Rescuing Richard Cœur de Lion: Rivalry, Rehearsal, and Performance at Sheridan's Drury Lane

Abstract

Utopia might always prove impossible. But it should not be entirely abandoned as a concept, or as a goal toward which work might be directed. It is hard to see how meaningful change could arise without at least some sense of utopian possibility. The architectural historian Nathaniel Coleman argues in this vein that simply “making-do with reality may be compensatory, but limits possibility, transforming apparent pragmatic agency into its capture by enclosing realism.”1 Dealing with reality—often enough by making do—while keeping an eye on more magical possibilities has sometimes appeared, and has certainly been claimed, as the founding experience of making theatre. Theatres have seemed unique places where much might happen. If they are indeed special places, able to achieve special things, then they are not simply ebullient, but like Foucault's “heterotopias” able to combine dissident elements at the margins. Even when viewed at considerable historical distance, theatrical companies can appear truculent, wayward, and unsettling, even when they remain exploitative, manipulative, hierarchical—as many utopias are.2 Inequities and exclusions based on race, sexuality, gender, and class are not absent from theatrical life. Coleman's point, however, is really to argue that that it ought to be possible to imagine sites and patterns of work that are not already foreclosed by the demands of the market, the law, or other forms of curtailment. It should be equally possible to imagine people coming together, bringing their skills, and working out how they might be combined. Reality and its utopian antithesis might then valuably contradict and coalesce. The combination is never easy. Imperatives, financial and otherwise, loomed large over theatres in Georgian England, as they do today. But improvisation and collective effort could both respond to and yet resist such downward pressures, to make something that is at least potentially dissident, as much a way of working as the work produced.