Theatre in the Chocolate Factory

Catherine Hindson is Professor of Theatre History at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Her research focuses on how theatre helps us understand societies past, and incorporates topics including celebrity, heritage, ghosts, and well-being. She has previously published two books, Female Performance Practices on the fin-de-siècle stages of London and Paris (2007) and London's West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Culture, 1880–1920 (2016), the latter of which was shortlisted for the Society for Theatre Research's Book Prize.

'Catherine Hindson draws striking parallels in her conclusion between the corporate ethos cultivated at Cadbury's and that nowadays espoused at Legoland, but what is most striking, reading her study, is how thoroughly the world it explores has vanished, not always regrettably. As she points out, what happened at Bournville was not exactly amateur theatre: all these thousands of people were performing, albeit out of hours, in their roles as employees. Cadbury's clearly provided them with wonderful facilities for making theatre, but at the same time it conscripted their leisure in order to project a utopian, PR-friendly vision of happy, unalienated collective endeavour. This excellent, richly researched study shows how playing was really part of their work.' Michael Dobson, The Times Literary Supplement

• Part I. Factory Theatre: 1. Staging Bournville's spirit: Cadbury's industrial performances; 2. Theatre in the Bournville factory: performance at work; Part II. Theatre in the Factory Garden; 3. Marketing fresh air: outdoor performance at Bournville's factory in the garden; 4. Serious play: John Drinkwater's masques at Bournville; Part III. Theatre, Education, and Worker Wellbeing: 5. Keeping on the right lines: making theatre in Bournville's recreational societies; 6. Dramatic methods of teaching: theatre and education at Bournville.