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The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First

Age of Globalization

CHRISTOPHER B. BALME

Theatre Research International / Volume 40 / Issue 01 / March 2015, pp 19 - 36

DOI: 10.1017/S0307883314000546, Published online: 06 February 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0307883314000546

How to cite this article:

CHRISTOPHER B. BALME (2015). The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in the First Age of
Globalization. Theatre Research International, 40, pp 19-36 doi:10.1017/S0307883314000546

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 theatre research international vol. 40 | no. 1 | pp1936
 Federation for Theatre Research 2015 doi:10.1017/S0307883314000546
C International

The Bandmann Circuit: Theatrical Networks in

the First Age of Globalization1
christopher b. balme

This article examines a theatrical network, the Bandmann Circuit, managed by Maurice E. Bandmann
in the first two decades of the twentieth century as a form of globalized theatre. It asks why this kind
of transnational theatrical activity has received so little scholarly attention and proposes utilizing
actor-network-theory as a means to make the complex connectivity of such enterprises visible. The first
section of the article discusses the concept of early globalization, roughly the period from 1860 to 1914, as
a period having many parallels with our own time. The second part discusses actor-network-theory as
a theatre-historiographical method, which is then applied to selected nodes of the Bandmann Circuit,
in particular repertoire, audiences and the use of local partners as examples of a much more multiaxial
undertaking.

In comparison to literature and the fine arts, there have been few attempts to theorize
and conceptualize a notion such as global, world or transnational theatre history.2 The
terms mean, of course, different things: whereas world and global tend to be used
interchangeably, transnational assumes clearly defined nation states as the point of
reference for whatever traffic and movement is to be studied. Historically, transnational
theatre has been, it could be argued, if not a norm, then at least an integral part of Western
theatrical culture since the early modern period, as Italian and English troupes set off on
extended peregrinations across the Continent.3 Behind these peripatetic excursions lies
the paradigmatic shift from a festival to a market economy, from theatre produced for
specific occasions according to a festive calendar to one that needed to sell its product in
a marketplace of competing entertainment forms. World or global theatre in the sense
of world-encompassing and circumnavigating, if not the whole globe, then a good part
of it, is a more recent development, not much older than 150 years. It is, I argue, part and
parcel of what many historians of global history term first-phase globalization, which
refers to the second half of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries.
In this article I want to focus in particular on the question of transnational theatrical
networks and how they functioned in the context of early globalization. I examine in
particular the phenomenon of theatrical touring, perhaps the most under-researched
of the various manifestations of transnational, even global, theatre in the period under
scrutiny. I begin with some general remarks on the term globalization and on how
historians have applied it to this period. Shifting to the theatre itself, the focus becomes
threefold: on the theatrical networks operating around the turn of the century that were
transitioning from the almost moribund actormanager model to complex, syndicated

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20 balme The Bandmann Circuit

systems of theatrical entrepreneurship represented in our case by the theatrical circuit

established by the largely forgotten actor and manager Maurice E. Bandmann, who,
I argue, is representative of a significant new development. I attempt to tie together
all of these heterogeneous factors by framing my material within the coordinates of
actor-network-theory, a sociological theory developed mainly in science studies which
is, however, now beginning to be adapted for historical research.

Transnational theatre and first-phase globalization

Many historians regard the period between 1850 and 1914 as a first phase of globalization
in as much as it evinces many parallels with current uses of the term, even though the word
globalization does not appear until the 1960s.4 The watershed for this reading of world
history is, according to Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, the mid- to late nineteenth-
century worldwide processes of unsettlement that saw an accelerating mobilization of
peoples, things, ideas, and images and their diffusion in space and time and the efforts
of both local rulers and global regimes (empires) to settle them.5 The tensions ensuing
from these dynamic processes form a central focus of global history. Concomitant with
these tensions are technological advancements such as the laying of telegraph lines, the
introduction of fast steamships and the growing networks of colonial and administrative
centres, as well as the rapid spread of newspapers, which all combined to create the
prerequisites for globalization in almost the present sense: a compression of time and
space, movement towards standardization and a growing sensation of being part of an
interconnected world.
Parallel with these demographic and technological changes, theatre too began to
internationalize or globalize on an unprecedented scale. In 1889 there existed at one
very conservative estimate 302 permanent theatre buildings in Germany, England, France
and AustriaHungary. By the mid-1920s there were 2,499 permanent theatres in Europe
alone. In the period post-dating 1890, over 1,500 theatres were built, most of them
before 1914.6 This pattern was repeated throughout many of the former and existing
colonial empires, particularly in South East Asia and Latin America. In addition to the
construction of permanent theatre spaces, the same period saw a massive expansion
of theatrical touring, which began to be organized on an industrial scale and brought
European-style theatre to all of those parts of the globe that could be reached by steamship
or rail. Telegraph networks, countless local newspapers and syndicated news agencies
provided the communications infrastructure enabling the touring companies to find
their audiences. The same networks that brought European troupes to Asia and South
America also enabled movement in other directions as Japanese troupes came to the
United States and Europe, Chinese opera moved around the Pacific rim,7 and Parsi
theatre spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and into South East Asia, where it
generated local variants (bangsawan in Malay regions, and komedi stambul and likay in
the Dutch East Indies).8
The rapid spread of theatre in this period was largely the work of theatrical
managers, entrepreneurs and agents who established networks for the dissemination
of this theatrical traffic. One prominent but today largely forgotten theatre entrepreneur

