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Phelps was the idol of the young Henry Irving who, after years of toiling in the provinces, became at the Lyceum the doyen of British theatre. Irving, awkward in movement, with a notably ugly voice and peculiar pronunciations — sight as ‘seyt’, hand as ‘hond’ or ‘hend’ — had an extraordinarily compelling presence. Actors physically and vocally ill-favoured can still be magnetic, like the more recent Nichol Williamson.
Among several other actor-managers Beerbohm Tree stands out for his sheer relish for life and art and wild sense of humour. The half-brother of Max Beer- bohm, he added Tree to his surname, I have always understood, because when audiences called for him after the final curtain ‘Tree’ was much easier to call out than ‘Beerbohm’. His speciality at His Majesty’s Theatre was spectacle. When he leased it out for the long-running Chu Chin Chow he described the costumes as ‘more navel than millinery’.
‘Gentlemanly’ actors like George Alexander also held sway. Later the beautifully crafted natural acting of George Du Maurier had a lasting influence. Anyone lucky enough to have seen A. E. Matthews or Rex Harrison stroll on to a stage, pick up a newspaper and throw away a line as if in their own drawing-rooms will know something of the Du Maurier style. Sir Gerald, incidentally, taught Celia Johnson — as adept at light comedy as she was at middle-class pathos.
When Masters arrives at the near-present he is more controversial and occasionally misleading. It is wrong to suggest that Alastair Sim gave up the stage for the cinema. Good as it is to have his uniquely amusing presence on film, until the end of his life the stage was his first love, and to witness, as I did, his long, woeful figure in full farcical flight in The Magistrate was to see him at his greatest.
In the pointless Gielgud versus Olivier arguments which erupted among spectators in my youth, Masters attempts to be impartial but emerges as a dedicated Giel- gudian. Olivier’s much acclaimed Othello had its strong detractors, but to call it a failure is downright perverse. Gielgud’s undoubted failure in the same role was surely not, as Peter Hall suggested, due to his sweetness of nature, but because he was quite simply physically miscast.
Choosing between actors is ultimately a matter of personal taste: both players were supreme artists who contributed immeasurably to 20th-century theatre. It is fitting that Masters’s story ends with the death of Gielgud in the year 2000.
Despite the author’s attractive optimism the book cannot but sound valedictory. ‘Great actors’, like ‘great statesmen’, no longer exist; perhaps the last was Paul Scofield. Today we have many excellent, even superb, actors — perhaps cleverer than some of the greats. But huge, awe-inspiring presences have all but disappeared. It may be a matter of class: we are no longer such a hierarchical, deferential society as we were. Perhaps the requirements of cinema and television acting have reduced the scale of performances. Critics now are as likely to revere directors as actors. People talked about the ‘Peter Brook Dream’ as they might once have talked about the ‘Irving Hamlet’.
I don’t think that Masters is quite right in suggesting that fiddling with Shakespeare’s texts is finished. Brook, in a reversal of Nahum Tate, cut two moments of hope from his King Lear, thus plunging it into total Beckettian gloom. I have heard of a recent Hamlet in which Ophelia, instead of taking her own life, is murdered, and a Macbeth whose witches were hospital nurses (The Three Ward Sisters?) And Shakespearian speaking has not improved.
Such fogeyish sentiments did not spoil my enjoyment of this book, which is beautifully illustrated with portraits from the Garrick collection.
Because you read about actors
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