Henry Irving

GREATNESS IMPERSONATING GREATNESS

Sir Henry Irving (1838–1905)

Before Irving, the general view of actors in England was that they were all disreputable vagabonds. By the time he received his knighthood in 1895, he had virtually invented the notion of the stage as a respectable vocation. The fact that he also carried on a discreet love affair for over thirty years with the great Ellen Terry did not in any way harm his image.

He was born John Henry Brodribb in Keinton, Somerset, the son of a tradesman. After first appearing on stage at the age of 18 in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet, it took him another ten years to learn his craft in the provinces before he made his mark in London. Ellen Terry first played opposite him in Garrick’s Katherine and Petrucio in 1867, and ten years later their liaison began in earnest when she became his leading lady at the Lyceum Theatre.

Irving took over the management of the theatre from H L Bateman in 1878. Bateman had engaged him seven years before mainly to play character comedies, but Irving’s sights were fixed higher. He soon persuaded his boss to put on a European melodrama called The Bells, whose main character Matthias is plagued by a guilty conscience fort having murdered a Jew fifteen years before. (The eponymous bells are those of the victim’s ghostly sleigh which haunts the murderer’s dreams.) The first night audience was tiny but Irving’s performance was so resonant that it set the seal on his fortunes.

Not that he was without his detractors, even within his own family. The story goes that, crossing Hyde Park in his brougham after that first night, his wife asked him “Are you going to make a fool of yourself like this all your life?” The actor immediately stopped the cab, dismounted without a word, and never spoke to her again.

Irving’s voice was never powerful and his mannerisms idiosyncratic, but by playing against the style of the day, he carved for himself a unique reputation. Despite his ungainly walk and sometimes stilted delivery, he was the champion for which tragedy had been waiting – ‘greatness impersonating greatness’.

He toured America and Canada eight times from 1883 to 1903, as well as visiting all corners of Britain. Although the texts he used were traditionally adapted to keep the spotlight on the star, he nevertheless ensured quality in his productions by surrounding himself with only the best. “He was,” Ellen Terry recalled, “quiet, patient, tolerant, impersonal, gentle, close, crafty, incapable of caring for anything outside his work.”

His final years were unhappy. In failing health, beset by money worries, his fortunes took a further nosedive when a fire at the Lyceum destroyed sets and costumes for the bulk of his repertoire. He finally gave up his managership of the theatre after performing in his son Laurence’s play Peter the Great, and his last appearance in London was n 10 June 1905 in Tennyson’s verse drama about Thomas à Becket.

Sir Henry Irving died on 13 October 1905 in Bradford while on a farewell tour. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.