The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  There was little time for pantomime. Like Garrick before him, Kemble conceded its place in the repertoire while considering it insufferably low, permissible only so long as it conformed to his written decree that it should always be ‘very short, very LAUGHABLE, and VERY CHEAP’. In 1789, the high point of Joe’s season was playing Young Marcius opposite Kemble’s Coriolanus: ‘I’ll run away till I am bigger,’ he said prophetically, ‘but then I’ll fight.’ Things were little better at Sadler’s Wells, where he emerged from the workshops only to be lost again in processions and prison scenes inspired by the vogue for all things Bastille. The bloody insurrection across the English Channel meant only one thing to managers, ‘the Bastille must bring money’, and the minor theatres fell over themselves to be the first to offer it.

  Although he was before an audience only rarely, Joe was nonetheless subject to a gruelling schedule that was especially tough when the seasons overlapped. A typical day began with the walk from the rooms he shared with his mother and the Baileys in Great Wild Street a mile and a half out to Islington to attend rehearsals from ten in the morning until two in the afternoon. As eighteenth-century crowd scenes were notoriously chaotic and unrehearsed, most of his time was spent in the carpenter’s shop before walking back to Great Wild Street for a meal and a short rest, then returning to Sadler’s Wells in time for the curtain at six. The remainder of the evening was spent charging in and out of the theatre’s steamy fug in a variety of mêlées and processions that required him to change costume up to twenty times a night, while moving scenery in between.

  When the curtain finally fell at eleven, Joe left immediately for Drury Lane to appear in the afterpiece. If the show at Sadler’s Wells ever ran over, as it frequently did, especially on those nights when new pieces were introduced to the bill, he had no choice but to run. Even after a long day and night of work he somehow found the energy to cover the ground – across the fields to St John’s Street, through Clerkenwell, scattering the sheep at Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, before turning at last down Drury Lane – in less than eight minutes.

  Walking home on the night of 17 June, he would have seen the sky above Haymarket glow orange as flames engulfed the King’s Theatre. It was initially thought to be an accident – unsteady footlights and untrimmed candles were constant hazards – but two years later, the deathbed confession of Pietro Carnevale, the acting deputy manager, revealed arson: he had preferred to raze the opera house than allow a rival to succeed him.

  For a child born into pantomimical aristocracy, Joe’s rise in the profession had almost completely stalled, his role as heir to his father’s celebrity seemingly forgotten. But the Signor’s death had not just robbed him of a teacher and patron, it also threatened London with a clown vacuum. Delpini had fallen out of favour. Sacked from Covent Garden, rejected by Drury Lane, and asked not to come back to the Haymarket after causing an affront, ‘he thought that when Grimaldi died he would inherit that clown’s fame,’ sneered The Times, ‘but forgot that it was first requisite to possess his abilities’. Drury Lane had been making do with the services of the auxiliary actor, Tom Hollingsworth. Hollingsworth, described as ‘remarkable short in person, but rather lusty’, played upwards of thirty different parts a season, in a long career he’d had the misfortune to see summed up in print with the words, ‘of acting I have seen enough … but none as bad as thine, I vow to God!’ Davison, one of the Signor’s apprentices who performed at the Royal Circus and Royalty Theatre, struggled through unfavourable comparisons with his master, ‘that excellent performer … which admitted no competition’, while, judging by the absence of reviews, the Signor’s son-in-law, Lascelles Williamson, had also failed to impress.*

  Covent Garden, meanwhile, oscillated between two unsuitable candidates: William Stevens, obscure save for a brief glimmer of popularity after ousting Delpini; and John Follet the younger, who had inherited the role from his father, a much better clown, and notable both for being the man who set George III laughing ‘almost to suffocation’ by swallowing whole carrots, and the one who had shot Delpini in the eye.

