New Albion (24 page)

The pantomime, which had proceeded from the pen of a Mr. Farquhar Pratt, went by the unpronounceable title
Yoyeyeyayomayatchu
. Joe thought it likely the most superla
tive pantomime of the London Theatre season, and he cheered wildly throughout. The audience was transported first to the court of an ancient Chinese emperor whose daughter was, as daughters are wont to be in melodramas, obstinate in her demand to marry whom she pleased. With a flash of yellow powder, blown from the hand of a Genie, the scene shifted to a harlequinade, where Luddites valiantly fought off attempts to
mechanize them. Joe found some of this exceedingly hard to follow,
as the pantomime at first condemned the going trend in industrialization which pervades England in the present day, but in the end he was heartened to hear that he was living in a land which had its equal in no other nation, even despite the heavy burdens borne by the nation’s poor and unemployed.

Several performances stood out to the point where Joe Whelks found himself excitedly on his feet, cheering the actors’
every move. Despite getting off to a slow start, Mr. Hicks displayed
fine improvisational skills, veritably petrifying the other actors with the unpredictability of what he had to say. This veteran actor’s articulation is anything but lazy. He thrilled Joe Whelks with his recital of the line: “I shaller goer and
acquainter the Empororor withalla.” He also performed backflips and danced the sailor’s hornpipe at the drop of a hat, any hat.

Speaking of dancing, Joe was most captivated by a young woman who bills herself as the Parisian Phenomenon but who is also rumoured to be the daughter of the theatre’s very English proprietor. So enchanting was her pas de deux that she danced almost entirely out of her own costume, which excited Joe to such a passion that he nearly had to leave the theatre until his composure returned.

By the end of the evening, the audience was moved to riot – owing, I am told, to misplaced anger over an entertainer who had promised to fit himself into a quart fruit jar on an earlier evening – and Joe narrowly avoided being arrested by a local constable. He found his way out into the street and later received intelligence that something horrible had happened before the police managed to restore order.

Joe’s fear is that many who read this will use the riot as an excuse to renew the call for closure of minor theatres like the New Albion. But he wishes to say that London’s poor, and those who have been driven into criminality by poverty, will be somewhere, and they might as well be in a theatre as in any other place. For in the theatre they are entertained and they are also kept from pursuing many of their illegal proclivities; they are kept off the street. The impetus, then, should not be toward
closure of the minor theatres; instead, it should be toward creating,
in those theatres, spectacular entertainments which are also instructive and morally wholesome.

* Chapter Fifteen *

Tuesday, 31 December 1850

I received a communication
from Mr. Wilton at my home this morning. In the letter, he requested that I meet him at the Ten Bells Public House at three o’clock this afternoon.

The Ten Bells is not my customary watering place, and it would not be my first choice for a place in which to meet about business. As London pubs go, it is not particularly well-appointed. The bar is heavy and oaken and scarred by rough usage. The barman is a Cockney who always seems of two minds whether he would like to serve you or administer a few turns of the boot. There are plain tiles on the wall and, incongruously, a painting of a pastoral eighteenth-century home and family above the bar. The pub is frequented by dollymops of the crudest sort and by surly itinerant labourers looking for threepenny knee-wobblers.

Perhaps that is what Mr. Wilton likes about the place. It is broad-shouldered and quick to violence, like the army. He was nevertheless eyed with suspicion as he sat upright at a corner table, he with his broad shoulders cloaked in a customary black suit and his manly mustache and bushy eyebrows framed by a shining high hat. “By gawd, Phillips, it is good to see you again,” were the first words out of his mouth when he saw me. The scars from his altercation with Colin Tyrone were almost healed.

“Good to see you, as well, sir,” I replied, pumping his hand as though we were brothers separated at birth.

