aristotle, the Plotiniana Arabica (a group of texts based on Plotinus and including the so-called Aristotle’s Theology derived from Enneads IV-VI), and the Liber de Causis, adapted from Proclus' Theology and known in Arabic as The Book of the Pure Good. Yet Greek sources are not enough to explain some developments. In 1979 Richard Frank argued that falsafa (the Arabic transliteration of the Greek term for philosophy, highlighting its foreign origin) is not immune to the influence of kalāmor Islamic theology, which had elaborated an ontology of its own. More recently, though controversially, he has argued that even al-Ghazālī, the famous author of the Incoherence of the Philosophers and the staunch protector of orthodox Sunni Islam, is himself deeply influenced by Avicenna.

‘Popular entertainment’ is used in this chapter as a convenient label for the music hall, circus, fairground amusements and other performance-centred spectacles which, while often overlapping and cross-fertilizing with the ‘legitimate theatre’, essentially ran parallel to it and were broadly distinguishable as separate entities by contemporary observers. The chapter is concerned with the growth, increasing specialization and impact of commercial amusements in general and the music hall, the most dynamic and influential element of the nineteenth-century popular stage, in particular. It begins, however, with two cautionary notes.

The focus on commercial entertainment results only from spatial constraint. Particularly from about 1850 and most noticeably in smaller towns and villages, Britain possessed a rich and dense amateur cultural life enabling thousands of performers from a wide variety of social backgrounds to amuse their communities in settings from parlour to concert hall. This cultural voluntarism vastly increased the opportunities available to contemporary audiences and indeed, for some genres, provided the major source of supply. Notwithstanding the efforts of D’Oyly Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan operetta owed much of its popularity to amateur performance, as in Hanley, Staffordshire, where a series of amateur productions attracted 15,000 people during a six-day run in 1896. Amateur activities also produced ‘casual labour’ for the professional stage, as exemplified by the use of children in pantomime-ballets and spectacles, and acted as a training ground for future professionals and the thousands of semi-professionals so crucial to the entertainment industry; Harry Lauder was only the best-known music hall star to receive a stage education in amateur concert parties.

In a formation that has rapidly become canonical in British historiography, the mid-Victorian years — from 1851 to 1870 — were an ‘age of equipoise’: a collective sigh of relief at having safely negotiated the landmines of electoral reform, Chartist agitation and revolutionary phobia. As the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay wildly and, as it turned out, accurately prophesied, 1851 – the year in which the Great Exhibition opened at the iron and glass Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park — would ‘long be remembered as a singularly happy year of peace, plenty, good feeling, innocent pleasure and national glory’. Although the mid-Victorian period lacked the sharp social and political contrasts of the 1840s and 1880s, it was nonetheless a crucial period in British history, because it provided a moment of respite in which the nation could pause to consolidate and savour its economic prosperity, technological modernity and political serenity. From the new perspective of the Crystal Palace, a dream of social order founded on respectability at last seemed possible. And leisure pursuits, one of the prized benefits of economic prosperity, were a prime area for achieving and advancing social harmony and intellectual enlightenment.

This chapter explores how the theatre made a bid for respectability,that most cherished of nineteenth-century virtues. Yet the exploration is not straightforward. Indeed, my central claim is that the mid-Victorian theatre both embraced and resisted the dominant middle-class goal of respectability — for the theatre as a cultural institution, for the acting profession and even for the social standing of theatre audiences. Just what the mid-Victorians meant by ‘respectability’ was always a bit unclear, even to them.

In the twenty-first century the concept of national identity is likely to be increasingly overshadowed by the global and post-industrial, or post-modern, cultural landscape. By the end of the twentieth century the omnipresence of worldwide mass media and multi-national conglomerates was already ensuring that potentially fashionable and profitable influences spread far beyond the national boundaries of their origin, blurring hitherto culturally distinct borders. Moreover, in this age of mass communication, ‘reality’ itself may be increasingly experienced through the mediations of communication and information technologies. Scott Lash and John Urry, drawing on the theories of Jean Baudrillard, argue that the post-modern anxiety surrounding the nature of representation is the consequence of living in a society

Where the distinction between the ‘real’ and the representation of that ‘real’ begins to disappear, the possibility of an identity that might exist outside of Baudrillard’s simulacrum — the world as no more than appearance — becomes severely threatened. Consequently, the search for ‘communal’ identities that dominated new theatre in England in the 1970s and much of the 1980s has been replaced by a preoccupation with individual identities.

