If it is true that many go to the theatre when they have eaten too much, it is, to a certain extent, true that many go to the music-hall when they have drunk too much, which, if I must choose, is less repulsive. They are frankly out for a rag; they want to laugh, and I had rather they guffawed than drowsed. You can’t drowse in a music-hall: from the moment when the conductor, in his elaborately luxurious and irremediably faulty dress suit, addresses his first and infinitely disabused bow to the audience, to the time when he calls upon the band to produce the smallest possible scrap of ‘God Save the King,’ and hurries out loyalty on the wings of ragtime, there is no flagging. It is not only that red-nosed comedian and eccentric comedienne, American dancer, or sketch got up regardless, tread upon each other’s heels; the main thing is the band, the harsh, rapid band, that never stops, that plays anything, providing it is the thing of the day, with all the regularity and indifference of the typewriter. From it gush patriotism, comedy or sentiment, and all three burst forth with their full headline value. There is no tickling of big drums; when the drum is banged you know it; nor is there measure in the sigh of the oboe, for the music-hall paints not in wash-greens and grays; scarlet, black, white, and electric-blue are its gamut.
Nothing else would satisfy the audience that every music-hall comedian must encounter every night. It is a mixed audience. There are old stagers who sit in the same seat every Saturday night, without looking at the programme, and this differentiates them from the playgoer: they are bound for a playground. There are the discriminating who follow the star, so long as the star’s songs refrain from appealing to what is described as their better feelings; there are the very young in search of excitement, and determined to get it; there are the slightly older, who come in pairs, and do nothing to conceal the fact. (Of late years, many of these have been lost to the music-halls and have taken to the cinemas because they are darker.) But one thing unites them all: they have come here to be amused, amused at once, amused all the time; they are not ready to make allowances; if an old song is a good song, it is a good song, but if it is not a good song the seasoned music-hall-goer will know it at once. I have heard him turn to his neighbour and say: ‘It’s all up. She won’t get across.’ Getting across the footlights is not, in a music-hall, the same thing as getting across in a theatre. The music-hall performer has no scenery to help him, in this sense, that the properties are well known to the audience. I have seen at least twenty turns at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in front of a drop-curtain which I swear is Croydon High Street. The words of the song are, as a rule, difficult to sing. Often, as in the case of George Robey, the costume is stereotyped and never varies. Thus the music-hall performer, having not the scenery of Harry Hope, or the knee-breeches of Malvolio, can rely on nothing but himself. He comes naked into an entirely cold world. His situation is ideally expressed by the old cartoon of the impresario, his foot bound up to show that he has gout. Before him stands the dingy figure of a little performer. This is their dialogue:—
Impresario: ‘What’s your line?’
Performer: ‘Comedian.’
Impresario: ‘Well! get on with it! Make me laugh.’
If within one minute of his appearance the performer has not got his laugh he will probably not get it at all. If he is famous, and if his turn is not too bad, nothing worse will happen than the administration of the frozen lemon. It is rather tragic, feeling the lemon come. You feel the audience leap up towards the performer, for it is always ready to give him his chance, even if he is unknown; then, in a minute or so, you feel the audience drop away from him; you are aware that he is not being listened to, for people begin to talk, to flutter with their programmes, and perhaps some one may hum an irrelevant air. The wretched performer knows it. If you are sitting in the first row of the stalls you see anxiety come over his face. He begins to shout or to dance rather wildly; he knows that he is not getting across; he tries to attract attention as a cockatoo if he cannot do so as an eagle. Then some one laughs derisively, and there is something hideous in that laughter; it makes one think of the thumb-down attitude in the Roman circus. The curtain drops in the middle of something that is half hum and half silence. That is the lemon.
