Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (46 page)

The Olympic had been licensed to Mme Vestris in 1831. Lucia Vestris (1797-1856) had an impeccably artistic family tree: she was the granddaughter of Francesco Bartolozzi, considered by many to be the greatest engraver ever to have worked in Britain (see p. 198). Her mother, a pianist, had studied with Clementi, and was the dedicatee of five works by Haydn. The young Lucia married Armand Vestris, a dancer at the King’s Theatre, and also the son of Auguste Vestris, one of the finest dancers of the century.
*
After a successful performing career, particularly in breeches roles, Mme Vestris acquired the lease of the Olympic, and managed to create one of the first theatres that had visibly modern elements. As a minor theatre, the Olympic was not officially entitled to perform straight drama. However, Mme Vestris had it redecorated to look like a fashionable drawing room; she kept the various areas of the auditorium rigidly segregated, so the middle classes could feel comfortable in their surroundings, without worrying about the ‘loose women’ that prowled so many theatres.
†
She managed to turn the restrictions on programming to her advantage, scheduling light comedy, a lot of music, and a lot of pretty dresses, with the whole thing winding up by eleven o’clock. The upper classes dropped in before moving on to more aristocratic haunts later; the middle classes attended and took part in a fashionable event, and they could still be home and tucked up in bed in good time for an early start at the office the next morning.

Now the majority of the audience was no longer the sort who had
attended the theatre when it was mocked by Maria Edgeworth in
The Absentee
in 1812. Then Lady Dashfort was mortified by the behaviour of her daughter Isabel: ‘Isabel! Isabel! lord D—bowing to you…Isabel, child, with your eyes on the stage? Did you never see a play before?…Major P—waiting to catch your eye this quarter of an hour; and now her eyes gone down to her play-bill!’
¹⁷
Clearly this is satire, but satire works only if it is based on some element of truth, and through to the end of the nineteenth century sociability was a major component of theatre-going. In 1882, for the British premiere of Wagner’s
Ring
cycle, the auditorium was darkened for the first time, and one historian has suggested that the icy response to this work had more to do with the fact that the inhabitants of the newly named ‘dress circle’ had dressed to be seen, not to sit in the dark.
¹⁸
*
By the end of the century, lighting was lowered intermittently in the auditorium, depending on the action on stage. For Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of
Hamlet
in 1894, the production notes read:

Act 1, sc. 1: house dark
2: house
¹
/
₂
up
3: house
¹
/
₂
up
4: house dark
†
Act 2: house
¹
/
₂
up
Act 3 house
¹
/
₂
up
Act 4 house
¹
/
₂
up
Act 5, sc. 1: house
¹
/
₂
up then general check 2: gradual check.
¹⁹

Gilbert and Sullivan, and the D’Oyly Carte company, knew their market better than the Wagnerians. Although their Savoy Theatre was the first theatre to be lit entirely by electricity, the auditorium lights were left up during the performances. The audiences preferred it, and so did the theatres - many did a nice little trade in librettos, which they feared
would vanish if the audience could not read them alongside the action. In 1882, after a performance of
Iolanthe
,
*
a reviewer in the
Illustrated London News
confessed, ‘I was so interested in the book that I could scarcely attend to the stage, except with my ears, and this feeling was general, for the whole audience was plunged into the mysteries of the libretto, and when the time came for turning over the leaves of the book there was such a rustling as is only equalled when musicians are following a score at an oratorio.’
²⁰
(For more on theatre lighting, see pp. 310-12.)

This audience with its eyes down, reading, was a far cry from Lady Dashfort and her friends. Most of this new audience had appeared in the theatres during the half-century since Maria Edgeworth’s parody appeared, and they had arrived not merely because they wanted to see plays, but because theatre had become accessible for the reasons that we can now recognize: new methods of transport, improved roads, and increasing urbanization. As early as 1816, the theatres of London had begun to draw larger audiences as new bridges were built across the Thames: Vauxhall Bridge was opened in 1816, Waterloo Bridge in 1817, Southwark Bridge in 1819. Coaches brought spectators to the Surrey Theatre by 1819, and in 1821 an advertisement for the same theatre advised its customers that there was now a hackney-coach stand in St George’s Fields, for their convenience. By the early 1830s the Red Rover Omnibus ran a special shuttle from Gracechurch Street, on the north side of London Bridge, to the Coburg Theatre in Waterloo before and after performances.
²¹

