ABSTRACT
The established view of First World War theatre in Britain is that it responded to the declaration of war on 4 August 1914 with a flood of crude propaganda plays and never really recovered. Historians of wartime culture have tended to follow Sassoon, adopting a disparaging stance towards an ephemeral form of entertainment that sought public approval and a "fast buck". This chapter argues for the importance of wartime revue and highlights some of the ways in which revues were generated and played out. It suggests that the wartime theatre industry's debt and continuing commitment to revue, as well as the form's relatively low status in subsequent histories of the period. Revue raises a number of questions for historians of First World War culture. Most obviously, there is the disappearance from cultural history of a particular body of work.
