The Theatre Royal

Theatre had been banned during the eleven-year Puritan Interregnum, and playhouses became possible again only when the English monarchy was restored with the return of Charles II in 1660. Charles soon issued Letters Patent to two parties licensing the formation of new acting companies; one went to Thomas Killigrew, whose company became known as the King's Company and who built a new theatre in Drury Lane. The patents granted the two companies a shared monopoly on the public performance of legitimate drama in London, meaning spoken plays rather than opera, dance, concerts or plays with music, and although it was challenged through the 18th century, the monopoly remained legally in place until 1843. Drury Lane had known playhouse trouble before: the Cockpit Theatre there, used by Queen Anne's Men, was targeted by rioting apprentices on 4 March 1617. Killigrew's playhouse, its architect unknown, opened on 7 May 1663 as the Theatre Royal in Bridges Street, named from the placement of its entrance. For its first two centuries, in the judgement of the author Peter Thomson, Drury Lane could “reasonably have claimed to be London's leading theatre”.

The King's Company had been forced into commissioning so expensive a playhouse by the success of the rival Duke's Company, which was drawing fascinated crowds to Lincoln's Inn Fields with moveable scenery, and the Theatre Royal imitated those innovations. Charles II attended its productions frequently, as did Samuel Pepys, who was there the day after the opening for Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Humorous Lieutenant. Killigrew's authority over his veteran actors was far from absolute: Michael Mohun, whom Pepys called “the best actor in the world”, and Charles Hart held out for shares and good contracts, and the division of power between patentee and chief actors led to conflicts that hampered the theatre as a business venture.

It was nevertheless mostly at the struggling Theatre Royal that the plays now counted as classics were acted, above all Restoration comedy, dominated in the 1660s by William Wycherley and the house dramatist John Dryden. With actresses appearing for the first time at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields in the 1660s, playwrights began writing outspoken female characters and provocative breeches roles, and Hart and Charles II's mistress Nell Gwyn refined the scenes of repartee and flirtation those comedies turned on. The Great Plague of London struck in the summer of 1665 and the theatre was shut down by order of the Crown on 5 June along with all other public entertainment, staying closed for 18 months until the autumn of 1666, a period in which its stage was widened. Lying well to the west of the City boundary, it was unaffected by the Great Fire that raged through the City in September 1666, but it burned down six years later, on 25 January 1672.

Killigrew built a larger theatre on the same plot, renamed the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, which opened in 1674 and lasted nearly 120 years. Who designed it is not settled. Through the 20th century one illustration was repeatedly published as Christopher Wren's design for the 1674 house, an attribution scholars have disputed since 1964: the drawing at All Souls College, Oxford, carries only a pencil inscription reading “Play house” and bears no signature and no date. The King's Company never recovered financially from the loss of the Bridges Street house. The cost of the new theatre, the replacement of costumes and scenery lost in the fire and competitive pressure from the Duke's Company all told against it, and the political unrest of 1678 to 1684, with the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill crisis, drew potential audiences away from things theatrical; the King's, which had no profit margin to carry it through the lean years, suffered most.

In 1682 the companies merged, or rather the King's was absorbed by the Duke's. Led at the time by Thomas Betterton, the United Company chose Drury Lane as its production house, leaving the Duke's theatre in Dorset Garden closed for a time. In 1688 Betterton was removed from managerial control by Alexander Davenant, son of William Davenant, the original patent holder for the Duke's Company; Davenant's management alongside Charles Killigrew proved brief and disastrous, and by 1693 he was fleeing to the Canary Islands in the wake of embezzlement charges. The theatre then fell into the hands of the lawyer Christopher Rich for the next 16 years.

Rich attempted to recoup what the patentees' sons had drained from the company's resources by cost-cutting tyranny, pitting actor against actor and slashing salaries, and by 1695 the actors were alienated and humiliated enough to walk out and set up a cooperative company of their own. Nine men and six women departed, all established performers, among them Betterton, the tragedian Elizabeth Barry and the comedian Anne Bracegirdle, leaving what was henceforth called the Patent Company in “a very despicable condition”. A private letter of 19 November 1696 reported that Drury Lane “has no company at all”, and that the company must break unless a new play revived its reputation; the play is assumed to have been John Vanbrugh's The Relapse, and it turned out the success it needed. Rich continued at the head of the theatre until 1709, when the patent was revoked amid a complex tangle of political machinations.