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 21

who developed theatrical touring on a hitherto unimagined scale was Maurice Edward
Bandmann (18721922). Bandmann managed numerous companies as well as a chain of
up to fifty theatres that stretched from Gibraltar to Japan. Although he drew most of
his productions from London, the centre of his operations was not the British capital,
however, but India, where he had his headquarters in Calcutta, and later Cairo. His
operations represent, I argue, a significant shift towards the globalization of theatre. The
period immediately pre-dating the First World War saw a major change in theatrical
touring, which reflected the economic structures of capitalism in the age of empire. Prior
to this, it was, of course, quite normal practice to tour theatre. Its organizational form
was based, however, on the actormanager, an almost premodern business model in as
much as at the close of the nineteenth century it did not differ greatly from the touring
English or Italian troupes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was
characterized by strong familial ties, often a husband and wife as the lead performers and
business managers, supported by about a dozen performers. Prominent examples of the
actormanager model were Maurice Bandmanns own parents: Daniel Bandmann9 and
Millicent Bandmann-Palmer.10 Both toured a predominantly Shakespearean repertoire,
at first together, then separately, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Better-
known actormanagers are Edwin Booth, Frank Benson, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and
Henry Irving, to name only the most prominent.
Maurice Bandmann is a key figure in the transition from a premodern to a modern
practice of theatrical touring. After completing his schooling at a classical Gymnasium in
Wiesbaden, Bandmann entered the acting profession touring with both his father, in the
United States, and mother, in the United Kingdom. Although he was an accomplished
actor who soon formed his own troupe, his managerial career marks a new phase in the
organization of theatrical touring. Within a few years, he managed four separate troupes
in Britain, and in 1899 formed the Mediterranean and the East Entertainment Syndicate
to tour Gibraltar, Tangiers, Malta and Egypt, the first stage in building a circuit that was
to extend all the way to Japan.
After a first and somewhat unsuccessful foray into India in 1901, which coincided
with the death of Queen Victoria and hence a temporary lack of interest in musical
comedy, Bandmann took his light opera company to the West Indies. In 1902, he
embarked on a tour to South America extending from Brazil to Peru, with a return
route that included Halifax, Nova Scotia. In 1905, Bandmann resumed operations in
India and made Calcutta his headquarters, where he rapidly established a circuit, which
by his own account took in Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, India, Burmah, with the Malay States,
the Straits Settlements, China, Japan, Java and Philippine Islands.11 He also included
regular tours to the Caribbean. A calendar he issued to prospective theatres along the
route in 1906 already figured him as a global player positioned between ships, trains
and different theatrical genres, his hand resting nonchalantly on a globe (Fig. 1).
Bandmann built, owned, managed or leased numerous theatres along his circuit,
thus extending commercial control over all aspects of theatre production and reception.12
A stranger to modesty and an expert in self-advertisement, for almost twenty years the
name Bandmann stood for high-quality theatrical entertainment aimed at European and
local audiences alike. As a Singapore paper noted in 1906, The name of Bandmann is

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22 balme The Bandmann Circuit

Fig. 1 (Colour online) A calendar issued by Bandmann to publicize the 1907 theatrical season and his own
self-image as a global player. Photo: private collection.

a sort of guinea stamp among itinerant theatrical circles.13 In 1914 he floated a public
company, the Bandman Varieties Ltd, and some years later the Bandman Eastern Circuit
Ltd (he dropped the second, Germanic-looking n on his name because of the war),
which controlled his many interests, including cinema distribution.14 Upon his death in
1922 aged forty-nine, his personal fortune was assessed at around 33,000, the equivalent
of 1 million in todays currency. Despite his early death, Bandman Varieties and the
Bandman Eastern Circuit companies continued to operate in India well into the 1930s.

Connectivities: theatrical networks

The material presented so far is largely unknown, or least entirely absent from theatre
histories, lexica and archives. Why is this? And perhaps more importantly, how can one
examine this material in such a way that its dynamics and interconnections become
visible? I propose that network theory, and in particular actor-network-theory, may
offer one avenue. There are, of course, as many network theories as there are networks:
social, technological, biological, political and economic, to name only some. What

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 23

connects most of these quite disparate concepts and theories is a common emphasis
on relational structures. By definition, relational structures are changing configurations
of actors and nodes that constitute relay points around which communication and
interaction take place. Some forms of network analysis attempt to visually graph these
interconnections to demonstrate degrees of connectivity and tend to privilege aggregated
data demonstrating multiple connections and correlations over monocausal factors
such as class, sex, clan membership or individual agency.15 This has been termed the
anticategorical imperative, which rejects all attempts to explain human behaviour or
social processes solely in terms of the categorical attributes of actors, whether individual
or collective.16
Actor-network-theory, often playfully abbreviated as ANT, is a particular variant of
social network analysis that emerged in the 1970s in the field of the sociology of science,
or what is now known as science studies, and is linked to a group of French sociologists,
the best known of whom is Bruno Latour, but which also includes Michel Callon and
the English sociologist John Law.17 Broadly and abstractly speaking and at the risk of
some simplification, ANT looks at interconnected networks of exchange known as actor
networks. Actor networks consist in turn of interrelated nodes and actants, in which
human beings are as much relational effects as initiating, all-controlling subjects.18 The
revolutionary move of ANT was to make the non-social microbes and scallops to cite two
famous examples into social actors. From objects being acted upon by conventional
social actors, i.e. human beings, they were reconceptualized as part of a network in
which, under certain circumstances, they are seen to have considerable agency. Although
I do not want to enter too deeply into the controversies of this approach, its multiple
perspectives and descriptive imperatives can help us rethink the complex relationships
between theatrical trading, imperial formations and an understanding of what it meant
to circulate and perform theatre on the eve of the First World War.
Methodologically, actor-network-theory can be considered a form of ethnography
where techniques and practices of fieldwork and participant observation are applied to
contemporary society and its many fields. Latour states that ANT is simply another
way of being faithful to the insights of ethnomethodology.19 Darryl Cressman refers
to ANTs ethnographic bent: micro-level studies of the labs and boardrooms tracing
how actors exert influence over the trajectory of scientific and technical innovation.20
Since ethnography tends to focus on the present, how can theatre historians extend such
insights gathered from present-day laboratories and boardrooms and make them useful
for their concerns? And does not ANT have tautological implications for theatre, not
the least of which is the term actor, but more so because theatre is intrinsically social
on account of its conditions of collaborative production and collective reception? If we
simply revisit the usual objects of theatre research plays, performances, performers,
audiences and occasionally theatre buildings then there is a real danger that we simply
reformulate old insights with new metaphors.21 A more productive application of actor-
network-theory would require a recalibration of epistemological assumptions regarding
why we do not know anything about Maurice Bandmann and his global activities. If the
person did not register in the theatre-historical archive, then perhaps his circuit might. An
ANT perspective would force us to concern ourselves more with the network than with

