That's entertainment!

The music halls were pioneers of mass entertainment ­ long before cinema and TV, writes Amanda Sebestyen

Lost Empires by Nigel Fountain
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IF you walk along Camden High Street, between the Jobcentre and Oxfam you’ll find an alleyway blocked by bollards. Here runs Bedford Passage, renamed Mary Terrace within the last year and thus obliterating the last trace of one of London’s premier entertainment venues.
The New Bedford Palace of Varieties opened in 1899 and hosted superstars of Edwardian music hall such as Marie Lloyd, George Robey, male impersonator Vesta Tilley, and a very young Charlie Chaplin.
Down the road the posher Royal Camden Theatre opened with Ellen Terry performing Shakespeare but quickly moved over to popular culture, becoming in turn the Hippodrome variety theatre, Gaumont cinema, a BBC recording studio, Music Machine nightclub, the Camden Palace and now KoKo – the last two magnets for young clubbers from around the world.
These traces of vanished halls and international entertainment routes are home territory for Nigel Fountain, the Kentish Town-based author whose latest book Lost Empires is the story of a quest. “Doing the book was an adventure for me,” says Fountain.
The title links the British Empire to those other Empires of spectacle that sprang up in its heyday, the music hall palaces extending from Shoreditch to Sunderland.
Fountain’s journey goes back to the Regency London entertainment gardens along the river. One of the most haunting moments comes when he cycles up to the solitary gates of the Cremorne – closed down, he says, as “the biggest open-air brothel in Europe” – but also the wondrous firework scene of Whistler’s once controversial painting Nocturne in Black and Gold. From here the history of Lost Empires’ moves on through scurrilous pub entertainments and ‘penny gaffs’ in the 1840s, to a mid-Victorian breakthrough – new spectacular ‘temples to music and the arts’, inspired by the Crystal Palace and aiming at large respectable family audiences. Of course bawdiness and double-entendre kept breaking through as mass music hall developed – and there were ongoing battles with feminist moral purity campaigners who disliked the exploitation of women’s bodies in bondage scenes.
On another level the starting point of the book is the author himself, a late child of the British Empire watching ‘The Queens’ Elizabeth and Mary set out from the docks in Southampton where he was born and bred. Fountain’s maternal grandfather James Douglas Gordon – projectionist of the Alexandra Cinema, Southampton before he joined up and fell in World War I – is a potent influence between the lines, inspiring the book’s fascination with Variety as a latter-day ‘Atlantic Trade’ in blackface minstrels and fake Chinamen, conjurors, escape artists and drag experts of both sexes.
Fountain recalls his own first experience of live theatre, viewing Cinderella from the dizzying gallery of the Southampton Empire Theatre and feeling as if he might float off into space. His taste for high-pitched spectacle must get satisfaction from his vertical house in Kentish Town (formerly the home of that brilliantly British character actor, Denholm Elliott), with its double height windows and rooftop terrace with panoramic views of the north London heartland.
Fountain remembers one Hackney day around 1970, pushing his way curiously through a dark foyer into a mainly-empty hall where scattered pensioners played Bingo in a sea of plastic cups. It was the old Hackney Empire.
Goodbye to all that, he thought wrongly. Over time Fountain came to recognise that the “deranged idealists and dreamers” who wanted to make the old monument into a working contemporary variety theatre were actually right. He joined the Empire’s board just over a decade ago.
Then he realised there were many more of those nutters out there, and set out to map them for the book. He found thriving Empires in Sunderland, Liverpool, Edinburgh (now the Festival Theatre) and Southampton (now the Mayflower), all places “where local councils and the Arts Council have created a highway for Andrew Lloyd Webber and Clear Channel”. Grand spectacle rules once more and motorways bring in a wider regional audience.
At the opposite extreme was an amusement arcade in Cleethorpes, with one last stained-glass window boarded up behind the machines and the old theatre roof become a dark and dusty vault where boys play with laser guns. Yet even here, the proprietor has a drawer full of 1940s posters from when the Cleethorpes Empire did repertory. “This wasn’t some John Betjeman, this was just a man who cared,” Fountain states.
In Lost Empires, he always comes back to the success in Hackney: the Empire building now restored to its Moorish glory, gilded domes and Alhambra arcades owing their survival to an indomitable band led by radical theatre veterans Roland and Claire Muldoon, gathering up Gerry Hall and Gryff Rhys Jones along the way.
Panto is a jewel in this Empire’s crown – Jack and the Beanstalk this year, Cinderella next – lauded by critics and audiences alike.
But perhaps the amazing thing about the place is that, in an age of niche marketing and focus groups, there are now packed audiences at an independent music hall for black theatre, visiting opera, clown genius Slava Polunin, the latest Korean martial arts and every variety of stand-up comic and cabaret. Variety is alive and flourishing.