by Simon Callow
I once had occasion to interview him on television on the subject of Charles Laughton. Before the cameras had started to roll, only minutes after meeting the man, I was already, after a few preliminary pleasantries, in serious trouble. He told his Lew Grade story: about how Grade had received a telegram from a rabbi saying that if only Jesus of Nazareth had been made at the time, the crucifixion need never have happened. Whimpering, gurgling noises started to emerge from my mouth as he proceeded. I was delirious, out of control. The cameras rolled. It was a struggle to ask my simple questions. He continued, unforgiving, describing the visit of his son Igor to the set of Spartacus during the filming of the bathhouse scene. Igor pointed at Laughton, asking, ‘Who is that lady?’ ‘That is not a lady,’ Ustinov gently pointed out, ‘it is Mr Laughton, a very famous actor.’ ‘Well,’ said the boy, not unreasonably, ‘if he’s not a lady, why has he got breasts?’
His evocation of Laughton gathering up the skirts of his toga and withdrawing to consider the scale of the insult he had just received destroyed us all – the cameramen, the director, the continuity girl. I’ve never experienced anything quite like it – mass hysteria on the part of six people trained to maintain absolute silence. Now that’s genius. ‘I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter,’ he tells Miller, ‘the sound of which has always seemed to me the most civilised music in the universe.’ He has spoken his own perfect epitaph.
Although I rejoiced in Ustinov’s comic performances, I was aware that there were greater heights to which actors could aspire. Two performances in particular had scorched themselves on my imagination, Laurence Olivier’s as Richard III, and Charles Laughton’s in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, two men with mangled bodies, one revenging himself on the world for it, the other impossibly looking for love despite it. Laughton’s was the one I identified with; it moved me in ways I simply didn’t understand. Olivier’s film was much more straightforward, pure Grand Guignol, in lurid Technicolor as against Laughton’s muted black and white. I had first seen it as a six-year-old, and it had given me screaming-out-loud nightmares, especially the terrifying scene with the young princes. This was a Captain Hook who could really kill you. I caught up with the film again when I was thirteen or fourteen, consumed with adolescent self-disgust, feeling myself to be deformed in some way. This time, identifying with Richard, I was excited by his superbly expressed contempt for the beautiful and the shapely. I was also by now aware that there was such a thing as acting. Having seen other examples of Olivier’s film performances – Hamlet, Henry V, Khartoum, Spartacus – I could see and hear how he was using himself physically and vocally, the way in which he was able to command his voice and body to do his will. This I found exhilarating and inspiring, and lodged in my brain the liberating possibility of transformation. One did not have to be stuck, it appeared, with the face and the form that nature had given one. Olivier’s voice, in particular, astounded me. I spent my days – far away from anyone who might hear me – shrieking out phrases like ‘Cry God for Harry, England and St George!’ and ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ It’s a wonder I didn’t give myself nodules. Both his Richard and Laughton’s Quasimodo stuck in my mind, became part of my mental landscape, in a way which I began to understand was the defining characteristic of great performances: they wouldn’t let go of you.
I began to learn something about the history of the stage, to read about actors past. Garrick is the first actor about whom we know a great deal. I reviewed Ian McIntyre’s biography in the Sunday Times in 1999.
Every age redefines acting, almost without exception in terms of greater realism. The New Actor, fresh on the scene, startles by his immediacy and truthfulness, making other actors seem stagey, hammy, corny. In time, the new truthfulness becomes widely current, and is in turn revealed as stagey, hammy, corny, to be replaced by the new New Actor; a familiar process across the whole range of human activity.
It occurred with particular abruptness in the case of David Garrick. His sudden eruption into London’s theatrical life in 1742 with his sensational portrayal of Richard III shocked the city and the profession.
The almost unknown twenty-five-year-old wine merchant from Lichfield gave an account of the role of such vividness and confidence that older actors of the day were immediately thrown onto the defensive. ‘If this young fellow is right,’ said James Quin, one of the reigning stars of the time, ‘then we have all been wrong.’
