1 - Savoy opera and its discontents: the theatrical background to a quarrel

Summary

The West End theatre as we know it is a Victorian in heritance. Many theatre buildings still stand from this period, but more importantly the methods of production and patterns of audience behaviour which we take for granted were established then. Those who work in the contemporary theatre often take exception to this state of affairs. They look on theatre-land as hideously bourgeois and seek, albeit in vain, to reclaim it for the working class. The Victorians experienced the same problem in reverse. For them the challenge was to overcome the disrepute of working-class association and establish the theatre as a domain of the respectable bourgeoisie. The Savoy operas have their full share of this ambition; but they are end products rather than prime movers. Their roots lie deep in the eighteenth century, or earlier, and we regard them as ‘entirely original’ only because we have ceased to be aware of those roots. Above all it should be understood that their ancestry does not lie in ‘opera’ as the term is generally used, but in the popular London alternatives to it.

Theatre regulation

Following the Puritan interregnum, which banned all forms of public entertainment, King Charles II in 1662 granted letters patent to Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant for the performance of ‘tragedies, comedies, plays, operas, music, scenes and all other entertainments of the stage’. One patent became established at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, while the other eventually devolved upon the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. In 1766 George III granted a summer patent to Samuel Foote at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, which duly became the third Theatre Royal. Theatres operating outside the patents were technically illegal, and ran under constant threat of interference by the authorities.