The Theater: Old Vic in New Quarters

In 1941 London’s shabby, slum-girdled Old Vic, one of the great repertory theaters of the world, was blitzed to atoms. But London was not to be robbed by a bomb of a tradition it cherished, or of the classics it loved. Fortnight ago, in St. Martin’s Lane, a reborn Old Vic opened in a blaze of glory, and helped a theater slump, brought on by the robombs, to turn back into a boom.

It was clearly the occasion, and not the play — Ibsen’s Peer Gynt — that made tickets scarcer than hen’s eggs and fetched everybody from Noel Coward in specs to G.I. William Saroyan. But Lady Colefax’s typical suspiration, “If one’s friends will put on Peer Gynt, one must see it,” changed to enthusiasm as Ibsen’s murky poetic drama, in a fresh translation by Norman Ginsbury, took on pace and clarity. When Peer made love to fat, giggling Anitra, the audience whooped. When he was crowned Emperor in a madhouse, everybody got goose pimples. With Ralph Richardson brilliant as Peer and Dame Sybil Thorndike a tender, humorous Aase, the play swept on to a 20-minute ovation.

Charwomen and Queens. Peer Gynt’s social glitter was in sharp contrast to the audiences the Old Vic had been used to —the long-haired, sandaled Bohemians, the cockneys, charwomen and ancients in Inverness capes who sat raptly on hard wooden benches and glared at anyone who even shuffled his feet. But in far-off days the old theater had known glitter too.

Called the Royal Coburg when it opened in 1818, the playhouse on the south side of the Thames was renamed the Royal Victoria when Victoria became heiress presumptive to the throne. A century ago it was a scene of splendor, with linkmen lighting theatergoers — including the young Victoria and her mother — across the undrained Lambeth marshes, where footpads lurked. There played the great Kean and the great Macready, while society folk goggled at the heavy curtain of looking glass that later had to be ripped out because its weight was pulling down the roof. Bits of the curtain served as dressing room mirrors till the blitz.

Cutthroats and Reformers. A generation later, the great Macready had given way to the cheapest melodrama, and the dukes in the audience to cutthroats. The theater remained an eyesore until a social reformer named Emma Cons (London’s first woman County Councilor) nailed it as one of her jobs. She turned it into a genteel music hall.

But it was Emma Cons’ musical, driving niece, Lilian Baylis, who brought the Old Vic back into the limelight by putting genius ahead of gentility. She introduced the new “moving pictures,” then opera and concerts, finally the repertory company that made the Old Vic a worldwide synonym for Shakespeare.