Marie Tempest

High point: The Tyranny of Tears

Although Haddon Chambers’ next full-length play,The Tyranny of Tears of 1899, was substantially his most successful and critically applauded play, re-staged over several decades, it presents us today with some real difficulty. At the heart of it is the relentless patronising of his wife by the leading man. As Elizabeth Schafer puts it:

The Tyranny of Tears featured a married couple renegotiating their marriage as the wife is pressured into behaving more acceptably. Initially she exerts ‘tyranny’ by crying prettily and using emotional blackmail to alienate her husband from his friends and keep his focus relentlessly on her, to the detriment of his writing … I would want to ask, more stringently than the play allows, what precisely would make a woman employ such ‘tyranny’ in the first place?

My own assumption is that the Hampstead writer-husband, Clement Parbury, is substantially based on Chambers himself. Indeed, it may be that this tightly composed domestic comedy is based on his own marriage, the wife Mabel on his own wife. While her manipulative tears might indeed drive a man to distraction, it never seems to occur to Parbury that he might be part of the problem. Being constantly positioned by him as an inferior being, a ‘dear little woman’, might well promote in a wife feelings of anger, even revenge. His self-perception (always being, by right, in the right) would be irksome, to say the least. Any modern staging would be bound to re-balance the roles—as happens so often with contemporary productions of, for example, The Taming of the Shrew.

One wonders whether Chambers’ relationship with such a powerful woman as Melba—so much more direct and self-confident than the Mabel character—might not have sharpened his sense of the problems in his own marriage. Another side of Chambers is embodied in a second male character, George Dunning, the unmarried outsider who disturbs the ‘harmony’ of the marriage. Mabel Parbury says to him that she thinks his alarming influence over her husband is ‘the ridicule of the untamed for the tamed.’ ‘Say of the disreputable for the respectable,’ responds Gunning.

Mary Moore photographed in 1886 by Barraud, London

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

1899 photograph of Charles Wyndham by Langfier, London & Glasgow

National Portrait Gallery, London

Scene from The Tyranny of Tears, Criterion Theatre, London, 1899

llustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 15 April 1899

Ethel Irving & Robert Loraine in the 1914 revival of The Tyranny of Tears, Comedy Theatre, London; photograph by Foulsham & Banfield, London, published by Rotary Photo

Private collection

The Tyranny of Tears opened at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus on 6 April 1899, presented by Charles Wyndham’s company, with Wyndham as the husband and his wife, the ‘adored’ Mary Moore, as Mrs Parbury. ‘I did not expect that he would ever take this keen interest in ordinary human character,’ wrote Max Beerbohm in The Saturday Review, ‘nor that he would ever write dialogues so pointed and witty.’ It ran for 115 performances and Chambers drew a ten per cent royalty from the play, which gave him £160 a week, equivalent to around $A30,000 a week in current money, supplemented by the royalties he was earning from the revival under Beerbohm Tree of Captain Swift, running at the same time at Her Majesty’s in London. Tyranny was revived in January 1902 at Wyndham’s and in February 1914 at the Comedy (52 performances).

Chambers’ friend Charles Frohman presented The Tyranny of Tears in New York in September at the Empire. It became a star vehicle for John Drew as Parbury. Drew was to become a ‘close pal’ of Chambers. In Australia it was toured by Robert Brough’s company in 1900 (and later 1902) with Mr and Mrs Brough in leading roles, first opening at the Theatre Royal in Sydney on 12 May. After Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, the company went on to Calcutta.

Robert Brough by Falk/H. Walter Barnett

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia, Falk 13/6

The Tyranny of Tears in New York with John Drew as Parbury, 1899; photograph by Eddowes Bros., New York

New York Public Library

Tyrannywas followed in 1901 by The Awakening, which did well and aroused much comment. A guru of turn-of-the-century theatre (and first translator of Ibsen), William Archer, paraphrased it as follows in Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship of 1912:

[It] turned on a sudden conversion—the ‘awakening’, in fact, referred to in the title. A professional lady-killer [Jim Trower], a noted Don Juan, has been idly making love to a country maiden, whose heart is full of innocent idealisms. She discovers his true character, or, at any rate, his reputation and is horror-stricken, while practically at the same moment, he ‘awakens’ to the error of his ways, and is seized with a passion for her as single minded and idealistic as hers for him. But how are the audience to be assured of the fact?

