Strolling

Under construction

  1. Prologue
  3. Strollin’, strollin’,
  4. Strollin’, just strollin’,
  5. In the cool of the evening air.
  6. I don’t envy the rich in their automobiles,
  7. For a motor car is phoney –
  8. I’d rather have Shanks’ pony,
  9. When I’m strollin’, just strollin’ …
  11. (Reader—Keith Prowse Music, 1959)
  13. Easy, that’s what strollin’ was when Bud Flanagan1, leader of “The Crazy Gang”, sang of it at the London Palladium. Slow tempo, feet hardly touching the ground, but Bud was using a soft-shoe shuffle to conceal holes in his soles. Hard, that’s what strolling was, as he well knew having once travelled by number 11 bus from London to Glasgow without a bean in his pocket in search of employment. Maybe that’s why he didn’t pronounce the “g”.
  15. This book is about ‘strollers’, in the strict sense of players through the ages like Bud who actually walked from place to place in order to find work and, hopefully, an audience. As in the case of so many words (‘presently’ = ‘soon’, for example), the once specific meaning of such strolling has become diluted, and is now synonymous in England with seemingly anyone who performs on tour outside London. The actor Brian Rix’s book Tour de Farce, a Tale of Touring Theatres and Strolling Players is, for instance, mainly a first-hand description of late twentieth century number two civic theatres, their managers and their inconveniences: in the age of the intercity train and the internal combustion engine Rix made no claim to having walked to any of them. This is not only a dilution of sense, but also of significance. The Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘Strolling actor, player – an actor of a low class, who wanders about the country, giving performances in temporary buildings or hired rooms’. Wanderers, certainly, but ‘low class’? Many were the black sheep of well-to-do families wanting more from life than the daily grind of a respectable occupation. There is, though, another basic requirement implied in the phrase besides extensive pedestrian peregrination: a shabbiness, not of social origin, but possibly of morals, and certainly of appearance, which usually pre-empted such players from more than aspiring to perform in legitimate theatres. Nevertheless, true strollers, were a professional class, that is to say that they ‘professed’ in order to make a living. Omnipresent in different forms throughout Europe in the days before mechanised transport, they should perhaps be known in English as ‘Perambulatory performers’ since inFrance they were known as comédiens ambulantes and in Spain comicos ambulantes – ambulare in Latin meaning to walk. In fact their story begins before Roman times, with the Greek bard Thespis in the 6th century BCE, said by Aristotle to have been the first to portray the mythological characters he sang of. He toured his effects, including masks, by a horse and cart in which, alas for the authenticity of our story, he may have ridden on rather than strolled beside. In 534 at the city Dionysia in Athens, hitherto a festival of music, dance and song, he won the first ever prize for Tragedy, acting a mythological role contrapuntally with the chorus.
  17. In Great Britain and Ireland, barns*, taverns, assembly rooms, mansion houses, tennis-courts, fairground booths, etc., made do for strollers before, and even after, the building of playhouses because were theatre in themselves: cut them through the middle and you would find ‘Thespis’ written like ‘Brighton’ in a rock-candy stick. As such they are part of our mythology, our cultural tribal memory, the Jungian collective unconscious, supposedly inherited at birth. Those of us that have homes to go to at night still wonder at their wandering, their seeming commitment to the vagrant life. We may also feel a slight, atavistic thrill at their threat to our more sedentary lives: we know we should once have locked up our daughters and our chickens, and left our purses at home – “Take the linen from the line: the strolling players are coming”, as the old saying went. But such apprehension did not prevent country folk from welcoming their arrival, or wanting to see them perform as an antidote to the mundane quality of their localised existence.
  19. We now suppose the act of strolling to have afforded a freedom, a looseness not only of foot, but also of behaviour and, perhaps most importantly, imagination. We remember, or think we do, the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ lifestyle of these supposed rogues, regarding them as either a threat or a treat – or both! For the strolling player, although a non-fictional entity, is also an idea, a fictive concept, one which has over the centuries attracted writers and readers alike. Their theatre was close to the soil, to folk ways and to the ways of the folk; they carried its ragged banner from place to place with a strange mixture of lawlessness and celebration. Its culture was indigenous, a value for not very much money that reflected what ordinary people wanted, not what authority thought they ought to have.
