York Guides

The York Theatre was closed for about seven weeks and re¬opened under the management of Robert J. Fitzgerald. Throughout the 19th century, until 1864 when John Coleman took over the lease, managers followed each other in quick succession, no-one staying longer than eight years, most only one or two years, and one as little as one week. Bankruptcy was often the result'of a period of management. The circuit - the mainstay of the York Theatre in the 18th century - gradually disintegrated, and with it the comparatively stable stock company, which had been the focus for audience loyalty and affection. York's "fortunes started to improve, it became a railway centre, and its population continued to increase, but the mass of the population was apparently not interested in theatre-going, and the Theatre continued to decline. Most actors and actresses now stayed with the company for very short periods, as the number of theatres and companies offering alternative employment proliferated in the 19th century, the result of, new legislation.

The Theatre Regulation Act of 1843 ended the power of the monopolies held by Covent Garden and Drury Lane, allowing more theatres to be built and companies to be set up, but it was largely a retrospective piece of legislation, in effect legalising the status quo. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries many illegal 'Minor' theatres had sprung up in London to cater for the new potential audience - London's population in 1800 was one million - and they evaded the letter of the law forbidding them to present 'legitimate drama' by presenting musical and spectacular entertainments. So popular did the entertainments they provided prove, that their illegitimate forms of drama carne to be presented at the legal theatres, and continued to be a large part of the staple theatrical fare after the 1843 Act. The provincial theatres, in three-piece a night programmes, reproduced the London theatres' tremendous output of melodramas, pantomimes, burlesques, extravaganzas, burlettas, ballets, comic operas, travesties and novelties of all kinds. The demand was for the spectacular, which new machinery and lighting techniques - reflections of the technological progress of the age - made the more sensational. Pageants, processions, firework displays, re-enacted battles and equestrian acts were the order of the day, provided by the local stock company or by visitors. In York novelties included: a Sieur Sanches, who displayed his antipodean powers by walking upside down on the ceiling over the stage in 1814; an exhibition of the newly invented velocipede, 'Dandy's Hobby Horse', the precursor of the bicycle, in 1819; 'Ching Lau Lauro, the Pacanini Of all Nicromancers, Ventriloquists, etc.'27in 1834; Carter, the American Lion King, in 1841 and 1843; Madame Warton and her Tableaux Vivants and Poses Plastiques in 1849; A. Abel and his dogs Hector and Wallace in a series of canine dramas in 1851; and King's Improved Patent of Marvellous Ghost Illusion in 1864. Many of the novelties reflected the 19th century taste for inventions, and their exhibition in theatres would often attract a public not usually given to theatre going.

In the spring of 1818 Mozart's Don Giovanni was presented in York. The new fashion in England for foreign operas was to further hasten the decline of the stock company and lead to its ultimate replacement by touring companies from London. Stock actors and actresses could manage English comic operas - there were always several singers in the company - but the Italian and German operas were of a different order. Increasingly, London singers were employed to take the leads in opera seasons, with the local stock company relegated to the supporting roles. Eventually this system was replaced by visits of complete opera companies, the first in York was in 1832, which made the perfunctory production sometimes given to opera by the stock company seem all the more inadequate. The York Chronicle of 30 April, 1835 said that the stock actor, Mr Chute, who played Figaro, 'did not attempt any of the solos, but he took part in the concerted pieces' in The Barber of Seville, and on 7 May, 1835 that the company first saw the music for Auber's Fra Diavolo only five days before performing it, 'and yet they performed it with precision and correctness which was perfectly surprising'.