Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth Century

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09612025.2013.849144

1747-583X

Rohan McWilliam,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

AbstractElsa Lanchester (1902–86) is best known today as a character actress in Hollywood, who played the title role in the Bride of Frankenstein. Less well known is her remarkable early life in Britain where she participated in the avant-garde through dance, theatre, film and other forms of performance. This article explores Lanchester's world before her marriage to the actor Charles Laughton in 1929 to investigate aspects of bohemian culture in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lanchester's artistic nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, on the edges of London's West End. Bohemianism, modern dance and musical comedy opened up new identities and spaces for female self-exploration. Notes[1] My thanks to Lucy Bland, Kelly Boyd, Kathryn Gleadle, Alex King, Alison Light and the two referees for their valued references and comments on the text. This essay is dedicated to Peter Bailey.[2] The opening paragraph is a composite based on Elsa Lanchester (1938) Charles Laughton and I (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 49–58; Lanchester (1983) Elsa Lanchester Herself (New York: St Martins Press), pp. 54–59; Lanchester (1988) A Gamut of Girls (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press), pp. 13–14; Alec Waugh (1962) The Early Years of Alec Waugh (London: Cassell), pp. 184–185.[3] Elizabeth Wilson (2000) Bohemians: the glamorous outcasts (London: I.B. Tauris); Virginia Nicholson (2002) Among the Bohemians: experiments in living, 1900–1939 (London: Viking); Peter Brooker (2004) Bohemia in London: the social scene of early modernism (London: Palgrave Macmillan). On New York, see Christine Stansell (2000) American Moderns: bohemian New York and the creation of a new century (New York: Metropolitan Books); Ross Wetzsteon (2002) Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: the American bohemia, 1910–1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster). On Paris, see Jerrold Siegel (1986) Bohemian Paris: culture, politics and the boundaries of bourgeois life, 1830–1930 (London: Viking).[4] Peter Brooker & Andrew Thacker (Eds) (2005) Geographies of Modernism: literatures, cultures, spaces (London: Routledge).[5] Judith R. Walkowitz (2012) Nights Out: life in cosmopolitan London (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press); for the United States, see Susan Glenn (2000) Female Spectacle: the theatrical roots of modern feminism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).[6] Further details of the Lanchester case can be found in Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, pp. 1–5; Lucy Bland (1995) Banishing the Beast: English feminism and sexual morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin), pp. 159–181; Karen Hunt (1996) Equivocal Feminists: the Social Democratic Federation and the woman question, 1884–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 94–99.[7] Sean Creighton (2003) Battersea Socialist Women's Circle, 1908–1910, Labour Heritage Bulletin (Summer), p. 2.[8] Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, p. 19.[9] Deborah Jowitt (1988) Time and the Dancing Image (Berkeley: University of California Press); Ann Daly (1995) Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).[10] Jowitt, Time and the Dancing Image, p. 83.[11] Margaret Morris (1969) My Life in Movement (London: Peter Owen), p. 36. See also Hermione Baddeley (1984) The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley (London: Collins), p. 22.[12] Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London, p. 82.[13] Patrick Balfour (1933) Society Racket: a critical survey of modern social life (London: John Lang), p. 172.[14] Ibid., pp. 173–175.[15] Alison Light (1991) Forever England: femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars (London: Routledge).[16] Jerry White (2001) London in the Twentieth Century: a city and its people (London: Viking), p. 106; Matt Houlbrook (2005) Queer London: perils and pleasures in the sexual metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 188. On Fitzrovia, see Hugh David (1988) The Fitzrovians: a portrait of bohemian society, 1900–55 (London: Michael Joseph); Mike Pentlow & Marsha Rowe (2001) Characters of Fitzrovia (London: Chatto & Windus).[17] Edwin Beresford Chancellor (1930) London's Old Latin Quarter: being an account of Tottenham Court Road and its immediate surroundings (London: Jonathan Cape).[18] Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, p. 63.[19] Ros Merkin (2000) The Religion of Socialism or a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon?: the ILP Arts Guild, in Clive Barker & Maggie B. Gale (Eds) British Theatre between the Wars, 1918–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 172, 182; Raphael Samuel (1985) Theatre and Socialism in Britain (1880–1935), in Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl & Stuart Cosgrove (Eds) Theatres of the Left, 1880–1935: workers' theatre movements in Britain and America (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 21–22.[20] Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, p. 67.[21] Douglas Goldring (1935) Odd Man Out: the autobiography of a ‘propaganda novelist’ (London: Chapman & Hall), p. 267.