What shall I assume the first piece that is to be performed this night to be? Will you have the “Flowers of the Forest,” the “Poor Strollers,” “Sweethearts and Wives,” “Pizarro,” the “Padlock,” or a “Game at Romps?” What do you say to a fine old English comedy, such as “John Bull,” or the “School of Reform,” with a dissipated young squire, a gouty, ill-tempered, and over-bearing old lord of the manor, an intensely-virtuous tenant-farmer, a comic ploughman, a milkmaid with a chintz gown tucked through the placket-holes, and a song, and a spotless but a persecuted maiden? No; you will have none of these! Suppose, then, we take our dear old genial friend, the “Green Bushes”—long life and good luck to Mr. Buckstone, and may he write many more pieces as good for our imaginary theatre. See; the green-room clock points to ten minutes to seven—I left that out in my inventory of the furniture. The call-boy has already warned the ladies and gentlemen who are engaged for the first scene, that their immediate presence is required, and the erst-deserted green-room fills rapidly.
See, here they came—the kindly old friends of the “Green Bushes”—Miami and Jack Gong, and Master Grinnidge; and yet, dear me, what are these strange, wild costumes mingled with them? Oh! there is a burlesque after the drama. It is somewhat early in the evening for those who are to play in the second piece to come down dressed; but then you are to consider this as a special green-room, a specimen green-room, an amalgam of the green-room element generally. This model foyer is to have something of the Haymarket and something of the Adelphi—the old by-gone, defunct Adelphi, I mean—a spice of the Olympic, a tinge of the Lyceum, and a dash of the Princess’s, about it. I except the green-room of Drury Lane, which never resembled anything half so much as a family vault, and the green-rooms of the two Operas, which, though splendidly furnished and appointed, are almost deserted during the performances, the great tenori and soprani preferring to retire to their dressing-rooms when any long intervals of rest occur.
“Things”—to use a bit of “Green Bushes” facetiæ, invented, I am willing to believe, by that incorrigible humourist, Mr. Wright, and which has grown proverbial—“things isn’t as they used to was;” and the attractions of green-rooms have deteriorated, even within my time. When I say “my time,” I mean a quarter of a century; for as I happened to be almost born in a prompt-box and weaned in a scene-painter’s size-kettle, and have been employed in very nearly every capacity in and about a theatre—save that of an actor, which profession invincible modesty and incurable incompetency prevented me from assuming—I feel myself qualified to speak about the green-rooms with some degree of authority. To have read a three-act melodrama to a (scarcely) admiring audience, and to have called “everybody for the last scene” in a green-room, gives a man, I take it, a right to be heard.
But, to tell the truth, green-rooms now-a-days are sadly dull, slow, humdrum places of resort. In a minor theatre they are somewhat more lively, as there is there no second green-room, and the young sylphides of the corps de ballet are allowed to join the company. The conversation of these young ladies, if not interesting, is amusing, and if not brilliant, is cheerful. They generally bring their needle-work with them if they have to wait long between the scenes (frequently to the extent of an entire act) in which they have to dance, and they discourse with much naïveté upon the warmth or coldness of the audience with reference to the applause bestowed, the bad temper of the stage-manager, and their own temporary indisposition from corns, which, with pickled salmon, unripe pears, the proper number of lengths for a silk dress, and the comparative merits of the whiskers and moustaches of the musicians in the band (with some of whose members they are sure to be in love, and whom they very frequently marry, leaving off dancing and having enormous families), form the almost invariable staple of a ballet-girl’s conversation. Poor simple-minded, good-natured, hard-working little creatures, theirs is but a rude and stern lot. To cut capers and wear paint, to find one’s own shoes and stockings, and be strictly virtuous, on a salary varying from nine to eighteen shillings a week—this is the pabulum of a ballet-girl. And hark in thine ear, my friend. If any man talks to you about the syrens of the ballet, the dangerous enchantresses and cockatrices of the ballet, the pets of the ballet, whose only thoughts are about broughams and diamond aigrettes, dinners at Richmond, and villas at St. John’s Wood—if anybody tells you that the majority, or even a large proportion, of our English danseuses are inclined this perilous way, just inform him, with my compliments, that he is a dolt and a teller of untruths. I can’t say much of ballet morality abroad; of the poor rats de l’opera in Paris, who are bred to wickedness from their very cradle upwards; of the Neapolitan ballerine, who are obliged to wear green calzoni, and to be civil to the priests, lest they should be put down altogether; or of the poor Russian ballet-girls, who live altogether in barracks, are conveyed to and from the theatre in omnibuses, and are birched if they do not behave themselves, and yet manage somehow to make a bad end of it; but as regards our own sylphides, I say that naughtiness among them is the exception, and cheerful, industrious, self-denying perseverance in a hard, ungrateful life, the honourable rule.
