A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and their Remarkable Families

by Michael Holroyd

Hardcover, 2008

Status

Available

Call number

792.02

Genres

Collections

Non-Fiction, Drama

Publication

Chatto & Windus (2008), Edition: 1st, 608 pages

Description

Henry Irving - a merchant's clerk who became the saviour of British theatre - and Ellen Terry, who made her first theatre appearance as soon as she could walk, were the king and queen of the Victorian stage. Creatively interdependent, they founded a power-house of arts at the Lyceum Theatre, with Bram Stoker as business manager, where they recast Shakespeare's plays on an epic scale and took the company on lucrative and exhilarating international tours. In his masterly new biography, award-winning writer Michael Holroyd explores their public and private lives, showing how their artistic legacy and their brilliant but troubled children came to influence the modern world.

User reviews

LibraryThing member RefPenny

This is a biography of not a single person but a group of people all of whom were involved with the stage during the Victorian era and through the two World Wars. It is a vast and comprehensive book but mostly very readable. Ellen and her 2 children came across as very real and concrete characters

but Henry Irvine and his sons remained much more shadowy. This book would be of particular interest to those who are currently involved in the theatre but the details of Ellen's son's numerous liaisons are the stuff of soap operas. I felt that this book could have benefited from slightly more stringent editing and I would have appreciated a family tree and/or handy list of characters to refer to.

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LibraryThing member piemouth

Ellen Terry and Henry Irving were the leading thespians of their day. This is an entertaining biography of them, with excursions into the lives of others in their wide circle, like George Bernard Shaw and Bram Stoker. It also follow their children, including Terry's son Gordon Craig who had a love

affair with Isadora Duncan and became an influential figure in the theater as a designer. It had many reminders of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, which covers the same period of theater history. Not profound, but an entertaining, gossipy read. I particularly liked the scene in which Henry Irving's first wife says to him, as they're riding home from a night he triumphed in the theater, "When are you going to give up this nonsense??" He caught the cabdriver's attention, stepped out of the cab, and walked away across the park, never to see his wife again.

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LibraryThing member otterley

A biography of two great Victorian actors, and their families. I love the theatre and I think this reading experience made me sure that the theatre is not well served by reading about performance without the benefit of engaging with it. Without the magic of their creativity, almost all of the

characters become dull and self-obsessed, and this is hugely strengthened by the focus on the essentially minor talents of Ellen Terry's very dislikeable son and unappealing daughter.

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