by Tim Rayborn
The Derby disaster at the London Coliseum (1905)
Stop horsing around
Sir Oswald Stoll (1866–1942) had a fantastic idea, or so he thought. He was the manager of the newly opened London Coliseum, sometimes called the Coliseum Theatre; in fact, he managed several of these popular theaters around Britain. Mere weeks after the Coliseum’s opening on December 24, 1904, Stoll planned to stage a spectacle that would be a sure crowd-pleaser: producing a version of the Derby horse race, live onstage! With real horses and jockeys! King Edward VII loved horse racing, the public loved horse racing, and here it was being combined with an exciting theatrical production; what could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a bit, in fact.
The plan was to place said horses and riders onto a carousel-like revolving construction. This would allow the horses to be brought up to a full run (in the opposite direction) while essentially remaining in place on the stage, and would be a magnificent way to simulate the thrill of an actual race in a small, enclosed area. These kinds of crazy spectacles weren’t all that unusual at the time, when every theater was trying to outdo every other one to bring in crowds. The use of live animals was also fairly common. Since there weren’t a lot of health and safety regulations inconveniencing everyone’s fun, the producers basically said, “Hell yeah, let’s do it!”
And of course, it all went horribly wrong. At some point during the onstage race, one of the horses stumbled and was thrown into the orchestra pit. The jockey, Fred Dent, was killed, and several musicians were injured. The Medical Press and Circular, a weekly London journal, was not at all amused and objected to future performances:
Real jockeys on real racers ride an imitation Derby on a rapidly revolving platform. It is needless to point out that the planting of a horse’s foot on the non-revolving centre of the platform would lead to instantaneous somersaults. The fatal accident a few days ago resulted from some such mishap. The whole performance is so absolutely dangerous to life and limb that in our opinion it should be stopped at once…. Should one of the racers fall on the revolving platform, the deadly havoc that might instantly be wrought is terrible to contemplate. The fall of a leading horse would rake the field as if a volley of shrapnel were fired into the ranks of the racers. The management of the Coliseum, having now had due warning, will have to be held responsible for any subsequent accident in this part of their performance.
Stoll managed to survive the incident with his career intact and learned his lesson about bigger not always being better; he eventually went into filmmaking, probably a safer option.
Ödön von Horváth (1901–1938)
Going out on a limb
An Austro-Hungarian playwright who fell afoul of the Nazis, von Horváth wrote a good number of novels and plays. He received literary prizes and much acclaim. His play Tales from the Vienna Woods (1930), a farcical attack on fascism, won him the prestigious Kleist Prize (a German literary award) in 1931. It told the story of a group of people in a town who remain complacent while fascist forces come to power. When the Nazis seized control, this story obviously didn’t go over so well; his works were banned, and he feared for his safety. In 1933, he fled Germany for Vienna, where he continued to write plays, including the amusingly titled Figaro Gets a Divorce in 1937. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, he escaped to Paris, where he continued to write against Nazi aggression.
He was not safe for long, however, and it had nothing to do with political turmoil. Poor von Horváth was out on the Champs-Élysées near the Théâtre Marigny during a thunderstorm. He was visiting a friend to discuss the possibility of filming his play Youth Without God, a tale of the struggle of an individual against a totalitarian state. A branch fell from a nearby tree and struck him, delivering a killing blow. Coincidentally, he had told a friend only a short time before, “I am afraid of streets. Roads can be hostile to one, can destroy one. Streets scare me.” His plays would not be revived in Germany until the 1960s, and an attempt to stage Tales from the Vienna Woods in Vienna shortly after the war incited a riot. Apparently, even after the fall of the Nazis, the subject matter was too sensitive and recent.
Von Horváth seems to have had an odd or humorous outlook on life. Once while he was hiking in Bavaria, he found the corpse of a man long dead. You would think this discovery would induce concern or outright panic, but not in our young man. Next to the body was a knapsack and inside was a never-sent postcard saying, “Having a wonderful time.” When asked how he reacted, he answered, “I posted it.”
Tennessee Williams (1911–1983)
All bottled up
Williams was a celebrated American author of plays, novels, screenplays, poetry, and other works. It was his plays that brought him the most recognition, earning him a Tony award and two Pulitzer Prizes (among other accolades) by the late 1950s. Among his most famous plays are The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), all of which were later made into films. Williams achieved fame and recognition, but his personal life was dogged by problems, controversies, and issues with addiction.
The son of an abusive and alcoholic father (whose temper led to his having a portion of one ear bit off in a fight over a poker game), Williams would eventually succumb to alcohol problems of his own. A homosexual in a world still deeply disapproving of it, he nevertheless maintained an ongoing, if stormy, relationship with actor Frank Merlo. They traveled frequently because Williams seemed to need a constant change of scene to stimulate his artistic work. He visited and lived in New Orleans, New York, Rome, London, and Barcelona, among other locales, noting that doing this prevented a downward spiral into depression: “Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.”
