Sadler's Wells Theatre has been a place of entertainment for over 300 years, ever since a Mr Dick Sadler opened his 'musick house' in Islington in the 1680s.

Soon afterwards an ancient medicinal well was discovered in the grounds and the enterprising Mr Sadler was quick to promote the water's health-giving properties. The spa soon became a fashionable attraction at the musick house, hence the name of Sadler's Wells.

The public eventually lost interest in 'taking the waters' at Sadler's Wells and by the beginning of the eighteenth century entertainment was once again the main attraction. Jugglers, tumblers, rope-dancers, ballad-singers, wrestlers, stage-fighters, dancing dogs and even a singing duck trod the boards there!

The surrounding area developed rapidly following the Great Fire of London and the musick house thrived. During the centuries that followed the building was to be reconstructed four times before the current Lottery-funded project.

Joseph Grimaldi, the great comic actor who led the development of English pantomime, was Sadler's Wells' star performer in the early years of the nineteenth century.

By the 1840s Sadler's Wells was known for pantomime, light opera and variety acts, largely because London's three Royal Theatres had a legally enforced monopoly on 'regular drama'. However, by the time actor/manager Samuel Phelps took over in 1844, the terms of the new Theatres Act of 1843 freed him to achieve his aim of turning Sadler's Wells into '...a theatre as it ought to be - a place justly representing the work of our great dramatic poets'. Within the next thirteen years he had staged thirty of Shakespeare's plays, introducing them in the original texts to large audiences of working people.

After Phelps' departure in 1862 Sadler's Wells went into a gradual decline. Variety and melodrama crept back into the repertoire. The theatre was then converted into a roller-skating rink and later a prize fight arena. After re-opening as a theatre in 1879, it became a music hall and featured the legendary performers Marie Lloyd and Harry Champion among its stars.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century Sadler's Wells became a cinema, one of only three places in London where the new cinematography could be seen. After a succession of managements in the 1900s, the theatre became increasingly run-down and was eventually closed in 1915. S.R. Littlewood, theatre critic of the Daily Chronicle, summed up its demise: "...poor old wounded playhouse. Here it stands, even now shabby and disconsolate, its once familiar frontage half-hidden with glaring posters...".

All was set to change when Lilian Baylis arrived at Sadler's Wells in 1925.

Yet once again Sadler's Wells was to receive its salvation from an unexpected quarter. The redoubtable Lilian Baylis had been asked some years earlier by the actress Estelle Stead to intervene to rescue the ailing Sadler's Wells. Miss Baylis had replied with a dusty "A madman's dream. It's ridiculous to think of adopting another child when one can't provide for one's own." Nevertheless, by 1925, she clearly felt that her Old Vic was enjoying a healthy adolescence. In that year, as a result of her ceaseless labours, she invited The Duke of Devonshire to make a public appeal for funds in order to set up a charitable Foundation designed to buy Sadler's Wells for the nation. Since the committee included such diverse and influential figures as Churchill and Baldwin, Chesterton and Galsworthy, Dame Ethel Smythe and Sir Thomas Beecham, it was not long before enough money had been amassed to buy the freehold. Designed by Frank Matcham, the new theatre opened on January 6th, 1931 with an appropriate production of Twelfth Night and a cast headed by Richardson as Sir Toby Belch and Gielgud as Malvolio. Sir John was not impressed, it seems. He later recorded his sour impression.

"How we all detested Sadler's Wells when it was opened first. The auditorium looked like a denuded wedding cake and the acoustics were dreadful."

Originally it was intended that Sadler's Wells should mirror the Old Vic in offering a programme which alternated drama and opera and for a time productions trundled between Rosebery Avenue and the Waterloo Road every two weeks. However, it soon became clear that this policy was not only impractical, it also made dubious commercial sense since drama flourished at the Old Vic but lagged behind opera and dance in popularity at the Wells, despite an acting company under Tyrone Guthrie that in 1933/34 boasted Charles Laughton, Peggy Ashcroft, Flora Robson, Athene Seyler, Marius Goring and a very young James Mason. By the 1935/36 season opera and ballet were firmly in the ascendant and Sadler's Wells Ballet with principal dancers Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin under the inspired leadership of Ninette de Valois became the first truly British ballet company, despite the exotic noms de danse which British dancers of that era were seemingly compelled to adopt.

About this time Wendy Toye made her first appearance in the story of Sadler's Wells. Later, to become a distinguished stage, film and opera director - her production of Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne and Orpheus in the Underworld with the can-can girls appearing a la Brigitte Bardot are fondly remembered by Sadler's Wells regulars - Miss Toye was then a somewhat overawed teenager in the corps de ballet. Her pleasure at dancing as one of the pigeons in Ninette de Valois' The Jackdaw and the Pigeons was a little dimmed when she had to be barred from the photographs because "I was too young to have a proper contract". She remembers with a shiver the chill of rehearsals in The Wells Room and the irksome trekking between Sadler's Wells and the Old Vic at each cross-over date.

