The roar of the greasepaint
ROY STRONG
As a child my great love was my Pollock toy theatre. Admittedly, I got over-ambitious later in my Oliver Messel transparent gauze period with endless transformation scenes, creating effects with my dimmer never achieved by a Victorian child. But one's basic fare was the gorgeous plays of Pollock, Redington, and Green, The Red Rover, The Silver Palace cr The Brigand. My own favourite was a tragedy, Home's Douglas, the playbook of which was a truncated version of the original blank verse. What an opening scene: a great sun spreading its rays across a backcloth of pink
clouds and blue sky in front of which stood cut-
out wings depicting trees of an indeterminate variety and gloomy castle walls and gateways. From the moment one pushed Lady Randolph on, in fluttering mourning veils gesturing grief at the end of a noisy piece of bent wire, it was enveloping, heady drama. And what an entrance
speech for a child of twelve to cope with: 'Oh,
Douglas! Douglas! if departed ghosts hear'st my lamentations: thy wretched wife weeps for
her husband slain, her infant lost.' Later one
learnt that the great Siddons had acted this memorably and young" Master Betty had caused an equal furore as her lost son, Norval, in a speech much easier to deal with at that age: 'My name is Norval, on the Grampian Hills my father tends his flocks.' And the end left any Joan Crawford movie at the starting post with Norval wrongfully slain and his mother, know- ing all, jumping off a cliff edge. The much-needed new edition of George Speaight's 'unobtainable Juvenile Drama, re-
entitled The History of the English Toy
Theatre, filled Me with happy nostalgia. None of the magic has yet evaporated,
I still love my toy theatre which stands
in the dining-room (The Miller and His Men now playing), and I have all the plays I
had as a child tucked away in carefully labelled
envelopes. George Speaight, too, is an un- ashamed enthusiast and the book includes photographs of him pouring with perspiration as he struggles with the impossible, hysterical,- stage instructions of those little playbooks: 'Enter Zorilda & Agib, on Horseback, Right Hand—Plate 7. They cross the Stage and Exit. Enter Timour, Right Hand—Plate 1. Enter Herim and Tartars, with torches, Right Hand— Plate 7,' etc etc. Few curtains ever fell on this arcadia without red and blue fire burning furiously while knights battle or fairies cavort. The origin of all this enchantment was a very, simple one, theatrical portrait pin-ups. Mrs Siddons gestures grandly in Dighton's rendering of her in Pizarro, the lines beneath typo- graphically following the cadences of her speech: 'Hold! Pizarro—hear me—if not always JUSTLY, at least act always GREATLY.' These pin-ups quickly developed into plates containing all the characters in a play. West and Green were the earliest publishers and their successors stretched down into this cen-' Wry to old Pollock and his daughter with their Hoxton shop, still going before the last war.. The qbality of the work varies enormously. but generally the story is one of a gradual decline to the crudities of Redington at the close of the last century. The Juvenile Drama, as it was called, preserves as a historical document the sets of this era of painted backcloths, cut cloths, side wings, raked stages and false perspective. In the hands of skilful painters and lit by candle or gas, the effects could be ravishing. The backcloths were great landscape paintings which could include rolling waves, birds flying, a sun rising or storm-lashed trees, all petri- fied. One can imagine the gasps of wonder as each layer of one of these spectacles un- folded: the Palace of Fairies, the Magic Cavern, the Palm Tree Forest, a castle courtyard or a plumed tent. On the stage itself, the actors of Kean's generation gesticulated in a series of almost set mimetic attitudes conveying elation, grief, crisis, or happiness. This theatre of spectacle and song was a result both of the play monopoly held by Covent Garden and Drury Lane, and of sheer public demand by mobs of poverty-stricken workers who longed for a few hours of total escapism. By about 1840, there were sixty theatres in London catering for this taste with musical, equine or water spectacles. And it coincided with the Romantic revival which lent itself admirably to the pattern of these enter- tainments : innocent girls are abducted and saved; robbers, Italian or German, plot in their lairs; long-lost children are restored to their rightful parents or inheritance; ghosts stalk Gothic baronial halls; nasty orientais are vanquished by captive beauties; young maids are always vindicated against absolutely any- thing or anyone. For all its triviality, it was a theatre of pure spangled magic. The index of toy theatre plays is a wonderful guide to popular taste in the Regency and early Victorian theatre. There was no Juvenile Drama King Lear; instead the grand pageantry of the history plays, above all Richard III (seven versions) or the dreamy romance of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sir Walter Scott ranked higher • than Shakespeare: Guy Mannering (five versions), Ivanhoe (six versions) and Rob Roy (six versions). Spectacular oriental dramas with Brighton Pavilion sets did very well: twenty versions of Blue Beard, seventeen of Aladdin, twenty-one of Ali Baba and twelve of Timour the Tartar. The play which beat them all in popularity was Pocock's The Miller and His Men of which no fewer than forty versions were printed. It is difficult to explain why this drama of the victimisation of a miller by bandits in some vague piece of the Rhineland should have been so compelling, but it was. It had, however, a wonderful ending with the mill blowing up and lots of red fire burning everywhere. Half the fun of a toy theatre was always in the preparation. One never really achieved a public performance. All energies for days went into painting the scenery and figures, pasting them on card and cutting them out (terrible difficulties with swords), then popping them into the little theatre and experimenting with scene change and lighting. It was a combination of immense physical activity with a release of the imagination as = one created a dream world, revealed as the curtain rose. Nothing seen later in the adult theatre ever achieved such total emotional involvement as one's feeble efforts to render Lady Randolph's anguish, and simul- taneously to propel her on her wire from one side of the cardboard woodland to the other withor: falling zver.
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