The Show Won't Go On

Positively The Last Night but One, the advertisement warns. Your penultimate chance to see this New Grand Dramatic Oratorio. The Scenery entirely New, the Costumes and Decorations upon an unusually extensive Scale. The Band will be numerous and complete. 

And, on account of the overwhelming clamour to see the show at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden, free admissions are suspended! That's bad news for ladies of the night, but at least they're still giving members of the press a complimentary ticket.... 

There's no business like show business. And it was ever thus, as we find out in Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain at London's Foundling Museum, an exhibition that takes you back to the 18th and early 19th centuries to see what has changed about going to the theatre or a concert over 200 years, and what hasn't. 

The hyperbole hasn't, clearly, though perhaps we're a bit less wordy. But there are a lot more toilets, even if patrons of some of the West End's more venerable theatres may find that hard to believe. 

However, the theatre-goers of today are rather better-behaved than their Georgian counterparts, even if some of them do forget to switch off their mobile phones. A German visitor, Charles P Moritz, went to the playhouse in 1782 to find "noise and uproar", not to mention a lot of citrus fruit being thrown around as he sat in the stalls. "Often and often, whilst I sat there, did a rotten orange, or pieces of the peel of an orange, fly past me, or past some of my neighbours, and once one of them actually hit my hat, without my daring to look round, for fear another might then hit me on the face." 

Buy six oranges, and you could get a free playbill. Though, our German visitor complained, he was charged sixpence for one orange at the theatre, "and that noways remarkably good", when you could sometimes get two for a halfpenny elsewhere in London.

You'll have noticed that Herr Moritz kept his hat on. No fun if you were sitting behind him, but worse if you found yourself behind a lady with an fashionable hairstyle, one designed to really catch the attention.

Perhaps the sort worn by Miss Prattle, who is here consulting Dr Double Fee about the headdress she's intending to show off at the Pantheon, the auditorium that opened in London in 1772. It was noted for the height of its interior, possibly encouraging both the ladies and the gentlemen to be adventurous with their hair. After all, what's the point of going out for the evening if you're unable to make an impact?

And if you want to be seen, you'll also want to know about the competition. So who is that person in the box over there? Well, let's just consult our souvenir fan....

The well-to-do tended to take boxes at a particular theatre for the entire season. So fans were produced with the layout of the boxes, and the names of who was in them. Because theatre-going in the Georgian era, we learn, wasn't really about seeing the play. It was about being seen to be at the play. Many people spent much of the time socialising, except for key scenes or songs. 

In Hogarth's The Laughing Audience, for example, those in the boxes above the rail are paying no attention whatsoever to the stage. At least those in the pit are enjoying the performance, apart from one man, presumably a critic. Well, he's probably thinking about what to write in his review....

There's much of interest in the first section of this show, downstairs in the Foundling Museum's exhibition space, and if you take the time, you'll both learn a lot and be entertained.  

However, when the exhibition continues on the upper floors of the museum, it loses a bit of oomph. Moving away from the theatre proper, the curators look at pleasure gardens, music festivals and benefit concerts. Handel raised more than £7,000 to support the Foundling Hospital with an annual performance of his Messiah. 

We felt that some sort of background music, maybe some extracts from the Messiah, might have enlivened the experience up here, although apparently some visitors to the Foundling's previous exhibition, the excellent Hogarth & the Art of Noise, found the accompanying soundtrack offputting.

Those pleasure gardens that were a major feature of Georgian society are a very interesting topic, but they were such an ephemeral phenomenon that not a huge amount has survived to sustain an exhibition. Thomas Rowlandson's illustration, though, captures the spirit of Vauxhall, full of the celebrities of the day, from Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith to the mistress of the Prince of Wales. 

In general, we felt the second act upstairs failed to live up to the promise of the first half. And this is quite an intense show, one where you'll need to do a lot of reading of wall captions to make sense of the exhibits.

Not up to the standard of the Foundling's previous Hogarth exhibition, then, but worth taking your tickets for anyone interested in history or the theatre. Red tickets for the ladies, sometimes, black for the gentlemen. Now, how about some oranges?

Practicalities

Two Last Nights! Show Business in Georgian Britain runs at the Foundling Museum in central London until January 5. The museum is open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 1000 to 1700 and Sundays from 1100 to 1700. Full-price entry costs £13.20 with a Gift Aid donation, £12 without. The Foundling Museum is located on Brunswick Square, only a few minutes' walk from Russell Square station on the Underground's Piccadilly Line.

Images

Printed advertisement bill, 1833. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation
William Marshall Craig, Buy a Bill of the Play, 1804. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Miss Prattle Consulting the Doctor about her Pantheon Head Dress. © Private Collection
Opera fan from King's Theatre, London, 1787-88. Courtesy of the Garrick Club, London

William Hogarth, The Laughing Audience, c. 1733. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation

Thomas Rowlandson, Vauxhall Gardens, 1785. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation
Ticket for Theatre Royal, A Comedy with the Mock Doctor, 1735. © Gerald Coke Handel Foundation