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24 balme The Bandmann Circuit

the biographical person Maurice Edward Bandmann. It would lead to a concern with
shipping and railway networks, newspapers, advance agents, the colonial judiciary, leaky
ships, storms and tropical heat.22 Actants would include texts, companies of performers,
contracts and even courts, which all act upon each other in webs of relations.23
Although one has not needed ANT to study Shakespeare, for example, the same
cannot be said, I argue, for Maurice Bandmanns now forgotten circuit and indeed
this whole branch of theatrical activity, which is also largely overlooked and often not
even recorded in our theatre archives.24 While we could certainly map the activities of
Bandmann and his many colleagues onto commonly understood historical processes
such as commodification, imperial expansion and colonial power structures, I wish to
view them from the perspective of connectivity.25 In the chapter entitled First Move:
Localizing the Global in Reassembling the Social, Latour emphasizes the importance of
examining connectivity itself:
we have to lay continuous connections leading from one local interaction to the other
places, times, and agencies through which a local site is made to do something.
This means that we have to follow the path indicated by the process of delegation
or translation.26

Following this perspective, we need to conceptualize itinerant theatre such as the

Bandmann circuit as a set of interconnected nodes that together constitute the relay
points for these associations. We can try and map these nodes and their forms of
agency. This means that connections, vehicles and attachments are brought into the
foreground.27 We must try and conceptualize this network of associations across time
and space spanning thousands of miles, interacting in a dozen locales, each regulated by
a different legal system, cultural mores, audience tastes and compositions.
Finally, actor-network-theory is not just something that is applied to a pre-existing
object of research. Research itself forms an actor network in its own right. Prior to the
accessibility of digital technology, it could be argued, the Bandmann circuit did not exist.
The type of research to be described in this article has only been made possible with the
digital revolution and the advent of digitalized newspapers, books and other resources,
which enable peripatetic artists to be tracked. This technology ultimately circumscribes
what is discoverable and knowable and is thus a key actor in its own right.
An ANT way to examine Bandmanns circuit (and the many others like it) would be
to investigate the different nodes that were required for it to function at all. Leaving aside
the managerial role of Bandmann himself, which was obviously crucial but ultimately
not essential (his circuit continued to function long after his death), it is more productive
to try and grasp, if not the totality, at least the multiaxial nature of the system and its
various nodes. These can be represented as in Figure 2. In this conceptualization of a
theatrical network it is not the person Maurice Bandmann who forms the central node
but the circuit itself. The biographical person Bandmann is only one fulcrum exerting
pressure on the rest of the network.
Of central importance for any actor network are what Latour terms mediators.
These are transporters of meaning that transform, translate, distort and modify the
meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.28 In this sense they should be

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 25

Fig. 2 A conceptualization of the Bandmann circuit as an interconnected network of nodes.

distinguished from intermediaries where there is no such distortion and modification.29

In both cases the function of a mediator can be human or non-human, a scientific panel
of experts can be an intermediary, or a machine such as a computer can be a mediator.
Concepts such as mediators carry major epistemological implications. A conventional
way of looking at touring theatre such as the Bandmann circuit would be to regard the
passage of productions along the circuit and measure their degree of modification and
distortion from the originating source, the original Gaiety production in London, to
its version in Bombay or Calcutta or Yokohama. Our object of interest would be, then,
the local production of meaning, whether colonial or indigenous or some mixture of the
two.
A less conventional and more ANT way of looking at touring practices would be to
examine certain mediators in terms of the connectivity the Bandmann circuit exerted on
the social fabric of the many communities it interacted with on a regular basis. First, this
is clearly a difficult question to answer in the light of a complete dearth of research into
his activities. Second, following ANT terminology, it would be necessary to understand
a term such as social fabric quite literally as a kind of texture of interwoven connections
and associations. The diagram of the Bandmann circuit gives an indication of the different
knots or nodes in this fabric. In the next section of this essay I propose, therefore, to
discuss familiar topics of theatre history repertoire, publics and partnerships from
the perspective of mediation in the ANT sense of the term. In each case, I suggest, such
mediators or mediation processes can be seen to translate, distort and modify meaning,
not in a pejorative sense but as factors that cast light on the social dynamics of touring
theatre in the first age of globalization.

