By the end of his reign, ideas – some of them, by his standards, subversive – were not regarded as inconsistent with entertainment. The old school was represented by the design of its sets. So the new wave, when it began to wash against the theatrical shore, defined its more cerebral attitude by critical reference to the old conventions. John Galsworthy – whose commitment to social realism was proclaimed in the titles of his plays – prided himself on ‘putting his characters on the stage simply and straightforwardly’. The author of Strife, Justice and The Mob did not ‘think it necessary to have three doors and a French window in every scene … on the grounds that stage rooms are like that’.7
The traditional conventions and the old habits might have disappeared more quickly had it not been for the survival of the Victorian actor-manager. Writing in 1901, the theatre critic Joseph Knight asked, rhetorically, if ‘any serious menace exists to the dramatic art?’ He replied that, ‘although no lover of art would dream of dispensing with it’, the ‘system of actor management leads at times to such over elaboration of style in a principal part as destroys the firm balance on which the highest efforts rest’.8 In short, when one man played both parts, the manager always made sure his role occupied centre-stage. The result was the cult of the great dramatic personalities and a theatre which, both in London and the provinces, depended for its commercial success more on the reputation of the actor than the quality of the play.
It produced a gallery of star actresses – all of them beautiful but not always possessing equally obvious dramatic talent. When Mrs Langtry played to capacity audiences in New York, Punch produced a cartoon of her opening performance illuminated by a spotlight which cast the shadow of King Edward across the stage. Some of the female actors were regarded with such reverence that they were always billed and addressed with appropriate respect. Madge Kendal was always Mrs Kendal until she became Dame Madge. She retained her star billing – and played with Ellen Terry in The Merry Wives of Windsor – even when she had become known as ‘the Matron of British Drama’.
When Dame Madge retired from the theatre in 1908, the first pretender to her throne was Mrs Patrick Campbell, who had made her name in The Second Mrs Tanqueray and gone on to play Juliet and Lady Teazle with equal acclaim. Bernard Shaw was in love with her. ‘It is impossible not to feel that those haunting eyes are brooding on a momentous past and the parted lips anticipating a thrilling imminent future.’9 He wrote Caesar and Cleopatra for her (although his Queen of Old Nile was a girl) and hoped she would be his Eliza Doolittle (‘your pretty slut’ Mrs Campbell called her) in Pygmalion. Mrs Campbell is now chiefly remembered as the object of Shaw’s infatuation. She deserves better. By general consent, she was both the best Hedda Gabler of her time and the most turbulent actress in Edwardian England. ‘She preferred temperament to talent and threw away a career as a great actor so that she might provide slight people with conversation.’10
Some of the women were made famous by more light-hearted productions. Julia Mielson (wife of actor-manager Fred Terry) hoped for an operatic career but, on the no doubt unwelcome advice of W. S. Gilbert, gave up her initial ambition and (in partnership with her husband) triumphed on the stage in Sweet Nell of Old Drury and The Scarlet Pimpernel. Eva Moore starred as the innkeeper’s daughter in Old Heidelberg – a play which became a musical comedy with the title of The Student Prince. But in the unequal days of Edwardian Empire, while actresses were objects of admiration and desire, it was the more orotund charms of the male leads that attracted the audiences. And the abiding hero of the English stage was Sir Henry Irving.
Irving had been the star of the Victorian stage. The Bells by Leopold Lewis (in which he had first played during 1871) made him famous. He was still playing it in 1905, the year in which he died. By that time he had become the acknowledged leader of his profession, a knight and, after he took over the Lyceum in 1878, the most famous of the Victorian actor-managers. ‘He was essentially a character actor rather than a tragedian [for] he lacked the physical power necessary to anyone who would scale the heights of tragedy.’11 And he knew it. According to Ellen Terry’s memoirs, he realised his limitations – and rejoiced in the way they had been overcome. ‘My legs, my voice – everything has been against me. For an actor who can’t walk, can’t talk and has no face to speak of, I’ve done pretty well.’12
Part of his appeal was the essentially theatrical character that made him the model on which a dozen fictional Victorian thespians were based. And his posthumous reputation was reinforced by the manner of his death. On 1 January 1904 he announced that he proposed to retire after fifty years on the stage and that it would take him two years to say farewell. There would be two London seasons, three twelve-week provincial tours and return visits to America and Canada. The long goodbye began in Cardiff in September 1904. Four months later he began his second provincial tour in Portsmouth. In March he was taken ill in Wolverhampton. The rest of the tour was abandoned and the America visit postponed. But the show must go on. After a brief recuperation in Torquay, he was back on the Drury Lane boards in a performance of Tennyson’s Beckett. Reinvigorated by his rapturous reception he set off again. On 2 October he played in Sheffield. It was another triumph, but before he moved on it was agreed that The Bells was too demanding to remain in his repertoire. So it was only Beckett in Bradford.
