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Audiences, stage managers and scenes that can only be described as beastly: Researching East End theatre in the nineteenth century Jim Davis University of Warwick 1 I don’t know whether there’s something special about East End theatre, but for me it inevitably calls up a series of memories. I first became acquainted with East End theatre per se in the early 1970s when I regularly travelled to Hoxton to rehearse and act (very badly) in a couple of productions at Hoxton Hall, the former MacDonald’s music hall, a few hundred yards up Hoxton High Street from the site of the former Britannia Theatre. I still remember wandering up dimly lit Hoxton Street on dark winter evenings and entering Hoxton Hall with its then murky atmosphere and faint smell of gas. Another memory, from around the same time, when I was living in East London within easy access of the Theatre Royal Stratford East (on which my colleague Nadine Holdsworth is currently undertaking some very exciting research), are visits to Sweeney Todd (the version that inspired Sondheim), regular trips to other new productions and large group visits to the Sunday evening variety shows. Later, when the theatre was under Philip Hedley’s enlightened direction, I took a group of students on a playwriting course I had just started at Roehampton University, where I then worked, to Stratford East, where Philip Hedley talked about the theatre’s writing policy, then generously provided us all with free sandwiches and free tickets to that evening’s show. And any visit to Stratford East at that period, of course, had to be rounded off by a visit to the bar, for further live entertainment after the show. My most significant memory, though, takes me right away from East London to the blue skies and sunshine of Sydney, New South Wales, where I was working in the late 1980s. I had decided to make the best of my distance from all my major research resources by undertaking a study of English actors in Australia. This meant visiting the Mitchell Library to see if they had any useful documents that would assist in my research. The Library is situated quite centrally in Sydney on the edge of a large open space called the Domain, just across from 2 the Art Gallery of New South Wales and adjacent to the Botanical Gardens, only minutes away from stunning views of the Opera House and Sydney Harbour Bridge. Browsing though the catalogues I noticed a reference to the manuscript diaries of the Britannia’s stage manager, Frederick C Wilton, with a rather parochial description beneath – ‘some Australian interest’. I’d ordered up manuscript diaries left by actors, stage managers and other theatre folk before at libraries in the UK and the States. I knew that one was often lucky to get anything more than a few pages of accounts and a couple of desultory entries in such volumes. Nevertheless, I ordered the manuscripts, which took the form of a set of small diaries contained inside a box file. I opened the first diary (for1863) not expecting very much, only to find I was plunged into the world of East London, the Britannia Theatre, Wilton’s domestic life, comments on the topics of the day: a panorama, in fact of one man’s life and work in East London from 186375. From then on, whenever I had a few free hours, I returned to the library to read more. I knew a bit about the Britannia from the late Clive Barker’s articles on that theatre1 and it was soon clear to me that these diaries represented one of the fullest accounts in existence of the day to day life of any London – let alone East End - theatre in the nineteenth century. The future direction of my research changed almost overnight and a long period of engagement with the history of East End theatre began. A few years later I was walking with my children and some friends through Waverley Cemetery (in the eastern suburbs of Sydney). Waverley is truly a cemetery to die for – it is beautifully situated on the coast, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was a beautiful Sydney winter day – blue skies, bright 1 Cliver Barker, ‘The Audiences of the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton’, Theatre Quarterly 9:34 (1979), 27-41; ‘A theatre for the People’, in Kenneth Richards & Peter Thomson, eds., Nineteenth Century British Theatre (London: Methuen & Co Ltd., 1971); ‘The Chartists, Theatre, Reform and Research’, Theatre Quarterly I:4 (1971), 3-10 3 sunshine – and I took a detour from the main path, glancing at the tombstones and monuments as I passed. One large rectangular monument caught my eye – the inscription was to F. C. Wilton, clearly described as stage manager of the Britannia Theatre, London. Wilton had eventually departed for Australia – where he was to spend the last twelve years of his life - not long after his retirement from the Britannia. Four of his six children were resident in Australia and they had seen to it that his life and his work at the Britannia were fittingly memorialised on the slopes of this graveyard so many