Oscar Asche, Orientalism and British Musical Comedy (review)

J. S. Bratton

Modern Drama, Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2005, pp. 619-621 (Review)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mdr.2006.0003

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/193168

[ Access provided at 25 Oct 2020 21:24 GMT from Fondren Library, Rice University ]
 Reviews 619

for doing so, such programmes are generally accepted. I think charges of rac-
ism can be overdone. It may not be a good policy for the Chinese to give priv-
ileges to foreigners, whom they regard as guests in their country, but I am not
convinced that it is racist.
These are difficult issues. But it is important to emphasize that Conceison
treats them thoroughly and, generally, fairly. She also does this through an
important medium, namely the spoken drama. Her book certainly brings out
new ideas and insights. It is well written and documented. It has quite a few
good and highly relevant pictures. I may not agree with all its viewpoints, but
I certainly acknowledge its great strengths. I recommend this book for its con-
tribution to our understanding of the Chinese spoken drama since the late
1980s and to that of how the Chinese perceive the United States.

brian singleton. Oscar Asche, Orientalism and British Musical Comedy. Lives of the
Theatre Series. Westport, CT, and London: Praeger, 2004. Pp. xiv + 219, illustrated.
£69.95/$39.99 (Hb).

Reviewed by Jacky Bratton, Royal Holloway, University of London

As its resonant series title suggests, Lives of the Theatre offers theatre history
through biography – a notion so traditional as to seem positively modish
today. The series preface offers “scholarly introductions to important periods
and movements in the history of world theatre […] through the lives of repre-
sentative theatre practitioners.” The list of volumes recently published, how-
ever, includes eight named dramatists and only one book about any other
theatre craft, under the title Michel Saint-Denis and the Shaping of the Mod-
ern Actor. The inclusion of the life of actor, arranger, entrepreneur, and light-
ing designer Oscar Ashe is all the more to be welcomed.
Under the rubric of “orientalism,” Brian Singleton collects most of Ashe’s
productions, widening the theoretical concept to “exoticism” of many kinds,
“a cultural practice that covered all art genres, predated the aggressive New
Imperialism of the late Victorian period, and continued to thrive in the cinema
and on the musical stage long after the Empire was dismantled” (11). He
argues convincingly that “the Orient of Empire provided a forum for topical,
contemporary, and relevant concerns” in early twentieth-century popular the-
atre (18). This is not to de-politicize the term, however; Singleton also demon-
strates, in his consideration of Ashe’s successes, from The Taming of the
Shrew to Chu Chin Chow, that “orientalist representation […] was the cultural
management of Empire” (87).
In this way, he is able to make sense of a career that began with an aesthetic
moulded by Victorian pictorialism and youthful membership in Benson’s
620 reviews

Shakespeare company but moved in a radically different direction when

Asche found personal acting success in roles that were, Singleton concludes,
“a version of a variety act in his wrestling and murdering while dressed as an
oriental” (76). Following a loosely chronological pattern, Singleton discusses
Asche’s Shakespearean acting and production as a whole, early in the book.
He demonstrates how Asche’s infallibly successful productions of those plays
from the canon that provided parts suiting his narrow range of athletic villainy
supported him through years of unsuccessful experimentation with the mod-
ern poetic drama.
Asche toured his native Australia in 1909–10 with triumphantly successful
Shakespearean productions and Count Hannibal, an adventure story from a
new historical novel that he had adapted as a vehicle for his own muscular and
spectacular performances. On returning to England, he began to tap into “the
market of the orientalist spectacular,” embarking upon the path that would
lead to the “megahit” musicals he staged and performed during World War I.
With a nicely wry turn of phrase, Singleton encapsulates the inevitable critical
and historical result of such a move: “his importance as a producer and player
of the work of England’s national playwright was swiftly to be forgotten.
Asche turned to the popular theatre, and historians subsequently proceeded to
virtually erase him from the histories of English theatre” (101).
The book’s study of Chu Chin Chow, therefore, comes as something of a
revelation to the modern reader, who has heard that this musical was a war-
time hit but, at least in the case of the present reviewer, has been unaware of
the extent, or the implications, of the piece’s success. The play, a musical
spinning-out of the Arabian Nights tale of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,”
“very swiftly became both a theatrical mother and a whore (121).” Chu Chin
Chow was “a cultural drug, fully licensed, for England’s fighting men,
deprived of female company, and traumatized by the horrors of battlefield
slaughter […] [I]t was a familiar fairy tale of childhood, rewritten and trans-
posed for an adult audience. The formula for success into which Asche had
tapped so successfully was of eroticizing the fairy tale” (130). Singleton
explores the show’s extraordinary gluttony for all forms of popular spectacle.
It begins with a slave-market spectacle, full of lavish costumes and exposed
flesh, which was regularly re-dressed, like a manikin parade of bizarre and
fleshly fashions; in America, touring productions normally began by parading
through the streets like circuses arriving in town; and when war-time emer-
gencies interrupted or truncated London performances, Asche simply asked
the audience which of their favourite scenes they would like to see in the time
left for the show, as if the whole familiar production were their own to shape –
like a TV reality show today. Singleton’s analysis of this extraordinary plastic
pantomime of empire is persuasively shaped by his understanding of its orien-
talism, including the commodification of the exotically draped female body.
The star of the show was Asche’s wife, Lily Brayton, whose name – and
 Reviews 621

performance presence – was linked with his throughout his successful career
as a producer and entrepreneur. It was the Asche–Brayton company – indeed,
brand – and while Asche produced, it was Brayton who starred. Reading this
effective and suggestive account of Asche and orientalism, it is difficult not to
think, at every turn, of another book that is not here, of another way this story
might be told. Lily Brayton starred in Chu Chin Chow and made a great deal
more money out of it than did Asche himself; Singleton’s account of the
financial arrangements involved seems to suggest that the story could be told
in a very different way, from her perspective (111). And why it was that, after
1922, Asche, the most successful and sought-after producer in the west, some-
how failed to hold onto his position might be very differently understood if
one focused on the fact that he had become estranged from Brayton, who had
retired on her share of the proceeds and left him to fail alone. There is surely
another story here, about the unremarked but indispensable importance of
female agency in the commercial theatre. But if this series headlines few prac-
titioners other than playwrights, it is even more striking that not a single
woman’s name occurs in the list.

kerry powell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 288, illustrated. £45/$65
(Hb); £16.99/$24 (Pb).

Reviewed by Jane Moody, University of York

As Nina Auerbach points out in her vivid introduction to this volume, the Vic-
torian theatre is “the scruffy orphan of high culture.” “Collaborative, messy,
and lost,” she writes, “the theatre is generally, and wrongly, dismissed as sub-
canonical, at least until the 1890s, when the self-conscious literacy of Wilde
and Shaw elevated it to the verbal sophistication that would become Edward-
ian drama” (3). The abyss between Sheridan and Shaw is one all too familiar
to generations of theatre historians specializing in the Victorian period, whose
field of research is all too often greeted with a mixture of amused bewilder-
ment and scarcely concealed disdain. This volume aims to challenge such ste-
reotypes and confirm the field of Victorian and Edwardian theatre as rich and
exciting, to sum up the achievements of recent research, and to open up new
avenues for the next generation of scholars.
It is sometimes tempting to take Companions to task for their gaps and
silences. Such a practice is at once irresistible and unfair: it is impossible,
given the prescribed number of words, to “cover” a period (here, almost a cen-
tury) in any comprehensive way. Moreover, the need for coverage in certain
key areas inevitably conflicts with the desire to highlight emerging areas of