Limelight

C.A. Asbrey

People have been performing since the dawn of history. Sometimes those performances depended on the flickering shadows of dancing flames and at other times the starkness of full sunlight to make sure every nuance, a flick of a hand or a turn of the head, could be easily seen. Many ancients theatres are built into hillsides that benefit most from the late afternoon sun, and writings from Ancient Greece say that they also used mirrors to deflect the sun and use it an early form of spotlighting. Churches and courtrooms were built to be flooded with light, but theatres, once they had roofs, were not.

The Romans famously used lighting and makeup in their theatrical performances; the lamps being filled with oils or animal fats. But more of the makeup later. This form of lighting continued right into the Elizabethan era. There’s a reason the famous Globe Theatre was open-air. Daylight. There’s also a reason that it burned down in 1613. During a performance of Henry VIII, a prop cannon misfired and ignited the wooden beams and thatching. It was largely constructed of timber and wattle and daub, so it was very vulnerable to fire. Nobody was hurt other than a man whose burning breeches were put out with a bottle of ale. It was rebuilt in the following year (with a tile roof) at a cost of £1,400. It closed during the English Civil War, under the Long Parliament, and never reopened. It was pulled down for housing around 1644, until it was rebuilt in 1997 about 750 feet from the original site.

All those candles and lamps required constant trimming, maintenance, and monitoring to ensure that the light not only remained safe, but acted in accordance to the scene. In the second
part of his Tutto l’Opera d’Architettura, which deals with perspective scenery in the 
theatre, Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), describes the stage as being “adorned with innumerable lights, large, 
medium, and small”, and
”a great part of the lights in the centre, hanging over the scene”. He specifies three categories of lighting common to all kinds of performances. General chandelier light for both audience and actors, scenery illumination, and dramatic lighting that changes in accordance with the action. Small glass vessels filled with coloured water or wine that filtered the light called ‘bozze’ were also used; light wine for light red and strong, red wine for
darkened light. By the 17th century, sheets of reflective mica were used, mainly as winglights in early baroque opera houses. These lamps consisted of a candlestick and mica reflectors supported by a lozenge shaped net of gold tinsel. Candle was preferred to oil for this as they produced more soot that stained the mica.

Dampening mechanisms could be employed to shut out the lights and darken a stage in seconds to dramatic effect.

Footlights, a row of lights set along the floor at the front of a stage to illuminate performers from below, started being used in 1670. They were initially candles or oil, but gaslight started to take over around 1804. The first recorded theatre to go fully gaslit, in 1816, was Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Limelight was invented in 1816 by British engineer Thomas Drummond, building on earlier foundational work with oxyhydrogen flames by inventor Goldsworthy Gurney. It produced a bright white light, hundreds of times brighter than anything candles, oil or gas could provide. It was done by heating a block of quicklime, calcium oxide, to high temperatures and then burning a jet of oxygen and hydrogen against it. It was used outdoors to light a juggler in 1836, and on stage in Covent Garden in 1837, and early adverts called it ‘koniaphostic light’. Incidentally, the juggler was Ching Lau Lauro, also known as Professor Ching. Little is known about him other than that he was thought to be from Cornwall. The use of yellow-face was common in the 19th century magician circuit to play on the public perception of the mysterious East, as well as to ride on the coat tails of the genuinely Chinese magicians like Ching Ling Foo, who became wildly popular in the 19th century. Incandescent electrical lighting superseded gaslight and lime light from the late nineteenth century.

Suddenly, the stage was lit as never before, and that brought other changes.

Right into the nineteenth century, theatres were loud, bawdy, riotous, and were places where people went to drink, be seen, and to show off. it was also a place where any kind of sexual pairing could be procured, both in the audience and backstage. Some places even had curtained off boxes where those wealthy enough to pay for them could copulate in the theatre itself – and when you attend a show and rent a box, that’s the origin of them.

After the Licensing Act of 1737, melodrama became an especially popular theatre style. Short, dramatic scenes were interspersed with musical accompaniment. These were simple, moral stories that featured stereotypical stock character types; such as the villain, the wronged maiden, and the overblown hero. The ‘declamatory’ acting style was popular at the time, and actors would strike a dramatic pose and speak their lines formally in a way that would be simply comical today. Brightly lit stages and darkened auditoriums forced actors to move from a broad, front-facing style of performing to a more natural and contained realism. Because gas systems had complex pipes and open flames, actors had to stay safely behind the proscenium arch rather than stepping out onto the apron among the audience. The moody, dramatic shadows produced by gaslight and pinpoint limelight fuelled the popularity of melodrama. Electric lighting allowed for precise, naturalistic illumination by the end of the century.

The streets being safer at night through lighting meant that the theatre became a more respectable middle-class entertainment. Theatre became stratified into solidly middle-class entertainment and the lower-class venues where poorer people drank and let off steam. The poorer areas were also frequented by predatory rich men who were said to be ‘slumming it’. That saying came from visiting the slums where people were more likely to be desperate for the money they could drop.

