The chariot scene from Ben Hur (1959) remains one of the most spectacular moments ever committed to celluloid. Costing around a quarter of the film’s total budget and shot using a team of 70 specially trained horses on the largest film set then in existence, the Buy Business Email Marketing List scene brought to life the decadence and spectacle of the ancient Roman world in a way that seemed only possible on the silver screen. This scene, though, did not originate in Hollywood. Sixty years earlier, in 1899, a production of Ben Hur had opened on Broadway based on the Buy Business Email Marketing List original novel by General Lew Wallace. In 1902 Arthur Collins brought the play to London’s Drury Lane. The epic chariot contest between Judah Ben Hur and Messala had 16 live horses race across the stage on a specially built treadmill.
Ben Hur was one of many stage productions from the 1880s and 1890s set in the ancient world, which became known collectively as ‘Buy Business Email Marketing List toga plays’. In an age remembered for the more reserved and realist drawing-room dramas of Ibsen and Wilde, toga plays were a feast for the senses. Their special effects, spectacular scenery, and decadent Buy Business Email Marketing List costumes were often recreated in exacting historical detail with input from ‘Olympian’ painters, including Frederick Leighton and Lawrence Buy Business Email Marketing List Alma-Tadema, and antiquarians, such as Sir Charles Newton. Toga drama often featured melodramatic plots involving depraved Romans in conflict with pious Christian heroes.
One of the earliest togae plays to tour Great Britain was Claudian (1883). Set in Byzantium in AD 360, just as it became the new capital of Buy Business Email Marketing List in the eastern Roman Empire, Claudian tells the story of a young nobleman, cursed for his wickedness to eternal youth and beauty by a priest. Eventually, after more than 100 years of depravity, Claudian learns morality and selflessness, sacrificing himself for the Buy Business Email Marketing List love of the young Christian woman Almida. The play was Buy Business Email Marketing List an instant success and received rave reviews from critics such as John Ruskin and Oscar Wilde. Wilde saw in Claudian a kind of ideal version of his own aesthetic philosophies, praising it as ‘not merely perfect in his Buy Business Email Marketing List picturesqueness, but absolutely dramatic also’.Indeed, Wilde would later publish his own tale of a decadent young man cursed with eternal youth and beauty in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), which perhaps owes more than a little to Claudian.