The Biography of a Theatre
FEW people under fifty years of age will remember all the glories of Daly's theatre in Leicester Square ; but this fascinating and well-written book is a history of Daly's from its erection by Augustin Daly for George Edwardes in 1893 to its demolition in 1938 to make way for a cinema belonging to Warner Bros. Mr. Daly was an American who introduced Ada Rehan to the London public, and the new theatre he built opened in 1893 with The Taming of the Shrew. The curious who care to turn to Mr. Bernard Shaw's Our Theatres in the Nirieties will find criticisms of Daly's productions of Shakespeare which are by no means complimentary but . very amusing to read, even today.
But the theme of Mr. Forbes-Winslow's book is not Augustin Daly but George Edwardes, who from 1894 until his death in 1915 was the presiding genius of Daly's. It was he who took over from Augustin Daly, he who produced there Humperdinck's opera Hansel and Gretel for the first time in England (in 1894) and, after various Shakespearian productions, inaugurated that brilliant era of musical comedy with An Artist's Model (in 1895) which set a standard fat this new genre that, for the next twenty years, was unequalled any- where in the world. For a period of fifteen years at Daly'S there were only eleven new musical plays, such was the persistent popular success of all Edwardes' productions. There has never been such a theatrical vogue either before or since, for the public that then patronised Daly's comprised every section of society, including the intelligentsia. This is not surprising when we consider the quality of both the musical plays and their casts. The merits of the librettists and composers of the best English musical comedies of this period have never been adequately recognised, and only those who are still alive and can remember Marie Tempest (in The Geisha), Huntley Wright, Hayden Coffin, W. H. Berry, Joseph Coyne, Lily Elsie, Gabrielle Ray and Gertie Millar are entitled to declare that you cannot find such personalities today and that to revive those delightful Edwardian musical comedies with the singers and dancers of today is to lose all their original flavour. The leading ladies of those days were exquisitely feminine and had irresistible vitality as well as a charm that the hardy, chromium-plated stars of today have sacrificed for less intangible qualities.
But the book will interest not only those who have a taste for comic opera and musical comedy, since the author has drawn vivid sketches of the leading theatrical personalities of the time, and George Edwardes in these pages appears the model of an enterprising, genial and brilliant impresario. He was of Irish extraction and was the sort of valuable export Eire no longer seems able to produce.
W. J. T.
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