History and the Frame of Genre:
Laughter! and Poppy

The Churchill Play offers a parable of the theater in a politically repressive society, a parable that allegorizes the more indistinct means by which our own theater is governed. Much of the argument of The Churchill Play is, in this sense, also directed against the hegemony of realistic theater and the social order it represents: the prisoners' play not only invokes the disruptive discontinuities of Brechtian drama, it provides the weapon that discloses the captor-audience and, for a moment at least, delivers it from the darkness into the prisoners' hands. Representing the techniques of Brechtian theater onstage, The Churchill Play illustrates a staple gambit in the rhetoric of political theater. For in plays like The Entertainer , Theatre Workshop's Oh, What a Lovely War (1963), Trevor Griffiths's Comedians (1975), Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979)—and two plays I want to discuss here, Peter Barnes's Laughter! (1978) and Peter Nichols's Poppy (1982)—the drama begins by refashioning a familiar stage genre and the rhetoric it embodies, as a way to dramatize the audience's performance.

"Like Brecht's Galileo, Jonson was an intellectual sensualist": writing of a playwright he has admired, imitated, and adapted for the stage, Peter Barnes might easily be speaking of his own work in the theater ("Still standing" 206). Like Jonson's drama, Barnes's plays—The Ruling Class (1968), The Bewitched (1974), Red Noses (1985)—burst with a stagey vitality, a baroque delight in extravagant language and incident, a shrewd skepticism, and a ferocious moral and sensuous intelligence. I want to pause here, though, over only part of one play, Barnes's most problematic restaging of history, the "Auschwitz" section of Laughter! Barnes's depiction of the bureaucracy of genocide in Laughter! has been rightly criticized for "setting out to wring humour from a subject like Auschwitz" (Hiley, "Liberating" 16). We might ask, though, whether the subject of Laughter! is Auschwitz, or something else, the audience it provokes to laughter. To read Laughter! as about Auschwitz alone is crucially to misread the play's theatrical design, which depends in

large measure on the way that popular performance genres inscribe a kind of activity for the audience in the performance itself. Unlike plays working within the realistic stage/audience division, Laughter! stages the spectator's performance as part of its critique of history. Laughter! places the audience before the spectacle of the holocaust, and identifies our performance as its theatrical—and historical—cause.

It may be useful to compare Laughter! with more widely disseminated treatments of "comical" Nazis, such as Chaplin's The Great Dictator , the "Springtime for Hitler" spoof in The Producers , or the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes . Recall the TV series for a moment: the easygoing and omnicompetent GIs continually outwit their captors, apparently remaining in prison from week to week only for the purpose of humiliating the Reich. The series rewrites the war as farce, a matter of much irritation in the mid-1960s to many veterans of the war, the POW camps, and the death camps. The sitcom genre articulates a powerful postwar ideology, one that replaces historical and political causality with an ethical motive, the effortless success of the American "character": those casual and clever, regular guys somehow overcome all obstacles, not least the series's troubling setting and subject matter, mostly by making us laugh—"I see NUTTINK," indeed.

This is some remove from Barnes's savage farce, which works to expose the conventions of comedy as a politically neutralizing device, complicit in the construction—literally, since the play takes place in a requisitions office—of an Auschwitz, a Dachau, a Buchenwald. In the prologue of the play, the Author delivers an impassioned tirade against laughter as the "ally of tyrants" but is defeated, in his efforts to "root it out," by the machinery of vaudeville—his whirling bowtie, squirting flower, and elusive pants provoke a laughter that his lecture can't stifle. In the "Auschwitz" section, Barnes extends this dissonance by characterizing the Nazis through a range of familiar comic devices and stereotypes. The Nazis' pratfalls, their Hitler jokes, their mania for "heiling," and so forth, become a kind of schtick. Barnes broadens his critique of laughter by repeatedly associating it with other kinds of conventionalized response. The bureaucrats, for example, speak in a kind of officialese—the play opens with Cranach's dictation: "WVHA Amt C1 (Building) to WVHA Amt D1/1. Your reference ADS/MNO our

reference EZ 14/102/01. Copies WVHA Amt D IV/2, Amt D IV/4: RSHA OMIII: Reich Ministry PRV 24/6D" (48). Barnes's Nazis are compulsively orderly and neat, and in their concern for propriety they most seem to rival Wilde's Cecily and Gwendolen, and generally to recall comedy of manners:

GOTTLEB: According to Hoflich of the "Schwarzes Korps" it is customary when Heiling Hitler to raise the right arm at an angle so the palm of the hand is visible.

