Ch. 16 of The Cambridge Illustrated
History of British Theatre, by Simon Trussler:
However clear-sighted may have been Karl Marx's diagnosis of the
ill-effects of nineteenth-century laissez
faire capitalism,
his prognosis, especially if misread as a programme for continuing
action, was deeply flawed. He acknowledged the skill of the English
ruling classes in deflecting revolutionary tendencies through timely
concessions: but he recognized less well their capacity to assimilate
or, where necessary, to cauterize the traditional culture of the
proletariat—the breeding ground of effective subversion.
At the lowly level of recreation, the process of assimilation had been
accelerating since mid-century. many of the sports which, though played
for generations according to vague but locally recognized oral codes,
had been banned as disruptive in their 'unofficial' forms now began to
be 'officially' resuscitated—replete with printed rulebooks,
top-hatted regulating bodies, and all the class ramifications of
'amateur' and 'professional' status. However, those popular customs
which threatened profits as well as peace of mind had, necessarily, to
be put down rather than merely contained. And so it was, for example,
that the diverse ways in which midwinter had traditionally been
celebrated were now tidied up and at first confined to Christmas Day
itself: the addition of Boxing Day (following the act of 1871 which
established Bank Holidays) was thus made to appear a benevolent
concession rather than a grudging acknowledgement of a far ampler
ancient right.
Not only were the twelve days reduced to two, but a once-communal feast
was turned inward upon the family and the domestic hearth—even the
raucous street music of the waits being suppressed in favour of the
'rediscovery' of carols, so much more reverent and demure. And all
those charitable ladies who, on Christmas Day, massaged their
consciences by doling out to those incarcerated in prisons and
workhouses their one decent meal of the year had now, in the cause of
temperance, to concede that their healths be drunk in water instead of
good ale—while the annual treat was, of course, preferably to be
confined to the 'deserving' rather than the recalcitrant poor.
Despite all these tendencies, Epiphany long kept its hold on the
popular imagination, although its traditional inversions had become
largely symbolic—practical jokes, typically, rendered down to cardboard
as the subjects of Twelfth Night cards (which long predated Christmas
cards as we know them). Stubbornly, however, seasonal topsy-turvydom
did survive—not least in traditions of cross-dressing, an indecorous
ebullience which disturbed not only the smug religiosity of the makers
of the Victorian Christmas but the discreet hypocrisies of their sexual
habits.
And so it was that the subversive transvestism of old became a
sanctioned form of sublimation, made manifest in the rituals of
pantomime—which, although often a Christmas offering in the past, was
now becoming exclusively so. In the process, most lingering
associations with the old commedia
masks were purged, as Harlequin and Columbine gave way to a
transsexually titillating principal boy and principal girl, backed up
by a chorus line in fleshings. The Clown was cut down to the likes of
Buttons, and Pantaloon unsexed to become the Dame—a male in drag,
usually a music-hall favorite drafted in to boost the box-office, as
pop stars and television personalities are today.
Drury Lane, notably under the management of Augustus Harris from 1879
to 1896 restored its drifting fortunes by specializing, for
ever-lengthening Christmas seasons, in pantomimes of the most
spectacular kind—filling out its year with sensation dramas similarly
dependent upon extravagant effects, for which the theatre's technical
resources as well as its sheer size made it well suited. Such effects
ranged from the sinking of the Birkenhead in Cheer, Boys, Cheer (1895) to August
Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath in The
Great Ruby (1898) and a full-scale horse-race in The Whip (1909).
[Illustr.] Augustus
Harris (1852-96) under whose management from 1879 Drury Lane
interspersed its regular diet of spectacular dramas with an annual
'Christmas' pantomime which might run past Easter. Although condemned
by traditionalists for his recruitment of music-hall performers in
panto, Harris retained many of its older features, including the Clown
and the harlequinade—which duly featured in Babes
in the Wood. Dan Leno, whom Harris
introduced to the West End in this production, remained teamed with
Herbert Campbell in pantomimes at the Lane until both died in 1904.
This cartoon was one of the long sequence published in Vanity
Fair by 'Ape' and (as in this case)
'Spy', otherwise Sir Leslie Ward.
(Illustr.): Impressions of characters from Babes in the
Wood, Augustus Harris's Drury Lane
pantomime of 1888. These were drawn for the Illustrated
Sporting and Dramatic—the
journalistic conjunction reminding us of the strong links between the
stage and the turf at this time. Dan Leno is shown here in the 'dame'
role of the wicked aunt, with Harriet Vernon (she of the redoubtable
thighs) as the 'principal boy', Robin Hood. The two babes ('of forty or
thereabouts', as the Sporting and Dramatic reminds us) are older music-hall stars,
Herbert Campbell and Harry Nicholls.
