Staging Napoleonic theatre

This follow-on project will provide additional impact by distilling and disseminating knowledge acquired during the AHRC-funded "French Theatre of the Napoleonic Era" project.
In the original bid, we envisaged small-scale participatory research workshops with theatre practitioners to explore practical issues surrounding the relationship between text and music in theatre of the time. By rehearsing scenes from melodrama we have shown that apparently simple musical cues operated on multiple levels -alluding to places or people; establishing atmosphere; marking moments of emotional release and coordinating the movement of actors. Follow-on funding would allow us to explore this much further and enable us to work more innovatively with 2 non-HEIs to put on public performances of plays not performed anywhere for nearly 200 years.
Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond
The Georgian Theatre Royal is the country's most complete Georgian playhouse, in regular use between 1788 and 1830. We have been asked us collaborate on a public performance of a Pixerécourt play (in new translation) with contemporary Napoleonic music. We will run workshops with the youth theatre, local amateur dramatics groups and schools in conjunction with the Theatre's artistic director and 2-3 professional actors, leading to a 'performance in a day'. In addition to the broader positive cultural impact of restaging this play, our work with local actors will enhance their knowledge and skills base by training them in French acting techniques of the period and opening their sensibilities to the relationship between music and text. The Theatre does not currently have the funds to invest in interpretation and so our work with them will provide valuable recordings to be used in their exhibition space and in subsequent outreach activities.
Portchester Castle
The collaboration with English Heritage at Portchester will allow us to explore the plays performed by Napoleonic prisoners of war, which included an ambitious selection of hits from the Paris stage but also their own plays, including a full-scale melodrama, Roseliska, written in 1810 by a 21-year old sergeant, Jean Baptiste Louis de Lafontaine, who had been an actor at the Théâtre des Troubadours in Paris. The play draws heavily on the Parisian tradition of grand spectacle whilst addressing a number of themes close to the prisoners' hearts.
Conducting performance-based research is particularly fruitful when surroundings can be properly taken into consideration. Although the wooden staging has not survived, the dimensions and acoustics of the basement of the Keep at Portchester are as they were in 1809/10 and working with actors and musicians alongside EH archaeologists allows us unique access into the mechanics of prisoner-of-war theatricals. Roseliska for instance has a scene where the hero escapes out of a window - working in situ will allow us to explore the possibility that the prisoners used the architecture of the keep to their advantage rather than constructing a set for this scene...
Performing and recording the prisoners' own play will bring the Keep to life for visitors and allow them to discover more about the ingenuity and creativity of those detained. The performances will bring other benefits to Portchester, including increased visibility as an English Heritage property, potentially an increase in visitor numbers and income and will allow the Castle to expand the topics covered in its schools work.
To coincide with the public performances at Portchester and in Richmond, we will run workshops for local schools on performing melodrama and the relationship between text and music. In this, we will be able to draw on our experience from running similar events in Oxford and Coventry in 2014. Staging Napoleonic theatre will allow us to reach new audiences, significantly enhance the value and wider benefits of the original project and create a firm basis for further collaboration with our non HEI partners.

Who will benefit from this research?
In the first instance, English Heritage and the Georgian Theatre Royal will be the two principal beneficiaries of the research. In the second instance, the wider public will also benefit, particularly those attending performances and visiting either of the two sites to look at exhibition material. Thirdly, those involved in the 'performance in a day' at Richmond will develop skills in 19th-century acting. Fourthly, school pupils who attend the planned sessions in both locations will be encouraged to develop their intellectual curiosity and an understanding of others and their history. Provisional conversations with amateur theatre groups in France indicates that there is the possibility of beneficiaries in France since well as the setting of the manuscript musical scores would make the plays accessible for anyone to perform.
How will they benefit from this research?
English Heritage will benefit from the research as they look to reinterpret the Keep at Portchester Castle as part of their renewal of displays and exhibits at the site. There are two elements to the benefits: i) an improved exhibition space informed by the most recent research into the theatricals of the prisoners of war and ii) increased and new interest in the castle through the performance of one of the plays written by French prisoners of war while at the Castle in 1809. The research has the potential to make a significant difference to the profile of Portchester Castle and its visitor numbers.
Benefits to the Georgian Theatre Royal can similarly be split between benefits to the Theatre and to the participants of the 'performance in a day'. The Theatre will benefit from an extension to its educational activities and visitors will be offered an enhanced understanding of the melodramatic tradition of which British theatre was part in the early 19th century as videos of performance will be available in the theatre's exhibition space. Recorded extracts of the performance of the Danube Fortress can also be used in its work with local schools. Members of their youth theatre will gain unrivalled experience in making an artistic tradition visible once more through the workshops that we will be running. They, and other local actors, will gain expertise in melodrama, a now lapsed theatrical form that requires actors to externalise emotion, switch from comic to tragic mode of expression, sing, dance, and hold tableaux. Being confronted by unfamiliar acting techniques will enable them to re-evaluate their usual working practices.
The research will enhance the UK's cultural enrichment, by giving audiences access to a theatrical form that dominated worldwide at the start of the 19th century - melodrama - but which has no continuous performance tradition.
It will increase public awareness of this forgotten theatrical form and also of the situation of French prisoners of war during the Napoleonic conflicts.
Many of the benefits of the research will be realised quickly because the follow-on funding is to facilitate performances but there will also be longer-term cultural and socio-economic benefits because recordings of performances will allow subsequent visitors access to the performance material.