CRANACH: Hoflich also wrote "if one encounters a person socially inferior, when Heiling Hitler, then the right arm is raised only to eye-level, so the palm of the hand is hidden."
(377)

A familiar situation, a familiar slur, a familiar laugh; as in Hogan's Heroes, such comic obsessions work to displace the more troublesome facts of anti-Semitism and genocide.

If laughter—our laughter—is the ally of tyrants, Barnes must dramatize the social consequences of laughter in the events of the stage. To accomplish this, Barnes juxtaposes the evasions of laughter against the confrontational seeing of theater. First, Gottleb identifies the evasive language of the bureaucracy: "CP3(m) described in regulation E(5) is the new concrete flue for the crematoriums" (401). He then opens the eyes of the bureaucrats, and of the audience, "to the sights, sounds, smells of Auschwitz." The filing cabinets lining the upstage area part, bodies spill forward onto the stage, and two horrific figures step out of the smoke, wearing gas masks and rubber suits: "As they clump forward, they hit the dummies with thick wooden clubs. Each time they do so there is the splintering sound of a skull being smashed " (405).

This is no laughing matter, but the play's bureaucrats desperately attempt to transform it into one, in order once again to "hide behind the words and symbols" of their self-protective administrative jargon. Indeed, Cranach leads Stroop and Else in a bureaucratic chant, the ritual effacement of the dead, "Future cases of death shall be given consecutive Roman numbers with subsidiary Arabic numbers. The first case Roman numeral I/1 the second the Roman numeral I/2 . . ." (407). As he does so, the files are closed, and all four characters return to the comic business of the play's opening: Gottleb (having been thrown from the office) "pops his head in " and "deliberately sticks his Hitler moustache back on his upper lip  . . .—HAAA.

Top that!" (408–09). Barnes restores the brittle vaudeville of the opening of the scene, but the consequences of the audience's laughter have been brought into view. Laughter at the comic Nazis is reconstituted as a sign of complicity with their project, an acceptance of conventional "words and symbols"—the comic conventions of the stage—and so of the work they do. The bureaucrats' language, the manipulative devices of comedy, and the audience's theatrical response lead to a common, final solution: the gas chamber.

Cranach proceeds to consider how centuries to come will explain the ruins at Auschwitz: "They'll find it hard to believe they weren't heroic visionaries, mighty rulers, but ordinary people, people who liked people, people like them, you, me, us." People like you, me, us. With Cranach's final word, the circle of laughter is complete. "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Althusser 162); only when our "imaginary" absence from the dramatic spectacle has been reconstituted as an authorizing complicity are we prepared for Barnes's epilogue: the vaudeville routine of "the Boffo Boys of Birkenau, Abe Bimko and Hymie Bierberstein," played while they expire under the gas. Barnes wants to root out the laughter that allows "anything" to be "possible," and the obscene fantasy of a vaudeville routine in the gas chamber is Barnes's attempt to "dramatize" both cause and effect, action and consequence. It might plausibly be said that Barnes shows the Jews going happily to their fate, responsible for their own victimization; such a reading, I think, misconceives how the interpretive relations of performance structure the meaning of this event.^[13] For in the epilogue, the comedians

[13] Barnes has suggested that the play questions "the old cliché that runs if we can laugh at our miseries and at the injustices that afflict us, somehow laughing alleviates those injustices and those miseries and makes it bearable." He continues, "One of the reasons the second part of Laughter is about Auschwitz is because the Jews have a great reputation of being able to laugh and make the most marvelous one-line jokes about their situation. I wonder if one of the reasons they have been persecuted (not the only reason of course) and haven't done anything about it is because of their ability to laugh at it, laugh at the terrors that have afflicted them" (Bly and Wager 46). I want to be very clear about this: I have no desire to salvage the scene that Barnes describes here, in which the Jews' laughter, rather than the Nazis' brutality or the Allies' indifference, is said to cause the holocaust. The issue is whether the dramatic scene that Barnes describes is the scene that is produced in the theater.

don't laugh. Onstage, Laughter! shows the Boffo Boys performing for our entertainment, not to soothe their own fears. Surely it's not funny; yet the scene presents us with the essential situation of stand-up comedy—comic, joke, audience. The Boffo Boys don't "slay" us, "kill" us with their routine. We execute them by assenting to the role of comic audience; the final cause of the scene is less their joking than the audience's potential for laughter. Representing the idiom of the comic, Laughter! stages our laughter as a gest, an action figured in a social and historical framework. Subject to the performance, we become the subject of the drama, and of the history it brings to the stage. The passive audience becomes the author of the spectacle of genocide.