What was it that so electrified Garrick’s contemporaries? In a word, actuality. The actors of the mid-eighteenth century were still recycling the rhetorical French style which they had adopted with the reopening of the theatres at the Restoration: the manner was declamatory, impressive, ponderous; Quin himself – the mighty Quin, a great barrel of a man with a deeply sonorous voice and the swaying motion of an ocean-going vessel – was the supreme exemplar of this style. The impact of Garrick, slight (only 5’3”), nimble, swift in thought and flexible in utterance, responsive to every impulse in the language, each development in the character, was clearly breathtaking.
Audiences felt that they were for the first time in the presence of the character, rather than a stylised representation of him, because they were able to see his thinking, minute by minute; moreover, the quite exceptional expressiveness of Garrick’s somewhat bland features, which seemed to be inhabited by the whole gamut of human emotions in rapid succession, was a marvel in itself, a sort of conjuring trick that defied disbelief. His senior contemporaries preferred on the whole to demonstrate the conventionalised lineaments of a role; they were reproducing the past. Garrick was thrillingly, hair-raisingly present.
His career took off instantly and with bewildering variety; his range encompassed high comedy, farce and tragedy – often on the same evening. When he played King Lear for the first time (at the ripe age of twenty-six) he followed it on the same bill with Cibber’s after-piece The Schoolboy, in which he played the fifteen-year-old Master Johnny. Needless to say, his fellow players did not take his sudden ascendancy lying down. ‘This might be a proper representation of a mad tailor,’ sniffed the comedian Samuel Foote, ‘but by no means corresponds with my idea of King Lear.’
The criticisms of his contemporaries bear a striking similarity to those offered to one of this century’s thespian mould-breakers, Laurence Olivier, whose early performances in Shakespeare were held to be a smack in the face for the values of nobility, lyricism, elevated tone and resonance. In fact, Olivier and Garrick have a number of things in common; how Garrick would have enjoyed Olivier’s famous doubles of Oedipus and Mr Puff, Hotspur and Justice Shallow. Like Olivier, Garrick was criticised for his naturalistic phrasing; his pauses were analysed in minute detail.
It was an age when theatre was the great metropolitan sport: the rival companies at Covent Garden and Drury Lane had their supporters and their detractors, whose conduct makes the most extreme football hooligans seem like pussycats. The best job to have in London c.1750 was a theatre repairer: at the slightest provocation the denizens of the pit would smash the benches, tear down the lighting sconces, and set fire to the curtains. The workmen would move in, swiftly reconstruct the auditorium, and the next day or the day after it would be business as usual, until the next offence from the stage, which could be almost anything: inaudibility, price increases, political incorrectness (betraying Francophilia, for example). Even Garrick, on whom the audience bestowed almost continuous favour, was hauled over the coals in this manner from time to time, though there is no record of him being made to kneel to the audience in contrition, the fate of many of his fellow players.
By 1747, a mere five years after his debut, Garrick was co-manager of Drury Lane, his reign inaugurated with a prologue written by his former schoolmaster and fellow Lichfielder, Samuel Johnson, with whom he had a somewhat uncomfortable lifelong friendship. ‘’Tis yours this night to bid the reign commence,’ the prologue proclaimed, ‘Of rescued nature and reviving sense.’ And he was true to his word. Over the next twenty years of his
tenure, he raised standards, of acting, lighting, scenic design and of the general conditions of theatre-going. The eighteenth-century playhouse was not the cesspit of the Restoration, but it was very noisy and the division between backstage and front of house not always clear. Garrick helped reform all this. As far as his encouragement of new writing is concerned, his record is mixed, but it is greatly to his credit that he brought back into circulation a number of Shakespeare’s plays, in more or less mutilated versions, but nonetheless always done with great vivacity and imagination.
It was inevitable that he should have been the frontman for the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769; the beginnings of the Shakespeare industry can readily be discerned in this event, which passed uncomfortably from pageant to pomposity until it was rained off. It confirmed Garrick’s position not only at the head of his profession but as a distinguished member of society long before Henry Irving’s symbolic knighthood supposedly made acting respectable; his acquaintance included dukes and marquesses, and indeed the intelligentsia of Britain and Europe.