This south- and eastward expansion of the theatres was a replication of the southern and eastern expansion of the city. The spreading dockyards along the Thames had created good job opportunities, and the population followed the work until, in 1901, the East End of London had the largest working-class population in the world - possibly as high as 2 million.
²²
With that expansion in population came an expansion in entertainment locally: from the 1828 opening of the East London Theatre (later the Royalty, and then the Brunswick; this was the theatre that collapsed on p. 177), a stream of theatres followed - the City Theatre in Cripplegate and the Garrick in Leman Street (both 1831), the Standard in Shoreditch (1835), the City of London in Norton Folgate (1837),
and the Grecian and the Britannia in Hoxton and the Effingham in Whitechapel (1830s and 1840s, all saloon theatres, see pp. 372-4). By 1866 six East End theatres accounted for 34 per cent of the total theatre audience in London, while more than 63 per cent of the capital’s theatre capacity was found outside the West End.
²³

The East End audience for the most part lived and worked near the theatres. But fewer and fewer of the audiences of the West End lived in that part of town. There was a general consensus by mid-century that most members of the audience travelled in to London, or at least in to central London, to attend the theatre. In 1855 John Hollingshead, later manager of the Gaiety Theatre, told a parliamentary select committee that ‘the old metropolitan playgoer lives out of town, and does not go so much to the theatre as he used to do; the provincial people come to town, and fresh audiences are created every night.’ Horace Wigan, the manager of the Olympic, agreed with him, saying that theatres were ‘in very great proportion’ supported by the non-London resident.
²⁴
This had been made possible by the railways and, from 1863, by the new Underground system, which was expanding to meet demand. Those living in the suburbs or even further away could travel in to see a play without having to have their own transport to get home. By the 1880s and 1890s, in addition, the new streets of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue with their stylish theatres had been bulldozed through the old slum areas, creating middle-class entertainment locations where previously had been Dickensian rookeries. To add further to a suburban audience’s sense of safety in foreign territory, these streets were now well lit with gas lights. Winsor’s gas-light demonstration of 1804 had led to the creation of the first company to supply gas lighting, in 1814; within eight years 200 miles of gas mains had been laid.
²⁵
G. A. Sala wrote for many in London when he said that ‘He who will bend himself to listen to, and avail himself, of the secrets of the gas, may walk through London streets proud in the consciousness of being an Inspector - in the great police force of philosophy - and of carrying a perpetual bull’s-eye [lantern] in his belt.’
²⁶
Gas meant light, and light meant safety.

The railways brought in new audiences to London; they also transported London theatre to the provinces. Previously, as we have seen, touring companies consisted of local theatrical troupes on annual circuits performing a repertory of plays. Now two new forms of touring were made possible by the ease and economies of the railway. A West End
hit, a single play, could be toured throughout the country by a company that was created by the play’s London management solely for that purpose, and that disbanded at the end of the tour. The second type of touring company was closer to the old provincial tour: this was a first-rate company which had a repertory of pieces ranging from melodrama to farce to Shakespeare, which toured continually, but, unlike the old provincial companies, was formed by top-class performers with West End-standard productions. These companies could be very successful: the Compton Comedy Company toured for thirty-five years. (Both kinds of tour eventually killed off the provincial theatre company, if very slowly - it survived in a ghostly form into the 1950s.) Audiences everywhere expected first-rate actors in first-rate productions, and the number of people prepared to attend a performance could now support several touring companies of a single successful play from London, all out on the road simultaneously. Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas were particularly suited to this system; in 1879 there were a 1st and 2nd
Pinafore
company; by 1880, there were A, B and D companies touring the same, plus a C, or Children’s, company. In 1881 the D’Oyly Carte company had five touring companies; in 1884 there were seven, as well as the London company,
the
D’Oyly Carte company.
²⁷
While Gilbert and Sullivan had a number of hits to tour, there was enormous potential even for one-off successes:
Charley’s Aunt
, in 1893, had seven touring companies criss-crossing Britain.
²⁸