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26 balme The Bandmann Circuit

Repertoire as mediation
The Bandmann repertoire was highly varied and specialized, with each troupe
representing a different genre: opera, comedy, drama, variety, etc. These catered in turn
to pre-existing patterns of taste, derived mainly from English theatre-going practices. At
the height of his activities, Bandmann had several companies moving around the globe
in a rotating chain of changing genres and repertoires. In an interview given in 1906 he
described in detail his new rotation system. He planned to keep companies going in
regular rotation, working to and from London via the Mediterranean and Cairo to India
and then up the Far East, and returning by the route that his present company is doing
i.e. Burmah, Calcutta, Ceylon, and Bombay. He also intended to have quick changes
once the system became fully functional, so that

during the next two years Calcutta will never be without some theatrical entertainments:
[my dramatic repertoire company] will play a weeks season, and that will carry us well
on into January. In February my new musical comedy company arrives, and I shall open
with them at the Theatre Royal on 1 February 1907, with an entirely new repertoire. I
shall play in Calcutta seven weeks, with two changes a week . . . At the end of the seven
weeks there will be another company on the road, and in May and June, 1907, you will
have my Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire company. In July the dramatic company will
be on its way back from the Far East, and will play in Calcutta for about a month, and
in its turn make room for the musical comedy company. I shall probably reorganise
and play the cold weather season with one of my companies in Calcutta.30

Although in reality the operation was not quite as seamless as he envisaged, the rotation
system was in fact implemented. A repertoire could consist of up to a dozen different
works performed in one locale over the course of a two-week run. A fourteen-week
season in Calcutta, with its population of over a million, was the longest period that a
Bandmann company remained in one place. A normal sojourn in most cities comprised
a week to ten days at most. A travelling company could therefore most certainly be
considered a form of structured circulation.31
Repertoire can be examined as it connects with a culturally heterogeneous public
which will be discussed below but it also needs to be seen in relation to intellectual
property, as choice of repertoire was determined as much by access to and control of
copyright as by questions of taste. Bandmann controlled and traded in a wide variety
of intellectual property. One of the economic foundations of the Bandmann enterprise
was a close cooperation with George Edwardes (18551915) and the Gaiety Company
in London.32 Edwardes, who practically invented the genre of musical comedy and
produced numerous hit productions over a thirty-year period, entered into an agreement
with Bandmann around 1903 with the result that the latter obtained sole rights for the
British colonies and the Far East of the Gaiety plays.33 The control and management of
intellectual property was a highly territorial affair, as performance rights were assigned
to people, usually agents, who represented countries and/or regions. Whereas a country
such the US or the UK could be quite closely monitored by the rights holders, this was
not the case for the far-flung territories covered by the Bandmann circuit.

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 27

As well as managing his troupes and theatres, Bandmann also acted as an agent,
perhaps the best example of mediation as translation in the ANT sense of the term.
According to Latour, translation denotes a relation that does not transport causality
but induces two mediators into coexisting. Although they do not exist in a casual
relationship, translations between mediators may generate traceable associations.34
The theatrical agent is the quintessential actor in as much as he or she (and in this
period there were many female theatrical agents) enabled other mediators to function.
An illustrative example of this aspect of mediation can be seen in an exchange between
Bandmann and the Incorporated Society of Authors, which represented, among other
dramatists, George Bernard Shaw. In 1912, Shaw complained to G. Herbert Tring, the
societys secretary, that unlicensed performances of Candida had taken place at the Royal
Opera House, Bombay, Bandmanns newly opened theatre there. Bandmann explained
that the culprit was actormanager Allan Wilkie, who was touring India under a rival
management. Bandmann also made a counterproposal:

If Mr. Shaw desires it I will write to my people in India and try to collect the fees. I
am afraid this will be somewhat difficult in the case of this company, as I understand
they are at present somewhere in the North West of India. I note what you say re Mr.
Shaws insistency, and of course quite agree with him, but to enforce compensation in a
country like India is a far more difficult task I am afraid than what Mr. Shaw imagines,
and also a very expensive proceeding. Prevention is very much better than Cure in
matters of this sort out East, and if your society could make up their mind to appoint
me as their representative, I would then be in a position to instruct the agents which I
have in every town of any importance in India and the Far East to act accordingly, and
I think your society would find that illicit performances of their plays would be put a
stop to.35

Despite a brief exchange of letters and telegrams, the Society of Authors did not appoint
Bandmann as their representative, but the proposal with its reference to agents . . . in
every town of any importance in India and the Far East represents the formation of an
actor network in embryonic form, as well as shedding light on the networked nature of
theatrical business. Bandmanns agents were probably the many managers of the fifty-
odd theatres he owned or leased. While copyright and protection of authorial intellectual
property existed in principle, its actualization was dependent on a functioning system
of agents. The imagined or actual passage of theatrical intellectual property around
the globe with Bandmann and his representatives as translational mediators illustrates
a web of connectivity linking Bandmann, Shaw, the Incorporated Society of Authors
and the Bandmann theatres as conduits for the commercial transaction. The enabling
technological mediator is in fact the telegraph system, without which the whole system
of monitoring would have been almost impossible.

Dispersed publics
As mentioned above, intellectual property also lay at the heart of Bandmanns special
relationship with George Edwardes and the musical comedy of the Gaiety Theatre,

