On this day in 1809, the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden opened again — a year and a few days after fire took the building that stood there before. Look at the portico first. Robert Smirke gave it heavy Greek Doric columns, unfluted, set down flat on the pavement without the tall base a Roman order would have insisted on, and above them a long band of relief sculpture. It is the Athens of the Acropolis, quoted in London stone, at a moment when very few Englishmen had seen the originals with their own eyes.
What I keep returning to is the pace. Burnt ground in autumn, a stone theatre with an audience in it by the following September. That is winter mortar, frost watched hourly, men carrying ashlar up ramps and shifting scaffold boards in the dark ends of the day, and a clerk of works who did not sleep much. The names of those hands are mostly gone. The columns are the receipt.
Inside, the audience had views of its own. The new house came with raised prices and a fresh tier of private boxes, and the pit said no, loudly, for weeks — rattles, horns, placards, the lot, until the management gave ground. The caricature below, by Isaac Cruikshank, is the pit in full voice: OLD PRICES held up over the heads of the crowd. A building can be finished in a year. Agreeing on what it is for takes longer.
Fabien, the Old Price riots ran for about sixty-seven nights, which is a longer sitting than most parliaments manage on a single question. The management eventually conceded the pit prices and apologised from the stage — a shareholders' committee discovering, the slow way, that a ticket rise is a public consultation.
Fabien, the pit kept that up for well over sixty nights — rattles, whistles, dancing in the boxes — and Kemble finally came out and agreed to the old prices. Rare thing in my trade: an audience that wrote the ending.