Spend some time with Heather Ladd and she just might spill the tea.
Only the gossip she’s serving is a little dated. Actually, it’s hundreds of years old.
The Kwantlen Polytechnic University English instructor’s first academic book, English Theatrical Anecdotes, 1660-1800, newly published by University of Delaware Press, explores the role theatre gossip played in the construction of stage fame in England’s emergent celebrity culture. Co-edited by Leslie Ritchie, the book also covers the challenges of using such anecdotes in theatre scholarship today, and demonstrates how toxic celebrity culture can be.
“Some of these stories are about relationships between these people and interesting things that happened on stage and off stage in green rooms. They’re very, very gossipy, but there’s a lot of really interesting information about the theatre in these stories,” says Ladd.
The book is a collection of essays from academic contributors exploring the entertaining, gossipy stories about theatre people in the Restoration period and 18th century, an important time in the history of stage celebrity in England. These anecdotes served as keys to a theatre person’s success – producing, maintaining and sometimes destroying individual fame.
Ladd, who holds a PhD in English literature, particularly enjoys the stories born from live performance, such as the tale of an actress playing Juliet in the William Shakespeare tragedy Romeo and Juliet. At the moment Juliet is to stab herself, she can’t. The props worker didn’t provide her with a knife so the actor is forced to improvise.
“At first the audience laughs, but she’s such an effective actress that she moves this audience to be horrified, even though they have to use their imagination,” says Ladd. “I find those stories the most entertaining, and they also give us a lot of information about theatre history.”
The rise of celebrity on stage coincided with the rise of print media. Besides word of mouth, theatre stories began taking root in reviews, newspaper articles and biographies. Theatre playbooks and memorabilia – akin to the modern-day Hamilton T-shirt – also became a thing, furthering stage celebrity.
In her research Ladd found not all stories could be verified. But even fiction says something about the way performers are regarded in this period. For example, Ladd says, there’s a disproportionate number of theatrical anecdotes about actresses and their sexual history, some of them quite salacious.
That erosion of the boundary between public and private and fictionalizing an individual is deeply familiar to today’s celebrity culture.
“I think we have to be aware of our own tendency to repeat these kinds of stories, even right now,” says Ladd. “We have to be aware of why and how these stories are told and how they might be perpetuating a lot of prejudices, like misogynistic views of women.”
Other stories from the period perpetuated racism or ideal body types. Ladd says the lesson of these anecdotes is they have to be taken with a grain of salt.
“They can tell us a lot about the cultural environment from which they arose. But we have to be careful when we do repeat them, not simply because they might be untrue because they're unverifiable, but because they might actually be damaging.”
A solo writing project is up next for Ladd, but for now she’ll be tittle-tattling about theatrical anecdotes, including sharing academic publishing tips at an upcoming panel discussion.