Days Gone
And nights scarce imagined
A Victorian Playgoer by Kate Terry Gielgud
Kate Terry Gielgud (yes, daughter of that Terry; yes, mother to that Gielgud) often went in youth to the theatre. And she didn’t just go to the theatre. She wrote about it. Not in reviews, formally speaking. But in letters, possibly scraps of diary, things like that. Small recollections of time gone by. Notes to family to say what everyone had done to keep themselves entertained. Recommendations or suggestions that so-and-so was not on good form, was not doing well, and a such and such a thing was not worth the visit. The author’s reviews were collected together after her death, introduced fondly by her son. They are an eye into a world far gone, and are the thoughts – sometimes discerning, discriminating, sometimes trivial – of a very young woman engaged in the hunt for entertainment and nothing more.
When I call this book charming – and it is – readers might retch and tell me to gain some faculties. Charm is the thing you attribute to things whose qualities you cannot parse, or those things you want to put down with faint praise. That’s what they say, though they are wrong. When I judge this book is charming, I mean it. It charmed me. I am amused by the author’s foibles. I enjoy her dislike of some of the theatrical personages of the day.
She comments often, very often, on the extremely famous actresses of her day. In fact, she mostly talks about the women. This is not much of a surprise. She has thoughts on their dress, their manners, their choices of role. She has much to say about the very fashionable, very modish Mrs Patrick Campbell – for whom George Bernard Shaw wrote Eliza in Pygmalion. The author finds fault with Mrs Patrick Campbell’s timbre, her projection, her speaking of verse, her presence on stage, her clothes, her general slovenly bearing. Her attitudes. And with her public, who seem to hang off the actress’s every syllable. But of course, the author concedes of Mrs Patrick Campbell, you cannot but say she is beautiful. You have to accept her beauty for what it is. (It is up to the reader to think whether this is damning with faint praise or merely damning, the praise proving, at root, illusory.)
What this book is not, for someone eventually so connected with the theatre, a great collection of theatrical anecdotage. The author was not a great person in the world of the stage, not when she was very young. All she is, one finds, is someone who went out often, who saw an awful lot, and who thought enough about it to compose a letter or two on the subject. (One makes exceptions for the recollections she has of her son John’s starring performances, at the tail end of the book, as the author herself reaches extreme old age. They are rather carefully weighted and implicitly very moving.)
What value has a work like this? As social history, of course, it cannot really be bettered. How often do we read the newspaper reviews of the stage of that period, the kind written by Mr Leland in Citizen Kane? Almost never. This book is more than that. It’s a real person, talking to other real people, about what they all really did and thought. It reopens controversies and shows that in the past as in the present, which is popular is not universally so. And it conjures, for those not present, the sometimes languid, sometimes desperate search for entertainment that we in our oversaturated age cannot completely understand.
It is the quest in David Copperfield for a party, already well-feasted and thoroughly drunk, to career roaringly out of the protagonist’s chambers and to go to the theatre. The bid to escape boredom, to know what other people were seeing and talking about, the need to see what was going on. It will make faint bells ring for anyone who has sat on a university sofa, very heavily, with an out of it friend who asks in a moment of lucidity, hazily approached, ‘What’s happening tonight?’
And it is a world gone. A world in the author’s case of dresses and gossip about those on stage, and wondering if this or that happening playwright like Shaw really had the greatness which history did, quite briefly, confer upon him. All that was still to come, long after the majority of those little letters that make up this book found their place in trunks, chests and rarely-opened drawers – by chance to be unearthed years later, and read again.