The Duke of York Theatre has seen West End legends, ghostly sightings, a cursed costume and Dracula himself pass through its doors, writes DAVID TURNBULL
Opened in 1892, the Duke of York Theatre, originally called the Trafalgar Square Theatre, was the first to be built on London’s St Martin’s Lane.
It was here that Charlie Chaplin made his West End debut as a child actor, playing a pageboy in Sherlock Holmes.
A teenage Claude Rains, later to become The Invisible Man, worked there as a callboy, racing along the corridors and knocking on dressing room doors when it was time for actors to make their appearance on stage.
In 1904, J.M. Barrie’s classic play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up made its world debut on the theatre’s stage.
The theatre was the brainchild of acting and producing couple Frank Wyatt and Violet Melnotte. When Frank died in 1926, Violet ran it single-handed until she sold it two years later.
Violet haunts The Duke of York
But she deeply regretted the sale and bought it back shortly before she died. In fact, she loved the Duke of York so much that even after her death in 1935 she couldn’t bring herself to part with it.
Over the years her ghost has made frequent appearances in several locations around the theatre.
She’s been seen dressed in black, mingling with the crowds in the bar area and also backstage in the green room. One of her favoured spots is the private box where she would watch performances whilst she was alive. Her ghost is said to be particularly active during opening nights.
She also makes herself heard through the slamming of an old iron fire door that has long since been bricked up.
If the ghost of Violet Melnotte is a benevolent force, simply keeping an eye on the theatre that was so close to her heart, the same cannot be said for the cursed bolero jacket.
Also referred to as the ‘strangling jacket’, the Edwardian velvet bolero-style jacket was one of the costumes worn by acclaimed actress Thora Hird in the play The Queen Came By, written by R.F. Delderfield and performed at the Duke of York in 1949.
Each time she wore the jacket, Hird claimed to experience it physically tightening around her.
During one performance she ran off stage, complaining that the jacket was trying to strangle her. A similar unsettling sensation was experienced by her understudy whenever she stood in for Hird.
A spiritual medium said that the bolero had been worn by a young Victorian actress who was brutally murdered and from whose body it was removed before she was thrown into the Thames.
Another theory was that she was still wearing it as she bobbed on the currents, and that the tightening sensation replicated how it had constricted around her bloating corpse.
The story of the bolero was recounted in Peter Underwood’s Haunted London. Underwood said the bolero was bought at auction by a wealthy American whose wife and daughter experienced the same crushing sensation when they tried it on.
Hamilton Deane’s Dracula
One of the plays performed at the Duke of York while Violet Melnotte was still alive was Hamilton Deane’s Dracula. She was thrilled by the play and the box-office takings it garnered, but also expressed concerns that Deane’s innovative vampire trapdoor might be damaging her beloved stage.
The play ran throughout July 1927, with Deane himself taking on the role of Van Helsing.
The title role of Dracula was played by 22-year-old Raymond Huntley, who went on to enjoy a 40-year career in film between the 1930s and the 1970s.
When the play was adapted for Broadway, Huntley turned down an offer to reprise the role, leaving the way clear for Bela Lugosi, who then went on to appear in the 1931 film version produced by Universal Pictures. Lugosi himself is woven into the history of the Duke of York.
In 1951, the 68-year-old actor rehearsed with the cast of the Dracula stage revival on the Duke of York’s stage before setting off on a 22-city tour. Unfortunately, the play never got the West End climax Lugosi had hoped for, and the tour was the last time he ever wore the vampire cape on stage.
Ghosts of a different ilk manifested on the Duke of York stage when Ghost Stories by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman began a year-long run there in June 2010.
Total audience figures for the year reached 200,000, with Dyson and Nyman asking audiences to agree to an unwritten pact to ‘keep the secrets of Ghost Stories’ so the shocking twists wouldn’t be ruined for future crowds.
It’s a pact that Violet Melnotte may well have been honouring from her supernaturally reserved seat in her private box.
