Download Background on Theatre in London

Background on Theatre in London:
Wood, E.R. Plays by David Garrick and George Colman the Elder. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982.
-- page 1 -INTRODUCTION
When David Garrick came to London in 1737 there were five theatres, Drury Lane,
Covent Garden, Goodman’s Fields, Lincoln’s Inn and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.
In that year the new Licensing Act gave the Lord Chamberlain power to ban the
performance of plays at any playhouse except the first two, the long-established Patent
Houses. When Garrick made his London debut four years later at Goodman’s Fields, the
audience who flocked to see him paid, by a legal subterfuge, to hear some music, and the
plays were announced as an extra, free of charge. The Theatre season ran its normal
course, that is, to the end of April, without interference from the Lord Chamberlain; but
the managements of Drury Lane and Covent Garden then complained that the law was
being circumvented, and Goodman’s Fields was closed down. During the next thirty
years other theatres tried other evasions of the law. Samuel Foote, for example, invited
the public to take tea with him. They paid for the refreshment but enjoyed the theatrical
entertainment gratis. Later he obtained a licence to put on plays at the Haymarket for a
season after the patent theatres closed for the summer. But with such exceptions, Drury
Lane and Covent Garden had a firm monopoly.
When Goodman’s Fields was suppressed, many of the players, including Garrick,
were taken on at Drury Lane; others at Covent Garden. Although Garrick later acted at
Covent Garden, it was at Drury Lane that he spent his greatest years, and it was for Drury
Lane that all the plays in this book (except The Lying Valet, which first came to life in
that historic season in Goodman’s Fields) were written.
THE THEATRE
Drury Lane had been built by Wren in 1674 and remained unchanged in essentials until
1775, near the end of Garrick’s reign, when the Adam brothers designed a new interior.
Garrick had contrived to increase the seating capacity from a little over 1000 at the
beginning of his career to twice that number at the end.
The typical eighteenth-century theatre was in three parts: the scene, behind the
curtain and proscenium arch; the platform or fore-stage; and the house or auditorium.
Behind the scene were dressing rooms, the green room, stores and offices. The scene was
a raked area about forty feed wide and fifteen feet deep, with movable settings and a
possible up-stage exit. The platform, in front of the curtain, was about the same size as
the scene. This was where most of the acting took place, for this was the most brightly
lighted part of the theatre. At either side of the platform were stage boxes, ordinarily
occupied by the most exalted members of the audience, and the stage doors, the most
usual means of entry and exit for the players.
The platform was separated from the house by a small orchestra pit and a row of
-- page 2 -iron spikes to discourage spectators from invading the acting area. The house may be
visualized as an elongated U shaped, occupying about half the total length of the theatre
building. The pit was an inclined floor rising to about the level of the stage at the back
and furnished with rows of backless benches. It was bounded at the rear by a wooden
palisade dividing it from a curved line of boxes, each of which could accommodate about
twenty people. This line of boxes facing the stage was continued along each side of the
house to join the stage boxes on the platform. There was another level of boxes above
these, and at the rear a gallery, and an upper gallery usually occupied by servants and
footmen who had secured seats below for their employers.
An important part of Garrick’s achievement as manager was in the evolution of
new possibilities in lighting and setting, influenced by what he had seen in theatres in
Italy and France. When he first came to the theatre, stage and house were illuminated by
a number of large rings or chandeliers, each containing a dozen candles, suspended over
platform and scene. There was also a trough along the front of the platform containing
lighted wicks floating in oil, and there were candles in sconces fixed down the sides of
the stage boxes. Later there were ‘ladders’, vertical battens holding candles or oil lamps,
fixed at the back of the wing flats at either side of the stage. From 1765 (when Garrick
came back from his travels abroad) there was an immense increase in candle-power.
Expenditure on candles at the end of Garrick’s time was five times the figure at the
beginning. Illumination was increased by reflectors on footlights and battens and there
were more ladders to light the scene. The chandeliers over the platform had always been
a nuisance to spectators in the galleries and upper boxes, glaring in their eyes, and
Garrick reduced their numbers or shaded them, while increasing illumination from
concealed sconces or battens.
Once the scene was well lighted, there was encouragement to improve the settings
and make more use of the space as a playing area. Until then there had always been
scenes painted on shutters sliding in grooves on the floor and above, or drop scenes on
rollers, providing conventional settings such as a sea-coast, a rural prospect, a scene
before the exterior of a house, which could then slide open or roll up to reveal an interior
into which the actors could walk up stage. Where a scene ended with a general exit, the
next scene could follow without any delay; critics complained of the tatty condition of
scenery and the negligence of stage hands who left dull clouds from an outdoor scene still
hanging in a lady’s bedchamber for the next.
Now the rear of the stage was more brightly lighted there was more need to
brighten up the scenery and encouragement to develop its scope. In 1772 Garrick
appointed a noted scene designer from Alsace, de Loutherberg, who made great advances.
He was interested in new possibilities of lighting his sets, in varying colour and intensity
of lights by reflectors and silk screens, and even some directional lighting from lamps on
movable pivots. So he was able to produce imaginative effects such as Prospero’s cave in
atmospheric chiaroscuro. Much money was spent
-- page 3 a picture; page 4 --
on lights and scenery, and plays were advertised as having entirely new settings. All this
stimulated the public demand for spectacle.
