Popular Theatre, Music Hall, Variety, and Pantomime

Abstract This chapter explores Scottish theatre’s popular origins in strolling players, fairground-based entertainments, and the travelling theatres known as ‘geggies’, which, until the late nineteenth century, constituted many Scots’ experience of theatre. The entertainment values of these shows—their dramatic narratives, comedy, songs, music, and interaction between performers and audience—and of related entertainments like circuses, ‘national’ spectacles, and burlesques, all fed into the development of the ‘free and easies’, singing saloons, and music halls which emerged in Scottish towns and cities in the 1850s, and, by recycling older songs and performing repertoires, maintained continuities with influences such as those of Burns and Scott. When music hall was rebranded as variety from the 1880s, the Scottish variety theatre developed a distinctive character as an authentic expression of Scottish working-class identity. Peaking in popularity in the interwar years, its stars became increasingly associated with long-running pantomimes, the genre in which Scottish variety’s vernacular humour has survived into the present. The chapter shows how the popular ethos of Scottish theatre, its irreverence and dynamism, has remained an energizing influence on modern audiences and performers.