Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (52 page)
Read Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain Online
Authors: Judith Flanders
Tags: #Fiction
For some, one sensation scene per play was no longer enough. At Drury Lane in 1882, in
Pluck
, there was a burning house, a blizzard in Piccadilly Circus, an angry mob breaking the windows of a bank, and an express train ploughing into the wreckage of another, already derailed, train. There were plays with scenes of an underwater fight with the heroes in diving suits, or an avalanche, or the Royal Academy summer exhibition, or the entire stage and auditorium of a music hall.
107
The Lyceum even had a version of
The Bride of Lammermoor
with ‘accommodating quicksand that allowed Edgar to stand on it with Lucy in his arms till he had quite finished his theatrical business, and then let him go suddenly down, together with the curtain’.
108
These spectacles were astonishingly transportable. Boucicault’s
The Colleen Bawn
, a huge success in 1860, had a sensation scene where the villain’s servant Danny went rowing with the heroine, Eily, on a lake in Killarney. When she refused to give up the marriage certificate that proved she was the legal wife of the villain, and not a fallen woman,
Danny pushed her overboard, but Myles (played by Boucicault himself in the first London performance) appeared in the nick of time, shot Danny, dived into the lake, and saved Eily from drowning.
*
The journalist Henry Morley, in
The Journal of a London Playgoer
, commended the ‘incidents of plunging, swimming, drowning and fishing up, of which the illusion provokes rounds of applause’.
110
Boucicault initially granted licences to provincial theatres to produce versions, but he quickly realized that if he ran his own touring companies he would do better financially. In 1861 the Theatre Royal, Sunderland, became the first to receive
The Colleen Bawn
, with Brighton following later that same week; soon Boucicault was earning £500 a week from touring productions alone - the first West End productions on tour.
111
And his
The Poor of New York
, which he had written for the New York stage in 1857, was equally innovatory: in 1863 Boucicault rewrote the play as
The Poor of Liverpool
, and opened it in the port city, clearing £1,000 in the first nine weeks. Over the succeeding years he created individual productions of
The Poor of
——for Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin, and even
The Poor of Islington
for Sadler’s Wells. Finally
The Streets of London
opened in the West End, with a set that replicated Charing Cross station and Trafalgar Square, just outside.
112
This was another trend that was popular: theatrical re-creations of domestic or local settings, which succeeded or failed by virtue of their similarity to the originals. Boucicault’s
Janet Pride
in 1855 had called for an exact replica of the Old Bailey; Tom Taylor’s
The Overland Route
was set on a replica of a P&O steamer, and the manager of the theatre boasted, ‘We were also fortunate in securing some real…lascars, and ayahs, who lent great reality to the picture.’
113
Other plays set in hotels hired waiters from the actual hotels.
Human Nature
, about the fall of Khartoum, advertised that it had ‘real police officers’ to control the stage crowds which gave the returning troops a hero’s welcome, while in the Grand Saloon of the theatre were displayed ‘interesting articles illustrative of African life and warfare’, together with maps and ‘a recreation of Ahmad Urabi’s Cairo cell, designed from on-the-spot sketches and featuring the actual carpet and furniture used by the Egyptian nationalist leader during his confinement’.
114
Theatre was a sort of newsreel, but it was also a magazine, and by the 1880s the links between theatre and display, display and fashion, fashion and shopping were being thoroughly exploited. Theatres had long carried advertisements: in 1855 Henry Morley had commented on the ‘bad taste of the curtain [at Covent Garden] which…is a mass of advertisements collected from Moses and Son and other well-known advertisers’.
115
But this simple appeal to those waiting for the play to begin soon became a more complex interaction. Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Utopia (Limited)
in 1893 had a drawing-room scene that was advertised to be an exact replica of one of Queen Victoria’s receptions. George Bernard Shaw wrote, ‘I cannot vouch for its verisimilitude, as I have never, strange as it may appear, been present at a Drawing-Room; but that is exactly why I enjoyed it, and why the majority of the [audience] will share my appreciation of it.’
116
It was the aspirational nature of voyeurism that was being played on, posing and answering the question: how do the rich live?
The magazines that reviewed plays carried long, detailed descriptions of the sets and, especially, the costumes. Retailers and dressmakers now supplied props and dresses to the theatres, seeing them as an advertisement for their wares.
