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12 Play Panoramic
or Ultra-Sensational
The Great City
VERY little was needed to turn realism into a game. A thrilled audience thought the property railway-engine ran true to life ; a bored audience said it ran true to the nursery. While After Dark was at the Princess's in 1868, Watts Phillips presented the Surrey with Land Rats And Water Rats, whose heroine, a beautiful Covent Garden marketwoman (one idea never copied 1), was placed inert upon the track. All the thanks he got for keeping up with the fashion was a critic's comment that the jerky express was " much given to shutting itself up telescopically ". Boucicault was wiser : his Rescued put steam locomotion to a fresh use at the Adelphi in 1879. The villain causes a swing-bridge to open because the passengers travelling towards the gap include the infant heir to vast estates. Down stage the heroine swings on a lever in the signal-box : up stage the distant bridge closes and a toy train rattles over a toy viaduct to safety. While Boucicault thus dropped the bound-and-gagged idea and stuck to the railway, Daly dropped the railway and stuck to bound-and-gagged in his drama of 1868, The Red Scarf. The hero is tied to a log that bears him almost to the mill with rescue music accompanying the shriek of the circular saw — which was so good a sensation that it continued on the stage, in other plays, long after The Red Scarf had been forgotten.
Realism was solely in the eye of the beholder. Scenes might possess this quality one year and lose it the next, and recover it when removed to some less pernickety theatre. So much depended not on what was viewed but on how it was viewed that almost any melodramatic spectacle of contemporary life could be acclaimed as the real origin of realism on a panoramic scale. Some have given all credit to The Great City, written by Andrew Halhday for Drury Lane at Easter, 1867,
1 This rash statement must be amended. Covent Garden Market was represented by a ballet at the Empire, Leicester Square. " Covent Garden Market ", said Sir Max Beerbohm, " is not like that. Don't you wish it were ? "
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