A NEW BOOM IN THEATRE BUILDING
That the ruling classes were now showing some readiness to alleviate
the harshest excesses of the industrial revolution had to do in part
with enlightened self-interest, in part with a calculated a ppeal to
class allegiances. Thus, because factory owners tended to be
free-trading Liberals, and imperialist Conservative government might
embark upon industrial reforms without offence to its supporters in the
rural shires—while in the process wooing those newly enfranchised by
the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, which gave the vote to virtually all
male householders. No less important, the Ballot Act of 1872 kept
secret from employers and landlords alike the way in which a man cast
that vote: and although no woman was yet able to cast hers, the Married
Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 marked a first step towards
greater economic independence.
Although the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was passed by Gladstone's
first Liberal administration, it was thus his successor Disraeli—the
first to deplore 'two nations' living in mutual ignorance—who as leader
of the Conservative government of 1874 enacted a programme of reforms
which one of the first two Labour MPs then elected declared to have
'done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals in
fifty'. Factory legislation significantly loosened the shackles of long
hours and insufferable conditions, while trades unions were freed from
criminal penalties for strike action and peaceful picketing. Under a
Public Health Act, sewage systems were built which have only recently
begun to show their age. An Enclosures Act not only brought the private
absorption of common land virtually to an end, but increased the
provision of public recreation grounds and allotments And local
authorities were encouraged to build 'artisans' dwellings'—thus
creating the very system of council houses that more recent
Conservative governments have been anxious to dismantle.
Although conditions for ordinary working people thus began slowly to
improve, the 1870s saw also the start of a severe trade depression
which, with only two brief intermissions, persisted almost until the
end of the century. But since some of the causative factors—tariff
barriers abroad, the end of the railway boom at home—left investors
with spare capital, the theatre, as an alternative focus for
speculation, ironically benefited, and it was during this period that
an 'entertainment industry' effectively emerged.
However, the tale of the two London theatres known as 'the rickety
twins' suggests that this development could have its pitfalls. On a
site between the churches of St Clement Dane and St Mary le Strand were
thus constructed in 1868 and 1870 the back-to-back playhouses best
remembered as the Globe and the Opera Comique. Slum clearance in the
area to make way for the Aldwych and Kingsway development was already
being actively planned, and the speculative builder Sefton Parry
therefore erected both theatres of the flimsiest materials in
expectation of their imminent demolition—and his own hefty
compensation. They were considered serious fire hazards, although in
the event both manged just to outlive the century.
Two sturdier products of the new boom in theatre building also opened
in 1870—the charming Vaudeville in the Strand, and the first Royal
Court, whose situation in Sloane Square testified to the ever-westward
drift of fashionable London. On Regent (soon to be Piccadilly) Circus,
the subterranean location of the Criterion Theatre, built in 1874
beneath the restaurant of the same name, bore witness to the spiralling
land values in the heart of the West End. Even further west, if never
quite so fashionable, Hammersmith saw its Lyric Opera House go up in
1888. And in 1881 had opened both the Comedy, in Panton Street between
the Haymarket and Leicester Square, and the first Savoy, midway along
the Strand. The Playhouse, which followed a year later, was anecdotally
another of Sefton Parry's gambles, owing its obscure situation off the
Embankment to an anticipated extension of the Charing Cross railway,
from which he hoped in vain to profit.
In 1884 the Prince of Wales's opened in Covent Street, off Piccadilly
Circus—and then, in 1887, were completed the slum clearances which now
drove Charing Cross Road north towards Oxford Street from Trafalgar
Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue south-west from Holborn down to
Piccadilly. The very heart of theatreland now underwent a rapid
transplant, fed by these wide, well-lit, and accessible arteries. In
1888 the first Shaftesbury Theatre went up near Cambridge Circus, where
the two roads crossed, to be closely followed by the Lyric, just a
little further west: and then, in 1891, arose the great sprawl of the
Palace, at first as the Royal English Opera, to dominate the Circus
itself. The Garrick had already staked a first claim for the theatre
along Charing Cross Road in 1889, and three years later arose the
almost abutting Trafalgar, now known as the Duke of York's, with its
frontage on St Martin's Lane.
THE VINTAGE
VICTORIAN THEATRE
The Empire
music hall, Newcastle, pictured
in 1891, and probably much as it had been for the previous half
century. Note the cane chairs for the orchestra, the plush seats in the
'front stalls' —and the hard benches in the slips. Flock wallpaper and
pictures lend a homely touch to the auditorium, which contrasts with
the fantasy world conjured up on the stage.
