Restoration Spectacular - Introductory: "A Lion, A Crocodile, A Dragon"

Introductory: "A Lion, A Crocodile, A Dragon"

The distinction between "legitimate" Restoration drama and the Restoration spectacular, or "musical spectacular," or "Dorset Garden spectacular," or "machine play" is one of degree rather than kind. All plays of the period featured music and dancing and some scenery, most of them also songs. Restoration heroic drama, for all its literariness, relied on opulent scenery. However, the true spectacular, of which Milhous counts only eight over the entire 1660–1700 Restoration period, was produced on a whole different scale. The spectacular is defined by the large number of sets and performers required, the vast sums of money invested, the potential for great profits, and the long preparation time needed. Milhous calculates a likely requirement of at least four to six months of planning, contracting, building, and rehearsing, to be compared with the four to six weeks of rehearsal time a new "legitimate" play would get.

Previous generations of theatre historians have despised the operatic spectaculars, perhaps influenced by John Dryden's sour comments about expensive and tasteless "scenes, machines, and empty operas". However, audiences loved the scenes and machines and operas, as Samuel Pepys' diary shows. Dryden wrote several baroque machine plays himself. The first, The State of Innocence (1677), was never staged, as his designated company, the King's, had neither the capital nor the machinery for it: a dramatisation of John Milton's Paradise Lost, it called for "rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts" over "a lake of brimstone or rolling fire". The King's Company's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was not up to lakes of rolling fire; only the "machine house" at Dorset Garden was, and that belonged to the competition, the Duke's Company. When the two companies had merged in the 1680s and Dryden had access to Dorset Garden, he wrote one of the most visual and special-effects-ridden machine plays of the entire Restoration period, Albion and Albanius (1684–85):

The Cave of PROTEUS rises out of the Sea; it consists of several arches of Rock-work adorned with mother-of-pearl, coral, and abundance of shells of various kinds. Through the arches is seen the Sea, and parts of Dover-pier; in the middle of the Cave is PROTEUS asleep on a rock adorned with shells, &c. like the Cave. ALBION and ACACIA seize on him; and while a symphony is playing, he sinks as they are bringing him forward, and changes himself into a Lion, a Crocodile, a Dragon, and then to his own shape again; he comes forward to the front of the stage, and sings."

How were such effects produced, and how did they look? The crocodile etc. obviously used the floor trap, but was it an illusionistically painted figure worked with sticks, or a man in a crocodile suit? Unfortunately there are no extant drawings or descriptions of machinery and sets for the Restoration theatre, although some documentation exists for court masques from the first half of the 17th century, notably the work of Inigo Jones and his pupil John Webb. One reason for the lack of information for the public theatres is that stage effects, and particularly machines, were trade secrets. Inventors of theatrical effects took great pains to hold onto their secrets, and the playhouses guarded their machine workings as zealously as a magician guards her or his tricks.

What the technology and the visual experiences were can only be tenuously inferred from stage directions. Milhous concludes from a review of Dorset Garden performances that "at a conservative estimate" the theatre was equipped to fly at least four people independently, and had some very complex floor traps for "transformations" such as that of Proteus. The plates printed in the first edition of Elkanah Settle's Empress of Morocco (1673) (see detail, top right) are the only pictures of actual Restoration stage sets. Pepys' mentions of stage effects in his diary, 1660–68, give the modern reader some help in visualising what audiences saw in the 60s, and even more in entering into their enthusiasms, but the 1660s were still early days. There are scarcely any descriptions or reactions preserved from the heyday of the machine play in the 1670s–1690s, although a general idea of its technology can be gathered from the better-documented French and Italian opera scenery which inspired Thomas Betterton at Dorset Garden Theatre.