Note 12 — Chapter III
Reading edition
Once a year the Gilbert and Sullivan operas came to Oxford; the booking opened a week in advance, and a queue stretched the length of George Street and half-way down the Corn. For days before and afterwards every piano in the college was tinkling with "The Silver Church" or the "Peers' Chorus." And we, in 1909, were privileged to entertain at luncheon Fred Billington, a great comedian and the greatest of all Pooh Bahs; fifteen or twenty of us, of the true Gilbert and Sullivan faith, shyly fed him with roast turkey and plum pudding, and he too was a little shy, suspecting some practical joke.
The visitor is sometimes surprised that the New Theatre contains no boxes; the reason was supplied, in my day, by a famous living actor, who explained that he and his friends had attended a melodrama in the old theatre and had taken an uncontrollable dislike for the villain's trousers. As Æschylus undertook to finish any prologue of Euripides with the words "ληκύθιον ἀπώλεσεν," so this undergraduate party qualified the villain's every boast and confession with the words: "Not in those trousers."
The dialogue ran roughly thus:
Villain. I will carry the girl off and make her my wife——
Interrupters.———————Not in those trousers.
Villain. I will be revenged——
Interrupters.———————Not in those trousers.
Villain. I will stick at nothing——
Interrupters.———————Not in those trousers.
As the curtain fell on the first act, the interrupters leapt from their box on the stage and pursued the villain down the Corn and the High until they captured him on Magdalen Bridge. They then returned to the theatre with the offending trousers but without the villain.
Jowett, as vice-chancellor, decreed that in the new theatre no boxes should be built.