On 13 October 1905 the curtain came down on Henry Irving for the last time. The final words of the play and his final words in the theatre were ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord! Into Thy hands’. He died, late that night, in the Bradford Midland Hotel. When his funeral took place on 20 October, only one floral tribute was placed on his coffin for the journey from church to crematorium. It was a cross which had been sent by Queen Alexandra. The message, which the Queen had written in her own hand, was ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord! Into Thy hands.’
Death in Bradford ended what might well not have been the last of Irving’s several ‘farewell seasons’. In 1901 he had ‘said goodbye’ with a performance of Coriolanus (with Ellen Terry as his mother, Volumnia) at the London Lyceum, which puzzled at least one critic. ‘It is difficult to see why Sir Henry should have selected a Shakespearean tragedy such as this which, though it lends itself well to scenic magnificence, affords leading parts entirely unsuited to either his own or Miss Ellen Terry’s personalities.’13 The answer lay in the question. Scenic magnificence was one of the secrets of Irving’s success. When retirement was temporarily abandoned, he appeared at Drury Lane in an adaptation of Dante’s Inferno which, The Times believed, qualified the translators for a place on Hell’s innermost circle of ice. ‘But’, it added, ‘there is always the scenery, the stupendous mechanical effects, the triumph of stage management.’14
After Irving died, Herbert Tree (eventually transmogrified into Herbert Beerbohm Tree) became both the undisputed leader of the English stage and its greatest exponent of the spectacular production. When Edward VII came to the throne, Tree was forty-eight and had already made his name as Svengali in Trilby. The fantastical always appealed to him. The sets for the plays he produced, and in which he performed, reflected that enthusiasm. Lady Tree, after his death, recalled his passion for the spectacular. ‘How he loved to try to bring woods and streams and fountains and mountains on to the stage. And pillared palaces and long aisles, stately castles, grim battlefields, pine forests, beech woods, fields jewelled with daisies, and yellow sands.’15
Tree did not allow Shakespeare to stand in the way of his scenic imagination. His Much Ado About Nothing in 1905 included an ‘intermezzo’ in Leonato’s garden. During the passing of the night, birds of every description took it in turn to awake and serenade the audience. The Illustrated London News was scandalised. ‘No manager can be blamed for making Shakespeare thoroughly entertaining, but the question remains whether Mr Tree, in his laudable anxiety to do his best for his author, has not sometimes on the smallest authority over-elaborated his illustrations.’16 The Daily Chronicle disagreed. It reminded its readers of ‘how gre
at an extent our present stage has to be grateful to Mr Tree for driving Shakespeare home to the hearts of the greater public by every means at his disposal’.17
Between 1910 and 1914 there were 150 productions of Shakespeare’s plays on the London stage – many of them at Beerbohm Tree’s Lyceum. In his A Midsummer Night’s Dream the woods were inhabited by rabbits as well as fairies. The witches in his Macbeth flew. His ingenuity was not unique. Oscar Asche’s Merry Wives of Windsor presented Falstaff (with some slight textual justification) in thick snow. When the play got in the way of the scenery, Edwardian actor-managers changed the play.
