Royalty Theatre - The Santley Years

The Santley Years

In 1877 began the association of the theatre, lasting some thirty years, with Kate Santley, who later seems to have acquired the head lease. Producer Richard D'Oyly Carte joined forces with Santley in January 1877 to present Lischen and Fritzen, Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Happy Hampstead by Carte (under the pseudonym Mark Lynne) and his secretary, Frank Desprez. In that year the First Chief Officer of the London Fire Brigade strongly recommended to the Metropolitan Board of Works the immediate closure of the theatre. Santley, however, had it reconstructed to designs of architect Thomas Verity, whose plans, providing improved means of egress were approved in 1882. Verity had also designed the Comedy and the Criterion theatres and the Pavilion at Lord’s.

Many of the productions in these years were opera-bouffes adapted from the French. M. L. Mayer, formerly of the Gaiety Theatre, staged twice-yearly seasons of plays in French. The Coquelins and other luminaries of the Comédie-Française appeared here in the 1880s, when the Royalty was 'the recognized home of the Parisian drama.' A threat of closure for safety reasons was averted by a further reconstruction of the theatre in 1883 to provide additional exits. This was designed by Thomas Verity, and Santley was praised for the theatre's renovations. The opening of Shaftesbury Avenue and of new theatres in that neighbourhood, including the Lyric Theatre and the Apollo Theatre, drew audiences away from the little Royalty Theatre in Dean Street, and in the 1890s the Royalty was not prospering. When the theatre finally had a great success, with Brandon Thomas’s play, Charley's Aunt, its popularity led to its transference after only a month to the larger Globe Theatre. Ibsen's Ghosts premièred, to predictable outrage, at the theatre, in a single private London performance on 13 March 1891. The Lord Chamberlain's Office censorship was avoided by the formation of a subscription-only Independent Theatre Society, which included Thomas Hardy and Henry James among its members. Again, for the Society, George Bernard Shaw premièred Widowers' Houses, his first play, here the following year.

In 1895-96 the Royalty's manager was Arthur Bourchier, and the theatre underwent another renovation, by architect Walter Emden. He produced, among other plays, The Chili Widow, an adaptation of his own that ran for over 300 nights. In 1899, the first production of the Incorporated Stage Society took place with the first performance of Shaw's You Never Can Tell. In 1900-01 Mrs. Patrick Campbell hired the theatre and staged a succession of contemporary plays in which she starred, and in 1903-04 Hans Andresen and Max Behrend presented a successful season of German theatre. Also in 1904, the newly founded Irish National Theatre Society gave plays by W. B. Yeats and, in 1905, it presented an early performance of Synge's first play, The Shadow of the Glen. In addition, Philip Carr's Mermaid Society produced Elizabethan and Jacobean plays.