COLUMN


theatre hats


by Clair Hughes Lily Elsie


Hats are dramatic – at Ascot they get more publicity than horses. But no Ascot hat has ever been more famous than Chaplin’s bowler, or has had a greater impact than the ‘Merry Widow’. On stage or screen a hat immediately establishes identity and telegraphs meaning: it can be a disguise, a sensation, a threat or a joke – or just a hat. Theatre and film are allied, but there are differences. A film is like a painting: it can be revisited. But a stage moment is fleeting, conveyed in anecdote, images or surviving conventions. A stage hat relates to a role; a movie hat, to an


actor. A bowler without Chaplin is just a bowler. The Merry Widow hat, however, refers to a specific stage performance of 1908. Lily Elsie, the original actress, is almost forgotten, but not the hat, which inspired a universal fashion. At the New York opening of the show, copies of the hat were promised to ladies in the audience, causing an unseemly riot. Feathers characterised the Merry Widow hat,


and feathers have always been important on stage. An actor’s impact – especially in the days before artificial lighting – is weakened by distance: the height feathers give was therefore important. They also distinguish leading from supporting roles and, responding to every movement, convey an other- worldly magic. Visual evidence of early stage headgear is scarce and unreliable. But some conventions emerge: crowns on


monarchs – obviously; turbans on exotic characters; feathers for military heroes. An engraving featuring the hero of an 18th-century tragedy, Busiris, manages to combine all three: a crown is topped by a turban which is surmounted by plumes – impressive, but how did he move? In Shakespeare’s plays certain traditions persist.


Richard III, the greatest of stage villains, usually wears one of two hats – a fur-trimmed crown or a sharp, plumed beaver felt. Laurence Olivier’s hat in the 1955 film, Richard III, shamelessly borrows Henry Irving’s beaky stage hat of 1877. Falstaff’s feathery Tudor bonnet, seen in an engraving of 1744, was worn as recently as 2008 by Bryn Terfel in Verdi’s opera. Surely the first Falstaff’s hat was in just this fashionable Tudor style? In comedy, contemporary fashion was important.


Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895 wore a hat “consisting of two broadly spread and stiffened bows of black lace, radiating from a clump of pink roses from which rises a tall, stiff feather”. She is a gloriously comic creation, but her hat is high fashion, not at all funny. What is funny is the juxtaposition of such up-to-the- minute elegance with a lunatic plot. The trilby became the male hat of 1900. It owes its name to the cross-dressing heroine of Trilby, a play of 1895 that inspired ‘Trilby-mania’ – songs, postcards and of course a best-selling hat. But mysteriously there is no visual evidence of the actress in the hat. Nonetheless, her moment on stage is immortalised in this enduring style.


Theatrical hats live on in our cultural memory and in our instinctive sense that t hey are keys to identity. Any five-year-old will tell you that if you want to be a Princess, Darth Vader or a Pirate of the Caribbean, the first thing you need is a hat.


Clair Hughes is an independent scholar. She previously held the position of Professor of English and American Literature at the International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Hats (2017), Dressed in Fiction (2005) and Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001)


may 2019 | 45


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