He looked entirely relaxed away from the theatre, ruddy-faced and jolly. “I had thought never again to see you in the context of the New Albion Theatre,” he said, “but I received this communication at my home yesterday evening.” He slid a legalistic-looking blue paper across the pock-marked table at me. It was typewritten and signed in the hand of Mr. Mayne of the Police Commission. The letter intimated that the New Albion Theatre would be allowed to open its doors once more, effective 1 January 1851, but that it would do so under strict conditions: that it refuse admission to known criminals and prostitutes; that no public drunkenness be tolerated inside the theatre; and that it refrain from presenting plays which are not morally uplifting.

I was astonished. “But how did you achieve this miraculous transformation in Mr. Mayne’s disposition toward our tiny theatre?”

Mr. Wilton’s face erupted into a broad smile. “Friends in high places, Phillips. Friends in high places. Of course, Mr. Dickens’ article did no harm, either.” He waved his hand at a pasty-looking waiter who had brought a toddy of rum to the table. “Ginger beer for you, Phillips?”

“Please.”

The waiter looked mildly affronted that I would not have ordered something stronger, but he returned to the bar wordlessly and came back, after a brief time, with my libation.

Perusing the blue letter once more, I said, simply, “Well.”

Leaning forward, Mr. Wilton again grew serious. “It is a new day, Phillips, and I had hoped to discuss with you a new strategy for the theatre.” His vigour was once again renewed, and I remarked how, Phoenix-like, he seemed always to rise from his own ashes.

Good-natured confidence is often contagious, and I found myself mirroring Mr. Wilton’s positive mood. “Are we to replace the orchestra pit with a pool of water, sir, and play only nautical melodramas?”

He laughed and swallowed some of his rum. “No, sir, that is not what I had in mind.”

“Perhaps a year-long Shakespearean Festival then?” I drank down a long sip of my ginger beer.

“Not that either, Phillips.” He took a breath and launched into his discourse. “I can foresee a day when plays will matter more than actors. When a great play will run for a hundred evenings or more. Osbaldiston has done it with
Sally Sadly
. Mr. Kean the younger is doing it now on Regent Street. There is no reason we cannot do it, as well.” He looked at me expectantly.

I would have liked to agree with him, but I could not. I lowered my cup to the table. “I’m not sure,” I began, in measured tones, “that Mr. Farquhar Pratt has many hundred-evening runs left in him.”

“Pratt is yesterday’s man,” Mr. Wilton observed. He had the look of a major who is forced to shoot his wounded comrade on the field so that the Sepoys cannot commit atrocities upon him. “Pratt will be sacked as of tomorrow.” The old major’s jaw was jutting again, and his eyes were hard.

“He is destitute, sir, and ill,” I said. “I have been to his lodgings.”

“Let his family care for him,” Old Stoneface said, his voice sharp as sabres. “We are not a charity.”

I was appalled. “I don’t believe he has any family, excepting a wife who depends upon him for her sustenance.”

“Not my affair,” he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand, “just as it will not be my affair when the acting company is dismissed.”

I could scarcely believe what I was hearing. “Dismissed, sir?”

Mr. Wilton’s hands were beginning to shake, and he steadied them by grasping the edge of the table firmly. “Oh, not tomorrow, Phillips, but eventually. You mark my words. The day will come when these actors are hired on a casual basis. Show by show. The day will come.” He saw the displeasure in my eyes and attempted to soften the impact of his words. Sitting back in his chair and smiling, he said, “Oh, don’t be a sentimentalist, Phillips. Necessity urges change, and progress cannot be stifled.”

I paused and reflected. “I thought the New Albion Theatre was a different kettle of fish, sir,” I said, “what with all this talk of a happy theatrical family.”

Old Stoneface did not take the bait. “We are still happy,” he said, “in the knowledge that the greater good will be served. In the meantime, please contact the company at your earliest convenience and tell them to be in the theatre bright and early, day after tomorrow.”

Thursday, 2 January 1851

Arriving at the New Albion this morning at nine o’clock, as usual, I found the actors in the Green Room, drinking hot tea and discussing Mr. Dickens’ article in
Household Words
. “I choose to see it as a rave,” sputtered Mrs. Toffat, somewhat defensively. “He did say that Joe Welks cheered wildly.”