There are yet a few green-rooms where the genus “swell” still finds a rare admittance. See here a couple in full evening costume, talking to the pretty young lady in the low-necked dress on the settee; but the swell is quite a fish out of water in the green-room of these latter days. Managers don’t care quite so much for his patronage, preferring to place their chief reliance and dependence on the public. The actors don’t care about him, for the swell is not so generous as of yore in taking tickets for the benefits of popular favourites. Actresses mistrust him, for the swell has given up raising actresses to the peerage. The ballet-girls are half afraid of him; and when they don’t fear him, they laugh at him. So the swell wanders in and out of the green-room, and stares at people uneasily, and at last escapes to his brougham or his cabriolet at the stage-door. Now and then a wicked old lord of the unrighteous evil-living school of British peers, now happily becoming rarer and rarer every day, will come sniggering and chuckling into a green-room, hanging on the arm of the manager, with whom he is on the most intimate terms, and who “My Lords” him most obsequiously. He rolls his scandalous old eyes in his disreputable, puckered face, seeking some pretty, timid, blushing little flower, whom he may blight with his Upas gaze, and then totters away to his stage-box, where he does duty for the rest of the evening with a huge double-barrelled opera-glass.
Such is the green-room of to-day, quiet, occasionally chatty (for actresses and actors can be pleasant enough among themselves, in a cosy, sensible manner, talking about butcher’s meat, and poor’s-rates, and Brompton omnibuses); but not by any means the glittering Temple of Radiant Delight that some might feel inclined to imagine it. There have been days—and I remember them—when green-rooms were very different places. There were women on the stage then who were Queens as well as actresses, and had trains of admirers round their flowing robes. There was a slight nervous man in those days—a famous writer of plays and books that yet live, and will live while our English language is spoken—a strange-looking, high-cheek-boned man, with long hair carelessly thrown away from his forehead, and a piercing eye, that seemed to laugh to scorn the lorgnon dangling from its ribbon. I have seen him so, his spare form leaning against the mantel, and he showering—yes, showering is the word—arrowy bon mots and corruscating repartees around him. He is dead: they all seem to be dead, those brilliant green-room men—Jerrold, Talfourd, Kenney, Haynes Bayley, Hook, A’Beckett. They have left no successors. The modern play-wrights skulk in and out of the manager’s room, and are mistaken at rehearsal for the property-men. They forsake green-rooms at night for drawing-rooms, where they can hear themselves praised, or smoking-rooms of clubs, where they can abuse one another; and if A. says a good thing, B. books it for his next petite comédie, which does not hurt A. much, seeing that he stole it from C., who translated it hot-and-hot from Monsieur de D., that great plagiarist from Lope de Vega.
Come, let us leave the green-room to its simple devices, and see what they are doing “Behind the Scenes.” You and I, we know, are in the receipt of fern-seed, and can walk invisible without incommoding ourself or anybody else, be the pressure ever so great; but I should strongly advise all swells and other intruders, if any such remain, either to withdraw into the shadiest recesses of the green-room, or to “get out of that”—to use an Irishism, without the least possible delay. For “Behind the Scenes” is clearly no place for them. If I were the manager of a theatre, I would not admit one single person into the coulisses save those connected with the night’s performance, nay, nor allow even the employés of the theatre, till the call-boy summoned them to approach the wing. Madame Vestris established this Spartan rule of discipline, and found it answer in making her theatre the best-managed in Europe; but it will be observed that no such ordre du jour has been promulgated in the theatre behind whose scenes we find ourselves to-night. What a confusion, what a hubbub, what a throng and bustle! The dramatis personæ, you will perceive, no longer contemplate the performance of the “Green Bushes.” Hoops, powder, brocade, black-patches, high-heeled shoes, bag-wigs, flapped waistcoats, and laced-hats prevail. This must be some Pompadour or Beau Tibbs piece—“Court Favour,” or “Love’s Telegraph,” or some last century dramatic conceit by Mr. Planché or Mr. Dance. How the carpenters scuffle and stamp, entreating the bystanders, not always in the politest terms, to get out of the way! Now and again the prompter rushes from his box, and in a hoarse sotto voce, that would be a shriek if it were not a whisper, commands silence.