the inevitable just seven months after the opening of Lincoln's Inn Fields, Killigrew and his actors signed orders for a new, even more magnificent, theatre in Bridges Street. This theatre, the first step in the war of spectacle escalation of the 1660s, was so full when Pepys and his wife went to see an opera there that "they told us we could have no room". The large, yet compact, Restoration playhouses, with audience capacities from 700 to upwards of 2,000, were enormous investments, financed through selling shares in the companies, which were thus bound to make more and more money from ticket sales. Not only the theatres and their technical equipment, but the flats painted for a single performance, the special effects, and the elaborate stage clothes, were extremely expensive. Audiences appreciated both luxury and appropriateness of décor and costume: Pepys was quite capable of going several times to see a play that, as such, he disliked, purely for the pleasure of viewing striking and innovative scenery like "a good scene of a town on fire". The companies struggled to outdo each other in catering to these expensive tastes, with precarious finances and the ever-present consciousness that the investments could literally burn to the ground in a few hours. When the theatre in Bridges Street did burn down in January 1672, with its entire stock of scenery and costumes, it was an economic blow from which the King's Company never recovered. The Duke's Company, operating smoothly under what soon became Davenant's and Thomas Betterton's joint management, consistently led the way while the King's lagged further and further behind, moving only in forced response and suffering from chronic management conflict between Killigrew and powerful actor shareholders like Michael Mohun and Charles Hart, who insisted on actor-centered "talk" drama. The difference can be traced in Pepys' regular preference for performances at the Duke's, and in his ever-renewed admiration for Betterton's acting. In December 1667, the King's Company even ceased acting for some days because of a quarrel between Mohun and Hart. With the escalation of expenses, days with zero takings were a very serious matter. The crowning grand investment of the Duke's Company was totally beyond the King's means to respond to: the "machine house" at Dorset Garden. 1670s: Machine theatre Dorset Garden Theatre When Davenant died suddenly in 1668, the Duke's Company was left in disputed ownership and Pepys' eyesight forced