Abstract
On Boxing Night 1865, Nottingham’s New Theatre Royal — which had opened in September that same year — staged its first pantomime, The House that Jack Built. ‘The house was filled in all parts to overflowing, more than 2000 being present’ according to the report in the next day’s Nottingham Journal.1 And what greeted those spectators, as the preview to the pantomime in the Journal made very clear, was a production that was very precisely located in Nottingham itself: ‘the librettist has interwoven with it [the well-known and popular nursery story] certain references and remarks which give a local habitation and a name’.2
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Notes
Nottingham Review, 29 September 1865, reproduced in Richard Iliffe and Wilfred Baguley, Victorian Nottingham: A Story in Pictures, 20 vols (Nottingham: Nottingham Historical Film Unit, 1970–83), vol. 7 (1972), p. 43.
Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 38.
See Jo Robinson, ‘Mapping performance culture: locating the spectator in theatre history’, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, 31.1 (2004), 3–17, for a detailed argument in support of extending Bratton’s concept of intertheatricality to include spectators of performance.
David Turnbull, Maps are Territories: Science is an Atlas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 61.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974), trans., Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 39.
Revelations of Life in Nottingham by the English Asmodeus (Nottingham: C. B Truman, ‘Telegraph’ Office [1860]), p. 94; Kathleen M. D. Barker, ‘The Performing Arts in Five Provincial Towns, 1840–1870’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leicester, 1982, pp. 49–50.
Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing,1840–1880. (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), p. 229.
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Robinson, J. (2010). Mapping the Place of Pantomime in a Victorian Town. In: Davis, J. (eds) Victorian Pantomime. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230291782_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230291782_9
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