Worlds Elsewhere (31 page)

Were my sources correct? I asked McDade as we headed in.
Was
this actually California's oldest theatre?

He sorted his words with care. ‘The correct definition is it's the oldest
original-use
theatre building. If push came to shove, I would have to say the Eagle in Sacramento is older, but that's a reconstruction. The oldest
theatre
is in Monterey, but it's currently closed.' He pursed
his lips in melancholy satisfaction. ‘I don't reckon it meets earthquake standards any longer.'

The Nevada's story was eloquent about the hardships of life in Gold Rush California, but also the buoyant optimism of those who participated. It was built on the ruins of a hotel that had burnt to the ground in 1851, then again in 1856, then once again in 1858. Reopened in 1860, the hotel lasted just three years before again going up in one of the fires that ravaged every jerry-built, overpopulated Gold Rush town.

Perhaps reasoning that the gods had made their views clear when it came to hotels, Nevada City residents formed a theatre association, with the aim of erecting a more splendidly appointed auditorium than the town had yet seen. Despite yet more bad luck when the scheduled opening was delayed by the nationwide mourning for President Lincoln, it finally opened in September 1865.

The Nevada's original facilities were impressive – gas lighting, with an elaborately painted scenic drop curtain, a stage 45 feet wide and 28 feet deep and a 10-foot basement. There was no lobby, meaning that it could cram in 750 seats, with more audience standing.

We were now in the auditorium, modestly sized, painted vermilion and scarlet, with a blocky proscenium arch and shallow stage behind. None of the original ornamentation had survived; it had a functional appearance, deliberately unfancy. The wavering bumps and lumps in the brickwork made it look as though someone had tried to iron the walls flat and failed. Like all theatres seen during the daytime, the place had a raffish and disreputable air. I knew and liked it well: the heavy scent of seat cloth and antique gloss paint. In the shaft of sunlight streaming through an open fire escape, the dust lifted and tumbled in lazy clouds.

Its spells as a movie house in the early twentieth century had taken their toll, McDade explained, pointing out the 1930s seating and a balcony added in the 1940s. A shallow rake had gone in, and the flies above the stage had been removed. But in all other respects, the Nevada was essentially the same as when companies played here in the 1860s.

It seemed impressive, I said, that the building had been entertaining people almost non-stop for 140 years.

McDade allowed himself a smile. ‘Hundred-fifty, coming up.'

Rather too aware of my experiences in North Bloomfield, I wondered if he ever thought of the spirits of performers past.

He prodded his glasses thoughtfully up his nose. ‘I ain't never seen the ghost. But we've had paranormal investigators here a couple times.'

There was an
actual
ghost?

‘That's the story. Hell if I know. But historical ghosts? I don't worry about those too much. We've gone from Mark Twain to Mötley Crüe.'

He left me standing in the middle of the stage. I wasn't entirely sorry to have missed
Antony and Cleopatra
: its absence meant that the space was bare, largely as it would have been originally. Twelve or so rows of maroon leatherette seats were ranged below me, the back wall almost close enough to touch. It looked a comfortable size for Shakespeare.

Standing there in the empty theatre, I found myself thinking of what I'd learned in Poland and Germany about travelling actors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English Comedians who had taken Elizabethan drama with them on the highways and byways of northern Europe. One reason, surely, that Shakespeare's scripts proved so portable was the way they combined supreme dramatic sophistication with crystalline dramaturgical simplicity.

To stage
Hamlet
or
Macbeth
you didn't need elaborate sets, or a huge store of props. Doubling of roles was assumed, indeed built into all of Shakespeare's texts. (
Romeo and Juliet
has something like forty parts written for a cast of perhaps sixteen; the sophistication of its construction beggars belief.) And if those texts were further adapted and pared down … While ever-larger armies of supernumeraries were cluttering ever-larger stages on the East Coast and back in Britain, here the old rules prevailed.

