Staging Napoleonic theatre

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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, RichmondThe 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 CastleThe 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.