THEATRE CURFEW

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 224, 10 June 1918, Page 6

THEATRE CURFEW

If Londoners have- to go to the theatro between half-past six and half-past nine in the evening they will only be accepting the, hours which prevailed m the great periods of the British drama. Indeed, they will still bo night-birds in comparison with the original Shakespenro audiences and with those of .the Restoration period. We imagine that wo I invented the matinee. Nothing of the sort. The afternoon was tho usual time for performances in Shakespeare's day. And Samuel Pepys had to get into his velvet tunic soon after midday if he wanted to seethe curtain risel on a new piece at tho "King's house" at four o'clock. Even at two o'clock he would sometimes find the theatre "infinite full." (Audiences then waited inside tho theatre,.not in tho 6treet.) After the theatre Pepys had plenty of time, as his Diary shows, to potter about Whitehall. It was not very different under Queen Anne. In tho diary of a fashionable woman printed in No. 323 of Addison s "Spectator" we read: "From Three to Four: Dined. Miss Kitty called upon me to go to tho Opera before I was risen from Table." The theatre hour became rather later as the eighteenth century advanced, let tho great nights of Garrick, Henderson, Macklin, and Siddons were really not nights, but evenings. Whon Garrick mado his first bow to* a London audienco as Richard 111, on October 19, 1711, at tho theatre in Goodman's Fields, tho performnuco was timed for "exactly six o'clock." When thirty-five years later he mado his everlasting farewell to a sobbing audionce at Drury Lane tho doors had opened at half-past five and the curtain had risen at six.