VARIETY reached the zenith of its popularity around the 1920s. Growing out of the old music halls, it was a true people's theatre, colourful in a tacky sort of way, and replete with amazing characters. It offered cheap entertainment, without patronising its audiences or trying to tell them what was good for them. It gave them places to go that were warm and companionable, and where they had a chance to forget, for a time, the hardships of hard lives.
It succeeded, and succeeded spectacularly, making fortunes for the shrewdest and toughest impresarios and it gave a stage to some of the greatest comedians and singers of all time, many of whom went on to huge fame and fortune in the early days of the cinema.
But it was the cinema which was to bring down variety and, for a time, supplant it as the world's most popular form of entertainment. At first the ill-lit, flickering short films which were shown in the variety houses were little more than another "act", something with which to fill out the bill until the comics, the real, stars of those days, came on. But, as the new medium became ink adept and sophisticated, the days of variety were numbered. It went on, in reasonable health, until the second World War, but the advent of another new medium, television, finally did for it and it exists now, if it exists at all, only in the form of cabaret.
This is the world that Stephen Dee celebrates in his exhibition, Variety, opening at the Temple Bar Gallery on Monday, in association with the Dublin Theatre Festival. Each of the pieces in his exhibition is a peepshow into that lost world, a series of porcelain figures, mounted in glass-fronted boxes, some lit from within. The voices of some of these variety performers will be heard, too, on a continuous soundtrack made from old records.
But what gives the show its special interest and feel for the lost world it celebrates is that, for the most part, the figures it shows are losers. Even when they are so famous that they are still remembered and cherished, he finds them at some low ebb in their careers. Thus we see Laurel and Hardy in the 1950s when, out of fashion in the cinema, they had to take to touring a stage version of their famous routines, or Buster Keaton, in his 60s, alcoholic and broke, in a French theatre performing the knockabout comedy in which he had started as a child - he at least was to be rediscovered before his death.
Many of the others in his cast have a touch of the sadness of failure about them too, even when we cannot but laugh at their sheer eccentricity. Who, except the most puritanical disciple of political correctness, could not be cheered up by Professor Cheer, the Man with the Xylophone Skull, on whose head an assistant used to tap out Tiptoe Through The Tulips? Or how about Wilson, Keppel and Betty, who did a pseudo-Egyptian dance and were told by Goebbels, on a visit to prewar Germany, to cover their legs as they were "bad for the morals of Nazi youth"?
Also to be seen are Walford Bodie MD and the Levitating Woman (when challenged about his medical credentials Bodie said the letters stood for "merry devil") and the briefly famous Rector of Stiftkey, a defrocked clergyman who was eaten by a lion with whom he was sharing a cage in Skegness.
Stephen Dee is the pseudonym of Stephen Dixon, since 1980 also a Dublin-based journalist, who has the world of porcelain modelling as well as variety in his veins. His grandmother was Olga Elcock, a well-known artist who in the 1920s designed figurines for Wedgewood, Royal Doulton and other big Potteries companies, while her husband Fred was a music hall strong man, who appeared in his time with the soon-to-be-famous Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel.
Originally deciding to be an artist, Dixon had his career cut short when he injured his hands in a car accident. The hands healed, but by then he was a working journalist, so when he resumed modelling figures the two jobs ran in tandem. In the 1970s, while working for the Guardian, he was sent out to interview a number of survivors of the age of Music Hall.
MOST of them were old and retired by then, but it was the start of a life-long interest for him and he started collecting books, cuttings and old recordings of the time which are being used in his Temple Bar exhibition. One of them, Hetty King, who features in the show, was an old lady in her 80s, the last representative of the lost art of male impersonator.
"There she was", he says, "still going round the theatres doing this act that was 40 years out of date, still full of life, fighting her corner about her billing and where in the running order she went on and so forth. She told me, with great pride, that she had earned a three-figure weekly wage ever since the 1920s. Not bad money then."
One of the greatest veterans of variety, Maureen Potter, will be opening the Temple Bar show on Monday when, no doubt, the stories of those long-ago nights will amaze and amuse us all.