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The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First Age of Globalization1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2015

CHRISTOPHER B. BALME
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Abstract

This article examines a theatrical network, the Bandmann Circuit, managed by Maurice E. Bandmann in the first two decades of the twentieth century as a form of globalized theatre. It asks why this kind of transnational theatrical activity has received so little scholarly attention and proposes utilizing actor-network-theory as a means to make the complex connectivity of such enterprises visible. The first section of the article discusses the concept of early globalization, roughly the period from 1860 to 1914, as a period having many parallels with our own time. The second part discusses actor-network-theory as a theatre-historiographical method, which is then applied to selected nodes of the Bandmann Circuit, in particular repertoire, audiences and the use of local partners as examples of a much more multiaxial undertaking.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 19 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

NOTES

2 On world literature see Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. On world art see, among many titles, Carrier, David, A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

3 See Henke, Robert and Nicholson, Eric, eds., Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)Google Scholar.

4 See, for example, Niall Ferguson: ‘a hundred years ago, globalization was celebrated in not dissimilar ways (the earth is flat) as goods, capital and labour flowed freely from England to the ends of the earth . . . In 1914 the first age of globalization ended with a spectacular bang’. Ferguson, Niall, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 643Google Scholar. One should add that capital and labour flows did not just issue from England but were much more multidirectional. England was, however, by far the largest foreign investor of the time. See in the same Darwin, vein John, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin Press, 2012), esp. p. 179Google Scholar: ‘By the 1870s, it becomes possible to speak of a global economy in which improvements in transport and communication by telegraph had encouraged the integration of markets and the convergence of prices in ordinary foodstuffs – perhaps the best indicator that the world was becoming a single economic space.’

5 Geyer, Michael and Bright, Charles, ‘World History in a Global Age’, American Historical Review, 100 (October 1995), 1034–60, here p. 1053CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Hoffmann, H. C., Die Theaterbauten von Fellner und Helmer (Munich: Prestel, 1996), p. 9Google Scholar.

7 See Lei, Daphne Pi-Wei, Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Cohen, Matthew Isaac, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (Athens, OH and Leiden: Ohio University Press and KITLV Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and Cohen, Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, 1905–1952 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Daniel Bandmann (1838–1905) was a German—Jewish actor who came to New York in the 1860s and performed initially in the German theatre before switching to English. Bandmann senior toured the world twice: from 1869 to 1872 and again in the late 1880s, when he visited India, China, Australia and New Zealand. The second tour is recorded in considerable self-acclamatory detail in his book An Actor's Tour: or, Seventy Thousand Miles with Shakespeare (Boston: Upham and Co., 1885). In the late 1880s he gave up touring and invested his theatrical profits in a ranch in Montana.

10 Millicent Bandmann-Palmer (1845–1926), Daniel Bandmann's second wife, was, along with Sarah Bernhardt, one of the famous Hamlet actresses of the late nineteenth century. Her Juliet was also legendary, a role she insisted on playing well into her fifties, when she performed alongside her own son as Romeo. After her separation from Daniel, she formed her own troupe and plied her trade around mainly provincial centres in Britain and Ireland but also in Germany, where she was invited to give a command performance before Kaiser Wilhelm I.

11 Weekly Sun (Singapore), 30 September 1911, p. 12.

12 In 1908, he built the Empire Theatre in Calcutta and, three years later, the Royal Opera House in Bombay. The latter, after a chequered history of refurbishment as a cinema and closure, is in the process of being renovated and restored to its original condition as an opera house. The former was refurbished as a cinema in 1941 and renamed the Roxy, which still operates today.

13 Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, 16 February 1906, p. 2.

14 See ‘Variety Theatres. Big Scheme for “All-Red Circuit”’, Straits Times, 10 March 1914, p. 2.

15 This is the approach of historical network analysis, for example, which adapts social network analysis and applies it to historical phenomena; see Wetherell, Charles, ‘Historical Social Network Analysis’, International Review of Social History, 43 (December 1998), pp. 125–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Emirbayer, Mustafa and Goodwin, Jeff, ‘Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency’, American Journal of Sociology, 99, 6 (May 1994), pp. 1411–54, here p. 1414CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 There has been little engagement with actor-network-theory amongst theatre historians. A notable exception is Marlis Schweitzer. See her article ‘Networking the Waves: Ocean Liners, Impresarios, and Broadway's Atlantic Expansion’, Theatre Survey, 53, 2 (September 2012), pp. 241–67. Her example is the transatlantic ocean liner and its importance for the theatrical networks connecting the United States with Europe.

18 The term ‘actant’ is a terminological residue of Greimasian semiotics that exerted a considerable influence on Latour and his group in the early period of research in the 1970s. It refers to any forces that exert agency within a network, ranging from natural forces to individuals and collective bodies.

19 Latour, Bruno, ‘On Recalling ANT’, in Law, John and Hassard, J., eds., Actor-Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 15–26, here p. 19Google Scholar.