It is only in extreme cases that the audience manifests disapproval. Indeed, it is an audience full of good-natured contempt, and if the lemon is taken it willingly passes on to the next turn; as a rule, the lemon is taken by the management, who ring down the curtain on the first song and do not let the performer come on again. But if the performer does come on again, and strives to recapture lost ground, the audience will give him thirty seconds to do it; if he fails, the hum grows angry as that of a swarm of bees. There is more derisive laughter; a few yells come from the gallery; a general uproar develops from the hum. You discern cries: ‘I want to go ’ome’.... ‘Take me back to mother.’ ... Opponents reply as loudly: ‘Shut up! chuck him out!’ But the voices resume in more and more sepulchral tones: ‘I want to go ’ome,’ while others join the rag for the rag’s sake, and some stentor high above roars: ‘Shut yer face, dear, I see yer Christmas dinner.’ And then everybody cries: ‘Chuck him out!’ while the performer sings louder and louder, and the band makes still more desperate efforts to drown his song. Then a large portion of the audience rise to their feet and bellow enmity until the curtain goes down. That is the scarlet bird, and I have not often seen it on the wing.
No, there is no mercy in the music-hall audience. For it is an honest audience, and is, therefore, capable of every brutality. Also, everybody has paid for his seat. Nobody there can afford to waste that small payment. They must get their money’s worth. They know exactly what they want; they have been wanting it ever since the Middle Ages, and, on the whole, have been getting it. They want rough and obvious jokes told in a subtle and intelligent way; they want to see the performer break plates or sit on the butter, but he must do it in a debonair style; they want songs of which they know the tune by the time the second couplet is reached, favourite songs of which they can bellow the choruses while the triumphant performer whispers it; above all, they want their traditional jokes. Cheese, lodgers, mothers-in-law, twins, meeting the missus at 3 a.m., alcoholic excess, one or more of these must be introduced to make a successful song. It does not matter who you are, whether the great McDermott, Dan Leno, or R. G. Knowles, you must tie your little bark to the great ship of the English music-hall tradition. No famous song has become famous unless a portion of it at least dealt with one of these subjects: ‘Champagne Charlie,’ ‘I’m following in father’s footsteps,’ ‘The Girl, the Woman, and the Widow,’ are clear evidences of this. Perhaps that is why some delicate artists, such as Maidie Scott and Wish Wynne, have never quite ‘got there.’ Maidie Scott is the most finished product on the music-halls of to-day. As soon as she comes on, her quick, schoolgirl walk, her red hair, her distrait eyes, and the voice which she knows so amazingly how to keep down to a minor key, cut her right out of the stage. When Maidie Scott sings ‘Amen,’ or ‘Father’s got the sack from the water-works’ (all along of his cherry briar pipe, because they were afraid he’d set the water-works on fire), and still more when she sings, ‘I’m glad I took my mother’s advice,’ one has a sense of extraordinary detachment. She is aloof, alone. She is so entirely under restraint; knows so well how, at last, to let her voice swell and underline her point; she knows so well how not to waste during a song the power of her splendid blue eyes, but to reserve them for that final point. Thus she should wield astonishing power, yet does not quite; she lacks grossness; like Wish Wynne, her art is a little too delicate to get across. The audience like her, they like Wish Wynne singing ‘Oo! er!’ and miserably dragging her little tin trunk, but never for either do they rise and roar as they do for Marie Lloyd.
It is true that Marie Lloyd takes us into another world, that of the comfortable public-house, with plenty of lights and red plush; to the publican’s dog-cart off to the Derby; to the large birthday party, enlivened by plenty of sherry wine. In Marie Lloyd’s world everything is fat, healthy, round, jolly, bouncing; when she keeps the old man’s trousers to remember him by after he’s gone, she defines the human quality of her sentiment: she can do nothing false and artificial, such as pressing his nuptial buttonhole. Marie Lloyd is a woman before she is an actress, and in this lies her strength. When she advises the audience to ‘’Ave a little bit of what yer fancy (if you fancy it, if you fancy it), ’Ave a little bit of what yer fancy, I say it does yer good,’ Marie Lloyd is expressing the eternal claim of the flesh against the spirit, which has been rediscovered a great many times since Epicurus. She survives a great generation; there is nobody to-day fit to wear her pleasantly-little shoes.
