John Brodribb was aged 11 when he arrived in London, a wiry youth with a pale
freckled face, solemn expression, sloping forehead and penetrating eyes. He
had by now a pronounced speech impediment. The boy begged his father to take
him to a professional theatre and was thrilled to find there an arena in
which deadly rivals contended for popular favour, where loyalties and
dislikes were loudly voiced and the atmosphere was charged with excitement
and passion.
To be part of this world where his pent-up feelings might be eloquently
released, his roughness of speech absorbed within rhythms of words he could
not find himself, became a necessity. After leaving school at 13, his life
settled into Dickensian drudgery, working as a clerk from half past nine
until seven o'clock six days a week.
Each morning he rose at five and went swimming in the Thames to strengthen his
physique. He also attended a school of arms in Chancery Lane where he learnt
to handle the properties of romantic drama - swords, rapiers and daggers. In
the evenings, he hurried off to elocution class, beginning to get the
measure of his stammer, repeating each difficult syllable slowly,
distinctly, again and again.
In the summer of 1856, aged 18, he had a piece of good fortune - a legacy of
£100 from an uncle. With this he was able to equip himself with some
essential items: several spectacular wigs, an assortment of feathers and
buckles, various pieces of stage jewellery, a dagger and three splendid
fencing swords. To test some of these new properties, he purchased the part
of Romeo in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet at the Soho
Theatre. For this performance he had to choose a stage name - a name which
would protect his mother from public humiliation. He chose Henry Irving,
decking himself out with a red velvet costume, white cotton tights, some
blue ribbons for his shoes, a black-feathered hat and at his side a
glittering court sword. Then he applied the dry caking powder to his face
giving himself a mask on which to paint his character - and experiencing a
wonderful transformation as he stepped on to the boards that night and began
to speak Romeo's lines, lines whose accents and inflexions he had studied so
carefully in the secrecy of his bedroom.
What had given him his perseverance? It seems as if he had a deeply planted
need to leave his parents, as they had left him when he was a child. His
aunt, like his mother, had prescribed the Church for him and it may have
been as a form of refusal, when confronted by their plans, that he developed
his stammer. Only by abandoning himself, John Henry Brodribb, his parents'
son, and becoming someone else - indeed, many other characters onstage -
could he gain confidence and find coherence of speech.
Nine years on, Irving's instinct, so alert in theatrical affairs, was blind to
the nuances of personal relationships. He loved the theatre far more than
his wife Florence, their son and their unborn child. She found that she
could not change him, could not penetrate that solitude he carried within
himself or match his single passion for the stage. As she waited outside the
Lyceum in her brougham after the first performance of The Bells,
waited in mounting irritation for him to detach himself from the braying
crowds within, and heard the chorus of fatuous adulation spilling out on to
the street, her anger rose. Tired almost beyond endurance, anxious to get
home, convinced that her husband had actually forgotten her pregnancy, she
was nevertheless obliged to go on to a celebratory supper and hear him
praised by people who had no knowledge of the real Irving. No one else knew
what he was like. The boredom, injustice and mockery of it were too much for
her.
Irving himself was wonderfully happy after his triumph. He noticed that
Florence was not joining in the tributes, perhaps not realising that his
success would lead to their financial security. Returning home late that
night in the brougham, he remarked they might soon be able to afford a
carriage-and-pair. They were crossing Hyde Park Corner (the very place where
Irving had proposed to her) when Florence finally broke her silence. “Are
you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?” she
demanded.
This was Mrs Brodribb addressing Mr Brodribb, Mrs Brodribb telling him to get
rid of Henry Irving, return to reality, and come home. She had chosen a peak
in his career at which to make her protest. After 12 hard years he knew what
he had accomplished that night, and could at last feel confident of his
future. It was John Brodribb, not Henry Irving, who must be abandoned. He
had left the other Mrs Brodribb, his mother, for a similar offence and knew
what he must do.