Youth
, at Drury Lane in 1881, had its set dressed with furniture from Gillows. B. J. Simmons and Co. advised the public that it had created the ‘costumes for the Blue Moon Scene, the Irish Girls, and the Moonbeam Dance in “Our Miss Gibbs” ‘.
117
In 1892 the
Lady
began a column called ‘Dress on the London Stage’, written by ‘Thespis’, who was confident that no play could be considered a failure if from it the audience could ‘get a new idea for a bonnet, hat, or other feminine trifle’.
118
Dozens of magazines listed details of all the best stage costumes throughout the decade, and often reproduced fashion plates as well, while for the first time theatre programmes began to give the names of the dressmakers who had made the costumes.
Black and White
magazine sold paper patterns for the costumes described in its pages, while the
Lady
described the eponymous fan in
Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892) in great detail - it had, the fascinated reader was informed, sixteen ostrich feathers fixed to a handle of yellow tortoiseshell, with the name ‘Margaret’ picked out in diamonds, and there was also an illustration, for those who wanted more.
Queen’s
simply advised its readers to visit Duvelleroy’s in Regent Street, where they would be able to buy a similar item.
119
Many department stores sold theatre tickets from special booths, and ‘going to the West End’ was no longer a geographical description, but meant spending the day either shopping or at the theatre, or both. From the 1860s the Gaiety Theatre had been a place for the man about town, but in the mid-1880s it was taken over by a new manager, who produced a series of musical comedies, many set in fashionable commercial locations - at the milliner’s or the dressmaker’s, or, best of all, in a department store. H. J. W. Dam, the author of
The Shop Girl
(which ran for two years from 1894) said, ‘As many thousands of people do business at the large shops and stores in London…[it was clear to me that] the stores formed an excellent sphere to make the basis of a musical piece.’ The first act was a conflation of the interiors of Whiteley’s and the Army and Navy Stores, and singing shoppers compared ‘the loyal, royal stores’ to ‘a daily dress rehearsal’. The even more successful
Our Miss Gibbs
(1909) was set in ‘Garrod’s’ department store, and its song lyrics linked, completely naturally, clothes, shopping and desirability:
Some people say success is won by dresses, Fancy that!
But what are dresses without a Hat?
If you would set men talking when you’re walking out to shop, You’ll be all right if you’re all right on top!That’s the last Parisian hat,
So buy it,
And try it!
Keep your head up steady and straight, Though you’re fainting under the weight!
We’ll declare that you are sweet, Men will wait outside on the street, If you have that hat!
120
In the 1870s a number of department stores had added their restaurants at more or less exactly the time that theatres had stopped using afternoon performances as try-outs for new playwrights, and instead established regular matinee performances of whatever was running in the evening.
*
The stores, the restaurants and the theatres were now all
working in concert. The idea was to get women to spend an entire day between these various places of commodified leisure: to come in from the suburbs by train or Underground, shop, have lunch in a departmentstore restaurant, attend a matinee, and take tea - from 1913, possibly at the Queen’s Theatre, which advertised that women could there ‘meet one’s friends, write letters, read all the papers and magazines, use the telephones, send messages…take tea and generally make themselves at home,
as at Selfridges’
(my italics).
121
They could do all this and still be home to greet their husbands as they returned from their offices.
*
This 1737 Act was passed after details of a particularly scabrous play about the private life of the King and Queen,
The Festival of the Golden Rump
, were made known by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, who read the dialogue concerning George II’s haemorrhoids out loud in parliament.
1
*
The Orchard Street Theatre secured a patent in 1768 - becoming the only patent theatre outside London - by the intervention of its proprietor, John Palmer, of postal-reform fame (pp. 128-9).
*
Napoleon refused him permission to travel, saying ‘Foreigners must come to Paris to see Vestris dance.’ (After Napoleon’s abdication, he travelled to great acclaim.) He was also renowned as a teacher, listing Fanny Elssler, August Bournonville and Marie Taglioni among his pupils.
†
Until the end of the eighteenth century the green room at Covent Garden was known as the ‘Flesh Market’; throughout the nineteenth century the Empires promenade was a haunt of prostitutes, while its gallery was a gay cruising spot. As late as 1902 ‘this exchange, this traffic, this Flesh Fair’ continued to take place nightly.
