The Balance of Comfort.
Book III. Chapter V.
Cool as a Cucumber.
For the plays there were over two hundred and sixty scenes, many of them of great elaboration. In fact, each scene, even if only a single cloth at back with wings and borders, took up quite a space. There were in all more than two thousand pieces of scenery, and bulky properties without end. And the prime cost of the property destroyed was over thirty thousand pounds sterling.
But the cost price was the least part of the loss. Nothing could repay the time and labour and artistic experience spent on them. All the scene-painters in England working for a whole year could not have restored the scenery alone.
As to Irving, it was checkmate to the répertoire side of his management. Given a theatre equipped with such productions, the plays to which they belong being already studied and rehearsed, it is easy to put on any of them for a few nights. There is only the cost of carting and hanging the scenes and generally getting ready—small matters in the vast enterprise of putting on a big play. They had had their long runs, and though they were good for occasional repetitions, few of them could be relied on for great business over any considerable period. Several of them were held over for a second run, of which good things might have been fairly expected. For instance, Macbeth was good for another season. It was taken off because of the summer vacation when it was still doing enormous business. Ravenswood, too, had only gone a part of its course when the Baring failure, as I have shown, necessitated its temporary withdrawal. Henry VIII. and King Arthur and Becket and Faust were certain draws. When for répertoire purposes in later years several were required, Louis XI., Charles I., The Bells, The Lyons Mail, Olivia, Faust, Becket were all reproduced at an aggregate cost of over eleven thousand pounds.
The effect of the fire on Irving was not only this great cost, but the deprivation of all that he had built up. Had it not occurred he could have gone on playing his répertoire for many years, and would never have had to produce a new play.
The fire was so fierce that it actually burned the building of the railway arches three bricks deep and calcined the coping-stones to powder. The Railway Company, therefore, not only made a rule that in no case was theatrical scenery ever to be stored on their premises, but actually refused to allow us to reinstate or to have use for the term of their lease. They were prepared to fight an action over it, but the scenery having all been burned, we had no more present use for so large a storage, and we compromised the matter.