Lighting changed acting style. Greater visibility meant that audiences appreciated actors could adopting realism and naturalism, behaving as if unobserved in a realistic “box set” These melodramatic acting conventions meant that actors like William Terriss clashed with the actors who moved with the times and used a more naturalistic style. Ellen Terry, said in her memoirs that when Terriss played Romeo at the Lyceum Theatre, he attacked the role with fire but “stamped his foot a great deal” while delivering his lines. She felt this style showed a “lack of deeper intelligence behind his interpretation of the character.” This was simply a hangover of the older style of acting that had grown in popularity from the eighteenth century.

The change of light had a massive impact on makeup and costumes too. White lead, which had been used for centuries along with red rouge for the cheeks and lips, looked ridiculous and clownish under gaslight. Grease paint goes back to at least the eighteenth century when W. R. Chetwood (1749) described the use of ivory-black mixed into grease for blackening the face. It was removed with butter. Many people claim to have improved on that by adding other substances to create different coloured pastes, but most credit opera singer Carl Baudin with doing so in the 1860s. He commercialised a flesh-coloured paste made of zinc, ochre and lard. His version was often called wig paint, as he used it to conceal the join of a wig. I personally find it hard to believe that women didn’t play around with it more than men, but that’s not recorded. Another name in the frame is Herman Vezin [1829-1910] who “mixed a lot of colour with melted tallow in Philadelphia in 1857”. Willy Clarkson [1861-1934] – an infamous London wigmaker – also suggested that Vezin was “if not the first, (then) one of the first to make up with grease” on the London stage. Ludwig Leichner was the first to commercialise the idea.

Leichner worked as a pharmacist as well as an opera singer, and he successfully managed to make a lead-free makeup which was successful enough got him to establish the Leichner Power and Makeup factory in 1873. It didn’t take long before he was selling internationally. Better lighting meant that actors had to look more realistic, and this new makeup allowed that. Skin tones, shadows and highlights were easier to create so actors’ faces looked more natural and expressive in the brighter light. And, vitally, it didn’t shift under the sweat induced by the heat of a bank of lights. Leichner’s greasepaint came in a range of numbered colours, with No. 1 as the lightest. Later manufacturers echoed this system. The sticks came in a range of sizes; thicker sticks for the base or foundation, and thinner sticks – known as liners – for shadowing, highlighting, age lines, veins, eyebrows and other features. It sounds simple to us, but nobody had done it before, but once Leichner did it, everyone did. After all, the recipe wasn’t hard to copy. British pharmaceutical chemist, William Arthur Poucher, recommended that up to 10% of the base be made of beeswax and/or lanolin, to make the greasepaint tacky so that powder will adhere to it. It wasn’t unusual for actors to know their Leichner numbers (the makeup they needed routinely or for a role) and to have nothing other than those in their dressing room.

It wasn’t acceptable to wear greasepaint in normal life, apart form the fact that it caused spots, but that never stopped young actresses using some to rouge their lips of cheeks, and in doing so pushed the boundaries of what was decent or suitable in polite society. And then professional photographers started using it to take perfect portraits. That spread the usage across all levels of society, and cracks started to appear in the wall of public opinion against the use of makeup. The start of the movie industry gave audiences huge close-ups of the stars, and they were obviously wearing makeup. That increased demand for a less natural look in the public, who wanted to look like their favourite stars.

In my previous post, I made it clear that makeup has always been in use, but that Victorians used it more discretely than their great grandmothers. The 19th-century ideal was natural, and they used all kinds unnatural methods to look as natural as they could. Pharmacies sold either pre-made preparations branded as ‘remedies’ or the ingredients to make your own at home. But what looked natural under candlelight looked chalky and ghostly under oil or gaslight, so new methods were required. Small female run companies, like the California Perfume Company (later rebranded as Avon) used the female agent system. Elizabeth Arden started this way, as did black women such as Madam C. J. Walker. She became the first woman to become a self-made millionaire in the USA, and she did so by identifying that nobody else was catering for black people, and created a marketing and distribution system that was impossible to ignore. Madam Walker is such a remarkable a lady she deserves a post on her own.

Post WW1 there was a societal shift. The loss of life, not just from the war, but from the 1918 flu pandemic weakened class systems, and the ‘Lost Generation’ challenged traditional beliefs in absolute moral, religious, and political authority, making way for modernism in arts, psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud), and new scientific paradigms. Women had been treated as second-class citizens; refused the vote, rights, and earning power, but they stepped up during the war and proved themselves in the workplace and kept society running while the men were away. It became harder to ignore their demands to vote, and a newly confident type of young woman rose to the fore; one who actively rejected the norms of her mother and grandmother. They not only cut their hair, smoked, showed their knees, and went out unchaperoned; they had expectations the earlier generation never had. Part of that was due to the shift in the balance of genders so not every woman could expect to marry. By the 1920s it became more acceptable for women to wear conspicuous makeup.

It’s odd to think that one of the drivers of all that was better lighting. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it was defiitely a factor.