GRACE PERVADES Theatre Royal Bath
Theatre is fond of sending itself love letters, albeit – from Sheridan’s The Critic to Frayn’s Noises Off – often prudently laced with affectionate mockery. Here, kicking off a Ralph Fiennes season in the prettiest and most approriate of Victorian playhouses, David Hare evokes two of the first ‘national treasure’ theatrical figures: the great Henry Irving, actor-manager of the Lyceum for two decades, and his leading lady Ellen Terry. Plus, as a side-helping of theatre history, the children Edward and Edith Craig she bore as a single mother: he as an advanced theorist, she a tough-minded touring producer.
Miranda Raison as Ellen Terry is a delight: light and likeable, every feeling shining through her eyes, a woman who’s lived and lost and struggled to feed her kids by keeping chickens, but who keeps all angst and sorrow for the stage. Fiennes of course is Irving, and deploys all his chiselled, Easter-Island anguish and dignity, even when pacing around in skinny black tights like cloak like a stork in mourning, while being gently told off by his leading lady for never looking fellow-actors in the eye. Jeremy Herrin’s direction, Bob Crowley’s briliantly atmospheric design and Fotima Dimou’s amazing OTT Victorian – and then Edwardian – costumes conjure a world where British theatre was first dragged up into respectability, stalled a little with Irving’s addiction for grand Shakespeare and melodrama, but was creeping into a new century with new ideas beyond. Having a great-grandfather who actor-managed (strictlyprovincial) in the period, how could I resist driving seven hours to see it? Especially when Fiennes’ anguished Irving explained the cost, the debt and struggles of an actor-manager, and how hours before his Othello he was on his hands and knees mending a torn seat in Row R.
The scenes with Irving and Terry, her recruitment and a growing, almost maternal, care for the brilliant, shy, troubled man are fabulous. It’s like watching a carefree robin cheering up a moulting eagle. He is anguished by critics (Bernard Shaw was very rude) and treats every entry, every show, with anxious intensity. She takes the banister down from her dressing room at the last minute and throws herself into the parallel world, glad to have her own life’s anxieties thrown aside for that moment. We could watch them all evening.
But her children are part of the story too, sometimes narrating, and following their own diverse lines. Jordan Metcalfe , perfect right down to his blond cowlick and earnest glasses, creates with mischievous brilliance young Edward’s progressive pomposity (he thinks theatre should abolish both actors and words, believes fervently in his own genius, and prefers his girlfriend Isadora Duncan’s wild flailings to the dreadful deadening discipline of ballet). Hare gives us a glorious scene in which Irving, having hired him as a nepo-baby of Ellen, points out that all the other spear-carriers hate Edward, and resent his loudly expressed theories of Theat-ah. All very Gen-Z. The scene where the young genius into /Stanislavsky and puts on Hamlet in Moscow is wicked theatrical jokery. It stands oddly out in the play but hell, it’s entertaining. Sister Edith (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis) is tougher, feminist, democratic, and just gets on with it. Perfect.
There are moments when bits of social history feel a bit shoe-horned in – there is talk of suffragettes, and one of Edith’s threesome household is in love with Vita Sackville West. But it’s irresistible when the finally ageing Edward explains, in the South of France, that one of his keen acolytes is a chap called Peter Brook.
Overall, it is never dull, and the Irving-Terry relationship and conversations about the craft of acting are mesmeric: well, it’s Ralph Fiennes. Always worth the trip. He directs As You Like it later in the season – the play Ellen Terry wanted to star in as Rosalind, but which was too light-hearted for Irving’s taste. A nice link. Fiennes himself turns up again in the new play A Small Hotel, in September.
theatreroyal.org to 22 July
rating. 4.
theatreCat 