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28 balme The Bandmann Circuit

a genre synonymous with Edwardian froth.36 There remains, therefore, the nagging
suspicion that Bandmann and his kind were just a theatrical extension of British
commerce and colonialism, detached from indigenous peoples and experiences. There is,
however, no doubt that non-European audiences frequented the productions in some
cases they constituted a majority of the spectators. Indeed, non-European audiences
were economically essential for the whole enterprise. The theatre-going public on the
Bandmann circuit was, in most cases, distributed in a double sense: only a section of
it corresponded to the implied spectators for which the original productions had been
conceived (very roughly a London metropolitan audience). It was also distributed in
the sense of being dispersed over a large territory.37 This state of dispersion represents
the differentia specifica of touring theatre, but it was especially pronounced on the
Bandmann circuit because of the astonishing geocultural and linguistic terrain covered
by the troupes. The question of dispersed audiences can be explored from an ANT
perspective by asking how repertoire provides an indicator of processes of negotiation
and calibration between production and reception, between institutional frameworks
and their social functions. The term transformation in its ANT meaning is the useful
here. If we take repertoire as a kind of potential actor in the sense of a factor exerting
pressure on the network then we can assume that it will change as it moves along the
network. In Latours terms, This is not done by transporting a force that would remain
the same throughout . . . but by generating transformations manifested by the many
unexpected events triggered in the other mediators that follow them along the line.38
The various plays and productions and their effect on heterogeneous audiences, and vice
versa, the transformations effected by the different audiences, were transformative in
just this sense and thereby were a key factor regulating the theatrical network.
In July 1911, while on one of his periodic trips to London to sign up new performers
and acts, Bandmann gave an interview to the English newspaper The Referee:
How do I find the Indian audiences? Excellent. They roll up in shoals for anything
good. We have educated the natives into playgoing. They have become especially fond
of Shakespeare. In Calcutta and in Bombay they will pay anything for seats, sometimes
fifty rupees (about 3 6s. 8d.). And they always bring their Shakespeare along, so as to
follow the play. At first these natives were much surprised and annoyed at our necessary
cuts. When Shakespeare is given at the native theatre as he often is now he is always
played entire. We are going to give the Indian and other natives a lot of Shakespeare
presently.39

The civilizing mission to tutor the natives in the art of play-going reads like an early
form of audience development, aimed less at acquainting them with the transcendental
qualities of Shakespeares plays than at entering them into the oldest Western theatrical
contract: paying an entry fee in exchange for entertainment. Despite Bandmanns promise
to give the natives a lot of Shakespeare, the Bard was by no means the mainstay of his
repertoire.40 A typical season in Singapore in 1912 included Mousme, Peggy, The Count
of Luxembourg, The Belle of New York, The Girl in the Train and Gilbert and Sullivans
The Gondoliers and Our Miss Gibbs, each work being performed on a different night.41
For the slightly more discerning audience his Comedy Company offered a repertoire

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 29

ranging from Charleys Aunt to Oscar Wildes The Woman of No Importance, while the
Bandmann Dramatic Company had more serious fare, such as Trilby, East Lynne and
The Prisoner of Zenda. For those determined to avoid any type of serious reflection,
the Bandmann Gaiety Company guaranteed a thought-free evening with a selection of
the Latest London Revues, including nightly programmes such as Frocks & Frills, All
French and Come Inside.42
This varied Edwardian repertoire was evidently necessary to cater to what was an
exceptionally heterogeneous audience. In most of the cities comprising the Bandmann
circuit, the performances were frequented by, ethnically speaking, a broad cross-section
of the population. Theatre-going as Bandmann mentioned, was by no means the preserve
of a colonial class. This was certainly the case in India but also held true in Shanghai,
where many Chinese people attended, and even more so in Singapore, where it was
calculated that on one night people from thirty different communities were present.43
Although the Bandmann repertoire was targeted primarily at European spectators, such
audiences were by no means large enough to sustain the longer seasons in the larger
Indian cities. In 1907, Bandmann calculated that nowhere in India will theatre-goers
patronise more than three or four companies during a single year. If Bombay can get
sixteen weeks of English attractions at reasonable intervals, that is as much as the town
will stand.44 In the cities further east such as Shanghai and Manila and in Japanthe
regular ports of call of Bandmanns companiesEuropean audiences were even smaller.
In Japan, Bandmanns companies performed to a largely Japanese public, the resident
European population being quite small.
As a theatre manager, Bandmann needed to cater to cultural exigencies in order to
provide for this heterogeneous public. In Calcutta in 1914, he renamed his Empire Theatre
the Palace of Varieties and advertised it in the anglophone Indian press somewhat
oxymoronically as the House of Refined Vaudeville where Indian Gentry were specially
welcome and special arrangements for Zenana ladies were available, meaning the
segregation and curtaining off of boxes and sections of the stalls for Hindu and Muslim
women.45 Sometimes the programme was adapted for Indian gentlemen, on other
occasions it was stressed that matinee and evening performances were identical.46 Variety
theatre, with its eponymous variety of acts, lent itself particularly well to culturally
tailored programming. Its combination of juggling acts, acrobatics, magic and films
provided a modularized structure that could be rearranged and adapted on a daily basis.
Musical comedy, Shakespeare, melodrama, comedy, variety, travelling magicians:
in a metropolitan centre all of these different genres would be housed in their respective
venues and cater to specialized audiences. In the Bandmann theatres they all passed
through the same venue, or, put another way, the same venue became a relay station
for a rich array of theatrical entertainment representing the whole gamut of English
performance genres. The theatre then becomes the mediator of cultural exchange:
socially, it becomes a place of contact for different races and religions; commercially,
it is place of competition between European and Indian theatre owners; aesthetically,
it provides a steady stream of plays, acts and persons, which act in some way on the
emerging local theatre and film industry.

