Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880-1939

Reviewed by: Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939 by Matthew Franks Emily Allen (bio) Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939, by Matthew Franks; pp. vi + 254. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, $89.95, $89.95 ebook, £72.00. If you still consider the list, the pamphlet, the press clipping, and the playbill to be the blank endpapers of the theatrical archive, think again. In Matthew Franks’s account of subscription lists and theatrical ephemera, the list becomes a locus for imagined collectives and the site of representative action. Drama and theater scholars will find much to admire in Franks’s Subscription Theater: Democracy and Drama in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1939, as will anyone interested in how physical culture produces the communal psychic space of inclusive democracy. While Subscription Theater has a role to play in the current resurgence of scholarship on Victorian and Edwardian theater, the star of the show here is material culture studies, which Franks leverages to consider the thinginess of ephemera and its role in the production of theatrical and political collectives. Subscriber lists and other print materials allow Franks to follow the money of collective funding—known today as crowd sourcing—to the places where theater audiences, patrons, and practitioners created modern forms of drama and new forms of collective action. (Although Subscription Theater boasts a long run of 1880 to 1939, its focus is turn-of-the-century audiences and theaters that were in the process of becoming modern.) Subscription Theater is organized around case studies of theatrical collectives: private subscription societies—largely made up of middle-class women—that in subverting the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of public theater were sites for the experimental modernization of drama (chapter 1); provincial repertory theaters and their citizen shareholders, who materialize in lists, newspaper columns, and annual reports to challenge the authority of both the metropolis and its wealthy patrons (chapter 2); subscription lists appearing in staged dramas (chapter 3); amateur actors who sought to transcend their local identities on stage and in playbills (chapter 4); and the real and imagined dramatis personae behind the metaphorical theatrical space of Edward Gordon Craig’s international theater journal, The Mask (1908–29) (chapter 5). As is demonstrated by the contents of these chapters, Franks is interested in the representative potential of different forms of print media. Indeed, one of the strengths of Subscription Theater is how it positions itself across and between performance history and book history, using methods from each to re-evaluate (and revalue) the ephemera that slipped through the cracks between stage and page. Methodological focus allows Franks to tell the story not only of divergent publics but also divergent disciplinary traditions, which should be of interest to both theater and literary scholars. He writes that his approach “would mean dusting off ephemera in order to process what book historians call bibliographic and what theater scholars might well call performance codes, asking how layout, typography, ink color, and paper weight, along with distribution and circulation, condition the sociability of theatergoing” (44). Franks reads contemporary databases not only as numeric fact but also as sites of figuration: “databases, like ephemera, participate in a long tradition of mediating collectivity, offering textual technologies that invite us to imagine virtual assemblages” (24). [End Page 142] While Subscription Theater is certainly alive to the many ways that supposedly horizontal structures in fact embed vertical power dynamics, it is most interested in how ephemera help produce or imagine egalitarian space: letters to the editor that amplify the voices from the pit and gallery; the (fantasy of an) amateur theater group as horizontal collective; mailed feedback forms and questionnaires that allow the public to flip the script. The drive throughout is to overturn the notion of passive theatrical spectatorship; indeed, Franks argues that active engagement in theatrical spaces (configured broadly) was a form of representational politics that both preceded and enabled subsequent enfranchisement: “subscription gave citizens the ability to participate in what was in legal respects a more inclusive alternative to Parliament and local government, from which so many members of the public—namely women and propertyless men—were excluded” (15...