West End Women

Reviewed by: West End Women: Women and the London Stage 1918–1962 Katherine E. Kelly West End Women: Women and the London Stage 1918–1962. By Maggie Gale. Gender in Performance. London: Routledge, 1996; pp. x + 262. $59.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. Maggie Gale’s rediscovery of the contributions made to West End theatre by women artists adds a crucial dimension to the long-term project of writing the work of women back into cultural history. Gale offers a fresh look at the theatre and drama of this period shaping and in turn shaped by social, political, and economic events like the two World Wars and their aftermath, the eruption of cinema and television, and the rise of the Welfare State. The value of Gale’s history as a counter-memory of the theatrical and cultural conditions of this period lies not only in its documenting of influential pre-War performance groups like the Actresses’ Franchise League but also in her situating of individual female writers, performers, managers, and directors within a set of larger social forces informing their field of possibility. She represents these forces in terms of thematic centers: working and non-working women, willing and refusing mothers, and women without men. These careful analyses are followed by a table of “plays by women on the London stage 1917–1959,” a parting gift to those who will take up and develop in greater detail the broadly suggestive patterns presented in the book’s seven chapters. Gale recognizes that, in the vigorous and contested arena of feminist studies, her choice of subject requires defending. Many of the women in her study rely on realist conventions in writing, staging, and performing plays and work within the economic imperatives of commercial theatre to make all or part of their living. Gale notes that feminist critics of realism and advocates of feminist polemic have either inadvertently or deliberately censored evidence pointing to women’s work in commercial theatre. As she persuasively argues, the location of these women in the cultural “mainstream” lent their work the potential to engage and illuminate widely circulating representations of such gendered action as mothering, working, and making art. In answer to the question whether such representations should be dismissed as politically and aesthetically inconsequential, Gale responds with an emphatic no: “[T]he danger of re-marginalising women’s playwrighting through an attempt to insert it into a purely feminist framework was . . . a concern” (4). But even while justifying the attention paid to this group as it engaged mainstream culture, Gale notes the particular position from which the engagement occurred. Women “infiltrated and integrated with a dominant form of theatre” as members of an “out-group” (4). While Gale’s necessarily broad and introductory study does not fully explore these infiltrating procedures in detail, subsequent studies might look at how power circulated in theatrical culture by studying particular cases of women learning to operate the mechanisms of commercial and artistic inclusion and exclusion. By choosing the commercial West End as her frame and by demonstrating the marginal participation of women in that arena, Gale aligns the gendering of theatre history with the efforts of social historians studying the formation and regulation of leisure as an economic, political, and social practice. Each of the book’s four thematic chapters brings to light not only overlooked writing by women but also the grounding of that writing in the material conditions of London and West End production and reception. Clemence Dane emerges as a West End writer who was both commercially successful and outspoken on the subject of British womanhood. In one of the strongest chapters, “Dramatising History,” Gale proposes that Dane’s barely successful 1921 verse drama Will Shakespeare used the figure of Elizabeth I to promote a new assertiveness for contemporary British womanhood. Twelve years later, when Gordon Daviot (Elizabeth Mackintosh) wrote the prose drama Richard of Bordeaux, she [End Page 397] created a box office success in part by fashioning Queen Anne after the ideal of an upper-middle class wife current at the time the play was written. Other heroines of this period, notably Katie O’Shea in Elsie Shauffler’s 1936 Parnell, resonated with audiences

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