Theatre Royal Drury Lane: The Man in Grey
Why is it significant?
Follow the colonnade along Russell Street round to the grand portico on Catherine Street. This is the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and there has been a theatre on this site since 1663, which makes it the oldest theatre site in London still in use.
Key Facts
| Place | Theatre Royal Drury Lane: The Man in Grey |
|---|---|
| Address | Catherine Street, London WC2B 5JF, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51300, -0.12020 |
| Part of Walk | Curtain Up: London's West End Theatreland, from the Savoy to Covent Garden and Leicester Square |
| Generated | Generated |
Follow the colonnade along Russell Street round to the grand portico on Catherine Street. This is the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and there has been a theatre on this site since 1663, which makes it the oldest theatre site in London still in use.
In 1660 the monarchy came back, and with Charles II came the theatres, closed for eighteen years by the Puritans. The king gave royal patents to just two companies, and one of them, under Thomas Killigrew, opened here. For the first time women appeared on the English stage, and one of them was Nell Gwyn, who started out selling oranges to the audience and ended up as the king's mistress. The building you see is the fourth on the site, opened in 1812.
Its predecessor burned in 1809, when the owner was the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The story goes that he sat in a coffee house across the street with a glass of wine, watching his fortune go up in flames, and when friends marvelled at his calm, he answered that surely a man may take a glass of wine by his own fireside. Inside there are two royal boxes, and legend says that is because George III and his son, the Prince of Wales, quarrelled so badly in the foyer that they had to be kept apart for ever after.
And then there is the Man in Grey. For generations, actors and staff have reported a figure in a long grey cloak, powdered wig and three-cornered hat, walking along the back of the upper circle in broad daylight, and vanishing into the wall. Legend connects him with a skeleton, a dagger in its ribs, said to have been found bricked up in a passage in the nineteenth century. Actors are pleased to see him: the tradition says that a sighting before an opening night means a hit.
There is a gentler tradition too. Every year on Twelfth Night, the company shares a cake paid for by the will of an eighteenth-century actor, Robert Baddeley. Now walk back along Russell Street, turn right up Bow Street, then left into Floral Street, under the twisting glass bridge of the Royal Ballet School, and on to a narrow alley called Rose Street.