A typical night's entertainment at the Britannia Theatre would include 3–4 plays, with variety acts in the intervals between.

After living hand to mouth and educating himself, with the help of a friend, William Brian, he encountered a troupe of actors who he had previously met on his journey.

He helped the leader of the troupe, Jack Adams, to find premises for performance at the Union Tavern in Shoreditch.

[5] In 1840, Lane and his colleagues thought they had identified a loophole whereby performances could be offered without charge, with profits made from the sale of programmes, food and drink.

Sadly, private life was more difficult, Mary became pregnant, and slipped and fell at a rehearsal, both she and the baby died.

[3] This building designed by Finch Hill, consisting of two circles, a pit and a gallery and had a reported record attendance of 4,790.

These included The String of Pearls (1847), the first stage adaptation of the story of Sweeney Todd, written specifically for this venue by George Dibdin Pitt.

Hazlewood, who wrote many melodramatic spectacles for it, often based on successful novels of the time, including an adaptation of Lady Audley's Secret (1863).

[9] Charles Dickens was a frequent visitor to the theatre, and noted in the Uncommercial Traveller (1861): Magnificently lighted by a firmament of sparkling chandeliers, the building was ventilated to perfection.

[...] It has been constructed from the ground to the roof, with a careful reference to sight and sound in every corner; the result is, that its form is beautiful, and that the appearance of the audience, as seen from the proscenium -- with every face in it commanding the stage, and the whole so admirably raked and turned to that centre, that a hand can scarcely move in the great assemblage without the movement being seen from thence -- is highly remarkable in its union of vastness with compactness.

or the San Carlo at Naples, or the Grand Opera at Paris, than any notion a stranger would be likely to form of the Britannia Theatre at Hoxton, a mile north of St Luke’s Hospital in the Old-street-road, London.

This really extraordinary place is an achievement of one man’s enterprise, and was erected on the ruins of an inconvenient old building, in less than five months, at a round cost of five-and-twenty thousand pounds.

[10]A review of King Doo-Dah, the Christmas pantomime, 1900, at the Britannia Theatre, appeared in the News of the World: Biggest, brightest best, and jolliest pantomime ever produced at "The Brit," is the Hoxtonian verdict upon Mr. Crauford's latest Christmas production, King Doo-Dah.

Indeed, the fourteen scenes that are utilised in telling the story are so full of good things that it would be quite impossible to do justice to them in the space at our command.

The ever-popular Albert and Edmunds troupe, assisted by Mr. Fred Lawrence and the Montrose Bros., very clever and humorous acrobats, keep the fun at boiling point from start to finish.

The pantomime does the greatest credit to the talents of the Britannia's popular stage manager, Mr. Bigwood, and is a distinct score for Mr.

George William Lupino was a puppeteer and the family continued to earn a theatrical living becoming associated with the harlequinade at Drury Lane.

The eldest son, civil registration as George Emanuel Samuel Hook (1853–1932) became both a clown and a prominent actor, amongst his grandchildren was the Hollywood actress Ida Lupino.

In Sarah Waters' 1998 novel Tipping the Velvet, her lead characters are engaged to play pantomime in the theatre.