Ecstatic Gaucho

Programme from Oscar Barrett’s Dick Whittington, December 1898 – February 1899

This Christmas hols I tried to find traces of my mysterious great-grandfather John. Not much is known about him despite searching the nationalarchives.gov. All that is known is that he died of consumption (as was the wont of 19c artists) at a young age in 1900 and painted theatre scenery. The 1891 census doesn’t yield a John Pritchard-Barrett and he only left behind two things – a sketch of a boat and a newspaper cutting of an advert for a play which included his name. But as he painted scenery, the Theatre Collection of the V&A at the V&A seemed like a likely place to hunt for clues.

The Theatre Collection is housed deep within the Byzantine labyrinths of Blythe House, a Victorian monstrosity behind Olympia that used to house the Post Office Savings Bank. I turned up at the museum having made an appointment the previous day, when I’d had to tell them who I was researching. No sooner had I made my way down the long musty corridors and stashed my stuff in a locker, than a librarian pulled out Theatrephile, a journal which included an article on Victorian ’scenic artists’. There was John, under ‘Barrett, J. Pritchard. Known to have been working in London during the 1890s.’ That would explain why searches for Pritchard-Barrett failed.

Next, I was presented with a record of all the theatre programmes in London from 1890 to the present, which listed the personnel involved with the performances. Again, there was great-gramps John’s name and the plays he’d been involved in. I just had to request them the relevant files and the programmes were sent down from the back room.

John, it appeared, worked in panto. Starting in 1892 he’d been involved with seven pantomimes, including Cinderella, Dick Whittington, Jack and the Beanstalk, Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe. Perhaps I was too keen to find links with this mysterious past, but it seemed there was something quite familiar about these ornate 1890s programmes. These are the same stories told in today’s pantomimes and all but one of the five theatres are still operating.

It turned out that great-gramps John was not only a scenic painter, but also ‘regisseur‘, which one of the librarians told me is a sort of choreographer. All very interesting, but it was only when I found that all the pantomimes were organised by a certain ‘Oscar Barrett’ that John’s world really came to life. Oscar Barrett started life as an actor in the 1860s and become a manager in the 1880s. When I got home, I typed his name into Google.

It turned out Oscar Barrett took Cinderella to Broadway in March, 1894 and the New York Times online archive contained several vivid reports. On April 22, the NY Times reported the arrival of the ‘long-talked-of Cinderella’ involved 196 people, 140 of whom had been brought over from London. The play had 10 scenes and involved elaborate props, including Cinderella’s carriage which had electrically illuminated wheels and Shetland ponies to draw it.

The next day, April 23, Oscar Barrett tries to explain pantomime to the Americans in an interview. British pantomime is not silent mime, as in the USA, but a ‘vehicle for spectacular effects and variety business’ with a minimal story. Barrett’s production was saturated with music, with six minutes being the longest peroid without tunes. He also aimed to make the story increasingly important – while cranking up the spectacle to even higher levels than previously seen on the stage. This gave the musicians, costumiers and scenic artists greater responsibility than in normal plays. ‘Fairy extravaganzas’ would describe the productions, he felt,  better than ‘pantomime’.

Barrett was 47 by the time of this interview, but in the last 15 years had cranked out 47 pantos. He sometimes ran two or three around the country each winter – and one year had managed to produce four. He tells a story of producing a panto in Manchester and another in Crystal Palace, South London which involved two weeks spent on trains travelling between rehearsals held in each city on alternate days. In the 1880s!

The scenery even gets its own page in the programme for Aladdin

On April 24, the NYT published its review of Barrett’s fairy extravaganza, calling it ‘pretty, but excessively British’ (pantomime is certainly the British). The large audience ‘admired much of it and patiently enjoyed the rest’. There were 10 scenes each with a different ‘elaborate and beautiful’ backdrop. In fact, the reviewer reckons that it was only the richness of backdrop and costumes that distinguished the ‘extravaganza’ from a Kiralfy show. Despite their reviewer’s snootiness, the paper records that by May 2 Cinderella as being a ‘big hit’ with audiences who filled the house every night ensuring plenty of advance orders.

Oscar Barrett was not just a big success in the UK and New York, but possibly also influenced the history of movies. On Google I found a book called Stage To Screen: Theatrical Method From Garrick To Griffith, a book written by Nicholas Vardag in the 1940s that looks at the development of film from the theatre. According to Vardag, there was a 19c genre called ‘pantomime-spectacle’ which included Oscar Barrett’s productions. These were a key ‘area for the development of pictorial staging’, which was to become the film set. The scenery was of crucial importance in these pantos and, Verdag thinks, they must have set a precedent which illustrated the vast potentials of the cinema to George Méliès. Known as ‘the father of special effects’, Méliès made a movie called ‘A Voyage to the Moon‘ in 1902 which is one of the earliest to contain sfx. The success of Méliès and his movie special effects explains why ’spectacle-pantomimes’ dissappeared from the stage, according to Vardag. Although Barrett’s productions were the ‘ultimate development possible to this form’, they just couldn’t compete with the big screen.

So, Oscar Barrett and his ‘fairy extravaganzas’ were impressive and influential, but this didn’t tell me much more about John himself. I’d learnt to look under ‘Barrett, J. Pritchard’ rather than ‘J. Pritchard-Barrett’ when searching the National Archive, but it still didn’t produce anything. The man remained a mystery, even if the milieu he worked in had come to life: if Paris had the Moulin Rouge, London had Oscar Barrett’s pantomimes.

If the audiences at Cinderella in New York were alert, they might have noticed that the scene ‘At Baron Pumpolino’s’ was John’s sole contribution. Five years later, he’d progressed to painting five scenes in the 1898/99 production of Dick Whittington. The season finished on 18 February, 1899, and on 15 March, 1900, just a year later, he was dead. Amongst the scenes he painted in that final season, the pantomime started at ‘Office of the Pantomime Supply Association, Unlimited’; surely a workshop ideally suited for an aspiring ’scenic painter’?

Tags: A Voyage to the Moon, Broadway, George Méliès, Le Voyage dans la lune, London's West End, Moulin Rouge, oscar barrett, pantomime, sfx, special effects, theatre collection at the V&A Museum

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