With Merlo’s death from lung cancer in 1963, Williams began a seemingly irreversible slide into depression. He wrote a good number of plays over the next two decades, but the shine seemed to have worn off and they were not the critical darlings that his earlier work had been. Several were outright failures. His health began to be affected—he suffered from a number of medical conditions, including arthritis and heart problems, and once commented, “I’ve had every disorder known to man.” His brother committed him to a hospital for a time in 1969.
Williams agreed to being prescribed amphetamines for his depression and sedatives for his insomnia, and he became addicted to both. He died in the Elysée Hotel in New York on February 25, 1983. That he was the victim of an overdose is not particularly surprising, but it was the nature of his death that was quite strange. He was found lying next to the bed with a plastic cap lodged in his throat; the cap had come from a bottle of eyedrops that he frequently used (he also had cataracts). It seems that he had ingested so much in the way of alcohol and drugs that his gag reflex was suppressed (an empty bottle of wine and barbiturates were found in the room). So he may have been attempting to put drops in an eye and dropped the cap into his mouth, but was unable to cough it back up. It’s possible that the sedative he was using, Seconal, was also in part responsible for killing him. The death was ruled an accident.
Albert Camus (1913–1960)
Can’t see the forest for the trees
Camus was a French-Algerian writer, playwright, philosopher, journalist, and essayist who embraced absurdism. This existentialism-like philosophy maintains that humanity’s attempts to find meaning in existence will ultimately fail. We want to feel significant and have purpose, but in the face of a cold, uncaring universe, that objective is thwarted. Camus nevertheless held that we should continue the struggle to find meaning, for in recognizing that the universe is not comprised of absolutes, we are thus freed and so can create our own meanings simply by searching for them. Despite similarities between this view and those of existentialism, Camus denied that he subscribed to existentialist beliefs, once remarking, “Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked.”
He was also devoted to communism (but later
associated with French anarchists) and football—a logical combination, or not. He played professionally for an Algerian team in the later 1920s. When once asked whether he preferred theater or football, he confidently answered “football.” As far as communism was concerned, he was later very critical of Soviet actions, and some think that this may have come back to haunt him, as we will see.
He began his literary endeavors as a playwright and a theater director, and while he drifted into other genres over time, he was always interested in the medium and considered his theatrical work to be very good. He wrote four original plays and adapted preexisting stories for the stage, though none of these were as popular as his other writings. At the time of his death, he was planning more dramas for live performance, as well as for television and film. The events of a cold winter day put an end to those plans.
On January 4, 1960, Camus was traveling with Michel Gallimard (his friend and publisher) in Gallimard’s car, returning to Provence from Paris. Camus had originally intended to take the train with his family back home, but his friend had convinced him to go by car instead. The roads were icy and dangerous. Just south and east of Paris, near Sens, Gallimard lost control of the car and slammed into a tree; Camus died instantly. Investigators found the train ticket for the return journey and an unfinished novel with his body. Gallimard also died a few days later. The French nation mourned the loss of their Nobel Prize–winning writer, and tributes poured in.
But was the crash a tragic accident? Not everyone thinks so. The Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana noted in his book, Celý život:
I heard something very strange from the mouth of a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources. According to him, the accident that had cost Albert Camus his life in 1960 was organised by Soviet spies. They damaged a tyre on the car using a sophisticated piece of equipment that cut or made a hole in the wheel at speed.
The order was given personally by [Soviet foreign minister Dmitri] Shepilov as a reaction to an article published in Franc-tireur [a French magazine] in March 1957, in which Camus attacked [Shepilov], naming him explicitly in the events in Hungary.
Camus had blasted Shepilov for his role in sending Soviet troops to crush the uprising in Hungary in 1956. Not long after, Camus also very publicly supported the work of Boris Pasternak, whose Doctor Zhivago had been banned by Stalin. Did Shepilov retaliate with a very fatal payback? It’s an intriguing theory, but many don’t believe it is true. Camus’s biographer Olivier Todd spent time researching old Soviet archives but could find no evidence that Moscow had ordered the assassination, noting, “While I wouldn’t put it past the KGB to do such a thing, I don’t believe the story is true.” Further, Gallimard’s offer seems to have been rather spur-of-the-moment, so when would the KGB have had the opportunity to sabotage the tires? Unless Gallimard was also in on it—he did die later, so maybe he didn’t intend to perish at all. But now we’re getting into the realm of conspiracy theory, best left to those in tinfoil hats with the luxury of abundant time to write lengthy blogs.
Attis, looking remarkably calm in the face of horrid castration and death. (Wikimedia Commons.)
A bust of Aeschylus, showing him sometime before his head became a makeshift mortar to a bird’s pestle. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Roman actors, preparing to get up to all sorts of debauched things by the look of it. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Nineteenth-century depiction of a medieval mystery play from fifteenth-century Flanders, with some folks looking rather distracted and bored. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Wild men accidentally catching fire in the Bal des Ardents (“Ball of the Burning Men”). One finds relief in a vat of wine. (Image courtesy of the British Library.)
