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Barbanell, Patricia

doi:10.4018/9781599043319.ch018

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“…The Psychic News correspondence records admission prices to her séances varying from four shillings to ten and sixpence in the 1930s, for example, and the 1944 Portsmouth sittings were priced at twelve and sixpence per person, with around twenty-five in attendance for each. 44 In July 1932, Maurice Barbanell reported that Duncan was receiving five or six pounds per sitting and that she 'has been sitting every night for three weeks' -a weekly income of around £35 that contrasted with her husband's normal wage of four or five pounds per week as a cabinetmaker (when he was employed). 45 The Edinburgh séance in which 'Peggy' was revealed to be a vest yielded three guineas, though to this must be added the undisclosed fee for her sitting earlier that day.…”

Section: The Economy Of Duncan's Theatrementioning

confidence: 97%

Spiritualism as Popular Performance in the 1930s: the Dark Theatre of Helen Duncan

Featherstone¹

2011

New Theatre Quarterly

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In this essay the social historian Simon Featherstone examines the theatre of the Scottish medium Helen Duncan and argues that her strange, illicit performances offer a way of re-reading British popular performance in the 1930s and 1940s. This critically neglected period has been characterized by the decline of the radical energies of nineteenth-century music hall and the variety theatre which displaced it. Duncan's performances, however, with their extravagant display and management of her body and deployment of a range of references to popular materials, including puppetry, melodrama, children's games, and sentimental narratives, suggest the existence of other trajectories. Like the ‘dark village’ that Eric Hobsbawm identified as the illegal shadow of nineteenth-century social practices, Duncan's ‘dark theatre’ can be seen as a shadow world of mid-century performance styles. It provided a knowing yet emotionally fulfilling theatrical experience for her audiences while at the same time posing radical questions about the limits and meanings of the representation of gender and class in the unregulated venues of the spiritualist circuit. Politically ambiguous in their mixture of entrepreneurial exploitation and willingness to offer forthright challenges to social and legal authorities, Duncan's performances indicate the persistence of complex spaces and traditions of popular theatricality in the period.

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Section: The Economy Of Duncan's Theatrementioning

confidence: 97%

Spiritualism as Popular Performance in the 1930s: the Dark Theatre of Helen Duncan

Featherstone¹

2011

New Theatre Quarterly

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show abstract

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Cited by 1 publication

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Spiritualism as Popular Performance in the 1930s: the Dark Theatre of Helen Duncan

Spiritualism as Popular Performance in the 1930s: the Dark Theatre of Helen Duncan

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