The theatre was opened in 1766 but, due to strict laws on entertainment, had to disguise plays as concerts. Bristol was a city which had, on balance, been Roundhead in its Civil War sympathies. It was the nursery of Quakerism, and would be that of Methodism, and so – with these kind of puritan values -- theatre met with opposition. For instance, John Power’s adapted theatre near Bristol Bridge had been repeatedly threatened with closure around its 1706 season.
It wasn’t until 1778 that the theatre was granted legal status. It then took the title ‘Theatre Royal’ and became a joint-company with the Bath playhouse. A year later, the most famous actress of the time, Mrs Simmons, gave her first recorded Bristol performance on Monday 15th March, 1779, when she played the title heroine in The Countess of Salisbury. Legend has it that Simmons’s ghost still haunts the theatre.
As with other regional theatres of the time, the Theatre Royal mostly followed the lead of the London theatre programme and performances. However, Brystowe, or the Harlequin Mariner with lyrics by local William Meyler and music by Brooks, shown between 1788 and 1791, was a Bristolian production. Similarly, the light satire One Rake in a Thousand, by Richard Jenkins, dramatic critic for the Bristol Gazette (1783), Hannah More’s plays The Fatal Falsehood and The Inflexive Captive, and Yearsley’s Earl Grey: an Historical Play, performed in 17889, all represented local playwrights.
In the late-eighteenth century, the theatre was immensely popular, staging a variety of plays: comedies, tragedies, histories, farces, pantomimes and operas. A Londoner, writing in 1792 of the Theatre Royal, remarked that ‘it was no uncommon thing to see one hundred carriages at the doors of the house,’ so great was its reputation.
A considerable change in the nature and behaviour of audiences also marked the last decade of the C18th. Mobilisation of the militia for the Napoleonic Wars meant a considerable swelling of the military presence in Bristol, whose Downs provided an ideal encampment ground, and, while traditionally soldiers and sailors were keen patrons, their behaviour, even that of the officers, was no also ideal (throwing apples, stones, damaging theatre). A dispute between two officers in the theatre led to a duel on Kingsdown. It also affected productions, which became increasingly patriotic in tone: Henry V was put on, and Voluntary Contributions (1798).
In the early years of 1800, the large numbers of troops still helped swell audiences and helped mask any appearance of declining audiences. Patriotic pieces and ebullitions of patriotism continued to mark programmes.
Even more than the declining standard of the stock company, the poverty of the repertoire attracted criticism. The real attraction of this period were melodramas, the pantomimes and the spectacles – Blue Beard, The Castle Spectre, The Miller and his Men had full-scale reproductions till almost the mid-century.
John Boles Watson’s management was a disaster. He faced serious difficulties: the post-war depression cast an economic blight which had already affected the theatre’s prosperity, unalleviated by new economic growth. By 1817, the residential centre of Bristol had moved westwards towards Clifton (which was rapidly expanding). The environs of the Theatre Royal more and more took on the character of the docks at the ends of King Street, and sailors and dockmen, rather than merchants and aldermen, walked the pavements. The theatre split with its sister company in Bath in 1819, and suffered lowering popularity until the 1850s.
