III

SHAKESPEARE AND THE "OLD VIC"

"I AM sure that much of the respect which we pay to an elderly man is due to our suspicion that he could avenge any slight by describing the late Charles Mathews in Cool as a Cucumber. Theatrical reminiscence is the most awful weapon in the armory of old age." I am quoting from that delightful essayist, Max Beerbohm, only now beginning to come into his own; and I am about to draw that "awful weapon," not in self-defense, but because it will give me pleasure to flourish it; I shall not, I think, do much harm, and it is barely possible some good may come of it. And now for the preliminary flourish.

It will, I think, be admitted by any Londoner whose memory carries him back to the palmy days of Irving and Terry, that the theatre in that great metropolis is now in a very parlous state. We do not greatly care for the revival of plays a quartercentury old, plays which once shocked us but which shock us no longer, and in which we remember But never mind: Gladys Cooper is not a fair exchange for Mrs. Pat Campbell, and Cyril Maude disporting himself as "Lord Richard in the Pantry" does not make us forget but rather long for Forbes-Robertson.

Even the music-hall has gone to h, I was going to say. The cozy, old-fashioned music-hall,

smoky, and witty, and often vulgar, has given way to the gaudy theatre in which revues, tedious and meaningless, are given month after month; performances which would seem to be chiefly a challenge to the police. To one who remembers Lottie Collins and Marie Lloyd- to mention only two names, but memory calls up a dozen; to one to whom Dan Leno was a delight and who frequently joined Herbert Campbell in a chorus; who has breathlessly watched Cinquevalli successfully defy the laws of gravitation, and who has learned his coster songs from Albert Chevalier and Gus Ellen; the passing of the "halls" is nothing short of tragic, but it might perhaps be borne had not the theatre practically disappeared. Then suddenly something happened - and it happened at the Old Vic.

And now, and only now, is this paper fairly started. I know a man who has written two or three books about modern London, who confessed to me that he had never been in the Old Vic; comparatively few Londoners know where it is, and many of those who do have but a hazy idea of its character. I stumbled on it quite by accident, in the delightful little cathedral city of Wells, while spending a day or two at the Swan. One evening two young ladies were ushered to our table for dinner; they were young, attractive girls, and after the usual preliminaries, the exchanging of mustard for salt, and so forth, we fell into conversation, and I soon discovered that my tablemates were college girls on a holiday. They were

taking a walking-trip and were about finishing four hundred miles. Then I learned, too, that they were actresses from London; and at length it developed that they had been playing Shakespearean parts at the Old Vic.

"The 'Old Vic,"" I said to myself, wonderingly; "I seem to remember a more or less disreputable music-hall of that name on the Surrey side of the river; surely such cultivated women as my companions cannot be playing there - not even Shakespeare!" Yet it was so. Little by little the story was told of how, many years ago, an enterprising woman, a Miss Emma Cons, had secured the old place and by degrees redeemed it; then she died, and someone else had taken up and carried on the work. When we parted next morning, I was fully determined to visit that theatre at the first opportunity.

Immediately upon my arrival in London I started out to learn exactly where the Old Vic was; the newspapers had not a word to say; finally someone told me it was in Lambeth in the New Cut; then someone else said it was in the Waterloo Road. Finally, it appeared that both my informants were right, that it was in the New Cut at the corner of the Waterloo Road; and by dint of reading and inquiring, this is what I discovered.

In 1811 there was building a great stone bridge over the Thames, for a long time known as the New Bridge; it was completed soon after the glorious battle of Waterloo, which gave a name to many

things, including the new bridge and the approaches to it. Shortly after the completion of the bridge, a theatre was begun in the marshes of Lambeth, about half a mile from the Surrey end, and in 1817 its cornerstone was laid, by proxy, by Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, uncle to Queen Victoria, afterward to become famous as the King of the Belgians. No one seems to know if or how the Prince became interested in the theatre, but in any event it was named after him, the Royal Coburg Theatre. With due regard for the character of the surrounding population, it was at once given over to the crudest kind of melodrama and the most vulgar of pantomimes.

The theatre had been erected in a dangerous slum, one of the worst in London, and for a time, in an effort to entice visitors from the other side of the river, it was announced that special guards were posted on the bridge and its approaches, in order that the audience might feel safe both before and after the performance from the attack of thugs and pickpockets. This announcement did not much mend

matters.

From the first the theatre had a checkered career: it prospered occasionally, but it usually was in financial or other difficulties. In 1833, in an effort to revive its fortunes, it was given a new name, the "Royal Victoria," in honor of the young princess who was then heir presumptive to the crown. But no one was deceived thereby. Edmund Kean acted there for a brief moment; but Grimaldi, the famous clown, was

more to the taste of its patrons. However, nothing really succeeded. Its location was desperate, if not positively dangerous.

With the coming of gas, and finally of electricity, and the better policing of the streets, it became relatively safe; but why travel such a distance to see performances of varying degrees of badness? For a hundred years its record was ten failures to one success. Drinking in the theatre was allowed (and still is), and fights were frequent; the audiences were fierce, in the proper use of that term. Missiles, overripe fruit, mellow eggs, and occasionally an empty beer-bottle, were thrown at the villain on the stage, while the heroine and the still more virtuous hero would invariably be encouraged by loud cries of approval. "Never will I give my consent to bring a virtuous girl to a life of shame!" was a sentiment that, we may be sure, brought the audience of halfdrunken men and women to their feet in a burst of delirious applause.

But it was no go. No one seemed to want legitimate drama in the Waterloo Road at the corner of the New Cut; and the "Old Vic," as it had come to be called, became a music-hall-about as common a music-hall as there was in London. Then it was that I made its acquaintance - but we hardly became friends. It was, before the coming of the taxi, in an out-of-the-way part of the town, and the performances, if cheap, were bad, very bad.

But it is always darkest just before dawn. A