1809 It wasn’t the first Drury Lane theatre, nor the first to burn. A theatre has stood on Bridges Street (now Catherine Street) in Covent Garden, backing onto Drury Lane, since 1663, three years after the Restoration cancelled the Puritan ban on public performance. The first escaped the Great Fire of 1666, but burned to the ground six years later. Its successor, designed by Christopher Wren, was home to the great actor-manager David Garrick and his famous 24 Shakespeare performances. On leaving the stage in 1776, Garrick sold his shares in the theatre to the Irish dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who used it to premiere both his enormous success (and perennial favourite) The School for Scandal (1777) and The Critic (1779).
In time the Wren building, even as refurbished by the Adam brothers (with Robert providing a handsome classical façade on the Bridges Street side) fell into such disrepair that it had to be knocked down. Sheridan put £80,000 of his personal fortune, including the earnings from his comedies of manners, into an ambitious new project capable of seating 3,600 on the ground floor and in six tiers of galleries supported by iron columns. The producers found it increasingly difficult to fill this cavern with ordinary, ‘legitimate’ theatre, so they staged plays that created their effect with spectacular display rather than well-turned verbal exchanges. One such spectacle featured a river flowing into a lake large enough to row a boat on.
Despite an iron safety curtain that was supposed to prevent it, the third theatre caught fire on 24 February 1809, and by late afternoon was burning furiously. Sheridan, who was also the Member of Parliament for Sheffield, could see the glow from the House of Commons, then in session. ‘A motion was made to adjourn,’ according to the Annual Register for that year, ‘but Mr Sheridan said, with great calmness, “that whatever might be the extent of the private calamity, he hoped it would not interfere with the public business of the country”.’
Finally he and ‘many of his friends’ left for the scene, only to confirm the bad news. The theatre was insured, but for far less than it would cost to rebuild it. Rumour has it that he went into a nearby tavern, ordered a drink and proceeded to sip it slowly (another version has him out on the street, glass in hand). When asked how he could remain so calm while his fortune was going up in flames, he replied: ‘A man may surely take a glass of wine by his own fireside.’