‘There is a stamina factor': Ralph Fiennes on his most daunting role yet

Telegraph

6 hours ago

If I listen to the few ­existing ­recordings of Henry Irving speaking in 1898, it's hard to connect. One of the most ­renowned actors of the Victorian era, he has a delivery that seems of another age, a style that feels alien to my ears. The slightly sung quality of his reading is not helped by the scratchy ­nature of the wax-cylinder recording, which gives the impression of words spoken in a rainstorm.
But it seems unfair to decide on the basis of these 'souvenirs' of Irving speaking; what kind of actor he was. So, in preparing to portray Irving in Grace Pervades – a new play by David Hare about him, Ellen Terry and Terry's two ­illegitimate children – I sought another means of getting to the heart of him.
Reading contemporary descriptions of Irving in performance, by those who saw him on stage, is more satisfying, and makes it poss­ible to build a sense of him. He was a slender man, precise and detailed in indicating the physical qualities of a role. His pictorial feeling for the characters he played was emphasised by great attention to his make-up. He was said to have had an odd gait and a mannered pronunciation, but was clearly able to grip an audience with what they read in his face and body.
If his voice lacked commanding thunder, he made up for it by intensity of thought, changing the atmosphere by a shift of emotional emphasis and holding the theatre riveted. In We Saw Him Act – a wonderful anthology from the Thirties of Irving's memoirs – a member of the audience recalls feeling a bit disengaged while watching a passable performance until, suddenly, he is moved to exclaim in awe at something Irving does – 'Oh, my God!' – and the young man next to him mutters, 'Yes, that's Mr Irving. He bores you for 20 minutes, then paralyses you for five.'
The essential impression I get from Irving's life is his determination to finesse his craft, to mould and redefine himself. Born John Henry Brodribb, in 1838, into an impoverished rural West Country family, he was afflicted with a speech impediment close to a stutter. In his early years, he attended a performance which gave him that vital spark of inspiration that I think many actors have felt in their childhood. You see an arresting theatre production, and suddenly a desire to be on the stage – or, at least, to be part of a world in which the enactment of stories is your job – feels like your destiny. This is the theatre as a calling: the urge to connect to audiences, ­provoking them, moving them, shifting their awareness and, for a moment, taking them out of their lives.
As an actor today, trying to discover Irving, you're looking back over a century and a half of huge changes in theatre – an evolution in both its writing and performance – and left asking what his audiences wanted and how he gave it to them. I believe they wanted to escape into other worlds; a heightened realism, a theatre of grand ­emotions framed by beautiful stage sets and evocative lighting effects. I think Irving delivered that and, even though the kind of drama he worked in is not at all our drama, what I can ­recognise is the determination to evolve and challenge oneself in the depiction of characters and in the realisation of any given play.
Irving (whose stage name was inspired, apparently, by the American writer Washington Irving and the Scottish preacher Edward Irving) wasn't just an actor: he was producer and director, too. Theatre managers of his era tended to be concerned less with aesthetics than with maximising financial returns through pragmatic choice of repertoire and performers. Yet Irving was a form of king, overseeing all aspects of management and stagecraft, caring profoundly about the total effect of each production. Artistic directorship of a theatre seems to have been defined by him.
It could be argued that Irving, with his heightened sense of visual drama, helped nurture and guide public taste towards a more uplifting, exciting form of theatre. ­History records how he enhanced a scene in The Bells (1871) – in which a murderer (played by Irving, in one of his most celebrated performances) reveals his guilt under hypnosis – with detailed use of music and sound effects; realistically portrayed the psychosis of Macbeth on a vast Scottish heath; and snapped into focus the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey in a magnificent pageant-like production of Shakespeare's Henry VIII.
Bram Stoker, the author of Drac­ula, served as Irving's loyal man­a­ger for more than 20 years, and his memoirs are full of detailed des­crip­tions of extraordinary stage effects ­created by Irving: salt on stage for snow, glistening under the lights, as the setting for a fatal moon­lit duel; an army played by professional ­soldiers, trudging wearily into the distant upstage then running back through the wings only to ­re-emerge downstage, creating the illusion of a vast unending column on the march; a small, single light to suggest a lonely fire burning at night. Irving paid attention, too, to the front-of-house atmosphere, illuminating the theatre lobby with candlelight and printing beautifully designed programmes.
Eventually, of course, towards the end of Irving's two successful decades, performing alongside the luminous Ellen Terry, at the Lyceum Theatre in London's West End (from 1878 to 1902), the dramas of Ibsen, Strindberg and George Bernard Shaw began edging their way into the public's awareness. Shaw in particular championed a new kind of theatre of ideas with embedded political provocation – something Irving loathed.