thousands of miles away from East London. One final memory – back in London and back in the East End - Not long after I had completed an edition of Wilton’s diaries2, I began research for a jointlyauthored book on nineteenth-century London theatre audiences, Reflecting the Audience3, focussing on representative theatres from different parts of London. From the East End we selected the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel, and the Britannia Theatre, although in the process we surveyed other east end theatres as well. Inevitably, in the nineteenth century, theatregoers often walked to neighbourhood theatres and even to theatres further a-field. Although not empirical research, I decided to spend a Sunday with some friends walking from Sadler’s Wells Theatre, via the site of every major nineteenth-century London theatre in East London right the way through to the East London Theatre in Mile End Road. From Sadler’s Wells we walked to the site of the Grecian in City Road, then across to the site of the Britannia in Hoxton, thence moving south towards Liverpool Street in an attempt to locate the sites of the Standard and City of London Theatres. From there we sought out the site of the Garrick Theatre in Leman Street – made a detour to Wilton’s (not on our original list), 2 Jim Davis, ed., The Britannia Diaries: Selections from the Diaries of Frederick C. Wilton 1863-75 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1992) 3 Jim Davis & Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840-1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001) 4 then on to Whitechapel Road and the putative sites of the Pavilion and East London theatres. Needless to say, London’s geography has changed so much that little could be proved about travel between theatres in the nineteenthcentury, but the journey (which included frequent stops for refreshments in various hostelries along the way), did indicate that a certain degree of mobility between theatres among East End audiences might have been possible. Before East End theatre turns into my own personalised version of Proust and the madeleines, let me say that one of the delights of working on nineteenthcentury East End theatre has been the visceral memories that, retrospectively, it conjures up. But the real work, of course, lies in the archives: in the Public Record Office, the London Metropolitan Archives, local collections such as those in Hackney and Whitechapel, not to mention the relevant materials held in the British Library and the V & A’s Theatre Collection. The East End continues to attract nineteenth century theatre scholarship, including Heidi Holder’s work on the female playwrights of East London and Janice Norwood’s work on the Britannia. For me there are a number of lessons to be learnt from researching East End theatre, which I will now go on to discuss. After the passing of the Theatre Regulation Act in 1843 public records relating to east end theatres become more common and more accessible. This continues throughout the nineteenth century, although from the 1880s onwards the London County Council Records become perhaps the primary source of manuscript material. That east end theatres and saloons were looked upon with suspicion in the 1840s is abundantly clear in a number of police reports, and in letters of complaint about audience behaviour in the vicinity of east end theatres. I have documented elsewhere the difficulties faced by Samuel Lane at the Britannia Saloon, by the Albert Saloon and by the City of London and 5 Garrick Theatres, when they fell prey to unsympathetic police reports.4 Many of these reports were generated because of obstructions caused outside the theatres and saloons by teenage boys and there is a possibility that rival theatre and saloon managers encouraged such behaviour in order to discredit their competitors. Inside the theatres, particularly in the galleries, younger members of the audience were also singled out for censure. A police report on the City of London Theatre for 1846 describes a performance of Jack Sheppard during which the gallery was crammed ‘almost to suffocation’ and generating an intense heat. Of the 466 members of the gallery audience we learn that most were youths of both sexes aged from around 11 to 18 and from the lowest classes, the males being divested of jackets and coats. The police officers recognised several male who were the known associates of thieves. Additionally There were also between 40 and 50 young prostitutes some apparently not more than 14 or 15 years old and the language going forward among them was bad in the extreme. Among those described above there were (on rough calculation) from 70 to 100 children of both sexes apparently of a superior class from their manners and dress. I saw more than 20 little girls decently dressed intermixed with the Prostitutes, some of whom from their gestures and manner towards the boys they were with, were apparently making use of rude observations, but it was almost impossible to get near them to ascertain.5 Yet