[22] Harry Wicks (1992) Keeping My Head: the memoirs of a British bolshevick (n.p: Socialist Platform), p. 25.[23] Goldring, Odd Man Out, p. 248.[24] Harold Scott (1946) The Early Doors: origins of the music hall (London: Nicholson), p. 226.[25] David, The Fitzrovians, pp. 114–117; Susan Compton (Ed.) (1987) British Art in the 20th Century (Munich: Prestel-Verlag), p. 132. On the development of interwar nightclubs, see Walkowitz, Nights Out, ch. 7.[26] Morris, My Life in Movement, p. 33.[27] James J. Nott (2011) ‘The Plague Spots of London’: William Joynson-Hicks, the Conservative Party, and the campaign against London's nightclubs, 1924–29, in Clare V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott & William Whyte (Eds) Classes, Cultures, and Politics: essays on British history for Ross McKibbin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 227–246.[28] Hubert Nicholson (1941) Half My Days and Nights: autobiography of a reporter (London: William Heinemann), p. 100.[29] Kenneth Hare (1926) London's Latin Quarter (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head); Frank Mort (2010) Capital Affairs: London and the making of the permissive society (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press), pp. 220–221. On the Gargoyle Club, see Michael Luke (1991) David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson); David, The Fitzrovians, pp. 122–123 and Baddeley, The Unsinkable Hermione Baddeley pp. 53–54. On the ‘Forty Three’, see D. J. Taylor (2007) Bright Young People: the rise and fall of a generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 43. On the ‘Fifty Fifty’ see Richard Huggett (1989) Binkie Beaumont: eminence grise of the West End theatre (London: Hodder & Stoughton), pp. 77–78.[30] Sally Cline (1997) Radclyffe Hall: a woman named John (London: John Murray), p. 163.[31] This point is influenced by Lewis A. Erenberg (1981) Steppin' Out: New York nightlife and the transformation of American culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press), ch. 4.[32] Ivan Patrick Gore, ‘Cabaret’, The Stage (22 January 1925), p. 25.[33] Waugh, The Early Years of Alec Waugh, pp. 184–185.[34] Lanchester, A Gamut of Girls, pp. 13–14.[35] Anna Snaith, ‘Jean Rhys and London’, in Brooker & Thacker (Eds), Geographies of Modernism, p. 80.[36] Philip Howell (2001) Sex and the City of Bachelors: popular masculinity and public space in nineteenth-century England and America, Ecumene, 8, pp. 20–50.[37] Elsa Lanchester to Ivor Montagu, March 1925: Ivor Montagu Collection (British Film Institute), Box 46.[38] Douglas Goldring (1945) The Nineteen Twenties: a general survey and some personal memories (London: Nicholson & Watson), pp. 147–148.[39] Programme in Ivor Montagu collection (British Film Institute), Box 46.[40] Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, p. 70.[41] Newman Flower (Ed.) (1933) The Journals of Arnold Bennett, 1921–1928 (London: Cassell), p. 54 (15 September 1924).[42] Flower (Ed.), Journals of Arnold Bennett, pp. 50–51 (17 June 1924).[43] Goldring, The Nineteen Twenties, p. 148.[44] ‘Elsa Lanchester Reminisces’ (1967): British Library Sound Archive.[45] Alan Sinfield (1991) Private Lives/Public Theater: Noel Coward and the politics of homosexual representation, Representations, 36, pp. 53–54.[46] Jane Marcus (1987) Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), p. 167.[47] Robert Medley (1983) Drawn from the Life: a memoir (London: Faber & Faber), pp. 63–64.[48] Scott, The Early Doors, p. 226.[49] Ethel Mannin (1930) Confessions and Impressions (London: Jarrolds), p. 188.[50] Jeffrey Weiss (1994) The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp and avant-gardism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), ch. 1; see also Robin Walz (2000) Pulp Surrealism: insolent popular culture in early twentieth century Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press).[51] Brooker, Bohemia in London, pp. 75, 80.[52] Frank Kermode (1961) Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev, Partisan Review, 28, p. 54.[53] Hare, London's Latin Quarter, pp. 98, 102. The programme for the event is in the Ivor Montagu Collection (British Film Institute), Box 46.[54] Light, Forever England, p. 8.[55] Playbill for the Royal Court Evening in Ivor Montagu collection (British Film Institute), Box 46.[56] Michael Davie (Ed.) (1976) The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Son), p. 170; Evelyn Waugh (1964) A Little Learning: the first volume of an autobiography (London: Chapman & Hall), p. 209; see also Selina Hastings (1994) Evelyn Waugh: a biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 118.[57] Note about possible closure of the Cave in Ivor Montagu collection (British Film Institute), Box 46.[58] Vogue, early May 1924, p. 53.[59] Yvonne Kapp (2005) Time Will Tell: memoirs (London: Verso), p. 86.[60] Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, p. 83.[61] Guardian, 10 September 1983, p. 8.[62] Elizabeth Darling (2007) Re-Forming Britain: narratives of modernity before reconstruction (London: Routledge), p. 36.[63] Alexandra Harris (2010) Romantic Moderns: English writers, artists and the imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson).[64] Guardian, 10 September 1983, p. 8.[65] Lanchester, Elsa Lanchester Herself, p. 71.[66] William M. Thackeray (1855) The Newcomes (London: Bradbury & Evans).