Irving stopped the brougham at Hyde Park Corner, got out and walked off into
the night. That December his second son, Laurence Sidney, was born, but
Irving, who seems to have been drinking heavily during this period, did not
attend the christening. In March 1872, he wrote to Florence laying down the
terms and conditions of their future life: “I have determined to live apart
from you...this course is imperative for my sake and for the sake of those
relying on me...On this subject my mouth for the future will be closed to
friend and foe. And now goodbye.”
Ellen Terry was not intimidated by Irving as so many actors were, but
he fascinated her. She detected in him an acute vulnerability to criticism -
indeed, this had become his most obvious human quality. He had been booed,
hissed and laughed at by audiences in his early days, greeted with howls of
execration by the public as well as attacked by critics for his curious
looks, his odd walk, his very face - all that was natural in him. He had
soldiered on and come through, acquiring some dramatic camouflage along the
way - tricks and mannerisms that were almost caricatures, some of them, of
his natural self. Ellen found she could soothe his apprehensions as few
others could. When he revealed that people had jeered at his spindly legs,
she told him that they were beautiful legs and that there was no reason on
earth to want fat legs like a prize-fighter's. He came to depend on her tact
and humour as useful assets - to value them almost as much as he valued her
acting, which he appeared to take for granted.
Ellen had not realised quite how comprehensive his melancholy was. He knew
only one way out of his isolation and that was by turning it to some use,
even to grim enjoyment, upon the stage. “The horrors had a peculiar
fascination for him,” she observed. He liked going to the police courts to
hear the trials and study the expressions of the accused (innocent men, he
told her, hesitated before answering questions and, except for their
wide-open eyes, almost always appeared guilty). He too appeared guilty of
some nameless crime and seemed to haunt the Lyceum in search of atonement.
In almost every aspect of their temperaments Ellen Terry and Henry Irving were
each other's opposites. Her childish high spirits baffled him. Seeing her
one day at the back of the theatre slide down some banisters towards her
dressing-room at the foot of the staircase, he smiled, but seemed unable to
acknowledge such a carefree spectacle or come to terms with it. Another
time, she suddenly caught hold of a bit of scenery that was being hoisted to
the flies and ascended 40ft above the stage until the astonished carpenters
lowered her gently down - whereupon she performed an Irish jig to show how
much she had enjoyed the flight. Her innocence was as mysterious to Irving
as were his motiveless black moods to her. He admitted to being hampered
when acting by the pent-up vehemence of his feelings, whereas she wore
emotion easily, using its energy. Her apparent naturalness and charm were,
in their way, as remarkable stage qualities as was the awful sense of
apprehension he spread through audiences.
Irving was what Ellen called an egotist - “all his faults sprang from
egotism”. His aim was to make everything at the Lyceum above criticism. He
employed some of the foremost artists of the day - Lawrence Alma-Tadema,
Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown - to design the sets and costumes and
would spend unprecedented amounts of money on producing what seemed
historically accurate and was visually dramatic.
Irving made a practice of commissioning original scores from contemporary
composers. The German-born Sir Julius Benedict took on Romeo and Juliet;
the Scottish musician, Sir Alexander Mackenzie, principal of the Royal
College of Music, obliged over Coriolanus and Ravenswood; the
Irish composer, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, orchestrated Becket;
and Sir Arthur Sullivan worked on King Arthur and Macbeth (for
which he provided a score of over 200 pages for an orchestra of 46 players
and a chorus). The young, allegedly Welsh, Edward German was to make his
reputation with an intermezzo, coronation march (later used for the
coronation of George V), and three popular dances for Henry VIII.
Irving himself knew nothing about orchestras but knew the sound he wanted,
sometimes driving these composers frantic as they attempted to follow his
instructions. It has been calculated that he spent almost £50,000
(equivalent to some £3 million today) on the Lyceum music during his reign
there, raising a simple band into a professional orchestra of 35 musicians.
