This book comprises a series of case studies of revue shows produced between 1910 and 1930. It draws on a number of specific contexts that thread their way through the period and that shape a focus on national and racial identities in fundamental ways. Firstly this was the age of nationalism, the “uncritically, passionate, patriotic love of country”, which fostered notions of both superiority and insecurity. Most importantly, nationalist discourses became framed in particular by Anglo-German rivalry before the onset of the First World War and by what was perceived as British musical theatre’s diminishing power against an “onslaught” of American authority over popular culture. Secondly, representation of racial and national identities was crucially shaped by the cultural project of modernism, which involved strategies that respond[ed] to and engage[ed] with the experience of modernity. Thirdly, the accelerating class conflict in Britain and across wider Europe before and after the First World War not only polarised the theatre world but also had a fundamental impact on how revue staged race and nation, shaped by the growing commoditisation of the female body. Finally, the representation of race and the staging of spectacle, especially in post-first world War revues, was centrally shaped by a fashionable infatuation with primitivism. Broadly, these thematic dimensions provide a significant part of the conceptual basis for this investigation of how national and racial identities were represented in West End revue across the period under discussion.weiterlesen