ABSTRACT
The theatre of the actor-managers was designed to attract the rising bourgeoisie. Arthur Wing Pinero, whom some saw as the saviour of contemporary drama in the 1890s, began his stage career as an actor, he was Rosencrantz in Irving’s Hamlet and this put him in a position to assert his right to dictate in rehearsal. The ‘fallen’ woman became his specialty: in The Magistrate, Agatha, Posket’s second wife, conceals her past from her husband; in The Schoolmistress , Miss Dyott is leading a double life, she is the schoolmistress, but she is also a somewhat risqué entertainer. Theatres beyond the west end developed their own version of the ‘fallen’ woman. The Pavilion in Whitechapel mounted shows like Arthur Shirley and Benjamin Laudeck’s Women and Wine in which Rachel la Solla played La Colombe, an ‘evil Parisian coquette of the most lurid type’.
