Digital Transgender Archive

Actors in "Madame Lloyd's choir and orchestra". Process print, 190-.

Madame Lloyd's choir and orchestra

Part of James Gardiner Collection: photograph album labelled ‘Drag’.

Actors, one in drag (?), pose for a group portrait. By the turn of the nineteenth century , music hall had become the most popular form of entertainment. Even quite small towns had their own theatre, and larger towns had many: Brighton for example, a popular holiday resort near to London, had more than twenty. Thousands of performers of every possible kind were needed to fill these stages, and the constantly changing bills of music hall and variety meant a peripatetic existence for large numbers of itinerant professionals, most of whom were soon completely forgotten. The present item depicts one such obscure music hall 'turn'. Madame Lloyd 's troupe, although billed as 'Choir and Orchestra', wears costumes which range from Tyrolean, to period rustic, to the obligatory 'Dame' on the far left (James Gardiner)