His acting was immensely influential on both sides of the Channel, not simply in theatrical terms, but philosophically. As part of the great rationalist inquiry into the human condition, the Enyclopédistes, and particularly Diderot, were fascinated by his ability apparently to create emotions at will: what did this tell us about the human brain? The Paradox of Acting, Diderot’s famous dialogue, identifies what has become the central issue of acting: to feel or not to feel? ‘Garrick will put his head between two folding doors and in the course of five or six seconds his expression will change successively from wild delight to temperate pleasure, from this to tranquillity, from tranquillity to surprise, from surprise to blank astonishment, from that to sorrow, from sorrow to the air of one overwhelmed, from that to fright, from fright to horror, from horror to despair, and thence he will go up again to the point from which he started. Can his soul have experienced all these feelings, and played this kind of scale in concert with his face? I don’t believe it; nor do you.’ If this was face-pulling, it is on a titanic scale. Johnson crushingly observed: ‘David looks much older than he is… such an eternal restless fatiguing play of the muscles must certainly wear out a man’s face before its real time.’
To the day of his retirement, audiences were astonished by his performances. He had few failures – Othello, Romeo, Hotspur – and seemed to understand his own range. He had a repertory of more than ninety roles; small wonder that, exhausted by management, acting, directing and writing – innumerable prologues and after-pieces and a number of very enjoyable full-length plays – he took a long sabbatical; he was forty-six, had acted for twenty-one years, and seriously wondered whether he hadn’t lost the taste for it. After eighteen months, he returned, renewed, and finally retired at the early age of sixty. His health was by now poor, and death – from the same savage kidney condition which claimed Mozart (uraemia: ‘the stone’) – came quite soon after. His obsequies were of the most splendid; the nation mourned.
Hesketh Pearson’s wonderful book about Beerbohm Tree, for whom he had worked, superbly evoked the late Victorian theatre; while Edward Gordon Craig’s book about Henry Irving was a kind of Blakeian vision of acting. Next to that, I read Shaw’s sceptical journalistic account of Irving, and Laurence Irving’s magisterial three-volume Life. Such conflicting opinions seemed to surround any great actor; there was no consensus. In 2005, I reviewed a recent and brilliantly perceptive book about the great actor which shows him as one of the key figures of his age.
When the actor-manager Henry Irving appeared for his curtain call in Swansea on his farewell tour in 1905, someone started softly singing ‘Lead Kindly Light’; soon the whole audience joined in. Not long afterwards on the same tour, after playing the title role in Becket in Bradford, he died. The last lines he uttered on stage were ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, into thy hands.’ When his lifeless body was borne through the streets at the beginning of his final journey back to London, thousands of people assembled along the way in perfect silence, a response repeated tenfold in London when he was interred amidst high pomp in Westminster Abbey; the cabmen going about their work that day wore black bows on their whips. All this for an actor? A mere actor? As it happens, the intense national mourning for Irving was the culmination of everything he had striven for in his life: the elevation of the status both of the actor and the theatre itself from bawdy disrepute and intellectual dismissal to a central place in the national landscape. His knighthood, bestowed in 1895, the first awarded to an actor, was powerfully symbolic of the respectability the theatre had acquired in the forty years since he had been acting professionally. That he was personally responsible for this transformation was in no doubt. ‘The actor’s world he lifted up,’ said one of the many poems inspired by his demise, ‘From base report and evil sway / Into the purer light of day / Where art and beauty rule the play.’
A crucial figure in the development of the theatre, Irving is equally significant as a man of his times, a phenomenon of the Victorian age, and it is as such that Jeffrey Richards considers him in a book which, though academic in design, is commendably clear in expression (when the non-word ‘performativity’ crops up in his otherwise jargon-free text, it is a bit of a shock). The details of Irving’s extraordinary life are briskly despatched in an opening paragraph, and then reappear in different contexts in Richards’s thematically headed chapters, in each of which a key concept of the Victorian world is explored. The thematic approach yields remarkable and unexpected glimpses of him. Focusing on Irving’s evangelical convictions, his Christian socialism, for example, reveals the central position in his world view of the ideal of gentlemanliness, of chivalry; this sense of the ennobling power of gentle strength was brought to its apotheosis in his production of King Arthur. Similarly his commitment to the educative potential of the theatre has its roots in the same philosophy, and resulted in the commission of a large number of historical dramas (Charles I, Becket, Robespierre, Dante), all scrupulously researched historically and archaeologically, none undertaken without extensive consultations with the British Museum.
