Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1978 - 25

prepared for a patron who gloried in wealth and in space and
would have liked everything to be remembered as much
grander visually than it really was. The artist is even forced to
redesign the theatre.
The most famous English theatrical painting is probably
William Hogarth's The Beggar's Opera (Figure XXI). It shows
the scene in Newgate ~aol towards the end when Lucy Lockit
and Polly Peachum beseech their fathers for the life of Macheath. The portraits of the five leading actors and of the
leading members of the audience are accurate and recognizable (the people sitting behind what looks like tables on each
side of the stage are, of course, members of the audience, not
prisoners). Therefore, it could be imagined that because
Hogarth was an accurate satirist and impeccable draftsman,
that here we have a literal report of the first production, in
1728, of The Beggar's Opera on the stage of Lincoln's Inn
Fields. Unfortunately, this is not so. This version was painted
in 1730. The scene is shown as the manager John Rich would
have liked to have staged the production after he had made
so much money from the play that he was able to build the
first Covent Garden, a theatre much grander than Lincoln's
Inn Fields.
A different version (Figure XXII) was also painted by
Hogarth but two years earlier, that is, in the same year as the
production. The actors are the same. The audience on stage
is largely the same but not so well dressed. And the group at
the back of the set, which in the grand version was a motley
array of prisoners or of guards, turns out to have been the
theatre orchestra.
Finally, there is Hogarth's drawing done in the theatre during a performance (Figure XXIII). There now appears to be a

vast number of people at the sides. Of course they are
neither crowd nor orchestra. They are audience on the stage
almost encircling the actor. This, not the prettified painting
you first saw, is evidence of theatre in early eighteenth-century England. 'o What at first one might take as scene a
I'ltalienne turned out to be much closer to Shakespeare's
Globe than to nineteenth-century theatre of fllusion. And,
Slondel's engraving of the old Comedie Francaise (1752)
shows that it was not only in England that the so-called scene
a I'Italienne was often filled with audience.
A second example comes from 1775, also England. Robert
Adam had just restored the tiny Drury Lane theatre of Garrick. A drawing of 1779 by Pastorini suggested a large
theatre. He cheated. All these people were drawn 1 meter or
less in height. It was a Piranesi-like device borrowed by Pastorini. Figure XXIV is a modern isometric drawn by Richard
Leacroft showing Drury Lane as it was in 1775. With the
figures drawn to scale we realize how very small was an
English Theatre in the eighteenth century. This theatre was
pulled down in 1791 and replaced with a much bigger theatre
designed by Holland, opened in 1794, and here drawn to
exactly the same scale as the previous theatre (Figure XXV).
The difference is monumental. The actor is now dwarfed, the
forestage cut back and the theatre has become the plaything
of the engineer eager to serve the new managers who were
anxious to make money out of spectacle at the expense of
drama.
In 1806 Richard Cumberland, comparing the two versions
of Drury Lane, wrote these words which I remember every
time I see another wide, wide 3,000 seat, bleak, fan-shaped
auditorium: "Henceforward theatres for spectators rather

Figure XIX National Theatre, 1977.

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Theatre Design & Technology

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