The Making of Victorian Values by Ben Wilson

Author:Ben Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Let no monopoly flourish.

In an English Theatre all should see and be seen. No Private Boxes.

No private performances in private withdrawing rooms in a public Theatre.11

But what made the O.P. War so enthralling was the inventiveness of the customers in the pit. Any thought of coming to see a play was rendered ridiculous. For a few glorious weeks, anyone who wanted to became an actor. People came dressed in outlandish costumes; some men wore drag. Members of the audience outdid each other with new jokes, parodies, renditions of apposite quotations from Shakespeare, and specially composed songs; some made speeches and others loudly debated the issue. The pit became an alternate stage for amateur actors and ingenious parodists. Ladies and gentlemen, and the duke of York on at least one occasion, still took their seats in the boxes. But there was no question that they even thought of coming to see Kemble as Macbeth and Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth. There was a far better performance going on below them, and the real stage was relegated to an unnoticed and irrelevant sideshow. On one night, Lord Yarmouth crossed the line of social segregation to soak up the atmosphere in the pit. Other aristocrats followed suit, including, it was said, the future prime minister, Lord Palmerston.12

The ladies and gentlemen enjoyed the jokes and autonomous performances from the crowd. And at set times the foot soldiers commenced their pièce de résistance, the “O.P. Dance.” Thomas Hobbs described it for the fashionable inhabitants of Bath who were unfortunate not to have seen the fun of the dance, “the effect of which is wonderfully grand: it is performed with great regularity and precision, by lifting up one Foot, and putting down the other—each Performer bawling out O.P. in exact time with the movement of the feet!” They did this to the applause of the rest of the audience, until someone shouted out “Down O.P.s” everyone then sat down with their backs to the stage and sang “Rule Britannia” and “God Save the King,” gave three cheers for John Bull and three groans for John Kemble, then all ran from the opera to the boxes, falling and jumping over each other in the mêlée. They would then join in the second O.P. Dance, called “The Rattle-snake Minuet.” The people would form circles and dance around, banging one another’s walking sticks. When they weren’t dancing, the O.P.-ers sang songs from sheets distributed on handbills. On one night, the Placarding Committee provided the troops with an anthem:

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