subsequent reports on the gallery audience at the City of London Theatre, even when Jack Sheppard was playing, were much more benign, suggesting that the police saw what they chose to see, were expected to see or perhaps were even bribed to see or not to see. 4 See Jim Davis, "Scandals to the Neighbourhood: Cleaning Up the East London Theatres", New Theatre Quarterly, VI:23 (August 1990), 235-243 5 Lord Chamberlain’s Papers LC7/6, police report 22 July, 1846 6 The gradual assimilation of those saloons that survived, such as the Britannia, the Grecian and the Effingham into theatres, as well as other neighbourhood theatres throughout London, into acceptable patterns of conduct and organisation seems to have largely been achieved by the early 1850s, but complaints did not completely disappear. Thus in 1870 the East London Theatre (formerly the Effingham), then under the management of Morris Abrahams, came under attack on sanitary grounds, although the prime mover in the complaints was a local bookseller, Gladding, who (as a vendor of theological books) apparently had religious objections to the theatre in general, and who in 1866 had objected to the construction of a public urinal immediately adjacent to the theatre. Gladding’s subsequent complaints had materialised in a memorial submitted to the Lord Chamberlain, complaining about the egress of males three or four times an evening from the theatre to relieve themselves against the houses, walls and railings of Mary Street, just across the road. It was not uncommon to see 20 or so males relieving themselves at any one time with perhaps twice that number awaiting their turn. As a result, claimed the memorialists: Female inhabitants...are often obliged to wait for some time before they can approach their habitations, whilst their exit is always made liable to the foullest offence by the exposure of male persons...The whole ground is saturated until the street has become offensive all day long...6 The Reverend James Cohen, Rector of Whitechapel, wrote to the Lord Chamberlain in support of the memorialists, claiming that in less than five minutes the previous Saturday sixty persons were actually counted committing this nuisance: 6 Lord Chamberlain’s Papers, LCI/232, memorial, 5 March, 1870 7 Health is endangered by the horrible smell which hangs over the place, especially in the summer time. One serous outbreak of fever had taken place some time ago, in which four members of one family died. Common decency is outraged; and the usefulness of large school rooms seriously interfered with because females are prevented attending meetings and classes in the evening for fear of encountering scenes which can only be described as beastly.7 Morris Abrahams claimed he had done his utmost to deal with these complaints and that the East London theatre itself now contained more urinals than any other public building in London. Two years later the Reverend Cohen targeted the Garrick Theatre in Leman Street in an unsuccessful attempt to have its licence revoked.8 So, if theatre was alive and well in London’s East End, so was anti-theatrical prejudice. In my co-authored book on nineteenth-century London theatre audiences I attempted to demonstrate that what was written about popular theatres (in particular those situated in the East End) and the ways in which they were represented in the nineteenth century were coloured by contemporary debates over leisure, popular entertainment, social order and public morality. Despite letters of complaint and sometimes unfavourable police reports the Lord Chamberlain’s Office was relatively benign in its treatment of East End theatres, although a reformist agenda of sorts was certainly implicit in the attitudes and decisions of Examiners of Plays such as W. B. Donne. Equally, descriptions by Dickens and his contemporaries not only constructed an East End audience (particularly in the galleries) that would benefit from the discipline and moral instruction offered by theatre, and therefore confound the complaints of the anti-theatrical lobby, but also provided templates for many 7 8 ibid., letter, 14 April, 1870 Lord Chamberlain’s Papers, LC1/263, letter, 5 June, 1872 8 subsequent accounts.9 Given their agenda such accounts are not entirely reliable. Equally, the burlesque accounts of the theatrical scene painter, Thomas Erle, provide an unreliable guide to East End theatre going.10 In effect it is necessary to look again at audience composition and habits of theatre going in the East End, especially in a context where many of our received accounts may be flawed, prejudiced or agenda-driven. Consideration of the communities that attended the theatre in nineteenth-century East London leads us into quite a complicated knot of assumptions and possible misapprehensions. I was surprised to find a blog on the East End section of the audience book (a section of which I was the primary author) which, while commending the crusading spirit of the arguments put forward, concluded: I was unsettled by their implication that East End theatres