The premiere of “The Phantom” on June 7 1852, is one of the earliest performances of a play by Dion Boucicault in which Agnes Robertson (then aged 19) starred.
Boucicault’s play, “The Vampire” at Princess’s Theatre, London, 19 year-old actress Agnes Robertson starred, met Dion Boucicault who appeared also in an acting role.
This playbill from Royal Queen's Theatre and Opera House Edinburgh, February 26 and 27, 1862, is just a couple of months after the London premier of Boucicault's "rewritten" version where Zoe survives. This bill announced: "[t]he great sensation drama in five acts entitled the Octoroon." This playbill features an account of a purported "true story" of a Miss Winchester who, like the fictional Zoe, was described as "the natural child of the planter by a quadroon slave; she was inventoried in chattels of the estate and sold; the next day her body was found floating in the Ohio river." The playbill declared, "[s]uch is the truth which underlies the story of the Octoroon." Presumably, the production of The Octoroon advertised in this manner would feature a mixed-race heroine who commits suicide but the scenes listed on the same playbill also include the duel that Boucicault introduced in the final act in the version in which Zoe survived, which complicates ways in which The Octoroon produced in each locale participated in debates about race and slavery. The story of "Miss Winchester" was reprinted in a later playbill from Birmingham December 14, 1865. Special Collections, Templeman Library, University of Kent.
The Octoroon opened in London on November 18, 1861 (though with understudy to Robertson in the role of Zoe Peyton. Robertson’s first night was November 19). For several weeks the Boucicaults performed The Octoroon as it was staged in America, ending with the character Zoe committing suicide. But London audiences vocally expressed their disapproval at the protracted and graphic death of the heroine.
The Octoroon opened at a particularly charged time in US and New York City history. The timing of the New York opening of a melodrama featuring a mixed-race enslaved heroine was both risky and audacious.
John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry had taken place two months earlier on October 16; John Brown was executed for leading that insurrection against slavery on December 2.
Pro-South democrat Fernando Wood was elected mayor of New York City on December 6, the same day that The Octoroon opened at the Winter Garden Theatre. Critical reaction to the play was immediate and extreme. For some of Boucicault's white American critics, like the anonymous reviewer from the pro-Democrat New York paper, Spirit of the Times, the prospect of Zoe and George's proposed interracial marriage was exceptionally inflammatory.
The New York Herald editorial entitled "Abolition On and Off the Stage" that we show here was published the day before the opening night, describing the play as a "work of disunion and treason." (James Gordon Bennett], "Abolition On and Off the Stage," (editorial), New York Herald, December 5, 1859, 6). But other reviews were equivocal, for example, the New York Times in a December 15, 1859 review declared that the play was a "cleverly-constructed, perfectly impartial, not to say non-committal picture of life as it is in Louisiana.”
Robertson's sympathetic portrayal of an enslaved mixed-race woman seemed to fuel the controversy and she later recounted that she had been "solemnly warned that if I attempted to play this auction scene I should be shot as I stood on the table to be sold." ("A Splendid Record: Mrs Dion Boucicault," The Sketch, May 16, 1894, 146). Seemingly as a result of this threat (though Boucicault had been attempting to break their contract with the Winter Garden), Boucicault and Robertson, by 14 December had left the Winter Garden altogether, although for several months the play continued to be performed there and in several other theatres in New York during the 1859-60 season.
