All the World’s a Stage : London museum holds a theatrical universe

For more than a decade, Theatre Museum curator Alexander Schouvaloff was a captain without a ship. Hundreds of thousands of playbills, photographs, costumes, set designs and other stage memorabilia languished in storage waiting for a permanent home.

After years of haranguing the government for financing, the museum finally got its money and settled into Covent Garden’s old Flower Market on April 23, 1987, the 423rd anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Within walking distance of many West End theaters, it is just down the street from the Royal Opera House and alongside shops and outdoor cafes, a scene often enlivened by street musicians who play Paul Simon one day, Mozart the next.

Museum planners obviously kept the lively Covent Garden neighborhood in mind. Just inside the front door is the Spirit of Gaiety, a queen-sized gold statue that perched on the Gaiety Theatre nearby until it was demolished. The museum’s cafe is a stage set, and its box office was originally decorated by the late Cecil Beaton for the Duke of York’s Theatre.

A Noise for All Reasons

While the museum itself is a few ramps down, there are several other things to see in the street level entryway. On display from the Drury Lane Theatre is one noise machine promising the sounds of thunder, train crashes, earthquakes and Jack the Giant’s footsteps. Another simulates cannons and machine guns “close at hand.” A wind machine runs the gamut from a low breeze to shrieking gale.

Past a looking glass from the St. James Theatre (closed in 1957), there’s a long hallway leading to the museum proper; the passage features multicolored celebrity handprints--Peggy Ashcroft chose red, John Gielgud chose blue. You can detour off to the study center or stop at one of the changing exhibitions, but the real draw is the museum’s thorough permanent exhibition of theater--and, to a lesser extent, dance and opera--from Shakespeare to today.

From the title page of Shakespeare’s First Folio through Restoration Theater, English and Italian Opera and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the museum exhibits artifacts and trappings of the international stage. There are displays on theatrical genres like music halls, pantomime and burlesque, as well as displays on individuals such as opera singer Jenny Lind and actor Edmund Kean.

An exhibit on Noel Coward includes one of his silk dressing gowns (red and monogrammed) as well as a Tony Award presented to designer Beaton in 1954 for costume design on Coward’s play “Quadrille.” A display devoted to Gilbert and Sullivan throws together manuscripts, programs, posters and Gilbert’s walking stick and top hat.

This isn’t a place to rush through. Unlike the National Gallery here, where wall maps list gallery locations of better-known treasures, the Theatre Museum makes you do the searching yourself. The casual visitor could miss Jean Cocteau’s caricature of Igor Stravinsky, say, or even the human skull that Victor Hugo gave Sarah Bernhardt.

Easier to spot are baritone Sir Geraint Evans’ costume from “Le Coq d’Or” (the Royal Opera, 1954) and the dress that Julie Andrews wore in “My Fair Lady” in 1958. A recreated dressing room looks a lot like artist Edward Kienholz served as artistic consultant: Little is missing and nothing is accidentally placed.

One of the museum’s best exhibits is the recreated office of Britain’s legendary Lillian Baylis, manager of both the Old Vic (1898-1937) and Sadler’s Wells (1931-37). Lawrence Olivier’s chain from “Hamlet” (the Old Vic, 1937) lies on a table near a thank-you letter to patron Gabrielle Enthoven, also one of the museum’s prime movers.

Collector’s Legacy

Collector Enthoven had been pushing a theater museum for years and eventually donated stage memorabilia to the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1924. “She continued to work on it until she died in 1951,” says Schouvaloff. “Her collection was a comprehensive record of the history of the London stage through the medium of programs and playbills . . . and it is the essential part of the whole collection.”

As Enthoven amassed programs, the separate British Theatre Museum Assn. collected its own artifacts, storing them in members’ homes. And a third group, the Friends of the Museum of the Performing Arts, raised money for ballet critic Richard Buckle to bid successfully on assorted Diaghilev sets and costumes from the Ballet Russes at Sotheby’s auctions in 1968 and 1969.

Curator Schouvaloff was hired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1974 soon after the three groups finally got together, and then house hunting began in earnest. But promised funds never came through, says Schouvaloff, and at one point, a government report even called the theater museum project “ a luxury, albeit a delightful one.”

These people were determined, however. A petition graced by a David Hockney drawing brought in more than 30,000 signatures. Then, at the end of ‘83, says Schouvaloff, a private benefactor stepped forward to provide initial funding and prod the Office of Arts and Libraries to toss in the rest.

About 4.2 million pounds ($7.8 million) and four years later, museum staff and collections moved to Covent Garden. While its 20,000 square feet of exhibition space doesn’t allow the museum to exhibit more than a fraction of its collections, Schouvaloff says it is still adding to its 2 million objects. He says the museum is “constantly” offered collections by families of performers and others.

So much of the museum was shaped by gifts of existing collections, Schouvaloff says his “only innovation” in terms of acquisitions is its pop music holdings. Among them: Mick Jagger’s jumpsuit from the Rolling Stones’ 1972 U.S. and Europe tour, a suit and tie that John Lennon used for stage performances and the conductor’s orchestral score of a song from Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar.” In the museum’s study center there are also materials on the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, even the Sex Pistols.

His interest in rock ‘n’ roll is historical rather than personal, the very formal curator emphasizes. Nobody else was collecting pop music memorabilia at the time, he says, and almost all the museum’s objects were gifts from the artists themselves. “Although I have no interest in it personally whatsoever, I think it’s rather an important cultural phenomenon and appeals to millions of people. . . . Now it has become extremely fashionable to collect this material and it’s become extremely expensive. We’re out of the running now. “

Two galleries also show temporary exhibitions, such as last year’s comprehensive look at Gielgud and his long career, which spans 130 stage roles. Just ended was a long-running exhibition of costume designs for Broadway musicals between 1900 and 1925 that came from the theater collection of the Austrian National Library.

On view until April 2 is “Circus! Circus!,” a show of photographs, plates, costumes and other circus items. (According to museum handouts, the circus was born in England.) A major retrospective of work by theater photographer Houston Rogers opens in May, followed in the fall by an exhibition on stage illusions and special effects.

The museum is quite scholarly, with extensive reading materials and display labels. Everything is surrounded by glass, whether it’s a dancer’s bodice, a miniature of an opera set or a full dressing room.

This low-key, straight-forward style is a sharp contrast to the hi-tech, glamorous Museum of the Moving Image which opened a few months ago at the South Bank arts complex, about a mile away. Schouvaloff readily admits that the Theatre Museum isn’t “quite fun enough” yet, one possible reason that only about 100,000 people visited during its first 18 months of operation, compared with 165,000 visitors to the Museum of the Moving Image since it opened in September.

Besides boosting attendance, the Theatre Museum seeks to become a hub for theatrical activity. Tickets for West End shows are sold in the lobby, and theater walks leave from the museum on Sundays. An 85-seat theater has been running one-person shows, lunchtime lectures and assorted dance, music and other performances. (Clowns drop by on weekends to entertain during the run of the circus show.)

Schouvaloff has tried to make greater use of the theater, and in November, the London Theatre Laboratory, an actor’s group run by actor/director Jim Dunk, moved in as the museum’s resident repertory company. The lab presented John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” last fall and is currently presenting a double bill of George Bernard Shaw comedies, “Village Wooing” and “Overruled.”

“The words theater and museum together are a contradiction in terms, and our aim here is to minimize that contradiction,” says Schouvaloff. “We don’t want theater to be stuffy and boring and museum-dusty.”