Book Review: Contemporary British Musicals: Out of the Darkness

Contemporary British Musicals is an anthology including work by an international group of academics, lecturers and researchers in the upcoming field of musical drama especially commissioned by the editors. The central question of the collection, “­Is there such a thing as a contemporary British musical canon?­”,  remains largely evaded by the mostly non-British academics. Yet other issues emerge, which the reader may not have considered or expected to see associated with Matilda, Flowers for Mrs Harris, Six, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and other recent UK productions.

It would probably be correct to highlight that, despite geographical differences, all contributors subscribe to what can be referred to as identity-based or identity-aware scholarship.

Some of the contributors openly acknowledge they had not had the opportunity to watch a live performance of the musical they were dissecting but only a recorded version of it, made available to the public during lockdown by theatre archives. This is supported by a more than cursory analysis of the “lived experience” of an academic who is also a mother of a young child and who would have to add the cost of childcare and transport to a major city to the cost of attending a show. Point made – loud and clear. It is a fact that musicals’ live audiences are self-selected on the basis of income, family status, city-v-country dwelling and age group.

Another contributor strikingly concludes their chapter by recusing themselves from passing a final judgment on a musical, stating that they do not have the required “lived experience” of members of a certain ethnic diaspora, where being part of that diaspora is a defining feature of one of its characters.

Other considerations that are given large space in this collection may feel even more uncomfortably far removed from the approach taken by the majority of British critics in assessing the entertainment value of an evening out but are worth bringing to the attention of the self-aware theatregoer.

A fair number of pages are dedicated to the question of whether a Black artist has ever been cast in a certain lead role or, conversely, whether such role has always been the preserve of white leads. This is a critique of British musical casting practices that can feel harsh but is not completely undeserved: US academics especially, well-attuned to Broadway’s longstanding tradition of appropriating Black artists’ work, are quick to spot this UK trend in their contributions. Another recurrent theme is whether a different ending would have been more in line with a story’s overall feminist message.

This collection makes for a genuinely surprising read. It not only offers a glimpse of the inventive ways in which academia is giving birth to a new field of study out of musical theatre entertainment, but also of how identity-based scholarship is creating a brand new academic language, canon and discipline. It is to be expected that this style of critique will soon be making an appearance in press night reviews.

Book Editors: Clare Chandler, Gus Gowland
Publisher and Imprint: Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama
Series title: Contemporary British Musicals
Year of publication: 2024
ISBN: 9781350268036