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A Thousand Years of British Theatre History (Part 5b)The Nineteenth CenturyTragedy The domination of melodrama did not mean that the major genres of tragedy and comedy were forgotten. Quite the contrary, for writers of many kinds continued to attempt to write tragedy in particular. The early part of the century, of course, was the flowering of English Romanticism, which, it has to be said, partook to an extent of the taste for melodrama. Keats' Isabella, or The Pot of Basil springs to mind here, as does his The Eve of St Agnes, but there are elements of melodrama in much of the Romantics' poetry, particularly that of the younger generation, best represented by Byron, Keats and Shelley. All the Romantics tried their hands at drama: Keats attempted a tragedy, Otho the Great, whilst Coleridge's "Historic Drama in five acts" The Triumph of Loyalty was performed "with universal applause" (so Coleridge, never famed for his modesty, tells us) at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 7th February, 1801. Shelley made a number of excursions into playwriting, with "lyrical dramas" (Prometheus Unbound, for example, and Hellas) and a fragment of what he called a tragedy but in reality was a satire, Swellfoot the Tyrant, based on Oedipus Rex. He also did some translations of dramatic works, among them Euripides' Cyclops. It was Byron, however, who was the most committed to writing plays: Manfred, a Dramatic Poem in three acts; Marino Faliero, Doge of Venice, a historial tragedy in five acts, which was very Greek-influenced and did poor business at Drury Lane in 1823; another tragedy, Sardanapalus; The Two Foscari, an historical tragedy; Cain: A Mystery and Heaven and Earth, both created in Byron's understanding of the style of the Mystery plays; Werner; or, The Inheritance, another "tragedy" which is much more of a gothic melodrama; and The Deformed Transformed, styled a Drama by Byron but, again, very much a melodrama. The only success Byron had as a playwright was with a revival of Sardanapalus in 1853, 29 years after his death. In fact, there have been a number of revivals of his plays since his time, the most recent being Cain, directed by Stanislavsky, at the Moscow Arts Theatre in 1920 and revived yet again by Jerzy Grotowski in 1960. Other poets who tried their hands at writing tragedy were Browning and Tennyson. The later had a "smash hit" in the nineties with a version of his Becket reworked and performed by Henry Irving, but it would seem that Irving was the draw rather than the play, for after the actor's death the play was forgotten. It is interesting that, apart from a few attempts such as those of T.S. Eliot, attempts to write poetc tragedy in the old tradition have more or less died out since then. After all, if poets of the calibre of Byron and Tennyson couldn't manage it, what chance have the rest of us? Comedy Comedy had a more successful centry than tragedy, partially because the comedy of manners, based as it is on the foibles of the generation which produces it, is always in fashion, and partially because comedy (then as now) proved to be much more flexible and willing to adapt itself to new conditions. Two major advances occurred in the nineteenth century: between 1865 and 1869 the Prince of Wales Theatre, managed by Marie Wilton, produced a series of plays by T.W. Robertson. He seized on the recent innovation of the box set (the first of the major advances) and made the people of his plays ordinary people, speaking the language of ordinary people and with ordinary people's concerns. His people were, of course, middle class, and this was to set the direction comedy was to take for a long time to come. The box set had come about because of a far-reaching technical development, the use of gas lighting, which was first installed in 1817 at the Lyceum and at Drury Lane. The effect of this was to allow actors to play inside the scenery rather than in front of it. We can see that comedy did fare better than tragedy, for no one produces nineteenth century tragedy any more (except in a somewhat perverse way!), whereas the comic masterpiece of the century is still played regularly today, by both amateur and professional companies - Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). By the end of the century, farce had assumed an important role in British theatre, with a one-act farce usually ending the rather long playbills of the time. The "golden age" of British farce, of course, was still to come with the work of writers like Ben Travers, but already the influence of French farce was being strongly felt. The best known name among the purveyors of these one-act farces was W.S. Gilbert, he of Gilbert and Sullivan and the Savoy Operas. Socially Aware Theatre Melodrama did not outlast the century, except as an interesting Victorian curiosity, but was revived in the middle of the twentieth century by the recreations of Brian Burton. These