Researching the history of entertainment buildings
Buildings created purely to house amusements are a luxury. Only wealthy civilizations can invest heavily in them. We may guess that at first people simply took advantage of natural topography - any flat area with banks around it for spectators to sit on would make a good outdoor arena for racing, sports and displays. Add seats and external walls and you have the amphitheatres of Ancient Greece and Rome. Make it smaller and roof it over and you have an indoor theatre, such as the Odeon of Agrippa, built in Athens in the first century BC.
In the Middle
Ages entertainment was offered in the halls of great men, or in the
open. In the 16th century travelling players performed in great houses, guildhalls, college halls, inns of
court and innyards. The
Vagabonds Act
(1572) obliged such companies in England and Wales to seek royal or
aristocratic patronage, which drew them to London. Since the City of
London banned theatres in 1574, they sprang up outside the City
boundaries. The Theatre, the Curtain, the Rose, the
Swan, and the Globe followed the pattern of the improvised innyard
theatre. Each
had a circular or hexagonal structure containing two or three galleries
with an unroofed space in the middle. That made good use of
natural light, but left players and audience at the mercy
of the weather.
So the indoor theatre had its advantages. The first of these was Blackfriars - the converted refectory of a former friary. It was owned by the Burbage family, who had built The Theatre and then dismantled it to build the Globe. In the Jacobean period, Shakespeare and Burbage staged plays at the Globe in summer and Blackfriars in winter. Until recently it was thought that there were no English playhouses outside London in Shakespeare's day, but the mass of research for Records of Early English Drama has uncovered evidence of short-lived Jacobean theatres in Bristol, Preston and York (see sources below).
The
London playhouses
were closed in 1642 by Puritans. Dublin's first theatre, opened in
1637, did not survive Cromwellian government either. When the
Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 revived drama in London and Dublin,
the new theatres followed European trends begun in Italy. Restoration
theatres were fully roofed and had tiers of boxes for the upper
classes. Theatres had to be licensed, which has left a useful paper
trail for researchers (see sources below.) In 1664 Christopher Wren
designed the remarkable Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford in the shape of a
D, after Roman models (right).
More purpose-built
theatres sprang up in provincial towns in the 18th century. The Bath
theatres were among the first. During the spa bathing season
Bath was pulsating with nobility and gentry looking for entertainment.
The 18th century also saw the rise of other places of amusement for the
leisured classes. By the 1770s all but the smallest English towns had
assemby rooms for balls and concerts. Pleasure
gardens charged an entry
fee and offered music and food in a pleasant setting. The most famous
were Vauxhall
and Ranelagh
in London, but most of the bigger provincial towns had at least one.
The coming of the railways made seaside holidays popular. With the rise of seaside resort came the building of piers, as well as theatres and ballrooms for the middle and working classes who were discovering the pleasures of a holiday.
Music-halls also catered to the working classes. They developed out of the singing rooms built onto pubs in the 1830s and 1840s. By the 1860s they were dotted around London and northern English towns. Chains of music-halls grew up. Moss Empires was formed in 1899 by a merger of three such chains and owned or built Empire variety theatres all over Scotland, Wales and London and northern England.
The motion picture had a yet wider appeal. Films could be shown in existing theatres, town halls or other venues, but as they became a truly mass entertainment, buildings were designed especially for them - movie theatres or cinemas. From 1913 lavish 'picture palaces' sprang up across the US. Other countries were swift to follow suit. One of the best known chains in Britain is the Odeon, founded by Oscar Deutsch in 1930 and owned by J Arthur Rank 1942-2000.
Studies and gazetteers
- Bainbridge, C., Pavilions on the Sea: a history of the seaside pleasure pier (1986). Includes gazetteer of surviving British piers.
- Beauvert, T., Opera Houses of the World (1996).
- Eyles, A., ABC: The First Name in Entertainment (1993).
- Eyles, A., Gaumont British Cinemas (1996).
- Eyles, A., Odeon Cinemas 1: Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation (2002).
- Girouard, M., The English Town (1990).
- Gray, R., Cinemas in Britain (1996). Includes lists of statutorily listed cinemas and other important surviving cinemas in Britain.
- Howard, D., London Theatres and Music Halls 1850-1950 (1970). A sourced directory.
- Leacroft, R. The Development of The English Playhouse (1973).
- Keenan, S., Travelling Players in Shakespeare's England (2002).
- Mellor, G.J., The Northern Music Hall (1970).
- Morash, C., A History of the Irish Theatre 1601-2000 (2002).
- Pevsner, N., A History of Building Types (1976) gives the wider European context.
- Shelley, H., Inns and Taverns of Old London (1909), Part IV: Pleasure Gardens of Old London.
Primary sources
- Records of Early English Drama (covering England and Wales before 1642), 25 vols. (1979-2005).
- Guidebooks: exist from the 18th century for London and major resorts and describe theatres, assembly rooms, pleasure gardens (often with engravings).
- James Winston, The Theatric Tourist (1805). Has aquatints of 23 provincial theatres and one in London: there are copies in The Theatre Museum.
- Britton, J. and A. Pugin, Illustrations of the Public Buildings of London, 2 vols. (1825-28) includes the London theatres. 2nd edn. with additional material by W.H. Leeds (1838) available for download via Google Books.
- Rogers, H.A., Views of the Pleasure Gardens of London (1896): a collection of images and contemporary sources.
- Images: search collections in local libraries, art galleries. These were popular subjects for artists. Postcards are a good source for seaside piers (The National Piers Society provides a selection online) and pleasure gardens. Some of the sources below may be illustrated.
- Licenses: playhouses were licensed by local JPs or by the Crown. See National Archives LC7: Lord Chamberlain's Department: Theatres 1660-1901, including ground plans and elevations c. 1870-1900.
- Diaries and memoirs: diaries were often kept by the leisured classes and are a good source for theatres, assembly rooms, concert halls. Theatrical memoirs by actors and managers from the late 18th century onwards provide a profusion of hilarious anecdotes.
- Playbills, advertisements in local newspapers: give a detailed picture of the building's use. They may have been collected by an aficionado in a scrap book, perhaps deposited in a local library. The British Library holds a large collection of Victorian playbills, in the Evanion Collection of Ephemera: and has put online a large selection.
Collections
- Bristol University: includes the archives of the London Old Vic.
- Cinema Theatre Association holds an archive including architect George Coles' collection of plans and photograph albums.
- Linen Hall Library: theatrical material from Northern Ireland.
- Plymouth Library holds a large collection of playbills, photographs and programmes relating to Plymouth theatres from the 18th century onwards, digitised on Flickr as Plymouth Theatre History.
- University of Kent at Canterbury: Victorian and Edwardian periods.
- University of Glasgow: The Scottish Theatre Archive.
- The Theatre Museum, a branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 1500 digitised images from its collection are online at PeoplePlay UK.
Society
The Society for Theatre Research: publishes Theatre Notebook: A Journal of the History and Technique of the British Theatre. Content list online.