Sunday 22nd September 2013 by Will Langdale
London is an incredibly old city, founded by the Romans in around 43 AD, and with an old, old city comes a lot of wonderful history! As a global city, London’s West End offers the pinnacle of English-speaking commercial theatre with hundreds of performance spaces, big and small, littering the city. Yet the history of the theatres themselves is in itself interesting, offering an amazing insight into how the process of staging plays has changed over the centuries.
The first theatres in London were The Theatre and The Curtain in Shoreditch, built in 1576 and 1577 respectively. Both were used by Shakespeare, and timber from The Theatre eventually made its way to Southwark in the construction of The Globe. Given how political Shakespeare’s plays were, it’s interesting that The Globe was itself set up as a political escape – on the south bank it was no longer controlled by the City corporation!
It was nearly a century later that the first of London’s theatres still standing today would be constructed, so presented for you is a brief introduction to the origins of London’s 5 oldest auditoriums.
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (1663)
After Britain got civil wars and puritanism out of its system, and Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England were united under an English monarchy under Charles II in the Restoration, the building of theatres once again got underway. Closed by Oliver Cromwell as they were not in line with his Puritanism, the backlash was the bawdy Restoration comedy, a reaction curiously similar to the kind of plays that were put on when theatre censorship was abolished in 1968. After surviving plague in 1665, and the Great Fire in 1666, it burned down on its own terms (theatre has always been revolutionary) in 1672 before being rebuilt in 1674. The new building was generally accepted to have been designed by the notorious Christopher Wren, though recent scholarship is divided on this.
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| Sadler's Wells by EZTD |
Sadler’s Wells (1683)
What do you do when you discover springwater beneath your property? Why, plop a theatre on top and sell the water to people of course! But this wasn’t just any water – Richard Sadler’s water could cure “dropsy, jaundice, scurvy, green sickness and other distempers to which females are liable – ulcers, fits of the mother, virgin's fever and hypochondriacal distemper.” At the time, Islington was a rural area, and once the idea of curative waters took hold, aristocrats would travel to Sadler’s Wells for the waters and the performances.
Theatre Royal, Haymarket (1720)
Not content with only having one Theatre Royal, when London acquired a third theatre the infinite naming possibilities were naturally narrowed down to this. That’s a bit of a lie, actually – while any theatre could perform comedy or pantomime, serious drama required a patent from the king, which the Theatre Royal Haymarket acquired in 1754 along with a name change. Originally it was The First Haymarket Theatre, and it was built by a carpenter called John Potter. During the winter, for some time it was the only theatre in London with a patent. One of its early successes was written by the unfortunately-named Samuel Johnson, unfortunate because not only was the dramatist not influential literary figure and dictionary writer Samuel Johnson, but the more famous Johnson had the temerity to be alive at the same time.
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (1732)
Today, a long-running play or musical will have performances in the thousands. The Mousetrap has been running for 60 years and 25,000 performances. In 1728, John Gay’s The Beggars Opera smashed box office records with a whopping run of 62 performances, the longest run in history at the time. It made its producer, John Rich, into a man very much an image of his surname, and he used the profit to construct the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In the summer, only this theatre and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane had patents to perform drama, and many a summer slapfight ensued, with the theatres often putting on the same plays at the same time. In defiance of all these theatres burning down all the time, the Royal Opera House put off its first razing until 1808.
The Adelphi (1806)
Some daughters want a pony, Jane Scott wanted a theatre. Luckily her dad was a merchant, and in 1806 the Sans Pareil (“Without Compare”) was opened and licensed to perform music, pantomime and light opera, although admittedly Jane was 36 by the time her dad finally sorted it for her. An accomplished playwright, manager and performer, Jane ran the theatre and its company until she retired in 1819. You may have noticed a pattern with theatres and things getting burned down here, and you’d be right to imagine this pattern continues. The Adelphi was demolished in the 1850s to make way for a startlingly new building: The New Adelphi.
Thus begins the story of the greatest theatre district in the world! Rising from the boring old ashes of Puritan England, some of the most significant works of art were born on the British stage. While its actors and playwrights that are best-remembered, one must never forget that someone had to build the stage in the first place.