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Wedekind at the Music Hall

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Laurence Senelick
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Abstract

In the valedictory issue of the first Theatre Quarterly, TQ40 (1981). we included a fascinating glimpse of a highly unlikely convergence – between Lenin and the London Hippodrome, where the Russian revolutionary leader found music hall an intriguing phenomenon, exemplifying ‘the anarchy of production under capitalism’. The author of that article, Laurence Senelick, now introduces the experiences of a contemporary of Lenin's who, though a dramatist himself, at first appears almost as unlikely a visitor to the ‘Old Mo’, the Middlesex Music Hall in late-Victorian London – the German playwright Frank Wedekind, author of Spring Awakening and the Lulu trilogy. Long before those plays brought him notoriety, Wedekind visited London, and recorded his views of music hall in his journal. Laurence Senelick, an Advisory Editor of NTQ, teaches in the Drama Department at Tufts University, and has published widely, mainly in the fields of Russian theatre and popular entertainment.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 4 , Issue 16 , November 1988 , pp. 326 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

Notes and Reference

1. Kutscher, Artur, Frank Wedekind: Leben und Werk (Munich, 1922), Vol. I, p. 149.Google Scholar

2. Wedekind, Frank, ‘Was ich dabei dachte’, Prosa, Dramen, Verse (Munich, 1964), Vol. I, p. 969.Google Scholar

3. For a good discussion of the enthusiasm of the German intelligentsia for variety performance, see Jelavich, Peter, Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance 1890–1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), p. 160–5.Google Scholar

4. Burt, Frank, ‘The Middlesex Music Hall’, Central London Times, 21 11. 1908Google Scholar. In 1919 it became the Winter Garden Theatre, was closed in 1960, and demolished in 1965.

5. Newton, H. Chance, Idols of the ‘Halls’, being Music Hall Memories (London, 1928), p. 30.Google Scholar

6. Barnes, Hampton R., ‘The Nights of Other Days: IV, The Argyll Rooms and the Middlesex’, The King, 6 08. 1901.Google Scholar

7. Willes, Frederick, 101 Jubilee Road, quoted in The Lost Empires: a Music Hall Companion, ed. Green, Benny (London, 1986), p. 183.Google Scholar

8. ‘MrGraydon, J. L.’, Encore, 17 11 1893.Google Scholar

9. Ibid.

10. Barnes, loc. cit.

11. Burke, Thomas, ‘Gina of the Chinatown’, in Limehouse Nights (New York, 1926), p. 192–3.Google Scholar