Sunday morning
Once participants were in and settled in the auditorium, half-filling the stalls—not a good house by commercial terms but quite respectable for an academic occasion—they were welcomed by conference organiser Gilli Bush-Bailey (an academic now, Reader in Women's Theatre History at RHUL, but older theatre-goers will remember her as an actress, especially in the television version of The Railway Children).
Things then kicked off with an entertaining Keynote Address from Jacky Bratton, Professor of Theatre and Cultural History at RHUL) under the challenging title "Dangerous Women: or, what's wrong with the story of the West End?". Professor Bratton is something of a feminist and she is concerned to reclaim the place in that story of a series of women who were instrumental in the development of the West End as we know it.
Appropriately, she started at the Haymarket itself and the management there of Squire Bancroft and his wife Marie Wilton, before looking back a little to their tenancy of the Prince of Wales Theatre off Tottenham Court Road where she had introduced the "tea-cup" plays of Tom Robertson, drawing-room drama that attracted a more middle-class audience. They were keen to move to a more fashionable theatre and transferred to the Haymarket in 1879.
Among the changes they introduced were the removal of the forestage and the replacement of the pit benches with comfortable stall seating. On stage they popularised the use of the box set and gave the actors much better treatment than most managements. This was recognisable as what became the pattern for West End theatre for the succeeding century.
At the other extreme, Professor Bratton instanced the Strand Theatre, a little illegitimate, almost illegal house just round the corner from the patent theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, under the rather rackety management of Harriet Waylett and later run by the Smith family (who adopted the stage name Swanborough) whose female members provided a succession of managers. Here too Marie Wilton could be found, appearing in burlesque alongside Ada Swanborough. An equivalent to the other side of the modern West End, for when W S Gilbert's burlesques began to banish women in tights and he started to collaborate with Arthur Sullivan, we were well on the way to developing the modern musical.
Jacky Bratton was followed by David Worrall (Nottingham Trent University) who looked at the role theatre played in the London economy in the early 18th century, when theatre was immensely popular and the important contribution that it also makes today. It was not just a matter of numbers paying to go to the theatre but the infrastructure that theatre created from candlemakers to costumiers, and we all known how important theatre is in attracting visitors to London.
Evidence of the money, presumably ready cash, available to theatre managers is contained in records of loans made to royalty. In the 1800s, both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York are known to have borrowed considerable sums from the management at Covent Garden. Another intriguing strand of Worrall's discourse showed how the theatre looked after its own. Already the patent theatres were running their own Theatrical Funds, actors paying a regular contribution in proportion to their earnings to provide support when they and their colleagues hit hard times.
Marcus Risdell (Curator and Librarian at the Garrick Club, where he has charge of its considerable collection of theatre material) talked about James Winston, an actor and sometime manager at the Haymarket. With William Elliston, he was involved in management at the Surrey and Olympic Theatres and then at Drury Lane from 1819-26. Being bang in the middle of things, he was called before the Commission that eventually led to the Theatres Act.
Asked by its chairman Bulwer-Lytton "What do you think is meant buy the regular drama?" he answered that if a theatre is allowed "to play everything, everything is regular drama," a belief which was to eventually to end the privileges of the patent theatres and allow the development of London's theatreland. Winston was also a driving force in the foundation of the Garrick Club; at first meetings took place in his house and he became its first Secretary and Librarian.
David Mayer (Professor Emeritus, Manchester University) was ill and unable to be present but his paper "Hotwiring West End Theatres" was read for him. It looked at the role of the Gatti family, ice cream makers and restauranteurs in the electrification of London's theatres. They had the monopoly of the power supply for the West end, with their own generator at their ice cream café where Charing Cross Station now stands.
Since DC current loses power as it travels further from the generator, when they acquired the lease of the Adelphi in 1878 they built a second generator in Bull in Court. The noise it generated brought complaints from the management of the Vaudeville—so they bought that theatre too. The first theatre purpose built with electric stage and house-lighting was D'Oily Carte's Savoy (1881) but the Gatti's not only developed an empire of restaurants, theatres and power supply but the family became involved in developing lighting equipment, dimmers, lamps, that venture eventually becoming Strand Electric.
A break for lunch was also the opportunity to attend the launch of Jacky Bratton's latest book The Making of the West End (Cambridge University Press) with Professor Peter Bailey (University of Minatola) giving a warm appreciation of Professor Bratton's contribution to theatre history through her writing and teaching. There was also the chance to view small exhibitions of archive material from both the Royal Holloway's Roy Waters Collection and from the Theatre Royal Haymarket's own collection, along with the publications available from the Society for Theatre Research.