Celebrity, Performance, Reception; British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage

David Worrall. Celebrity, Performance, Reception; British Georgian Theatre as Social Assemblage.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 305 pp. index, append, bibl. $99.00 USD (hardback). ISBN 9781107043602.In recent years, the late eighteenth century has become one of the liveliest and most productive areas of research in contemporary theatre studies. Studies by Daniel O'Quinn, Gillian Russell, Jane Moody, Laura Engel, Julie Carlson, and others have effectively redefined this field, demonstrating through their many different approaches this theatre's centrality in British cultural, political, and social life. David Worrall's Celebrity, Performance, Reception is another work in this revisionist vein. This book brings groundbreaking research to bear on its discussion of actors, performances, audiences, and playhouses in Britain in the 1780s and 1790s, in addition to advancing a provocative new conceptual framework for discussing Georgian theatre.A central proposition of Celebrity, Performance, Reception is that the scale and complexity of Georgian theatre can best be described by deploying the social assemblage framework outlined by Manuel DeLanda, as derived from the latter's reading of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In each chapter of his book, Worrall insistently applies DeLandas conceptual apparatus, an effort that requires a constant process of translation from a standard performance/theatre terminology into this social assemblage lexicon. From the perspective of this reader, at least, it is not always clear what one gains by this transposition process. Why, for instance, is it more useful to say that "performances and performance reception constantly mutate and evolve, progressively territorializing, deterrritorializing and reterritorializing" (15) rather than saying that that plays change in meaning as they are repeatedly rehearsed, interpreted, and re-interpreted by actors and audiences alike?That said, it is also true that this assemblage framework facilitates the production of a new, multi-faceted kind of theatre study, one that deals, as few traditional theatre studies do, with reception as well as production, and that accounts for the "mass heterogeneity" (32) and scope of that complex entity we call Georgian theatre. In the book's introduction and chapter 1, where the structural elements of the theatrical marketplace are analyzed, for instance, country-house private theatricals are considered alongside the performances of Londons larger public theatres, and the diversity within audiences is usefully illustrated by contrasting the reception of plays in these two very different kinds of venues. The lack of standardization in play texts, and the frequency with which plays were reiterated, Worrall persuasively argues, also contributed to this heterogeneity, creating a theatrical economy which "comprehensively mediated, reflected, and produced a variety of perspectives on politics, empire, sexuality and celebrity" (40).In chapter 2, the focus shifts to performance itself as an assemblage, one made up of actors, authors, venues, and "outlier social networks" (47) such as newspapers and print media. In support of his argument here, Worrall turns to Samuel Birchs The Mariners (1793) and John O'Keeffes The Siege of Curzola (1786), dramas which helped mediate the collective anxieties about invasion then being expressed in daily newspapers. By focusing on the ensemble of female players (Margaret Cuyler, Elizabeth Ban- nister, Giovanna Sestini, and Georgina George) whose acting and singing talents ensured the success of O'Keeffe's play, Worrall also argues persuasively that performance itself is the work of a collectivity, an argument that is developed in more detail in the book's two central chapters on celebrity.Challenging the belief that celebrity is the product of extraordinary in- dividual talent, Worrall emphasizes instead the "networks of collaboration" (76) that underwrote professional relations in the theatre and, as he shows through his discussion of provincial touring companies, these networks were frequently strengthened by ties of kinship, family, and marriage (ch. …