The scope of this chapter is dauntingly broad, since Avicenna was the central figure in the history of Arabic-Islamic philosophy. Before Avicenna, falsafa (Arabic Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy) and kalām (Islamic doctrinal theology) were distinct strands of thought, even though a good deal of cross-fertilization took place between them. After Avicenna, by contrast, the two strands fused together and post-Avicennian kalām emerged as a truly Islamic philosophy, a synthesis of Avicenna’s metaphysics and Muslim doctrine.

To talk about the sources, evolution, and influence of Avicenna’s ideas is, in fact, to talk about over two thousand years of philosophical activity. Avicenna’s sources begin with Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E. and include the late antique Greek Aristotle commentators, both Peripatetic and Neoplatonist. Avicenna himself was extremely prolific: between 40 and 275 titles have been attributed to him by bibliographers ranging from his student Jūzjānī to the late Egyptian scholar Georges Anawati, with approximately 130 reckoned to be authentic by the Iranian scholar Yahyā Mahdavī. What is more, his ideas evolved during the course of his career,with the result that, as with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, Avicenna’s philosophy will often resist our attempts to systematize it, and his position on a number of important philosophical issues will appear frustratingly underdetermined. As for Avicenna’s impact, it was felt acutely in both the Islamic world and in Christian Europe.

Diana of Dobson’s, by Cicely Hamilton, was one of the undoubted hits of British theatre in 1908, proving both a popular and a critical success. Mischievously subtitled ‘A Romantic Comedy in Four Acts’, the play made its audiences laugh at the same time as it made them think about theatrical convention, voyeurism, the ‘living-in’ system for shop employees, sweated labour and capitalism, homelessness and unemployment, double standards and the nature of marriage. The number of issues with which it engages may seem formidable but, as one reviewer wrote, Hamilton

Almost unanimously, critics hailed it as fresh and original, blending realism and romance, and doing so with considerable wit.

Before exploring the play, its issues and contemporary reception, it is worth examining the circumstances of its production. After three weeks in rehearsal, Diana opened at the Kingsway Theatre, London, on Wednesday 12 February 1908, the second offering of Lena Ashwell’s management there. Ashwell, who was a leading actor, had taken over the small theatre on a long lease, renamed and redecorated it. Her announced policy was

‘to alternate Plays of serious interest with Comedies, and to produce at Matinées pieces which, while worthy of production by reason of their artistic merit, would not perhaps interest a sufficient number of the public to warrant their being placed in a regular evening Bill. Thus … I hope to form a Repertory of Plays likely to appeal to the varied tastes of my Patrons.’

Glasgow Unity first performed Ena Lamont Stewart’s Men Should Weep at the Athenaeum Theatre, Glasgow on 30 January 1947. After the company closed in 1951, the play fell into obscurity until John McGrath staged a rewritten version for 7:84 (Scotland)’s 1982 Clydebuilt Season. The long absence of this play from the public arena is remarkable considering that it provided a major theatrical landmark for the representation of Scottish, class and gender identities. This chapter takes the opportunity offered by these two texts, productions and their critical reception to make a transhistorical comparison of the relationship between theatre and its wider context. Taking the play’s central thematic framework of gender politics, poverty and notions of community, my argument explores how these two productions intersected with and revealed a great deal about their immediate social, political and economic landscapes. By highlighting Glasgow Unity’s and 7:84’s distinct use of staging, theatrical apparatus and acting techniques, I also aim to illuminate the responsiveness of performance to historical change.

Prior to writing her first play, Starched Aprons (1945), which deals with the trials and tribulations of everyday hospital life, Lamont Stewart was frustrated with the trivial and irrelevant representations she witnessed in post-war Scottish theatre: ‘I came home in a mood of red-hot revolt against cocktail time, glamorous gowns, and under-worked, about-to-be deceived husbands. I asked myself what I wanted to see on the stage, and the answer was “life”. Real life. Real People. Ordinary people.’.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MEDIEVAL JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

The broadest periodization of medieval philosophy, in general, and of medieval Jewish philosophy, in particular, begins with Philo in the first century and comes to an end with Spinoza in the seventeenth century. This is the well-known periodization of Harry A. Wolfson, who explains:

Wolfson was in a sense correct. The problems and concerns of Philo were to a great extent those of the medieval philosophers. Yet, while it is helpful to think of the philosophy of Philo as the “Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” virtually all datings of medieval philosophy begin centuries later and in the case of medieval Jewish philosophy nearly a millennium later. The resistance of scholars to beginning medieval Jewish philosophy with Philo is not simply a result of their discomfort with beginning the medieval period in the first century. More importantly, if one begins medieval Jewish philosophy with Philo, there is no continuity. From Philo to the ninth century, there are no writings that may be considered Jewish philosophy. Moreover, although Wolfson can speak of the recurrence of Philonic views in post-Philonic Islamic and Jewish philosophy, Philo – as far as we know – was not translated into Arabic or Hebrew and accordingly had no direct influence upon Jewish philosophers until the Renaissance.

