From Moveable Stage to Moving Image: Portable Theatre and Early Narrative Film in William Haggar's Charles Peace,1905

Abstract

Portable theatres were a distinctive part of the British cultural scene in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overlapping with the emergence of cinema, their contribution to narrative filmmaking has been little studied. Mostly shot between 1901 and 1908, in the films of William Haggar, we have a striking example of portable theatre turned into crowd-pleasing cinema. Marketed by leading distributors such as Charles Urban and Gaumont British, Haggar's films reached far beyond the fairgrounds for which they were originally made. Drawing heavily on his family of professional actors and the standard repertoire of portables, Haggar's films had a confidence and energy born of years of experience on the road. As evidenced in his 1905 masterpiece, Charles Peace, they also had a strongly anti-authoritarian streak. Through a contextualised reading of this still extant film, we not only see a prime example of early British cinema, but also catch sight of the otherwise lost practices of the popular nineteenth-century stage.