Drury Lane, Theatre Royal

Address: Catherine St , WC2B 5JF

Tube: Covent Garden

Architect: Thomas Killigrew in 1663,1674 Christopher Wren, 1794 Henry Holland, 1812 Benjamin Dean Wyatt

Opened: Originally 1663 the current building was opened in 1812

Capacity: 2196

Drury Lane is one of the oldest of London theatres as there has been a theatre on this site since 1663. The first theatre was built in the early years of the English Restoration, its most famous actress was Nell Gwyn, the mistress of Charles ll for seventeen years. Fire destroyed the first Drury Lane theatre in 1672.

The opening of the theatre followed the Civil War during which Oliver Cromwell had banned frivolous pastimes. These included Christmas. The eating of Christmas pudding was made an offence and although the law is ignored, it still stands on the statute books today! Other banned pastimes were the theatre. Soon after Charles ll came to the throne he issued Letters Patent for the formation of two acting companies. The Letters Patent granted the two companies a shared monopoly on the public performance of legitimate drama in London; this meant spoken drama and not operas. This monopoly was not challenged until the 18th century and remained legal until 1843. Killigrew owned the first patent and he built the first Drury Lane Theatre.

It was also known as the "King's Playhouse." It was a three-tiered wooden structure, 112 feet long and 59 feet wide; and it could accommodate an audience of 700.

The architect for the second and larger theatre was Sir Christopher Wren who designed St Paul’s Cathedral. It was renamed the "Theatre Royal in Drury Lane," and it opened in 1674. This building survived for nearly 120 years, under the inspired leadership of such celebrated names, of Colley Cibber, David Garrick, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan the author of the School for Scandal. In 1791, whilst the theatre was under Sheridan's management, it was demolished to make way for a larger theatre, which opened in 1794. This enormous new Drury Lane survived a mere 15 years, burning down in 1809; the fourth and current Drury Lane opened in 1812.

During its illustrious history it has been home to the Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, comedian Dan Leno, comedy troupe Monty Python who recorded a concert album there, and musical composer and performer Ivor Novello. Today, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful theatres group owns the theatre. The Diaries of Samuel Pepys record him attending a performance of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Humorous Lieutenant. However, the original theatre differed very much from modern theatres in its conception, and how the performances were structured. Daylight was essential and the majority of the audience were housed in the pit, which had no roof to let in available light and of course the elements. Most of the performances began at 15.00 to take advantage of the natural light.

The King's Company did have competition as there were two letters of patent granted by Charles ll the rival Duke's Company had installed new inventions "moveable" or "changeable" scenery. Their theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields was drawing larger audiences. The theatre royal at Drury Lane had to compete or go bankrupt, so reluctantly changes were ordered. The Theatre Royal featured moveable scenery with wings or shutters that could be smoothly changed between or even within acts. The theatre had a proscenium arch, which means that part of the stage is in front of the curtain. When the shutters were not in use, they nestled behind the arch. This created the impression of a window box with curtains and it was an innovation that was imported from a Spanish idea.

However, this new design was cumbersome because the theatre still had the thrust stage of Elizabethan theatres; also called Open Stage, or Platform Stage, it projected into the audience and was surrounded on three of its sides by the audience. The open stage was popular in the corrales of Spain's Golden Age of theatre in about 1570 and in the traditional “no” theatre of Japan. It was also used in the first London playhouses, including the Globe, which were built during Elizabethan times, in England it had evolved from stages set up in the courtyards of inns.

With the new stage the players, could still step forward and bridge the distance between performer and audience, but it was not unusual for audiences to jump onto the stage, as a sort of aside show. The innovations had made the two companies equal at least on a technical footing but the differences in types of performance created a real divide. The Theatre Royal’s repertoire was dominated by spoken drama, contrasting with William Davenant's baroque spectacles and operas at Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Internal power structures within the two rivals fuelled this difference. Davenant skilfully commanded a docile young troupe, but Killigrew's actors were veterans, Michael Mohun (who Pepys described as "the best actor in the world" and Charles Hart. Both of these men refused to perform baroque spectacles. This dichotomy had strange results even if they were not reflected in commercial success. As a business, it was a disastrous decision, but the strong and confident actors insisted on dialogue and literary quality over ornament and visual effects. Whilst they lost audiences, it created an extremely powerful rebirth of English drama.

