THEATRE
Bristol Cream
By HILARY SPURLING
Two hundred years ago on Monday, the theatre in King Street, Bristol, first opened its doors—in the teeth of John Wesley and other nefarious enemies who urged the corporation to? follow Nottingham's recent example and put the playhouse down. If Nottingham had to wait for its theatre, Bristol would not: in 1764 a certain William Powell came down from Drury Lane, and 'a theatrical mania began to rage in Bristol.'. It had raged before, in the late sixteenth century, and it has raged intermittently ever since.
Bristol, in spite of or perhaps in reaction against its Puritans, has a unique theatrical past. Shakespeare very likely trod its boards (or if be didn't, Edward Alleyne did and George Peele; the Lord Chamberlain's men came down in the, summer both before and after Shakespeare joined them). Garrick wrote the prologue for the opening of the present 'theatre, and is said to have seduced the manager of a previous one, a Mrs Jane Green. -Mrs Siddons played all her best parts in King Street. Kean was there and J. P. Kemble and Master Betty. Junius Brutus Booth fought a duel in Queen Square (with an acrobat appearing in the same bill, named Il Diavolo Antonio, over the Diavolo's wife; Booth was the brother of Lincoln's assassin). Macready came down often, and Ellen Terry met her future lover there, well before her marriage at fifteen to the painter Watts. Sybil Thorndike was there in 1904 with the famous Horniman company from Manchester; Ernest Milton brought a Shakespeare company in 1921, at a very low ebb in the theatre's fortunes, and played Shylock to an audience of four in the pit; John Neville (who no doubt has Wesley tossing in his grave) and Peter O'Toole were there not so long ago. In short, practically every English actor known to fame has done his stint in King Street, and Henry Irving, by his own account, felt his 'first spark of ambition' there, when he was four or five years old and watched the famous lion-tamer, Van Amburgh, give his thrilling performance in the lion's den.
The theatre has had, of course, its ups and downs: the enthusiasm of the 1760s was followed by a period of undisputed pre-eminence among provincial stock companies in the 'eighties, then by a slow decline. 'How those great actors would have blushed to see themselves mixed up with rope-dancers, pugilists, horses and dogs! ! ! ' lamented Richard Jenkins in 1826. But worse was to come, notably, four years later, 'the talented and stupendous ELEPHANT,' for whom the entrance was enlarged. A typical bill of the 1840s had Othello, followed by two songs, a Highland fling, and The Widow's Victim, con- taining one Maustache Strappade—`a mysterious foreigner, ferocious, melodramatical and panto- mimical.' The theatre was closed more or less for ten years from 1868, and up for sale three times between 1919 and 1942. If prices are a guide, they ranged from 3s. 6d. to Is. 6d. in 1766; from 12s. to 3s. in 1966; and reached a spec- tacular low—from Is. 3d. to 4d.—in the 1930s, when the Theatre Royal was a notorious flea-pit in unsuccessful _competition with the cinema. At present, under Val May. the theatre is back in its old position among provincial companies. a pre-eminence disputed only by its very junior rival at Nottingham. The link with London— strengthened when the company became the Bristol Old Vic after the war, cemented by several recent West End transfers and by the continuing two-way flow of actors—is much as it was in the days when Powell was the chief subject of conversation in our coffee-houses, taverns and tea-tables.' Bristol has always been noted for fierce freaks of enthusiasm. When Powell died, the news reached the theatre during a performance of Richard III which ended in tears, and the whole city turned out for his funeral. Nearly a hundred years later, Bristol was split between Hodsonites and Terryites, fol- lowers respectively of Miss Henrietta Hodson and the Terry sisters—the latter vigorously led by the critic Jottings. This was E. W. Godwin (a local architect, later father of Ellen's children), of whom a sarcastic Hodsonite inquired, 'Is it the fact that Miss Terry, who is now the deity that Jottings swears by, never got a favourable notice till she had "tea'd" with the critic?' Godwin's teas were famous. So was his feud with the manager, James Henry Chute, who was once goaded to such fury that he advertised a forth- coming drama called Monomania or Softening of the Brain, in which 'to insure efficient repre- sentation' he hoped to prevail on the celebrated Jottings to take the principal part.
This kind of sniping was nothing new; Bristolians have always felt and freely expressed a jealous, proprietary pride in their theatre. It makes them parochial, no doubt, but solid, and ardent, even doting apologists in face of outside competition. They have seldom offered much financial or any other tangible support in time of crisis, but always been generous of their sentiment. Their feeling is not exactly a com- munion with the past—often, in fact, accom- panied by a quite surprising ignorance—but it is something which has lasted for centuries, and which no other theatre in the country can command.
And I should be very surprised if it has changed much since those first hectic days when (a certain folie de grandeur appearing even then) the proprietors found that they had built their theatre eight feet higher than Drury Lane, and had to start all over again. The theatre opened on May, 30, 1766, with a performance of Steele's The Conscious Lovers; and the University Drama Department gave a very pleasant performance of the play in celebration three weeks ago. But Mr May has chosen a more varied bill for the staple diet : Sixty Thousand Nights, which opened last Wednesday at the Theatre Royal (script by George Rowell, music by Julian Slade), is one of those cheerful, higgledy-piggledy entertain- ments to which the Bristol public has always
been particularly partial. Paul Edington turns in three finished portraits—of Saunderson. the immemorial stage carpenter who designed the house, of Lamb's great favourite, Munden, and of Irving. toying idly with an idea for The Bells.
There is an electrifying performance from Jane Asher as the young Ellen Terry. playing Cupid in a tunic 'too scanty to be quite nice.' with a thrust of her bow at Godwin in the stage box. Otherwise it is. as it should be. chiefly a bill for home consumption : the house on the first night laughed loudest at the local jokes and particularly at Garrick's dig in the prologue:
If we fail . . .
We all- each son of Thespis and each daughter Must for sweet Bristol Mill, drink Rristol Water.
One should not make too much of theatrical tradition, but there is no question that the Theatre Royal's present comfortable solidity is in part at least a matter of ancient habit. In London there is not and cannot be any comparable support from the large, slow-moving body of citizens: and, fail- ing such support, it is dangerous to appeal, as various companies have tried to do, to such special and eclectic elements that the larger public feels cut off. The Royal Court in particular has illustrated these dangers, and illustrated them again last week with Arnold Wesker's Their Very Own and Golden City. This chronicle of troubles in the labour movement is Theatre of the Absurd with knobs on. The TUC, for instance, is asked and stubbornly refuses to risk millions in sup- port of the projected city on the sole grounds that it is beautiful. This by an architect whose aesthetic judgment one would hesitate to trust, let alone his business flair. The immaturity of the thought goes hand in hand with a failure to grasp the basic essentials of playw riting. If I may reverse the judgment of a colleague, Mr Welker on this showing has no business writing plays; he had better stick to organising Centre 42.
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