Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (51 page)

The great success achieved at Drury Lane…certainly justifies Mr Harris [the manager] in his strong opinion that at a theatre so large his action is vastly more important than dialogue, and situation infinitely preferable to sentiment…As a rule the playgoers of to-day want to see and not to think. A facile stage workman who understands dramatic effect is nowadays of far greater value to a manager than a man of letters who has a capacity of writing for the stage.
⁹⁵

The early-nineteenth-century melodramas were frequently set in the rural world. Isaac Pocock’s
The Miller and his Men
(1813 at Covent Garden, by 1814 in the provinces) had, according to the
Norwich Mercury
, ‘a variety of spectacular scenic effects - a windmill working, a boat passing, a cottage room with a fire, a dark forest, a bandits’ cavern, an inn, and a celebrated finale involving a bridge from a high rock to the ground and an explosion’ involving a drawbridge ‘which passes to the Rocky Prominontory [
sic
] across the Ravine; from whence Lothair fires…a dreadful Explosion ensues, the Mill and Millers are blown into the air, &c. &c.’.
⁹⁶
From the late 1830s a number of melodramas revolved around the railways, as the biggest, most dramatic new topic that could be portrayed. The very first, in 1836, was Edward Stirling’s
The Lucky Hit; or, Railroads for Ever!
, a drama about railway speculation, but while there was emotional turmoil aplenty, there was little of scenic excitement in it. It was
The Scamps of London
(1843), based on Euge`ne Sue’s French melodrama
Les Myste`res de Paris
, and set in Waterloo station, that really began to take the measure of what could be achieved scenically. In 1863 a ‘real’ train was brought onstage, in
The Engineer
, at the Royal Victoria: ‘In the thunderous finale, young George Stephenson mounts the footplates, shunts the heroine to safety in a ballast truck, and crushes her prostrate seducer beneath his cardboard wheels.’
⁹⁷
And in
London by Night
(1868) came the apotheosis of the railway melodrama. The opening scene was set in ‘A London railway terminus, exterior, The stage filled with passengers, newspaper boys call
ing

out the names of their papers, shoeblacks following their occupation, vendors of fruit and cigar-lights, porters with luggage. Railway and engine heard without; the scene, in fact, to realise the arrival of a train.’ The final scene took the audience to ‘The brick-fields at Battersea. Lone house, L. The river in the distance. Night, and moonlight. A railroad track runs at back from L. to R.’ Our hero, the rather wonderfully named Dognose, has been knocked unconscious and left on the railroad track; Louisa, the heroine, can see him from the house where she has been locked in. ‘Locks and bars alike defy me,’ she wails. She finds an axe. ‘Heaven has not deserted me. Courage! (Strikes gate) Courage! (The steam whistle is heard again nearer, and rumble of train on the track) It must give! (Noise of train increases. A last blow. Gate flies open and Louisa rushes to Dognose. Just as his head is removed from the track, the train passes with a roar and a whistle.)’ The hero declares of his arch-enemy, ‘Let the law punish him’, and heads into his golden future with Louisa.
⁹⁸

Who wrote this deathless narrative it is difficult to say. One historian of Victorian melodrama has suggested that it was a combination of Moncrieff, Sue, and Dion Boucicault, who was to do so much for the genre, with perhaps others all adding bits and pieces as it was re-staged in different theatres, and all claiming it as their own.
⁹⁹
But, whoever wrote it, it was Boucicault (1820-90) who became for ever connected with ‘sensation scenes’. Alfred Thompson’s
Linda of Chamouni, or, Not Formosa, An Operatic Incongruity, in Three Scenes and a Sensation
(1869) was happy to acknowledge Boucicault’s primacy even as it derided it:

I’ll sing you the tragic story
Of a young man of our days,
Who gained not tin, but glory,
By writing five act plays.
He soon found plays legitimate
Could never boil the pot;
He voted Byron second-rate
And Shakespeare awful rot.
All this was laid to the fault,
Of one whose name was
Boocicault
,
Of one whose name was Boo bar sic was salt,
Was
Boocicault.

Chorus. All this, &c.
He did away the cupboards old,
The screen that used to fall,
The folding doors which would unfold,
With ‘Heaven bless ye all.’
And to his aid sensation calls,
Real cabs, real turning tides,
Real railway trains, real music halls,
Real plunging suicides.