Irving's struggle for perfection was fed by anxiety. For long periods before
his entrance cue, he would stand in the wings, tortured with nerves and
making everyone else nervous, before Ellen persuaded him to wait more calmly
in his dressing-room until the call-boy came to summon him. Like a political
dictator, Irving “never wholly trusted his friends”, Ellen shrewdly observed
in her memoirs, “and never admitted them to his intimacy, although they
thought he did”. But in so far as he trusted anyone, he trusted her - at
least she thought he did.
Ellen's radiance illuminated the Lyceum, reawakening some stirrings of emotion
in Irving's life and easing his loneliness. He came to feel that “he had
introduced an angel into the house, or perhaps a sylph - half-angel,
half-imp”. By the end of this first season she was recognised wherever she
went and was well on her way to earning the affectionate title, “Our Lady of
the Lyceum”, which Oscar Wilde gave her. What audiences were discovering was
that by seeing her move so gorgeously around the stage, responding with such
charm to the authoritative figure of Henry Irving - simply witnessing her go
through these actions - made them feel happy. As the Sun and the Moon
contended in the skies while day followed night, so Ellen Terry and Henry
Irving took their passage across the stage, and all seemed well. Like
Polonius, audiences were convinced that they were seeing here “the best
actors in the world”. The Lyceum became recognised as a national
institution, a cathedral of the arts that seemed to house the spirit of the
age - the guardian spirit, as Nina Auerbach has suggested, “of the larger
theatre of Victorian society”. With the development of cheap public
transport, London and its surrounding suburbs were growing enormously and
with this growth came new audiences. Irving, who gradually increased the
capacity of the Lyceum from 1,250 to more than 1,700 seats, helped to create
their taste especially in respect to Shakespeare. His repertoire of plays
represented British culture during the late 19th century in much the same
way as Hollywood would represent the culture of the United States in the
20th century.
In his The Life of Oscar Wilde, the actor-biographer Hesketh Pearson
reminds us that, although the elevation of actors was not uniform throughout
the country, Irving had been steadily raising the social status of the
London theatre to a point that would have been unbelievable a generation
earlier. “Princes, peers, cabinet ministers, judges and even bishops were
constantly to be seen at the Lyceum, and they treated Irving as an equal,
whatever their private feelings may have been”, Pearson wrote. Wilde's own
admiration for Ellen Terry overflowed into three sonnets, the first of which
was addressed to her Queen Henrietta Maria in Charles I which he saw at the
end of June 1879.
O Hair of Gold! O Crimson Lips! O Face
Made for the luring and the love of man!
With thee I do forget the toil and stress,
The loveless road that knows no resting place.
Wilde championed Irving's policy of staging third-rate melodramas, arguing
that this liberated the art of the actor. But his attitude offended Henry
James who also had his eyes focused on the Lyceum. He wanted to see an
artistic revolution on the British stage which would enable him to present
his own sophisticated chronicle of human behaviour. The prospect of becoming
part of this dramatic world, semi-attached to smart society yet with its own
secret tiers of moral behaviour, offered him another aesthetic viewpoint
from which to observe human society - observe it with the passionate
detachment of an anthropologist. But what opportunity did he have of
entering this theatrical arena and standing before the curtain while it
remained so obdurately unsubtle and inartistic: in short, so thoroughly
un-French?
What he saw at the Lyceum were pretty pictures, almost visual clichés,
illustrating aspects of Victorian taste. It was because she was able to
embody this taste so decorously, James thought, that Ellen Terry had been
over-appreciated. “She is greatly the fashion at present, and she belongs
properly to a period which takes a strong interest in aesthetic furniture,
archaeological attire, and blue china,” he wrote.
Yet despite Henry Irving's extravagances and Ellen Terry's girlishness, the
Lyceum was, James reluctantly acknowledged, the greatest theatre London had
produced.
©Michael Holroyd 2008.
Extracted from A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen
Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families, published by Chatto and
Windas at £25. It is available from Times BooksFirst for £22.50, free p&p
from 0870 1608080 or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
