Darkening the Auditorium in the Nineteenth Century British Theatre

Today when we go to the theatre we expect the house lights to go down, heralding the start of the stage action. Any exception to this would be seen as seeking to impart some particular angle or significance to the stage action. However, prior to the late nineteenth century, a fully lit auditorium¹ was the norm. This change in theatrical practice has received little attention. Wolfgang Schivelbusch (207) wrote that the move to a darkened auditorium was not simple and straightforward and had proceeded in "fits and starts" while Michael Booth concluded that it "did not become general in the west End until after first World War" (Theatre 62). Neither provided much detail on nineteenth-century practice, on which Terence Rees (219-221) and Gösta Bergman (298-300) are the fullest, although even here the discussion is limited. The aim of this paper is to give a better idea of its erratic history.

While the nineteenth century saw great strides in stage lighting as it took advantage of first gas, then limelight and finally electricity, auditorium lighting remained much the same with the lights on for most of the time–despite gas and electricity being installed, which offered the possibility of dimming or darkening with relative ease. In practice it was much easier to dim than to darken using gas because of the difficulty of relighting the gas even after the introduction of pilot lights in the last quarter of the century.² Whenever an auditorium was said to be darkened in the gas era, it almost certainly meant dimmed, perhaps heavily dimmed. On the other hand it was easy to darken with electricity by switching off the lights. In any case, such possibilities were forestalled by the social pressures of an audience wanting the lights up in order to see and be seen and, less importantly, to read their librettos or programmes.

The level of auditorium lighting was not an issue when theatres were outdoors but once they moved indoors some provision needed to be made and the tension between stage and auditorium lighting began to be appreciated.³ For lighting, Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres used a combination of windows, lamps and candles, which would have given some ability to darken the auditorium by closing the shutters on the windows. By the later seventeenth century, both stage and auditorium lighting must have achieved a good degree of control. When Shakespeare's The Tempest was performed at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1667, in an adaptation by William Davenant and John Dryden, one of the additions was an ambitious opening scene to illustrate the shipwreck that brought Antonio, Alonso and others to Prospero's island. The extensive stage instructions (Shakespeare, 1) included "and when the Ship is sinking, the Whole House is darken'd, and a shower of Fire falls upon 'em (the sailors)".

Thus comparatively early in the life of the English theatre, the power of darkening the auditorium in order to emphasise the effects on the stage was recognised and continued to be exercised from time to time for particular scenes until the end of the nineteenth century, the main exception to an otherwise lit, often brightly lit, auditorium. Perhaps surprisingly there did not seem to be any concern about possible problems during these dark interludes of controlling the often boisterous, not to say occasionally riotous, behaviour of the pit and gallery audiences. Also, notwithstanding the sexual and social anxieties of the Victorian era, has any press comment been found about the hazards of the sexes or classes mixing in darkness in Britain.⁴

Occasions of darkening in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were probably rare and thus unexpected as in a darkened scene in James Cross's pantomime, Harlequin and Quixote, at Covent Garden in 1797, which "created a momentary alarm among the audience" (Whitehall Evening Post 26 Dec. 1797: 2). It was difficult to darken a candle lit auditorium smoothly and with minimal disruption part way through a performance. London theatres may have followed a similar practice to seventeenth-century Venetian theatres, which used the simple expedient of hauling...