English West End Revue

London West End revue constituted a particular response to mounting social, political, and cultural insecurities over Britain’s status and position at the beginning of the twentieth century. These insecurities were compounded by growing demands for social reform: the call for women’s emancipation and the growth of the labour and the trade union movements created a climate of mounting disillusionment. Revue correlated the immediacy of this uncertain world, through a fragmented vocabulary of performance, placing satire, parody, social commentary, and critique at its core and achieving popularity by reflecting and responding to the variations of the new lived experiences. Experimenting with narrative and expressions of speech, movement, design, and sound, revue displaced the romanticism of musical comedy by combining satirical detachment with defiant sophistication in a manner that reflected the sensibility of a waning British hegemony as a cultural expression of the fragile and changing social and political order.