16
*
The boxes in the first balcony began to be removed over the course of the century, and the new open seating area became known as the dress circle. The boxes that survived were those nearest the stage - that is, the worst place in the theatre from which to see the performance, but the one where the audience can most easily see the box’s inhabitants. The royal box at Covent Garden to this day is virtually on top of the stage, and requires a mirror on one wall to give some of the box’s rear inhabitants any idea of what is taking place onstage.
†
As there is no Act I, scene v listed, it must be assumed that scenes iv and v were run together, and thus the two scenes with Hamlet’s father’s ghost are the two that have the house lights down.
*
With this appearing soon after the
Ring
cycle, Gilbert had the Queen of the Fairies topically costumed with breastplate, winged helmet and spear.
*
Tom Taylor (1817-80) was another of those exhaustingly busy Victorians. He was, in turn, a professor of English at the University of London, a barrister, a journalist and the editor of
Punch.
He was also secretary to the Board of Health and an art critic for
The Times
and the
Graphic
(although one very much of his time and place: he appeared as an expert witness for Ruskin in the notorious Whistler libel trial, testifying that Whistler’s paintings were really no more than wallpaper - although very nicely coloured wallpaper). In between times he managed to write nearly forty plays.
Our American Cousin
, his most famous play, is however known today simply as the play at which Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
†
Byron’s reputation has not lasted, and the two most interesting facts about him may well be that he was Lord Byron’s second cousin, and that he named his daughter Crede, after the Byron family motto, ‘Crede Byron’.
29
‡
The Italian Opera at the Haymarket outdid even Covent Garden - it charged 10
s.
6
d.
for a pit seat, while boxes, which were privately owned, could be rented for a mere 2 or 3 guineas, compared to other theatres’ 2 to 5
s.
*
In the eighteenth century, only boxes could be bought in advance; all other seats were sold on a first-come, first-served basis. The boxes were sold from an office near the stage door: hence ‘box office’.
*
The nineteenth-century obsession with fairies really needs a chapter to itself, but this brief footnote summarizing some of the places where they turned up will at least highlight their extraordinary omnipresence. In 1840
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
had its first grand nineteenth-century staging, at Covent Garden, which included an Act V that was more or less a pantomime transformation scene. The 1853 Sadler’s Wells production carried this even further, with green and blue gauze drops in the earlier acts, and gas jets covered with gauze inside the columns of Theseus’s palace in the last act. When the lights dimmed, the columns glittered brilliantly in the darkness. But fairies were not only a pantomime theme: ballet treated fairies in Henry’s
La Silfide
(1828) and Taglioni’s and Bournonville’s
La Sylphide
in 1832 and 1836; in Coralli and Perrot’s
Giselle
(1841), which had a libretto by Théophile Gautier, based on a legend described by Heine. Opera found the subject as rewarding, with Carl Maria von Weber’s
Oberon
(1826), a fairy ballet (also choreographed by Taglioni) in Meyerbeer’s
Robert le Diable
(1831), Wagner’s
Die Feen
(1834), Lortzing’s
Undine
(1845) and Puccini’s famous debut opera,
Le Villi
(1884); even W. S. Gilbert planned for ‘Self-lighting fairies, with electricity stored somewhere about the small of their backs in
Iolanthe
(1882). Offstage, fairies were everywhere: Richard Dadd’s fairy paintings were painted throughout the 1850s and 1860s; and fairy-tale books poured off the presses: the collections made by the brothers Grimm were first translated into English in the 1820s, T. Crofton Croker’s
Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland
was published between 1825 and 1828, followed by Andersen’s fairy tales in English from 1846, in dozens of editions, Ruskin’s
The King of the Golden River
(1851), Cruikshank’s
Fairy Library
(1853-4), Thackeray’s
The Rose and the Ring
(1855), Charles Kingsley’s
The Water Babies
(1863), Andrew Lang’s thirteen ‘coloured’ fairy books (1889-1910) and, finally, on to J. M. Barrie’s
Peter Pan
in the new century.
40
*
Iolanthe
set off a craze for ‘electric jewellery’, the most famous example of which was Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt having Worth make her an ‘Electric Light’ ball gown in 1883 (although it is not clear from the description if the whole dress lit up, or only the lamp she carried with it). In 1888, Woodhouse and Rawson, ‘manufacturers of incandescent lamps’, produced a ‘Complete set [of jewellery], superior, for Ball-Room purposes’ for the Princess of Wales. But the connection with the stage meant that electric clothing and jewellery were at best seen as fit only for fancy-dress parties. However, a book on the subject,
Decorative Electricity with a Chapter on Fire Risks
, was written by Mrs J. E. H. Gordon, the wife of a director of an electricity company.
