Gaiety Theatre

“ On 21 Dec. 1868 Hollingshead opened as manager the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand, which had been newly built by Charles John Phipps [q. v. Suppl. I] for Lionel Lawson. It was erected on the site once partly occupied by the Strand music-hall. A theatre and restaurant were now first combined in London in one building. At the Gaiety, Hollingshead made many innovations, including the system of 'No fees,' and inaugurated continual Wednesday and Saturday matinees. ”

“ His father intended him for the army, but his own taste did not lie in that direction, and when only sixteen and a half he elected to go upon the stage, and five years later was playing a principal light comedy part at the Gaiety Theatre. Like his wife, he has been several times in America, where both have met with success, and when not acting, at which he is almost constantly employed, this energetic man occupies his time by writing plays, of a light and [Pg 65] musical nature, which are usually successful. ”

“ This vogue was later to bring fortune to a larger and more luxurious theatre, the Gaiety, under Nellie Farren, as the successor to Mrs. Bancroft, whose former rôles she vulgarised to a remarkable degree. If you mention her name before an elderly “man about town,” who was young and went the pace from 1865 to 1875, you will set his eye aflame. To-day you hear no more of Nellie Farren, no more of burlesque.
The operetta, too, is vegetating; the pantomime serves hardly to amuse the children. Of inferior dramatic forms, two still survive, and have even extended their clientèle. ”

“ The Ambigu, the Historic Theatre, the Gaiety, the Funambules, the Olympic Circus, the Little-Lazari, the Délassements Comiques,—ten theatres or so will add to the excitement with their strange, nervous, grandiloquent, noisy companies of actors. The gay apprentices, at all times fond of plays, will cheer [Pg 274] as they go by the heroes of all these dramas and melodramas, so numerous that popular slang had nicknamed as Crime Boulevard the thoroughfare where, at twelve each evening, so much blood flowed on the boards of these theatres. ”

“ An immense humming floated like a fog of noise over the arena. On the sunny side of the building palpitated and glistened thousands of fans and little round parasols with handles made of reed. They looked like flocks of birds, of ever-varying hues attempting to fly. There was not one place empty. I can assure the reader that it is in itself a grand sight to see twelve thousand people assembled in a theatre of such a size, that heaven alone is capable of painting the ceiling with the blue which it procures from the palette of eternity. ”

“ I have always wondered how he came to be in a theatre."
"Why, madame, the theatre is a house of correction for morals," said Gaudissart. "Poor Pons!—Upon my word, one ought to cultivate the species to keep up the stock. 'Tis a pattern man, and has talent too. When will he be able to take his orchestra again, do you think? A theatre, unfortunately, is like a stage coach: empty or full, it starts at the same time. Here at six o'clock every evening, up goes the curtain; and if we are never sorry for ourselves, it won't make good music. ”

“ Godmother replied, “and neither right costume nor proper scenery makes good acting, you know. If we had time to stay and listen, we should hear this play very well acted. Do you notice how breathlessly quiet the audience is?”
Betty followed her guide reluctantly out of this strange theatre, looking back at the curtain-hung stage, with the young men in their short velvet cloaks, seated on stools close to the players, at the crowd standing in the open space under the blue sky, and at the circular galleries thronged with people. ”

“ With such an arrangement of the stage, the piece itself, the actors' mode of playing, in a word, everything was to coincide; and thus an entirely new theatre was to arise.
The French actors had, in comedy, attained the summit of the true in art. Their residence at Paris, their observations of the externals of the court, the connexion of the actors and actresses with the highest classes, by means of love affairs—all contributed to transplant to the stage the greatest realness and seemliness of social life; and on this point the friends of nature found but little to blame. ”

