6 - Playhouses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Summary
As for any house, the location and fabric of a playhouse create opportunities and risks as well as social capital or deficit. ‘Improvement’ was a concept cherished by dramatists who translated old masters for the modern stage, and Restoration theatre managers were correspondingly preoccupied by the need to modernize their playing spaces in order to attract not only the largest audience but the wealthiest. For this reason, although the mythology of Restoration Theatre is dominated by names that signal either gleaming continuity with the present or pastoral idylls – Drury Lane, Dorset Garden, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Haymarket – the history of playhouses in the period is that of everything else: of rapid development, a dash for riches, a haste to abandon the past. While most of the period’s theatre history can be told in terms of pairs of companies operating under tightly controlled patents – the King’s and the Duke’s, Rich’s and Betterton’s – those companies and their offshoots operated from more than a dozen different premises, ranging from the glories of Dorset Garden to small ‘nursery’ accommodation in Hatton Garden and the Barbican. Then there were the improvised spaces provided for court performances and summer tours, which brought financial rewards of their own: from Whitehall Palace to Dover Castle to the living room of a South Coast MP, and then, right at the bottom of the scale, the variety of [in]‘convenient places’ where touring companies were licensed to perform. While it is tempting to think of the Restoration period as marking the invention of a prosperous, West End, institutionalized kind of theatre, Restoration actors had to be as adaptable to different kinds of playing space as any before or since.
Restoration playhouses therefore have a shadow history: one less of stable institutions than of buildings pressed into temporary service and then abandoned to other, often unlikely, uses. In November 1660 Thomas Killigrew renovated Gibbons’ Tennis Court in Vere Street as a temporary home ahead of his planned move to a new Theatre Royal in Bridges Street. Two and a half years later, soon after Killigrew’s move, Samuel Pepys strolled down Vere Street and heard that fencing matches were being held in the old theatre; a fortnight later it boasted a full house once again, but the audience was a congregation and the stage commanded by a single performer in the shape of a Nonconformist preacher.
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- Restoration Plays and PlayersAn Introduction, pp. 144 - 163Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014