The Awakening seems to me to be the most autobiographical of all Chambers’ work, and the ambivalence that Archer senses in the ‘lady-killer’ may well reflect ambivalence in the playwright himself. In a letter to a friend Chambers admits that he was ‘weak enough to be persuaded into making [an] alteration’, going on to say that ‘when the play is done in America it will be exactly as written, as the balance was disturbed by a regretted attempt to whitewash Jim Trower.’

Initially postponed following the death of Queen Victoria, it opened at the St James’s Theatre in London on 6 February 1901 (running for 59 performances) with George Alexander as the philanderer James St John Trower, A.E. Matthews as Cecil Bird, H.B. Irving as Lord Reginald Dugdale and Fay Davis as the ‘country maiden’ Olive Lawrence. ‘He uses his innate sense of the theatre, not for striking out unscrupulously theatrical effects, but for creating effects of real life across footlights,’ wrote Max Beerbohm in The Saturday Review. The following month Chambers directed H.V. Esmond’s The Wilderness at the same theatre. Although Frohman purchased the American rights for The Awakening, I have yet to discover any performance there. It was given a decade later by an amateur company at the Palace Theatre in Sydney (December 1912).

Acts 1 & 4 set for The Awakening, showing Trower’s rooms in London, designed by W. Hann

JCW Scene Books, Theatre Heritage Australia, Book 02-0022

Act 3 set for The Awakening, showing Olive's cottage, designed by W. Telbin

JCW Scene Books, Theatre Heritage Australia, Book 02-0024

In the early years of the new century, Haddon Chambers followed up the success of The Tyranny of Tears and The Awakening (1901) with a series of adaptations from European originals—A Modern Magdalen (1902), The Younger Mrs Parling (1904), The Thief (1907), Suzanne (1910) and Tante (1913). Did he turn to adaptation because he felt his own creative powers waning?

Chambers’ next three productions all had their premières in New York. A Modern Magdalen was refashioned by Chambers from a Danish play, Familie Jensen by Edgar Hoyen. Here Chambers returns to an earlier theme—the woman with a past and her subsequent rejection by society. It opened in New York in March 1902 at the Bijou Theatre with Amelia Bingham in the lead role, playing for 73 performances.

An apparently different play, specifically written (it was claimed by George Musgrove) by Haddon Chambers for the Australian musical comedy star Nellie Stewart, called Dolores, made its première at the Theatre Royal in Sydney in July 1903. Not lasting long there, it was toured throughout Australia. In reality, Dolores was A Modern Magdalen.Clearly, Nellie Stewart was not enamoured of Mr Chambers, complaining in her memoirs that an agreement was made with the playwright for a series of new plays for Nellie, none of which was forthcoming. She described him as a ‘casual Australian’. Perhaps Haddon was not amused. Around the same time, there were reports that A Modern Magdalenhad been translated into French for the great actress Sarah Bernhardt, but this does not seem to have come to anything. A Modern Magdalenwas made into a movie in Hollywood in 1915 starring Lionel Barrymore and Cathrine Countiss.

Photo of Nellie Stewart by May Moore, Sydney, 1930

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Lionel Barrymore & Cathrine Countiss in the movie The Modern Magdalen, 1915

The Moving Picture World, 13 February 1913

His next adaptation, The Younger Mrs Parling opened at the Park Theater in Boston in November 1903 with Annie Russell in the lead role, and then ran for 36 performances at the Garrick in New York. It was from Le Détour by Henri Bernstein, and again took up the cause of the ‘fallen woman’—‘a mixture of Ibsen and Dumas fils,’ said the New York Times. Mauled by the American critics, it never reached the stage in London.

The Thief was adapted by Chambers, again from the French of Henri Bernstein, and opened in September 1907 again at the Lyceum in New York (a major hit, running for 281 performances), with the English actor, Kyrle Bellew, as Richard Voysin and Margaret Illington as his wife. Bellew had toured Australia twice with the radiant Mrs Brown Potter in the 1890s and had prospected (and acted) on the goldfields of Victoria twenty years earlier.

Margaret Illington & Kyrle Bellew in The Thief,Lyceum, New York

The Theatre, October 1907

Ethel Barrymore & Henry Edwards in Tante, Empire Theatre, New York

The Theatre, December 1913

The version of The Thief which ran at the St James’s Theatre in London (opening 12 November 1907 with George Alexander and Irene Vanbrugh) was by Cosmo Gordon Lennox. Haddon Chambers’ adaptation was not performed in England until June 1927, when it was given by the repertory company at the Playhouse in Broadstairs, Kent.

