Hughes had joined the company after running away from an apprenticeship to a Birmingham button-painter, and though unremarkable in his dual roles as scene painter and utility actor (his acting, it was said, was ‘not of the first rate’), he absorbed Kemble’s managerial lessons well, implementing them when he was offered his first managerial position at Plymouth’s Dock Theatre. As theatres went, it was not good, described as ‘one of the most inconvenient in England’, but he still managed to squeeze a profit from it by enticing trade from the nearby barracks and shipyards and economising wherever he could. Success led to the acquisition of a number of provincial playhouses, in Exeter, Weymouth, Truro, Penzance, Dartmouth and on the island of Guernsey. London, and Sadler’s Wells, was to be the jewel in his crown.
As an administrator, Hughes was the polar opposite of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Both were full of energy and innovation, but there the comparison stopped. Hughes was considered ‘industrious to an extreme’, skilfully balancing the affairs of his various companies while continuing to perform small parts and painting the scenery himself to keep down costs. Yet his commitment to upholding the hierarchy he’d worked so hard to ascend didn’t immediately win him friends in Islington. His insistence on status was reflected in his first important decision as proprietor, a move to consolidate the Wells’s gradual gentrification by separating the private boxes even further from the regular stalls in the hope of enticing aristocrats previously deterred by the abhorrently democratic seating. To this, he added an emphasis on decorum, insisting that the ladies be properly dressed at all times and on the ‘punctuality, propriety and attentiveness’ of his company, something the Bohemian London cast felt smacked of prudery and provincialism. He had an abrupt, disciplinarian manner that to some was refreshingly ‘prompt, explicit, and decisive’, though others thought he demanded ‘the most abject servility’ and maintained a mania for efficiency that kept him constantly on the lookout for signs of waste that would result in an angry scolding whenever they were found.
This ‘Master Manager’ and ‘perfect Man of Business’ devoted himself so tirelessly to his theatre that by the summer of 1792 he was introducing a new novelty every week. High turnover did not necessarily signal low quality in this age of industry and empire, that saw profusion as virtue and an endless stream of variety as evidence of its supremacy. Having such a well-stocked theatrical bazaar was the central pillar of Hughes’s campaign to improve the overall standing of the Wells by attracting members of the nobility. Not only would their presence confirm it as the most respectable of the minor theatres, but it would act as a further inducement to his core audience, ordinary Londoners who liked their pleasures vindicated by the presence of their betters. Moreover, it was working. ‘To those who have not visited Sadler’s Wells in the last five or six years,’ wrote The Times in 1793, ‘the concourse of Nobility and Fashion now to be found at that elegant little Theatre must prove a matter of astonishment,’ a fact that was confirmed by the number of sumptuous carriages that stood outside on midsummer nights, ‘a train of coronets … altogether as familiar to the eye in the Wells Yard as at St. James’s Square’.
While the name Grimaldi was still infrequently on the bills, Hughes thought Joe a ‘clever lad’ and was happy to put him back before the crowd on a more regular footing. With his dark curly hair and Mediterranean skin, Hughes decided he might best be deployed as a moustachioed villain, and saw to it that he received instruction from the Wells’s resident swordsmen, Messieurs Durenci and Bois-Maison, master men-of-arms who tutored him in a full armoury of fearsome weapons. Some nasty cuts and fairly decent roles followed – as an evil Sans Culottes in The Sans Culottes and the Grand Culottes, as Hatred in Pandora’s Box and Jacky Suds in Mars’s Holiday; or, a Trip to the Camp – all of which was enough to bring sufficient recognition in the company to merit a part-share in a benefit night, an evening that would earn him his very first grown-up review, an encouraging paragraph that somewhat deflated Hughes’s hopes of casting him in action roles: ‘The comic abilities of this youth are very great,’ it read. ‘We wish him his deserved success.’
When Drury Lane finally reopened in March 1794, it was the largest theatre in Europe, with a seating capacity of almost four thousand that brought to an end the mad rush and dangerous overcrowding that had often required the doors of the old auditorium to be screwed shut to prevent patrons spilling out into the halls. That London’s theatres were desperately in need of modernisation had been proved just one month before when fifteen people had been crushed to death at the foot of a stairwell at the Haymarket. The enlarged auditorium guaranteed a seat, but it also meant an end to the anticipation and intimacy that James Boswell had enjoyed on those nights when he struggled to find a place a full two and a half hours before the curtain rose. It also meant that the actors were dwarfed. ‘The nice discrimination of the actor’s face, and of the actor’s feeling, are now lost in the vast void of the new theatre,’ wrote Lord Torrington, while Mrs Siddons warned William Dowton, an actor débuting that season, ‘You are come to act in a wilderness of a place.’
Henry Holland’s building not only made an impact on acting styles, it also influenced the repertoire by demanding spectacles of an entirely different register. Kemble obliged with the first hit of the new house, an anglicised French romance called Lodoiska, that told the story of two imprisoned lovers (played by Michael Kelly and his real-life mistress, Maria Crouch), and their rescue from Lovinski Castle by an accommodating horde of Tartars.
The scenario was entirely secondary to the effects, especially those of the third act, an extravaganza of fire and combat intended to be literally explosive. The spectacle began with the Tartars storming the castle to the accompaniment of ‘shouts, drums, trumpets, and cannons’, after which real flames rose at the back of the stage, followed by a series of deafening booms as ‘the battlements and towers fall in the midst of loud explosions’. Behind the scenes, an army of carpenters fanned braziers with enormous bellows to produce flames eighteen feet high, while a heavy reflective backdrop engulfed the stage in an intense red glow. As extras scurried through the mêlée throwing handfuls of saltpetre into the flames, Mrs Crouch appeared, trapped in the highest tower. With the battle raging below and the orchestra shrieking away at full volume, Kelly dashed to her rescue, sprinting across a bridge high above the stage to save his lover just as a carpenter knocked out the supports and both bridge and tower collapsed in a blaze.
It was a triumph of choreography that called for perfect timing both on stage and off. Even the draughts in the corridors had to be carefully managed lest they cause Mrs Crouch to be consumed by flames, as they had threatened to do one night in the opening week. Kelly had noticed the danger and ran to her, but the carpenter knocked the bridge down too soon and he fell to the stage just as her tower began to collapse. Hitting the ground only seconds before she did, he somehow managed to recover himself and catch her in his arms, carrying her out of the smoke to the front of the stage, where they received a standing ovation. The audience, oblivious to the danger, was in raptures, and from that moment on, Kelly and Crouch were obliged to repeat the impromptu stunt nightly.
Bodies were needed to feed this grandiosity and the company was subsequently enlarged. Joe was now constantly on stage, albeit in crowds and country dances, or as a page or red-cheeked stable-boy in polite comedies like The Belle’s Stratagem. By 1796, at the age of seventeen, he at last graduated from the juvenile ranks and became an adult member of both companies, but he was still earning less than he had been when the Signor died. It was time to reinvent himself.
* Though some found Pasquin raffish and witty, most people thought him highly undesirable, a fact that was spectacularly proven when he tried to sue his rival, William Gifford, for libel. The judge not only threw out Pasquin’s case, he publicly congratulated Gifford for defaming him, saying, ‘I do most earnestly wish and hope that some method will ere long be fallen upon to prevent all such unprincipled and mercenary wretches
from going about unbridled in society to the great annoyance and disquietude of the public.’ He was also very smelly. Having once asked his best friend, Lord Barrymore, what he should wear to a masquerade, he was told, ‘Go in a clean shirt, Anthony, and no one will know you.’
* It might be that Williamson had forgone clowning in favour of a double-act he had been working up with Joe’s half-sister Mary, which they eventually developed into a family concern with the arrival of a baby. The infant’s first appearance was the mirror of Joe’s, in a musical extravaganza at Astley’s Amphitheatre entitled The Caledonian Lover’s Village Festival.
4
THE FLYING WORLD
While the hour of pleasure flies,
Unimprov’d ne’er let it pass,
In our Masque a Moral lies,
Truth exposes here her glass;
Like the Bee of its honey the blossoms beguile,
And our efforts reward in return for a smile,
Those efforts still destin’d your Joys to maintain,
By your sanction thus cherish’d, new vigor shall gain.
Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin Junior,
Peter Wilkins; or, Harlequin in the Flying World (1800)
JOE GRIMALDI GREW IN CONFIDENCE with every new performance, thanks largely to the encouragement he was receiving at Sadler’s Wells and the consistent improvement of his roles. For this he could thank a man called Thomas Pitt. Like Joe, Pitt was a young man in the midst of forging himself. He had come to London in 1794 after reading in a Scottish newspaper that Sadler’s Wells had staged one of his burlettas, The Rival Loyalists, without asking his permission. Having met the proprietor, Richard Hughes, he was taken into the company, and as it was Hughes’s policy to delegate artistic matters, Pitt was given the job of stage manager, a catch-all position that required him to be author, director, producer, set designer and whatever else the situation called for.
Though Pitt had been born into a theatrical family, his actress mother Harriet had wanted to spare him the iniquities of theatrical life, farming him out as apprentice to his uncle, a furniture-maker, with the long-term hope that he would one day come to be the Lord Mayor of London. Her aversion to the theatre was the result of her appalling treatment at the hands of Pitt’s father, Charles Dibdin, the hapless manager of the Royal Circus, and devoted enemy of the Signor. Dibdin senior was a self-important poetaster with a persecution complex whose career had been steadily deteriorating ever since his writing partner, Isaac Bickerstaffe, had been forced to flee to France to escape prosecution for sodomy. Charles had fathered two illegitimate sons with Harriet Pitt before renouncing the entire family so thoroughly that Thomas later claimed ‘he had seen his father so seldom, that, having weak eyes, he should not know him if he met him in the street’. But given his parentage, not to mention that his godfather was David Garrick and his onstage début had been playing Cupid to Sarah Siddons’s Venus, it is unsurprising that Pitt saw his future in the theatre. As soon as he was ensconced at the Wells, he signalled his intention of remaining a theatrical man by asking everybody to call him Thomas Dibdin, a move that greatly angered his father.
Thomas had inherited his father’s ability to write prolifically and at great speed, and quickly earned a reputation for being able to begin a play on Monday morning and have it finished by the following Saturday. This pleased Hughes immensely, and soon the joke around town was ‘Write to Tom Dibdin, and you’ll get it by return of post.’ Though his ambition was to write legitimate drama at one of the patent houses, his keen eye for absurdity overrode everything. One story has it that, aboard ship, Pitt had once seen a sailor catch fire. His shipmates quickly threw a rope around him and chucked him overboard, but as they heaved him back up, the rope slipped from his waist to his neck and strangled him. Instead of being horrified by the man’s ordeal, Thomas found it funny, remarking drily that ‘The poor fellow had actually undergone the triplicate horrors of burning, drowning and hanging.’ It was exactly this sort of comic atrocity he brought to Islington, and within months of his arrival, Sadler’s Wells had the reputation for staging the very best pantomimes in town.
One of these was The Talisman of Orosmanes; or, Harlequin Made Happy, taken from the Tales of the Genii and promising ‘the Orgies of the Persian Enchanters’. It opened on Easter Monday 1796, and although Dubois was in the initial cast, the recent death of his wife (for which Kemble cancelled the Drury Lane pantomime as a mark of respect) prompted him to leave London for America and a series of engagements at the John Street Theatre in New York, then the city’s only playhouse. Free of his oppressor’s yoke, Joe gave himself licence to dig into his role as Morad, a globe-trotting witch who lived in a magic box, singing, ‘Every ill my thoughts employ/And man’s disaster be my joy.’ The performance was roundly praised by both Dibdin and Hughes, but it was the praise of another member of the Sadler’s Wells community that had the deepest effect on Joe.
Like Samuel Johnson before him, Joe was finding himself increasingly disconcerted by the preponderance of pale bosoms and silk stockings that surrounded him at the theatre. Most of his friends felt the same. Jack Bologna had been romancing a girl called Harriet Barnewell, while Bob Fairbrother had been seeing the daughter of the Grimaldis’ old landlady, Mrs Bailey, and had picked up some bankable skills as a furrier into the bargain. Joe was much shyer than Bologna, whose tall, athletic figure and captivating accent gave him seemingly boundless confidence, and far less pragmatic than the industrious ‘friend Bob’. Instead, he nursed an impractical flame for Dora Jordan, Drury Lane’s principal comic actress. She was seventeen years his senior and at the height of her fame, though still very much a credible object of affection with her bouncing figure, ‘delicious voice’ and splendid legs, which had won her legions of admirers – mostly men who liked to see her cross-dressed and in breeches. Dora Jordan was also the mother of three children, and for the past four years had been living a contented life of semi-rural domesticity with the Duke of Clarence, the future William IV.
In Joe’s eyes, these facts only made her more appealing for, as he had shown through his attachments to the Bolognas and the Redigés, he was drawn to people who seemed capable of leading stable family lives. The real attraction of Mrs Jordan, though, was her easy, natural humour and a laugh that the critic Leigh Hunt found ‘social and genuine’, like ‘sparkles of bubbling water’. ‘When the whole stream comes out,’ he wrote, ‘nothing can be fuller of heart and soul.’ To the boy for whom laughter was the transcendental palliative, Dora Jordan was a goddess, and when the opportunity arose, he was quick to confirm his devotion with an offering.
One morning following rehearsal at Drury Lane, Dora Jordan had noticed Joe carrying a case of his favourite butterflies, Dartford Blues. He stood mute and blushing as she leant over him to admire the great care with which each specimen had been displayed. It was all the encouragement he needed, and following the evening performance at Sadler’s Wells, he ran home to fetch his net and set out on foot for Dartford shortly after midnight, reaching his hunting grounds at five in the morning. There he stayed until one in the afternoon before walking the fifteen miles back to London to perform, only to turn around again as soon as the curtain dropped to return to Dartford and chase more butterflies. So it continued for three consecutive days, at the end of which, having covered almost ninety miles on foot and virtually renounced sleep, he had finally caught enough butterflies to present a surprised but pleased Mrs Jordan with two frames of lovingly set Blues.
Joe’s affection wasn’t to last, however, as Dora Jordan was soon to be usurped by a new and younger idol recently arrived from Plymouth, Maria, one of Richard Hughes’s nine children. The Hughes family lived in the big house at the corner of the Wells’s coachyard, and Maria was constantly in and out of the theatre, running errands during the day and taking her place in the proprietor’s box at night, sitting demurely beside her mother, Lucy, and older siblings, Julia and Richard junior. Maria had made friends with Joe’s mother, Rebecca,
who had flourished since the Signor’s death, emerging as a lively and contented woman and something of a mother-hen to the entire company.
As Rebecca was still dancing at the Wells, she made it her habit to spend the afternoons sewing and chatting in the ladies’ dressing room between morning rehearsals and the evening performance. Occasionally Joe would join her there, although as Maria started to become a regular, he found a reason to attend almost every day. Glancing timidly over his teacup and trying not to catch her eye, he found her pretty and vivacious, more than able to hold her own in this fast-talking group, and blushed alarmingly when she happened to praise his performance as Morad.
Deep infatuation followed, but with it came a debilitating sense of defeat. Maria had the advantage over Dora Jordan of being both unattached and more or less his own age, but as the manager’s daughter she was no more attainable than the consort of the king-to-be. Worst of all, Joe had no idea what, if anything, Maria thought of him, and the dual miseries of self-doubt and unrequited love conspired to ruin his success in the pantomime. The feelings worked themselves deeper, to a point where he was dumbstruck and mortified in her presence, and once even fled the room in tears. Displaying all the classic symptoms of teenage love, he ‘ate little, drank little, slept less’ and moped around the workshops in despair.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 9