Andrew Walker
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474420952
- eISBN:
- 9781474453851
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420952.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Andrew Walker examines playwright Mary Kelly’s writings on village theatre and her production of agrarian pageantry for purposes of expanding notions of the genres and cultural impacts of rural ...
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Andrew Walker examines playwright Mary Kelly’s writings on village theatre and her production of agrarian pageantry for purposes of expanding notions of the genres and cultural impacts of rural modernity. Kelly, best known as the model for Miss La Trobe in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, enjoyed success as a director of rural theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. This led to two influential books on rural arts, How to Make a Pageant (1936) and Village Theatre (1939). Envisioning the theatre as an outgrowth of folk religion and mythology grounded in agricultural and fertility ritual—a vision taken up to great effect by T. S. Eliot—Kelly advocated a theatre run by and on behalf of rural performers, producers, and audience. This chapter looks at her development of these ideas in print and practice as a way of examining interwar rural dramatic production writ large.Less
Andrew Walker examines playwright Mary Kelly’s writings on village theatre and her production of agrarian pageantry for purposes of expanding notions of the genres and cultural impacts of rural modernity. Kelly, best known as the model for Miss La Trobe in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts, enjoyed success as a director of rural theatre in the 1920s and 1930s. This led to two influential books on rural arts, How to Make a Pageant (1936) and Village Theatre (1939). Envisioning the theatre as an outgrowth of folk religion and mythology grounded in agricultural and fertility ritual—a vision taken up to great effect by T. S. Eliot—Kelly advocated a theatre run by and on behalf of rural performers, producers, and audience. This chapter looks at her development of these ideas in print and practice as a way of examining interwar rural dramatic production writ large.
Michael McCluskey
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781474420952
- eISBN:
- 9781474453851
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420952.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In this chapter, Michael McCluskey looks at amateur films/home movies about rural Britain, including footage of Sussex, Yorkshire, Cornwall and Kent, in order to understand changes in rural areas and ...
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In this chapter, Michael McCluskey looks at amateur films/home movies about rural Britain, including footage of Sussex, Yorkshire, Cornwall and Kent, in order to understand changes in rural areas and to make new connections between media history and social history. He argues that these films, preserved in the collections of Britain’s regional media archives as well as the British Film Institute and private collections, offer ‘visible evidence’ of the impact of modernization: what was destroyed, what was preserved, who adapted, who did not. They show interest in farming, rural crafts, village traditions, and threats of intruding motorists and the spread of the suburbs, but they also offer access to places and exchanges otherwise absent from these familiar depictions. The films participate in a broader process of what Andrew Causey calls ‘stocktaking’: an interwar interest in documenting what were feared to be disappearing people, places, and patterns of behaviour.Less
In this chapter, Michael McCluskey looks at amateur films/home movies about rural Britain, including footage of Sussex, Yorkshire, Cornwall and Kent, in order to understand changes in rural areas and to make new connections between media history and social history. He argues that these films, preserved in the collections of Britain’s regional media archives as well as the British Film Institute and private collections, offer ‘visible evidence’ of the impact of modernization: what was destroyed, what was preserved, who adapted, who did not. They show interest in farming, rural crafts, village traditions, and threats of intruding motorists and the spread of the suburbs, but they also offer access to places and exchanges otherwise absent from these familiar depictions. The films participate in a broader process of what Andrew Causey calls ‘stocktaking’: an interwar interest in documenting what were feared to be disappearing people, places, and patterns of behaviour.