Our
illustration shows some typical features of the vintage Victorian
theatre: its fully-formed and ornately gilded picture-frame
stage, from which any residual trace of apron and stage doors has been
eliminated; its rich but highly (and sometimes confusingly) eclectic
embellishments; its pit foreshortened or (as here) abandoned before
encroaching stalls; and upper tiers ever-extending towards the stage,
as new techniques of cantilevering removed the necessity for so many
supporting pillars. Other less immediately obvious characteristics were
dictated by considerations of safety: these included, besides improved
ventilation, a new tendency for the pit to be sunk below ground so that
the dress circle was at entrance level, and a requirement that the
theatre should be isolated from surrounding buildings by passageways.
Since rooms could no longer be built above
the auditorium, the fly-tower now became a dominant external feature,
while new scenographic techniques were encouraging the internal
improvement and development of the flying space. However, overriding
commercial considerations meant that, in comparison with continental
practice, front-of-house facilities in the new theatres were meagre,
with box-office, cloak-room, and refreshment areas often so cramped as
not even to be adequately functional. As, in many such theatres, they
remain.
But the most enduringly important
innovation in theatre construction to occur during this period lay, of
course, in the use of electric lighting. Richard D'Oyly Carte led the
way in 1881, his new Savoy not only the first theatre but the first
public building of any kind in London to be so lit; and later in the
1880s two disastrous fires within two years at the Theatre Royal,
Exeter, accelerated a nationwide conversion from gas which was
virtually complete by the end of the century. But D'Oyly Carte
continued to illuminate the auditorium as well as the stage during
performances, and this hungover habit at first limited the artistic
potential of electricity—at a time when Henry Irving was insisting not
only on the lowering of the house lights at the Lyceum, but on the
retention where possible of gas, which he believed to permit subtler
control over his effects.
Irving was, indeed, entirely modern in
deploying light not merely for illumination but for dramatic emphasis,
a diffusion and variation allowed more readily by the banks of
individual gas taps and valves than by the initially more limited
controls over the new source. Famously, Irving relished, too, the
resources of limelight—not merely for its mellow brilliance in tracking
his own actions like a modern follow-spot but for the varying
impressions of moonlight and directional or waning sunlight it
facilitated.
IRVING AND THE LYCEUM YEARS
In view of his approach to lighting, it is ironic that in other
respects the period's leading actor-manager, Henry Irving, was a rather
old-fashioned player with a preference for an old-fashioned repertoire.
Indeed, in 1877 there even appeared a small, anonymous pamphlet
entitled The Fashionable Tragedian—a
'criticism with ten illustrations' which set out to prove that, for all
his then burgeoning influence, Irving was, in truth, 'a very bad
actor'.
Unlike much of the critical sniping to which he was subjected, this
squib in brown paper wrappers merits attention because its authors,
William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, were to become respectively the
leading critic and theatre historian of their generation. And both
clearly sensed, as early in their own careers as in Irving's, that the
grip this charismatic performer was already exerting would encourage
(as it also exemplified) a spirit of conservatism which for some time
yet would insulate the British theatre from the new drama of Europe.
For while Irving was not a 'very bad actor', he did, as Shaw perceived
and complained, choose to contour his greatness within a corset of very
constraining trim.
Having served an old-style extended apprenticeship in the provinces,
Irving spent five inconspicuous years in London before being noticed in
1871, at the age of 32, in the role of Digby Grant in James Albery's Two Roses—
a role which, ironically, was also to be among the most modern he ever
attempted. Albery, whose dilutions of what Archer described as the
'flippant and feebly sentimental small talk' of the 'Robertsonian
school of playwriting' kept the new Vaudeville full for 294
performances, was briefly hailed as the natural successor of Tom
Robertson—who, already in ill-health, died the following year. However,
Robertson proved to have no natural successor—although hes widely
imitated knack of making dialogue trip with seeming ease from
well-mannered tongues made this an era when affluent amateurs
encouraged themselves to believe that acting was an accomplishment
easily acquired.
Thus arose a new breed of superior supernumeraries—'extra ladies and
gentlemen' who duly got their billing, but seldom in other than
walk-on roles. And among the fond (though in this case not so foolish)
parents who encouraged their offspring in their histrionic ambitions
was one Hezekiah Bateman, who, also in 1871, had gone so far as to take
the lease of the old Lyceum Theatre—which was still finding it hard to
live up to the pretensions of its portico—as a showcase for the talents
of his four daughters.
Bateman duly recruited Irving to the company: but neither the opening
play by his own wifre nor the stage adaptation of Dickens's Pickwick Papers which followed
caught the imagination of audiences. And so it was very much as a final
fling that Bateman agreed to let Irving take the lead in an adaptation
from the French by Leopold Lewis of a melodrama entitled The Bells, in which Irving was to
take the role of the haunted burgomaster Mathias. The opening night of
25 November 1871 not only rescued Bateman's fortunes but, in the words
of Clement Scott—a critic as traditional in his tastes as Archer was
innovatory—lifted Irving 'at one bound above his contemporaries'.