All this, &c.…
¹⁰⁰

Boucicault’s first play,
London Assurance
, a tidied-up version of a Restoration comedy, had been produced by Mme Vestris and her husband at the Olympic in 1841, to enormous success. But it was with his adaptation of
The Corsican Brothers
in 1852 that he achieved the impossible: he tamed the melodrama, domesticated it, and made it safe for the middle classes - and thereby hugely increased its audience numbers.
*
The Corsican Brothers
was taken from a French play that was in turn adapted from a story by Dumas
pe`re
, and it opened at the Princess’s Theatre, which, like the Olympic, was one of a handful of theatres that were attempting to lure in the respectable middle classes by stressing their gentlemanly elements, both onstage and off. These were in general smallish theatres, with foyers decorated in a style that mirrored the homes of their desired patrons. The dramas they mounted also revolved around scenes of domestic life that their audiences would recognize, or, as in the case of
The Corsican Brothers
, a historical setting that could be considered educational.

The plot itself was very simple: the story of a murdered man and his brother’s revenge. But there were two elements, one of plot construction, one of staging, that took the audiences of the day by surprise, and lifted the piece out of its genre category. First, Boucicault set Acts I and II so that they had to be understood to have taken place simultaneously. This novel approach gave the illusion of depth to a straightforward narrative. Taken together with the innovative technology and staging, many thought they were seeing far more than was in fact the case: the plot had been raked over a hundred times before. What was shatteringly original was the staging. At the end of Act I, Fabien dei Franchi sits at his desk,
writing to his brother Louis (both played in the original by Kean), with his mother nearby.

At the same time Louis dei Franchi appears, without his coat or waistcoat, as his brother is, but with a blood stain upon his breast; he glides across the stage, ascending gradually through the floor at the same time, and lays his hand on Fabien’s left shoulder…Louis dei Franchi waves his arm, passes through the wall, and disappears; at the same moment the scene at the back opens and discloses a glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau. On the side, a young man who is wiping the blood from his sword with a handkerchief; two seconds are near him. On the other side, Louis dei Franchi, stretched upon the ground, supported by his two seconds and a surgeon. Picture.

Act II opens in Paris, with the events that are to lead up to this duel, and then ‘A glade in the Forest of Fontainebleau…’, and the duel takes place, an exact replica of the conclusion of the previous act, except that, as the scene ends, ‘[Louis] sinks back exhausted and dies…The back of the scene opens slowly and discovers the chamber of the first act, the clock marking the hour…Mme dei Franchi and Fabien, looking exactly as they did before. Fabien: “Pray for Louis, dearest mother. I go to avenge him.” ‘ The third act concerns Fabien’s pursuit of his brother’s murderer. He finally avenges Louis’s death and, at the end of the act, ‘He passes behind a tree up stage; then advances, with face covered by his hands, and sinks weeping upon the fallen tree. A pause. Louis dei Franchi appears, rising gradually through the earth and placing his hand on the shoulder of his brother. Louis: “Mourn not, my brother. We shall meet again.” Curtain.’
¹⁰¹

This ran for sixty-six nights consecutively, and within a year there were seven adaptations onstage in London alone. G. H. Lewes thought it ‘the most daring, ingenious and exciting melodrama I remember having seen’.
¹⁰²
Partly its success was due to the clever mix of melodrama with chivalric morality that gave sober audiences who did not normally attend melodrama permission to be stirred. But what was really exciting was not the rather moth-eaten story, but the technology that produced the ghostly double.

Stage machinery had undergone a transformation during the century. Earlier, scenery was painted on to flats that were set in grooves on the floor; each successive scene slid into place in front of or behind the
current scene. Now some scenery was flown down from newly developed fly-towers high above the stage, while other sets were built as freestanding boxes, creating a sense of three-dimensional reality. These threesided sets, which we take for granted, were completely revolutionary, a newly created reality appearing in front of the audience. To change them from one scene to the next, a front cloth was dropped down before all but a thin strip at the front of the stage, music was played to drown out the noise, and playwrights were asked to provide ‘carpenters’ scenes’ that could be staged on the narrow front stage while the set was wheeled into place behind. To produce special effects within the box, planks were removed from the floor, and scenery was raised from underneath. The most advanced stages had four bridges built under the stage, set between the grooves for the scenery; these wooden platforms were then raised by ropes to the level of the stage, while the orchestra once more produced extra-loud music to cover the noise. Specialized ‘grave’, ‘star’ and ‘vampire’ traps were set, each opening at a different place on the stage, with different types of hidden door, to permit ghosts, demons, vampires - or simply the star of the show - to appear suddenly, and ostensibly out of thin air. The Corsican trap, devised for Boucicault’s show, was different: the performer stood on a wheeled platform that moved slowly and silently up an incline built into the understage bridge: the ghost of Louis dei Franchi floated ominously across the stage, rising ever upward behind his oblivious brother.
*