“He was extremely rude to Eliza,” Fanny Hardwick replied. “Mentioning her embarrassment.”

“Yes, but he said that she was enchanting, which she is, with or without her costume.”

Mr. Hicks, who had been brooding quietly in a corner of the room, interjected, “I think a sound beating is in order for the eloquent Mr. Dickens. He’s had it in for this theatre ever since we brought out
David Copperfield
last spring.”

“He was kind enough to you, though, Mr. Hicks,” said Mrs. Toffat, her voice growing strident. “He said that you had fine improvisational skills and that your articulation was muscular.”

“Not sure what he meant by that,” growled Mr. Hicks, his voice and manner as blunt as a ten-pound cudgel, “but if there’s
any offense in it, I warrant I’ll dance a hornpipe upon his
writing hand.”

Not wishing to play a part in this travesty, I proceeded to the stage, where my empty desk awaited. Mr. Sharpe and his crew were busily attempting to repair the damage caused by the riot. Stock flats of a pastoral rural setting, purportedly painted by Inigo Jones in 1789, were slid faded but hopeful into the stage grooves. Mrs. Hayes was excising the charred portion of the curtain and replacing it with a bolt of velour which was approximately the same color. I was not at my desk long before I heard Pratty picking his way down the stairs from Mr. Wilton’s office in a methodical fashion. He looked paler than before and more frail. His aspect was somewhat bewildered, his eyes empty and unfocused. “What a pleasure it is to see you again, Mr. Farquhar Pratt,” I said, trying to manufacture some happiness for the poor soul.

He halted beside my desk and spoke to the proscenium arch. “I understand the panto did not go well,” he said, his voice devoid of modulation. “At any rate, I have been sacked.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “And is there no redress?”

He behaved as though he had not heard me. “I want to thank you for past kindnesses, Mr. Phillips. You alone have shown compassion where others lacked it.” I had no response for this, and Pratty turned away from me, without further ado, and tapped his way across the stage to the exit stairs. As he withdrew, his corporality melted into the darkness of the wings as a ghost melts into the walls of a palace in one of Mr. Walpole’s novels.

* * *

A half-hour later,
Mr. Wilton came down the stairs, talking animatedly with Eustace Heywood, former stock playwright at the New Albion. “First order of business,” he was saying, “is to write me a minstrel show that will be the envy of all London.”

“I do have other plays in hand,” Mr. Heywood replied. “I have not been slothful during my stint at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.”

Mr. Wilton was impatient. He paced restlessly about the backstage area like a caged wolf. “Yes, but a minstrel show is what I want. I had hoped to attract Mr. Christie’s minstrels to this theatre and thought I had a signed contract in hand for next month. But recent troubles have tarnished the theatre’s reputation, and Mr. Christie chose to ignore his obligation to us.”

Mr. Heywood did not seem to understand. “Have you any darkies in your own company, sir?”

Old Stoneface was in the process of dragging Heywood over to my desk. “No, sir,” he said, “but I have plenty of cork to burn and actors with some modicum of talent. Phillips, I’m sure you remember Mr. Heywood.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, “I remember him well.”

Mr. Heywood turned his gaunt white face to me and managed a smile. His eyes were clear and his manner changed from my remembrance of him. When he shook my hand, his grip was steady. “I am perhaps not the same man I was,” he said. “Life in the debtor’s prison has a way of curing one of one’s vices.” There was something in Mr. Heywood’s eyes that was hard as diamonds. There was little humour in his voice.

“Mr. Heywood has returned as Stock Playwright,” Mr. Wilton interjected. “He tells me that he has a satchel full of new melodramas. Enough to sustain us well into next season.”

“Mr. Wilton was kind enough to pay off my debtors,” Mr. Heywood added, “and I have promised him ten of my choicest melodramas for a mere four pounds each.”

“Very good,” I said. I could hear the dryness in my own throat. The situation was not very good. That much I understood. The cold, hard, straightened Heywood would be the future of the New Albion Theatre.