Ben-Hur, London, April 3 1902

Ben-Hur, London, April 3 1902

Live horses and 30-ton chariots amaze the critics at the premiere of Ben-Hur, April 3 1902

Samantha Ellis
Wednesday October 8, 2003

The Guardian

Charlton Heston looking more than usually rugged is the image most people have of Ben-Hur. But before it was a film it was a novel, and after that - unbelievably, when you think about the chariot race and other amazing special effects required - it was a play.

Ben-Hur, a Tale of the Christ, was written by the grizzled lawyer and soldier General Lew Wallace while he was governing wild New Mexico. After its publication in 1880, he was deluged with requests to dramatise it, but refused them all because he objected in principle to the portrayal of Christ on stage. When William Young suggested an ingenious solution - Jesus would be represented by a beam of light - Wallace let him adapt it. The result was a hit on Broadway in 1899: it ran for an astonishing 21 years, during which time over 20 million people went to see it.

In 1902, Arthur Collins produced a replica production in London at the Drury Lane theatre. "The staging of such a play," wrote Tatler's critic, "is just the thing that Mr Arthur Collins revels in, for it requires all the ingenuity of a master of stage mechanism to give the play the actuality of the posters." The posters had had quite an impact; the Tatler critic's prose turned purple as he described these "fine samples of American lithography". Not for nothing had Collins poured money into the production, retaining the effects but bringing in a new cast and design team to give London a spectacle such as it had never seen before. As Tatler's critic noted gratefully: "Everything about Ben-Hur is on an enormous scale."

The impressive cast included Constance Collier as the temptress, Iras, despite the fact that she was also starring as Calypso in Ulysses, another stage epic, down the road at His Majesty's. She would run between the theatres and slip out of Calypso's flowing robes into Iras's unkempt wig and exotic, dishevelled clothing. Born in Kennington, like her friend Charlie Chaplin, Collier had been a Gaiety Girl before she switched to "legitimate" theatre, specialising in goddesses, queens and romantic heroines. Doe-eyed, curvy and carmine-lipped, she lamented in her 1929 autobiography that classic Victorian beauties had been overtaken by a succession of "lovely nymphs", leaving the British stage bereft: "There is none of the languid grace or warm beauty of 1900." Noël Coward, another friend and sparring partner, described her in later life as a grande dame, "presiding from her bed, attired in a pink dressing gown, with a Pekingese in one hand and a cigarette in the other".

The press liked the performances. Robert Taber, wrote the Illustrated London News's critic, played the eponymous Jewish prince with "rare personal charm" and the whole was "capitally acted", while Collier was coyly described by the Sketch's critic as "very alluring". But the real star of the show was backstage, in the mighty machinery that made the chariot race come alive.

The Era's critic dutifully detailed how it was achieved by "four great cradles, 20ft in length and 14ft wide, which are movable back and front on railways". The horses - real ones - galloped full-pelt towards the audience, secured by invisible steel cable traces and running on treadmills. Electric rubber rollers spun the chariot wheels. A vast cyclorama revolved in the opposite direction to create an illusion of massive speed, and fans created clouds of dust. It was, wrote the ILN's critic, "a marvel of stage-illusion" that was "memorable beyond all else". The Sketch's critic called it "thrilling and realistic ... enough to make the fortune of any play" and noted that "the stage, which has to bear 30 tons' weight of chariots and horses, besides huge crowds, has had to be expressly strengthened and shored up".

But there was more to Ben-Hur than sensation. The Sketch's critic noted that the opening night crowd included not just "sporting-men", there for the horses, but also "several clergymen", and it was the religious story, with the clever prefigurement of Christ and heart-wrenching melodrama, that finally impressed the audiences. The Sketch's critic was particularly moved by the "beautiful finale, breathing peace to those who have suffered".

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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