  21. The image of the stroller, if not the foot-slogging reality, was also later aspired to by so-called ‘legitimate’ theatre performers and directors. One of the pre-revolutionary Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold’s definitive productions, for example, was of Alexander Blok’s The Fairground Booth. His name for the strolling player, the raggle-taggle proprietor of such a booth, was ‘cabotin’; he considered the cabotin to be ‘kinsman to the mime, the histrion and the juggler’, keeping alive ‘the history of the true art of acting’ in order to ‘rescue the Russian theatre from its own desire to become the servant of literature’. For his contemporary, the French director Jacques Copeau, however, the term was practically one of abuse, ‘cabotinage’ being for him the equivalent of what would be called ‘ham acting’ in English. This pejorative nomenclature probably comes from an abbreviation of ‘ham-fatter’, meaning an actor who can only afford melted ham fat as a make-up base or removal cream. The ham is, however the upper part of the leg, above the shank…
    1. Chapter 1: Shanks’ Pony
  23. In Europe, top-notch troupes did not stroll, but travelled in hired coaches. In January 1577, for example, the famed commedia dell’arte company, the Gelosi, are said to have crossed the Alps in thirteen golden carriages on their way to perform before Henri III of France. Those coaches, however, had to be dismantled and carried over the fearsome Alpini by mule train. In Spain, at that time, going down the scale in terms of numbers and reputation involved, we shall see mules being replaced by the oxcart and oxen by shoe-leather and even bare feet. In England there might be but one ‘cabotin’ in the company, or rather with no company, walking solo a stony path to stardom – or oblivion.
  46. <FIGURE 1.1> Tarot card of The Fool. Note the footwear: buskins*.
  49. At the end of December, 1776, finding himself indisposed and without Roscian2 employ in Manchester – ‘resting’ as we would say today – the young actor John Edwin3 strolled forth with his belongings tied in a handkerchief to a crabstick slung over his shoulder. Unlike Dick Whittington who was famous for turning back, Edwin strolled on, the very embodiment of The Fool in the Tarot pack, ‘the card of new beginnings, opportunity and potential’.
  51. Sometimes The Fool is labelled zero, but then zero is not a number. He does not necessarily come before the number one, nor after the other twenty-one major arcana, but exists in the gaps between them all – first, last and in between. He is carefree, impulsive, spontaneous, enthusiastic and frivolous. He lives in and for the moment and his power is revolutionary: he turns the mundane world upside-down for the hell of it, breaks rules without knowing of their existence, and without fear or caution as to what might happen next. His preferred path is the unknown; often he is depicted as about to step into the jaws of a crocodile or over the edge of a precipice, and behind him a dog or a cat has torn down his hose, leaving him bare-arsed. He carries the symbols of the four elements in his bundle, but doesn’t know what they mean, and wouldn’t care if he did. As he travels through the deck (i.e. the World) he is the harbinger of change. Such was the carefree existence, with the sun shining down on his back eternally from clear skies above, that strolling Edwins must have aspired to, but,
  53. …when he had journeyed peaceably, if not joyously, about twenty miles, in the hope of getting an engagement as an actor, he discovered that he had made a small mistake, which had nearly proved ruinous, being so restricted in point of cash. This error originated in his forgetting the name of the town where the company of comedians were; and an evil star governing the hour, the unlucky infant of Momus went to NORTHWICH instead of Nantwich, both being equally distant from Manchester, though they were not equally welcome to his expectations. This disappointment, added to his weak state of body, disheartened Edwin very much; however he crossed a forest in the vicinity the next day, and got to Chester; and in a day or two afterwards he got to Wrexham, in Wales. At this place he heard Mr. Heaton’s company were performing at Oswestry…
  55. Although it is doubtful that Edwin was conversant with the Tarot Fool, it is significant that he chose Momus as his pen name. ‘Momus’ was the Roman nomen for ‘Momos’, the ancient Greek god of mockery who was expelled from Olympus by Zeus for ridiculing the other gods. The Roman Jupiter also found his impudence troublesome and had him chained to a rock and castrated. By Edwin’s time, however, he had simply become an all-licenced Fool, permitted to tell uncomfortable truths provided he raised a laugh.
  83. <FIGURE 1.2> The Fool from and eighteenth century playing card deck.

1 1896-1968. As a double act with Chesney Allen, best known for the duet “Underneath the Arches”. Solo performer after Allen’s death, voice still resonant today singing “Who do you think you are kidding Mr Hitler” at the beginning of Dad’s Army.

2Quintus Roscius, (died 62 BC), Roman comedian whose name became a cognomen for any successful actor.

3 1749-90. He had previously strolled throughout Ireland. Later became a highly successful comic actor at the Haymarket. Ascribed to him are The Last Legacy of John Edwin; Edwin’s Jests and Edwin’s Pills to Purge Melancholy. Not to be confused with son John, also an actor.