It would be tedious to enumerate all the references to actors and plays, famous or forgotten, which crowd the pages of Punch in this period; to quote them in full would be impossible. Toole was one of his favourites. Boucicault was not, and excites satirical comment for having written a letter to Disraeli in 1876, puffing his own play The Shaughraun. A little earlier The Great Vance—immortalized in Stevenson's Wrong Box—the "lion comique" of the music-halls, is rapped over the knuckles for advertising his performances as "patronized by the Prince and Princess of Wales." Punch's notice of Zola's L'Assommoir when he saw it in Paris in May, 1879, reflects a divided mind. He found it fascinating and intolerable. Gil-Naza's acting as Coupeau was "wonderful, fearful, admirable, awful, infernal." Yet "the moral to most of those who assisted, the other evening, at L'Assommoir was, 'I say! Dash it! It's too horrible! Let's go and drink!' and the biggest drink I've had for a long time—much needed, I assure you—was after seeing L'Assommoir." Punch doubts whether the play could ever be done in English, but it was produced at the Princess's Theatre only a few weeks later in Charles Reade's version, with Charles Warner as Coupeau. The notice in Punch purports to be written by a working man, who signs himself "one as is a-thinking seriously of Taking the Pledge, but don't see his Way to it yet." He acknowledges the terrible realism of Warner's acting, but his testimonial is invalidated by the final sentences:—
Yes, Sir, Drink is a moral drama if ever there was one. It ought to do a deal of good. And as I think it over, I feel as I want a little something just to take the taste on it out o' my mouth.
Punch clearly did not believe in temperance propaganda on the stage. Nor did he support the restriction of child performers, maintaining in 1880 that the theatres at Christmas time were admirable infant schools; "even for teaching," he was "open to back the Theatre, while it lasts, against the Board School any day." There was much talk at this time about dramatic schools, but Punch refused to take the movement seriously, preferring to give a burlesque list of lectures by well-known actresses on aspects of acting entirely foreign to their own styles. He joined in the protest against the abolition of the pit at the Haymarket and the general raising of prices in the same year; and Captain Shaw's Treatise on Fires in Theatres found in him an energetic supporter of reform in respect of structural and other safeguards. Laments over the degeneracy of pantomime and the decline of the red-hot poker business still occur, but honourable exception is invariably made on behalf of the famous Vokes family. He had at an early date described the Drury Lane pantomime as "Vokes et præterea nihil." Bluebeard, at Christmas, 1879, is called "Vokes's Entire." "The family is a necessity at Drury Lane"; and then Punch goes on to embroider his text. Necessity has no Legs, but here the Vokes family have the pull over the Mother of Invention—alluding to the high-kicking exploits of Fred Vokes and other members of that engaging and high-spirited family. If pantomime showed signs of decay, the "sacred lamp of Burlesque" was burning brightly at the Gaiety with John Hollingshead as Lampadephoros and the famous quartet—Nellie Farren, Kate Vaughan, Edward Terry and Royce—as his chief hierophants. Miss Vaughan's secession in 1883, chronicled in a graceful tribute, rendered possible the historic question from the bench, "Who is Miss Connie Gilchrist?" but by 1892 she too had quitted the Gaiety to add histrionic lustre to the pages of Debrett. In 1883 Miss Vesta Tilley was playing in pantomime at Drury Lane; in 1884 Mrs. John Wood was singing "His Heart was true to Poll"; in 1886 the inauguration of the O.U.D.S. at Oxford introduced Mr. Bourchier as Feste in Twelfth Night; in 1887 Punch records the début of Miss Violet Vanbrugh.
More Gibes at Ibsen
Ibsen's Pillars of Society, produced at a matinée in July, 1888, is compared by Punch with a melodrama performed at the "Old Vic" before it became "a sort of frisky Coffee Palace," very much to the disadvantage of Ibsen. In the old play the dialogue was crisp and to the point, in the new it was "hopelessly dull." Punch adds that Mr. William Archer's translation seemed excellent, adding, "But what a pity he ever learned Norwegian!" Ada Rehan, the famous Irish-American actress, made her first appearance in London with Daly's company in the summer of 1890, but Punch, while delighted by her charming vivacity, thought she was already too old to play ingénue parts. Her successes in Shakespearean comedy were to come later.
IBSEN IN BRIXTON
Mrs. Harris: "Yes, William, I've thought a deal about it, and I find I'm nothing but your Doll and Dicky Bird, and so I'm going!"
Three familiar names greet us in the notices of the Christmas pantomimes of 1891. Marie Lloyd, Dan Leno and Little Tich all appeared in Humpty Dumpty, but the last-named receives the Benjamin's portion of praise. "Why Marie?" asks Punch, who disliked these unnecessary variants, which have since taken a more eccentric form in "Maudi," "Mai," and so forth.