Early in 1850, Charles Dickens went to the Victoria Theatre in Lambeth. One of several theatres sited close to the bridges linking the southern bank of the Thames with the north, the Vic was a prominent neighborhood institution catering to a mostly working-class audience. Launched in 1818 as the Royal Coburg Theatre, a move designed to coincide with the opening of Waterloo Bridge, its investors’ hopes of drawing a more upmarket crowd were largely disappointed. Visiting the theatre in 1820, William Hazlitt was distressed to find Junius Brutus Booth among an ill-assorted and noisy throng, and in 1831 Edmund Kean was reduced to haranguing the “unmitigated brutes” gathered before him. Pelted with orange peel and nutshells, he still drew his nightly fee of £50. Although research by Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow has revealed an audience more varied than once assumed, upon the changing of its name in 1833, the Victoria's core clientele was more or less established, as indeed was its reputation for the bloodier aspects of popular drama. It had also experienced regular changes of management, sudden spells of closure, and periodic clashes with the authorities. Suitably enough for what follows, by 1840, the Vic was judged to have suffered “more vicissitudes” than any other theatre in London.

In the winter of 1845–6 the United States Army languished on the border waiting for an opportunity to provoke what would be the Mexican–American War, or, as the Mexicans would come to call it, La Intervención Americana. To break the dull monotony, the army turned to theatre. In January, Second Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in a production staged for the troops and the local community. Grant would later be the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. He was not yet that person. In 1846 he was a twenty-four-year-old, newly commissioned officer, only three years out of the US Military Academy. His peers, a cohort of junior officers who would become the senior military leadership on both sides of the Civil War, were also actors in the production, as well as its producers. The anecdote is humorous in large part because the Grant of national record and memory is the least Desdemona-like figure anyone can conceive. It has been repeated multiple times across the nineteenth century and still holds in the imagination almost two hundred years later.

The story of influential French stage director Jacques Copeau's 1917–19 residency in New York City was documented at the time by Copeau himself and subsequently analyzed by Copeau scholars.1 Copeau (1879–1949) is remembered today for his innovative, experimental theatre work in the early twentieth century; he developed core practices that became foundational for modernist stage artistry, including mime and physical theatre as well as devised theatre techniques.2 In 1913, he established his Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, breaking away from traditional ornate design practices and envisioning an ensemble of actors trained in methods comparable to those used by Konstantin Stanislavsky, although Copeau knew comparatively little of his techniques at this time.3 Copeau's “‘attempt at dramatic renovation’”4 included staging plays to be performed in repertory and maintaining modest budgets and ticket prices to secure financial stability. In these and other regards, his vision paralleled those of other modernist colleagues not only in Europe, but also in the United States, where the Little Theatre movement was already underway,5 although Copeau similarly had little knowledge of US theatre at this early moment.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

[It] may be that never before in my life have I had to meet such a trial as I am undergoing today.