Laughter! stages the spectator as captor, dramatizes the ideological work performed by the conventions of comedy and the laughter they channel. Peter Nichols's Poppy stages the spectator by examining how the working of a theatrical genre duplicates and extends the genres of social action. Poppy concerns the economy of the Opium Wars, England's promotion of Indian opium in China as a means of securing the tea trade and reversing a damaging trade imbalance. In the play, an impoverished young aristocrat, Dick, contracts to marry into a wealthy mercantile family. To prove his business sense he takes a trading assignment in the Far East, accompanied by his faithful servant Jack and his lovelorn ward Sally. When he arrives in India, he finds out that he has engaged to trade opium, and that he must open the China market as well. Dick swallows his scruples, and we see him pursuing dangerous expeditions, negotiating trade agreements in the splendid Manchu court, and getting caught up in the fighting as the British brutally quell Chinese resistance and sack the Summer Palace. His moral compromise eventually exacts its price, for Sally—without a fortune, an unthinkable match for Dick—becomes an addict and must be married off to rustic Jack before both are sent off to America. For his pains, Dick is rewarded by the queen and finally marries the merchant's daughter.

The foreign setting, the class tension suffusing personal relations the ritual snobbery of the Chinese aristocrats and the British traders, the background of actual events: as an episode in Victorian colonial expansion, the Opium Wars invite the plush, cultivated soap-opera treatment of Masterpiece Theatre . Nichols, though, designs the play's political substance more directly in the relations of

performance, for Poppy examines the imperial economy in the rhetoric of the quintessential Victorian theatrical genre, the English pantomime. Queen Victoria—who, as the panto "good fairy," assumes a variety of guises in the play—appropriately defines the conventions of English pantomime, explaining them to her principal adversary in Poppy, the Chinese Emperor:

  I fear I must detain
You yet a minute longer to explain
That regular immortal intervention
's a vital part of pantomime convention.
Another is a superfluity
Of blatant sexual ambiguity.
A man, for instance, always plays a Dame—
Yet he may have a son who by the same
Perverse tradition struts on high-heeled shoes
And flaunts an ample bosom . . .
(31)

Dick is of course Dick Whittington, "principal boy" of the classic Christmas panto, now the decayed descendant of the famous Lord Mayor. Played by a woman, he is paired with the panto "dame," the dowager Lady Whittington (Dodo), played by a man, and accompanied by his faithful servant Jack Idle, his ward Sally, and their blue panto ponies.^[14] Along with Aladdin, Cinderella, The Babes

[14] For details see Coveney. The traditional legend, which dates from the sixteenth century, is a parable of capitalist investment. Dick Whittington leaves rural poverty for service in London. He comes into the employ of the merchant Fitzwarren, and his happiness is clouded only by regular beatings from the cook, and by the mice and rats that infest his bedroom. For a penny, he buys a cat, which rids him of the vermin. The merchant, preparing an argosy, invites each of his servants to invest some property. Since Whittington has only the cat to invest, he does so; the vermin return, the cook's beatings worsen, and Dick sadly leaves London. Meanwhile, the ship lands in Barbary to trade. The captain and crew are feasted by the Barbary king, but before they can eat, hordes of mice and rats swarm over the feast and consume it. The captain strikes a deal with the king, and when Dick's cat drives away the vermin, the king buys the cat and all the goods on the ship as well, paying "ten times as much money as the ship's whole cargo." When Dick changes his mind and returns to London, he discovers that his investment has produced a huge return, and that he is wealthy. With such good fortune, Dick grows up to become the renowned Lord Mayor, knighted by Henry V, and known for his public munificence. For illustration, I quote from The History of Dick Whittington [c. 1814].

in the Woods, Puss-in-Boots, and Robin Hood, Dick Whittington and His Cat provides one of the perennial pantomime plots, and in its bawdy couplets and horrific puns, music and dance numbers, special effects and "transformation scenes," dramatic structure and tone, Poppy everywhere deploys the traditional devices of Boxing Day fare.^[15] "Deciphering the British pantomime" is the critical activity of the play, for Poppy invites us to see panto as representative of the ideological process sustaining both the Victorian and the contemporary social order: "Good honest folk subliminally know / That romance helps maintain the status quo" (31).

