Music Hall Memory Box

The New Variety 

Music hall culture transitioned in the 20th century into that of a more respectable nature, Variety Theatre. In the later decades of the 19th century there had been increasing concern about the lack of respectability in halls, and campaigners set out to improve their moral nature. By the turn of the century, Moss Empires were at the forefront of this trend. They established a chain of Variety Theatres across the country and began to establish a monopoly on the sector. They built new palaces of splendour that were furnished with grand chandeliers, gold decorations and red velvet seats complete with armrests. Examples included the Nottingham Palace (1898), the Hackney Empire (1901) and the London Coliseum (1904). The company was committed to making their theatres more culturally aspirant, and so, they developed a new style of Variety to match their new opulent buildings. They invited artists who had never appeared on music hall stages and began to blur the lines between ‘variety’ and ‘legitimate theatre’. While traditional music hall acts remained, ballets and short dramatic plays, starring theatre actors, were added to the programming. For example, Sarah Bernhardt starred at the London Coliseum in the melodrama Une D’Elles.

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For those who remembered the music halls of the mid-19th century, the experience of going to the new variety theatres would have seemed quiet alien. The ground floors of music halls were filled with dining tables, but in the Variety Theatres, they were furnished with rowed seating (the stalls), and the habit of eating and drinking that had been so ingrained in music hall culture, was discouraged. Whereas the bar and auditorium were adjoined in music halls, they were contained in separate areas in the new theatres. Similarly, the new seating style worked to discourage audience participation. The music halls had been a space to socialise accompanied by entertainment. At the variety theatres, however, the entertainment was the main attraction, and socialising was restricted to the intervals. There may have been an overlap in performance styles, but the music halls and variety theatres were opposite environments.

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Between the 1860s and 1870s, moral reformers had achieved limited success in implementing programmes of rational recreation in the music halls they perceived to be 'vulgar'. The working classes had resisted attempts to control their leisure time. However, by the turn of the century, the obsession with respectability had again arisen, but this time, moral reformers succeeded, and music hall culture was changed forever.