Mention Music Hall
and one tends to think of the London
halls, or maybe the Northern Circuit.
If one thinks of the Scottish halls
it tends to be negatively – Glasgow
Empire and the Comedian’s Graveyard
may be a standing joke but ironically
it points to a wider truth about the
differences in origin between the English
and Scottish halls – a subject addressed
in considerable detail in Paul Maloney’s
exploration. London halls evolved from
pubs but in a Scottish atmosphere of
Presbyterian disapproval and Temperance
movements the Scottish variety was much
more likely to emerge from the numerous
troupes and fairground entertainers
and from already established theatres.
In this sense the working class Music
Hall audience tended to exist parallel
to the regular theatre or variety audiences,
though nothing quite prepares one for
the exponential rocketing of the halls
between 1888 and 1914 – when Glasgow
went from 3 halls to 18. As a point
of comparison London had 300.
The halls were of course
big business; the new halls around Hope
Street and Sauchiehall Street arrived
as there was an acceleration in the
banning of alcohol – doubtless a self
preserving exercise to pre-empt criticism
and preserve vested interests by the
emergent consortia who controlled the
theatres. With new buildings came new,
big architects; Matcham for instance,
whose Edinburgh Empire Palace held 3,000;
and with such sophistication came a
suitable refinement on stage. Acts were
increasingly sophisticated and elaborate;
there were sketches and scenes, not
simply turns; the elision of the dramatic
theatre and the Music Hall revue was
inescapably present. In that sense the
halls embraced modernity and topicality,
showing submarine acts and bioscopes
and kinetoscopes. Gradually the Music
Hall modified and transformed itself
into variety – it tried to stave off
the inevitable competition of sound
pictures and recordings for as long
as it could and offered Glaswegians
a veneer, at least, of social respectability.
As Maloney shows the
stage Scotsman, then Scotchman, was
a figure of acute ambiguity even then
and Lauder and Will Fyffe continue to
generate heat on the subject; the High
and Low were in distinct opposition
and, in any case, it’s quite possible
that the majority of performers on Scottish
stages were actually English. The nursery
seedbed for such native talent was the
free and easies, talent houses that
offered a grounding though often insalubrious
locations (often the backs of pubs).
But as Maloney shows in a time without
mass media, without radio and in the
earlier part of the study at least,
without mechanical reproduction, vibrant
local cultures existed and Scotland
had its own stars and its own broad
cosmopolitan culture.
This is a study that
examines ideas and the social and cultural
history of the Scottish Music Hall;
it’s perhaps inevitable that in doing
so it is compared and contrasted against
the English model – the better to bring
out the essential differences that existed
between them. These extended to permissible
subjects on stage as well as permissible
dress – or undress (frowned upon). It
sheds great light on the diversity that
existed in a supposedly monolithic machine
and on a movement that rose and fell
with vertiginous haste.
Jonathan Woolf
Manchester University Press