John Rich (producer) his work. Garrick even said his pantomime performances were unmatched in his time. John Rich (producer) John Rich (1692–1761) was an important director and theatre manager in 18th-century London. He opened the New Theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields (1714), which he managed until he opened the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (1732). He managed Covent Garden until 1761, putting on ever more lavish productions. He introduced pantomime to the English stage and played a dancing and mute Harlequin himself from 1717 to 1760 under the stage name of "Lun." Rich's version of the servant character, Arlecchino, moved away from the poor,
Pierrot masks of "commedia dell'arte", Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere. Pierrot played a seminal role in the emergence of Modernism in the arts. He was a key figure in every art-form except architecture. With respect to poetry, T. S. Eliot's "breakthrough work", "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), owed its existence to the poems of Jules Laforgue, whose ""ton 'pierrot'"" informed all of Eliot's early poetry. (Laforgue, he said, "was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of