Billie-Gina Thomason is currently undertaking an MRes in Modern History in Liverpool John Moores University and is beginning the historicisation of trans* identity. Billie-Gina’s research focusses on nineteenth century female husbands. By using newspapers her interests lie in how female cross-dressers lived in their communities despite living in a time of such gender and sexual rigidity. Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester was written by Abi Hynes. The play was directed by Helen Parry and produced by Pagelight Productions and
Read moreTag: Plays
‘The Masque of Anarchy’ at the Manchester International Festival, 2013.
‘The sun looked down through a sultry and motionless air’ (Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, i (London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co, 1844), p. 208. Monday 16 August 1819 was a hot day, the weather contributing to the size of the crowd that assembled at St Peter’s Field to attend a political meeting that entered the annals of history under the name ‘Peterloo’. Nearly two hundred years later, around two thousand people a night (12–14 July 2013)
Read moreBBC Radio Three and Dion Boucicault’s ‘The Octoroon’ (1859)
By Ian Higgins (University of Leicester) A few week’s ago Victorian melodrama was (briefly) revived on the airwaves in a one-off production of Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon, which forms part of a series of plays curated by Mark Ravenhill for BBC Radio 3’s Drama on 3. The play was recorded for radio in front of a live audience at the Victorian-era Theatre Royal Stratford East, which hosted a production of the same play in 1885. It was a
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