The Golden Age of Pantomime

Slapstick, Spectacle and Subversion in Victorian England

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

Of all the theatrical genres most prized by the Victorians, pantomime is the only one to have survived continuously into the twenty-first century. It remains as true today as it was in the 1830s, that a visit to the pantomime constitutes the first theatrical experience of most children and now, as then, a successful pantomime season is the key to the financial health of most theatres. Everyone went to the pantomime, from Queen Victoria and the royal family to the humblest of her subjects. It appealed equally to West End and East End, to London and the provinces, to both sexes and all ages. Many Victorian luminaries were devotees of the pantomime, notably among them John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and W.E. Gladstone. In this vivid and evocative account of the Victorian pantomime, Jeffrey Richards examines the potent combination of slapstick, spectacle and subversion that ensured the enduring popularity of the form. The secret of its success, he argues, was its continual evolution.
It acted as an accurate cultural barometer of its times, directly reflecting current attitudes, beliefs and preoccupations, and it kept up a flow of instantly recognisable topical allusions to political rows, fashion fads, technological triumphs, wars and revolutions, and society scandals. Richards assesses throughout the contribution of writers, producers, designers and stars to the success of the pantomime in its golden age. This book is a treat as rich and appetizing as turkey, mince pies and plum pudding.

1

Transformations

Of all the theatrical genres most prized by the Victorians, the pantomime is perhaps the most recognizable in the twenty-first century. It remains true that it constitutes the first theatrical experience of most children and now, just as in the nineteenth century, a successful pantomime season is the key to a profitable year’s work in most theatres.¹ What explains the enduring success of this strange hybrid combination of slapstick and spectacle, comedy and art?

Firstly, pantomime had a universal appeal. Everyone went to the pantomime in Victorian England. From the Queen and the royal family to the humblest of her subjects. It appealed to West End and East End audiences, to London and the provinces, to both sexes and all ages. The first play Queen Victoria saw after her coronation was the Drury Lane pantomime, Harlequin and Jack Frost, which she visited on 10 January 1839. In December 1860, to entertain the royal children, there was a command performance of Babes in the Wood at Windsor Castle. The royal children even performed their own pantomime-type play Red Riding Hood for their parents, an event captured in a charming canvas by E.H. Corbould, which Prince Albert commissioned and presented to his wife on her thirty-sixth birthday, 24 May 1855.² Many of the luminaries of the Victorian Age, among them John Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold and W.E. Gladstone, were devotees of the pantomime. But ordinary people also queued for hours to get into the pantomime all over the country. Illustrated magazines regularly published pictures of the queues and the packed galleries.

The magical escapist appeal of pantomime was put into words by theatre-mad Charles Dickens in his account of David Copperfield’s visit to Covent Garden to see the pantomime:

The mingled reality and mystery of the whole show, the influence upon me of the poetry, the lights, the music, the company, the smooth stupendous changes of glittering and brilliant scenery, were so dazzling and opened up such illimitable regions of delight, that when I came out into the rainy street, at twelve o’clock at night, I felt as if I had come from the clouds, where I had been leading a romantic life for ages, to a bawling, splashing, link-lighted, umbrella-struggling, hackney-coach-jostling, patten-clinking, muddy, miserable world.³

Secondly, pantomime was never static as a form but was continually evolving. In 1881, the eminent critic Dutton Cook, surveying the history of pantomime wrote:

Some eighty years ago John Kemble, addressing his scene-painter in reference to a forthcoming pantomime, wrote: ‘It must be very short, very laughable and very cheap’. If the great actor-manager’s requirements were fairly met, it is certain that the entertainment in question was a kind very different to the pantomime of our day – a production that is invariably very long, rarely laughable and always of exceeding costliness … In modern pantomime it may be said that the opening is everything and that the harlequinade is deferred as long as possible.⁴

How had this come about? Through a series of transformations, in which the key figures were James Robinson Planché (1796–1880), William Roxby Beverley (c.1810–89), Edward Leman Blanchard (1820–89) and Sir Augustus Harris (1852–96). All of these changes were contested and there was a continual battle for the soul of the pantomime. A recurrent refrain from theatre critics throughout the nineteenth century is ‘the pantomime is not what it was.’ This is declared, for instance, by Leigh Hunt in 1831, by Andrew Halliday in 1863, by W. Davenport Adams in 1882 and by Max Beerbohm in 1898.⁵ In fact it was never what it was but was always being refreshed and reinvigorated.