The continued growth of the cities was changing access to theatre. It was also changing the way plays were produced. Previously, when populations were small, and the number of regular theatregoers smaller still, a run of a few weeks was considered perfectly successful for any show - Garrick’s Jubilee pageant had been a great success, running as it did for twenty nights in a row, and then another fifty-one performances after that. Until the catchment area for theatres had become large enough to be able to draw on audiences for months at a time, the repertory system, which relied on a small group of very regular customers, of necessity had to prevail. Once the population passed a certain level (it appeared to be about 3 million in London), then a long run could be sustained, with an audience that constantly renewed itself. Long runs were naturally more economical, as the investment in rehearsal time, in costumes and in scenery became a smaller proportion of the whole.

In the 1840s only four plays ran for more than 100 nights, and they
were not consecutive. In the 1850s sixteen managed that feat, and Charles Kean’s 1857 production of
The Winter’s Tale
ran for 102 consecutive nights, then the longest run ever. By the 1860s eleven plays had achieved 200 nights, while six had reached 300. Tom Taylor’s
Ticket-of-Leave Man
(1863) ran for 407 performances.
*
In 1875 Henry James Byron’s
Our Boys
began its record-shattering run of 1,362 performances.
†
In the 1890s, 169 plays made it past their hundredth performance, another 73 reached 200, and 39 passed 300.
³⁰
Now, instead of small productions, economically staged, for a finite audience that returned time and again, the theatre world revolved around plays with large casts and even larger technical support teams to produce elaborate scenery and special effects for audiences that were constantly renewed.
³¹

The new long run contributed in part to a drop in the price of admission. In the eighteenth century the pit, which was the location for ‘honest citizens’, cost 3
s.
; the first gallery, for the upper working classes, cost 2
s.
This was a high sum, but the production costs were equally high - at Drury Lane 150 people worked in the theatre ( just over half of them actors), with annual running costs of approximately £40,000.
³²
By 1842, prices for seats in the pit ranged from 1
s.
(for the Queen’s and the Surrey), to 1s. 6
d.
(Sadler’s Wells), 2
s.
(the Adelphi, the Olympic and the Strand), and up to 3
s.
for theatres that considered the appeal to exclusivity worth the reduction in audience size - Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the English Opera, and the St James’s and Haymarket theatres.
‡
The first gallery at the Queen’s or the Surrey, could be gained for a mere 6
d.
, however, and most others settled at 1 or 2
s.
³³
East End theatres charged even less: the Britannia had gallery seats at 3
d.
or 4
d.
, and the pit was 1
s.
6
d.
³⁴
Yet it was not as if the number of people employed in
the theatres had dropped commensurately with the prices (and neither had the wage bill: wages rose steadily through most of the nineteenth century). In 1832 Covent Garden had 1,000 employees, and spent over £60,000 annually.
³⁵

Instead, money was being made in part from non-theatre revenue: from refreshments, either directly or from selling licences to serve food and drink to an outside contractor. There was also a small income from playbills, which were sold in the auditorium until the 1870s, when they were replaced with programmes. Librettos were sold too, and many theatres had annual sales of their props and costumes. But the main increase in revenue came from increasing audiences, and increasing professionalization of the box office.
*
Until the 1880s, tickets were written out by hand, which was a slow, laborious process and one that was open to fraud - a dishonest booking agent could sell many more places than the theatre held, or claim to have sold far fewer and hang on to the cash. Possibly as a result of this, in the late 1860s a large number of patents were filed for various methods of checking admissions, or producing printed consecutive tickets, and by the 1880s the modern system of pre-printed tickets with counterfoils, which had a date, price and seat number on both halves, was in place.
³⁶
From the 1860s to the end of the century many bent their minds to finding ways to fit more and more people into the same-sized theatres: in 1860 a patent was filed ‘for the purpose of facilitating the passage of spectators between the rows of seats in the pits of theatres or in other places where long rows of benches are used’; another proposed a seat that is ‘raised, and the occupiers of the seats can then stand close to the projecting parts’; in 1873 there was yet another, this one for the first time proposing something similar to the modern tip-up seat that makes it possible to set rows of seats tightly together while still giving access to late-comers.
³⁷