Fashioning fairy fellows: Androgynous performativity in the Savoy Shakespeare Productions 1912–14

For a few seasons in London theatres before the outbreak of the First World War, modernizations of historical costume embodied androgyny in both Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and Harley Granville Barker’s Savoy Shakespeare Productions. In Twelfth Night of 1912 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1914, cross-dressing, folkloric and magical characterization through costume performed a gender fluidity at the heart of both scenarios. In Prefaces to Shakespeare (1927–46), Barker positions Oberon’s intersex hybridity as ‘travesty’. The Savoy Productions reimagined the androgyny of the fairy characters supplanting the feminization and infantilization favoured in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions with the casting and costuming of Dennis Neilson Terry as Oberon and Donald Calthrop as Puck. Neglected archival evidence of Norman Wilkinson’s drawings originally bequeathed to the Courtauld Institute and now in the V & A London reveal how his historical and ‘Post-Impressionist’ costume designs enrich understandings of these productions glimpsed in publicity photographs and reviews. These traces capture how the embodied interpretation of Barker’s players performed a folkloric androgyny through gesture, movement and costume. Cross-dressing in modernized Elizabethan ‘menswear’ in Twelfth Night and the exotic golden and sylvan ‘fairies’ of The Dream reveal how costume amplified the performance of complexly fluid and androgynous gender on the Edwardian stage.