In the Regency period, the harlequinade was everything and the ‘opening’, a handful of scenes with a fairy story or nursery rhyme narrative, was as short as possible. In the celebrated production Mother Goose (1806–7), which ran for ninety-two performances, made Grimaldi a star and defined the nature of the Regency pantomime, there were four opening scenes and fifteen of the harlequinade. The harlequinade was essentially dialogue-less and centred on physical action, slapstick, knockabout and comic songs, a form dictated by the 1737 Licensing Act which gave the monopoly of the spoken word on stage to the patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

The passing of the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 signalled a major shift in the nature of the genre. The act abolished the patent theatres’ monopoly of the spoken word and opened up the use of dialogue to all theatres. This had a direct effect on the pantomime opening, which got steadily longer and longer, revelling in the linguistic freedom allowed by rhyming couplets, the ability to pun and the chance to comment on current events. It was now directly affected by another form which had emerged to beat the dialogue ban – the extravaganza or burlesque. These forms emerged from the burletta, ‘by which description’ Planché reported:

after much controversy both in and out of court, we were desired to understand dramas containing not less than five pieces of vocal music in each act, and which were also, with one or two exceptions not to be found in the repertoire of the patent houses.⁶

The Olympic and Adelphi Theatres were specially licensed for burlettas and James Robinson Planché perfected the extravaganza form, first seen at the Olympic in Olympic Revels in 1831. There is no doubt that the extravaganza and burlesque were different animals and a whole scholarly industry has grown up seeking to define and distinguish between them.⁷ In fact we can do no better than refer to Planché who wrote that the term extravaganza distinguished ‘the whimsical treatment of a poetic subject from the broad caricature of a tragedy or serious opera which was correctly described as a burlesque.’⁸ The problem for the learned academics agonizing over precise descriptions is that in their characteristically expansive way the Victorians used the terms interchangeably throughout the century. W. Davenport Adams, for instance, in his 1891 history A Book of Burlesque announced that he would not be covering extravaganza but then claimed that Planché had been the pioneer of ‘the classical or fairy burlesque’.⁹ Planché, who prided himself in writing extravaganzas, rather than burlesques, would have been furious.

From 1831 to 1856 Planché provided extravaganzas for a succession of theatres, culminating in the series at the Lyceum which was deemed to represent the peak period of the form. Dutton Cook, like Davenport Adams equating extravaganza and burlesque, wrote:

Without doubt the modern pantomime opening owes much of its form to modern burlesque and extravaganza, of which the late Mr Planché may be regarded as the inventor … Gradually he created a school of burlesque writers indeed; but his scholars at last rebelled against him and ‘barred him out’, a fate to which schoolmasters have often been liable. Still burlesque in the worthy Planché form, and of the spuriously imitative form, which copied, and at the same time degraded him, grew and throve and at last invaded the domains of pantomime. ‘Openings’ fell into the hands of burlesque-writers … punning rhymes, parodies and comic dances, delayed the entrance of clown and harlequin, till at last their significance and occupation seem almost to have gone from them.¹⁰

The 1850s and 1860s were the heyday of the burlesque and extravaganza. The stage, liberated by the 1843 Theatre Regulation Act, revelled in wordplay. The particular appeal of burlesque lay in puns, parodies both musical and literary, topical allusions and contemporary slang. Certain theatres, notably the Olympic, the Adelphi, the Strand and later in the century the Gaiety, came to specialize in burlesque and a group of talented writers provided an unending flow of scripts: Frank Talfourd, H.J. Byron, Frank Burnand and the Brough Brothers, Robert and William, among them. But as Richard Schoch points out, none of the great actor-managers of the nineteenth century, Macready, Phelps, Charles Kean, Irving or Tree, ever staged a burlesque, though Macready did memorably produce a Planché extravaganza.¹¹ Everything was fair game for burlesquing: classical myths, fairy tales, popular melodrama, English history, Arthurian legend, Arabian Nights tales, grand opera, Shakespeare, Scott, Ainsworth and Dickens. A breed of burlesque performers developed who attracted devoted followings: Madame Vestris, Marie Wilton, Nellie Farren, James Bland and Fred Leslie among them. This all had an unquestionable effect on the pantomime.