Abū al-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Rushd (ca. 1126-98), who came to be known in the Latin West as Averroes, was born at Cordoba into a family prominent for its expert devotion to the study and development of religious law (shar'īa). In Arabic sources al-Hafīd (“the Grandson”) is added to his name to distinguish him from his grandfather (d. 1126), a famous Malikite jurist who served the ruling Almoravid regime as qādī (judge) and even as imām (prayer leader and chief religious authority) at the magnificent Great Mosque which still stands today in the city of Averroes' birth and where Averroes himself served as Grand Qādī (chief judge). When the governing regime changed with the success of 'Abd al-Mu'min (r. 1130-63), founder of the Almohad (al-Muwahhidūn) dynasty, the members of the family continued to flourish under a new religious orientation based on the teachings of the reformer, al-Mahdī ibn Tumart (d. ca. 1129-30). Although insistent on the strict adherence to religious law, Ibn Tūmart’s teachings were at the same time equally insistent on the essential rationality of human understanding of the existence and unity (tawhīd) of God and his creation as well as the rationality of the Qur'ān and its interpretation. This approach was embraced – even exploited – by Averroes in his own writings on dialectical theology and thereby played a role in the development of his thought on the nature of religious law and revelation in relation to philosophy founded on the powers of natural reason.

Why a ‘case study’ of The Beggar’s Opera? Because, first, the Opera’s astonishing opening run makes it a candidate for special attention in any historical account. Nothing like it, so far as the records demonstrate, had ever been seen on the London stage before then (nor seen there again, for a long time): thirty-two consecutive performances and a total run of sixty-two performances for the season, after the opening on 29 January 1728 at John Rich’s theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (hereafter LIF).

As A. H. Scouten has noted, ‘Heretofore, a run of nine nights had been considered excellent, one of twelve nights unusual’. But sixty-two? A perception that something important was happening was almost immediate. By the third of February – in the first week of the run – the opposition newspaper the Craftsman gave first voice to the witticism that has become standard: the Opera ‘has met with a general Applause, insomuch that the Waggs say it has made Rich very Gay, and probably will make Gay very Rich’. And so it turned out, with Gay transformed virtually overnight from an impoverished poet making do by living with his wealthy friends to the most prosperous dramatist of his time, and the saturnine Rich becoming, if not gay (i.e., merry), at least tranquil. In May 1728 the first imitation of The Beggar’s Opera appeared at the Little Haymarket Theatre, Thomas Cooke and John Mottley’s ballad opera Penelope – the Odyssey story set in Queen Anne’s England – but ran only three nights. Gay’s Opera continued serenely on at LIF through its sixty-second performance on 19 June.

Lost and yet to come

Barthes’s comparison of a rejected lover with a prisoner at Dachau hangs frozen on the page. It is indecent, but it is also characteristic of much of the philosophy of the last two decades of the twentieth century in its rejection of history, abuse of scale and hence values, and in the removal of context which, if present, would render the point grossly inappropriate. From the perspective of a materialist history, the two situations have nothing in common.

The comparison is intended to demonstrate the dehumanising loss of ‘self’, yet, while self-confessedly self-centred, Barthes chooses to ignore the differences between a one-to-one relationship and the state-initiated and state-controlled Holocaust, indeed ‘one of the most unimaginable insults of History’. But like so much else in our post-modern culture, and in the arts of the fin du millennium, there is a dangerous absence of historical readings, of differences of context.

An historian of English drama in the period 1660–1776 needs to start by admitting that sequential analysis of new plays by themselves can only yield a very partial picture. We may legitimately characterize the new plays and trace generic changes, but we must reckon with the fact that these plays were the product of a theatre system that emphasized the appeal of favourite actors and relied heavily on stock repertory. New plays occupied few nights in most seasons and they do not really have a separate history of their own.

The period we are considering is tidily bounded at the outset by the restoration of the theatres by Charles II when he returned from exile in 1660. No satisfying terminus ad quem exists: there is no sharp break in the drama between the revival of playwriting in the 1750s (following the lull caused by the Licensing Act of 1737) and the 1820s, when ‘illegitimate’ competitors put the patent theatres on the skids. The year 1776 makes a convenient stopping point: Garrick retired from acting and management at Drury Lane that year (selling out to a partnership headed by Richard Brinsley Sheridan), and Thomas Harris was just beginning his long reign as manager at Covent Garden. In drama, though there is no abrupt change, the social comedies and fancy musicals (‘English operas’) of the eighties and nineties reflect norms significantly different from those of the sixties and seventies.

