New Thinking: Playhouses and opera-going

From Lyons’ Corner House opera performances in the 1920s to 1980s productions staged in fish and chip shops in Scotland – Alexandra Wilson has been studying the history of opera going and presents us with a wider audience for the art form than current stereotypes might have you think. Callan Davies has looked at what went on in Elizabethan playhouses aside from plays by the likes of Shakespeare. New archaeological digs and legal documents featuring complaints are giving us evidence for a kind of leisure centre or arena which might have seen animal sports, fencing matches or spectaculars. Laurence Scott hosts the conversation.

Alexandra Wilson is Professor of music and cultural history from Oxford Brookes University and the author of Opera in the Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain

Callan Davies is lecturer in 17th-century studies at the University of Southampton. His book is called What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620 and he’s involved in a research project called Box Office Bears which you can hear more about in another of our New Thinking episodes of the Arts and Ideas podcast and you can find more information about playhouses here: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/shakespeares-world/playhouses/ https://www.thestageshoreditch.com/discover/history-heritage

Laurence Scott is the author of two books The Four-Dimensional Human and Picnic Comma Lightning. He teaches writing and literature at New York University in London and became a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in the first year of the scheme in 2011.

This New Thinking episode of the Arts and Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find a collection of episodes focused on new research on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking programme website.