THE AUDIENCE
Readers of theatrical memoirs of the period may gather the impression that all London
went to the theatre, from the king and the aristocracy, poets and politicians, lawyers and
merchants, to prostitutes and servants (few artisans or labourers, whose working hours
precluded theatre-going). Estimates suggest, however, that fewer than two per cent of the
city population did so. This limited public had some sense of belonging to a community
which included the players. Many of them were there long before the play began. Since
the whole house was illuminated throughout the evening, it was easy to see one’s friends
and acquaintances before and during the play. Players on the stage would greet their
friends in the audience, sometimes when their attention should have been on the play in
progress.
Performances began at six, but the doors were open for at least an hour before. As
there was no reserving of seats or queuing for orderly admission, there was sometimes
violent and even dangerous jostling to get in and find a place. The gentry sent their
servants to jostle for them and keep their places until they arrived.
Audiences were often boisterous and rowdy. From the upper gallery came a din of
catcalls, animal noises, insults and badinage, and often a hail of orange peel and oranges
or apples, and, on the worst occasions, bottles. On an evening in 1775 a young lady was
injured by a hard lump of cheese weighing half a pound, flung from above, and a German
visitor once complained that his hat was so saturated by a liquid which he did not identify
that he had to have it cleaned next day at the hatter’s. The uproar was not confined to the
upper galleries: Boswell among the gentry once entertained the audience at Drury Lane
by lowing like a cow.
Before the play opened the platform was swept clean of the rubbish that had been
thrown on to it. When the curtain rose, the audience normally fell silent. ‘All noise and
bombardment ceases,’ a German visitor reported, ‘and one is bound to admire the quiet
attentiveness of such an estimable folk.’ The theatre-going public was interested in acting
and susceptible to its spell.
But it was not always so! Garrick himself in his play Lethe gives a vivid
impression of the reaction of the house to a beau asserting his right to a place on the
scene or the platform:
FINE GENTLEMAN: I dress in the evening and go behind the scenes at both
playhouses, not, you may imagine, to be diverted with the play, but to
intrigue and show myself. I stand upon the stage, talk loud and stare about,
which confounds the actors and disturbs the audience; upon which the
galleries who hate the appearance of one of us, begin to hiss and cry, “Off,
off!” while I, undaunted, stamp my foot, so -- loll with my shoulder, thus,
take snuff with my right hand, and smile scornfully -- thus. This
exasperates the savages, and
-- page 5 --
they attack with volley of sucked oranges and half-eaten pippins.
AESOP: And you retire?
FINE GENTLEMAN: Without a doubt, if I am sober; for oranges will stain silk,
and an apple disfigure a feature.
Insulting the actors was a common recreation, and Tate Wilkinson (Memoirs,
1790) says that it came from different parts of the house, ‘too often from those places of
more fashionable resort’. There were many occasions when serious riot developed the
great Garrick himself was humiliated. One of the worst was in 1755, when he had
engaged Noverre, a Swiss choreographer, to present his Chinese Festival. War with
France was imminent, and an anti-French section of the audience, wrongly supposing
Noverre and his company to be French, noisily expressed their disapproval on the first
night, when the king was present. On subsequent nights interruptions grew into violence
when the dancers came on. …
Garrick was helpless and abject in the face of rioters, but it is a relief to learn that
a few days after this riot he stood up to an obstreperous audience with dignity and
courage. He come on in the role of Archer (in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem) to
insults and demands for apology. He advanced to the front of the stage and after talking
of the damage he had suffered, both to his property and his reputation, he declared that
unless he was allowed to perform that night to the best of his ability, he would never
appear on the stage again. The house listened in silence and then burst into universal
applause.
Opposition from the public frustrated many of Garrick’s attempts to reform stage
conditions. It had long been customary to allow members of the audience -- not merely
beaux and idlers such as were satirised in Lethe -- to sit or stand on tohe stage. On big
occasions, such as a popular player’s benefit night, as many as 200 might be seated on
benches built up in a sort of amphitheatre behind the actors, in addition to the usual idlers
crowding the side entrances and impeding the actors. Garrick tried to get rid of this
nuisance without success until 1762, when he greatly increased the seating capacity of the
house. He failed completely to withdraw the customary concessions to late-comers,
where they were admitted at half-price after the third act of the main play.
-- page 6 -His choice of plays and provision of programmes were often influenced by the
taste of the public rather than his own. Pantomimes were much more popular than dramas,
comedies than tragedies. Farcical afterpieces (which could be enjoyed by the half-price
late-comers) were in great demand. A typical evening’s programme would include a fiveact play, a pantomime or half-length farce, and songs, dances or a pageant. Well-known
pays of Shakespeare, much shortened and altered, and many old favourites of the
Restoration and later, could be counted on to run for up to a dozen performances in a
season. New plays were more of a risk.
During his twenty-nine years as manager of Drury Lane, Garrick gave the public
what they wanted but he also widened their horizons. He brought back to the stage many
long-neglected plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and introduced 85 new
main plays and 150 afterpieces. By one objective standard his achievement is
indisputable: he made the theatre pay.