London's First Theatre
More than a 1,000 years before Shakespeare.
Welcome to Londonist: Time Machine, the newsletter of London history.
It’s the Easter school holidays here in London. I’ll be spending much of my time with the kids over the next two week — 6 and 9, and both budding historians. I like to use these opportunities to give voice to a few other writers on Londonist: Time Machine, and this week I’ve got a treat.
David C. Ramzan has written a dozen or more books about London, including Thames Bridges and (a topic close to my heart) Greenwich Pubs, all published by Ameberley. His latest book London’s Theatrical Heritage offers a richly illustrated history of our city’s performance spaces, from the earliest times to the 21st century stage.
In the excerpt below, David describes the very first stirrings of the theatre in pre-Roman society before detailing what was probably London’s first dedicated theatrical space. Enjoy!
London’s First Theatre
By David C. Ramzan
In these modern times, a majority of London’s theatres are located in the City of Westminster, an area known as the West End, and along the Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue, the capital’s streets illuminated at night with their colourful, bright illuminations. Several other principal London theatres are also located within the ancient boundary of the City of London to the east, and south of the River Thames at Southwark, once part of Surrey.
All vicinities were incorporated within Greater London as a whole, which grew and evolved as a result of ceremonial and administration requirements, where many more theatres and performance spaces can be discovered throughout a majority of London’s boroughs, many established and built before London spread outwards into the suburbs. London’s ‘theatreland’ now has the greatest concentration of theatres of any other city around the globe.
London’s theatrical heritage, however, first began within the City of London’s boundary and can be traced back to a time after the Romans invaded Britain and established a vicus, an encampment, on the north bank of the River Thames, once an important river crossing point and territorial intersection for tribes of ancient Britons.
Before the arrival of the Romans, these ancient Britons would have taken part in their own cultural theatrical performances for ritualistic or religious ceremonies, in readiness for war, or acting out legends and stories from times past, many involving dance and song. These rituals were performed at places that had historical significance to early settlers, yet it would be the Romans who constructed London’s first purpose-built theatre of entertainment.
Roman London’s theatrical attraction
As the early Roman settlement evolved into an important riverside port and fortified town, known as Londinium, large splendid-looking properties were erected for the wealthiest of Roman London’s citizens away from the quayside area of the city, where the poorer class of society resided in more modest houses erected amongst warehouses and stores, and barracoons, a place where slaves waited for transportation to other parts of Rome’s empire. These slaves, many of whom were Britons captured during Roman occupation, were destined to become servants, fight as cohorts in Roman legions, or compete in gladiatorial exhibitions, a popular form of entertainment of the day.
Gladiatorial combats, and the slaughter of wild beasts, took place within a purpose-built amphitheatre, or colosseum, and it has been speculated through the years by archaeologists and historical scholars that, like many Roman settlements which grew into large towns and cities, Londinium’s development would have included the building of an amphitheatre.
It had been speculated London’s Roman amphitheatre was erected close to the port area known as Queenhithe, opposite the reconstructed Tudor playhouse Shakespeare’s Globe on the Southbank. Another suggestion was at Farringdon Street, near the River Fleet, where a large man-made mound was thought to have been part of an amphitheatre, situated outside the city’s walls. It would have been a more common location for an amphitheatre, as a place of the execution and slaughter of men, women, and wild beasts would not have been permitted within the city wall. However, up until the mid-1900s, there had been no archaeological indication London ever had an amphitheatre.
When London suffered bombing raids during the Second World War, the Guildhall Art Gallery, to the south-east of the fifteenth-century Guildhall, the centre of civic government, was destroyed during one of those night raids. The site was left vacant up until 1987. A team of archaeologists then began excavating the site before construction work began on a new gallery where the remains of London’s Roman amphitheatre were discovered. Surprisingly the amphitheatre was located within the city wall, the remnants consisting of two lengths of curved walls situated around a large sand and gravel arena.
Plans were drawn up to construct a new gallery over the amphitheatre site, allowing public access to the lower level for viewing the archaeological remains, the ellipse of the arena partially marked out by an 80-metre-wide curved line of dark stone slabs on the Guildhall’s paved yard. Toward the end of the second millennium, a team from the Museum of London uncovered the amphitheatre’s south entrance, two public gateways, and a male skeleton laying below the entrance, believed to be a ritual burial of a gladiator.
First constructed around AD 70, and improved and enlarged during AD 120, measuring 105 metres by 85 metres, excavations revealed the open-air amphitheatre was originally constructed in timber, then later in stone, the walls plastered and brightly painted with additional decorative marble inlay work. From the high outer wall, banks of terracing provided seating for an estimated 7,000 spectators, which sloped down towards an inner wall encircling the arena.
Although no records exist of the type of activities taking place, to amuse and captivate the enthusiastic and bloodthirsty crowds attending Londinium’s first theatre of entertainment, performances undoubtedly followed the traditions of other Roman amphitheatres. A venue for bloody executions, gladiatorial combats, and savage encounters between a variety of wild beasts, or between beast and man, entertainment included social comedies and dramas performed by a complement of actors, mostly trained slaves. London’s Roman citizens would have attended both the gladiatorial exhibitions and staged dramatic performances, where both combatants and actors became legendary idols, much like today’s sports and entertainment superstars.
What might the Romans have watched on stage?
The Romans brought with them their own cultural forms of entertainment, many derived from early Greek productions. Unlike the Greeks, however, whose theatrical preferences were melodrama and tragedy, Roman actors and their audiences favoured comedy along with dramatic storylines.
The early dramas and comedies written by Roman playwrights such as Terence, Plautus, and Caecilius involved legendary heroes, mistaken identities, lovers, and disguises, storylines which influenced the writings of future Renaissance playwrights.
Although it is very likely comedic drama was performed at London’s Amphitheatre, by the time of its enlargement in the mid-third century, Roman plays had degenerated into acts known in Greek as mimus, bawdy farces performed by a troupe of players which for the first time included women, and pantomimus, a coarse dancing and singing act where a nonspeaking performer played all the characters accompanied by a group of singers, the chorus. These early mimus and pantomimus performances were the origins of today’s mime and pantomime evolving in Britain during the eighteenth century, although they were much different productions from those played out at London’s Amphitheatre.
By the early fourth century, a majority of Rome’s military force had abandoned Britain, the city falling into disuse and decay, the amphitheatre laying dormant for several hundred years, and its stonework robbed to construct new buildings after the city was reoccupied during the eleventh century. By the twelfth century, all that remained of London’s first performance space was buried below layers of rubble, before the Guildhall was erected upon the site.
What came next? Did London have any theatres between Roman times and the famous stages of the Tudor era? David C. Ramzan tells the full story of London’s theatres up to the present day in London’s Theatrical Heritage, out now from Amberley Publishing. Get a copy from the publisher or via Bookshop.org.
(The latter link sources from independent bookshops, and gives Londonist: Time Machine a small commission.)
Thanks for reading. I’ll be back on Friday with a celebration of London’s boroughs, 60 years old this month. As ever, please do leave comments below or email me any time on matt@londonist.com
Wow fascinating stuff! I wonder how uncommon it would have been to have the amphitheater inside the city gates at the time, given that the Colosseum was in the center of Rome back in the day. At what point did the tradition shift?
Have a good break with your mini-historians, Matt! Thanks to David for the theatrical post - I'll be reading that book. I'm particularly interested in the Elizabethan-era theatres, but I visited the amphitheatre beneath the Guildhall Art Gallery recently and it was an excellent experience. Similarly to the remains of the Rose in Borough, it gave me an eerie sense of the former performances, the memory of the actors and gladiators long gone.