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| A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Holroyd
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Category: Book
List Price: £25.00
Buy New: £15.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 14746
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6
ISBN: 0701179872
EAN: 9780701179878
ASIN: 0701179872
Publication Date: August 28, 2008
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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Delightful reading fodder for theatre lovers November 11, 2008
Let me start off by saying that, having been a Gordon Craig enthusiast for many years, I am altogether delighted by the appearance of a new, substantial and well-researched book on Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Edward Gordon Craig and the lesser known Harry and Laurence Irving (Henry's two sons) and Edy Craig (Ellen Terry's other child).
Needless to say, Michael Holroyd has an enviable reputation as a biographer, earned with his volumes on Lytton Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw - none of which, I hasten to confess, I have read - and his family memoirs. This volume, which segued out of his Shaw biography via the Shaw-Terry flirtation, is a very ambitious undertaking that manages to intertwine six memoirs with a considerable degree of success. (To create the required transitions between the different strands of the six-fold narrative Holroyd uses numerous flash-forwards and flashbacks. While these were probably unavoidable, they repeatedly made me lose my bearings in the chronology.)
I use the word memoirs rather than biography. This really is a bouquet of memoirs, with the attendant conciseness and elegance, gathered into one volume. The three main protagonists - Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Edward Gordon Craig - have already been amply served by earlier biographers and memoirists and once again take up most of the space here. However, this is no mere summary of what's been written before. Holroyd creates his own multi-faceted narrative that includes some surprising and enlightening digressions.
He has also done a substantial amount of new research. Thus he comes up with the startling story about Jess Dorynne, the mother of one of Gordon Craig's many illegitimate children, turning up in his sister Edy's entourage as the author of a play called `The Surprise of his Life', which was attacked in the press for being 'a brief for bastardy'. He also serves up some delightful vignettes for our entertainment. A good example is the painter G.F. Watts' entourage that engineered his marriage to, and subsequent separation from, a 17-year old Ellen Terry. This is deftly sketched, with a couple of comedic touches that hint at a cast of eccentric characters that might warrant a little volume of their own. This elegant teasing occurs throughout the narrative. Unfortunately, these amusing asides leave less room for the main attractions.
On the whole he manages to achieve an admirable synthesis that is sure to fascinate readers who are new to these stories. He also supplies some interesting new details for more seasoned readers, such as Irving's prop coffin that contained not his body - that could not be accommodated in Westminster Abbey - but his ashes. Holroyd's speculations about the romantic nature of the illicit Henry Irving-Ellen Terry relationship, fuelled by the knowledge that many indiscreet letters were posthumously destroyed, seem reasonable enough. The couple really did spend a lot more time together than even close theatre colleagues would normally do.
I found it interesting to read about respectability issues in Victorian times, such as Lewis Carroll who would not visit Ellen Terry while she was disreputably divorced, but did show up once she had remarried. Fortunately Holroyd does not psychoanalyse overmuch about Craig's repeating his parents' illicit affair with his succession of lovers (thirteen children with eight different mothers), but trusts his readers to draw their own conclusions. And he does make you feel sorry for some of these handmaidens - if you can call them that after bearing his offspring. On the other hand, Godwin, the designer and architect who fathered Ellen Terry's children, is dismissed as a dilettante, although I have a huge volume on my bookshelf that shows how productive he was.
As an enthusiast of the technical aspects of theatre production I felt a trifle short-changed. Perhaps it was unreasonable on my part to expect a biography of six theatre people to delve into the precise nature of their theatrical achievements. Holroyd provides very little detail about acting styles, scene design and lighting, even though these are the things in which these characters distinguished themselves. I was struck by Bernard Shaw's astute observation that in many respects Edy's pageant-like productions more closely resembled Edwards Godwin's than Gordon Craig probably imagined and would have liked to read more insights like that.
Ellen Terry's playfulness and impulsiveness are given full scope, but Gordon Craig's playfulness and his wicked sense of humour - surely contributing factors in his amorous and theatrical conquests - are rather downplayed. Somehow I get feeling Holroyd never quite managed to get Gordon Craig and his ideas in sharp focus. I certainly do not wish to condone Craig's impulsive behaviour and his callous attitude to women - loving and leaving them, a male chauvinist that increasingly depended on a string of female 'assistants' - but they are foregrounded at the expense of his more appealing side. Nor do you get a sense of his wit - surely one of the factors that make his 1911 classic On the Art of the Theatre: 1 (recently reprinted) such great reading.
Irving's sons are a rather sad example of sons growing up in the dark shadow cast by their father and even in this book in which they are supposed to be among the six leads they remain bit players. Edy Craig's story is rather more interesting. I didn't know very much about her and her suffragette and lesbian entourage, so that was an enjoyable read. The pansexual enclave that held forth at Ellen Terry's former home at Smallhythe must have been quite a sight and I shall need to re-read Virgina Woolf's 'Between the Acts' knowing whom it was based on.
As you see, it isn't easy to review such a wide-ranging book coherently! Perhaps you had better explore it by yourself.
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