Britain Goes Back To The Music Hall

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30472, 20 June 1964, Page 5

Britain Goes Back To The Music Hall

(By L. ft. SWAINSON. in th* "Sudnev Morning Herald.' Rep: inted by arrangement.) MUSIC Hall, vulgar and. rumbustious delight of yesteryear, is back with a vengeance.

And this is happening in England, where it first sprang into full-blooded life more than a century ago and where, in the anaemic guise of “Variety,’’ it -gave up the ghost in the 1950’5.

At the present moment no fewer than three London theatres—not to mention a round dozen in the provinces —are doing brisk business with this nostalgic and uninhibited form of entertainment.

Moreover, there is no question of any tired and tepid lampoon of the sort of show which enlivened the Victorian and Edwardian scene.

This is the real thing . . . authentic Music Hall, brought up-to-date . . . take It or leave it At present the accent is on take it So much so that one of London’s newest theatres, the Prince Charles, has completely revamped itself on Edwardian lines. Its lugubrious chairman presides over the acts amid popping corks, foaming tankards and sausages-and-mashed.

all in an atmosphere of gilt red plush and gaslight and

with a life-expectancy (according to the management) of at least two years.

Venerable Top-Of-All-The-Bills is that “Beautiful Doll” and grandest of grand oldtimers, Miss Ida Barr, who was 82 just before opening in “Nights At The Comedy.”

There are also some of Miss Barr's more adolescent contemporaries, like Ted Ray, Jimmy James, Cicely Courtneidge, Donald Peers, Billy Danvers, and Randolph (“On Mother Kelly’s Doorstep") Sutton, all doing their timehonoured routines. Audience, Too Among the more robust pleasures are Red Indians, snake - charmers, jugglers, wire-walkers and acrobats, as well as hoary old. villainhissers like “Maria Martin" and “Sweeney Todd,” with “audience participation" sessions which include talent contests, drinking yards of ale against the clock, and impromptu boxing matdies. Considering the lavish funeral rites, this is a quite extraordinary exhumation. It is also a perfect example of history repeating itself. For the new boom has come about through precisely the same evolutionary process as that which gave rise to the original Music Hall, when Queen Victoria was a girl. It started gathering momentum, some two years ago, in

Britain’s pubs, clubs and social centres.

And it was in the early nineteenth-century equivalent of those places—murky bar parlours and gin palaces and garish song and supper rooms —that original Musid Hall first took permanent root Inherently English, made for and by the working classes, Music Hall had, until then, been a peripatetic art practised by individuals who, part gipsy, part suitease, roamed the country in small groups, pitching' their tents in one place for a week, then moving on to pastures new. The bars and supper rooms created a pivotal centre. There, for sixpence, the customer got. entertainment as well as a voucher for that amount of refreshment

Then on May 17, 1852, the Canterbury Hall in London made history. It rescinded the sixpenny drink ticket and instead imposed a definite charge of threepence for admission. And so, for a modest threepence a head. Music Hall was bom, bom to weave a magic spell around the globe as one of the people’s greatest recreations.

According to the artist’s importance there was strict precedence over “top,” “middle” or “bottom” of the bills. But everyone, however famous, however obscure, was always individual. Your theatre star, no matter how illustrious, needs a supporting company. Not an the Music Hall stars. They were complete in themselves.

They never appeared together on stage, and they had their own allotted “spot” before the public. Music Hail reached its zenith in Britain during file eighties, nineties and 1900’s, when an amazing cavalcade of stars performed equally amazing acts to everybody’s joy. Dan Leno, Marie Lloyd, Vesta Tilley, Leo Dryden, Eugene Stratton, Chirgwin (“The White-Eyed Kaffir”), Albert Whelan, Harry Tate, George Robey,-Bransby Williams, Little Tich, Arthur Roberts, Ella Shields, Harry Champion, Ada Reeve, Hetty King, Charles Coburn, Nellie Wallace, Harry Lauder and an embryonic genius named Master Charles Spencer Chaplin—what great ones they were. Losing Battle The songs, too: "Burlington Bertie,” “Lily of Laguna,” “Any Old Iron,” “My Old Dutch,” “Boiled Beef and Carrots,”" To-Ra4la-Boom-De-Ay," “Oh, Mr Porter,” “Dear Old Pals,” “Daisy Bell," “Joshua,” “Oh, Oh, Antonio,” “A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good.” Songs and stars swept all before them—until the First World War. Then life changed. The conditions which had created Music Hall no longer existed. The old insularity had gone. And there was a new thing, called sophistication.

“The pictures,” too were gaining ground. They got better and better. Music Hall artists found work scarcer and scarcer.

Then came the smashing blow of the “talkies,” softening Music Hall for the final “kill" by television.

It seemed the end. But it wasn’t Such is irony, television saw to that

Three years ago the 8.8. C. began an old-time Music Hall series—and started up the same cycle all over again. Now, Music Hall is really turning the tables on television.

Most of Britain’s big pubs and clubs, which run into thousands, already have entertainment rooms. Others are reshaping and converting. In every case it means whipping out the television set to make way for live acts. And there is nothing cheap or shoddy about these places. Nor does this apply only to London’s Golden Square Mile. The cabarets and dining clubs of Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and other big provincial cities make some of the top Mayfair and Soho showplaces look to their laurels (and to their cash registers). In Manchester

alone there are some 350 different dubs, all . of them a stamping ground for national and local talent Yes. Music Hall is on the march again, though whether in a genuine revival or merely as a seven-day wonder remains to be seen.