Nichols's scrupulous attention to the rhetoric of pantomime implies that the politics of Poppy arise from the way that English panto traditionally addresses its audience. Despite its fantastic spectacle and audience of children, pantomime has always verged on "good Aristophanic satire," as Leigh Hunt put it (qtd. in Booth 5: 46). What distinguishes pantomime from other theatrical genres is not its topicality but its rhetorical elasticity in performance. Pantomime's mishmash of spectacle, song and dance, ballet, slapstick, and cross-dressing tends to interrupt the fictive surface of the drama, and of the fourth wall separating the actors from their audience. Rather than assigning a fixed performance style to the production, and so fixing a relationship between stage and spectator, pantomime constantly alters its strategy of address, as when the Cook was played as a "New Woman" in an 1894 Dick Whittington, or when Jack Idle joked about the Barbican's air-conditioning and parking facilities during Poppy 's run with the Royal Shakespeare Company.^[16] Not only is the audience acknowledged, it is often invited to play a part in the drama. At one moment in Fred Locke's Dick Whittington (Edinburgh, 1893), Dick asks, "Is it a crime to have an empty purse?" to which Jack, encouraging the audience

[15] On pantomime, see Booth 5: 46. Booth's introduction provides an informative account both of the development of pantomime in the nineteenth century and of its relation to other spectacular genres such as burlesque and extravaganza.

[16] Since such topical remarks must arise from current events, they are, naturally, not to be found in the published text of Poppy; Jack Idle's comments on the Barbican are reported by Michael Coveney in his review. On the "New Woman," see the photograph of Herbert Campbell and Dan Leno in the 1894 Drury Lane Dick Whittington in Mander and Mitchenson plate 135.

to join him, replies, "A crime! Society knows nothing worse." Brecht recognized that such "radical separation of the elements  . . . always brings up the question 'which is the pretext for what'" (Brecht on Theatre 37). By decentering the dramatic representation as the motive "pretext" for the performance, pantomime builds an active and actual relationship between the spectator, the drama, and its performance.

The pantomime audience authorizes the spectacle, and often quite literally enables it to proceed. Panto frankly addresses us as spectators, and it implicitly addresses us as paying spectators, since the holiday pantomime has traditionally offset the expenses of the "legitimate" drama. W. S. Gilbert noted that the theater manager "looks upon the pantomime he is about to produce as the only source of important profit that the year will bring him. Its duty is to recoup him for the losses attendant upon two or three trashy sensation plays, a feeble comedy, and a heavy Shakespearian revival" (qtd. in Booth 5: 55). Although for some theaters the pantomime subsidy has been replaced by one from the government, panto remains popular in London—Dick Whittington was staged there during the Christmas season prior to the opening of Poppy, as were Aladdin and Cinderella —and in the provinces, and becomes profitable in the traditional manner: by widening the class composition of the audience.^[17] Panto is usually recalled with nostalgia, as "ideal family entertainment because it combines a children's story with a great deal of sexual innuendo which the parents can enjoy while it remains unnoticed by the children" ("Pantomime").^[18] Yet the fairy world of panto is firmly rooted in the economics of theatrical survival. Pantomime author John Morley remarks that the "only time working-class people go to the theatre is in the Christmas season," which lends panto its populist flavor. Even though the "real national theatre is not on the South Bank at all. It's in the provinces, at pantomime time," panto is widely regarded as a genre "mounted with cynicism, and executed without art," offered each Christmas to the "more conservative proclivities" of a dramatically naive audi-

[17] On the continued popularity of panto in the provinces and in London, see "Dame for a laugh."

[18] Yet as Stanley Baxter—a pantomime pro—describes them, the children watching his Cinderella hardly seem so innocent: "They scream obscenities their parents never imagined they knew!"; see Hiley, "Revolution" 15.

ence.^[19] While panto identifies its children as "innocent," it identifies its adult audience as childish, easily seduced into financing the "legitimate" theater that largely eludes or excludes them—"What signify Dick's riches, fame, and glory, / If they—our patrons—relish not our story?" (Locke). Although pantomime claims to serve its public, it witholds "patron" status from the audience that underwrites the theater's more artistic endeavors. Drama and entertainment, patron and consumer: pantomime conceals its patronizing innuendo within the "popular" and profitable gusto of good dirty fun.

