John Durang: Man of the American Stage By Lynn Matluck Brooks

Gérard de Rayneval further influenced Durang: “The first pantomime I ever saw was performed by his household domestics in the old Theatre South Street” (8). The Southwark Theatre had been used in 1778 by a troupe of British soldiers, their wives, and a few theater professionals. These performers, called “Howe’s Thespians” after Sir William Howe, commander of the British forces in America, produced plays and farces under the direction of the flamboyant, ill-fated Major André and the talented Captain Delancey.³² American troops, upon returning to Philadelphia, continued their theatrical habits established at Valley Forge the previous spring where, grateful to have survived the winter, they too produced plays. American officers organized Southwark performances beginning in September 1778, and it may have been one of these that John Durang later recalled as a production by Gérard de Rayneval’s household staff, or perhaps some of these joined the American soldiers on stage. Or, Durang might have been remembering performances by a Frenchman later than Gérard de Rayneval’s sojourn in Philadelphia (he left in September 1779): those given in January 1782 at the Southwark by Alexander Quesnay de Glouvay, a teacher of French and possibly also of dancing.³³

The young John Durang was fascinated by eye-catching characters, pageantry, and theatricality. He commented, “I cannot pass unnoticed a noted kind of lunatic character, one Jemmy de Rover, known by everybody as he followed the soldiers from town to town, dress’d in regimentals and knapsack” (8). He also remarked on watching “all the brass cannon, the flags and trophies of war the Americans had gained at York[town] from Cornwallis brought in to Philad’a by our troops” (9), following the British surrender in October 1781. Processions, illuminations, fireworks, transparencies, and dressing up in character would become John Durang’s professional stock. The theatricality of the war was not lost on him.

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It was during and just after the American Revolution that another war was waged on American soil—for or against “vain sports and pastime,”