Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Julia Fawcett, UC Berkeley
Title: Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City (U Michigan Press, 2025)
Release date: October 25, 2025

This episode features Dr. Julia Fawcett discussing her new book, Movable Londons: Performance and the Modern City. The conversation explores how performances—especially those in the London theaters during the Restoration era—interacted with the social, spatial, and political transformations of early modern London post-Great Fire. Fawcett examines concepts of personal, public, and theatrical space, mobility, and how actors, workers, marginalized groups, and urban planners navigated the city. The discussion draws resonances between Restoration-era housing precarity and present-day urban issues.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Motivation for the Book

• Personal and Professional Background (03:03)

  • Fawcett is a professor at UC Berkeley, interested in theatre history and performance studies, particularly unscripted aspects of performance.
  • Initial inspiration stemmed from relocating to Toronto and encountering pronounced, vocalized rules about personal/public space; led her to think about unspoken spatial norms in cities.

• Historical Relevance to Contemporary Issues (04:30)

  • Connection between post-Great Fire housing changes in London and current housing crises, especially in places like the Bay Area.
  • Quote:

    “I started to kind of think about other housing crises in history, or rather this particular housing crisis happening just after the Great Fire as being maybe one way to think about our own situation in the Bay Area.” (05:32, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

2. Title Keywords: "Movable," "Performance," "Modern City"

• The Concept of "Movable" (06:20)
  • Movable Property vs. Real Estate:
    • Rise of trade economy and capitalism shifted value from static land to circulating goods and people.
  • Social Mobility and Forced Movement:
    • Enslaved people, refugees, and laborers were forced to move around the empire and city. Their experiences left faint traces in the historical record.
  • Theatrical Scenery:
    • Introduction of movable scenery in public theaters changed stagecraft, shifting from static backdrops to dynamic, changeable environments.
    • The illusion of perspective worked only from a fixed viewpoint, breaking down when the viewer moved—a metaphor for lived experience in the city.
  • Memorable Moment:

    “I started to focus not just on the scenery and not on the scenery when it was still, but on its movement and all of the movement around it… conceptualizing the city as this place of shifting scenery and shifting spaces and shifting bodies.” (10:45, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

3. Why Theatre? The London Theatre Scene as a Lens (11:59)

• The Restoration marked radical changes: legal return of theatres (post-Interregnum), entry of women on stage, and the spread of movable scenery.
• Movable scenery, previously exclusive to court theaters, now had a profound public impact and lasting legacy on audience experience.

4. Class, Labor, and Space: Servants on Stage and in Society

• Rise of Servant Visibility (14:26)
  • Social and economic change meant more people displaced from agriculture became urban servants; rise of the bourgeoisie led to more visible servant classes.
  • Theatrical roles for servants expanded, mirroring greater real-world prevalence and agency.
  • Actors, precariously employed, often blurred lines between performance and servanthood due to patronage systems (issued livery, called "the king’s servants").
  • Stagehands, requiring similar skills as servants, became visible thanks to movable scenery.
  • Quote:

    “There’s all sorts of overlaps between these kind of classes of workers in the theaters at the time.” (17:15, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

5. Gender, Law, and Theatrical Space

• Changing Laws and Women’s Navigation of the City (18:30)

  • Transition of rape law from a property crime (against men) to a sexual crime (property in one’s own body)—but only for (some) white, upper/middle-class women.

  • Rise of scrutiny and policing of women’s movement and clothing.

  • On stage, popular formulae set "chaste" against "promiscuous" women (e.g., Anne Bracegirdle and Elizabeth Barry’s roles).

  • Aphra Behn, a pioneering female playwright, challenged these conventions, using detailed stage directions to map out gendered movement.

  • Quote:

    “A popular formula in the plays at the time was to set a chaste woman beside a sort of promiscuous woman in the plot of the play. And this was so popular that there were actresses who were typecast in these roles.” (20:15, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

  • Limitations for Lower-Class and Enslaved Women (24:38)

    • Legal and societal changes did not extend to enslaved women or, to a lesser extent, lower-class and servant women.
    • Plays, including Behn’s, sometimes hint at the vulnerability of women excluded from reforms.

