16 
LAND 6? WATER 
November 7, 1918 
me jHexTRE 
By W, J. Turner 
LAST week, in mentioning the performance of 
Macbeth at the "Old Vic," I said nothing about 
the extraordinary history of this theatre, which is 
one of the oldest in London. It was opened 
exactly one hundred years ago, and the centenary 
was celebrated last week by the presence of the Queen and 
Princess Mary at a special programme which briefly reviewed 
the theatre's activities during that time, omitting only 
what is described in a semi-official account of the "Old 
Vic's" history as "the bad old days," when "the gallery 
was a huge amphitheatre probably containing about fifteen 
hundred perspiring creatures ; most of the men in shirt- 
. sleeves, and most of the women bare-headed, with coloured 
handkerchiefs round their shoulders, called 'bandanna 
wipes,' and probably stolen from the pockets of old gentlemen 
who were given to snuff-taking. This ' chickalerry ' audience 
was always thirsty — and not ashamed. It tied handker- 
chiefs together — of which it always seemed to have plenty — 
until they formed a rope which was used to haul up large 
stone bottles of beer from the pit, and occasionally hats 
that had been dropped below." This was the sort of audi- 
ence that used to assemble in the late 'forties to see Oliver 
Twist, and there is a contemporary account of a performance 
of E. F. Savile as Bill Sikes, which reads : " The murder of 
Nancy was the great scene. Nancy was always dragged 
round the stage by her hair, and after this effort Sikes always 
looked up defiantly at the gallery, as he was doubtless told 
to do in the marked prompt-copy. He was always answered 
by one loud and fearful curse, yelled by the whole mass like 
a Handel festival chorus. The curse was answered by Sikes 
dragging Nancy twice round the stage, and then, like Ajax, 
defying the lightning. The simultaneous yell then became 
buler and more blasphemous. Finally when Sikes, working 
up to a wall-rehea-sed climax, smeared Nancy with red ochre, 
and, taking her by the hair (a mast powerful wig), seemed to 
dash her brains out on the stage, no explosion of dynamite 
invented by the modern anarchist, no language ever dreamt 
of in Bsdiam could equal the outburst. A thousand enraged 
voices, which sounded like ten thousand, with the roar of 
a dozen escaped menageries, filled the theatre and deafened 
the audience, and when the smiling ruffian came forward 
and bowed, their voices in thorough plain English expressed 
a fierce determination to tear his sanguinary entrails from 
his sanguinary body." . This is an interesting example of 
getting the audience to take part in the play, which I recently 
suggested might procure a dramatist some remarkable effects. 
So.Ti3what earlier, about 1838, Dickens himself wrote a 
description of the miserable, filthy condition of the district 
round the Victoria Theatre, as it was then called, and during 
the last eighty years the neighbourhood is not so entirely 
changed in character as most other parts of Lond9n. 
The theatre was originally opened as the Royal Coburg 
Theatre, and the following is an advertisement of May nth 
1818: ^ 
ROYAL COBURG THEATRE. 
Under the immediate patronage of 
His Royal Highness Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. 
The above elegant theatre WILL OPEN THIS EVENING, 
May nth, with an appropriate address by Mr. Munro. 
After which, a new melodramatic spectacle called 
TRIAL BY 'BATTLE: 
or. Heaven Defend the Right. After which a grand Asiatic 
ballet, called ALXORA and NERINE ; or. The Fairy 
Gift. To conclude u-ith a new and splendid harlequinade 
called MIDNIGHT REVELRY. 
It is interesting to note that the prices for boxes were four 
shillings for lower and three shilHngs for upper ; the pit 
was two shillings and the gallery one shilling. The perform- 
ances began at 6.30 p.m., and at 8.30 p.m. you could get in 
at half-price. It was, no doubt, the building of Waterloo 
Bridge that was responsible for the erection of the theatre, 
and, in fact, the company owning the bridge — which at that 
time, of course, was a toll-bridge— gave financial assistance 
to the promoters. The ground in that part was not 
much better than a swamp, and it was no infrequent 
occurrence for people going to the theatre in the dark to 
fall into the marshes after crossing the bridge. People 
seemed to have been much more wilHng to run risks in those 
days than at present, when merely being a little out of the 
beaten track is enough to kill a theatre. Take, for instance, 
the London Opera House, in Kingsway, at which almost 
every possible kind of entertainment has proved a failure, 
owing mainly to its being rather out of the way ; though, 
personally, I should like to think it was due to the utter 
hideousness and bad taste of the building. 
