page_title: Nellie Farren
section_title: Gaiety Theatre years
hierarchical_section_title: Nellie Farren / Gaiety Theatre years
caption_attribution_description: English: Ellen (Nelly) Farren 1848-1904, English Actress and Singer.
context_page_description: Ellen "Nellie" Farren was an English actress and singer best known for her roles as the "principal boy" in musical burlesques at the Gaiety Theatre.
  Born into a theatrical family, Farren began acting as a child. She made her professional adult debut in 1864 and joined the company at London's Olympic Theatre, performing in Shakespeare, contemporary comedies, dramas and musical burlesques. From 1868 to 1892, she performed at the Gaiety Theatre, which specialised in musical burlesque, becoming famous in the male and principal boy roles, which permitted an actress in the Victorian era theatre to show her legs in tights. Farren gained a large following among the theatre's mostly male audience.
  Farren created the role of Mercury in Gilbert and Sullivan's first collaboration, Thespis and created or played roles in works by Dion Boucicault, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, William Congreve and Henry James Byron, among many others. In the 1880s, she created roles in the series of famous Gaiety burlesques with musical scores by Meyer Lutz, often written by Fred Leslie.
context_section_description: Farren began her long tenure at the Gaiety Theatre in December 1868, at the re-opening of the theatre under new management by John Hollingshead, playing Sprightly in On the Cards and the title role in its companion piece, Robert the Devil, by W. S. Gilbert, a burlesque of the opera Robert le Diable.  This ran until May 1869. Her husband, Robert Soutar, joined the theatre at the same time and served as an actor, stage manager and writer there. Farren next played the title role in Alfred Thompson's Columbus!, or the Original Pitch in a Merry Key (1869).
  Farren continued at the Gaiety for the next 25 years, playing in comedies of all kinds and in Shakespearean dramas, first under Hollingshead and then under George Edwardes, performing the lead in dozens of shows, many also starring Edward Terry, Kate Vaughan, Fred Leslie and E. W. Royce.  She was most acclaimed in the "principal boy" roles. These roles permitted the actress to show her legs in tights, and Farren became very popular with the young men of the Gaiety audience, who would wear a coloured scarf to show support for their favourite actress. Farren's colours were dark blue, light blue and white, and she could look out over the audience to compare the number of fans displaying her colours as compared to the colours of the other actresses. According to Hollingshead, Farren developed a "spinal complaint, which troubled her in her early Gaiety career [and] developed into locomotor ataxy" later.
  Some of her best known roles in the 1870s included Tilly Slowboy in Dot (Dion Boucicault's version of The Cricket on the Hearth); Miss Prue in Love for Love; Princess of Trebizonde (1870), based on the Jacques Offenbach operetta; Sam Weller in Bardell v. Pickwick; Mercury in Gilbert and Sullivan's first operatic collaboration, Thespis, or, the Gods Grown Old (1871); Ali Baba; Polly Neefit in Shilly-Shally (1872), by Anthony Trollope and Charles Reade; Leporello in Robert Reece's Don Giovanni; Antony and Cleopatra (1873); Clemency Newcome in The Battle of Life, (based on Charles Dickens's Christmas story of that title); the title role in Henry James Byron's Little Don Caesar de Bazan (1876, a send-up of Boucicault's play); Thaddeus in Byron's The Bohemian G-yurl and the Unapproachable Pole (1877); and title roles in Byron's farce Little Doctor Faust (1878) his Handsome Hernani, or The Fatal Penny-Whistle (1879); and Robbing Roy (1879).
  Farren's Gaiety pieces in the 1880s included Lutz and Robert Reece's burlesques of The Forty Thieves (1880), as Ganem; the title roles in Aladdin (1881) and Little Robin Hood (1882); Ariel (1883, by F. C. Burnand, based on The Tempest); Blue Beard (1882); Camaralzaman and Mazeppa (1884); perhaps her most famous role as Little Jack Sheppard (1885); Richard Henry's Monte Cristo Jr., as Edmond Dantes (1886); Dr. Frankenstein in Frankenstein, or The Vampire's Victim (1887); Miss Esmeralda, or The Maid and the Monkey (1887); Fra Diavolo, Gulliver, Rip Van Winkle, Sonnambula; the title role in Cinder Ellen up too Late (1891); and dozens of others. Perhaps the most successful of her later roles was the title role in Ruy Blas and the Blasé Roué (1889, by Fred Leslie and H. F. Clarke, a take-off of Victor Hugo's play Ruy Blas), which she and Fred Leslie toured in Australia (with Sidney Jones) and elsewhere in 1891. In 1888–89, she, Leslie, Letty Lind, Sylvia Grey, Marion Hood and the Gaiety company had toured the US and Australia with Monte Christo, Jr. and Miss Esmeralda.
   
  In addition to these burlesques, Farren also appeared in other comedies such as The Man of Quality (an adaptation of Vanbrugh's Relapse), as Miss Hoyden (1870); William Congreve's Love for Love, as Miss Prue (1871); Bickerstaff's The Hypocrite, as Charlotte (1873); The Rivals (1874) as Lillian Languish (1874) and as Lucy (1877); The Critic, as Tilburina (1874); Ursula in Much Ado About Nothing (1874); Maria in Twelfth Night (1876); The Grasshopper (1877, an adaptation of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy's La Cigale); and a number of farces. James McNeill Whistler saw The Grasshopper and 
caption: Nellie Farren
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