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30 balme The Bandmann Circuit

Building partnerships
To reach audiences, Bandmann required intermediaries and mediators of different kinds.
These included advance agents in his employ, the local newspapers and theatre owners. Of
these intermediaries, business partnerships were perhaps the most important mediators,
connecting the peripatetic entrepreneur with the culture of the locale, which became
a distinguishing characteristic of the Bandmann network. In comparison with normal
touring, where an artist or company would pass through a city with little long-term
impact, Bandmann attempted to forge lasting ties with the important centres on his
circuit. This involved leasing theatres, not just for his companies but for other troupes
and artists as well. Most significantly, he planned to, and indeed did, build new theatres.
The fact that Bandmann built or attempted to build modern theatres in many of these
cities suggests that his investment was long-term and predicated on a growing public for
theatrical entertainment.
The construction of a theatre, a highly complex operation involving considerable
capital investment, local knowledge, bureaucratic negotiations and political savvy,
represents in itself the formation of a new actor network. To build such theatres, the
itinerant entrepreneur needed the collaboration of local partners as mediators within the
city in question. Of particular importance are the partnerships Bandmann entered into
in Bombay and Calcutta, where his operations were physically based. In order to build
the Royal Opera House in Bombay in 1911 at a cost of approximately 33,000, he formed
a partnership with a Parsi coal merchant and entrepreneur, Jehangir Framji Karaka.
In Calcutta, where he owned two large theatres, the Empire and the Theatre Royal,
Bandmann, by his own account, first formed a partnership with an Armenian-born
property investor, Arratoon Stephen. Later he alternately joined forces and competed
with the Calcutta-based Parsi businessman Jamshedji Framji Madan (18571923), who
was also expanding his operations with theatrical performances and was to establish the
foundations of a local film industry. Certainly indirectly and perhaps directly, there is a
connection between Bandmann and the beginnings of Bollywood.47
At the end of the First World War, Bandmann temporarily relocated the centre
of his operations to Cairo, where he had already entered into a partnership with the
Italian Chevalier Augusto Dalbagni (18741951), who had been an Egyptian resident
since the 1890s and had established himself as an impresario. Together they owned
and managed three theatres in Cairo the Empire, the Kursaal and the Piccadilly
as well as the Alhambra in Alexandria. They also forged plans to control further
theatres in Haifa, Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Jaffa and Jerusalem.48 The partnership in
Cairo functioned mainly on the level of repertoire. Before 1914, Augusto Dalbagni had
established a reputation for building and managing the Kursaal theatre. Next to the
Khedival Opera House, it became an important venue for touring troupes providing a
varied programme ranging from opera to tragedy for Cairos cosmopolitan citizens. With
the outbreak of war, Cairo was flooded with foreign, mainly British and empire, troops
whose taste was more inclined towards variety and revues. Here Bandmann provided
the necessary theatrical fare, as he had just completed plans for establishing a circuit
devoted entirely to variety theatre.49 The partnership was provisional, as most are. By

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 31

1920, life in Cairo slowly returned to normal and Dalbagni terminated the collaboration
and reinstated his pre-war repertoire, which included Italian, French, English, Spanish
and Greek companies performing a broad collection ranging from opera, ballet and
Greek tragedy to classical concerts.50
In each case, Bandmann combined his technical theatrical know-how with local
capital and knowledge: in Calcutta with the Armenian property tycoon, in Bombay
with a wealthy coal merchant, in Cairo with an established impresario. From an ANT
perspective these partnerships were actants in the sense of being strategic alliances
that enabled other actor networks to come into play. One of these was the provision of
technology and know-how from England, for example through the famous British theatre
architect Frank Matcham, who designed the stages in Calcutta and Bombay. In India,
this technological transfer joined forces with local capital to enable the construction of
the finest and most up-to-date theatres in Asia.51 Both theatres still stand, although the
Empire (Fig. 3) is forgotten and now masquerades as the Roxy Cinema, oblivious of its
colonial history. The Royal Opera House in Mumbai, also once a cinema and facing
destruction, has been declared a Category One heritage building and is currently being
renovated (Fig. 4).52
Partnerships, being just one node in a complex structure, demonstrate how
theatrical networks enabled the relay of people, intellectual property, entertainment,
technical know-how and affects around the world. The multiplicity of factors at play
suggests that each individual actor can form the node of a network leading to further
networks that the theatre historian needs to follow. There are many more connections
one could trace in Bandmanns case: his interaction with the judicial system as he became
embroiled in an endless series of legal disputes with partners and performers, contacts
with colonial bureaucracy, or the importance of modern communication systems to
facilitate the movement of people and intellectual property around the globe.

Conclusion
If we attach premium value to those activities and products that issue from or reflect
bounded geopolitical entities the village, town, community or nation then mobile,
circulating products or people are by definition difficult to map onto our scholarly
and evaluative templates. This observation has a number of theatre-historiographical
implications. First, from a long-term historical perspective, a theatre of mobility was
as much a norm as the rooted, sedentary variety. In many periods of European theatre
history, the provision of performance was entirely reliant on itinerant troupes. Once
we move outside the major metropolitan centres, we can observe a practice of visiting
companies rather than permanent ensembles, the latter being, even today, the exception
rather than the rule.
Second, the itinerant theatre is by definition primarily commercial in orientation,
and not motivated by the imperatives of art, community or nation. But when one
considers that all professional theatre in the English-speaking world in the period under
consideration was commercial, then the itinerant variety represents the geographical
extension of a norm, not the exception. While mobility and commerce certainly condition

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32 balme The Bandmann Circuit

one another, no movement, no trade their mutual entanglement results in almost total
theatre-historiographical amnesia. Theatre on the move leaves few traces: some playbills,
newspaper advertisements, the occasional article and review, and perhaps a scrapbook
here or there. From ubiquity to disappearance is but one step in theatre history, it seems.
Maurice Bandmann and his many companies were certainly ubiquitous, quite literally a
household name, a guinea stamp of quality and many things besides. Now they have
been obliterated from our disciplinary memory because their activities do not appear to
warrant attention; they do not meet current epistemological criteria of attention.
I have argued that while the performances derivative productions performed for
colonial audiences, the epitome of a spectateur manque may not warrant sustained
hermeneutical enquiry, the network itself is another matter. Its range, complexity and
multiaxial nodal structures require sustained investigation in order to understand how
theatre globalized in the first decades of the twentieth century. I have adapted certain

Fig. 3 (Colour online) The Empire Theatre in Calcutta, c.1914. Programme cover. Courtesy of Vanessa
Lopez.