Sometimes the text was altered because the actor-managers thought that they knew better than Shakespeare. Beerbohm Tree’s Antony and Cleopatra opened with the fourth scene of the first act and swiftly moved on to Alexandria in order to facilitate the early entrance of the lovers. At the Lyric Theatre in 1902, John Forbes Robertson’s Othello was purged of ‘passages and scenes … of a character which might prove distasteful to a modern audience’18 – Desdemona was called a ‘wanton’, not a ‘whore’. At least the rewrite men could not be accused of attempting to popularise Shakespeare by culling the obscurities and emphasising the well-loved lines. When William Poel produced Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses’ speech, ‘Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back’, was omitted.
Poel, although an eccentric, normally displayed the reverence which is Shakespeare’s due. Indeed, directors of the Beerbohm Tree school described him as the ‘Father of the Puritan Revolution’19 because he eschewed exotic effects and extravagant scenery in favour of a visual austerity which did not distract attention from what he called ‘the tuned tongue’. Harley Granville-Barker (who had acted for Poel in his time) hoped, as a director, to strike some sort of balance between sight and sound. The woods in his 1913 A Midsummer Night’s Dream were enchanted by every stage effect he could employ, but the palace was a model of classical simplicity. Toys – electrical and mechanical – which had been so novel at the beginning of the century were becoming commonplace. From then on, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree had founded, was less influenced by the extravagance of his early productions than by the discipline of his maturity.
Writing about his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Granville-Barker described the cast as ‘a company inspired by such scholarly ideals as Benson could give’.20 That was a generous tribute to a man whose reverence for Shakespeare allowed none of the improvisation by which Barker made his name. Frank Benson directed the festival at Stratford-upon-Avon before the creation of a resident company extended the Shakespeare season into three-quarters of the year. He also performed each year in London at the Comedy and the Lyceum theatres but, because his productions were brief and scholarly, the capital thought him a poor relation of Irving and Beerbohm Tree. His real forte was touring. Sometimes two or three ‘Frank Benson Companies’ were playing simultaneously in different towns. Edwardian England provided plenty of opportunity for the expression of his peripatetic talent. In 1901, there were 260 provincial theatres in Great Britain – eight in Liverpool, seven in both Manchester and Glasgow, six in Newcastle and five in Birmingham and Edinburgh. It was to them that, over the years, Benson took almost the whole canon. ‘Poor players or begging friars we go up and down the land [so] that the people may never go without an opportunity of seeing Shakespeare played by a company dedicated to his service.’21 One of the paradoxes of life in Edwardian England – a time at which the lights of London were thought to be irresistibly enticing – was that perhaps the best, and certainly the purest, Shakespeare was to be seen in the provinces.
At the turn of the century, provincial playgoers were paying two shillings for a seat in the stalls and fourpence for a place on one of the wooden benches in the gallery. On Saturday nights a ticket for ‘the gods’ went up to sixpence and patrons had to endure ‘packers’ leaning on the unfortunate who sat next to the aisle until the row was sufficiently compressed to make room for latecomers. In London, where attendance at the theatre was, for a certain class of person, a social obligation rather than a pleasure or aesthetic experience, a seat in the stalls might cost as much as half a guinea. But, since even the greatest stars went regularly on tour, the provincial and metropolitan repertoires were much the same.
People went to the theatre in much the same way as people went to the cinema in the 1950s. In January 1902, Victor Cavendish saw two plays in three days – ‘Sherlock Holmes (very good)’22 and ‘The Mummy and the Mocking Bird (quite good).’23 Ben Hur the following April24 did not merit a classification. Rowland Evans, a patron of the provincial stage after he moved to Leicester to complete his engineering apprenticeship, chose more serious drama – Pinero’s His House in Order25 and Sullivan’s The Prodigal Son.26 In May of the same year, he celebrated his birthday by going ‘to the Palace to see Vesta Tilley’.27 Even Kate Jarvis, the nursemaid whose regular recreation was walking in cemeteries, patronised the stage – The Duchess of Bayswater28 and Diana of Dobsons.29 The forgotten plays of the Edwardian theatre do credit to the era’s enthusiasm if not to its critical judgement.
