Reading on Trains Number 28: Underneath the Arches: the Players' Theatre at Charing Cross
This piece appeared in the Evening Standard Magazine on 28 February, 1996. I have embellished it slightly and brought it up to date at the end.
The Players’ Theatre is in the railway arches on Villiers Street, below and behind Charing Cross Station; the noise of the trains forms an unofficial part of the entertainment.
The official entertainment is Victorian Music Hall, and the staple show is called the Late Joys, which starts at the not especially late hour of 8.15pm and consists of three ‘halves’, with intervals in-between. The acts are introduced by a venerable MC in white tie and tails, and when he calls out, ‘Gentlemen, you may smoke!’ the audience always replies, ‘But what about the ladies?’
Right from the off – the moment when the chairman quite matter-of-factly asks everybody to drink the health of Queen Victoria – the newcomer to the Players can feel a little unsettled. Most audience members seem rouged and starched in a 19th Century way, and when the bell announcing the beginning of the first ‘half’ was rung, the tremulous young woman next to me exclaimed, ‘We are bidden!’ But then people talk like that all the time at the Players.
Around the walls of the cosy bar are pictures of past luminaries, including the one-time director of the theatre, Leonard Sachs, who went on the present the The Good Old Days – a Players spin-off – from the City Varieties Theatre Leeds, and another Leonard: the superbly named Gervase Leonard Farjeon, whom Sachs appointed as stage director. Under their management, many soon-to-be big names performed at the Players in the late 40s and early 50s, including Hattie Jacques, who was always the Fairy Queen in the Players’ pantomimes, Ian Carmichael and Peter Ustinov.
The rumble of what sounds like bombs increases the novice’s unease. This is the noise of trains rumbling overhead from Charing Cross en route to Kent, and the chairman acknowledges this by calling out, ‘To hell with the London Chatham and Dover Railway!’, which is justified to the extent that, in 1899, the perpetually hard-up LCDR formed a partnership with the equally strapped-for-cash South Eastern Railway, whose main terminus was Charing Cross (whereas the LCDR’s home had been Victoria). The audience responds with ‘Sleepers awake!’ (a pun, I suppose), and this call-and-response was introduced by John Hewer, who went on to play Captain Birdseye, and whose father had been a train driver (a conjunction that Gyles Brandreth once affected to believe was described by the phrase, ‘in loco parentis’).
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