ABSTRACT
The rejuvenation of fairground theatre properly derived from a man who called himself ‘the penny showman’, John Richardson. Inside ginger beer, apples and nuts were for sale, as well as the playbill, available for a penny. Glasgow-born David Prince Miller, who started with Richardson, soon had his own ‘penny geggie’ in Glasgow, where he sometimes performed Richard III twenty times in a single day and at other times played Napoleon’s entire army in The Battle of Waterloo. In John O’Keeffe’s Wild Oats, the company of strollers seek a barn to perform in, and the local farmer eagerly shows them there, anxious to prevent the inn from obtaining their trade. But for nearly half a century, Richardson, the ‘penny showman’, had forged an exciting and much-loved theatre for the lowest social groups. William Hone saw The Wandering Outlaw, a Gothic melodrama lasting approximately twenty minutes, complete with castle, prison and murder, performed in front of scenery which Richardson boasted was ‘splendid’.