The success on the stage of extravaganza and burlesque led the I.L.N. (2 January 1847) only four years after the Act was passed to comment: ‘Every season convinces us more and more that [pantomimes] have had their day; and that, with the exception of their mere physical jokes, none can elicit from an audience those peals of laughter and applause which accompany the progress of a burlesque.’ The physical jokes which elicited the laughter the critic enumerated:

There are ludicrous associations connected with putting a sweep in a milk-pail, or knocking over an image-man; and an assault upon any of the recognised authorities (especially policemen) is sure to be hailed with shouts from the gallery. But when these are over, the insipidity of the attempts at comicality, and want of sustaining interest in the action, become very tedious.

The critic complained that the pantomime had fallen way behind other theatrical forms, had not changed or developed in twenty years, that the harlequinade was now just meaningless knockabout and that there was no link between it and the opening:

It is generally acknowledged … that amusement is only to be found in the openings of pantomimes; and that the dreariness begins as soon as the characters are changed. We think that a great hit might be made by producing a pantomime all opening. Let us have all the funny big heads, the imps and fairies as at present; but work all the tricks into the action, abolishing the Clown and his companions altogether … and the hits at the day might all be worked in mechanically, as they are in the dialogue of the burlesques; and the greater the anachronism the greater the entertainment.

This is exactly what did happen, but not for forty years. The conclusion was that:

Burlesque has entirely superseded pantomime, as at present constructed; and we expect that the latter will, in a year or two, go out altogether, and rank with the Mysteries and other dramatic productions of the past, unless some entirely new elements are introduced.

What happened was not the disappearance of pantomime but the merger of the pantomime opening and the extravaganza, ensuring the continued life of the pantomime. The London Dispatch (1 January 1837) reported:

The general characteristics of pantomime have been changed of late years. We have less humour and innocent satire, but more of scenic effects, blue fire and magic. Harlequin has less occasion to be piquant and active, when the eye of the spectator is to be pleased and not his mind; and the Clown and Pantaloon need not be satirical and humourous, when a rope-dancer is the chief attraction of the evening. Sufficient, however, is still left to make us laugh heartily; and we do not find that the children of the present day are less amused than those of our younger year.

John Bull (27 December 1841) attributed the change in the nature of pantomime to its transformation into a show aimed specifically at children:

A few years ago all ranks flocked to see the pantomime. The question was then put with a confident smile, when your opinion was inquired, as certain you had witnessed the favourite and national pastime. Now young men have a pride not to see such amusements, which are thought to be specially devoted to children.

Now the humour had been watered down so much that neither adults nor children were likely to be amused by pantomimes: ‘They are losses to the management and unprofitable to the spectators.’ Like the I.L.N. critic, the John Bull critic predicted the demise of the form. The young men he mentions had, it seems, transferred their patronage to the burlesques which were aimed at an adult audience.

Reviewing the classical burlesque, The Paphian Bower at the Olympic, The Athenaeum (29 December 1832) praised it at the expense of the pantomime:

The time for this species of entertainment is nearly gone by. They had reached their high point of attraction some twenty years ago, and have been declining ever since.

This critic attributed this decline in pantomime’s appeal to rising educational standards.

The critic in The Morning Chronicle (27 December 1845) assessing Planché’s The Bee and the Orange Tree, the Christmas extravaganza at the Haymarket, began his review by saying:

Pantomimes are vanishing from the stage as fast as stage coaches from the country road. On this side the water there are but two legitimate pantomimes, the other Christmas pieces being extravaganzas and fairy tales which, indeed, are...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• 1 Transformations
• 2 Harlequinade
• 3 Fairyland
• 4 James Robinson Planché and the Classical Extravaganza
• 5 James Robinson Planché and the Fairy Extravaganza
• 6 William Roxby Beverley and the Triumph of Scene-Painting
• 7 The Drury Lane Pantomime: The Creators
• 8 E.L. Blanchard and the Drury Lane Pantomimes: The Smith Management
• 9 E.L. Blanchard and the Drury Lane Pantomime: The Chatterton Management
• 10 Sir Augustus Harris and the Battle for Pantomime
• Epilogue
• Appendix: E.L. Blanchard’s Annual Income
• Notes