The scandalous Pietro Aretino laughs himself to death, in a painting by Anselm Feuerbach (1829–1880). (Wikimedia Commons.)
A period sketch of the Swan Theatre in 1596, giving important insights into Elizabethan theater designs. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Ben Jonson, the gifted English playwright with some anger issues. (Image courtesy of the British Library.)
The title page of The Roaring Girle, a play about the scandalous life of the cross-dressing Moll Cutpurse; her actual life was even more interesting. (Archive.org.)
The diabolical pact of Urbain Grandier. The demons’ signatures (Satan, Leviathan, Astaroth, and others) look like heavy metal band logos. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Molière, the French genius who angered many but wrote the best comedies of his age. (Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.)
Moll Davis, an early English actress who may have had some continence issues in her quest for royal patronage. (Image courtesy of the National Library of Portugal, Lisbon.)
The Golden Rump of King George II (as a satyr) in all its glory; rumors of said play led to a crackdown on English theater. (Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.)
Goldoni, famous for reinventing the Commedia dell’Arte and getting into feuds. (Image courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna.)
Voltaire, the controversial genius who had more than a few unpleasant things to say about religion, politics, and society. (Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.)
Alexander Pushkin, who couldn’t stomach his final duel. (Wikimedia Commons.)
The title page of The Vampire, but said vampire looks less like a creature of the night and more like a kilted hipster. (Image courtesy of the HathiTrust digital library.)
Alfred Jarry, unofficial pioneer of the Theater of the Absurd, whose own life often bordered on absurdity. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Tennessee Williams, who got a bit bottled up at the end. (Library of Congress, Washington, DC / Wikimedia Commons.)
Camus, who didn’t see the forest for the trees. (Library of Congress.)
Titus Andronicus prepares to lose a hand, and all for nothing. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Sir Francis Bacon, one of many that some claim secretly wrote Shakespeare’s plays; take a number and get in line, pal. (Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library.)
Pantalone from the Commedia dell’Arte, in the early seventeenth century, looking grotesque and greedy. (Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.)
An eighteenth-century Punch and Judy show. Violent puppet shenanigans were a spin-off from the Commedia, and not especially child-friendly. (Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library.)
The horrific Bluebeard prepares to kill his bride. His onstage death by the hand of a murdered wife’s corpse thrilled nineteenth-century audiences. (Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.)
One of the endless horrors of the Grand Guignol: “The man who killed death.” (Wikimedia Commons.)
The three witches, in thunder, lightning, and rain. Is “the Scottish Play” cursed? (Image courtesy of Michael John Goodman, The Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive.)
A ghost light, kept on to illuminate the way for restless spirits and wayward janitors. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Joseph Grimaldi the mime, whose disembodied clown head is said to float about, haunting the Drury Lane Theatre in London … Sweet dreams! (Wikimedia Commons.)
Olive Thomas, who charmed audiences and died tragically, but now playfully haunts the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Acclaimed actor David Garrick, posing with bust of Shakespeare; no bewigged dogs in sight. (Image courtesy of the Rijksmuseum.)
John Wilkes Booth (with strangely short limbs) assassinates Abraham Lincoln. Nearly a century later, one gentleman recounted seeing it all happen. (Wikimedia Commons.)
Intermission
And so, for a moment, the curtain drops, and the house lights come up. While you’re getting a drink or waiting in line for the facilities, you may be thinking about a few things. Obviously, many important playwrights and actors didn’t appear in the previous scenes; the omission of several good stories and people is inevitable, unless we want an encyclopedia, which we don’t.
The thing is, many of said omitted playwrights lived surprising
ly calm and “normal” lives—except for the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, who seemed to wallow in a never-ending parade of scandal and violence—and so wouldn’t have been good candidates for inclusion, anyway. Who wants to read about something boring like living a long, happy, productive life?
The lack of women is a notable and unfortunate stand-out feature that is representative of the sidelining that such creative souls have faced throughout so much history. However, English actresses and female playwrights were finally getting some credit by the seventeenth century, and women have played important roles in continental theater for a very long time.
Musicals, vaudeville, pantomime, and Broadway in general are missing from these accounts, simply because they represent whole other genres of entertainment, involving music as much as acting. It seemed like a bit of a task to try to cram them all in, when there were so many purely theatrical grotesque goodies to survey. Perhaps another book for another time …
So, now the show moves away from chronological history and treats you to a buffet of the bizarre, from fascinating facts and questions about Shakespeare (of course he had to have a whole chapter devoted to him!) to violent (yet hilarious) Italian comedy, to appalling amounts of blood and guts onstage, haunted theaters, and the endless superstitions that plague actors. Return to your seat; the curtain rises, the house lights dim, and the players take their positions to continue with the show—merde!