This was a sensation, and created the now almost obligatory parodies. The Strand Theatre produced a burlesque of both
The Corsican Brothers
and Kean’s recent production of
Hamlet
: both, after all, were in essence plays about taking revenge for the murder of a family member. So the ghost of Hamlet’s father appeared through a Corsican trap, and the playbill also mocked Boucicault’s novel dramatic structure, promising that ‘The Action of the Second Scene is supposed to take place immediately after the First, and not before, as many, perhaps, will be inclined to suppose. Scene the Second will be followed in regular succession by Scene the Third; the Action of which is supposed to Occur after Scene
the Fourth, before Scene the First, and simultaneously with the Second, Fifth, and Seventh Scenes.’ Another parody, Planché’s
The Discreet Princess
of 1855, had one brother who was Hamlet and one who was Louis dei Franchi.
Masaniello; or, the Fish o’Man of Naples
took this idea even further: at one point the audience was watching the comedian Frederick Robson play Masaniello, who was impersonating Prince Richecraft from
The Discreet Princess
, who was in turn playing Louis dei Franchi. This may have been an audience who loved stage gimmicks, but it was hardly an unsophisticated one.
¹⁰³

With
The Poor of New York
, staged in that city in 1857, Boucicault harnessed the power of the sensation scene; now the grand spectacle was intended from the first to be more important than the story. The stage directions stress the importance of this scene, by their minutely detailed instructions:

The house is gradually enveloped in fire; a cry outside is heard. ‘Fi-er!’ ‘Fi-er!’ It is taken up by other voices more distant. The tocsin sounds - other churches take up the alarm - bells of engines are heard. Enter a crowd of persons. Enter BADGER, without coat or hat - he tries the door - finds it fast; seizes a bar of iron and dashes in the ground-floor window; the interior is seen in flames. [he climbs in through the window, followed by Dan]…Another shout. DAN leaps out again, black and burned, staggers forward and seems overcome by the heat and smoke. The shutters of the garret fall and discover BADGER in the upper floor. Another cry from the crowd, a loud crash is heard, BADGER disappears as if falling with the inside of the building. The shutters of the windows fall away, and the inside of the house is seen…

And at this point, on to the stage rolled a real fire engine.
¹⁰⁴

The formula was set: Boucicault’s
Pauvrette
(1858) had an avalanche; his 1859 play,
The Octoroon
, had the firing of a Mississippi riverboat;
*
in
London by Night
(1868) a life-sized express train roared across the stage; this was the progenitor of so many later train melodramas, with the hero tied to the railway track while the express rushed onwards.

Boucicault was not alone in his love of sensation.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was published in Britain in 1852, and by early 1853 there were eleven versions competing onstage, many with a sensation scene of Eliza escaping
over the ice, pursued by the evil slaver and his dogs. (Astley’s version had a runaway horse, which ‘loved freedom’ too.)
¹⁰⁶
The Standard Theatre, in the East End, in the 1880s specialized in sensation scenes:
The Ruling Passion
(1882) had a real balloon in which the heroine, an escaped lunatic and his keeper all rose from the Crystal Palace and landed in the Channel in a storm, to be rescued by a lifeboat.
Glad Tidings
(1883) was set in Rotten Row, with a full complement of riders on horseback.
Daybreak
(1884) staged the Derby with real horses (this was two years before the same thing appeared at Drury Lane, but, to make up for coming second, from 1886 Drury Lane set plays at Goodwood, the Derby, Newmarket, the Grand National and Longchamp). The Standard did not have Drury Lane’s facilities, but nevertheless managed to create the necessary racetrack drama by taking over some of the street outside. The scene docks with their ramps leading down to the street were opened on both sides of the stage. The horses gathered at the bottom of one ramp, cantered out into the street, then raced around the building to the other side, up the opposite ramp, and at full gallop tore across the stage, out the other side and down the first ramp, to be pulled up in the street. This arrangement also provided essential working space to gather the crowds used in pageant and processional scenes:
Our Silver Wedding
(1886) had 250 children on a Sunday-school excursion to Epping, in 12 horse-drawn wagons.