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 33

Fig. 4 (Colour online) The Royal Opera House, Mumbai. Photo: private collection.

concepts from actor-network-theory to make visible the associations and connections

that enabled the network to grow and function over a thirty-year period and astonishing
distances. I have focused on three different components in the network repertoire,
publics and partnerships and demonstrated how they functioned as actors and
mediators in enabling a commercially organized theatrical network to finds its audience.
In each case, I have argued that a particular actor forms a multiaxial point at which
other networks interconnect: repertoire in relation to intellectual property which is in
turn translated by agents; dispersed publics as a transformative force on a pre-existing
system of genre-based companies; and finally partnerships as mediators between the
itinerant manager and the actual locale. Together and we could analyse many more
such actors they function to make visible a complex, even abstract, theatrical network
that managed to transport theatre in a multitude of genres to a plethora of different
publics in what could be termed the first age of theatrical globalization.

notes
1 This article is based on a public lecture presented at the Mellon School of Theater and Performance,
Harvard University, 10 June 2013. My thanks to Martin Puchner and the participants of the Mellon
School on World Theatre for the invitation and stimulating discussions. Research for it was conducted
within the framework of the DFG-funded Koselleck project Global Theatre Histories: Modernization,

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34 balme The Bandmann Circuit

Public Spheres and Transnational Theatrical Networks 18601960. See

www.gth.theaterwissenschaft.uni-muenchen.de/index.html
2 On world literature see Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On world art see, among many titles, David Carrier,
A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008).
3 See Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, eds., Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
4 See, for example, Niall Ferguson: a hundred years ago, globalization was celebrated in not dissimilar
ways (the earth is flat) as goods, capital and labour flowed freely from England to the ends of the earth
. . . In 1914 the first age of globalization ended with a spectacular bang. Niall Ferguson, The War of the
World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 643.
One should add that capital and labour flows did not just issue from England but were much more
multidirectional. England was, however, by far the largest foreign investor of the time. See in the same
vein John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin Press, 2012),
esp. p. 179: By the 1870s, it becomes possible to speak of a global economy in which improvements in
transport and communication by telegraph had encouraged the integration of markets and the
convergence of prices in ordinary foodstuffs perhaps the best indicator that the world was becoming a
single economic space.
5 Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, World History in a Global Age, American Historical Review, 100
(October 1995), 103460, here p. 1053.
6 H. C. Hoffmann, Die Theaterbauten von Fellner und Helmer (Munich: Prestel, 1996), p. 9.
7 See Daphne Pi-Wei Lei, Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacific (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006).
8 See Matthew Isaac Cohen, The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theater in Colonial Indonesia, 18911903
(Athens, OH and Leiden: Ohio University Press and KITLV Press, 2006); and Cohen Performing
Otherness: Java and Bali on International Stages, 19051952 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010).
9 Daniel Bandmann (18381905) was a GermanJewish actor who came to New York in the 1860s and
performed initially in the German theatre before switching to English. Bandmann senior toured the
world twice: from 1869 to 1872 and again in the late 1880s, when he visited India, China, Australia and
New Zealand. The second tour is recorded in considerable self-acclamatory detail in his book An Actors
Tour: or, Seventy Thousand Miles with Shakespeare (Boston: Upham and Co., 1885). In the late 1880s he
gave up touring and invested his theatrical profits in a ranch in Montana.
10 Millicent Bandmann-Palmer (18451926), Daniel Bandmanns second wife, was, along with Sarah
Bernhardt, one of the famous Hamlet actresses of the late nineteenth century. Her Juliet was also
legendary, a role she insisted on playing well into her fifties, when she performed alongside her own
son as Romeo. After her separation from Daniel, she formed her own troupe and plied her trade
around mainly provincial centres in Britain and Ireland but also in Germany, where she was invited to
give a command performance before Kaiser Wilhelm I.
11 Weekly Sun (Singapore), 30 September 1911, p. 12.
12 In 1908, he built the Empire Theatre in Calcutta and, three years later, the Royal Opera House in
Bombay. The latter, after a chequered history of refurbishment as a cinema and closure, is in the
process of being renovated and restored to its original condition as an opera house. The former was
refurbished as a cinema in 1941 and renamed the Roxy, which still operates today.
13 Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, 16 February 1906, p. 2.
14 See Variety Theatres. Big Scheme for All-Red Circuit, Straits Times, 10 March 1914, p. 2.
15 This is the approach of historical network analysis, for example, which adapts social network analysis
and applies it to historical phenomena; see Charles Wetherell, Historical Social Network Analysis,
International Review of Social History, 43 (December 1998), pp. 12544.

