Royal Adelphi Theatre Seasonal Digest for 1875-1876
Ed. Frank McHugh & Gilbert Cross
In this season proprietor Benjamin Webster and his manager Frederick B. Chatterton filled their bills prudently. They consistently scheduled a proven melodrama as the featured piece and supplied plenty of comedy before and after it. They took few chances.
Andrew Halliday's Nicholas Nickleby, which had begun on 20 March 1875, ended its long run on 29 October of this season. It was replaced by Little Em'ly, another Halliday adaptation of a Dickens novel, David Copperfield.
On Saturday night, Little Em'ly, one of the most successful of Mr. Andrew Halliday's adaptations, took the place of Nicholas Nickleby in the Adelphi program; Peggoty, on whom much of the interest of the piece depends, being represented, as at the Olympic, by Mr. S. Emery, who made that part one of his best. Miss Lydia Foote is Em'ly; Mr. Fernandez, Micawber; Miss Edith Stuart, Rosa Dartle; Mr. John Clarke, Uriah Heep; and Mr. M'Intyre, Ham. Little Em'ly has already been played in London more than 200 times, but, to judge from the applause it met with on Saturday night, it will probably be repeated until the Shaughraun is transferred from Drury Lane (Times, 1 November 1875, p. 8).
The Shaughraun began on 27 December and ran for 24 nights. Dion Boucicault and his wife, Agnes Robertson, absent from the Adelphi stage since 1861, began a virtual festival of Boucicault drama at the Adelphi. They were popular figures, and thirty-eight of Boucicault's plays were performed at the Adelphi between 1844 and 1890. After this season, Boucicault retired to America, repudiating his wife and making what the Dictionary of National Biography delicately calls "other so-called nuptial arrangements." He appeared briefly in two more Adelphi seasons and died in 1890 four years after his last performance.
Three more Boucicault plays were given this season. Grimaldi was played only twice, at benefit performances. Immediately after Shaughraun came another Irish drama, Peep O'Day, with the author Edmund Falconer in his original role of Barney O'Toole. This tried and true piece played for more than ten weeks.
The most novel offering of the season was the American play Struck Oil. It introduced the Americans Maggie Moore and James C. Williamson. The piece had the longest run of the season, playing more than 100 times. The Times and Athenæum agreed that it had little merit but that Williamson was a very funny comedian, though not the equal of his predecessors Jefferson and Emmett. Williamson's Pennsylvania Dutch dialect and mannerisms won over the Adelphi audiences. "Mr. Williamson," the Athenæum wrote, "possesses ... distinct originality, and the performance has both pathos and drollery" (22 April 1876, p. 575).
Boucicault's Colleen Bawn and Arrah-na-Pogue were the final major offerings of the season. The Boucicaults did not act in these plays, but Williamson and many other skilled actors did, including Mrs. Alfred Mellon, who had been in the original cast of Colleen Bawn, McIntyre, a veteran melodrama villain, and Shiel Barry, acclaimed for his spy and informer roles in Irish plays. Erroll Sherson writes that Colleen Bawn, first produced in 1860, "was seen again and again by playgoers on account of the cave scene where the Colleen Bawn is rescued from drowning. This was something quite new in sensational effects and was the forerunner of many sensational scenes in subsequent dramas" (London's Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century, p. 157).
H. Barton Baker identifies the precise mechanical effect, which drew the spectators to this play: "the shaking waters and rolling billows and watery effects." He notes that "transparent stage water had never before been seen, and a few yards of blue gauze did more than all the finest acting in the world could accomplish" (History of the London Stage and its Famous Players, p. 97).
Sherson singles out the Adelphi's revival of Arrah-na-Pogue this season for special praise:
Boucicault's part was taken by an American actor, Williamson, and the hero, Beamish McCoul, was that ideal dramatic lover--Will Terriss. Shiel Barry ... was the Michael Feeny in the Adelphi revival, a part that had been previously taken by Dominick Murray. There was one great scene in "Arrah-na-Pogue" which never failed to 'bring down the house.' This was the climbing of the outer prison wall by Shaun the Post by means of the ivy, and his hiding in the ivy when the soldiers looked out of the window with their lighted torches (London's Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century, p. 159).
The Athenæum praised the "idyllic grace" with which Boucicault presented Irish rebellion in Arrah-na-Pogue: it was praise that suggested both the playwright's cleverness and his limitations:
So evenly does Mr. Boucicault hold the balance between contending factions that neither the nationalist party nor the party of order finds its feelings shocked. He treats of Irish rebellion, and solicits the sympathy of the audience for those who are in open revolt against English authority. He goes so far as to give upon the stage a ballad, one verse of which, thirty years ago, delivered in an Irish theatre would have produced riot and bloodshed; yet the authorities are subject to no alarm. Changed conditions have doubtless something to do with this. The author, however, has manipulated his story with extreme skill (19 August 1876, p. 252).
The editors have designated September 22 1876 as the end of the 1875-76 season.
