After the Ballets Russes: movement and modernism in British theatre, 1914-1935

This thesis illuminates the significant yet frequently overlooked contribution that Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes made to the development of British theatrical modernism. The extraordinary historical importance of leading dramatists and theatre practitioners such as Harley Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Terence Gray, and W. H. Auden has long been recognised, yet the debts they owed to Diaghilev’s company have remained neglected. This thesis recovers a striking selection of these debts, tracing the complex ways in which Barker, Barrie, Gray, and Auden gestured to various formal and aesthetic aspects of Diaghilev ballets in their endeavours to create total theatre art. Galvanised by the philosophical conditions of Britain’s early twentieth-century theatre scene, which saw growing interest in Nietzschean responses to classical drama and Wagnerian notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk, these theatre figures found inspiration in the formal and choreographic innovations of the Ballets Russes—particularly those pioneered by the revolutionary choreographer Michel Fokine. It was chiefly by taking these innovations as a point of departure that this diverse group of dramatists and theatre practitioners began to experiment with using the moving body to express aspects of dramatic texts, harnessing the company’s avant-garde repertoire to the service of advancing theatrical modernism. The first full-length study of the wider theatrical significance of Diaghilev’s company in the context of British drama and dramaturgy, this thesis offers new insight into the genesis, evolution, and performance of distinctive new theatrical forms, including a whimsical balletic burlesque and a deeply political poetic dramatic satire, as well as prominent modernist stagings of Shakespearean comedy and classical Greek tragedy. Grounded in extensive archival study, historical research, and textual, choreographic, and photographic analysis, this thesis provides a fresh account of underexplored areas of modernism in performance. It unfolds the nuanced ways in which the theatrical legacy of the Ballets Russes enhanced, inflected, and intertwined with a plurality of the period’s broader dramatic and dramaturgical developments, elucidating its relationship to everything from the Wagnerian theatre theories of Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig to the iconoclastic aesthetics of central European expressionism, from the Mallarméan concerns of symbolist playwrights such as W. B. Yeats and Maurice Maeterlinck to the new forms of embodied stage poetics pioneered by figures such as Jacques Copeau, Rolf de Maré, and Jean Cocteau. In recovering the Ballets Russes’ role in British theatre history, this thesis thus illuminates a series of new artistic networks, expands understandings of some of the most eminent dramatists and theatre practitioners of early twentieth-century Britain, and uncovers a selection of literary and dramaturgical innovations that have previously been neglected in studies of British modernism.

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