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 balme The Bandmann Circuit 35

16 Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin, Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency,
American Journal of Sociology, 99, 6 (May 1994), pp. 141154, here p. 1414.
17 There has been little engagement with actor-network-theory amongst theatre historians. A notable
exception is Marlis Schweitzer. See her article Networking the Waves: Ocean Liners, Impresarios, and
Broadways Atlantic Expansion, Theatre Survey, 53, 2 (September 2012), pp. 24167. Her example is the
transatlantic ocean liner and its importance for the theatrical networks connecting the United States
with Europe.
18 The term actant is a terminological residue of Greimasian semiotics that exerted a considerable
influence on Latour and his group in the early period of research in the 1970s. It refers to any forces that
exert agency within a network, ranging from natural forces to individuals and collective bodies.
19 Bruno Latour, On Recalling ANT, in John Law and J. Hassard, eds., Actor-Network Theory and After
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 1526, here p. 19.
20 Darryl Cressman, A Brief Overview of Actor-Network Theory: Punctualization, Heterogeneous
Engineering & Translation, April 2009, at http://blogs.sfu.ca/departments/cprost/wp-content/uploads/
2012/08/0901.pdf, p. 7.
21 I am aware that this is a somewhat polemical oversimplification of current theatre-historiographical
methodologies and approaches. For a stimulating cross-section of current approaches see Charlotte M.
Canning and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography
(Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2010).
22 On the networked newspaper in this period see G. M. Winder, Imagining Geography and Citizenship
in the Networked Newspaper: La Nacion Reports the Assassination at Sarajevo, 1914, Historical Social
Research/Historische Sozialforschung, special issue, 35, 1 (2010), pp. 14066.
23 John Law, Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics, in Bryan S. Turner, ed., The New Blackwell
Companion to Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), pp. 14158, here p. 141.
24 There is, for example, no entry on Bandmann in the standard four-volume reference work Who Was
Who in the Theatre: 19121976. A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Directors, Playwrights, and
Producers of the English-Speaking Theatre (Detroit: Gale Research, 1978).
25 Other theatre-entrepreneurial networks are better known, such as J. C. Williamson in Australia or I. W.
Schlesingers African Theatre Trust in South Africa. Nevertheless, the method I propose here could be
used to analyse them as well.
26 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), p. 173.
27 Ibid., p. 220.
28 Ibid., p. 39.
29 In Latours terminology, an intermediary is a black box where input equals output, and no
modification takes place.
30 Eastern Daily Mail and Straits Morning Advertiser, 29 September 1906, p. 5.
31 On the concept of structured circulation see Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, Cultures of
Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity, Public Culture, 14, 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 191213.
32 See the article by Thomas Postlewait, George Edwardes and Musical Comedy: The Transformation of
London Theatre and Society, 18781914, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland, eds., The Performing
Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatres History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 80102.
Despite the prominence and dominance of George Edwardes in the London theatre of the late
Victorian and the Edwardian periods, Postlewait notes that with rare exceptions theatre historians
have shown little interest in this popular form of entertainment. Ibid., p. 81.
33 For a discussion of intellectual property in Edwardian theatre, especially with reference to George
Edwardes and the Gaiety Theatre, see Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage 18001914
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 3503.
34 Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 108.

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36 balme The Bandmann Circuit

35 Letter to G. Herbert Tring, 16 May 1912, British Library, Manuscript Section, Add 56627.
36 Edwardes openly admitted that his plays with music did not appeal to people who wanted the theatre
to improve our minds. Cited in Postlewait, George Edwardes and Musical Comedy, p. 81.
37 I borrow the term distributed from media network theory. See the article by Anna Munster and Geert
Lovink, Theses on Distributed Aesthetics: Or, What a Network is Not, Fibreculture Journal, n.d., at
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue7/issue7_munster_lovink.html. For an application to theatre and
performance see Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), chap. 6.
38 Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 107. Original emphasis.
39 Quoted in Mr Maurice Bandmann. His Theatrical Enterprises in the East, Straits Times, 5 August 1911,
p. 3. In 1910, Bandmann had toured the actor Charles Vane with a selection of Shakespearean scenes but
not a complete play.
40 For a discussion of Bandmanns Shakespearian tours see Christopher B. Balme, His means are in
supposition: Shakespeare and the Beginnings of the Global Theatre Trade, in Shakespeare Jahrbuch,
150 (2014), pp. 11127.
41 Advertisement in the Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertizer, 6 September, 1912, p. 1.
42 Straits Times, 4 September 1915, p. 11.
43 David Holloway, Playing the Empire: The Acts of the Holloway Touring Theatre Company (London:
Harrap, 1979), p. 151.
44 Bombay Amusements: Mr Bandmanns New Theatre, Times of India, 5 June 1907, p. 8.
45 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 5 May 1914, p. 3. The paper was an Indian-owned English-language daily with a
strong nationalist bent.
46 Amrita Bazar Patrika, 31 March 1914, p. 3.
47 On Bandmann and early Indian film see Kaushik Bhaumik, Cinematograph to Cinema: Bombay
18961928, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2, 1 (January 2011), pp. 4167; Sharmistha Gooptu,
Bengali Cinema: An Other Nation (London: Routledge 2011), p. 16.
48 Mr. Bandmans Plans the Theatre in the East, Times of India, 30 September 1919, p. 11.
49 Variety Theatres Big Scheme for All-Red Circuit Mr. Maurice Bandmanns Proposals, Straits
Times, 10 March 1914, p. 2.
50 For information on Augusto Dalbagni, see the website http://xoomer.virgilio.it/nuovopapiro/
in_egitto_file/dalbagni_famiglia.htm
51 The only theatre in Asia that technologically rivalled Bandmanns was the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo,
which opened in 1911.
52 See Supriya Nair, Opera Around the Corner, 28 October 2011, at www.livemint.com/Leisure/
VHH6Mo35YzYkGI1YooU57J/Opera-around-the-corner.html

christopher balme (balme@lmu.de) holds the Chair in Theatre Studies at the University of Munich and
is President of the International Federation for Theatre Research. His publications include Decolonizing the
Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Postcolonial Drama (Clarendon Press 1999); Pacific Performances:
Theatricality and Cross-cultural Encounter in the South Seas (Palgrave, 2007); Cambridge Introduction to
Theatre Studies (CUP, 2008) and The Theatrical Public Sphere (CUP, 2014). He directs the Global Theatre
Histories project at the University of Munich.

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