Dozens of new plays were written and produced throughout the country each year. Most of them had little merit. When the London theatres reopened after the week of mourning which followed Queen Victoria’s death, the plays on view make up a roll-call of the forgotten second-rate – The Awakening, A Message from Mars, The Noble Lord, Mr and Mrs Daventry and A Cigarette Maker’s Romance. It was thirteen years since the first night of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan and almost six years since the explosive opening of The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1898 Plays Pleasant was published in advance of the production of some of the plays which it contained. They included Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell and Mrs Warren’s Profession. George Bernard Shaw had arrived on the scene. The theatre of ideas was about to challenge drawing-room drama, whimsicality and the sentimentality of lovers’ betrayals and lives ruined by the incompatibility of the classes.
To think of Edwardian theatre as the forum for a conflict between frivolity and philosophy is to ignore the pure and simple entertainment which, in many ways, epitomised the period. Twenty years before Edward VII came to the throne, Victorian England had made the theatre more secure and respectable. The law which required a safety curtain to separate stage from auditorium had changed the character of neither the plays nor the playgoers, but the obligation to confine both the sale and consumption of alcohol to specifically licensed bars behind the stalls and circle had closed down many of the small music halls. In their place had risen up theatres which prided themselves on providing ‘family entertainment’. The sexual innuendo of Victorian Variety was replaced by the escapism of musical comedy. The male impersonators, led by Vesta Tilley, became daring rather than salacious. More and more shows were ‘produced’ by a new phenomenon – the theatrical impresario who regarded the stage, like any other commodity, as a vehicle for making money.
Chief amongst them was Oswald Stoll, an Australian who, on the death of his father, came to England with his widowed mother. Mrs Stoll’s second marriage, to the owner of the Parthenon Music Hall in Liverpool, ended equally prematurely. So, in 1880, at the age of fourteen, young Oswald was assisting in the management of a provincial theatre. Success encouraged expansion, first to Cardiff and then, at the turn of the century, to London itself. Stoll acquired the Coliseum. He went on to own and manage the Empires at Hackney, Holloway, New Cross, Stratford-atte-Bow and Shepherd’s Bush, and Empires or Coliseums in virtually every large town.
Stoll’s principal rival was Edward Moss, who owned the London Hippodrome and a chain of provincial theatres. Like Stoll he boasted that he provided family entertainment. His productions were usually brief dramatic interludes interspersed with romantic songs and clean jokes. Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry both appeared at the Coliseum in one-act plays which occupied half of the bill. Tamara Karsavina (one of Diaghilev’s prima ballerinas) danced as part of the C
oliseum’s programme and Pavlova appeared at the Palace Theatre.30
The demand for respectable lowbrow entertainment reflected the emergence of a new upper-working class and lower-middle class. It was eventually gratified by the gradual emergence of the musical comedy. The process had begun three years before Queen Victoria’s death with Edna May in The Belle of New York, but it only really flowered after the opening of the Gaiety Theatre in 1903 – in the presence of King Edward and Queen Alexandra. Part of the theatre’s attraction was its chorus, the Gaiety Girls, three of whom went on to be respectively Baroness Charston, Countess Powlett and the Countess of Drogheda. By the time of their elevation, musical comedy had become the fashion and Frank Curzon, a tailor by trade who owned the Piccadilly Hotel, turned his attention to the popular theatre. He rebuilt the Strand and obtained controlling interests in the Avenue, the Camden Coronet, the Prince of Wales, the Comedy and the Criterion. The musical and the operetta had several homes from which to choose.
At the top end of the cultural scale there were the works of Edward German – Merrie England and Tom Jones. They could not compete, at least in terms of popular appeal, with the romantic escapism of The Arcadians and The Quaker Girl, but their sentimental patriotism had an appeal which made the impresarios believe that English operetta was always good box office. Unfortunately, in 1907 no new English operetta was available, so the gap was temporarily filled with Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. It ran for more than two years and established the Austrian (or perhaps Ruritanian) style of musical comedy as a feature of the English stage. Neither The Count of Luxembourg nor Gypsy Love achieved the commercial success of The Merry Widow, but Lehár’s first operetta was a unique popular success. The King saw it four times. And those of his loyal subjects who could not obtain or afford a ticket made the composer’s fortune by buying the sheet music. The waltz alone sold almost a quarter of a million copies.
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