47
*
No one is quite sure who wrote this early hippodrama. The names that have been put forward include William Barrymore, J. H. Amherst and George Male. A. H. Saxon, the leading expert on hippodrama, thinks it was probably by Male, and later claimed by Barrymore (whom we met on p. 179 as author of a knock-off version of Pierce Egan’s
Life in London
).
56
This was a pattern that was to recur with many theatrical productions later in the century, especially melodramas, where the staging of the spectacle was considered far more important than the mere words.
*
Ducrow’s background, according to journalists, gave him an attractively ‘creative’ way with language. His completely filthy vocabulary apparently came as a shock to the refined souls at the legitimate theatres, but he has come down to us as the man who said, apropos of his belief in the merits of as little dialogue and as many cavalry charges as possible, ‘Cut the cackle and come to the ‘osses.’
*
By the 1860s, even when Astley’s was virtually defunct, and no longer staged hippodrama,
The Battle of Waterloo
limped on, with a production that was reduced to a single horse, ridden in turn by all the commanders of the various forces.
*
Given
Mazeppa
’s long-term fame, it is extraordinary how little is known about Milner. He flourished from the 1820s to the 1840s in the minor theatres, adapting plays from other sources for the most part, but never again with the success of
Mazeppa.
*
Menken (
c.
1835-68) was a much-married (and possibly rather less often divorced or widowed) actress, who, were it not for
Mazeppa
and a scandalous private life, would barely be remembered. In Paris she had a notorious affair with Alexandre Dumas
pe`re
, and in London a slightly more peculiar one with Swinburne, who is said to have immortalized her in his ‘Dolorida’. She died in Paris, and was buried at Montparnasse under a tombstone that mysteriously informed the viewer, ‘Thou knowest.’
71
*
This was one of several attempts to add to the sensory assault on the audience: scented programmes, perfume fountains, vaporizers and other mechanisms were all used briefly in theatres.
*
A quick untangling: ‘The Duke of Buckingham is taken’ is from
Richard III
, with a glancing reference to Dennis Lawler’s
The Earls of Hammersmith
, a spoof Gothic melodrama; ‘To be or not to be’ is of course
Hamlet
, while Adelaide Ristori had performed not in Irish, but in Italian, and in
Macbeth
, not
Othello
; ‘Pop goes the Weasel’ is, unsurprisingly, not to be found anywhere in
Trovatore.
*
It was renamed the Royal Victoria in 1833; by 1871 it was the New Victoria; less than ten years later it had metamorphosed into the Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall, a temperance music hall, with the word ‘theatre’ removed to dissociate the venue from the stage’s notoriously dubious standards. In 1898 Lilian Baylis took over, and gradually the colloquial name for the theatre became its formal title: the Old Vic.
*
It was these productions that created the slippage that shifted the name ‘Frankenstein’ from the scientist to the monster, and it happened within the first year of these many stage versions.
*
And Boucicault’s family went on entertaining the middle classes: his son Dion Boucicault Jr directed the first production of
Peter Pan
in 1904, while his daughter Nina played Peter.
*
Nowhere in the surviving script, however, is it explained how the two brothers appear simultaneously onstage in the first scene, played as they are by the same actor. It is noticeable that in all the other scenes where they appear together the stage directions have one brother’s face partially hidden, but in the first scene the opposite is clearly stated. One must assume, perhaps, that the technology behind the ghost’s appearance was so overwhelming that a double playing the ghost could creditably pass.
*
And also a villain unmasked through photography: the first time a camera appeared onstage.
105
*
‘The Colleen Bawn Galop’, ‘The Colleen Bawn Waltz’ and ‘The Colleen Bawn Quadrille’ were all shortly available as sheet music, and they all had the picture of Eily’s near-drowning on their cover page.
109
*
However, in 1880 the journalist and theatre critic William Archer could still get the Gaiety Theatre for a matinee to stage his translation of Ibsen’s
The Pillars of the Community
, the first time Ibsen was performed in Britain. Ten years later Gaiety would appear to be a strange place for Ibsen.