We are now just over half way through the year and I have kept to my pledge to post a chapter a month, in instalments, of my personal take on five hundred years of British theatre.
It has not been easy. It entails a vast amount of research into the actors, the theatres and the people who ran them and the backgrounds and the fashions of theatre throughout five centuries and whittling it all down into manageably consumerable chunks. So if I only have a few pages to devote to, say, Thomas Betterton or Sarah Siddons or David Garrick, how can I possibly do justice to them?
The answer is I can’t and I don’t even claim to. What I am trying to do, as I’ve explained here, is to give readers a glimpse into what I have called the essence of their lives, their talents, their personalities and the reasons for their success.
There have been many times when I’ve been tempted to give up. I am getting very little feedback on my chapters and I have the growing suspicion that nobody is reading them.
What? After all my hard work?
What is a writer expected to do if nobody is reading her work?
In my case, I shall carry on as normal. I am enjoying the research. I am learning new stuff all the time and I am writing about it with total freedom, without fear of criticism or correction. Isn’t that what a first draft is for?
I am discovering some aspects of the acting business that are common to all my subjects, namely:
All actors are incomplete people
Who only feel totally at home when they are pretending to be someone else on stage. The difference between the on- and offstage behaviour of my subjects is marked. Many if not most of them – Sarah Siddons included, especially even – used the stage as a way of escaping the tribulations and mundanity of real life. Acting to them was not just a job
It was a compulsion
Which is why they worked so unbelievably hard, often in gruelling circumstances, when pregnant or days after giving birth or when physically debilitated. The most successful actors had something else in common:
They were quite unlike anything seen before
which obviously depended on who had gone before; so, for instance, David Garrick’s well-reported ‘naturalism’, which set him apart from his predecessors, blew like a gust of fresh air into a world used to the hyperbole of James Quin and his contemporaries. Edmund Kean’s casual yet flashy ‘lightning-strike’ acting might not have captured the public’s imagination had it not been in such contrast to the formal, scholarly pedantry of John Philip Kemble. As the critic William Hazlitt said, ‘We wish we had never seen Mr Kean. He has destroyed the Kemble religion; and it is the religion in which we were brought up.’[1]
All this might not have been so important had it not been for the fact that
There were no theatre directors
Right up until the early twentieth century. Before that it was the responsibility of the manager of the theatre, usually an actor himself such as Betterton, Garrick or Kemble, to choose the plays and to stage them, usually with very little rehearsal time. The ‘stars’ were mostly left to do their own thing, especially if he was also the manager, which was often the case.
Actors were required to hold a dozen parts in their heads at any one time
and be asked at very short notice to appear as any one of them. Plays did not necessarily run for set periods; a smash hit could quickly replace something from an old repertoire and vice versa. If a play did not ‘take’ immediately it would be withdrawn immediately, according to another vital element of the theatre adventures: the audience.
Audiences were frighteningly demonstrative
We complain nowadays about mobile phones and the fact that if an audience doesn’t get to its communal feet at the end of a performance the show is deemed a flop.
Compared with eighteenth and nineteenth century audiences we today are remarkably reticent. Not only did people scramble over one another at the risk of their own and other people’s lives in order to gain access to a ‘hot’ show or the latest super-actor, they thought nothing of chatting among themselves throughout a performance, waving at friends or, on many occasions, rioting. The idea of sitting quietly and listening was not something audiences did.
At the same time if they approved of something they let it be known. They thought nothing of applauding at the end of a speech or of demanding encores in the middle of a performance, with which actors invariably complied. Up until and beyond David Garrick’s attempts to remove them they assumed the right to wander onto the stage at will, getting in the actors’ way and causing general mayhem; not to mention the freedom to meander backstage in and out of actors’ – and more to the point actresses’ – dressing rooms and watching them undress.
Then there was the business of being allowed to enter a theatre halfway through a play at half price, which meant playwrights were expected to include a précis of a Netflix-style what-happened-before at the beginning of the last act.
When John Kemble, manager of Covent Garden Theatre, tried to hike ticket prices following the rebuilding of the theatre after a fire, they rioted for two whole months until he was forced to back down. They even, more astonishingly still, got him to reinstate the flesh-and-blood figure of Banquo in the banquet scene in Macbeth, who hitherto had been visible only to Macbeth.
Audiences had power.
So what hasn’t changed?
The fundamentals of the theatre world have never truly changed. Actors have always come from all sorts of backgrounds, many of them quite unexpected. Some, such as the Kembles, the Keans, the Terrys and the Redgraves, are acting families. Others such as Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, William Macready and who knows how many others have no known connection to the theatre in their backgrounds. Still others came from very humble beginnings: Nell Gwynn began her career selling oranges at the Drury Lane theatre. Peg Woffington – Garrick’s favourite, in every way – was ‘discovered’ selling food on the streets of Dublin.
Theatre management
This has certainly changed. In the old days anyone foolish enough to buy themselves shares in a theatrical enterprise was more than likely to end up in a debtors’ prison. Many of them – such as Christopher Rich – were frankly crooks. Others such as Richard Sheridan were charismatic yet incompetent. Theatres survived by luck more than good management.
More importantly still:
State subsidy
Introduced through the Arts Council after World War Two, public subsidy has allowed theatres to experiment with new ideas without having to be constantly concerned only with the box office. It also helps to keep ticket prices down so anyone can afford them.
Lastly, as we know –
Theatre survives no matter what
Plague, pandemics, fires, government crackdowns, strikes, wars, censorship – none of it has ever done more than temporarily halt the determined march of the theatre and its people, nor will it in the future despite the competition from other media. The need of live audiences for live entertainment, and vice versa, is and always will be paramount.
[1] The Examiner, December 8 1816, cited in The Collected Works of William Hazlitt