That same night, Irving, returning home, is said to have stepped down
from his cab and out of his marriage when his socially ambitious wife
asked irritably if he was going to go on making a fool of himself all
his life. His subsequent career was dedicated to showing that making a
fool of oneself might be no bar to social advancement: and in 1895, at
the second time of asking, he duly accepted a knighthood—the first such
honour for services to the theatre, which could from then on regard
itself as officially respectable and respectably official. A knighthood
for Squire Bancroft followed in
1897, and for Charles Wyndham, aptly an Edwardian creation, in 1902.
Meanwhile, in September 1872, began Irving's long association with the
hack dramatist W. G. Wills, whose reincarnation of the martyr king in
the actor's won image for the historical romance Charles I led to his appointment as
house dramatist to the Lyceum at £300 a year. Wills's talent, like
Lewis's, was mediocre, but in every sense adaptive—and subervient to
Irving's requirements, as in his mangling of Goethe's Faust in 1885, to the interests of
the actor's Mephistopheles.
Henry Irving's
Mephistopheles in W. G. Wills's version of Goethe's Faust (Lyceum, 1885). Against
massive costs of over £15,000, the production (five years in the
planning) took in nearly £70,000 in its first year and £57,000 in its
second. By then Irving had added the grotesque splendours of a scene in
the Witches' Kitchen to the climactic Walpurgisnacht revels on the
Brocken Mountain, in which (according to Clement Scott) a 'shrieking,
gibbering crowd' of witches, goblins, and apes from hell made a
terrifying contrast with 'shadowy greys and greens' suggestive of
Gustave Doré.
Even the poet Tennyson, then
entering his dotage, permitted Irving to shape the part of Philip of
Spain in Queen Mary (1876) as
a vehicle for his talents, and while the laureate lay dying, Irving
went to work on Becket
(1893), reconstructing the role of the archbishop and a good else
besides.
Irving's first Shakespearean production at the Lyceum, judiciously
chosen, was his Hamlet of
1874. He played the title role 'like a scholar and a gentleman', wrote
Clement Scott: Irving was 'not acting' but 'talking to himself . . .
thinking aloud'. During the run of 200 nights, then unprecedented for a
Shakespeare revival, Bateman died, and his widow, after briefly toying
with the reins of management, amicably resigned them to Irving in 1878.
Irving continued to extend his Shakespearean range, a mannered Othello (1876) and a curiously
unromantic Romeo and Juliet
(1882) easily outweighed by triumphs as Richard III in 1877, as Shylock
in 1879, as Wolsey in Henry VIII in 1892, and as Iachimo in Cymbeline
in 1896.
Despite scenic embellishments of a kind which had driven others into
bankruptcy, incidental music often specially composed for an orchestra
of thirty, and ambitiously choreographed crowd scenes, Irving managed
to make more money from Shakespeare and to play him for lengthier runs,
than had ever proved possible before. He took no less trouble over
lesser plays: his biographer Alan Hughes has thus calculated that the
formidable number of 639 people were employed to work on Robespierre, including 355
performers and musician, 236 technicians (the lighting crew alone
numbering 38), and 48 administrative staff.
That was in 1899: later in the same year Irving gave up his management
of the Lyceum, which he had recently turned into a limited company. He
died six years later, during what he had already declared to be his
farewell tour.
A rare
photograph of
Irving in performance—in Sardou's Robespierre,
on tour to New York in 1900 (cameras were banned at the Lyceum, where
the production had opened the previous year). Irving as Robespierre is
here addressing the hall of the revolutionary Convention in the last
act of the play. The picture is, of course, posed, but begins to
suggest Irving's concern for the careful orchestration of his crowd
scenes.
As an actor, Irving seems to have
exerted a force of will
which not only infused his role but took command of his audience. An
unusual mixture of the protean and the idiosyncratic, he was physically
adept at shrinking, extending, and otherwise dissembling his spidery
limbs into a new character, while deploying mannerisms of speech and
gait which made him, unmistakably and with deliberation, Irving. An
eccentric showman who wooed his audiences rather as Disraeli wooed his
Queen, he sustained the dying tradition of a permanent acting company,
but not in the spirit of interdependence on which Richard Burbage or
even David Garrick had built; rather, Irving was the undisputed first
among unequals.