  The situation would have been dire, were it not for the meteoric rise of a six-foot Frenchman named Jean-Baptiste Dubois, the ‘Goliath of clowns’, which coincided precisely with the passing of the Signor. The sole existing portrait of the Frenchman shows him to be primped and powdered, a porcelain-featured libertine in the style of Moreau’s aristocratic lovers, although the image could not be more deceptive. Dubois was one of the most courageous, athletic and physically gifted performers of the eighteenth century, first arriving in Britain sometime in the 1770s as a trick-riding clown both at Astley’s Amphitheatre and Jones’s Equestrian Amphitheatre, Whitechapel. Even in his earliest performances, he demonstrated the enormous versatility that would make him a star, vaulting over seven horses and their riders (‘which is one more than any person ever vaulted over in England’), acting in mimes, dancing a hornpipe, and descending from horseback to imitate birdsong ‘in a manner far superior to anything of the kind ever performed in this kingdom’. This particular skill was known as ‘julking’ and was often performed to full orchestral accompaniment.

  When Jones’s closed down in 1787, Dubois moved seamlessly into non-equestrian theatre at the Wells, proving both his dexterity and his versatility as a rope-dancer, tumbler, trampoline artist, strong man and singer, listed in Doane’s Musical Directory as a tenor who could also play a variety of musical instruments and was skilled enough at archery to play William Tell, shooting apples from children’s heads. He clowned in pantomimes, performed ‘macaronis’ – medley entertainments of jokes and songs – and was a master of chironomia, the art of mime and gesture. Inevitably, he came to the attention of Drury Lane, who not only hired him as Clown to replace the much-missed Signor but, having uncovered his considerable talent for acting, used him as Scaramouch in Carlo Delpini’s popular afterpiece, Don Juan; or, the Libertine Destroyed, and fitted him with straight roles in Richard Coeur de Lion, The Siege of Belgrade and even Sheridan’s The Critic.

  Dubois’s appeal stemmed from the disconcerting energy he exuded whenever he walked on stage. According to James Peller Malcolm, an antiquary who bought a season ticket to the Wells every year and attended every performance sitting in the same seat, he had a natural affinity with the sinister that made him particularly suited to traitors, murderers, savages and any ‘dark, malicious and ambitious part’. ‘The transitions in his countenance,’ wrote Malcolm, ‘from smiles to threats, from approbation to abhorrence, are masterly performances. I have seen him, when (pursued by a person whom he had injured, and whose parent he had murdered) disguised as a ghost, betray such dreadful emotions of terror, horror, guilt, confusion and revenge, that I could almost suppose the fiction a reality.’

  Dubois imbued everything he did with this same unnerving strangeness, an atavistic monstrosity he covered with only the thinnest veneer of civility. For this reason his signature role was the Wild Man in Valentine and Orson, a mimed romance based on a medieval Flemish legend of twin brothers separated at birth. As the feral brother raised by a bear, Dubois mixed ‘the tricks and sagacity of the monkey with the gleams of matured reason’ to deliver a performance so forceful that Malcolm declared it ‘a thorough insight into human nature, debased’. He brought the same intensity to his depictions of exotic enemies, Arab and African bogeymen that pandered to imperial fantasies of Oriental barbarity. Malcolm records his performance in ‘a recent character of a Moor’ where ‘his motions are no longer European, they are those of the savage: grimaces, glaring search for the most vulnerable part of his antagonist’s body, and endeavours to fix a firm footing, to dart like a tiger of his prey, characterise every muscle’. Versatility, however, remained the key to the success of this ‘true son of Proteus’ as, after he had terrorised his audience with baleful histrionics, a quick change saw him back on for a ‘most wonderful and unexpected performance on the Cymbals’.

  Success did not change Dubois, who re
mained shrewd and entrepreneurial, and in many ways the archetypal forain. There was more than a hint of the gangster in the way he presided over his court at the Sir Hugh Myddleton, the pub across the way from Sadler’s Wells that acted as a clubhouse and labour exchange for performers and scenemen, cashed promissory notes and loaned advances. He and his associates had their fingers in more than a few pies: even when he was taken on by Drury Lane, he managed to persuade them to pay him an additional six guineas a week to oversee the theatre’s stables, where he bought and sold horses for himself as well as the stage, and also appeared to have traded in wood.

