Henry Irving and Ellen Terry were not just celebrities but national
figureheads, and they transformed the British theatre. Mapping their
spectacular careers might seem enough for one book, but Michael Holroyd goes
further, tracing what happened to their descendants, and uncovering the
private selves behind the public image. Their origins were very different.
Irving was a stagestruck solicitor's clerk, whose mother dreamt of him
becoming a Methodist minister. He had a stammer and spindly legs, and his
early theatrical appearances were greeted with boos and catcalls. But he
laboured to learn his craft, taking minor parts in touring companies,
including an ugly sister in Cinderella, and rose at five each morning to
swim in the Thames to improve his physique. Drama had entered his soul, and
nobody was permitted to question it. He married an upper-class woman, and
they were quite happy at first, and had two children. But she despised
acting as socially inferior, and one night when they were driving home
across Hyde Park she asked him how much longer he intended to go on making a
fool of himself on the stage. He stopped the brougham, got out, strode off
into the darkness, and never lived with her again.
Ellen Terry's parents were actors, so she had been in and out of theatres from
babyhood, and made her London debut aged nine as Mamillius in The Winter's
Tale. Her stage presence was bewitching. She seemed an unblemished,
diaphanous creature, and Victorian gentlemen went into raptures over her
virginal purity. In fact, her sexual appetites were perfectly healthy and
she had three husbands and two illegitimate children. Irving's dark,
imperious nature was quite alien to her, and, though they were almost
certainly lovers, he found her childlike good-heartedness bewildering. Even
as a grown woman she would slide down banisters or dance an Irish jig out of
sheer high spirits.
Under Irving's management, the Lyceum Theatre brought culture to the masses.
It was unstuffy, lavish and daring. Shakespeare's plays were put on in
tandem with blood-and-thunder melodramas and their texts were ruthlessly
cut. Ten scenes disappeared from Macbeth. The blinding of Gloucester was
omitted from King Lear. But Irving's interpretations were new and
thoughtful. He was the first actor to make Shylock sympathetic, the symbol
of a persecuted race. His Malvolio in Twelfth Night was a tragic figure,
reflecting his own struggle to better himself. Ellen's Lady Macbeth was
sexy, as never before: “pungent with the odeur de femme”, one shocked critic
recorded. Purists such as Henry James tut-tutted. Great art was being made
“trivial and vulgar”. They were outraged by an adaptation of Goethe's Faust
with Irving, as Mephistopheles, clad from head to toe in scarlet and
encircled by blue fire wherever he went. But the highbrows missed the point.
Irving's innovations, plus the late-Victorian system of cheap public
transport, brought new audiences to see masterpieces they would never
otherwise have encountered.
Quite apart from the acting, the Lyceum productions were magnificent
spectacles. The sets for King Lear, with Irving as Lear and Ellen as
Cordelia, were designed by the artist Ford Madox Brown, and showed the cast
of ancient Britons cowering among the vast, crumbling ruins of Roman temples
and aqueducts, with fully grown trees soaring beside the columns. Tennyson's
Becket, in which Irving played the doomed archbishop, required the
construction of a gothic cathedral and extensive woodlands full of
bluebells. The incidental music for these extravaganzas was by leading
contemporary composers, Arthur Sullivan, Edward German, Charles Villiers
Stanford. Costumes were lavish and carefully researched, with every spur and
sword belt checked against historical documents. Ellen's Lady Macbeth gown,
in which John Singer Sargent painted her portrait, was a costumier's
masterpiece. A special yarn was imported from Bohemia, a twist of green silk
and blue tinsel, to give the appearance of soft chain armour, and a
suggestion of serpent scales was added by sewing the finished dress all over
with real, green, beetle wings.
What these gorgeous enterprises proclaimed was confidence and national
supremacy. When Irving and Ellen took their company on its triumphant
American tours, they were ambassadors, bringing the riches of the world's
cultural capital to the benighted provinces. But this same confidence was
the Lyceum's undoing. Irving's bravura approach could not encompass the new
questioning and subversive strains that infiltrated drama in the 1890s.
Ellen made him read some of Ibsen's plays, but he thought it would be mad to
produce them. So he became passé. The young turned to George Bernard Shaw
who, in love with Ellen, and jealous of Irving, had always been a merciless
critic of the Lyceum style. All the same, Irving's achievement as an
educative force in British society was colossal. He transformed the social
standing of the theatre, and was the first actor to receive a knighthood.
When he died in 1905, it was rightly said that he had dignified the nation.
Ellen lived on until 1928, and Holroyd not only covers her declining years but
adds full-scale biographies of Irving's children and her own. This was
perhaps a mistake. Irving's children, Henry and Laurence, did nothing
remarkable. They were fairly successful actors, but always in their father's
shadow. Laurence died in a maritime disaster, Henry of a degenerative
disease. Ellen's daughter Edy had a more interesting life. With her
companion, Christabel Marshall, who adopted the pseudonym Christopher Marie
St John, she presided over a lesbian community in Smallhythe, Kent,
dedicated to the promotion of women's rights through plays, pageants and
publications.
Ellen's son Ted, who went under the name of Edward Gordon Craig, was the one
who suffered most from having a famous parent. He was pathologically
self-pitying, untrustworthy, devious, parasitic and convinced that he was a
genius. Women found him seductive, at least until he had seduced them, when
they discovered, with some bitterness, that he had no intention of staying
around. He fathered 13 children by eight women, and took no responsibility
for any of them. When his wife May, who bore him four children, managed to
get an alimony order against him, he left Britain, and lived abroad for the
rest of his life to avoid paying her anything.
In theatrical circles on the Continent he gained some reputation as a theorist
of drama. Yet his theories, as outlined by Holroyd, seem nonsense. He
believed that both actors and writers were useless in the theatre. Actors
should be replaced by marionettes, and words by “the impersonal magic of
abstraction”. By contrast with his mother's and Irving's belief that drama
belonged to everyone, his theories brought out clearly the elitist and
fascistic elements in modernism. He welcomed the advent of Mussolini, and
was delighted to hear that Max Reinhardt had been driven out of Germany by
Hitler (“Jews are not much wanted”). During the war he signed a contract
with the Nazis, yielding them his theatrical archive to help them rebuild
German theatre when they had defeated the allies. Rather surprisingly, he
was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1958.
This is a fabulous cavalcade of a book, written with infectious verve and deep
imaginative sympathy, and all the stuff on Irving and Ellen is a joy to
read. It would be better without Edward Gordon Craig - but then, so would
anyone.
A Strange Eventful History by Michael Holroyd
Chatto £25 pp640