Chambers adapted Suzanne from a Belgian comedy, Le Mariage de Mademoiselle Beulemans, by Frantz Fonson and Ferdinand Wicheler. It was produced at the Lyceum in New York by Charles Frohman, opening in December 1910, with Billie Burke (Suzanne), Julian L’Estrange and George W. Anson in leading roles. It ran for 64 performances.

The last of these adaptations, Tante, was from a best-selling novel by Anne Douglas Sedgwick. Another Frohman production, it was tried out at the Apollo in Atlantic City in October 1913 before opening at the Empire in New York, where it ran for 79 performances with Ethel Barrymore in the lead role of the artist, Madame Okraska. The New York Times described it as a work of ‘exceptional adroitness’ with ‘splendid characterisation’. It opened at the Haymarket in London as The Impossible Womanin September 1914 with Lillah McCarthy (running for 89 performances) and under that title was made into a British film with Constance Collier in 1919.

Breaking with Melba

It seems that Haddon Chambers’ relationship with Nellie Melba came to a halt at some time during the period around 1906-08. Some saw it as an abrupt break. In his memoirs, Henry Russell says: ‘For reasons that I never understood and which he never explained, he suddenly ceased to be persona grata to her.’ He goes on to speculate that Haddon ‘found her a trifle too exigent from time to time’, seeming to imply that he dropped her, which I doubt. Exigent had been a word he had used in The Tyranny of Tears to describe the manipulative wife. ‘His infatuation lasted longer than hers, and she had a lot of trouble in getting rid of him,’ wrote Melba’s early biographer, Percy Colson.

One possibility is that the breach stemmed from difficulties surrounding the royalties committed to Chambers by Melba from her early recordings (one shilling per record sold in America). Melba’s first recordings, made at her home in Great Cumberland Place in March and April of 1904, came after long periods of separation from Haddon and this may be a second issue. He was at the carriage door at Euston Station as she left in July 1902 for her first tour of Australia after sixteen years in Europe and she toured frequently in the succeeding years.

A third possible contributing factor is that Haddon’s estranged wife, Marie, died in November 1904, so ironically he was at last legally free. And, of course, his reputed philandering ways may have had something to do with the breakdown. Ann Blainey suggests that Melba’s affections switched to the Australian flautist, John Lemmoné. In March 1904 Haddon copied out in his own hand a triolet (eight-line verse) that rehearses whimsically the heroic absences of men and the inconstancy of women:

‘Glory calls me – I must go!’

   Said the lover to his lady:

Noble words were those, I trow.

   ‘Glory calls me – I must go.’

Back he came: another beau

   Toying with her tresses shady:

‘Glory calls me – I must go!’

   Said the lover to his lady.

In fact, the verse was not by Chambers, but had been first published in the 24 November 1883 issue of The Bulletin in Sydney as the work of VJD (Irish-Australian poet, Victor Daley). Clearly, it had some enduring meaning for Haddon.

‘Glory calls me …’ by Victor Daley, written out by Haddon Chambers, September 1904

Courtesy the author

Nellie Melba, photographed by H. Walter Barnett, London, 1903

National Portrait Gallery, London

Sadly, Haddon Chambers is not mentioned either in the first biography of the diva (Melba: A Biographyof 1909 by Agnes G Murphy), which was virtually dictated to the writer by Melba, or in her ‘official’ autobiography, Melodies and Memoriesof 1925, which was ghost-written by Beverley Nichols.

Between 1903 and 1906 Haddon wrote two original new plays, The Golden Silence and Sir Anthony, neither of them enjoying any great success. A third, The Head of the Family, seemingly not produced, perhaps unfinished, was written in partnership with the American, Paul Kester, who had a major hit on his hands at that time in England, America and Australia, Sweet Nell of Old Drury.

The Golden Silence opened at the Garrick Theatre in London on 22 September 1903, running for 78 performances. The lead roles were taken by Violet Vanbrugh (Countess of Arlington) and Arthur Bourchier (Augustus Mapes), who also directed. At the première, Bourchier had a cool reception from the audience and at the close Haddon Chambers came forward, bowed, and was received with a chorus of groans.

Sir Anthony, opened at the Savoy Theatre in New York on 19 November 1906, produced this time not by Frohman, but by Liebler & Co. It ran for only 16 performances, transferring to the Park Theatre in Boston. It opened successfully in London at Wyndham’s Theatre two years later (28 November 1908, 48 performances), and Max Beerbohm commented on ‘the extreme fidelity with which Mr Chambers has painted the class of people who are his theme … the lower-middle and middle-middle classes’. Perhaps Chambers’ satirising of British snobbery found a more ready response in London than it had in New York. Among the London cast were Weedon Grossmith and Nina Boucicault, and the Wyndham’s staging was co-produced by Frank Curzon and Chambers’ long-time associate in New York, Charles Frohman.

