BIOGRAPHY: A Strange Eventful Historyby Michael Holroyd, Chatto & Winduss, 620pp, £25
MICHAEL HOLROYD'S magisterial and intensely entertaining biographies of Bernard Shaw, Augustus John and Lytton Strachey are now followed by yet another, covering roughly the same period, in which three luminaries of the British stage are treated within one vastly absorbing volume. The principal characters are Henry Irving (1838-1905), the dernier-cri in actor-managers; Ellen Terry (1847-1928), his leading lady, much beloved by the public; and Edward Gordon Craig (1869-1966), Ellen's son ("Ted") by the fashionable architect and designer Edward William Godwin. Their lives - as well as those of several of their forebears, descendants, dependants and hangers-on - are vividly revealed here as professionally and emotionally intertwined.
Irving was partly a product and partly a creator of the Victorian ethos. Coming from a very poor Cornish family he had no theatrical or creative background whatsoever. It was with a kind of messianic fervour that he contrived to overcome financial and physical difficulties (a stammer and stiff posture) in order to train himself for a life on the stage, changing his name from the bucolic Brodribb to the more classy Irving.
As the Timesobituarist was to put it half a century later, he became "a fascinating but alarming figure", reviving the art of tragic acting on the grandest scale. Holroyd neatly summarises his talent as "distinct and unborrowed", regenerating tragedy "socially, morally and artistically". Irving was the first actor to be knighted.
Ellen Terry also "encompassed the age". "She moved through the world of the theatre like embodied sunshine," said Irving's overworked manager, Bram Stoker, when he had a minute from his multifarious duties to make such a well-considered assessment. The famous portrait by GF Watts of Ellen aged 17, surrounded by pink camellias and entitled Choosing, must be one of the most charming and affecting in the entire British portrait collection. Ellen, who had just married Watts, soon found the middle-aged academician to be an unsatisfactory husband, and chose to take herself off to Godwin - though that liaison did not last long either. It did result in the birth of Ted and also of Ted's sister "Edy" (Edith), whom time has forgotten but who had a busy career as an actress and stage-director (for Irving) and became the organiser of a suffragist group of players called The Pioneers. Edy set up house with a (female) writer called Christopher St John who, shocked by being arrested for setting fire to a post-box, turned the direction of her political career from incendiarism to the writing of polemical plays. She also drafted speeches, including early broadcasts, for Ellen.
Whether Ellen Terry and Henry Irving were lovers as well as business partners at any time has been disputed, but it would be curious if they were not, especially as they shared hotels on six-month-long tours of the United States.
These tours, which originated at his Lyceum Theatre in London, carried immense productions, mainly of Shakespeare but also of historical pageant plays and melodramas such as The Bells. He discarded the "declamatory" style of acting of the previous generation. A kind of hyper-realism was sought through "authentic" costumes and scenery usually designed by established painters such as Alma-Tadema and Burne-Jones. The composers Sullivan and Stanford were commissioned to write incidental music. It was Hollywood before the cinema was invented.
Irving's company had a payroll of 400 that included an orchestra of players; he saw to it that pensions were provided for employees with long service. During his time the Lyceum was the nearest there was to a National Theatre - except that Irving was not interested in promoting the work of dramatists who broke the mould. He was quite out of sympathy with Ibsen, Shaw, Pinero and Wilde. As that generation's work slowly gathered popular momentum, Irving's rapidly declined. He died in a gloomy hotel in Bradford, but his funeral resembled that of royalty.
The following year Ellen celebrated the 50th anniversary of her stage career with a "jubilee" before a packed Drury Lane. Coquelin performed Molière, Caruso sang, Mrs Patrick Cambell recited, the D'Oyly Carte company gave an excerpt from Trialby Jury. Eleonora Duse described Ellen in a dazzling red dress as " comme une flamme". Later in the programme she performed a scene from Much Ado About Nothingas Beatrice, universally considered as her most brilliant part.
Twenty-two members of the Terry theatrical dynasty were present. There might have been 24, but her great-nephew John Gielgud was only two and her illegitimate son Edward Gordon Craig was absent due to continental engagements - or perhaps because his numerous deserted wives, children and lovers might have, embarrassingly, turned up.
Ted spent almost all his working life constantly on the move in Europe where his stage design - or, more importantly, his theory of design - was better appreciated than in conservative England. It was the complete antithesis of Irving's detailed historicism. If allowed, he declared, he would "strip the theatres of actor-managers, commercial businessmen and playwrights", concentrating on "music, movement and light". Actors would be replaced by marionettes.
Ellen felt that Ted appeared to "blunder foolishly . . . unable to retrieve his mistakes". Shaw, annoyed at the grief Ted caused Ellen by his personal life - she provided generous handouts to him as well as to his neglected families - referred to him as "a cockatrice".
Alexander Hevesi, dramaturge-régisseur of the Budapest State Theatre, said that his book On the Art of the Theatredisplayed "the soul of a child and the knowledge of a student", but nonetheless contributed the Introduction. The fact is that Edward Gordon Craig was supremely talented, but his attitude, to his life as well as to his work, remained undergraduate in its enthusiasms and impracticalities.
This wonderful book, abounding in theatrical, literary, artistic, social and sexual aperçus, resoundingly echoes the Shakespearian quotation that is its apt title.
Christopher Fitz-Simon is author of The Boys, a biography of Micheál MacLíammóir and Hilton Edwards; The Abbey Theatre: The First 100 years; and Eleven Houses, a memoir of the 1940s