Manager
Similar to his father, Stephen Kemble became a very successful theatre manager of the Eighteenth-Century English Stage. He managed the original Theatre Royal, Newcastle for fifteen years (1791–1806). He brought members of his famous acting family and many other actors out of London to Newcastle. Stephen's sister, Sarah Siddons was the first London actor of repute to break through the prejudice which regarded summer " strolling," or starring in the provincial theatres, as a degradation. Stephen Kemble guided the Theatre through many celebrated seasons. The Newcastle audience quickly came to regard itself, that is, as "in a position of great theatrical privilege.". The original Theatre Royal was opened on 21 January 1788 and was located on Mosley Street, next to Drury Lane. While in Newcastle upon Tyne Kemble lived in a large house opposite the White Cross in Newgate Street.
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Royal Theatre, Newcastle
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Kemble Theatre Ticket
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Stephen Kemble
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Kemble by John Raphael Smith, National Portrait Gallery
Stephen Kemble quickly branched out and began to manage other theatres: Theatre Royal, Edinburgh (1794–1800)); Theatre Royal, Glasgow (eventually replaced by Tivoli Theatre (Aberdeen)) (1795); Chester; Lancaster; Sheffield (1792); Berwick-upon-Tweed (1794),; theatres in Northumberland; Alnwick (where he builds a theatre)(1796) and rural areas on the theatre circuit. From Newcastle, Kemble ran the Durham circuit (1799), which included North Shields, Sunderland, South Shields, Stockton and Scarborough (opening for the Stockton Races). He also managed theatres at Northallerton and Morpeth. In Broadway, he performed in the Assembly Room of the Lygon Arms (formerly known as the White Hart Inn). He also managed Whitehaven and Paislie (1814), Northampton Theatre, the theatre at Birmingham and Theatre Royal, Dumfries, Portsmouth. For a short time in 1792, actor Charles Lee Lewes assisted Stephen Kemble in the management of the Dundee Repertory Theatre
He supported the careers of many leading actors of the time such as Master Betty, his wife Elizabeth Satchell, his sister Elizabeth Whitlock, George Frederick Cooke, Harriet Pye Esten, John Edwin, Joseph Munden, Grist, Elizabeth Inchbald, Pauline Hall, Wilson, Charles Incledon, Egan. His nephew Henry Siddons (Sarah Siddons' son) made his first appearance on stage in Sheffield (October 1792), his younger brother Charles Kemble, Thomas Apthorpe Cooper, John Liston, John Emery, Daniel Egerton, William Macready.
Stephen presented London stars such as Edmund Kean, Alexander and Elizabeth Pope (née Elizabeth Younge), Mrs. Dorothea Jordan, his brother John Philip Kemble, Wright Bowden, his sister Sarah Siddons, Elizabeth Billington, Michael Kelly (tenor), Anna Maria Crouch, and Charles Lee Lewes.
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Famous quotes containing the word manager:
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house, but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments. He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)