Another Chambers project from 1905-06 that seems not to have reached the stage was a musical comedy, Mr Flame, created with the composer Bernard Rolt. Young and handsome, Rolt was primarily a composer of drawing-room ballads. He had become a close friend of Nellie and Haddon Chambers. The three of them had vacationed together with others in Italy in July 1904—first at a house party at Henry Russell’s villa at Stresa on Lake Maggiore, moving on to Venice, where Melba studied Madama Butterfly with Puccini, a role she never sang. In 1906, Haddon was living in ‘my new little house in Waverton Street’ in Mayfair.

Bernard Rolt’s ‘Valse Melba’, published by Chappell & Co. Ltd, London, c.1908

 Yarra Ranges Regional Museum, Lilydale

Haddon Chambers by Max Beerbohm, 1907

A Book of Caricatures by Max Beerbohm, Methuen & Co., London, 1907

On 19 September 1908 Haddon Chambers participated in a ‘copyright’ performance of a new American operetta by Victor Herbert and Henry Blossom, The Prima Donna.Haddon read the lead male role. This happened at the Knickerbocker Theater in New York on 30 November with Fritzi Scheff as the prima donna.

In 1910 Chambers was reportedly writing another musical comedy, The Best Girl, with music by John L. Golden, but this too does not seem to have come to anything.

Late works

Two of his last three plays, written immediately before and during the First World War, were admired and also successful at the box office.

Cast list for Passers-Byat Wyndham’s Theatre, London, 1911

Private collection

Nina Sevening & Gerald du Maurier in Passers-Byat Wyndham Theatre, London, 1911; photograph by Daily Mirror, published by Beagles’ Postcards

Elisabeth Kumm collection

The basic idea for Passers-By of 1911 came to Chambers when he and a friend, the Gaiety actor, Paul Arthur, were walking home on a foggy night from the theatre in London. Chambers collided with a tramp, who apologised gracefully, so Chambers invited him home for supper. Dedicated to his own daughter, Margery, the play opened, well received, at Wyndham’s Theatre on 29 March with Irene Vanbrugh and Gerald du Maurier in the lead roles. It was to be one of the most successful new plays of the season with 163 performances.

Gerald du Maurier by Spy for Vanity Fair, published 25 December 1907

National Portrait Gallery, London

Irene Vanbrugh as Marise Chelford in Cosmo Gordon Lennox’s version of The Thief, St James’s Theatre, London, 1907; photo by Ellis & Walery, London, published by Beagles’ Postcards

Elisabeth Kumm collection

When a young gentleman of leisure, Peter Waverton, invites a tramp, Samuel Burns, out of the fog into his Piccadilly apartment for supper, his butler, Pine, complains at the upsetting of social hierarchy. Also out of the fog comes a distressed young mother, Margaret, the father of whose child, unbeknown to him, is Waverton.  Haddon Chambers’ proto-feminist attitudes can be gauged from the unmarried mother, Margaret: ‘You needn’t be embarrassed for me, Peter. I’m not ashamed and I’ve no remorse. He’s my child. I’ve won him and he’s mine only.’

Irene Vanbrugh wrote in her memoirs: ‘I was to be Gerald du Maurier’s leading lady, an experience I had always wanted. This was in Passers-By by Haddon Chambers, a play with true sentiment, and Gerald’s special, very flexible, sensitive approach to his art delighted me … and kept the scenes between us alive.’ The theatre critic of The Times had a different view on the proceedings: ‘Mr Peter Waverton is not a real person, but the “sympathetic” personage in a sentimental play.’

Passers-By opened on 14 September 1911 at the Criterion in New York, produced by Frohman, running for 124 performances. ‘Richard Bennett need not fear comparison with Gerald du Maurier,’ wrote the New York Times critic, ‘he has the variety, charm, naturalness, ease.’ It was twice made into silent movies in Hollywood (in 1916 and 1920), the earlier version with Chambers’ close friend, Charles Cherry. Cherry was also in the American stage productions of Tanteand The Great Pursuit.

