There are many other plays in the course of which genuine food is consumed on the stage.  But some excuse for the generally fictitious nature of theatrical repasts is to be found in the fact that eating during performance is often a very difficult matter for the actors to accomplish.  Michael Kelly, in his “Memoirs,” relates that he was required to eat part of a fowl in the supper scene of a bygone operatic play called, “A House to be Sold.”  Bannister at rehearsal had informed him that it was very difficult to swallow food on the stage.  Kelly was incredulous however.  “But strange as it may appear,” he writes, “I found it a fact that I could not get down a morsel.  My embarrassment was a great source of fun to Bannister and Suett, who were both gifted with the accommodating talent of stage feeding.  Whoever saw poor Suett as the lawyer in ‘No Song no Supper,’ tucking in his boiled leg of lamb, or in ‘The Siege of Belgrade,’ will be little disposed to question my testimony to the fact.”  From this account, however, it is manifest that the difficulty of “stage feeding,” as Kelly calls it, is not invariably felt by all actors alike.  And probably, although the appetites of the superior players may often fail them, the supernumerary or the representative of minor characters could generally contrive to make a respectable meal if the circumstances of the case supplied the opportunity.

The difficulty that attends eating on the stage does not, it would seem, extend to drinking, and sometimes the introduction of real and potent liquors during the performance has led to unfortunate results.  Thus Whincop, to whose tragedy called “Scanderbeg,” published in 1747, added “a List of all the Dramatic Authors, with some Account of their Lives,” &c., describes a curious occurrence at the Theatre Royal in 1693.  A comedy entitled “The Wary Widow, or Sir Noisy Parrot,” written by one Higden, and now a very scarce book, had been produced; but on the first representation, “the author had contrived so much drinking of punch in the play that the actors almost all got drunk, and were unable to get through with it, so that the audience were dismissed at the end of the third act.”  Upon subsequent performances of the comedy no doubt the management reduced the strength of the punch, or substituted some harmless beverage, toast-and-water perhaps, imitative of that ardent compound so far as mere colour is concerned.  There have been actors, however, who have refused to accept the innocent semblance of vinous liquor supplied by the management, and especially when, as part of their performance, they were required to simulate intoxication.  A certain representative of Cassio was wont to carry to the theatre a bottle of claret from his own cellar, whenever he was called upon to sustain that character.  It took possession of him too thoroughly, he said, with a plausible air, to allow of his affecting inebriety after holding an empty goblet to his lips, or swallowing mere toast-and-water