NAUTICAL DRAMA
by Catherine Haill, V & A
England was a seafaring nation, and in the 1820s and 1830s a mania for nautical drama gripped the London stage. Plays featuring the exploits of brave, patriotic, honest sailors battling at sea or safe in harbour included stirring songs, picturesque hornpipes, nautical jargon, spectacular scenery and effects, and sentimental endings. They presented a hopelessly unrealistic view of life in the British navy, and audiences adored them.
The taste for nautical drama began in London's West End. Covent Garden and Drury Lane staged tributes to the death of Lord Nelson in 1805, and in 1806 The Battle of Trafalgar was re-enacted as the finale of The Rival Patriots on the water tank of the Aquatic Theatre, Sadler's Wells, with miniature ships made by Woolwich dockyard shipwrights. The craze really set sail however at the Adelphi Theatre, with Edward Fitzball's plays including The Floating Beacon (1824), The Pilot (1825), and The Flying Dutchman; or, The Phantom Ship (1827). Undoubtedly the biggest hit was Black Eyed Susan; or, all in the Downs, by Douglas Jerrold at the Surrey Theatre, 1829, with Thomas Potter Cooke (1786-1864) as the valiant sailor William. Both Jerrold and Cooke had served in the navy, and their combined talents resulted in a sensation which became the mainstay of Cooke's career.
The home of nautical drama in the East End was the Pavilion Theatre, Whitechapel. By 1827 when the theatre opened, a proliferation of newly-built docks were in use, and the area was awash with sailors, and people concerned with ships and sailing. As one author noted:
.....in and about and among the houses and the streets around the docks rise a forest of masts; there is no seaport in the country, not even Portsmouth, which is so charged and laden with the atmosphere of ocean and suggestion of things far off as this port of London and its riverside.
In August 1827 the `Grand Serious Nautical Pantomimical Recreation' at the New Royal Pavilion Black Beard the Sea Devil, provided ample opportunity for outlandish pirate costumes, naval uniforms, ship-board and seascape scene painting and effects, and ubiquitous hornpipes. In January 1831 the undisputed master of the hornpipe, T.P. Cooke, starred at the Pavilion in a double nautical bill, as William in Black- Eyed Susan, and Long Tom Coffin in The Pilot, or a Tale of the Sea. The accession of William IV `the sailor King' in 1830 encouraged a new wave of nautical drama, and on Easter Monday 1831 the Pavilion's seafaring credentials were reflected in its opening address, liberally salted with nautical metaphor:
New rigg'd and freighted for the Thespian main Our gallant vessel seeks the Seas again.... Here, at her helm, the self-same Pilot steers, And the same Crew partake his hopes and fears
Although the craze for nautical drama reached a peak in the 1830s, the Pavilion staged nautical drama well into the 1870s, and reflected its taste in its interior decoration. The playbill for England's Pride!, or, Seamen's Perils and Seamen's Fortitude, September 1842, proudly listed the auditorium's nautical paintings (`in compliment to the sons of the ocean, the steady patrons of this establishment') including vignettes of classical water gods, views of the life of a ship, portraits of English admirals, and a `splendid new act-drop depicting the Battle of Trafalgar'. Twelve years later the Pavilion's poster for 16th September 1854 noted that the correctness of its scene paintings of naval conflicts would be recognised by: `the Jolly Jack Tars who so liberally crowd on board (the now) first rate craft, the Royal Pavilion.' Even after the disastrous fire of February 1856, the new Pavilion opened in October 1858 with The Sailor's Home, or, the Terror of the Ocean, and an act drop curtain depicting Neptune giving Britannia the Sovereignty of the Seas.
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Search Terms
Subject Terms: Sailors,Pirates,Ships,Mutiny,Nore Mutiny, 1797,Name Terms: Great Britain. Royal Navy,
Keyword Terms: Nautical drama,
East London Theatre Archive