are worthy of theatrical scholarship because they attracted respectable or orderly people, not just prostitutes and thieves. There is more than a whiff of a Victorian social reform agenda about this. It’s as if they are saying ‘look, these people are more like us than we realised, and thus deserving of our notice’. Wouldn’t they be deserving of attention anyway? I was equally unsettled by this statement, since I think it is a misreading in which the opinions of nineteenth-century west end journalists become compounded with and mistaken for my own authorial intentions, but we are talking about two distinct perspectives here. At the end of the day, as historians, we can only speculate on the composition and behaviour of east end audiences, and on their reception of what they saw, based on close analysis of the available evidence, and guarding against any tendency to stereotype these spectators. 9 See Reflecting the Audience, pp. 78-80 Letters from a Theatrical Scene Painter (London: 1880) 10 9 That the newly constructed Whitechapel Pavilion should appeal to a wide range of its potential demographic in 1858 was a concern not so much for theatre historians but for the East London Observer, a fascinating repository of information about life in East London at this period. A year earlier it had argued that Places of rational entertainment – of light entertainment, such as appeals to the hearts of the low and uneducated - should always be encouraged when their tendency is beneficial, and we are not always disposed to imagine that they must be the contrary because the entertainments provided are discussed with the assistance of a pipe and a glass of grog. 11 [Shades of Brecht there – although smoking was actually forbidden in most licensed theatres and the provision of alcohol carefully regulated.] Such venues, argued the Observer, were infinitely preferable to the taprooms, gin-palaces and brothels to which the itinerant sailors of East London would otherwise resort. Now, in 1858, changing tack somewhat, it expressed its disappointment in the Pavilion’s failure: [t]o provide at least one theatre where respectable people might go, with a reasonable expectation of enjoying what has been called the highest form of intellectual amusement – a fine play, finely acted. We expected to see a step in advance of the Royal Standard, where good plays are presented with one or two of the characters efficiently and the remainder wretchedly filled – a single star of the first or second magnitude being expected to counterbalance a constellation of muffs.12 11 12 East London Observer, 28 October, 1857 Ibid., 6 November, 1858 10 The recent sprouting of elocution classes and dramatic clubs in the vicinity had done much to counter an anti-theatrical prejudice amongst some local inhabitants, while The spread of education among the masses has removed much of that mental darkness which is requisite to make a drama of the “blood and thunder class” endurable. [Even] [p]utting...entirely out of consideration the large class of residents at the east-end whose intelligence and education require some resemblance to nature in the characters they see upon the stage and are either play-goers or would be if good plays were more accessible, and east-end theatres were not associated with every thing vulgar and dreary – putting these out of consideration, we do not think a manager would do wrong in speculating on a high class of entertainment.13 Continuing this attack several days later the Observer asked: Surely the tradesmen are as refined, and the working people as intelligent in the Tower Hamlets, as they are in Southwark or Lambeth, where flourishes the Surrey Theatre, or Bagnige [sic] Wells, where Mr Phelps so deservedly proceeds.14 For a time the Whitechapel Pavilion did endeavour to provide the East End’s answer to the Surrey and Sadler’s Wells, but in the end commercial pressures, changing demographics and the Standard Theatre’s assumption of this role, meant that the Pavilion did not quite fulfil the East London Observer’s aspirations on its behalf. It did continue into the twentieth century, however, 13 14 Ibid. Ibid., 13 November, 1858 11 providing in the early 1900s an interesting mixture of conventional melodrama and Yiddish entertainment.15 The East End’s Jewish population is often referred to in accounts of East End theatre, often enhancing a tendency to exoticise and orientalise East End theatregoers. Such descriptions reach their apotheosis in this semi-caricatured portrait of a Whitechapel Pavilion audience for Yiddish drama in the early 1900s contributed by Anthony Ells to the Pall Mall Magazine: The day’s work in the tailor’s shop or the cap-making factory is over. Presser, machinist and button-hole maker are free to enjoy their precious leisure. Swart and bearded, the signs of excessive labour under unwholesome conditions written in their pallid lips and hollow eyes, these alien-born sons of Israel cast care behind them when the theatre is entered...With them come the daughters of Israel, beautiful sometimes