Only his leading lady, Ellen Terry—whose hiring was
one of the first acts of his independent management—was permitted to
complement rather than challenge his supremacy, and even she had to
confine herself to roles which would reflect Irving's brilliance. As
Beatrice and Benedick, Portia and Shylock, or Imogen and Iachimo the
pair could thus work on an equal footing, but she was unable to play,
for example, Rosalind in As You Like
It, because there was no role of equivalent stature for the
'partner' who was also the boss. Terry's Imogen, which was much to the
taste of virtuous Victorians:
As a manager, Irving well understood his respectable Lyceum audiences
and was always responsive to their predictably limited tasts: but
within these limits his productions were rigorously rehearsed by
disciplined companies, and their polish scrupulously maintained during
long runs which would otherwise have fallen apart. And to be found
among the names of his company were such harbingers of the theatrical
future as George Alexander, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and John
Martin-Harvey.
PROSPERITY IN THE WEST END
Irving not only brought commercial and (by his own and his audience's
standards) artistic success to the old Lyceum: he also did much to
create a climate in which other West End managements might
prosper—though all, confessedly, were assisted by favourable economic
conditions. Thus, the increase in middle-class incomes consequent upon
falling prices and stable salaries after 1873 allowed them not only to
shunt many patrons of the pit to a more fitting place—well out of sight
in the upper gallery—but also to risk increases in seat prices, thereby
boosting profit margins.
And so, despite Tom Robertson's death in 1871, the Bancrofts continued
to prosper at the Old Prince of Wales's, prettifying safe classics from
Shakespeare to Sheridan with what Bancroft called 'elaborate
illustration'. In 1880, following the retirement of the veteran
Buckstone, they moved to the Haymarket, which he had left largely
unrefurbished: they proceeded to refurbish it thoroughly, gilding the
picture-frame of their proscenium arch, cunningly concealing the
footlights and orchestra, and, to howls of impotent protest, pioneering
the total abolition of the pit. Meanwhile, their protégé John Hare, in
partnership with Madge Robertson and her husband W. H. Kendal, was
winning the public's initially uncertain favour for the new Court
Theatre, the same team later moving successively and successfully to
the St James's and the Garrick.
In 1875 Charles Wyndham began his long association with the underground
Criterion, where at first he specialized in vasectomized adaptations of
French farces, before becoming his own matinee idol in middle age.
Augustus Harris was soon to begin his long reign over pantomime at
Drury Lane, and Richard D'Oyly Carte to take Gilbert and Sullivan's
light operas to triumph from the Opera Comique to the Savoy—whence
George Edwardes crossed the road to help John Hollingshead keep 'the
sacred lamp of burlesque' burning at the Gaiety. J. L. Toole, taking on
the little Charing Cross Theatre in King William Street in 1879,
reflected the prevailing managerial self-confidence by renaming it
after himself—an American fashion which found few other followers.
The
promenade of the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1902. A youthful
Winston Churchill was among those opposed to the attempts led by Mrs
Ormiston Chant to close down the promenade in 1894 (on the grounds that
it was a haunt of 'ladies of the town'). Later, the theatre housed
revue, and, after the First World War, musicals were performed there,
until it was demolished in 1927 to make way for a cinema.
MUSIC HALL AS
BIG BUSINESS
When, as the spectacular centrepiece to A Life of Pleasure (1893), the
promenade at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square was recreated on
the stage of Drury Lane, a back-handed compliment was being paid to the
famous music hall. As the notoriety of the Empire promenade confirms
—it was allegedly a favoured haunt of prostitutes—music hall continued
to offend the bourgeoisie, though its appeal (like that of
horse-racing) united the more raffish elements of the aristocracy with
the generality of the working class. This was in spite of the
endeavours of those would-be respectable music-hall managers who banned
alcohol from the auditorium—an auditorium in which the old, convivial
clusters of tables and chairs were giving way before regular rows of
fixed seating, and where performers once welcomed with the raised glass
of the chairman were now identified by numbers slotted into the
invasive and alienating proscenium arch.
Such palatial West End establishments as the Empire,
the nearby Alhambra in Leicester Square, and later the surviving Palace
on Cambridge Circus were, of course, aiming to attract customers of a
different class from those who attended the humbler halls down in the
East End, and there were many gradations of neighbourhood hall in
between. But after 1888 all had to obtain a Certificate of Suitability
by meeting minimum legal standards of safety and sanitation: and the
cost of the necessary reconstruction work often required a major
injection of capital. Companies were therefore floated to build new
halls as well as to rebuild old—often to the designs of 'legit' theatre
architects, such as the prolific Frank Matcham.
