Best known nowadays as a leading venue for international and UK dance theatre, Sadler’s Wells is not only one of London’s oldest (and sometimes most disreputable) theatres, but one with water running through its history, literally in many cases.
In 1683, one Thomas Sadler, among other things a Surveyor of the Highways, was digging for gravel on his property when he discovered a well. The canny Sadler did not argue when this was believed to be the well of the medieval Priory of Clerkenwell, associated with miraculous healing powers in the Middle Ages, and built himself an enclosed gardens and pleasure resort, including a wooden music house with a platform serving as a stage, where a fashionable audience came to partake of the allegedly therapeutic waters at – Sadler’s Wells.
Novelty was as much in demand then as now, however, and it did not take long for the fashionable to drift away, and Sadler’s Wells to not so much drift as plummet downmarket, and by the early eighteenth century a contemporary magazine described it as “a nursery of debauchery”.
Its audiences, often consisting of sailors and their ‘temporary wives’, were unruly and disreputable even by the standards of the time. The 1737 Licensing Act gave a monopoly on spoken drama to the Theatres Royal in Covent Garden and Drury Lane, the so-called Patent Theatres, and this meant that other venues could only produce musical and variety entertainment with incidental dialogue, although the boundaries were often tested. The Wells also relied heavily on sales of alcohol, which did not improve the behaviour of its audiences, or its reputation.
In 1795, the great comic actor of his day, Joseph Grimaldi, played Thrumbo, the Giant’s dwarf, in the pantomime Jack and the Beanstalk. The Giant to his dwarf was the extraordinary Giovanni Battista Belzoni, later to achieve fame as a pioneer Egyptologist, who was around six foot six inches tall, with a correspondingly impressive build. Also billed in displays of strength as The Patagonian Sampson, Belzoni carried eleven, and sometimes as many as thirteen people round the stage on a specially constructed iron frame, itself said to have weighed 127 lbs. (Patagonia had been associated with giants since the first European account of the region and its inhabitants, by a member of the explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s crew, in the sixteenth century.)
Belzoni is also credited with displays of hydraulics which began to appear at the Wells around this time. During one of his performances, in 1803, the stage collapsed, plunging him and his human cargo into a tank installed under the stage to supply the hydraulics, fortunately without serious harm.
In the winter of 1803, a huge new irregularly shaped tank was built, 90 ft long, and 24 ft wide at its widest point, tapering to 10 ft wide, with two side branches reaching out to the walls of the theatre. Only 3 ft deep, it was supported on stout dwarf walls 2 ft 4 inches high and wide. Originally it took three relays of four men with an Archimedes screw twelve hours to fill the tank from the nearby New River, but later water from the river was piped in. The water was changed every three weeks, and more often in hot weather. Later, a tank 15 foot square and 5 foot deep was added in the roof so that waterfalls and other such effects could be created. The stage of the theatre could be raised out of sight behind a drop scene or act-drop curtain.
On April 2nd 1804, the new facility, known as the Aquatic Theatre, opened with The Siege of Gibraltar. One hundred and seventeen model ships three foot long were built, to a scale of one inch to one foot, with rigging and workable sails, brass cannon that fired and could be reloaded in action, and model crews 5 – 6 inches high. The ships were manoeuvred by young men and boys swimming in the tank, who wore “thick duffil [sic] trousers” but still had to be given tots of brandy before and after plunging in.
In the performance, ships were dismasted, sunk, and even blown up, and while smoke obscured the background children dressed as sailors in real rowing boats ‘rescued’ other ‘sailors’ from the water. The spectacle was a great success, but like any novelty soon had to be succeeded by another to please the audiences, and although the tank continued to play its part in productions, it does not seem to have been used for another naval spectacle until 1815, when the programme concluded with a re-enactment of the Battle of the Nile which no doubt included a suitably spectacular recreation of the explosion of the French flagship L’Orient.
The modern Sadler’s Wells, revived in 1931 under Lilian Baylis, is a far cry from the Aquatic Theatre, but faint echoes of its watery past seem to reverberate to this very day. In 1945, it saw the premiere of Britten’s nautical opera Peter Grimes, 1995 brought Matthew Bourne’s interpretation of Swan Lake, and the recent multimedia production Cast No Shadow, from artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien and choreographer Russell Maliphant featured spectacular images of icebergs, waterfalls and snow.
Maybe, at the Wells, dancing will always have a spring in its step.
