Sedos Reads: The Lights o' London

Watch the performance of The Lights o' London on Thursday 18 March via Zoom.

Although melodramas had been staged for the majority of the nineteenth century, The Lights o' London by George Sims went beyond much of the shallow characterisation and stock situations with its life-like characters and fast-moving plot.

The humour which runs through the play also stops it falling into sentimentality. As one of the travelling players says of his wife, "If you see her play Lady Macbeth, she's that natural... the audience sometimes go out and fetch the police." 

To be part of the audience, email audience@sedos.co.uk to secure your ticket

See the full cast list for the show.

George R Sims wrote his long-running romantic melodrama The Lights o' London for the newly rebuilt Royal Princess' Theatre, Oxford Street in 1881. The theatre was designed by C J Phipps, who followed it up with the new Savoy Theatre for Richard D'Oyly Carte. The actor manager at the Princess's was Wilson Barrett who, needless to say, cast himself in the romantic lead in The Lights o' London.

The stage was equipped with all the latest machinery enabling swift scene changes from exterior of country mansion through a snow-covered road to London and a bridge over the canal basin in Regent's Park to a two-storey house in Borough Market, among others. Everything that a late Victorian theatre audience expected in this 2,000 seater theatre, and what modern day audiences expect from a cinema blockbuster.