A lawyer named William Collier was briefly given the right to mount productions at Drury Lane, but by 1710 the troupe was in the hands of the actors Colley Cibber, Robert Wilks and Thomas Doggett, a triumvirate later sharply satirised in Alexander Pope's Dunciad. Barton Booth replaced Doggett in 1713, and on 2 March 1717 the theatre gave the premiere of The Loves of Mars and Venus, choreographed by John Weaver and the first ballet to be performed in England. Cibber led the theatre through a controversial but generally successful period until 1733, when he sold his controlling interest to John Highmore, probably at a vastly inflated price. An actors' revolt followed, and control passed to Charles Fleetwood: his abolition of the practice of allowing footmen free access to the upper gallery led to riots in 1737, and his gambling problems entangled the theatre in his own financial difficulties.

It was during this period that Charles Macklin, a native of Inishowen in County Donegal in Ulster, rose to fame, propelled by a singular performance as Shylock in an early 1741 production of The Merchant of Venice in which he introduced a naturalistic style of acting in place of the artificial bombast typical of dramatic roles before him. In 1735, in an argument over a wig, Macklin thrust a cane into the face of his fellow actor Thomas Hallam, piercing his left eye and killing him. When Fleetwood's playhouse patent expired in 1747, the theatre and a patent renewal were purchased by the actor David Garrick, who had trained under Macklin, and his partner James Lacy.

Garrick served as manager and lead actor until roughly 1766 and continued in the management role for another ten years. He is especially associated with advancing the Shakespearean tradition in English theatre; during his time at Drury Lane the company mounted at least 24 of Shakespeare's plays, a surge traceable in part to the Licensing Act 1737, which mandated governmental approval of any play before it could be performed and created something of a vacuum of new material. It was under his management that spectators were for the first time barred from the stage itself. In 1775 he had Robert Adam and his brother James renovate the interior, work that brought a stucco facade facing Bridges Street, the first time any part of the theatre proper actually abutted the street. With a series of farewell performances, Garrick left the stage in 1776 and sold his shares to the Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Sheridan and his partners, Thomas Linley the elder and Doctor James Ford, court physician to King George III, completed their purchase two years later, and Sheridan owned the theatre until 1809. He premiered his own comedy of manners The School for Scandal there in 1777. Active management passed through several hands: Sheridan himself, his father Thomas, and the popular actor John Philip Kemble from 1788 to 1796 and again from 1800 to 1802, while Linley took the post of Musical Director on a retainer of £500 a year. Sheridan employed dozens of children as extras, among them Joseph Grimaldi, who made his stage debut there in 1780 and became best known for developing the modern white-face clown; his career at Drury Lane became turbulent and he left for good in 1806.

The theatre needed updating by the end of the 18th century and was demolished in 1791, the company moving temporarily to the new King's Theatre in the Haymarket. A third theatre, designed by Henry Holland, opened on 12 March 1794. It was a cavernous house accommodating more than 3,600 spectators, a scale one owner defended by arguing that small theatres would deprive proprietors of the revenue needed to meet the heavy expenses of such a concern. Iron columns replaced bulky wood and supported five tiers of galleries; Holland said the theatre was “on a larger scale than any other theatre in Europe”, and except for churches it was the tallest building in London. Accounts from the period bemoaned the scale: the actress Sarah Siddons, then part of the Drury Lane company, called it “a wilderness of a place” before leaving along with her brother John Philip Kemble in 1803.

