page_title: Frederick Robson
section_title: The 'Olympic' and stardom
hierarchical_section_title: Frederick Robson / The 'Olympic' and stardom
caption_attribution_description: English: Italian actress Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906) as Medea in Médée by Ernest Legouvé (1807-1903).
context_page_description: Frederick Robson, born Thomas Brownbill was an English comedian, actor and ballad singer. During his acting career, he combined outstanding comic gifts with the power of moving an audience to a sense of tragedy or pathos. Although Robson's career spanned more than two decades, the period of his greatest success was at the Olympic Theatre, beginning in 1853 and lasting only a few years.
context_section_description: Later in March 1853, Robson was offered an engagement at the Olympic Theatre in London under the management of old-school actor William Farren. In the first piece Robson did not seem to connect with his audience, but in the short farce which followed he introduced a comic song he had sung already at the Grecian, The Country Fair, which allowed him to improvise characters and introduce comic business. "That's very good: he's an actor!" was his manager's satisfied verdict, and Robson's place was assured. By April his performance of the song was being advertised on the bill separately in bold type.
  On 25 April, Robson took the lead in a burlesque version of Macbeth, a freewheeling adaptation that poked fun at the solemn and scholarly productions of Shakespeare offered by the likes of Charles Kean, while also including as many popular American minstrel songs as it could. Reviewers were impressed, commenting that Robson's Macbeth was more than a simple caricature: "His peculiarity is that he really seems to be aware of the tragic foundation which lies at the bottom of the grotesque superstructure".
  Then on 23 May 1853 Robson appeared in a revived one-act farce called The Wandering Minstrel playing Jem Bags, a bedraggled Cockney street-singer. He produced a realistic portrayal which astonished and delighted his audience with its originality, but which may have owed something to personal experience.  His culminating song, Villikins and his Dinah, quickly became the rage of the season and within two years was known throughout the English-speaking world, reaching Australia and America.
  Robson's talent for burlesque came to the fore again in Shylock, or The Merchant of Venice Preserv'd in which, playing the title role, he again produced the unsettling effect of veering from comedy to tragedy and back within a single speech. 
  His most memorable performance in burlesque was as Medea, in which he parodied the strongly-emotional, gestural acting of the Italian star Adelaide Ristori in the same role.  Between the laughs, however, he also made his audience shiver at the sheer desperation of an abandoned wife. Dickens, who saw both, preferred Robson – not for his comedy, but because he found him more moving in the tragic passages, writing: 
  "[T]he extraordinary power of his performance ... points to the badness of Ristori's acting in a singular way by bringing out what she might do, and does not. The scene with Jason is perfectly terrific. ... He has a frantic song and dagger dance, about 10 minutes long altogether, which has more passion in it than Ristori could express in 50 years."
  Ristori herself came to see his version on its opening night, and Robson, who suffered badly from stage fright, was so disconcerted he forgot his lines and was unable to go on: he was saved only by the presence of mind of the little girl playing his stage 'son', who cued his first lines.
  Other roles in which Robson excelled included the sinister Desmarets in Plot and Passion,(1853) the malevolent spirit Gam-Bogie in The Yellow Dwarf(1854) and deformed Prince Richcraft in a fairy extravaganza, The Discreet Princess(1855).   Henry James, who as a child saw him in the latter role, never forgot it: "I still see Robson slide across the stage, in one sidelong wriggle, as the small black sinister Prince Richcraft of the Fairy Tale; everything he did at once very dreadful and very droll, thoroughly true and yet nonetheless macabre..." Thackeray, who saw him in The Yellow Dwarf, was astonished to find himself at one point almost in tears at a burlesque.
  Barely five feet tall, with small hands and feet but a large head, Robson made brilliant use of a physique which lent itself easily to comedy or the grotesque.  Despite his physical oddities however critics suggested from early in his career that he could develop into a powerful tragic actor if he chose but he never did so, usually playing parts in which he could make the lightning transitions between humour and pathos which caused one admiring critic to exclaim 'Mr Robson is not a star - he is a meteor.' Sir Henry I
caption: Ristori as Medea
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