page_title: John Lawrence Toole
section_title: Peak Years
hierarchical_section_title: John Lawrence Toole / Life and career / Peak Years
caption_attribution_description: English: Source: http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/miscpics/0/0/6/doc/mp006003.shtml Engraving of John Lawrence Toole as "The Don" 1890
context_page_description: John Lawrence Toole was an English comic actor, actor-manager and theatrical producer. He was famous for his roles in farce and in serio-comic melodramas, in a career that spanned more than four decades, and the first actor to have a West End theatre named after him.
context_section_description: In 1858, at the suggestion of Dickens, Toole joined Benjamin Webster's company at the Adelphi Theatre and established his popularity as a farceur, creating, among other parts, Joe Spriggins in Ici on parle français by T. H. Williams, Augustus de Rosherville in The Willow Copse by Boucicault, in Birthplace of Podgers, Tom Dibbles in Good for Nothing by J. B. Buckstone, and in Bengal Tiger.  He remained at the Adelphi as principal low comedian for nine years, frequently partnering with Paul Bedford, whose sedate comic style complemented his own contrasting energetic style.  His most successful roles there included Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol (1859),  the title role in Asmodeus in 1859, Peter Familias in The Census by William Brough (among many pieces by Brough), Milwood in George de Barnwell by H. J. Byron (1862), Caleb Plummer in Dot (1862), by Dion Boucicault, Pitcher in The Area Belle (1864), and Prudent in The Fast Family by B. Webster, Jr.  His other great successes there were as Mr. Tetterby in an adaptation of Dickens' The Haunted Man and of a frightened servant in Boucicault's The Phantom.  He played a season in 1867 with the impressive new company at Queen's Theatre that included Irving, Henrietta Hodson, Lionel Brough and Charles Wyndham, where he appeared in such works a H. J. Byron's Dearer Than Life, as Michael Garner, and W. S. Gilbert's La Vivandière, as Sergeant Sulpizio.  Frederick Waddy wrote of Toole in 1873 that as Harry Coke in Off the Line, "Mr. Toole makes one of those perfect pictures of everyday life of the lower class in which he has so often proved himself a consummate artist. But in low comedy and broad farce it would be difficult to find an actor of equal merit....  As Paul Pry he keeps his audience in a roar whenever he is on the stage".
  Toole was then engaged in 1868 at the Gaiety Theatre by Hollingshead, appearing in many pieces there including Thespis (1871), the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration, and as John Lockwood, in a drama called Wait and Hope.  In 1872–74, among other successes, he portrayed Tom Larkin in Good News by H. J. Byron,  the Irishman Brulgruddery in John Bull by George Colman the Younger; Bob Acres in The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, together with Charles James Mathews and Samuel Phelps; the title role in a Robert Reece burlesque called Don Giovanni in Venice; another title role in Guy Fawkes by H. J. Byron, and created the role of the barrister Hammond Coote in Wig and Gown by James Albery.  Toole's fame was at its height in 1874, when he went on tour to America, but he failed to reproduce there the success he had found in England.  He remained based mostly at the Gaiety until the end of 1877, when he moved to the Globe Theatre under his own management for two years.
  In 1878, Toole created the role of Charles Liquorpond in A Fool and his Money by H. J. Byron. Liquorpond was a retired footman unexpectedly overtaken by wealth, and Toole's affectedly superior pronunciation, particularly of his own name, was a tremendous success.  In his prime, Toole achieved wide popularity as a comic actor, being noted for his comic delivery of words, but he did not confine himself exclusively to comedy. He also excelled in domestic melodramas (adaptations by Dion Boucicault and others of Charles Dickens and similar writers), playing "tender-hearted victims of fate", where he was famously able to combine humour and pathos. The Times said of his performance in Dearer than Life by Henry James Byron: 
  "Mr. J. L. Toole... is associated in the minds of the general public mainly with parts provoking to uproarious laughter; but it may fairly be questioned whether, like his predecessor in this also, his heart does not lie with, and he himself is not seen to more advantage in, the telling sketches from everyday life to which, for want of a better, we give the name of domestic drama. Anything more lifelike than the intensity of cold and hunger from which he may be almost said to suffer, in the garret-scene, as Michael Garner it would be difficult to conceive."
caption: Toole in the title role in The Don (1888)
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