in the flower of their youth, but too often gross and coarse of feature and of figure when once the flower has faded...of all trade, all ages, and both sexes, the audience pass in, soon filling the house to overflowing. What an audience! Bubbling, effervescent, undisciplined, it is noisy and excitable after the invariable manner of Orientals. When the play begins, however, it follows with rapt attention, yielding to its emotions with the frankness and simplicity of children...16 Almost a century of similar commentary lies behind descriptions such as this. In discussing East End theatre in the nineteenth century it has always seemed important to me to relate theatres and their repertoires to their neighbourhoods 15 See Jim Davis, "The East End" in Michael Booth & Joel Kaplan eds., The Edwardian Theatre: Essays on Drama and the Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.201-219. 16 ‘The East End Jew at his Playhouse’, The Pall Mall Gazette, ns, 41; 78 (9 February, 1908), pp. 174-9 12 and local communities. When Michael Booth undertook a survey of East End melodramas he wrote: When I began work on this paper I expected to find in many of the plays an element of social protest, some reference to the problems of East End life, and a strong sense of urban society and the daily life of the streets. In this expectation (again I was only dealing with printed texts) I was largely disappointed. Social protest, for instance, is mostly confined to a few plays in the country in which the game laws are passionately denounced.17 My own experience, from close reading of unpublished east end manuscripts in the University of Kent’s Pettingell collection, is that social protest is an omnipresent, if at times unfocussed, ingredient of many popular east end melodramas.18 Without in any way devaluing Booth’s significant and important contributions to nineteenth century British theatre scholarship, the printed texts (which inevitably were of those plays which had a broader appeal beyond their east end origins) do not provide the best guide to an understanding of repertoire and its impact in east end theatres. Equally, when Booth argues that the popularity of nautical melodrama at the Surrey Theatre in the early nineteenth century was due to the large local population of sailors and those engaged in maritime trades in South London – a view that has been erroneously repeated by other theatre historians – he flies in the face of demographic evidence.19 Sailors and those engaged in maritime trades largely resided in the east end, where, for instance Jerrold’s hard-hitting Mutiny at the Nore, rather than the Surrey’s sentimental Black-Ey’d Susan, was premiered at the Pavilion. 17 ‘East End Melodrama’, Theatre Survey XVII:1 ((1976), 65 See Jim Davis, "The Gospel of Rags: Melodrama at the Britannia 1863-74", New Theatre Quarterly, VII:28 (1991), 369-89. 19 See Davis and Victor Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840-1880, p. 6 18 13 To return to audiences - It is clear that nineteenth-century London theatre audiences were relatively mobile and that one should avoid generic notions of both the audience per se or even of the audiences for specific theatres. The Britannia Theatre in Hoxton has attracted much scholarly attention, not least due to the pioneering work of the late Clive Barker. His seminal study of the audiences of this theatre made it quite clear that any attempt at a generic definition of the Britannia’s audience was flawed because there were so many problems, contradictions and inconsistencies to overcome. But there are certain assumptions that can be drawn about the Britannia’s role in its own community, not least through the Britannia Festival, held each year for Sarah Lane’s benefit just before the theatre closed to prepare for the annual pantomime. At the end of the evening each performer dressed in their most popular role from the previous season and spoke a few lines in rhyming couplets; afterwards the stage was showered with hundreds of gifts, usually ear-marked for individual performers. H. Chance Newton recalled how: You saw hurtling down from the gallery or up from the stalls and pit, or flying out of the private boxes, pipes, tobacco pouches, umbrellas, walking sticks, a batch of neckties, pairs of boots, hats, comforters, pairs of socks, , and even pairs of trousers...All these and other useful articles were for the actors. For the ladies of the company...the present givers pelted gifts of another kind. These included rounds of beef, a fine parcel of sausages, a goose, pairs of ducks, legs of pork, and sundry articles of wearing apparel... Some of the audience – especially the sweeter sex – mostly humble shop assistants, servant girls and artificial flower makers (very numerous in the district) would hand over the footlights cheap (and often gaudy) clocks, glass cases of wax fruit and flowers. Sometimes they would throw at the 14 feet of their favourite actresses sprays of artificial flowers – the work of their own deft hands.20 One of the factors we should remember, and