The rebuilding had cost double its original estimate of £80,000 and Sheridan bore the whole of the debt, while productions cost more to mount in the larger house and increased audience revenues failed to make up the difference. On 15 May 1800 James Hadfield fired two pistol shots from the pit towards King George III, sitting in the royal box; jostled by a Mr Dyte, he missed by inches, and the King, apparently unruffled, ordered the performance to continue. The comedy actor John Bannister became acting manager in 1802 and helped see the theatre through its next catastrophe: on 24 February 1809, despite an iron safety curtain and attic water tanks installed as proof against fire, the building burned down. Encountered drinking a glass of wine in the street while he watched it burn, Sheridan was famously reported to have said, “A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside.” Already on the shakiest financial ground, he was ruined entirely by the loss and turned to the brewer Samuel Whitbread, an old friend, who invested strongly and agreed to head a committee to manage the company and oversee the rebuilding, but asked Sheridan to withdraw from management, which he did entirely by 1811.

The present Theatre Royal, designed by Benjamin Dean Wyatt for Whitbread's committee, opened on 10 October 1812 with a Hamlet in which Robert Elliston took the title role. It made some concession toward intimacy at 3,060 seats, about 550 fewer than the earlier building. On 6 September 1817 gas lighting was extended from the audience area to the stage, making Drury Lane the first British theatre to be gaslit throughout. The portico that still stands at the Catherine Street entrance was added in 1820. Management after the reopening in 1813 fell to Samuel James Arnold, overseen by an amateur board and a subcommittee concerned with the theatre as a centre for national culture, on which Lord Byron sat from June 1815 until he left England in April 1816. The on-stage highlight was Edmund Kean, who, like Macklin before him, made his reputation as Shylock, premiering in the role in 1814 and remaining until 1820.

Elliston leased the theatre from 1819 until he went bankrupt in 1826 and the American Stephen Price of New York's Park Theatre followed from 1826 to 1830; through most of the rest of the 19th century Drury Lane passed quickly from one proprietor to another. Alfred Bunn gained control of both Drury Lane and Covent Garden in 1833 and managed the former from 1833 to 1839 and again from 1843 to 1850, championing English opera in place of the Italian operas heard there earlier. The actor-manager Samuel Phelps joined in 1837 and appeared with William Charles Macready in several Shakespeare plays; Macready was briefly manager from 1841 to 1843 and put significant reforms in place, though most productions there were financial disasters. The theatrical monopoly first bestowed by Royal Letters Patent 183 years earlier was abolished by the Theatres Act 1843, but the patent had been largely toothless for decades and the change had little immediate effect. The general decline culminated in F. B. Chatterton's resignation in 1878 and his verdict that “Shakespeare spells ruin, and Byron bankruptcy”. The theatre's best-known ghost, the Man in Grey, is held by legend to be a knife-stabbed man whose skeletal remains were found within a walled-up side passage in 1848.

The house's fortunes rose again under the management of Augustus Harris from 1879. He focused increased resources on the annual pantomime, adding the comedian Dan Leno from Christmas 1888, and these spectacular Christmas shows were a major success. Spectacle became the norm under Harris, who ran the theatre until 1896, and then under Arthur Collins from 1896 to 1923. In 1922, under the managing director Sir Alfred Butt, the building underwent its last major interior renovation of the 20th century, a £150,000 scheme that made it a four-tiered theatre seating just over 2,000. The composer and performer Ivor Novello presented his musicals there from 1931 to 1939. The theatre closed in 1939 on the outbreak of the Second World War, served through it as the headquarters of the Entertainments National Service Association, sustained some minor bomb damage, and reopened in 1946 with Noël Coward's Pacific 1860. From the war onwards it has primarily hosted long runs of musicals, among them Oklahoma! from 1947 and Miss Saigon from 1989 to 1999, the theatre's longest-running show. The building was Grade I listed in February 1958. Andrew Lloyd Webber purchased Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 2000, and on 15 May 2013 he revealed a £4 million restoration marking the theatre's 350th anniversary, which returned its public areas to their original Regency style. The present building is the most recent of four theatres to have stood on the site since 1663, which makes it the oldest theatre site in London still in use. Renovations began again in January 2019, and in July 2021 the theatre reopened after more than two years of extensive work and closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2014 it has been owned and managed by LW Theatres, Lloyd Webber's management company.