Bring on the Elephants

Peter Longman’s talk, which opened the 2016 PROBUS programme, took us back to the world of theatre 100 years ago.

He explained how theatre ownership had declined from being a very good way of making money – London’s Savoy Hotel had been built on the profits from Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas in the Savoy Theatre next door – to a good way of losing it. The increased cost of mounting productions, coupled with competition from cinema and then television, led to 85% of those theatres that had stood in 1914 being lost by 1970. Many theatres were victims of rising land values as developers bought them up simply in order to demolish them and build something more profitable. Peter explained some of the less ethical tricks resorted to by developers, as well as the successes of preservation groups often working against the odds. And he told us of some of the strange ‘sleeping beauty’ theatres still waiting to be rescued.

Finally we discovered some of the spectacular theatrical productions that toured the country before the days of animal rights or health and safety regulations; circus rings that sank beneath the ground to reveal huge tanks of cold water into which elephants slid down slides, coaches and horses being swept off bridges as an explosion of dynamite destroyed a dam, human cannon balls, and we learned how they did the famous pantomime ‘transformation scene’.

PL 11 Feb 2016