“ I answered from a soul immune to vaudeville sensations, and I did not glance at the programme.
A boy came into the box swinging a tray of glasses of ice-water. I took one and held it in my hand as I spoke. At that moment No. 5 began. With a whirl of my chair which made the man next me frown with astonishment, I had twisted toward the stage, the glass crashed to the floor; the water splashed on a velvet gown and I did not see it; I saw only a figure which stood there, alone, by the footlights.
Strong, sweet, the song of the loggers on the River Gatineau rang flute-like through the theatre. ”

“ Yeats believes, save in the building-up of an audience, some people remaining away, perhaps, who might have been attracted had "such bodies as the Elizabethan Stage Society, which brought 'Everyman' to Dublin some years ago, been able to hire the theatre."
No phase of the dramatic movement has been more interesting and none has been more important than this building-up of an audience to appreciate the plays. ”

“ In that panic the English drama disappeared for the time, and at the moment of writing it does not exist. There are many excellent entertainments at our different theatres, and most of them are deservedly successful. But in the very height of this theatrical season there is not a single London theatre that is giving a play that so much as pretends to picture our modern English life,—I might almost say that pretends to picture human life at all. ”

“ The auditorium was tastefully decorated and would hold about three hundred people.
“Well, monsieur! what do you say to our theatre?”
“That it would put many provincial theatres to shame.”
“And we flatter ourselves, too, that we give better performances than one sees in the provinces. We do not shrink from anything: comedy, vaudeville, opéra-comique! We play everything except tragedy.” ”

“ But Katy's opinion was quite the opposite. She assured me that even in its present state the theatre is above lecture-rooms and books, above everything else in the world. The theatre is a power that unites in itself all the arts, and the actors are men with a mission. No separate art or science can act on the human soul so strongly and truly as the stage; and therefore it is reasonable that a medium actor should enjoy much greater popularity than the finest scholar or painter. No public activity can give such delight and satisfaction as the theatrical. ”

“ There was a large tennis-court not far from the hotel, which was wonderfully well suited to make a theatre of; so our comedians hired it, took immediate possession, set carpenters and painters to work, furbished up their own rather dilapidated scenery and decorations, and soon had a charming little theatre, in which all the numbered seats and boxes were eagerly snapped up, directly they were offered to “the nobility and gentry of Poitiers,” who secured them for all the representations to be given by the troupe, so that success was insured. ”

“ And, indeed, the excitement of arrival must have compensated for the loss of sleep and long travel, for there was noise and confusion outside the theatre where the bill-boards, gorgeous posters depicting the characters in the play in brilliant colours on powdered gold backgrounds, glistened in the sunlight, the many coloured flags, presented to the actors on which their names were to be seen, floated bravely in the breeze, and rows of lanterns bearing the actor’s crest decorated the theatre inside and out. ”

“ One has to live among the people, like you, of whom an old man said in my hearing, "She has been a serving-maid among us," before one can think the thoughts of the people and speak with their tongue. We turned my dream into the little play, "Cathleen ni Houlihan," and when we gave it to the little theatre in Dublin and found that the working-people liked it, you helped me to put my other dramatic fables into speech. ”

“ A movement of impatience escaped him. He let the edge of the blind fall and, stepping down from the bench on which he had been standing, walked out of the chapel.
He passed out of the schoolhouse and halted under the shed that flanked the garden. From the theatre opposite came the muffled noise of the audience and sudden brazen clashes of the soldiers' band. The light spread upwards from the glass roof making the theatre seem a festive ark, anchored among the hulks of houses, her frail cables of lanterns looping her to her moorings. ”

“ Old comrades and contemporaries might be seen lurking at the back of shady little boxes on the pit-tier of the theatre, and addressing a presumed form in the corner facing the stage, of which nothing could be seen but a white gleaming arm, a fan, and an opera-glass ”

“ In the comedies of intrigue, on the other hand, conventional types of the stage or of the theatre-going London world, especially the fashionable and the Bohemian provinces thereof, owe their existence chiefly to him. Blackguards, wittols, colourless tricksters, roaring captains, gallants, debauchees, lechers, bawds, libidinous wives, sophisticated maidens who preen themselves with meticulous virtue but not with virtuous thoughts, all these people the scenes which Fletcher contributed to the joint-comedies. ”

