My Lifetime

Abstract

My relations with Mr W. S. Gilbert had always been of the most friendly character, and he gave me a play to read — his first comedy — which I produced immediately. Its literary merits were very great, and it could be read with pleasure. It was in three acts, and was called An Old Score. I engaged Mr Sam Emery and Mr Henry Neville for the cast, and used Mr John Clayton, and also engaged a very charming little actress named Rosina Ranoe, who is now loved and admired by a large circle of friends and a numerous family, under the respected name of Mrs Frank Burnand. The Old Score was said to be founded on a passage in the life of Mr Dargan, the great Irish contractor,² and Sadleir, the banker who committed suicide on Hampstead Heath,³ but as a play it was original, and Mr Gilbert’s first serious effort as a playwright. It was like many of the comedies by Douglas Jerrold — a success with a first night and critical audience, but not an enduring success with the public. It was too like real life, and too unconventional. The leading characters were a rascally father, and a son who did not hesitate to tell him of his rascality. The dialogue was not playhouse pap. It was a little too brutally straightforward. Perhaps that is why I liked the play — in manuscript, but manuscript is not the stage; the closet is not the theatre; and one man, even of average intelligence, possessed or not possessed of the managerial instinct, is not an audience any more than a dress rehearsal before a jury of experts is a public performance.

John Hollingshead (1827–1904) began as a journalist who wrote frequently for Dickens’s Household Words and as a reviewer of plays for the Daily News. He moved from management of the Alhambra (where he introduced the can-can) to that of the Gaiety (1868), and it is with that theatre that he is most often associated in theatrical histories. There his famous Quartette — consisting of Edward Royce, Kate Vaughan, Edward Terry and Nellie Farren — perfected a new style of burlesque. He was the first theatrical producer in England to stage an Ibsen play: William Archer’s translation of Quicksands; or, The Pillars of Society (1880), as well as serious plays by Tom Robertson, Charles Reade and Dion Boucicault. Thespis, the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration (1871), was produced on the stage of the Gaiety.