The future of English drama was profoundly affected by the terms of its relegitimation in 1660. Four points are fundamental. These are the duopoly created by the patent grants of 1662 and 1663, the introduction of actresses on the public stage, the construction of changeable scenery theatres, and the radically unequal division of rights to old plays between the two companies that jointly shared a monopoly on dramatic entertainment in London.

There is a chilling phrase in Gwyn A. Williams’s seminal historical study of Welsh culture and identity, When Was Wales? (1985), that suggests something of the character of Welsh theatre in the late twentieth century. Baffled and disheartened by the results of the 1979 general election, which saw significant advances by the Conservative Party throughout the principality, Williams foresaw ‘the elimination of Welsh peculiarities’ and a ‘powerful simplification’ of political consciousness in Wales – a disastrous state of affairs which ‘strongly suggested an integration into Britain more total than anything yet experienced’.

By the turn of the millennium it was clear, though, that this vision of a ‘powerful simplification’ had not emerged and that rumours of the imminent death of Wales had been greatly exaggerated. Wales was not assimilated by Britain, not in the political sense at least. Rather, it clawed its way back into existence, so that the sumptuous eleven-seat Tory rump of Welsh MPs returned in 1979 had withered away to nought by 1997, and a new National Assembly for Wales – rejected by the electorate in the referendum of 1979 – convened for its inaugural session in May 1999. Williams’s fear that the Welsh political map would lose its diversity and local complexity, leading to ‘standard British two-party contests’ in most Welsh constituencies, was also misplaced. In the National Assembly elections of 1999 such constituencies were largely confined to the extreme south-east and north-east of the country. More significant still, Plaid Cymru/The Party of Wales made astonishing gains in some of the former industrial heartlands of south Wales and became the main opposition party to Labour in the Assembly, guaranteeing that the internal politics of Wales had a radically different character to those of Britain as a whole. Williams’s worries had come to nothing: quite simply, he got it wrong.

No text has stimulated a wider spectrum of theatrical presentations and adaptations in Wales than the story of Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers, from the fourth of the medieval tales known as the Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Indeed, from 1948 onwards the changing face of theatre in Wales is mirrored in the different stagings of the Blodeuwedd story. This chapter explores the varying cultural moment of each major production based on the myth.

The full range of tales, the Mabinogion, has long been regarded as the crown of Wales’s classic imaginative literature. First translated in three volumes by Lady Charlotte Guest in 1846, then issued as a popular single volume in 1877, the tales became much more widely available in 1948 through Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones’s now standard translation. In the early 1950s Dylan Thomas, aware that his own first name came from the Mabinogion, in Under Milk Wood has the Revd Eli Jenkins speak of an ancient Llareggub, ‘before the Celts left the Land of Summer and where the old wizards made themselves a wife out of flowers’. The Mabinogion have been a major source for Welsh-language and non-Welsh writing alike, the most popular tale remaining that of Blodeuwedd.

No one within the tradition of medieval Islamic political philosophy contests the notion that human beings are political by nature. Indeed, in a now famous passage of his Muqaddima, Ibn Khald un (1332-1406) cites a corollary of that adage - namely, “human social organization is necessary” - with approval, using it to focus on what the philosophers mean by “regime” (siyāsa), especially “political regime.” As contrasted to the way the term is understood by the jurists and theologians, the philosophers understand the “political regime” to encompass

Mainstream theatre is such a major feature of the cultural landscape in Britain that it scarcely ever merits discussion as an idea, and yet it is significantly absent as an entry in the four most substantial contemporary dictionaries of the theatre. It is as if its constitution, its shape and its location were so obvious as to need no placement. Its apparent transparency as a concept is, however, highly problematic and contentious. For many contemporary analysts whose central concern is with performance rather than theatre, the simple fact that a piece takes place in a conventional theatrical space would seem to justify the descriptive tag ‘mainstream’. For others there is a perceived need to make distinctions between a ‘serious’ mainstream tradition and other occupants of the theatrical space, popular theatre and the avant-garde. The use of the qualifying ‘serious’ does not in itself greatly aid in an attempt at definition, but it does point to the way in which mainstream theatre seeks to assert itself as centrally offering a drama that is capable of sustaining debate. It is this sense of centrality that is most important in considering the development of mainstream theatre in post-World War Two Britain, for as this centre changes, so perforce must the rest of the theatrical apparatus.