Some managements also began to accrete first a local
chain of halls, and then a larger circuit—the beginnings of the
music-hall empires of the likes of Oswald Stoll and Edward Moss. At the
same time, a divide began to open up between the top-billing stars who
were able to command huge salaries to work the new circuits—Dan Leno
and Marie Lloyd being probably the most familiar to emerge during this
period—and their lowlier brethren, whose dispensable services were open
to exploitation. A long struggle for better conditions began with the
formation of the Variety Artists' Association in 1885, well before
'legitimate' players had successfully formed thamselves into a union—a
right at last acknowledged by the social reforms of the 1870s.
[Illustration:]
Opening bill for the New
Cross Empire in 1899. Designed by the prolific Frank Matcham, this
typical suburban hall had a capacity of around 2,000. Note the
'credentials of the organizers' whose capital investments are listed
along with their 'present market value'.
NEW WRITING—AND
A NEW STYLE OF OPERETTA
Managements in the [1870s]
required new writing to provide vehicles for
the acting talent at their command and to satisfy the expectations of
their paying public. Indeed, by the 180s the problem of the English
drama was not particularly the absence of a 'literary' output of
intellectual substance—none such had existed for over a century—but
rather the presence of a deeply bourgeois audience which, scornful of
the hearty affirmations of melodrama, had come to prefer the enervated
emotional shorthand of the 'society' style. Writers now seen as
harbingers of a 'new dram' could and did get their work staged in the
West End—just so long as their innovations titillated but did not
seriously disturb their audiences.
The production of original work
was encouraged by the international
copyright agreements which now began to stem the flood of foreign
imports and adaptations. The five years of protection from unauthorized
translation given to foreign writers in 1852 was extended in 1875 to
cover adapted pieces, and in 1887 the Berne Convention strengthened
copyright arrangements between most European countries—the most
important non-signatory, the United States, following with its own
legislation in 1891. Some doubts remained until 1911 as to how far
prior publication of a play might endanger performing rights, and this
led to numerous one-off 'copyright performances': but the new
arrangements did help to encourage reading editions, alongside the
ubiquitous acting texts of Lacy and French—whose technical jargon and
abbreviations proved forbidding to the uninitiated.
As commissions to adapt foreign
plays began to dry up, some writers
unwisely made bids for posterity by attempting those five-act
historical tragedies in blank-verse for which posterity was presumed to
have an unquenchable thirst. As Irving wryly observed in 1880, many of
the unknown authors who submitted such works to him by the score
'proudly claimed that they made a point of never going near a theatre'.
Even such a piece as Joan of Arc
(1871) by the thoroughly professional veteran Tom Taylor, has not only
failed to impress posterity ever since but owed such notoriety as it
enjoyed in its own day to the realism with which the saintly maid was
burnt at the stake.
Among the few writers who achieved
both an immediate and more enduring
fame, W. S. Gilbert occupies a special place. His 'fairy' comedies for
the Kendals at the Haymarket in the early 1870s were, improbably,
satiric burlesques in blank-verse in which Gilbert made audiences laugh
at their own hypocrisies by transplanting them to fairyland. Despite a
prolific early career (in 1872, for example, no fewer than five of his
plays were running in London theatres) at first he won more respect
than acclaim. His satirical edge was a touch too sharp for comfort,
needing not so much to be blunted as to be melodically honed to the
music of Arthur Sullivan.
Although John Hollingshead first
teamed the pair in the over-erudite Thespis
at the Adelphi in 1871, it
was only when Richard D'Oyly Carte, in search of a native equivalent to
the French opera bouffe, persuaded Gilbert to adapt his Trial by Jury for a musical setting
at the Royalty in 1875 that the long, symbiotic association began,
finding a first permanent theatre at the Opera Comique from 1877 to
1881. Then the team transferred along with their latest
production, Patience,
to the new Savoy Theatre, a slight but salubrious step westwards along
the Strand. G. K Chesterton described the characteristic tone of what
have ever since been known as the 'Savoy operas' as capturing that
'half-unreal detachment in which some Victorians came at last to smile
at all opinions including their own'.
The Savoy Theatre, during the opening production,
Patience, in 1881. So closely were
Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas associated with Richard D'Oyly
Carte's new theatre that they are often known collectively as the
'Savoy operas'. The theatre was the first to incorporate electric
lighting, and in its decorations and colouring it was more subdued than
earlier Victorian houses. It was to the Savoy that J. E. Vedrenne and
Granville Barker moved in 1907 from the Court, staging the first London
production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Between 1912 and 1914 Barker staged here
his innovatory productions of Shakespeare, further described on p. 271.
The theatre was reconstructed in art deco style in 1929, but severely
damaged by fire in 1990.