It was mostly at the commercially nearly not viable Theatre Royal, rather than the efficiently run Lincoln's Inn Fields, that the plays we know as classics today were premiered and enacted. This was especially true of the new form of Restoration comedies, dominated in the 1660s by William Wycherley and the Theatre Royals dramatist John Dryden. Actors such as Hart and Nell Gwyn refined the now classic scenes of repartee, banter, and flirtation in Dryden and Wycherley's comedies. Another factor in the direction the drama took at this time was the appearance of actresses for the first time on the British stage, during Tudor times all female parts were played by men. Their presence encouraged playwrights to develop outspoken female characters, daring love scenes, and provocative roles.

The Great Plague struck London in the summer of 1665, and the Theatre Royal, along with all other public entertainment, was shut down by order of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London on 5 June. It remained closed for 18 months until the autumn of 1666, but its forced enclosure was not wasted during that time the stage had been widened. Perversely the theatre survived the Great Fire of London in September 1666, but it burned down six years later on 25 January 1672.

The King's Company never recovered financially from the loss of the original theatre in Bridges Street. However they were still locked in a commercial drama of their own with the Duke's Company forced them to reinvest, and construction work began immediately on an even larger and more luxurious theatre which would house an audience of 2,000. The Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, designed by Christopher Wren, opened on 26 March 1674. It began life with serious financial constraints the rebuilding had been financed by selling shares in the company, but the company was still desperately short of operating capital.

The seating was divided into four classes, and the tickets were priced accordingly. The Box seats were the most expensive and at a cost of five shillings, each, only the wealthiest patrons such as the gentry could afford them. The pit had a series of benches and these seats cost three shillings and occupied the first gallery with seats costing 2 shillings, while and "ordinary people," occupied the 1-shilling seats of the upper gallery. It became customary for servants to have to sit there all morning, as a ticket did not come with a seat reservation; the seats were allocated on a first come first served basis.

The stage was 45 feet wide and 30 feet deep with an elevated angled floor from the footlights to the backdrop. The stage rose one inch for every two feet of its depth therefore an actor at the back of the stage was 15 inches above an actor at the footlights. The proscenium arch covered the stage equipment above the stage, which included a pair of girondels or large wheels holding many candles used to counteract the light from the footlights.

Towards the latter part of the 18th century, doors were placed on either side of the stage, and a series of small spikes edged of the stage to prevent audiences from climbing onto the stage. At the very back of the stage, a large door was placed that opened to reveal Drury Lane!

The lack of capital continued to dog the King’s company they had no cushion against lean times and they had a hand to mouth existence. In 1682 Duke's company absorbed the King’s company. However, it was the end of the King’s company’s associated with Drury Lane as they chose Drury Lane to host their productions. For the next fifteen years the actors feuded and by 1695 the actors, including the acting legend Thomas Betterton who was acting manager, threw in the towel and walked out. Nine men and six women established professional performers departed to form their own cooperative, including tragedienne Elizabeth Barry and comedienne Anne Bracegirdle.

A private letter from 1696 reported that Drury Lane "has no company at all, and unless a new play comes out on Saturday revives their reputation, they must break." The new play, John Vanbrugh's The Relapse was a viable successs. Christopher Rich continued to be manager until 1709, when the patent in question was revoked. A lawyer named William Collier was briefly given the right to mount productions in Drury Lane, but by 1710 the troupe was in the hands of the actors Colley Cibber, Robert Wilks, and Thomas Doggett the triumvirate satirised in Alexander Pope's Dunciad.

By the time Garrick managed the theatre in 1747 it had ten connecting structures, made up of contained a warren of offices, practice rooms, a library storage space for scripts and another for copying of scripts and parts, as well as dressing rooms. Fifty technical staff worked in the theatre as well as the theatre company, which comprised 70 actors and managers. A licensing act ten years earlier meant any theatre had to seek government approval before new material could be performed. In practise, this created a vacuum of new material and Garrick staged a Shakespearian renaissance at Drury Lane. It was under Garrick's management that spectators were barred from the stage itself.

Garrick commissioned a renovation of the theatre's interior, 1775. For the first time in its 112 year history the Drury Lane Theatre had an exit to the street. The original theatre had been built in the centre of the block hemmed in by other structures and had connecting passageway to all parts. Garrick sold his shares in the theatre to the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1776 and Sheridan owned it until 1809. Sheridan premiered his own comedy of manners The School for Scandal in 1777.

