On our first expedition to America everything was packed in a very cumbrous manner, the amount of timber, nails and screws used was extraordinary. There were hundredweights of extracted screws on the stage of the Star Theatre of New York whilst the unpacking was in progress. When I came down to the theatre on the first morning after the unloading of the stuff, Arnott, who was in charge of the mechanics of the stage, came to me and said:
“Would you mind coming here a moment, sir, I would like you to see something!” He brought me to the back of the stage and pointed out a long heap of rubbish some four feet high. It was just such as you would see in the waste-heap of a house-wrecker’s yard.
“What on earth is that?” I asked.
“That is the sink-and-rise of the vision in The Bells. In effecting a vision on the stage the old method used to be to draw the back scenes or “flats” apart, or else to raise the whole scene from above or take it down through a long trap on the stage. The latter was the method adopted by the scene-painter of The Bells.”
“Did it meet with an accident?” I asked.
“No, sir. It simply shook to bits just as you see it. It was packed up secure and screwed tight like the rest!”
I examined it carefully. The whole stuff was simply rotten with age and wear; as thoroughly worn out as the deacon’s wonderful one-horse shay in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem. The canvas had been almost held together by the overlay of paint, and as for the wood it was cut and hacked and pieced to death; full of old screw-holes and nail-holes. No part of it had been of new timber or canvas when The Bells was produced eleven years before. With this experience I examined the whole scenery and found that almost every piece of it was in a similar condition. It had been manufactured out of all the odds and ends of old scenery in the theatre.
Under the modern conditions of Metropolitan theatres it is hard to imagine what satisfied up to the “seventies.” Nowadays the scenery of good theatres is made for travel. The flats are framed in light wood, securely clamped and fortified at the joints; and in folding sections like screens, each section being not more than six feet wide, so as to be easily handled and placed in baggage-waggons. The scenes are often fixed on huge castors with rubber bosses so as to move easily and silently. But formerly they were made in single panels and of heavy timber and took a lot of strength to move.
II
From the time of my joining him in 1878 till his death Irving played The Bells in all six hundred and twenty-seven times, being one hundred and sixty-eight in London; two hundred and seventy-three in the British provinces, and one hundred and eighty-six in America. During its first run at the Lyceum in 1872–3 it ran one hundred and fifty-one nights, so that in all he played The Bells seven hundred and seventy-eight times, besides certain occasions when he gave it in his provincial tours previous to 1878. Altogether he probably played the piece over eight hundred times.