“ But it was not, after all, as a poet that Gautier was to achieve either profit or fame. For the theatre, he had but little gift, and his dramatic efforts (if we except certain masques or ballets in which his exuberant and graceful fancy came into play) are by far his weakest. ”

“ If we could secure this endowment, that theatre would become in a very few years the most fashionable, if not the most popular, in London, and even the great public would go to it. Nor need such a theatre be expensive—as theatres go—for it is to the mind and not to the eye that it must appeal. A sufficient audience is there ready; what is lacking is the point of focus, a single-hearted and coherent devotion to the best, and the means to pursue that ideal without extravagance but without halting. ”

“ Subtle emotions it cannot express, for pantomime cannot figure that ‘she thought this, because she thought that he thought that.’ (If a cinema company will film The Golden Bowl, I will burn seven candles as an offering to the Albert Memorial.) All that, the cinema must leave to the play and the novel. It cannot risk wearying the audience by leaving it for half an hour before the same scene; the theatre can do that because the voices of the actors afford relief; the cinema, being unable to reproduce footsteps, is compelled to reproduce flying feet. ”

“ Were our theatres of the shape of a half-closed fan, like Wagner’s theatre, where the audience sit on seats that rise towards the broad end while the play is played at the narrow end, their pictures could be composed for eyes at a small number of points of view, instead of for eyes at many points of view, above and below and at the sides, and what is no better than a trade might become an art. ”

“ Nothing in the world would have induced me to dishonour the illustrious blood that flows in my veins. The disgraceful license of the coulisses, and the loathsome gallantries lavished upon all actresses, even those who are not comely, disgusted me from the first, and I have lived in the theatre almost as if in a convent. ”

“ As our experimental theatres increase in number—and they are increasing—it will probably play its part, and perhaps no insignificant a part, in the development of a national drama through the development of a local drama and the cultivation of a taste for self-expression in various communities. It is only when these experimental theatres are sufficient in number, and the amateur spirit has been sufficiently aroused in various communities, that the commercial theatre of tradition will be seriously influenced. ”

“ In New York at the present day a singular similarity to Elizabethan conventions may be noted in the Chinese theatre in Doyer Street. Here we have a platform drama in all its nakedness. There is no curtain, and the stage is bare of scenery. The musicians sit upon the stage, and the actors enter through an arras at the right or at the left of the rear wall. The costumes are elaborate, and the players frequently parade around the stage. Long speeches and set colloquies are common. Only the crudest properties are used. ”

“ The noble company of actors stood in breathless expectancy behind the scenes of their theatre, waiting for the sound of tramping feet that should tell of the rush of the public to witness their genius, as shown in this particular line of business. The interest was so great that even Dickey forgot the discomfort of his Macbeth costume, and stood as near a crevice in the boards as possible, to see their patrons as they filed into the hall. ”

“ It requires accomplished actors to carry it off; but it was not, in the present instance, very heroically cast. The Haymarket Theatre inclines more to comedy than to tragedy; and there are several scenes in this tragedy (for such it really is till it is over) , which, ‘not to be hated,’ should be seen at the greatest possible distance that the stage allows. One advantage, at least, of our overgrown theatres is, that they throw the most distressing objects into a milder historical perspective.
THE WONDER
The Examiner. ”

“ It was a dreary job, for surely one can find no more desolate and melancholy place in a great city than a theatre seen by daylight. From the front of the house one receives an impression of loss. The sight of an empty chair is saddening—here are a thousand of them. This dimness and vastness, this gilding and crystal and metal that does not glisten nor glitter. The depressing silence of checked music, of vanished laughter—even an actor shivers at sight of the auditorium of a closed theatre; it is like looking on the face of a dead pleasure. ”