________
A scene from HMS Pinafore, by
Gilbert and Sullivan:
________
THE LEADING WRITERS
Arthur Wing Pinero, whose later 'problem plays' contributed to the
theatrical debate over the 'woman question' (to which we shall turn in
the next chapter), made an earlier and arguably more deservedly
enduring reputation as the writer of a string of successful farces,
largely for the Court Theatre. From The
Magistrate in 1885 through The
Schoolmistress and Dandy Dick
to The Amazons
in 1893, he rang proficient changes on that distinctively British
pattern whereby would-be adultery and its exposure are secondary to the
dread of embarrassment and social gaffes—a dramatic emphasis also
happily inoffensive to the Lord Chamberlain.
Unlike many other farceurs, Pinero gave the impression of being almost
fond of characters who were only a degree or so offset from reality.
George Rowell compares the types with those of the Aldwych farces of
the 1920s—among them a 'pure and persecuted husband', a 'knowing man of
the world' with his 'vacuous companion' , and a 'formidable matron'.
These were played respectively by Arthur Cecil, John Clayton, Fred
Kerr, and Mrs John Wood—a team whose regular 'lines', well-developed
sense of ensemble, and consummate timing must have endowed Pinero's
writing with the same ring of confidencethat Robertson Hare, Tom Walls,
Ralph Lynn, and Mary Brough were later to give Ben Travers.
[Illustration:]
Arthur Cecil as Posket,
The Magistrate in
Pinero's farce of that name. Seen at the Court in 1885, this was one of
the sequence of plays at that theatre with which Arthur W. Pinero
(1855-1934) consolidated his early reputation as a farceur. After
flirting with a seduction theme in The Profligate (1890), he turned, most famously in The
Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893),
to social dramas and 'problem plays': but these have generally worn
less well than either the farces or such later comedies as Trelawny
of the 'Wells' (1898) and The
Gay Lord Quex (1899). He wrote
inextinguishably on, but was out of touch with the style and values of
the post-Victorian world.
Among those considered leading writers at the time, Henry Arthur Jones
cuts the least appealing figure today. The equivocal stance of his
'problem plays'—and their no less equivocal solutions—must, like
Pinero's, await later discussion: meanwhile, in his early work his
success depended upon combining an old-fashioned melodramatic
instinct—well-matched to the temperament of the actor-manager Wilson
Barrett at the Princess's—with a solid storytelling technique and a
good ear for dialogue. However, such structural skills were too often
blighted by a pervasive and invasive social snobbery—perhaps inspired
by contempt for his own petty-bourgeois origins—as early exemplified in
Saints and Sinners (1884).
Jones went on to specialize variously in dramas of thwarted or
distorted passion, such as Judah
(1890), and old-fashioned intrigue comedies of which The Triumph of the Philistines
(1895) is a typical and The Liars
(1897) a rare superior example. Unfortunately his satire was not only
heavy-handed, but betrayed an almost clinical detestation of the common
people—also evident in his distaste for 'The Theatre of the Mob', as
Jones dubbed it in one of his numerous polemics for a higher drama.
Elsewhere, a shrill anti-clericalism sits oddly with an awed reverence
for high society—any intended criticism of which is effectively muted
by his insistence that those of lowly origins, inhabiting 'the dark
places of the earth', are beneath the notice of art. Later, he was to
prophesy that 'the epitaph on . . . all this realistic business will
be—it does not matter what happens in kitchen-middens'.
Oscar Wilde was outraging and amusing fashionable London by strutting
his aesthetic stuff as early as 1881, when Gilbert parodied such
greenery-yallery decadence (as it was viewed by the properly grey
majority) in Patience.
Although, with nice incongruity, Wilde was a cousin of W. G. Wills, it
was only with Lady Windermere's Fan
(1892) and A Woman of No Importance
(1893) that he found his own, very different kind of theatrical voice:
for within the ostensibly well-made structures of these plays social
norms are obliquely questioned by means of that calculated confusion of
satire, cynicism, and delight in paradox, which was already shaping the
Wildean inverted epigram.
Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance
of Being Earnest
(1895), which pushed this technique to its comic limits, is a farce
rooted in the native stock of situation and mistaken identity rather
than in threatened adultery—though here sublime aristocratic
insouciance substitutes for the precarious poise which Pinero's
middle-class characters strive to maintain. The play is, indeed, in
part a parodic reaction to the Robertsonian style of understatement,
still dwindling into the drawing-room miniaturism of the likes of James
Albery; but where those authors believed that their neatly-turned
phrases aspired to some ultimate truth, Wilde delighted in ultimate
paradox, avowedly aiming at an 'art divorced from life'.
[Illustration:]
George Alexander as Jack Worthing, in mourning for his pretended
brother Ernest, in the first production of Wilde's The
Importance of Being Earnest
at the St James's in 1895. In an interview published one month before
the opening in February, and four months before the libel action which
changed the course of his life, Wilde declared of the play: 'It is
exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its
philosophy . . . that we should treat all the trivial things of life
very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and
studied frivolity'.
