Episode 20. Lilian Baylis and Emma Cons at ‘The Old Vic’.

SYNOPSIS

The direction of English theatre, opera and ballet was profoundly changed when mandolin player and member of The Gypsy Revellers, Lilian Baylis returned from South Africa in 1898 to help her aunt, Emma Cons run ‘The Old Vic’ near Waterloo, London. Like friend and fellow housing reformer Octavia Hill, Emma was strongly influenced by the Christian socialists F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes. With Hughes she established the Cat and  Comfort coffee tavern in Covent Garden. In 1880 Emma took over a massive, derelict melodrama-house amid the slums of Lambeth, reopening it as the teetotal Royal Victoria Coffee and Music Hall to avoid associations with theatre. Out of the premises grew Morley College for working men and women, Emma’s favoured project. After Emma’s death Lilian Baylis applied for a theatre licence, fulfilling what she saw as ‘God’s mission’ to bring high quality Shakespeare, opera and the ballet (at Sadler’s Well) to the masses.    

GUEST

Elizabeth Schafer is Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London.  She has published performance histories of The Taming of the Shrew and Twelfth Night, and a monograph on the work of women theatre directors, MsDirecting Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare. As the interview indicates, she was invited to write a biography of Lilian Baylis, published in 2006, which recovers the shrewd, courageous and privately devout woman behind the eccentric façade.

Elizabeth Schafer’s interview with Simon Machin was recorded online on 5 September 2022.