There is nobody, because the spirit of the music-hall is changing, and women, who are more adaptable than men, are feeling it first. An awful thing is happening to most of the young women on the halls; they are becoming refined. Louie and Toots Pounds, Ella Retford, Clarice Mayne, Ella Shields, have nothing of the Marie Lloyd tradition; they are almost creatures of the drawing-room. Even Beattie and Babs, though Babs does what she can with stockings that nothing will ever keep up, never seem to experience the thick joy of being alive that Marie Lloyd conveys in one slow, sidelong raising of her immortal eyelid. There is, perhaps, a white hope, Daisy Wood, but one cannot be sure. They sing well, these young women, they dance well; they do it too well; women of the older tradition, such as Victoria Monks and Nellie Wallace are still themselves: they do not do it so well, but they do it. These are not trained, like the young women, but they have grown up and discovered themselves; they do not act joy or distress: they cut joy or distress out of common life and lay it down on the bare planks. All that is going, for the music-hall is growing refined.
Let me dispel a possible misunderstanding. When I say music-hall I do not mean those sinks of virtue, the Coliseum, or the Palladium, the Palace, and the Hippodrome. Those are royal theatres of varieties, eminently suited for long skirts and acrobats, and large enough for elephants. Two of them can safely be handed over to revue, and the rest is silence. I have seen Mr George Robey, I forget whether it was at the Palladium or the Coliseum, and the place was so broad, and so deep, and so high, that his eyebrows looked normal: can I add anything to the horror of this picture? The only comedian who ever seemed to me a success in those barns was Little Tich, as little Miss Turpentine, because they made him still smaller, which heightened his effect. But those halls pay large salaries, and I suppose they will go on. Indeed, I fear that they are gaining ground because we are daily sinking deeper in the Joseph Lyons civilisation, where everything must be cheap, gilt, and enormous. The old halls, the Holborn, the Metropolitan, the Bedford, Collins’s, will not last long; already many halls have been seized, the Tivoli and the Canterbury by cinemas, the Shepherd’s Bush, I think the Paragon, Mile End, and certainly the Shoreditch Empire by Sir Oswald Stoll. We have to count with Sir Oswald Stoll. Together with Sir Joseph Lyons, he has done more to drive out Merrie England than the dourest champion of methodism. You can go to his music-halls, or to the Palladium, which is not a Stoll hall, but a stollomorphe, and nothing will offend your good taste. During the last dozen years Sir Oswald Stoll has been engaged in a continuous and painfully successful campaign to raise the English music-hall; he has almost succeeded in elevating it. True, in his halls appear all those men who carry on the old tradition and glorify the flesh: George Robey, Sam Stern, Ernie Mayne, Sam Mayo, who sing the crude joy of poor life, which is found in drunken sprees and conjugal misunderstandings, but which yet is true life. Little by little their songs grow less broad. Sam Mayo would not, at a Stoll hall, sing the ditty which used to delight the old Middlesex: ‘Ching Chang, wing wang, bing, bang, boo,’ nor would Dutch Daly sing about the larks in May. Our old comedians are limiting their humours, discolouring their noses, rolling their umbrellas. The young ladies in the audience, and their young gentlemen, modern forms of the donah and her bloke, would feel uncomfortable if too crudely reminded that love is something more than kisses on Brighton Pier under a pale pink sunshade. The old comedians are not yet dead, and Ernie Mayne can still sing:—
‘Last night I wandered thro’ the park,
I met a female after dark;
And, feeling faint for want of food,
I fell into her arms—how rude!
Just then she murmured “Kiss me,
George!” her face I chanced to see,
The girl was black, with nigger lips;
I shouted, “Not for me!”
It’s my meatless day, my meatless day,
I’m not going to eat any sort of meat.
Meat, meat, meat, meat,
I’m thin and pale, all I’ve put away
Is two roly-polies, never left a crumb,
Three currant puddings and a little bit of plum,
And five apple-dumplings are rolling round my tum,
’Cos it’s my meatless day.’