It's impossible to write about Irving without writing about Terry. Her intuitive alertness and generosity balanced his conscious striving. Born into a theatrical family, she had acted since childhood and seemingly had an unforced gift for performance. Actors can't act alone; or, at least, doing so will only get them so far. Irving was smart enough to identify Terry's talent and know that a partnership between them would have the power of complementary spirits. They may also have been lovers.
What is certain is that Terry's two illegitimate children by the architect Edward Godwin were affected by Irving's theatre. Born in 1872, Edward Gordon Craig – ­Terry's son, and Irving's godson – started to formulate his own ideas, involving simple sets, shafts of light, no actors and no text. It was almost a theatre of dance or puppetry; the antithesis of Irving's taste. Yet he always worshipped Irving as an actor and the spirit of his leadership.
Terry's daughter, Edith (known as Edy), is the unsung heroine of this quartet. She had organisational gifts that helped her as a costume-maker – first for Irving at the Lyceum, then independently – but she eventually found her theatrical calling was answered more fully producing and mounting shows from the ­converted barn her mother had bought at Smallhythe Place, in Kent (now a National Trust museum). With a small group of like-minded women, she developed plays with a political or feminist intent, producing many more than her iconoclastic brother, whose reputation as a director hangs largely on a single 1911 production of Hamlet for the great Russian actor/director ­Konstantin Stanislavsky.
By the time you read this, Grace Pervades will have begun its run as part of a three-play season I've been invited to oversee at Theatre Royal Bath. I had fallen in love with the place after performing T S ­Eliot's Four Quartets there in 2021, and was both daunted and excited when Danny Moar, the theatre's director, first made me this offer. I quickly knew that I wanted both to present new plays (Grace Pervades will be followed, in October, by Small Hotel by Rebecca Lenkiewicz) and also to direct my first Shakespeare on stage, As You like It.
During the Covid lockdown, I had read about Irving and Terry in A Strange Eventful History, Michael Holroyd's account of their partnership, which had in turn inspired me to pull out my battered copy of ­Gordon Craig's On the Art of the ­Theatre (1911). Reading it, I was really struck by the sense of a past era of momentous change in the theatre, of what this art form can do and who it can reach – and I approached Hare with the suggestion that this subject would be rich material for a play. As a result, I now find myself in a very small version of the situation Irving must have inhabited for years, which is to be rehearsing and then performing a role at the same time as preparing two other productions as both director and actor – while also dealing with aspects of publicity, programme design, ­casting and the scheduling of rehearsals. It is, shall we say, an adrenalising process.
As an actor, I look to be reassured by the nurturing hand of the director. Sometimes that assurance is not on offer, so instead you look for ­signals – often from fellow actors – that you are swimming in the right current. In this case, in our rehearsals for Grace Pervades, the brilli­antly perceptive Jeremy Herrin has been offering precise notes with gentle consideration. I value his guidance as he helps me and Miranda Raison (playing Terry) through the fine detail and nuance of Hare's dialogue. I'm also paying attention to how he encourages and crucially allows the energy of scenes to evolve without imposing or insisting. I absorb this, and also remember how other directors I have worked with brought together the elements of a production.
Next week, I will have to turn and become – I hope – that enabling person for the cast and creative team of As You like It. Immersed in Henry Irving: The Actor and His World, Laurence Irving's forensically detailed 1951 biography of his grandfather, I can't help reflecting on the totality of Irving's vision, shaped by years of uncertainty and penury – the idealism and perfectionism that drove him to capture his audience. It's hard not to be inspired by him.
But there is a stamina factor. If you are directing and performing – at the same time – tiredness must be accepted or ignored, as sheer adrenaline helps you through. If you don't fall ill, there can be a sweet spot between activity and exhaustion. How will I feel, having played Irving on Monday night, getting up to lead rehearsals for As You Like It on Tuesday morning? How will I feel, having opened As You Like It, to turn around and start working with director Holly Race Roughan and be secure in my lines for Small Hotel? Ultimately, it's the company spirit that will carry us – the energy of a team.
The collective energy of any ensemble has always been moving to me, whether I'm part of it or not. I'm idealistic about what a theatre company represents at its best; that whatever the scale or size of role held by each individual within it, on or off-stage, it is a community work­ing in harmony. There can be discord or tension, of course, but the aspiration is to offer an experience that touches the mind or heart and especially the soul of that other ess­ential theatre community: the audience.
That is the destination that will define us. Irving and his ­productions had varying critical responses, yet, ultimately, the fact of the ­audience's continuing attendance suggests that they decided over­­whelmingly in his favour. As he says in Grace Pervades, 'Ellen, ­theatre is a group activity.'
Grace Pervades by David Hare, the opening production in the Ralph Fiennes Season, is playing at Theatre Royal Bath (theatreroyal.org.uk), until July 19