one which doubtless contributed to the Festival’s success, was that many members of the company not only worked but also lived in the local community. In the 1860s Wilton, the stage manager, and Edward Elton, second low comedian, lived just south east of Hoxton in Nichols Square. Many of Sarah Lane’s family lived in lodgings adjacent to the theatre. A search of the 1861 and 1871 censuses led Tracy Davis and myself to deduce, in a jointly written article on the social demography of the Britannia Theatre, that many of its company lived with and as its audience, sharing lodgings with or residing next door to a spectrum that included petty tradesmen, skilled craftsmen and unskilled labourers.21 This also raises an interesting question about the nature of theatrical celebrity, when your local stars are also your next door neighbours. Admittedly, east end theatres attracted visiting stars - Ira Aldridge, J. B. Howe and James Anderson at the Britannia, G. V. Brooke at the City of London Theatre, for example – but perhaps the greatest celebrity of all was Sarah Lane , whose association with the Britannia for well over fifty years had turned her into an iconic local figure. Her funeral procession in 1899, prior to her burial in Kensal Green Cemetery, was one of the East End’s great public spectacles and I hope that Janice Norwood, who has researched this in great detail, will publish an account of it before long. After the period of time I spent working on the Wilton Diaries I found that any stereotypical assumptions I might have made about East End theatres and their employees severely challenged. What are we to make of Frederick Wilton, who 20 Referee, 3 February, 1924 Jim Davis and Tracy Davis, "The People of the "People's Theatre": The Social Demography of the Britannia Theatre (Hoxton)" (with Tracy C. Davis), Theatre Survey, 32:2 (November 1991) 137-65 21 15 had acted with Kean, Macready and Phelps in the provinces, read The Times every day, went fishing every Sunday (often using passes secured from the Superintendant of London’s North Division of Police, Inspector Mott, another keen angler), renewed annually his pass to the British Museum Reading Room, owned a personal library that included most major poets plus volumes of periodicals that he had bound himself (book binding being one of his hobbies), played chess (even teaching the captain of the boat on which he travelled to Australia how to play it), was au fait with current affairs, could sit with the Examiner of Plays and discuss problems with Britannia manuscripts over a glass of wine, worked a gruelling six day week superintending and stage managing Britannia productions all year round, also concurrently ran a grocery shop in Houndsditch until 1862 – one census return enters his occupation as comedian and grocer – and in any spare time remaining lovingly tended his garden in Nichols Square (to which he moved in 1863)? His comments on the Britannia theatre have been published, but there are equally publishable accounts within the diaries of his weekly fishing trips in the vicinity of East London (often far more detailed than his entries on the Britannia), everyday life in East London, his voyage to Australia and, finally, his experiences of Australia in the late 1870s and 1880s.22 Wilton may be an exception to the rule, but may also be a warning that we ghettoise East London theatres, their employees and their audiences at our peril. That there were always pockets of poverty in the East End is undeniable – and that areas like Hoxton sunk into extremes of poverty in the late nineteenth century is equally incontrovertible – but the East End was also, for much of the nineteenth century, a thriving, bustling hub of trade and industry. Neither the area nor its theatres were the resort merely of thieves, prostitutes or the ‘great 22 See The Britannia Diaries, pp. 36-48 16 unwashed’. It is impossible, therefore, to arrive at a generic definition of East End theatre and its audiences during the nineteenth century since changing demographics and socio-economic conditions, developments and changes in means of transportation, all contributed to circumstances in which theatres, performers, repertoire and spectators were constantly responding to mobility, mutability and forever varying financial pressures. I would like therefore to argue that we approach nineteenth century East End theatre devoid of the baggage and preconceptions that have so often bedevilled past accounts of it, using the opportunity of this new project to re-evaluate and extend our knowledge of this fascinating period of English theatre history. I would also like to think that, in an Australian cemetery far, far away, Frederick Wilton is turning in his grave, not out of trepidation about what we might discover, but out of excitement at the possibilities for illuminating the lives of others – those others often mythologized or misrepresented in previous scholarship – and providing a more informed and carefully evaluated perspective on nineteenth century East End theatre. 17