Carnival Night at Collins's
By CYRIL RAY ONDAY night is carnival night at Collins's Music Hall, and last Monday's was the first since the news that the shabby theatre by Islington Green had been saved—by a showman happily called Collins—from becoming a reposi- tory for bags of flour.
'Carnival Night' means that between the first and second performances of the week's show— this week, a variety bill under the general heading of Fancies and Scan ties—the spectacled manager of the theatre, clutching the stage microphone, as all his performers do, calls for 'Any lady with blue garters,' Any gent with another man's wife,' 'Any lady in the gallery with a lodger' to come up to the stage and choose a free gift from a table piled with polythene buckets and washing-up bowls and pressed-glass dishes.
No more is asked of them than to display their qualifications, and nobody on Monday had anything more excitingly improper to show us than the hems of a blue and a pink petticoat, or 'another man's wife' who turned out to prizewinner's married sister. waS 3 So much for the grown-ups, but there _ded call, too, for 'the kiddies,' and a trio of powa, Islington youths—a shade, I would have sal°' over 'kiddy' age—jigged and hitchy-kooe inte the microphone a ditty of which every sine word escaped me, and two small girls of eig./1 and nine sang into the same ineluctable devl a flat little lament of which I distinctly heart/ and cannot now succeed in disremembering
Though hope is gone I'll travel on Unto our Ron- Day-Voo.
An all too modest way, it seemed, to celebrate the granting of a new lease of life to a famou5 old music hall that Sickert had painted and Marie Lloyd had played in, but there was no more t°, it than that, unless one accepts as celebration solitary quip from one of a pair of rather 'lc pressed comedians to the effect that the °Niles° pit was likely to be filled in to make a circti5 ring—a reference to the source of the new Mc' Collins's wealth. cool' It failed to raise even a smile from the f pletely toothless old thing in the front NW 1)' the (four-shilling) stalls—a regular weekly visitilf for more than the ten years he had been there himself, the attendant told me (progranInAt.' seller, fireman and night watchman in one), 3" be the
dressed by the comedian as 'Mabel,' who cackled her excited enjoyment of all the other jests, even the one that went :
'What blend of tea d'you call that?' 'Lyons'?
`Lyons'? Blimcy, it looks more like cats' to me.' Men outnumber women in an average Collins's audience by about ten or twelve to one, but it .ts the women who provide the old faithfuls— those like Mabel, still on the ball, uproariously 'delighted by the nude who nearly moved (as Pales must not) and who nearly, therefore, got he giggles : and those like the bundle of nlackintosh and grey hair, fast asleep in her three
. - seat in the circle, of whom the attendant said, 'She'll be here again on Thursday—comes
every Monday and Thursday, all the way from tlighgate, and always has done; always goes to sleet); and if I say, "But I saw you here on Mon- day, ma," she'll say, "Yes, I know, but it's such alovely show, ducks."' Both in men and in women the average age f the audience is very high indeed : look down no the auditorium from an upper box (a seat in Which will cost you four-and-sixpence) and you ould swear that it could well be in the sixties. Stationary nudes at the back of the stage—even this Week's lovely Patricia, in her Artistic Nude rresentation, who is prettier and looks better nourished and less given to goose pimples than niost do—seem to hold little appeal for the young Men of Islington, who perhaps know more ap- Proachable young women; and certainly do not shock the district's old ladies, most of whom eorne, if at all, apparently with their husbands, and seem to have done so for decades, not quite having noticed, perhaps, that the jokes have gone ?sir a little since the days of Little Tich and George , Obey, or that the golden-haired young thing, Vturchi
ng a microphone, singing in a muddy off-
American accent what she has announced, for herself as 'a lovely little number,' has a little Less than the personality of Marie Lloyd, a vast °.leograph of whom, all teeth and feathers, nominates the downstairs bar. That is the bar that, for some odd puritanical rveson, I suppose, of the licensing authorities, f:u may not visit if your seat is on another ,levci__the circle or an upper box. 'We don t have rover tickets,' you are told, as though you Were suspected of trying to revive the raffishness Of the old Empire or Alhambra promenade. But It IS there, in the faded photographs that cover Vie walls—Kate Carney and Harry Tate; Dan 'eno and Vesta Tilley; and Belle Elmore, who Was Mrs. Dr. Crippen, for a time—that the glory Of Collins's lies. , There and, of course, in the curious hold that Shabby old theatres with flickering gas-jets in wire cages have (Mr. Betjeman will rejoice to know that Collins's keeps alight its fish-tail gas-jets- Presumably because of not entirely trusting the neW-Iangled electric light that is also installed) over the members of a notoriously soft-hearted and traditionally nostalgic profession. Not long age' We fell in with a rich, stately and almost Tiddle-aged matron, heavily bejewelled, spaci- Usly and most wealthily and e(JLtClY married. 'You live near Collins's!' she -dried. 'But I've played Collins's! Oh, what happy aysI was one of The Petulant Pretties.'
No doubt in those days the mackintoshed old lady from Highgate used to keep awake.
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