20 Darryl Cressman, ‘A Brief Overview of Actor-Network Theory: Punctualization, Heterogeneous Engineering & Translation’, April 2009, at http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/cprost/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/0901.pdf, p. 7.

21 I am aware that this is a somewhat polemical oversimplification of current theatre-historiographical methodologies and approaches. For a stimulating cross-section of current approaches see Canning, Charlotte M. and Postlewait, Thomas, eds., Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

22 On the networked newspaper in this period see Winder, G. M., ‘Imagining Geography and Citizenship in the Networked Newspaper: La Nacion Reports the Assassination at Sarajevo, 1914’, Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung, special issue, 35, 1 (2010), pp. 140–66Google Scholar.

23 Law, John, ‘Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics’, in Turner, Bryan S., ed., The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 141–58, here p. 141CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 There is, for example, no entry on Bandmann in the standard four-volume reference work Who Was Who in the Theatre: 1912–1976. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Directors, Playwrights, and Producers of the English-Speaking Theatre (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978).

25 Other theatre-entrepreneurial networks are better known, such as J. C. Williamson in Australia or I. W. Schlesinger's African Theatre Trust in South Africa. Nevertheless, the method I propose here could be used to analyse them as well.

26 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 173Google Scholar.

27 Ibid., p. 220.

28 Ibid., p. 39.

29 In Latour's terminology, an intermediary is a ‘black box’ where input equals output, and no modification takes place.

30 Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, 29 September 1906, p. 5.

31 On the concept of ‘structured circulation’ see Lee, Benjamin and LiPuma, Edward, ‘Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity’, Public Culture, 14, 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 191–213Google Scholar.

32 See the article by Postlewait, Thomas, ‘George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformation of London Theatre and Society, 1878–1914’, in Davis, Tracy C. and Holland, Peter, eds., The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre's History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 80–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Despite the prominence and dominance of George Edwardes in the London theatre of the late Victorian and the Edwardian periods, Postlewait notes that ‘with rare exceptions theatre historians have shown little interest in this popular form of entertainment’. Ibid., p. 81.

33 For a discussion of intellectual property in Edwardian theatre, especially with reference to George Edwardes and the Gaiety Theatre, see Davis, Tracy C., The Economics of the British Stage 1800–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 350–3Google Scholar.

34 Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 108.

35 Letter to G. Herbert Tring, 16 May 1912, British Library, Manuscript Section, Add 56627.

36 Edwardes openly admitted that his plays with music ‘did not appeal to people who wanted the theatre to “improve our minds”’. Cited in Postlewait, ‘George Edwardes and Musical Comedy’, p. 81.

37 I borrow the term ‘distributed’ from media network theory. See the article by Anna Munster and Geert Lovink, ‘Theses on Distributed Aesthetics: Or, What a Network is Not’, Fibreculture Journal, n.d., at http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue7_munster_lovink.html. For an application to theatre and performance see Balme, Christopher B., The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), chap. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 107. Original emphasis.

39 Quoted in ‘Mr Maurice Bandmann. His Theatrical Enterprises in the East’, Straits Times, 5 August 1911, p. 3. In 1910, Bandmann had toured the actor Charles Vane with a selection of Shakespearean scenes but not a complete play.

40 For a discussion of Bandmann's Shakespearian tours see Balme, Christopher B., ‘“His means are in supposition”: Shakespeare and the Beginnings of the Global Theatre Trade’, in Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 150 (2014), pp. 111–27Google Scholar.

41 Advertisement in the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertizer, 6 September, 1912, p. 1.

42 Straits Times, 4 September 1915, p. 11.

43 Holloway, David, Playing the Empire: The Acts of the Holloway Touring Theatre Company (London: Harrap, 1979), p. 151Google Scholar.

44 ‘Bombay Amusements: Mr Bandmann's New Theatre’, Times of India, 5 June 1907, p. 8.

45 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 May 1914, p. 3. The paper was an Indian-owned English-language daily with a strong nationalist bent.

46 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 March 1914, p. 3.

47 On Bandmann and early Indian film see Bhaumik, Kaushik, ‘Cinematograph to Cinema: Bombay 1896–1928’, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2, 1 (January 2011), pp. 41–67Google Scholar; Gooptu, Sharmistha, Bengali Cinema: ‘An Other Nation’ (London: Routledge 2011), p. 16Google Scholar.

48 ‘Mr. Bandman's Plans – the Theatre in the East’, Times of India, 30 September 1919, p. 11.

49 ‘Variety Theatres – Big Scheme for “All-Red Circuit” – Mr. Maurice Bandmann's Proposals’, Straits Times, 10 March 1914, p. 2.

50 For information on Augusto Dalbagni, see the website http://xoomer.virgilio.it/nuovopapiro/in_egitto_file/dalbagni_famiglia.htm

51 The only theatre in Asia that technologically rivalled Bandmann's was the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, which opened in 1911.

52 See Supriya Nair, ‘Opera Around the Corner’, 28 October 2011, at www.livemint.com/Leisure/VHH6Mo35YzYkGI1YooU57J/Opera-around-the-corner.html