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Sir Henry Irving - A Victorian Actor and His World
By Jeffrey Richards
Hambledon and London
£25.00
Dateline: 23rd May, 2006
The demise of Sir Henry Irving in 1905 must have made a deep impression
on the people of Bradford, the city where he died and I spent part of
my childhood. Sixty years later a garbled version of the event had passed
into local legend - one of my earliest theatre-related memories is of
my grandfather telling me that Irving died on-stage at the Theatre Royal
after a performance of The Bells. Several other elderly people
told me essentially the same story, but in fact Irving died in the lobby
of the Midland Hotel after playing the title role in Tennyson's Becket.
It's instructive to note that local people preferred to remember Sir
Henry in his greatest melodramatic role rather than as the protagonist
in Tennyson's turgid history play.
Jeffrey Richards' book, as the subtitle indicates, is not a straightforward
biography. Irving's early life, rejection by his puritanical mother
and disastrous marriage are dealt with in a couple of paragraphs. Instead
of taking the usual chronological approach Richards devotes fourteen
chapters to the influences on Irving's career - the concept of chivalry,
the Victorian repertoire, Ellen Terry, celebrity culture and history
plays being just a few of them.
This system allows Richards to take an in-depth look at the Victorian
stage in all its aspects, although it inevitably results in some mildly
irritating repetition of basic facts. But this is more than compensated
for by the sheer wealth of information in this lengthy (444 pages excluding
notes) biography of the first theatrical knight.
The mention of Irving's name instantly conjures up visions of his partnership
with Ellen Terry at the Lyceum Theatre, where they appeared together
in lavish productions of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and
other Shakespeare plays, including - rather surprisingly - Coriolanus
and Cymbeline. The Merchant of Venice provided the actor
with one of his greatest roles, and Richards devotes a fascinating chapter
to the controversy surrounding Irving's interpretation of Shylock.
Irving once told his fellow actor-manager Squire Bancroft, "No
actor can be remembered long who does not appear in the classical drama",
and no drama was more classical than that of Shakespeare. Yet most of
the plays in which Irving appeared and kept in his repertoire for years
were melodramas (The Bells, Robert Macaire, The Iron
Chest), sentimental tearjerkers (Olivia, A Story of Waterloo)
and history plays (Becket, Charles I, The Cup).
Richards' account of the long-forgotten playwrights of the era - including
Oscar Wilde's cousin William Gorman Wills - is one of the most interesting
chapters in the book.
Despite the public adulation that surrounded Irving - typified by the
young lady who opened the door of his carriage, shook his hand and then
cut up her glove like a holy relic to share amongst her friends - the
actor was not above criticism. Critics and playgoers alike found fault
with Irving's voice projection and even Ellen Terry was irritated by
his strange pronunciation of vowels. "Take the rope from my neck"
was pronounced, according to her son Gordon Craig, as "tack the
rup frum mey neck". But Irving's sheer charisma overcame any technical
shortcomings, and Jeffrey Richards' wide-ranging biography - published
last year to mark the centenary of the actor's death - is a compulsively
readable account of Irving's career and cultural milieu.
J D Atkinson
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