Toga Plays and Tableaux Vivants: Theatre and Painting on London’s Late-Victorian and Edwardian Popular Stage

Abstract

This essay examines the relationship between the representation of antiquity in popular theatre and painting in late-Victorian and Edwardian London. While there is a long tradition of theatrical and visual interchange, the nineteenth century witnessed an increased merging of cultural categories. Classics, traditionally associated with an educated elite, entered the popular arena through the appropriation of high-art academic images. In toga plays, a decadent Rome provided sensational plot lines and an array of familiar heroes and villains, while pictorial detail was privileged in the quest for theatrical spectacle. At the same time, tableaux vivants staged in variety theatres legitimized a display of the female body through imitations of Greek-subject paintings. If Roman melodramas may have been criticized for historical inaccuracies, notional nudity found in tableaux involved these shows in the much more controversial issue of distinctions between art and obscenity. Classicizing performance brought indicators of exclusivity into a much wider arena, and in doing so found itself at the heart of major debates surrounding gender, class, and culture.

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