recreations were much more in keeping with their time (as was, for example, Sondheim's Sweeny Todd) than the originals, for, unlike Burton's versions, they took themselves very seriously and would have been rather too over-the-top for twentieth century taste. However, melodrama's preoccupation with sex (in "acceptable" form, of course: innocent maidens were always struggling against "a fate worse than death"), coupled with Robertson's thematic and linguistic innovations, brought about the birth of plays which dealt with social problems. The great innovator here was Arthur Wing Pinero, whose The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893) was a huge success. Unlike his twentieth century successors, Pinero did not challenge the accepted morality of his time, but he did, at least, recognise the plight of women and that there were problems. His The Profligate (1898) really shocked society for it dealt openly with seduction. This is a strand of drama which was to assume great importance in the coming century. Shaw's even more "shocking" and controversial Mrs Warren's Profession, which received its first performance in 1902, was actually first published in 1898 as part of his Plays Unpleasant, but society continued to be shocked by plays such as Coward's The Vortex (1924) and Fallen Angels (1925). This line of socially aware plays, of course, runs right through to the so-called "kitchen sink" drama of the fifties and sixties, and it even then continued to shock contemporary society. Pinero, of course, also wrote comedies, and Trelawney of the Wells (1898), a nostalgic look back at theatre in mid-Victorian times, is almost certainly the best of them, and is possibly the only one really still playable today. Other Dramatic Forms The comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, written between 1877 and 1896, made their authors (and D'Oyly Carte, their patron) rich men, with their peculiarly English approach, as compared to the Opera Bouff of France (best exemplified by Offenbach), which was considered rather indecent by the Victorian English. Generally theatre and opera of all kinds were very much the province of the middle and upper classes: for the working class the entertainment of choice was the Music Hall, basically a variety show with emphasis on music, but, as the end of the century approached, this changed and large scale variety theatres began to be built by such as Oswald Stoll, Edward Moss and Richard Thornton. Many were designed by leading architects such as Frank Matcham. Partly this was due to the fact that Music Hall stars began to appear in pantomimes which, in a way, legitimised the genre for the middle classes. Many of these, often very large, theatres grew to become venues for touring productions as well as variety shows during the twentieth century, some even setting up their own repertory companies for part of the year. The Empire Theatre in Sunderland, built by Richard Thornton, opened by Vesta Tilley and later to become part of the Stoll Moss chain, was one such. Seating 2000 people in stalls, grand circle, upper circle and gallery, plus boxes, it presented some of the biggest stars of the day, and paid the going rate - one contract from 1911 shows that one top-of-the-bill "name" was paid £2000 for a week! The Actors If the nineteenth century was not outstanding for its drama, it certainly was for its actors. The profession of actor finally began to move out of the "rogues and vagabonds" class, a process which the Kembles had begun in the late eighteenth century. It was the great actor-managers, those who ran a theatre and performed on its stage, which characterised the latter half of the century. Best known was Henry Irving, who ran the Lyceum for an astonishing 24 years from 1878 to 1902, and who was knighted in 1895. These actor-managers tended to choose plays, not for their quality as dramatic works, but for the quality of the leading role, which is why Irving appeared in ther greatest of Shakespeare's plays and some pretty dreadful melodramas! Shakespeare benefited enormously from this tendency, for what actor can resist parts such a Hamlet or Lear? Increasingly, too, there was a reverence for Shakespeare which led to the reinstatement of his versions of plays: Edmund Kean played Shakespeare's ending of King Lear as early as 1826 and twelve years late Macready brought the Fool back to the same play. Research into costume led to greater historical accuracy than even Shakespeare had required, and there was even a bare-stage version of Twelfth Night in 1895 (William Poel), which came about because of the discovery of a drawing of the original Swan Theatre in 1888. Strangely enough, nineteenth century taste did not extend to performing the full version of The Merchant of Venice, the last act, after the departure of Shylock, being always omitted. Links Glasgow: Popular Entertainers of the Nineteenth Century Articles Indices:
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