Ellen Terry once said: “We players know quite well and accept with philosophy the fact that when we have done we are forgotten”. Yet, of all her contemporaries, Terry has always been more than a theatrical ghost. She is Julia Margaret Cameron’s beautiful dreamer, an epistolary match for George Bernard Shaw, and the heart of one of England’s theatrical dynasties. She was her generation’s Portia, Ophelia and Imogen – but an anaemic Lady Macbeth. Unlike her contemporaries Sarah Bernhardt, Minnie Fiske, Eleonora Duse, Maxine Elliott and Lillian Russell, she was not a committed or skilled producer or director of a company, choosing instead to support Henry Irving’s ego at the Lyceum.
It is said that she was more invested in the art of life than in life in the theatre, and set aside the stage without regret during several career hiatuses. She found James Whistler and Oscar Wilde far more engaging than Irving, and viewed the actor- manager’s diligent cultivation of the establishment with scepticism. Terry had legions of admirers on both sides of the Atlantic, spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but boasted that Shakespeare was her one and only “sweetheart”. Towards the end of her career, she wrote and delivered several insightful and eloquent lectures about his plays, which were published posthumously in 1932. They are, naturally, out of print; but in 2014, Dame Eileen Atkins gave an unforgettable one-woman show as Terry on the Shakespearean lecture circuit, a vivid complement to the actor’s similar rendering of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1989, 1991), in which Woolf imagines the life of Shakespeare’s tragic aspiring-playwright sister. There were, arguably, more successful women playwrights in Terry’s and Woolf’s era than now, many grappling with women’s political, economic and social emancipation. One of them was Terry’s formidable daughter, Edith.
So, it was with some trepidation that I heard David Hare was writing about Terry and her “relationship” with Henry Irving, allegedly at the suggestion of Ralph Fiennes. As it turns out, Fiennes may have been better served had he written the play himself. Grace Pervades, set in a series of drawing rooms and dressing rooms, framed with the ornate motif of a Victorian photo album, stamped above with key dates and settings from Irving’s and Terry’s professional careers, displays its historical research at every opportunity. The actors, especially Miranda Raison as Terry, are beautifully clad in an assortment of robes and reproductions of Lyceum costumes (a lovely, if somewhat faded, rendering of Terry’s green gown in Macbeth is a sight to behold). The trouble is, to paraphrase Terry’s son, Edward Gordon Craig, the actors open their mouths and speak Hare’s lines. It is, in many senses, like getting a Wiki-lite history lesson in Victorian and Edwardian drama. Edith Craig, played by Ruby Ashbourne Serkis, lets us know that she produced more than 150 plays in ten years, but she also reminds us that a real play should have a meaning and a point to exist. Agreed. But as Hare’s drama, directed by Jeremy Herrin, skips from one elegantly appointed vignette to the next, from the Lyceum stage to an American tour to Smallhythe in the 1920s, the point is less apparent.
Raison’s Terry is pretty but less physically substantial than the genuine article, and her voice lacks the richness and ease of the belle époque grande dame speaking the few Shakespearean inserts as if they were her native dialect. Raison opens her eyes wide and smiles brightly and tries to charm Ralph Fiennes’s Irving, but she appears perpetually uneasy. Terry, in contrast, handled people and animals naturally, and Raison is perhaps ill served by not having younger versions of Edith and Edward at home with her in the earlier scenes with her sister Kate, or her menagerie of little dogs. It was Terry who gave Irving her Jack Russell, Fussie, whom Irving adored beyond any of the women in his life. Perhaps with a canine actor playing Fussie under his arm, Fiennes would have loosened up a bit. As it was, Raison tended to keep her distance, as if Fiennes’s Irving were some dreaded undertaker. Admittedly, Irving’s factotum Bram Stoker modelled Dracula on Irving’s dark, grim persona – but Dracula also had more than his share of sexual magnetism. Fiennes doesn’t show us any of that. Only once do he and Raison embrace, and it is more of a cautious lean-in than a cuddle.
On stage, costumed as Hamlet and Ophelia, they are at odds intellectually as well as physically, and keep to their sides of the stage. Hare doesn’t imagine Terry and Irving acting as equals, as they did in Much Ado About Nothing, when Terry’s easy-going Beatrice unbent Irving’s Benedick. Instead, Grace Pervades shows us Irving-the-Boss, the workaholic, the rigid master of the Lyceum, and a pleading, almost schoolgirlish Terry, unable to persuade Irving to “let” her have the role of Rosalind. The real Irving didn’t see a starring role for himself in As You Like It and never put on a production just for Terry’s sake. That said, Terry could have done what countless other female stage stars of the time did and produce her own version in another theatre. Hare never suggests this as a plausible alternative, but prefers to present Terry as a charming suppliant, foiled by Irving’s male ego, but willing to “serve” him as the spirit of the theatre. This “stand by your man” take on the Terry-Irving partnership is wearing, and the spin-off scenes touching on Edith’s career and attitude toward her mother, and Hare’s unbalanced savaging of Edward Gordon Craig’s work in the theatre, seem less satisfactorily connected to the Terry-Irving not-quite-romance.
Of course, many will go to see Fiennes as Irving. He is a star. One expects Fiennes to be larger than life, but Irving, over 6ft tall, with coal-fire eyes and extravagant slimness, may be beyond the stature of any living actor. He was, like so many eminent Victorians, an original with no sequel. Decades later, people would compare him to Laurence Olivier, founding director of the National Theatre, but even then, Olivier was possibly Irving’s equal only in ego. Fiennes presents a lurchingly awkward, repressed Irving, a shy Richard III. Yes, the real Irving was allegedly mannered on stage. But it is also said that there was a real chemistry between Terry and Irving, on stage and off. Fiennes does not rekindle the old fires.
In the past few years, British stage history has generated material for new plays and films – Terry’s grandnephew John Gielgud, for instance, or Richard Burton. Unsurprisingly, stage women are comparatively neglected. David Hare’s attempt at the Irving-Terry collaboration comes at another point of crisis in arts funding, and by invoking Britain’s great theatrical history, perhaps the playwright suggests that the memory of our cultural heritage is not priceless – it needs government investment. However, as Irving’s loss of the Lyceum indicates, Britain has never funded its arts or its artists adequately. Not then, not now. A knighthood and a membership at the Garrick Club do not sustain the theatre. For a few decades in mid-twentieth-century Britain, the RSC and the National Theatre received almost generous subsidies, and there were scholarships for bright young talents such as Eileen Atkins and Tom Courtenay, who had an enlarged photograph of Terry in his Islington flat in the 1960s. Both Terry and Irving were of working-class backgrounds and inspired this new mid-century generation of talent. In our time, arts careers are increasingly the province of the wealthy, and the odds of becoming a successful playwright still favour men.
J. E. Smyth’s most recent book is Mary C. McCall Jr.: The rise and fall of Hollywood’s most powerful screenwriter, 2024
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