  • Quote:

    “This didn’t apply to enslaved women who are still regarded property and who were, I think, very visible and part of London life at this time. And it applied sort of less so also to servants and lower class women who had less access to personal space than upper class women...” (24:38, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

6. Spatial Technologies: Beyond the Theatre (27:06)

• Dissenters and Secret Worship

  • Dissenting religious communities, banned from gathering, used theatrical technology—trapdoors, movable walls, hidden entrances—to evade authorities.

  • Irony: These anti-theatrical groups had to borrow technology and even some mannerisms from the stage.

  • Reciprocal references as plays poked fun at dissenters’ disguised performances.

  • Quote:

    “Dissenters were often using theatrical technologies to escape this group of laws ... technologies were very similar to those used on stage to shift scenes.” (27:47, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

7. Immigration, Labor, and Ethnic Identity (30:13)

• Irish Migration and Stage Representation
  • Influx of Irish labor post-Great Fire addressed building needs; many likely became theater stagehands and set constructors.
  • The “stage Irishman” was a stock character; playwright George Farquhar, himself Irish, offered a new, insider take.
  • These migrations linked population anxieties, urban labor, colonial resettlement, and theatre.

8. Cosmopolitanism and Appropriation (35:04)

• London’s growing diversity (due to imperialism and economic change) led to new valuations of "cosmopolitan" identity.

• The paradox: those considered most "cosmopolitan" (upper-class English) appropriated the knowledge, experience, and mobility of actually mobile populations—especially enslaved Africans and immigrants—while downplaying or denying their contributions.

  • Quote:

    “There was this kind of both admiration for the knowledge that enslaved Africans held about geographical, you know, areas beyond England ... at the same time that the English wanted to claim that knowledge for their own.” (37:10, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

9. Legacies: London’s Influence Beyond London (38:07)

• London’s post-fire planning was exported—often imperfectly—to colonies (e.g., Kingston, Charleston, Mumbai).

• The grid and spatial logic of London shaped—and sometimes clashed with—the geographies of other places.

• Reference to Dionne Brand’s experience of urban familiarity between Caribbean and London, due to colonial planning.

• Modern urban “makeshift” communities (like in Chamoiseau’s Texaco) reflect ongoing resistance to imposed urban order.

  • Quote:

    “This tension between the plans that these elite urban planners are making in London and then sort of spreading out all over the world ... is so key to how we think about cities, not only in London, but all over the world now.” (40:52, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On personal experience shaping research:

  “Torontonians...would shout rules at me all the time when I was biking or when I was walking. And so I kind of started to think about differences between cities and...how people were invited to use public space and all the sort of unspoken rules around that.” (03:29, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

• On movable scenery and urban experience:

  “The minute that you moved to the right or to the left, the perspective would...get messed up. And I was interested in that messing up.” (09:21, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

• On the paradox of cosmopolitanism:

  “What makes [Mr. Spectator] feel the most like a Londoner is when he goes to the Royal Exchange and he sees all of these people and products from other places...it seems kind of oxymoronic that what makes him feel most English is being able to blend into all of these people that he defines as non English.” (35:45, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

• On global legacies of London’s city planning:

  “All of these people who are not from London originally and who are not even from Europe originally are actually influencing the way that London is built and is imagined and is perceived.” (38:37, Dr. Julia Fawcett)

Important Timestamps

• 03:03 – Fawcett on her background and motivation
• 06:20 – Explanation of “movable” as both argument and method
• 11:59 – Why the London theatre scene is key for exploring space and mobility
• 14:26 – Visibility and role of servants in theater and society
• 18:30 – Gendered movement, rape law, and women’s space in city and on stage
• 24:38 – Limits of legal changes for enslaved and lower-class women
• 27:06 – Theatrical technologies adapted by religious dissenters
• 30:42 – Irish migration, labor, and representation on London stages
• 35:04 – “Cosmopolitan” identity and appropriation
• 38:07 – London’s city planning as global export; living legacies

What’s Next for Dr. Fawcett?

• Current/Future Projects: (42:55)
  • Articles on Bethlehem Asylum and urban madness, the intersection of air as performance and early urban air pollution, possibly exploring the history play and conceptions of time.

Conclusion

Dr. Julia Fawcett’s Movable Londons weaves together theater history, urban studies, class and gender, and the legacies of British imperialism, showing how the changing city and the moving stage were entangled in shaping modernity. Her engaging discussion highlights both the visible and invisible actors influencing urban transformation, bringing past and present into provocative dialogue.

The book is available from University of Michigan Press, 2025.