Stage-Land

Stage-Land is a short comic book by Jerome K. Jerome, published in 1889 in the same year as Three Men in a Boat. It is one of his most concentrated pieces of satire and one that requires almost no introduction to be enjoyable, even though it is making fun of theatrical conventions that have now mostly disappeared.

The device is straightforward. Each short chapter takes one of the stock character types of the late Victorian stage and describes how he or she behaves in plays. There are chapters on the hero, the heroine, the villain, the comic man, the lawyer, the servant, the peasant, the soldier, the Irishman, the detective, and several others. The chapters work as gentle deadpan reports from a sociologist who is studying these strange beings, listing their habits and their unfailing reactions to standard situations. The hero, for instance, is invariably found at the start of the play to have been falsely accused, never has any visible source of income but always pays his bills, and addresses the heroine in long speeches of unparalleled idiocy.

The satire works because the conventions Jerome is mocking were so universally observed in the theater of his day. Every theatergoer recognised the stock village inn keeper who was either a comic Irishman or a comic Yorkshireman and who never had any other personality. Jerome’s quiet pretense that he is documenting alien creatures gives the book its consistent comic distance, and there is hardly a joke in it that has gone stale, even when the specific theatrical conventions have.

The book is short, about a hundred pages, and is illustrated in the original edition by J Bernard Partridge, whose drawings of the stock characters are part of the joke. It works as a single afternoon read. For readers who like Jerome’s other comic work, Stage-Land pairs naturally with The Diary of a Pilgrimage and with the comic sections of Novel Notes, where he is also making fun of bad popular fiction. It is also a small piece of theater history and is worth reading for anyone interested in late Victorian popular drama.