An Irishman's Diary

WHEN PERFORMERS speak of “dying on stage”, this is usually just a metaphor. But the great Irish actress Peg Woffington came closer than most to experiencing the real thing.

In what would indeed prove her final role, at London’s Covent Garden in 1757, a shocked audience watched her collapse mid-soliloquy. Although she made a partial recovery – and would linger for almost three years afterwards – her acting career ended then and there.

Woffington's famous last words, theatrically, were from the epilogue of Shakespeare's As You Like It. Playing Rosalind, she had complained of feeling unwell during the last act, but changed costume and went back on for the closing speech, which progressed smoothly until the line: "If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased . . ." A witness in the wings described what happened next: ". . . her voice broke, she faltered, endeavoured to go on but could not proceed – then in a voice of tremor cried 'Oh, God! Oh, God!' [and] tottered to the stage door speechless, where she was caught. The audience of course applauded until she was out of sight and then sank into awful looks of astonishment . . . to see one of the most handsome women of the age, a favourite principal actress . . . struck so suddenly by the hand of death".

Accounts differ as to her date of birth, but according to most, Woffington was not yet 40 when she made her dramatic exit. She was, nonetheless, a veteran of the stage, having played her first serious role – Ophelia – at the age of 15. And even then, she already had a career in light entertainment behind her.

The daughter of a Dublin bricklayer whose early death left her mother to survive by taking in washing, Woffington made her dramatic debut as a very small child, courtesy of a certain Madame Violante.

“Dramatic” may be an understatement. Madame Violante was a French “tumbler and tightrope dancer” who had set up in what is now Temple Bar to provide more visceral thrills for audiences jaded by the conventional offerings of Smock Alley. For a time, the climax of her show involved walking a tightrope with baskets suspended from her feet: each containing an infant, one of which was Peg.

Surviving this experience may have been Woffington’s first big break.

Her second – after years selling watercress on the streets – came via the same source. Going up-market, but still with a keen grasp of public tastes, Madame Violante had the idea of presenting The Beggar's Opera, then a big hit in London, but with a cast of children.

The result was so successful that a jealous Smock Alley lobbied the city mayor to close her venue, whereupon supporters had a new one built outside the mayor’s jurisdiction, so that the show could go on. In the part of Polly, Peg was the production’s star of

stars and her career never looked back.

As an adult – and rather ironically, for a famous beauty – Woffington's defining performance involving playing a man: Sir Harry Wildair in Farquhar's The Constant Couple. From a situation in which all roles had once been performed by male actors, theatre had now progressed so that there was much gender-bending by both sexes. But Woffington's Wildair was said to have surpassed even that of the great male actor,

David Garrick, one of her many lovers.

Some admirers lamented her success in this and other “breeches roles”, and the perverse typecasting it brought. Indeed, the paradox of her onstage talent for impersonating men and her offstage talent for attracting them was summed up in one reported exchange with a friend. Speaking about a favourite role, the actress remarked: “I have

played the part so often that half the town believes me to be a man.” Whereupon the friend replied: “Madam, the other half knows you to be a woman.” Her success in the former respect may have been in part due to a flaw that even admirers had to admit. Hers was a harsh voice – the apprenticeship as a Dublin street trader hardly helped – and, however she tried to soften it for tragedy, it tended to limit her to comic roles.

It did not limit her appeal, however. In her London debut season, one commentator dismissed her as a “bad actress” and another as an “impudent Irish-faced girl”. But neither could contest her popularity. The second critic conceded: “All the town is in love with her.” Returning to Dublin at the height of her career, she performed a series of roles in Smock Alley, the combined box-office of which was a phenomenal £4,000. It was the most successful period of her life, until her friendship with the theatre manager Thomas Sheridan spoiled it.

One problem was that he made her a member of his “Beefsteak Club”: an otherwise all-male theatrical gathering that the public became convinced was a political association linked with an unpopular faction in London. Theatres were rowdy then, at the best of times. But the ensuing hostility led to a riot that wrecked the house. That aside, gossip about the relationship scandalised both Dublin and Sheridan’s native Cavan alike.

Events combined to send Woffington back to London, where she spent her final years. There she reprised the comic roles for which she was famous, up to and including Rosalind and her unexpectedly tragic end. She died – offstage and peacefully – 250 years tomorrow, on March 28th, 1760.