  But Dubois didn’t merely play the man of action, he actively engaged in real-life heroics, once saving the entire Astley’s company from drowning after a storm blew up on the voyage back from Dublin. Astley had hired the cheapest ship available, a packet incongruously named Venus that had a clutch of emaciated paupers and two wanted Irish rebels in its hold, holes in the sails, compasses that gave different readings, and only two lifeboats, one bottomless, the other with a broken side. The voyage was supposed to take seven hours but took forty-eight, and when the weather turned nasty and the ship began to flounder, the scared and beleaguered captain was forced to admit that he’d never sailed across the Irish Sea and had no idea what he was doing. Relieved by Dubois and a retired navy man named Fitzgerald, they managed to keep Venus afloat, and steer her safely back to Holyhead.

  Joe did not like Dubois. Not only had his unexpected demotion left him in the Frenchman’s shadow, he was also in his line of fire: it was Joe’s head he used to practise shooting apples for his role in William Tell. Like the Signor, Dubois kept a number of pupils and, as an anonymous manuscript reveals, after his father’s death, Joe learnt ‘all his pantomimical amusements under Dubois’. This, however, was a claim that Joe would vehemently deny his entire life. He resented the arrogant ruffian and the feeling was mutual. Dubois saw Joe as a relic, an annoying little boy who needed to submit to this brave new age regardless of a surname that conferred status in the pantomime world. Besides, he already had a favourite apprentice in Frank Hartland, the son of an Islington hairdresser, and would shortly introduce his own son, Charles, into the profession. Such animosity made for a bad-tempered first performance together, as Joe and ‘dearly beloved’ William watched Dubois climb into their father’s shoes at Drury Lane, since he had accepted the invitation to play the part of Clown in Harlequin’s Frolics; or, the Power of Witchcraft on 7 February 1789.

  A hint of competition can perhaps be detected in the reviews, which, while praising individual performances, declared the piece ‘stale and flat’: ‘The pantomimic trash brought forward under the title of HARLEQUIN’S FROLICS,’ said one, ‘not even the matchless grimace and activity of dubois, the new Clown from Sadler’s Wells, could save from indignation [although] the tricks of the MONKEY, though stolen from HARLEQUIN’S CHAPLET were admirably played off by that little Marmozet Grimaldi.’

  For all the ill feeling that existed between Joe and Dubois, the end of the 1791 season saw them working in closer proximity than ever before. Sheridan had taken a long-overdue decision to rebuild Drury Lane. Its company had outgrown the faded auditorium and subterranean world of peeling dressing rooms and reeking cellars more than a decade before, but renovation had proved a constant headache due to the theatre’s location in an oblong stableyard in the middle of a dense block of properties that were owned by multiple lessees. Expansion had been chaotic and irregular, resulting in a hotchpotch of accommodations that were connected to the main building by boxy extensions, sloping staircases and mazy passageways, and subject to a patchwork of tenancy agreements that caused ludicrous problems of jurisdiction – more than once the company were evicted from their scene room for failure to pay the rent. Calls for a third patent theatre to meet audience demand had been steadily growing, and the double threat of competition and lost revenues forced Sheridan’s hand. Borrowing heavily, he persuaded the Duke of Bedford to buy up all the necessary plots and sell him the leases, then engaged the Prince of Wales’s pet architect, Henry Holland, to remodel the entire building.

  Drury Lane shut down for three years, and the displacement of its company, first to the soulless and grandiose King’s Theatre and then to the Haymarket, served to draw Joe much closer into the community at Sadler’s Wells, suddenly the oldest continuously running theatre in London. The Wells retained its comforting smell of lamp oil, and though Joe’s lot had hardly improved, a number of factors lent it an appeal that couldn’t be replicated under Kemble. The first was the quality of its clowning. Regardless of personal animosity, Dubois was a superlative clown, and Joe couldn’t help but absorb his lessons night after night.

  There was another significant addition in the engagement of Pietro Bologna, an old-school forain described as ‘a handsome Italian, who swung on the slack wire with amazing grace and ease, and was the most whimsical and laugh-compelling clown we ever saw’. He arrived at the Wells with his wife and three children, Jack, Louis and Barbara, all of whom performed. Like the Grimaldis, the ‘Blognas’, as they were known in London, had ties to Genoa but were more properly citizens of the clown diaspora, nomads who had perfected their acts at the Paris fairs before finding their way across the Channel. Unlike the Grimaldis, they were known as a happy, friendly, loving family, ‘well behaved honest people’, in the words of the respected manager of the York circuit, Tate Wilkinson.