The late comedies were more extravagant in their requirements – perhaps the reason they were less popular in the Old West (difficult to stage
The Tempest
's masque in a saloon in Rough and Ready, still less on the sawn-off trunk of a giant sequoia). But in most of Shakespeare's plays, stage directions were famously minimal. It was a professional requirement to make it up as you went along. That must have appealed to many a barnstorming nineteenth-century ham.

Thinking about the rambunctious audiences, the improvised venues and scenery, the bear-baiting and gambling, the fine costumes dragged around on horseback, I found it impossible not to think that Gold Rush miners had experienced something even Henry Folger, with all his filthy riches, could never have bought: a theatre Shakespeare himself would have understood.

The question still remained of why the pioneers responded so keenly to Shakespeare. Sure, they'd learned him in school and by rote, but wasn't the Gold Rush a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape all that? Most Forty-Niners made very little money – if anything, they lost it. Part of the attraction of going west must have been the opportunity to get out of the rat race, to find a new life for yourself. The myth that lay behind it, Manifest Destiny and the rest, was that this was a chance to forge an entirely new civilisation, an American one. What could an Elizabethan playwright possibly have to say to you out here?

An answer came to me at the North Star mining museum in Grass Valley, just down the road from Nevada City. I was peering at a photograph of a hydraulic mine in operation some point in the late 1850s. Hydraulic mining was not a sophisticated art: you took a high-pressure hose (initially powered by mountain streams, later by water wheels), pointed it at a hill, and washed the hillside away, running the gravel through sluices to separate the gold. The photograph depicted a hose in operation, pummelling a hillside stripped bare of every living thing. The water described an elegant white arc that belied its horrendous force. All around towered hundred-foot pines, clustering gloomily at the edges of the frame. Near the hose – I nearly missed him at first – was the tiny shape of a man, knee-deep in sludge.

The scene was dismal and awesome all at once: the trifling figure dwarfed by the immensity of nature, and conquering it nonetheless. It was a kind of unvarnished real-life equivalent to the huge Western landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church I had seen in the De Young Museum in San Francisco, done in the 1850s and 1860s: thunderous waterfalls, epic chasms, mighty crags, towering clouds, beetling peaks. The Triumph of the Sublime. Man versus Nature.

Was it too rhapsodic to think that Shakespeare had a similar totalising force? The repository of immense, larger-than-life stories? The chronicler of passionate and fatally troubled men? If Coleridge had described watching Edmund Kean as like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning, a galaxy of Romantic critics had been equally overwhelmed, especially in Germany: Shakespeare the demigod sitting on a mountain, roaring sea at his feet (Herder); an Alpine avalanche crushing everything in its path (Schlegel). Was a similar movement abroad in the nineteenth-century United States? Edwin Forrest had been compared to Niagara; indeed, so had Shakespeare, in a speech given by the writer William Cullen Bryant on the inauguration of the Shakespeare statue in Central
Park (‘among the poets he is what the cataract of Niagara is among waterfalls'). Emerson had gone even further, comparing Shakespeare to a planet.

It seemed to make sense. What statistics there are show that while comedies were certainly popular on early Californian stages, they weren't Shakespeare's. It was the tragedies, with their weighty central roles, that were performed most often:
Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello.
No one seemed sure why.

I tried to approach the plays as a Forty-Niner might.
Macbeth
is the story of an isolated, underrewarded and ambitious man making the best of the hand he's been dealt; out of nowhere he's offered a path to riches.
Hamlet,
for its part, has bleak humour by the bucketful, a hero far too intelligent for the situation he finds himself in, and an obsession with death that must have struck a chord with miners forever burying comrades dead of cholera, scurvy or just plain exhaustion. The play even has a thrilling brawl at the end.

