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Reviewed by:
  • The Victorian Marionette Theatre
  • John Bell (bio)
The Victorian Marionette Theatre. By John McCormick with Clodagh McCormick and John Phillips. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004; 280 pp. $49.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

There are particular challenges to writing about the history of puppet theatre. As a popular culture form that is not text-based, puppet theatre does not offer itself easily to theatre histories focused on dramatic literature. In addition, historians of puppet theatre often feel compelled to convince the reader that their subject is, in fact, worthwhile; and that the taxonomy and the world history of puppetry must be explained before the reader will be able to follow.

The Victorian Marionette Theatre finesses these challenges in an expansive study of a specific area: string-operated puppets in 19th-century England. John McCormick arrived at the study of puppetry after extensive writing on 19th-century theatre in general (including a study of French popular theatre and a biography of Dion Boucicault), and this understanding enables him to see marionette performance as an important element in the plethora of Victorian performance forms including panorama, picture performance, hand-puppet theatre, peepshows, pantomime, harlequinade, and music hall revues, as well as the "legitimate" theatre of actors' dramas.

Another daunting challenge for puppet historians is the multivalenced quality of the subject. The historian must write not only about what human beings do in performance, but also about some combination of the following elements: the design, construction, typology, manipulation techniques, and costuming of the puppet figures; the design and construction of stages; the sociology of the puppeteers and their way of life; and, if the writer is adventuresome, the theoretical and aesthetic questions connected to playing with objects as performance.

McCormick does this well; for example, in the following passage where he deftly connects the mimetic style of marionette theatre with the different varieties of contemporary actors' theatre, in terms of theories articulated by Henry Siddons in his 1822 Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action:

Siddons distinguishes between "picturesque" acting (more concerned with the sculptural beauty of the attitude and gesture) and "expressive" acting (more concerned with conveying meaning). He comes down heavily in favor of the latter. Siddons was thinking in terms of the legitimate drama. The expressive style was also endemic to both pantomime and the [End Page 167] melodrama, forms of theatre that did not meet with his approval. The expressive acting of the marionette stage was probably closer to pantomime and melodrama than to the legitimate theatre.

(77-78)

The arc of McCormick's story involves the century-long rise and demise of marionette theatre as a popular English art form, from itinerant family-based companies that toured the fairgrounds of rural England in the early 1800s, with a repertoire largely based on the romantic and melodramatic actors' theatre of the age; to companies appearing on urban stages (music halls and variety theatres), with a repertoire of pantomimes, harlequinades, and plotless collections of trick transformation puppets and variety acts; and finally, to shows that increasingly incorporated film until the new technology eventually superseded the puppets.

Sometimes McCormick methodically lists puppeteers' names and the dates of their performances in mind-numbing rhythm (although the utterly unusual character of the puppeteers is consistently enthralling) as he lays the groundwork for his reading of Victorian performance aesthetics. But mostly he is succinct and lucid, and also enlightening in scope. The reader comes away from this book with an utterly clear image of what transpired on the Victorian marionette stage. An extensive collection of black-and-white and color photographs is quite helpful.

The more one considers the nature of the 19th century, the more one realizes it to be a crucible of the central issues of the 20th: industrialization, mechanization, imperialism, globalization, and the increasing momentum of new performance technologies. McCormick's study often stops short of connecting marionette theatre to these larger issues. For example, questions of race and ethnicity repeatedly appear as central elements of Victorian marionette performance, in the ubiquitous black-face minstrel characters and exoticized "Turk" figures that were indispensable elements of the form. However, McCormick refrains from a sustained analysis of these aspects...

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