H.C. Sidney

H.C. Sidney was a British actor and comedian

He came to South Africa in 1884 with a company got together by Henry Harper, when - according to Boonzaier (1923) he was Harper's leading man and superb in roles such as: "Cecil Vane" in Faces in the Fire (Bayard and Laurencin/Buckingham), "Sir Joseph Porter" in The Wreck of the Pinafore (Searelle and Lingard), "Pygmalion" in Pygmalion and Galatea (Gilbert), "Sir Simon Simple" in Not Such a Fool as He Looks (Byron), "Captain Crighton" in Impulse (Stephenson), " " in The Two Orphans (Oxenford), " Mildmay" in Still Waters Run Deep (De Bernard/Taylor), "John Stratton" in The Old Love and the New (Howard and (Albery), "Chalcot" in Ours (Robertson), "Henry Beauclerc" in Diplomacy (Sardou/Stephenson and Scott), "Job Armroyd" in Lost in London (Phillips), "Sir Horace Welby" in Forget-me-Not (Merival and Grove), and "a host of other characters he acted in a manner that stamped them indelibly on the memory" (cited in Bosman, 1980: pp. 377-8).

After Harper had given up the Theatre Royal, Sidney stepped in to take it over in 1885, with H.J. Fiedler as his business partner. Inspired by Sutton Vane's rediscovery of the text of The Silver King (Jones and Herman), the Sidney-Fiedler Company put it on in the theatre, providing Sidney with an opportunity to give his best performance ("the apex of his colonial career" as Boonzaier phrases it) as "Wilfred Denver" in Sutton Vane's production of the play.