Poppy relates the performance conventions of pantomime to Victorian imperialism, in order to identify our performance in the audience with our conduct outside the theater. The conventions of panto include the audience in the dramatic action, much as when Obadiah Upward gleefully explains the opium economy to us, the "boys and girls" in the house:

Your cuppa's what it's all about. Your English cuppa China tea. We needed that but they never wanted anything of ours. Not Derbyshire porcelain nor the latest mousetraps nor cotton drawers from Manchester. So all the time we paid for tea with hard cash it was a drain on our currency reserves. We had to discover something they wanted as urgently as we wanted their tea. Are you with me so far?
(45)

Rolling a huge crate of opium balls onstage, pulling down a chart from the flies, surrounded by calculating clerks, Upward transforms the traditional Dick Whittington scene in Fitzwarren's countinghouse into an illustration of how the English instigated and monopolized the opium trade: "John Chinaman is already paying more for his pipe than John Bull's paying for his cuppa. We've achieved a balance of payments!" (47).

Poppy shrewdly identifies us as—economically speaking—chil-

[19] Hiley, "Revolution" 15, 12. In their 1969 survey of the audience of the subsidized Citizens' Theatre of Glasgow, Roy Wilkie and David Bradley imply the extent to which the pantomime audience differs from the usual audience of subsidy theaters. The Glasgow audience identified itself as largely composed of students and professionals: 68% identified themselves as either students, professionals, or teachers. Of this audience, 32% had attended the opera during the previous year, while only 16% had seen a pantomime (39, 56).

dren, needing a graphic illustration of the coercive principles of free trade. Although Poppy assigns us a childish grasp of the ways of the world economy, it refuses to allow us to hide behind childlike sentiment. The play reverses the usual disjunction between panto's "innocence" and the economic calculation it conceals. Much as in Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), the audience's "belief" is put to the test, but in a way that casts theatrical participation as social complicity. Late in the play, for instance, Upward and Lady Dodo sing a rousing song about the sacking of the Summer Palace. Since the "finale's not ready yet," the song must be repeated, and, as Upward complains, "Well, if we're going to sing it again, we're going to need some help from the boys and girls." Upward and Dodo divide the house in two, pull lyrics down from the flies, and lead the audience in a song, miming a machine-gun accompaniment: "The sound you hear's the fusiliers / Shooting the crystal chandeliers" (108). As John Russell Taylor reported, "It is a sight to behold": "'Rat-tat-tat-tat! Ker-pow, ker-splat!' cry the bejewelled women and dinner-jacketed men enthusiastically, aiming with a will their imaginary gatling guns and hand-grenades at one another."^[20]

Audience participation of this kind is a traditional part of pantomime "fun," one that explicitly characterizes the audience's performance as part of the dramatic action. William Archer reports that "Miss Ada Blanche made a very popular Robinson Crusoe" in Sir Augustus Harris's 1894 panto, ministering "to that patriotism which is one of the holiest feelings of our nature, by exterminating a huddled crowd of savages with a machine-gun" (1894 7). Raising the house lights always alters the spectators' sense of the spectacle, momentarily revealing an intimacy both enabled and structured by the performance we have shared. Here, Nichols decisively qualifies that intimacy. We applaud the theatrical spectacle, confirming its success. Our performance also authorizes, and literally advances, both the plot of the drama and its theatrical presentation. Our activity strips away the layers of "innuendo" that are the real subject of Poppy , dramatizing our ongoing addiction to the rhetoric of empire. Poppy invites us to play out both a political act and its inscription as ideology, to sing for ourselves the song of domination.

[20] John Russell Taylor, rev. of Poppy, Plays and Players (December 1982).

In the theater, Poppy dramatizes both the process of imperial expansion, and its "transformation" to entertainment. In this regard, the stage illusions of pantomime are also shown to have an ideological function. The Chinese play the part of the panto primitives in the Whittington genre. In Poppy , though, the Chinese also provide most of the play's best special effects.^[21] In the opening scene, the Chinese Emperor appears to the sound of a gong, flying in a throne suspended high above a mist-swirled stage, chastising Victoria before he disappears in a burst of flame, smoke, and music. Throughout the play, the Emperor relies on his magnificent stage magic; at the moment of Canton's final collapse, the Emperor performs "a series of impressive illusions, conjuring WARRIORS in antique garb from traps and flies. . . . invoking DEMONS, SPIDERS and FIGURES from Chinese classical theatre. Smoke and drums " (98–99). As the Emperor discovers, "Such gestures aren't to be relied upon" (67). The imperial pantomime constitutes Chinese power as illusion, mere mystification. In defeat, the Emperor's magic is defeated, too: after his fall, the Emperor slowly rises from the trap, "No flash, no smoke. He juggles with three cigar boxes, drops one and throws them in disgust down the hole " (105). To the English, and to the audience, the Chinese are not barbaric; their culture and society are simply unreal, an "illusion" within the codes of theater and power shared by the English characters and their audience. Of all of the theater's participants, only the Chinese are unable to decipher the British pantomime. Only for them is Dick's gender subject to an unreadable code—is he a man, woman, or "Foreign Devil Eunuch" (62–63)?