"Lilian Baylis had made sure that the two stages had identical measurements and I remember the sets being loaded into carts and taken by horse from one theatre to the other. Because of the need to fit in with the Old Vic's dimensions, the Sadler's Wells stage was really too small - especially for grand opera. You'd leap off the stage during a performance and bump your nose against the wall. We were once getting ready for a performance at the Old Vic when the actors started to arrive and we realised we were at the wrong theatre! Miss Baylis, of course, was always fund-raising. She'd go through the auditorium and talk to people as if they were family 'Please give us some money my dears,' she'd say. 'A prayer would be nice but money would be even better'."

To an extent Sadler's Wells has always fostered that kind of community spirit.

"A First Night at Sadler's Wells could be very glamorous," says Miss Toye. "But you never felt that people came simply to be seen. There was real knowledge about and real enthusiasm for the work - opera or dance."

For all her memories of great nights at Sadler's Wells, Joan Cross singing Madame Butterfly, productions of Iolanthe, The Flying Dutchman and her own Orpheus in the Underworld, "we had three encores", there is an even more potent association.

"I'll never forget the smell of the size - the gluey substance which they used to paint on the back of the scenery to stiffen it. That will always mean Sadler's Wells to me."

Wendy Toye also has affectionate memories of the premiere of Britten's Peter Grimes, staged at Sadler's Wells on 7th June, 1945 - scarcely a month after VE Day. Featured well down the cast list was dancer Barbara Fewster.

"I played an urchin in Peter Grimes but luckily I wasn't the one who had to do the scream when the boy fell over the cliff. We'd often have tea with Britten at a nearby cafe, run by a traditional Victorian spinster with an ancient mother in the background. She must have used up all her butter ration on the hot buns which we'd devour while Britten told us ghost stories. They were truly golden years at Sadler's Wells. We were young and life was exciting - especially hiding underneath the stage from the buzz bombs."

In the decades following 1945 Sadler's Wells built itself a high reputation for opera and dance but with the departure of the Opera company to the Coliseum in 1968, it was increasingly felt that the theatre was able to play a pivotal role as a receiving house - both for foreign companies and those within the UK looking for a metropolitan shop-window. In addition, Sadler's Wells, strategically positioned at some remove from the West End hot-house, was seen as the ideal launching-pad for artists at the outset of their careers.

 

Accordingly the theatre played host throughout the 1970s to a rich diversity of attractions and Sadler's Wells recaptured something of its traditional eclecticism. On Rosebery Avenue one could see everything from Handel Opera to the Black Theatre of Prague, to the Netherlands Dance Theatre with its controversial nudity. "We had more House Full notices (and sold more front stalls) than the theatre had seen for years", recalled Douglas Craig, Sadler's Wells' Director from 1970 to 1980. Also gracing the stage during this period were Merce Cunningham, Marcel Marceau, the Kabuki Theatre, the Dance Theatre of Harlem and the Kodo Drummers from Japan.

With the opening of the Baylis Theatre in October 1988 with Denis Quilley and Nichola McAuliffe in the zany comedy, The House of Blue Leaves, it seemed as if the dream of a permanent theatre company was about to be realised but financial constraints soon torpedoed that ambition. The new theatre's Diamond Jubilee was celebrated in style in January 1991, hotly pursued by revivals of The King and I starring Susan Hampshire, and of The Sound of Music, with Liz Robertson and Christopher Cazenove under the direction of Wendy Toye. In 1994 Ian Albery took over as chief executive. Babes in the Wood with Roy Hudd, Keith Barron and the peerless Jack Tripp as Dame revived the glories of Sadler's Wells panto over Christmas 1994 and, with a surge of the artistic pendulum so typical of Sadler's Wells, November 1995 saw Matthew Bourne's maiden voyage of his interpretation of Swan Lake, a year before its sensational conquest of the West End.

On 30th June, 1996, the last ever performance was given at the old theatre before the bulldozers moved in. On St. Valentine's Day the following February a more unusual ceremony took place when Ian Albery buried a time capsule under the centre stalls of the new building. Future archaeologists will puzzle over a motley collection of Sadler's Wells objects which include a piece of the wooden floor from the de Valois Room, a copy of the original deeds of the land dated 1834, a conker from Lilian Baylis' commemorative horse chestnut tree and a bus ticket of route 19.

The present theatre opened its doors in October 1998.

By Tube
Angel (Northern Line City Branch) is a 250-metre walk from Sadler's Wells. Trains run every few minutes northbound to Kings Cross and Euston, and southbound to Bank and London Bridge

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