'Divine Sarah' – the 'Queen of Tragedy' who got her first break in Worcester

As it was, when they came twice in 1963, they had to make do with the stage of the Gaumont cinema, which was a bit better than the wooden shed they’d have been offered 200 years before.

In the 18th century few places had a theatre that wasn’t a barn or some other impoverished property. At Worcester, the performing arts were staged in a wooden building in the yard of the King’s Head Inn, opposite the Guildhall in High Street.

First recorded mention of the venue was in the Worcester Postman (the forerunner of Berrow’s Worcester Journal) of January 4, 1717 when Oedipus, King of Thieves was performed.

Worcester’s Theatre Royal in Angel Street in 1903, following a refurbishment

In the style of the times, the King’s Head Theatre, as it was known, was hired out to travelling companies, which would traverse the country renting short stay places to put on plays and other entertainment.

For a number of years it was managed by a man called John Ward and his son-in-law Roger Kemble, the father of a young lady who became nationally famous as “the divine Sarah Siddons”.

Sarah Kemble, as she was then, made her first appearance at the King’s Head Theatre in 1767, although it was some time before her performing career took off.

Read more: The next train will be arriving by road!

After several years of drudgery and failure, she secured a spot on stage in Drury Lane and became an overnight sensation. Rather like Jimmy Tarbuck at the London Palladium, but a couple of centuries before.

One London newspaper said: “London is infatuated with her and the public talk of little else,” while noted critic William Hazlitt wrote “ To have seen Mrs Siddons was an event in everyone’s life.”

Not bad for a girl who started out performing in a pub yard in Worcester.

She went to school at Thorneloe House in Barbourne, later the site of Worcester Eye Hospital, and last year the city’s Civic Society unveiled a Blue Plaque to her in High Street where the King’s Head pub once stood, now a Costa coffee shop.

The Blue Plaque to Sarah Siddons in Worcester High Street, near the site of the old King’s Head Theatre

Sarah Siddons reigned for years as “the Queen of Tragedy” and several leading artists of the day, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Sir Thomas Lawrence, painted her portrait.

No doubt to promote his show, an escapologist tries his luck from an upper window of the Theatre Royal

...the escapologist descends into safe hands

There  is also an earlier painting of Sarah and her fellow actors at the back of the King’s Head by John Opie, the Cornish portrait and history painter, who obviously saw something special about her from the start.

A handbill for a production called A Barber-ous Suicide at the original Theatre Royal

Although Worcester’s was not an important theatre, it was home to some of the greatest stars of the 18th century stage. For besides Sarah, there were her brother and sister, John and Fanny, who also reached the peak of their profession.

However, by the late 1770s the old wooden theatre at the back of a pub had had its day and was regarded as no longer worthy of the fashionable provincial capital Worcester had become.

In its latter years, before closure in 1955, the Theatre Royal had moved to the long mac end of the market. The show Forbidden Fruit had nothing to do with eating too many strawberries

A new theatre was built in Angel Street in 1779 – initially called Angel Street Theatre but reopened as the Theatre Royal in 1805 – and after that there is no further record of the King’s Head being used. It had been a long and winding road.