In its thorough refiguration of the rhetoric of pantomime, Poppy dramatizes the continuity between the fictions of the stage and our own. To suggest the historical progress of colonization, Nichols occasionally interrupts the panto mode, intercalating moments of Savoyard light opera, Broadway musical, and the officious narra-

[21] The cultural misunderstandings typical of the English encounter with the inhabitants of Barbary are transformed in Poppy into a misunderstanding of the basis of opium economy—the Emperor argues, "Without our tea and rhubarb your whole nation / Will die in agonies of constipation" (3). Nichols, in fine panto manner, works the rhubarb/opium "shit" joke for all it is worth and more. In Locke's Whittington , a similar situation develops when the native king Rustifustican develops an ambiguous passion for the Cook: "She's not half bad-looking. I'll mash her, and if she's a failure as a wife, she'll always come in handy for the larder" (42).

tive voice of 1940s newsreels ("To the likes of you and me it may look like nothing more than a common wild flower but to old Abdul and his hardpressed family it means full stomachs and a safe future" 33). This sequence comes to a climax in the panto's finale, the transformation scene:

DICK and LUCY are twentieth century City-of-London people: he in dark suit, bowler, rolled umbrella, Financial Times. She a City man's wife in dowdy dress.

They all turn upstage and above, VICTORIA appears as ELIZABETH the SECOND, waving in the royal way.
(115)

Instead of the traditional harlequinade, the play trains its panto magic on the audience once again. Dick and his rapacious contemporaries are transformed into staid moderns, the play argues, precisely because nothing is really changed: the Victorian adventurer and the modern banker are convertible within the imperial "romance" that maintains the status quo. When Dick is transformed into one of us, and the cast turns upstage to wave to Victoria/Elizabeth, Poppy enacts another, more subtle change. The "characters" are transformed into modern "spectators," while we—as our playing has implied throughout—are explicitly converted to "characters," an extension of the onstage audience waving at the queen. Like the transformation of the Victorians into moderns, this conversion also urges a substantial likeness between characters and spectators, by claiming the "spectator" as a kind of character, a site of performance grounded within the procedures of the theater and its society. Our activity, our wave of acknowledgment, provides the play's concluding harlequinade.

Or at least Poppy might stage us in this way. Nichols has inscribed the politics of Poppy in the rhetoric of its staging; changing that rhetoric unavoidably alters our performance, and the political process of the play. This problem was illustrated by the RSC's 1982 production. Perhaps because of the size of the Barbican, which seemed to thwart the intimacy needed for pantomime, director Terry Hands inflated, polished, and smoothed out the play's style, rephrasing the homely dialect of English panto in the brassy idiom of Broadway musical. This compromise between Broadway and the London Palladium reversed the play's theatrical politics: "The Royal Shakespeare Company's spirited and well-drilled perfor-

mance allows almost no time for any intrusion by sombre realities. . . . if you can forget what [Poppy ] is actually supposed to be about you will find this jolly romp quite suitable—give or take a few blasphemies and four-letter words—to bring all the family to for a Boxing Day treat" (Hayter). Rather than capturing the spectator within the politics of pantomime, Nichols's Aristophanic panto became a complacent "celebration of Britishness," just some "jolly good fun"; if that fun could make enough money to subsidize all that dreary Shakespeare, so much the better.^[22] Small wonder that Nichols vowed to leave the stage: Poppy was transformed into a "jolly romp," brilliant technique emptied of social implication, a golden haze through which we might see, faintly, the trace of politics. Theater for pleasure or theater for instruction: both the direction and the critical reception of Poppy reveal a desire to resume the privileged, invisible power assigned to the audience of the realistic theater. In this production, at least, the spectators' "jolly good fun" remained distinct from the field of human relations constructed by the performance. The patrons were encouraged to believe in their child-like privilege, their freedom above and beyond the spectacle of exploitation.