In examining how practices of theatregoing were impacted by the war this chapter provides a partner to Claire Cochrane’s examination of theatre-making in Chapter 3. It considers changing audience demographics over the war and reveals how the ‘new’ audiences were often blamed for the deterioration of theatrical quality. It pays particular attention to the two groups of audiences that received the greatest attention during the war: women (especially single women and mothers) and servicemen. Whilst recognising the value of newspaper and magazine commentaries on audience, the chapter also draws on letters, memoirs, commentaries and diary entries to understand and draw out the first-person experience of theatre-going during the war. It highlights the impact of air raids, lighting restrictions, the Amusements Tax and other wartime conditions on audiences. It also shows how changing social realities and relations in the wider world impacted on the theatre, bringing new class and gender dynamics into the auditorium.

“The autobiographical occasion (whether performance or text) becomes a site . . . ripe with diverse potentials . . . [and] can be productive in . . . articulating problems of identity and identification.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson / Actresses' autobiographies and autobiographical performances figure in several volumes on women and autobiography, but not in a number that reflects the ratio of actress-autobiography to other types of female life writing. Part of the problem is that the actress in history has represented an atypical figure, one of the few examples of women with a public life. Actresses usurped the male right to a public persona both as individuals and as a class, but without losing their subordinate and domestic role as women: this dichotomy is inevitably manifest in the actress-autobiographer's writing. This chapter offers both an overview of actresses' autobiography to 1939 and a model for reading these works for their 'diverse potentials'. It embraces the autobiographical work of performers from the 'beginnings' of the publication of actresses' autobiographies to the point in the 1930s where the 'autobiographical act' had stabilised as a commodity. The number of actress-autobiographers examined is inevitably limited by space, the range discussed intentionally diverse, situating the famous alongside the less well known, the Shakespearean alongside the musical comedy performer.

P. P. Howe’s description of the state of British theatre in the last years of the Edwardian era is, with hindsight, both true and misleading. What is missing from his view is the later perception that this was both a luxuriant, golden era for theatre and a period of ideological and aesthetic ‘revolution’. Critics and chroniclers, born in the late nineteenth century and growing up in the British provinces, often write with passion of their early experiences of the actor-managers who visited their towns and cities. But they also decry the commercial ‘revolution’ that mostly destroyed the actor-manager system after World War One, as well as championing the fragmented experiments that brought about another type of ‘revolutionary change in the character of the theatre’ in Britain. Allardyce Nicoll describes this new theatre as ‘possessed of an animating spirit the like of which the nineteenth century … had never known.’