FM
Royal Adelphi Theatre Seasonal Digest for 1876-1877
Ed. Frank McHugh & Gilbert Cross
Early in the season a Times reviewer noted that Boucicault's Shaughraun, which he saw at the theatre on 18 November, was not a good play, "but in its time it pleased, and will no doubt please again, the audiences which are mostly attracted to this house." The absence of Mr. and Mrs. Boucicault from the leading roles, he said, "must always be felt, though felt perhaps in a less degree at the Adelphi than elsewhere." He focused on the curtain raiser, a new piece called Give a Dog a Bad Name, and its reception:
As it is set down to begin at 7 o'clock it is probably not intended to serve any other purpose than that of 'playing in' the audience, and if the behavior of a considerable portion of the audience on Saturday night may be taken as typical of the general behavior of an Adelphi audience being 'played in,' this piece may do as well as no doubt any other. Perhaps a more literal interpretation of the phrase by the orchestra would do better still; at least it would serve to drown the remarks of the gallery, and one would at least be spared the unpleasantness of seeing actors of the capabilities of Mr. Emery and Miss Coghlan reduced to the position of the performers in the farce which ushers in the pantomime on Boxing night. On that particular night the custom of years has sanctioned such licence, but in any other circumstances such behaviour is little short of disgraceful (20 November 1876, p. 7).
The Athenæum reviewer said nothing about the audience, but he too had kind words for Rose Coghlan's acting in Give a Dog a Bad Name. He found Charles Sullivan's performance as the Shaughraun "not a little startling. This gentleman has a voice of such range he seems capable of communicating, in his own person, an idea of the hubbub at the Tower of Babel, or of performing the feat ascribed by Butler to Cerberus, of pronouncing a 'leash of languages at once'" (25 November 1876, p. 698). Such a startling voice may have had its value in the sometimes-noisy Adelphi.
Not all the audience was rowdy, however, for the Adelphi was a house divided in many ways. In Discovering Theatre Ephemera, John Melling says, "By the 1880s, it was noted that the lower-priced sections of the house received an inferior, thin, folio sheet, heavily and odoriferously printed, whilst the expensive seats got a scented octavo programme advertising the particular perfumer" (p. 46). Eugene Rimmel's company, which specialized in novelties and choice perfumes, began advertising on the Adelphi's programs in December 1870. Whether there was any scent, we cannot say at this date. However, we do know that Rimmel perfumed the waterfall in the 1871 pantomime.
The management had to beware not only of noise and rowdiness but also of the danger of fire in the theatre. On 21 December, "after the recent tragedy in the Brooklyn Theatre, at New York," the Lord Chamberlain's Office issued a memorandum to all managers reviewing the fire rules and warning against putting additional seats in the gangways, as some theatres had been doing (Times, 22 December 1876, p. 6).
The most extraordinary success of this season was a pantomime, Little Goody Two-Shoes, written by E. L. Blanchard and performed entirely by children. According to the Times, "The management here has got together 18 clever children to play a pantomime which occupies two and a half hours in the representation and through it all leaves nothing to be desired" (27 December, p. 5). This piece played more than 150 times, at first only in morning performances at reduced prices but by February in evening performances as well. Sometimes the whole pantomime was given and at other times only the opening. This section, the Times said, was "almost a fairy play, it is so full of pretty thoughts, graceful sentiments, and poetry." More surprising, the "comic business" was not neglected. "In the two scenes of the harlequinade, the fun is fast and furious" (p. 5).
So successful was the pantomime that in August the management offered a second one of the same kind, again written by Blanchard. The Theatre praised Little Red Riding Hood but suggested "the full warmth of sunny August" was unsuitable for such entertainment (7 August, p. 1). However, this second pantomime ran into November 1877, for some 85 performances.
As in the preceding season and except for the children's pantomimes, the Adelphi's programming showed little imagination or innovation. It continued to depend on Dion Boucicault revivals and such other proven works as True to the Core, one of the most successful of nautical melodramas. In a very terse notice of Falconer's Peep o' Day, which returned once again to the Adelphi, the Athenæum observed, "Some stirring of the waters of the Adelphi is much to be desired, if the house is to maintain its place among theatres" (28 April, p. 556.)
Just after Peep O’Day, the management succeeded with yet another Boucicault work, Streets of London, which played for twelve weeks. Boucicault's was one of several adaptations of Les Pauvres de Paris (1856). Erroll Sherson writes, "There were two sensations--a house on fire with real fire-engines and horses galloping on to the stage, and a scene where the heroine and her brother are just saved from being suffocated by charcoal fumes" (London's Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century, p. 158).
Paul Merritt’s The Golden Plough, a new melodrama, followed Streets of London. The Theatre said of it "if ever there was a thorough-going Adelphi melodrama of the good old Jack Sheppard school, this is one" (14 August, p. 33). Like The Athenæum, The Theatre praised the work for its construction and some effective scenes rather than for any profound qualities. It thought John Billington was not up to his usual standard and McIntyre was "extremely disappointing. Nor was Mr. S. Emery altogether satisfactory" (p. 34).
The editors have designated 24 August as the end of the 1876-77 season.
FM
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