The designs of his shows – entrusted to the leading painters of the day – were universally acknowledged to be miracles both of stagecraft and aesthetic accomplishment; when the curtain went up on the first scene of Charles I, the set painter had to be given a round of applause before the play could continue. Irving’s exploration of the possibilities of light (always evocative gas or limelight, never harsh and unpoetic electricity) was exhaustive and innovative, constantly aspiring to ever greater patination of texture. Richards’s book is especially thought-provoking in its account of Irving’s achievements as a director. He endlessly strove for a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, the integration of all the elements – scenic, musical, thespian – into one artistically overwhelming gesture, hypnotising his audiences with a succession of sustained and deeply harmonised visions. The intention was spiritual as much as theatrical: by sheer force of will and intensity of belief, he turned Tennyson’s indifferent verse drama Becket into an act of worship. Even his (many) detractors admired the physical productions at the Lyceum Theatre, achieved with the aid of veritable armies of collaborators, on stage and off: in one of his shows, Robespierre, the company of sixty-nine actors was supported by three hundred and fifty staff backstage; the regular standing orchestra consisted of thirty-five players. In one sense, his work was old-fashioned, the culmination of the nineteenth-century stagecraft of illusion, but in another he looked forward to the cinema: had he lived only thirty years later, that is surely where his great talents would have found their proper place. The most remarked-on scene in his production of The Merchant of Venice, for example, was one not envisaged by Shakespeare at all, in which Shylock returned to his empty house, knocked at the door and was greeted by silence. The curtain fell as he turned his grief-stricken face to the audience. In the parlance of Hollywood, Irving was ‘opening the play out’.
Richards fascinatingly proposes that I
rving’s passion to create theatrical harmony was fuelled by his sharp awareness of one of the central Victorian experiences: doubleness, the schism in the soul, the lie in the heart. Many of the age’s most famous citizens led double lives: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Oscar Wilde. Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson provided the great fictional exemplars of this doubleness, and Irving’s repertoire encompassed many plays in which he played twins, one brother noble, the other dastardly. Most famously he brought to the stage the portrayal of stricken conscience: Eugene Aram, Faust, Vanderdecken in The Flying Dutchman. Supreme among these guilt-racked figures was Matthias in The Bells, his first and perhaps greatest success: ‘The feverish alertness engendered by the strife of a strong will against a sickening apprehension,’ as a contemporary wrote, ‘the desperate sense, now defiant and now abject, of impending doom, the slow analysis of the feelings, under the action of remorse – these indeed were given with appalling truth.’
Few disputed Irving’s greatness as Matthias, but despite his pre-eminence as a manager, his gifts as an actor were by no means universally acknowledged. ‘Nature has done very little to make an actor of him,’ wrote Henry James. ‘His face is not dramatic, it is the face of… anything other than a possible Hamlet or Othello. His figure is of the same cast, and his voice… is apparently wholly unavailable for the purposes of declamation.’ The playwright Henry Arthur Jones identified the doubleness at the heart of his art, writing of him that ‘he was supremely great in what was grim, raffish, ironic, crafty, senile, sardonic, devilish; he was equally great in what was dignified, noble, simple, courtly, removed, unearthly, saintly and spiritual. The core of them was in himself. The sly impishness, the laconic mockery and grim diablerie that were the underwoof of his character were the strange, harmonious complements of his hauteur, asceticism and spirituality.’ It is a paradox that such an exotic and complex actor, with no access to straightforwardly heroic or romantic characters, should have become the outstanding actor of the day. He achieved his pre-eminence by will-power, by unremitting hard work and by shrewd manipulation. He imposed himself on the British theatre, and the British theatre on the nation.