Lighting at the King's Theatre, Haymarket, 1780–82

Abstract

For late eighteenth-century London theatres, lighting is the facet of production about which we have least information. In his authoritative Lighting in the Theatre, Gösta Bergman describes Garrick's reforms of the 1760s with reference to contemporary French practice and then speculates on what de Loutherbourg's advances in scene design imply about lighting. However, no detailed lighting accounts like those for the Comédie-Française have hitherto been known for any English theatre of this period. This gap can now be partly filled: a ‘Schedule’ attached to the answer in a 1787 Chancery lawsuit gives two seasons' worth of the daily accounts of Joseph Hayling, a tinman and purveyor of lamps, who provided light at the King's Theatre in the Haymarket from about 1768 to 1782. His schedule can be compared with contemporary French and English records to clarify our picture of lighting practices in London in the late eighteenth century.