Reading Theatre Writing: T.H. Lacy and the Sensation Drama

Abstract

When Frank Jocelyn, the reluctant hero of The Woman in Mauve, is revealed to the audience reading directly from Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) the playwright Watts Phillips presents his audience with a cultural space where modes of reading and sensational representation could be debated alongside notions of legitimacy, identity and value. Jocelyn is found reading the popular novel in private, but Dr Harvey’s physical intervention functions to enervate both Jocelyn and the audience in a complex generic interplay between fictional and theatrical forms. Enervated by the act of reading a narrative, Jocelyn’s character physically articulates the multiple somatic reactions to the appearance of Collins’s ghostly Anne Catherick. The novel generates a mirrored, static response in Jocelyn, who is ‘brought to a stop’ by the narrative tension, creating the conditions by which he can read on with renewed focus. However, it is the actions of Dr Harvey which function to release that tension, partly for comic affect and also to allow the audience to see the immediacy of the drama as an alternative, paradoxically authentic mode of representing Collins’s dramatic events. In staging a moment where the psychology of terror creates an increasingly autonomous physical form, Phillips articulates the nature of the sensational as a cultural form, a shifting set of influences and counter-responses which resonate across multiple mediums. As Deborah Vlock has provocatively argued, the Victorian reader was not a solitary figure but one who ‘performed his or her reading in a highly public “space” drawing upon a set of consensual popular assumptions … novelists drew quite freely from the body of sociodramatic possibilities established by the theatre’.¹ Phillips’s staging of the reading dynamic in the highly public space of first The Prince of Wales Theatre in Liverpool in 1864 and then at the Haymarket the following year, alludes to cultural practices of collaborative, cross-disciplinary reading.