Wilde was the first in a line of homosexual dramatists whose legally
prescribed distance from social and sexual norms lends ironic weight to
their latter-day comedies of manners. In Earnest,
his own delight in outraging the proprieties gave us an inimitable
slice of art divorced from life—but, as life divorced him so cruelly
from art, it was also to enmesh him in the scandal and imprisonment
which (compounded, it is now believed, by the debilitating progress of
syphilis) led to his premature death.
The would-be successful social critic had to find a more protective
persona, and it was through his genius in creating just such a persona
that Bernard Shaw secured his dominance over the drama of the ensuing
decades. Shaw was, of course, a novelist and critic well before he
found success in the theatre—and by the time he pitched himself into
the critical front-line in the ealry 1890s two of his contemporaries,
Clement Scott and William Archer, had already staked out positions as
heads of the opposing forces in a new battle of 'ancients' versus
'moderns'.
ANCIENTS VERSUS MODERNS
Scott, the theatre critic of the Daily
Telegraph, who also edited the leading general-interest theatre
journal of the day, The Theatre, headed
the traditionalists, while Archer had sounded his optimistic clarion
call for the new in English
Dramatists of To-day
as early as 1882. Writers such as Robert Lowe and Percy Fitzgerald were
at the same time introducing some scholarly discipline into the writing
of theatre history and biography, which in the past had been largely
impressionistic when not unashamedly anecdotal. Lowe also produced his
massive Bibliographical Account of
English Theatrical Literature,
the first serious attempt to review everything published about the
theatre—as valuably distinguished from treatments of the drama as if it
were a branch of literature.
Even the theory of acting, which had not much concerned either the
profession or its critics of late, began to be debated with some
liveliness. As long ago as the 1770s the French encyclopedist and
playwright Denis Diderot had written in defence of objectivity as
opposed to emotional identification in acting: now, Walter Pollock's
translation of Diderot's work as The
Paradox of Acting
(1883) became central to a dispute which found Diderot's
fellow-countryman and disciple, Constant Coquelin (who had published
his own study of intellectually controlled acting technique in 1880),
ranged against no less an authority than Henry Irving. The isues—and
the opinions offered by these and numerous other actors—were summarized
and analyzed in Archer's aptly titled Masks
or Faces? in 1888.
Thanks to ever-speedier means of transport, this international exchange
of ideas was increasingly complemented by the cross-fertilization of
theatrical activity. Irving and Wyndham took full companies to America
where earlier they would have taken only themselves, while Sarah
Bernhardt with the company of the Comédie Française visited London from
Paris. From the USA came Edwin Booth to play Othello (to an Iago whicvh
far betted fitted Irving's temperament than his earlier Moor), from
Italy the great tragedian Tomasso Salvini, and from Germany the company
of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen—often regarded as the first director in
the modern sense, whose meticulous concerns with ensemble playing
certainly influenced Irving's
treatment of his
Lyceum crowd scenes.
Then in 1891 a visit from André Antoine's Théâtre Libre from Paris
inspired the creation of a similar experimental art theatre in London,
the Independent Theatre, by the critic J. T. Grein. This provided a
living platform on which the 'moderns' might focus their attack against
the 'ancients' through their promotion of the already ageing Norwegian
dramatist Henryk Ibsen—among whose champions were both Shaw, whose Quintessence of Ibsenism also
appeared in 1891, and Archer, whose first complete edition of his works
in translation was then in preparation.
However, for most British audiences ibsen remained merely an obscure
dramatist from an obscure vcountry whom such intellectuals had made it
their business to promote well above the heads of their good selves—and
who might therefore consider himself lucky to have had his Doll's House redeemed by the use of
its happy ending in Henry Arthur Jones's version of 1884, coyly
retitled Breaking a Butterfly.
Janet Achurch acted in Archer's more faithful translation in 1889, and
this was duly pronounced 'ibscene' by Scott—who two years later was
scandalized beyond such punning put-downs into his legendary scream of
outrage against the first English performance of Ibsen's Ghosts.
Staged as the opening production of the Independent Theatre at the
Royalty, on 13 March 1891, this was at once condemned by Scott as 'an
open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly'—and
anything phoney about the war between 'ancients' and 'moderns' was
clearly over.
[Illustration:
] Wilde's 'studied frivolity' as ironic liberation: Janet Achurch as
Nora Helmer, dancing the tarantella in the middle act of Ibsen's A
Doll's House. This
pen and ink drawing was made when the play was staged for thirty
performances at the Avenue Theatre in 1892—one of no fewer than five
London revivals during the 1890s.
