Restoration Spectacular - 1690s: Opera

1690s: Opera

While the monopoly United Company's takings were being bled off by Davenant's shyster sons, one of whom, Alexander, was forced to flee the country in 1693 and other predatory investors, Thomas Betterton continued to act as de facto day-to-day manager and producer, enjoying a budget on the scale of Cecil B. DeMille. In the early 1690s, he staged the three real operas of the Restoration spectacular genre, or the shows usually so designated: Dioclesian (1689–90) by Massinger/Fletcher/Betterton; King Arthur (1690–91) by John Dryden; and The Fairy-Queen (1691–92), adapted from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream by perhaps Elkanah Settle, all of them graced by music by Henry Purcell, and together perhaps a sign of the coming 18th-century vogue for Italian opera. The lavish variety entertainment Dioclesian, adapted by Betterton, with many monsters, dragons, and machines, from Massinger and Fletcher's History of Dioclesian, was very popular throughout the '90s and made a lot of money for the United Company. So did Dryden's much more serious King Arthur, the first operatic entertainment that Hume is prepared to consider an artistic success, with Purcell's marvellous music a major part of the entertainment and the songs "for once well integrated into the play".

At the very end of its history, the economics of the Restoration spectacular spiralled out of control with the magnificent production of The Fairy Queen in the 1691–92 season. It was a great popular success, but so stuffed with special effects and so expensive that it nevertheless proved impossible to make money from it. As Downes recalls: "Though the court and town were wonderfully satisfied with it ... the expenses in setting it out being so great, the company got little by it." Its twelve-foot-high working fountain and six dancing real live monkeys have become notorious in theatre history.

The spectacular play died out with the Restoration period, but spectacle would continue on the English stage as the splendours of Italian grand opera hit London in the early 18th century. The dangerous Restoration economic spiral of the ever-more-expensive machine plays would teach 18th- and 19th-century theatrical entrepreneurs to dispense with playwrighting altogether and minimise the cast, utilising any number of surprising effects and scenes in the dumbshow of pantomime and Harlequin, without attendant costs in music, dramatists, and cast.

There have been a small number of attempts to resurrect the Restoration spectacular as a background to modern cinema: Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen features at its start perhaps the most accurate reconstruction, with painted scenery, mechanisms and lighting effects typical of the period.