The Epitome of National Life: Metropolitan Music Hall and Variety Theatre, 1913–1919

Abstract

Perhaps the best-known representation of the music hall of the First World War remains Siegfried Sassoon’s poem ‘Blighters’, published in 1917, in which the poet imagines a tank ‘lurching’ down the aisle of a raucous variety theatre to wreak havoc on both its complacent audience and the ‘harlots’ in its chorus line.¹ On the one hand, it is a neurasthenic fantasy, on the other it is a statement which encapsulates two features that came to define later treatments of the popular theatre of the period: crude patriotic display and imminent doom. In Theatre Workshop’s Oh! What a Lovely War! (1963), for example, frivolous and sentimental variety songs serve as counterpoints to the soldiers’ oral traditions which express the musical’s real political and emotional centre. Elsewhere, in the still relatively slight body of music-hall scholarship and in the larger literature of memoir and popular journalism there is a clear sense of the war as marking an end point for that mode of popular theatre. Dave Russell argues that the ‘variety theatre, as an institution, had clearly reached the limits of its expansion by 1914’, a judgement already expressed in different ways by the writers of the 1920s and 1930s who established the Victorian and Edwardian music hall as a site of quintessential — and lost — Englishness.² As J. B. Booth put it in one of his several nostalgic memoirs of the halls, ‘[w]ar, the internal combustion engine, wireless, and the silver screen [changed] our lives; the old continuity of things was […] broken’.³