  Joe, who craved stable family life, was immediately drawn to them, becoming especially close to Jack, then studying his father’s speciality of balancing on a slack-rope while playing a flute through each nostril and accompanying himself on a drum. Jack was three years older than Joe and immediately enrolled him as his sidekick, treating him with rambunctious brotherly affection. They had much in common, for not only was Jack an excellent acrobat with a gift for ‘trick and expression’, he was fascinated by models and mechanics. In the late eighteenth century, with the line between scientific demonstration and popular entertainment indistinct, Jack and Joe found much to engage their imaginations in London’s many attractions. The most famous of these was the brainchild of Drury Lane’s former scenic artist Philippe de Loutherbourg, a series of animated dioramas grandly titled the ‘Eidophusikon’. Visitors to a small, but splendidly appointed private theatre in de Loutherbourg’s house in Lisle Street, off Leicester Square, were treated to a sequence of marvellous moving scenes, rendered in intricate detail and three dimensions that included the sun setting over Dover, the cataract at Niagara Falls, and ‘Satan arraying his Troops’ on the shores of a lake of fire.

  As it is highly unlikely that two grubby theatre waifs would have been allowed into de Loutherbourg’s exclusive salon, they would naturally have gravitated to the west end of the Strand, the noisy, traffic-jammed junction between Westminster and the City that was one of London’s busiest shopping areas. Here, spread throughout the pokey arterial back-streets, an abundance of shows and curiosities was to be found, shows like Haddock’s Androides, ingenious automata that could draw pictures and answer questions, or Madame Tussaud’s ‘Cabinet of Wax’, exhibiting the likenesses of the leading figures of the French Revolution. This was also the site of Cox’s Museum, the rare and ornately decorated home of richly bejewelled clockwork figurines that moved and played music to visitors who almost universally declared the experience to be acutely unnerving.

  Nearby, at Exeter Change, Jack and Joe could have enjoyed all manner of ‘rational’ entertainments – hydraulic demonstrations of the power of water, lectures on ballooning, and a ‘philosophical fireworks display’ – or entered Pidcock’s Royal Menagerie, a scanty collection of beasts, where for an extra penny you could watch the keeper put his head in the lion’s mouth. Less expensive entertainments included marvelling at the working guillotine outside Fore’s print shop or, in the summer, lying on the grass at Bermondsey Spa and watching the fireworks explode above a view of the Tower, and walking to the fairs that sprang up each year in the suburbs of Peckham, G
reenwich and Tothill. Bartholomew Fair, the British equivalent of the Parisian fairs that had given succour to the original Grimaldis, was the biggest and brashest of them all, and an event to which Joe looked forward every year of his life. Taking in the freak shows and down-at-heel tumblers, the boys would chatter incessantly, dreaming up their own implausible devices, and imagining triumphant routines full of exciting machines and mechanical wonders.

  All Joe needed now were opportunities to develop his skills on stage, and his chances greatly improved with the arrival of a new proprietor in Richard Hughes. In partnership with his close friend William Siddons, the disloyal and painfully envious husband of the famous Sarah, Hughes had bought a half-share in Sadler’s Wells after a long and lucrative period of management in the provinces. Both men had been strolling players under John Philip Kemble’s father, Roger, eking out a living around Worcester and the Welsh borders in a company that was run, according to the playwright Thomas Holcroft, like ‘a small kingdom, of which the manager is the monarch’. Though maintaining the operation on a shoestring, Kemble senior refused to relent on artistic standards, which he imbued in his children, demanding professional excellence from his troupe in addition to thrift and obedience. Kemble’s authoritarianism was an anathema to many of the free spirits and lost souls who made up a travelling theatre, among them Siddons, who was banished for romancing Kemble’s fourteen-year-old daughter, although for Hughes, the patriarch’s Spartan commitment was an inspiration.