The theatre was demolished in 1791 and a third theatre was designed by Henry Holland and opened on 12 March 1794. This was cavernous accommodating more than 3,600 spectators. This structure was possible because the development of iron columns meant that they could bear more weight than the previous wooden columns. The new theatre had five tiered galleries a huge stage 83 feet wide and 92 feet deep. Holland, the architect, said it was "on a larger scale than any other theatre in Europe." It certainly dwarfed all the building in London except the church spires.

Actress Sarah Siddons, then part of the Drury Lane company, said it was "a wilderness of a place" and she left Drury Lane with her brother John Philip Kemble in 1803. Technical advances had made the building possible but there was a problem with acoustics. Sound from the stage could not keep be heard at the top of the five tiers. To compensate, new productions tended to be visually spectacular rather than the spoken word. A 1794 production featured water flowing down a rocky stream into a lake and a boat being rowed across the lake. This water was housed in the attics in large tanks; they had been installed as a fire precaution with an iron safety curtain.

Despite the tanks of water, the third Drury Lane theatre building burned down on 24 February 1809 whilst the theatre was still under Sheridan’s ownership and management. The 1794 rebuilding had cost double the original estimate of £80,000, and Sheridan had had to make up the shortfall from his pocket. Productions were much more expensive to stage in the larger structure, and the increased audience revenues failed to make up the difference.

Already on the brink of financial disaster, the burning of the third theatre was the end for Sheridan. Samuel Whitbread of the brewery Whitbread’s an old friend, agreed to manage the company and oversee the rebuilding of the theatre, but one of his conditions was that Sheridan stepped down as manager.

The present Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, commissioned by Whitbread and designed by Benjamin Dean Wyatt opened on 10 October 1812 with a production of Hamlet with Robert Elliston in the title role. The new theatre design intended to recapture a feeling of intimacy that was present in the first two theatres but was lost in the cavernous third. Accordingly, it seated 3,060 people; however, by contemporary standards it was still huge. In 1820 the present portico at the theatre's front entrance on Catherine Street was added, and in 1822, five years after gas lighting was installed, the interior underwent a significant remodelling. The colonnade down the Russell Street side of the building was added in 1831.

Acoustic technology had still not caught up with the plans of this theatre and the management was still forced to rely on visual dramatics rather than dialogue, as the sound did not carry to all the seats. The 1823 production of “Cataract of the Ganges” had a finale featuring a spectacular horseback escape up a flowing cataract with fires raging around the stage. It was clear the management had not learned the dangers of fire! At the time, these productions were contentious because the Drury Lane Theatre still held one of the very few patents permitting it to stage legitimate drama with spoken dialogue.

Lord Byron was briefly on a management subcommittee, from June 1815 until leaving England in April 1816. Actor Edmund Kean was the onstage hero he made his reputation as Shakespeare’s Shylock in the Merchant of Venice. However the theatre still hung on by a thread and for the remainder of the Century the management of Drury Lane Theatre passed through many hands, none of whom made a complete success of the venture, and the worst of them went bankrupt. In 1878 F. B. Chatterton departed as the current manager and his resignation contained the words;

"Shakespeare spells ruin, and Byron bankruptcy."

The Theatres Act 1843 abolished the theatrical monopoly first bestowed by Royal Letters Patent one hundred and eighty three years earlier, but the patent had not really meant anything and the knock on effects were not immediate. Again in practise, other theatres in the West end continued their tradition of presenting musical entertainment whilst Drury Lane continued with spoken dramas.

In the 1880s and 90s, the theatre hosted many of the productions of the Carl Rosa Opera Company. Productions still relied on visual effect in 1909 The Whip, which featured a train crash complete with hissing steam, but also a horserace. Twelve real horses ran around the stage jockeying for position. However, the last major interior renovation took place in 1922, leaving a four-tiered theatre able to seat between 2,200 and 2,300 people. Composer and performer Ivor Novello, hugely popular in his time, presented his musicals in Drury Lane from 1931 until the theatre was closed in 1939 for the duration of World War II. During the war the theatre served as the headquarters for the Entertainments National Service Association; it sustained some minor bomb damage as well. The theatre reopened with Noel Coward's Pacific 1860 in 1946.

In the post-war years, a number of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals made their London debuts in Drury Lane, including Oklahoma in 1946, South Pacific 1951 and The King and I 1953 and My Fair Lady, began a five-year run in 1958. Today, the theatre usually stages musical productions.

Past productions on the Drury Lane Theatre:

42nd Street (1984–89)

Miss Saigon (1989–1999)

A revival of Mel Brooks' musical The Producers, closed in January 2007, and the theatre is currently hosting a musical adaptation of The Lord of the Rings.