Othello
really interested me. Nowadays we tend to think of it as an investigation of racial politics, but before the twentieth century it was most often played – by, of course, a white actor blacking up as the Moor – as a tragedy of tormented passion far away from home. It mapped on to the Gold Rush almost too well. Most of it takes place far away from the fleshpots of Venice (San Francisco), in the remote location of Cyprus (the mountains), in the musky male stink of a military barracks (mining camp), and features a character, Cassio's lover Bianca, who is probably a prostitute (no translation necessary). One didn't have to be a doctoral student to see how the theme of sexual jealousy might resonate with lonely, frustrated men who had left families behind, or how they might identify with the hero's tortured words to Iago:

Similar agonies coursed through letters by miners I had read, despondent about the lives and loves they had left back east. There was
a good reason the play was popular in the military (it had to be, if you cast Ulysses S. Grant as Desdemona). And that ‘begrimed' must have got a rueful laugh, at the very least, in Rough and Ready.

I had a suspicion I was indulging in the fatal flaw of literary critics and solitary travellers: inappropriate over-reading. Probably these scripts were popular here simply because they were popular, as they were popular elsewhere in the United States. But there was one play above all that struck a chord here, and which had stalked me on my travels through America. It was far and away the most performed drama in the Old West, as it seems to have been in the emerging United States:
Richard III.

On the face of it, for
Richard III
to be a big hitter in California seemed strange: hard to imagine that pioneer audiences had much time for the tangled skeins of the Wars of the Roses, still less for the Tudor Myth. One could see why it would be popular with companies – that jewel of a star part – and, in Colley Cibber's version, eminently tourable through the mountains. But why with miners, so particularly? I remembered watching Al Pacino's 1996 documentary,
Looking for Richard,
in which Pacino spends most of his time explaining to befuddled contemporary American actors and audiences who King Richard actually was, let alone why they should perform in or watch his play.

Critics have ventured a number of explanations for
Richard III
's runaway popularity in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. Theatre historian Kim C. Sturgess calls Richard a ‘tyrant fit for a rebellious population', suggesting that the play offered a kind of ‘oral essay' about the excesses of the English monarchy that made it appealing in the heady independence days of the 1760s and 1770s. The critic Mark Thornton Burnett, investigating film spin-offs from two centuries later, suggests something else – that Richard was a prototype Horatio Alger figure, an embodiment (albeit malign) of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps American Dream.

Looking around the museum for something that snagged my interest, I saw a Perspex case containing a rusty Colt revolver, a whiskey flask and a little travelling box of the card game Faro. Like the photograph, it touched an idea. Gambling was a religion in the Old West. Miners would bet on just about anything – horse races, cock fights, bear fights, dog fights, bull fights, fights between themselves. The historian Susan Roberts argues suggestively that gambling – far and away the most popular activity in the diggings, usually Faro or a
Mexican three-card game called Monte – took on ‘a special significance in a setting like California, where it shared with the primary economic activity, placer mining, elements of unpredictability and irrationality'. That was surely true: what was the Gold Rush, if it wasn't the biggest gamble of everyone's lives?

And who is Shakespeare's biggest gambler, if it isn't Richard Gloucester? The Crookback, ‘cheated of feature by dissembling nature', who nonetheless wins the crown and almost everything, before losing it all again in battle? The greatest puzzle about Shakespeare's Richard is what really drives him: relentless ambition? crazed bloodlust? buried childhood trauma? Surely a more straightforward explanation is that he can't resist throwing the dice. As he chortles after successfully wooing Lady Anne over the coffin of her uncle:

One could say something similar about other antiheroes popular with Gold Rush audiences, notably Macbeth and Iago in
Othello.
But in Richard, surely, it is crystallised, this restless need to improvise, the relentless determination to risk it. He is an inveterate chancer who begins with nothing and gambles, and gambles again; who woos and wins, and charges through the play with a snarl and a wisecrack on his lips.

Like Richard, Californian miners had put everything in jeopardy in the hope of a passage to riches. Like him, many of them ended up dying in the attempt. I thought of Bosworth – in California often a room above a saloon, being bashed to pieces by the boots of touring actors – and what are very nearly Richard's last lines in the play: