Can I get there by candlelight? by Lydia Syson

In the spirit of advent, I’ve been having some (very secular) thoughts about candles.

These thoughts have come in the middle of a big edit. Being of a disgustingly pedantic disposition, I find it hard to write the word ‘candles’ in a manuscript without wanting to know exactly what kind of candles they might have been – surely not tallow or beeswax, in a church in Montmartre in 1871?  Paraffin wax?  Sperm whale oil? And since this is a church that has become a radical political club by night, would the votive candles have been left burning through all that revolutionary oratory? 

Simon Eliot’s investigation of reading by artificial light in The Nineteenth Century Novel: Realisms (edited by Delia da Sousa Correa) answered some of my questions. A century earlier, the vast bulk of night-time readers had faced more difficulties than choice.  The most basic form of illumination was firelight. Then there were simple oil lamps, not that different from the Roman variety, which smelled fishy or meaty, and were, like rush lights, fairly dim and smoky. Tallow candles, another option, usually made of solidified mutton fat were also unpleasantly smoky, smelly and greasy.  But at least these could be eaten in extremis, as the Trinity House lighthousekeepers apparently did when their feeble rations ran low. 

The beeswax candle had been the most effective as well as the most expensive means of lighting in Europe since the Middle Ages – and smelled divine. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the booming whaling industry transformed artificial lighting with spermaceti wax, which was clean, nearly odourless, and much better able to withstand hot rooms and burning summers without drooping than any of its competition.  (Spermaceti wax candles quickly became so ubiquitous that they provided the original measure for standardised units of ‘candlepower’.) 

In the nineteenth century, everything changed.  Never mind the introduction of gas, then paraffin oil, and finally the electric light bulb, invented in 1879.  Or even the mechanisation of candlemaking, or the developments in chemistry leading to paraffin wax, soon to be improved by the addition of stearic acid, which would have been used to make the kind of candles burning in my Montmartre church.  Until I started reading it up this week, I’d never appreciated quite what an improvement the new tightly-braided ‘self-consuming’ wick turned out to be in the 1820s.  

Before this wicks were simply made of twisted strands of cotton, and they were troublesome things which demanded frequent ‘snuffing’.  This actually used to mean trimming the wick, rather than putting a candle flame out, as I’d always assumed.  Hence the confusing sentence in Northanger Abbey when Catherine is trying to read the laundry list.  Alarmed at the dimness of her candle, she hastily snuffs it:  ‘Alas! It was snuffed and extinguished in one.’   If you’re stuck in a Gothic novel, the last thing you want is a unsnuffed ‘guttering candle’ (or perhaps it's the first?)  Unattended, those pesky old-fashioned wicks – so useful in novel-plotting – simply grew longer and longer until they curved right over and melted the retaining solid wall: all that precious molten wax flowed uselessly away down the gutter thus created, and the candle went out too quickly.

 

Last Sunday evening, I went to see a play at the new, candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the first time – an exciting, funny and moving production of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore.  For more about this beautiful theatre built on Jacobean plans, do read Mary Hoffman’s February post. It was a completely new theatrical experience for me and I loved every minute.  At one point, the lights 'began to dim' - two ruffed stagehands came on and flame by flame, extinguished every candle in each hanging candelabra.  And then the stage really was pitch black.  The murder that followed –  a case of mistaken identity – became utterly convincing. Since I’d just heard Mal Peet bemoaning the plot difficulties caused by mobile phones, it also made me wonder if there was a time when novelists complained about the infuriating awkwardness of electric light bulbs.  So much harder to start a house fire (e.g. Jane Eyre) or engineer an encounter with a potential new lover  (e.g. La Bohème).

We’d managed to get the last seated tickets left in the house – ‘a very restricted view’, I was told – in the Musicians’ Gallery.  Actually, these were magical seats, which I thoroughly recommend trying. At only £15, they weren’t quite as much of a bargain as the amazing £5 groundling tickets at the Globe itself (best view in the house, by far) but they give you the same mesmerising proximity to the action.  You have to go backstage to get to them, escorted by an usher – carefully avoiding tripping over empty instrument cases and a musician lying on his back with his feet in the air – and then you sit at the top of the Frons Scenae, (see Mary’s post) looking right down on the actors, and sometimes across, drumbeats vibrating through you, seeing most of the play through a mass of candles. 

The effects of lowering and raising the main candelabra were reversed from our viewpoint, for it grew brighter for us when it got darker for the audience in the pit.  But, so close to the actors, we were all the more aware of the ways in which individual actors were responsible for spotlighting themselves, and often their fellow players, with single, double and triple candlesticks, crude lanterns, torches and sconces on walls or bedposts.  White ruffs and pearlescent make-up help reflect the light onto faces. 

Each performance apparently uses up to £500 worth of pure beeswax candles.  The smell is heavenly, and with their wonderful modern wicks they don’t need all that snuffing.  Jacobean performances had to be interrupted frequently for this to take place.  An experiment carried out in 1838 calculated that a tallow candle only gave off 23% of its original light within 19 minutes of being lit if its wick wasn't trimmed. 

Since encountering the ‘How many miles to Babylon?’ rhyme in my childhood in Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, I’ve always found its second question ‘can I get there by candlelight?’ extraordinarily evocative.  Now I know that the answer depends entirely on the candle.

(Images of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore are by photographer Simon Kane and reproduced with thanks to the Globe Theatre Image Archive)

An indoor "Jacobean" theatre by Mary Hoffman

These were the plans for an indoor theatre that fell out of book in Worcester College Library, Oxford in the 1960s.A roughly U-shaped building with galleries, pit seating, a stage, musicians' gallery and a tiring house. For years they were thought to have been the work of Inigo Jones, but now scholars believe it to have been his protegé John Webb who sketched out his ideas for a theatre in the late 17th century. It is the earliest design for such a building in England.

And it is almost certain that it was never built.

But when  the visionary Sam Wanamaker had his ideas for building a new Globe based on the one Shakespeare's company would have played in, he wanted to create TWO performance spaces on Bankside.

Photo by Christine Matthews under Creative Commons

We are all familiar with the octagonal Shakespeare's Globe which sits opposite St. Paul's just a (no longer wobbly) walk across the Millennium Bridge. But you might not have realised that there was another building inside the complex, a red brick shell built at the same time in the 1990s to house an indoor performance space. It sat there waiting for its time to come - and it has.

The outer shall of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse as seen from the remodelled Foyer

From 1609 onwards, Shakespeare's company, called The King's Men after their valuable patron James the First, had two places to stage his plays in: the open air Globe theatre south of the river and an indoor hall in Blackfriars on the north side. Globe in summer, Blackfriars in winter was the pattern.

There are no drawings left to tell us what the Blackfriars hall was like and the building is long gone. It had been the Refectory of the Dominican Friary and James Burbage, father of the actor Richard, bought it in 1596, only to be thwarted by local Nimbys, who did not want a "common playhouse." So Burbage built the Globe and waited for the Wheel of Fortune to turn.

As it has again. A formidable team at the Globe, headed by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, has been working for years to create not a facsimile of Blackfriars, which remains unknown nor a realisation of the Worcester College plans, which would have been unworkable, but a convincing wooden, candlelit indoor theatre as close to the Jacobean playgoing experience as possible.

Computer generated image of the stage

 I saw Webster's The Duchess of Malfi there a week ago and it was a triumph. The theatre holds only 340 playgoers and is lit by six twelve-branched candelabra ("branchers") as well as sconces on the wooden pillars ("wallers"). The candles are lit in full view of the audience, by members of the cast.

We sat at the lower level, only feet from the stage and, although well to one side had no problem seeing everything, but we were in the front row, just above the pit. The seats are made, like most of the wood in the playhouse from unseasoned oak, by Peter McCurdy's firm, who completed the main Globe theatre in 1997.

By the interval, taken very late in this Duchess, I was wishing there had been cushions for hire as in the open-air theatre.

The Frons Scenae, as the wall at the back of the stage is called, has three openings and is richly gilded, the detail being picked up by the light of the 72 + candles. In Shakespeare's day, in the Blackfriars it would have also sparkled on the jewellery and brocades of the audience. Alas, the jeans and jumpers of a matinée audience in January did not give much scope for that. Next time I must wear some bling.

The lighting is just one aspect of the meticulous planning by Reconstruction Architect Jon Greenfield and the whole Architecture Research Group. Panels in the corridor between the auditorium and outer shell mimic the light going down as the afternoon advances. Professor Martin White, of Bristol University, knows how long it takes a beeswax taper to burn down and how much longer they last if their wicks are trimmed in the interval (no smelly tallow here!)

Of the many specialists listed in the excellent programme for The Duchess of Malfi, it's good to see a Fire Consultant but  Oliver Heywood from Allies and Morrison, who were the architects for the project, assured me that perhaps surprisingly it is very hard for flame to get any kind of hold on solid timber. That's reassuring considering the main Globe theatre burned down in 1613 - though that is thought to have have been caused by a spark in thatch.

Once Shakespeare had the resources of the candlelit Blackfriars at his disposal, he wrote plays that could take advantage of the more intimate, interior space. It's hard to think of the "headless corpse" scene in Cymbeline, the living statue of Hermione in Winter's Tale or the many illusions and masques of The Tempest coming off in broad daylight.

For this if no other reason, I shall be fascinated to see what goes on in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. And just as in the main Globe theatre, they have resisted the tourist trade "Heritage" approach, if the first production is anything to go by.

Do go if you can but I was also pleased to see a credit for Video/Camera Systems, which I hope means in time the plays will be part of the cinema relays that are proving so popular and which the main theatre already is. I'll be there if they are, bling at the ready.



The Artistic Director of the Globe is Dominic Dromgoole, who also directed The Duchess of Malfi. It is thought that the Duchess was first performed at Blackfriars in 1613, the year the Globe burned down.

My review of the production is over at my Book Maven blog.

I am grateful to Oliver Heywood of Allies and Morrison for giving me his time and taking me to see the Playhouse while it was under construction