A stage of life

In the late 18th century, dramatic performances were long, raucous and stinky, yet hugely popular. PAUL BLOOMFIELD goes backstage in North Yorkshire at Britain's oldest working theatre in its original form

- Paul Bloomfield

The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd, the flare of the floodlights - what enchantments they conjure! If you'd visited a regional playhouse over two centuries ago, though, a very different set of sights, sounds and, particularly, scents would have assailed you.

"Light was from tallow candles made with mutton fat-smelly and smoky," explains tour guide Dave Palmer in Richmond's Georgian Theatre Royal. Not that the audience would have cared. "They were pretty pungent, too," smiles Palmer. "They didn't bathe much, and puffed away on clay pipes throughout the five or six-hour show. With about 400 people packed into pit, stalls and boxes, the whole place ponged to high heaven. And it was a wild crowd: yelling, booing, cheering, hissing, throwing things at the actors - flowers if they liked them, rotten apples if they didn't." That was a transformative era for theatre.