The "Old Vic." — or "Royal Coburg," as it was then 
called — started with giving the regulation triple bill, of 
which a sample is given in the advertisement I have quoted 
above. This triple bill, of which a lurid melodrama was 
the cluef ingredient, persisted throughout the greater part 
of its history, but, at the same time, nearly every actor 
of note during the last hundred years has played there ; and 
although at the beginning of its career its rival, Drury Lane 
(with Covent Garden), had an official monopoly by law of 
the works of "Shakespeare, Jonson, Massinger, Fletcher, 
Beaumont, Ford, and a long line of illustrious poets and 
wits," to quote some one writing in 1840, it was not long 
before the Royal Coburg began to infringe these rights by 
giving versions of Shakespeare ; and although an action 
was brought against the proprietors by the Drury Lane 
Committee, resulting in a fine of £50, this never prevented 
Shakespeare being given in some form or other until 1843, 
when the law was altered, and the "Victoria," as it was 
renamed in 1833, became legally as free as Drury Lane to 
give Shakespeare's plays. In 1831 Edmund Kean played 
Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. It was for this occasion, 
according to Mr. Booth's History of the Theatre, that stalls 
were made out of a portion of the pit, priced at four shillings 
each, so that ladies and gentlemen could be nearer the great 
tragedian than when in the boxes. It was during this season 
also that Kean, annoyed by the constant interjections of the 
audience and the incessant popping of ginger-beer bottles, 
when called for after the fall of the curtain, stepped out 
and asked abruptly: "What do you want?" After a 
moment's surprise, many voices shouted: "You! You!" 
"Well, then, I am here." He then proceeded: "I have 
acted in every theatre in the United Kingdom of Great 
Britain and Ireland, I have acted in all the principal theatres 
throughout the United States of America, but in my life 
I never acted to such a set of ignorant, unmitigated brutes 
as I now see before me." 
Others who played at the "Victoria" were Sheridan, 
Knowles, Phelps, and Macready, and it is noteworthy that 
again and again Shakespeare proved the financial prop of 
the theatre, although the audiences, during the worst period 
of the theatre's existence, were often "so noisy that it was 
impossible to take the play seriously." Scene shifters and 
carpenters used to stroll about the stage in the midst of the 
play, and Mr. Booth records that one night an actor spoke 
the line in a piece: "Now then, we are all safe," and at 
that moment tripped over a ladder on the stage, and fell 
down and burned his nose on a torch he was holding. 
Paganini, most famous of all violinists, who used to get 
offered the enormous fee of ;fi,ooo for three nights, played 
at the " Victoria " in 1834, and created a sensation ; another 
interesting event was the production, in 1848, of a drama 
founded on " Currer Bill's celebrated work Jane Eyre." This 
production, which is said to have been quite well done, was 
given during one of the theatre's bad periods. Charles 
Mathews describes the audience as rushing there in mobs, 
and in shirt sleeves, applauding frantically, drinking ginger- 
beer, munching apples, cracking nuts, calling actors by their 
Christian names, and throwing them orange-peel and apples 
by way of bouquets. It was not until i87cr that the Victoria 
got a new lease of life, when Miss Cons was chiefly responsible 
for its being turned into a music-hall on temperance lines. 
In 1889 concert performances of opera were started, and 
now, under Miss Baylis, an operatic and a Shakespeareai. 
company have been started since the war, and have both 
been highly successful. The Christmas Shakespeare Festival 
has just commenced, and will la.st until January yth. Shake- 
speare will be played every evening, Tuesdays, Thursdays, 
and Saturdays excepted, when operatic performances are 
given. J shall have more to say about the Shakespeare 
Festival ; but at the moment I only wish to point out that, 
at the moment, the "Old Vic", as it is now called, is much 
the most interesting theatre in London. 