The rights for Australasia having been signed by J.C. Williamson, Passers-Bytoured extensively there from January to September 1912. The production opened at the Theatre Royal in Melbourne with Hilda Spong as Margaret. Spong had previously appeared in Haddon Chambers’ The Fatal Cardin Sydney seventeen years earlier in 1895. This was her first return to the Antipodes since that time, having established her reputation as a fine actor in Britain and America.

After Melbourne, the Passers-Bycompany went to New Zealand (Auckland, Wanganui, New Plymouth, Christchurch, Dunedin, Wellington), returning to His Majesty’s in Brisbane, the Theatre Royal in Adelaide, the Town Hall in Kalgoorlie, His Majesty’s in Perth, the Princess in Bendigo, Her Majesty’s in Ballarat and finally the Theatre Royal in Sydney. In Melbourne and Sydney, Waverton was played by Harcourt Beatty, but on tour the part was taken by the American William Desmond.

Advertisement for J. Stuart Blackton’s 1920 movie of Passers-By

Motion Picture News, 19 June 1920

W. Graham Browne & Marie Tempest, 1911; photograph by Foulsham & Banfield, London, published by Rotary Photo

Elisabeth Kumm collection

Less successful, The Great Pursuit of 1916 was put on at the Shubert Theatre in New York as a vehicle for the English actor, W. Graham Browne, with his starrier wife Marie Tempest taking a small role. It ran for 29 performances.

Charles Hawtrey; photograph by Bassano, 1914

National Portrait Gallery, London

Cover of The Play Pictorial, no. 188, 1917, featuring Charles Hawtrey in The Saving Grace

Elisabeth Kumm collection

Cast of The Saving Grace at the Garrick Theatre, London, 1917

Private collection

A young Noel Coward, 1912

Present Indicative by Noel Coward, Heinemann, London, 1937

Haddon Chambers’ last finished play, The Saving Grace of 1917, was a hit in London, running for 200 performances at the Garrick Theatre with Sir Charles Hawtrey in the lead role and the young Noel Coward as the juvenile lead (his first ‘grown-up part’). Haddon was at this time living (with valet Hogg) at 4 Aldford Street, off Park Lane, Mayfair—‘tiny but charmingly furnished … every room differently and delightfully decorated,’ according to John D. Williams. In New York (at the Empire again), The Saving Gracewas played to ecstatic reviews (‘amazing subtlety and distinction’) by the English actor, Cyril Maude. Chambers himself directed and the play ran on Broadway for 96 performances.

It was brought to Sydney by Robert Courtneidge’s company, opening at the Tivoli in October 1920. Brisbane followed, where on 21 November, according to the Northern Herald: ‘A serious panic at His Majesty’s Theatre was narrowly averted … when about 150 university students raided the building and startled the audience … Many people thought there was a fire.’

The central figure is Blinn Corbett, a penniless English army officer, who has run off with his commanding officer’s wife. Written past the mid-point of the war, millions of casualties having been sustained, but set at its outbreak, it seems astonishing that the enthusiasm to join up was still uppermost in men’s thinking. Nevertheless, The Saving Grace is tautly plotted with crackling, witty dialogue. ‘Haddon Chambers’ best,’ said the New York Times of its American première. Reviewing his long career, the piece continued:

He has to his credit one of the small number of perfect comedies of manners in the language. The Tyranny of Tears, and a character romance of distinguished charm, Passers-By. The present play blends the acute actuality of the one with the kindly feeling of the other.

And assessing the whole Haddon Chambers oevre, Michael R. Booth (in his English Plays of the Nineteenth Century) wrote:

From the French they [English dramatists] absorbed the planned management of plot structure, the elimination of irrelevant material, and the careful subordination of means to ends. In Pinero and Jones French skills are generally applied to plays with many characters, a substantial plot, and an elaborate social setting. The Tyranny of Tears [and The Saving Grace] goes further: the characters are remarkably few in number; the plot is slight; and the setting is many miles, both literally and figuratively, from Mayfair.

In his memoirs-article of 13 October 1918, ‘Thirty Years of Playwriting’, the fifty-six-year-old playwright described his sadness at losing over recent times so many of his closest friends, naming particularly Charles Frohman (who had drowned in the sinking of the Lusitaniaby a German submarine in May 1915), Herbert Beerbohm Tree (in 1917) and George Alexander (in 1918). He also mentioned in passing ‘certain war activities that I had been engaged upon.’ What these were remains unclear.

If Nellie Melba had been Haddon Chambers’ closest woman friend, his closest male intimate in New York and London over a quarter of a century had been Charles Frohman. Around 1900 Chambers introduced Frohman to Marlow, which the producer fell in love with, regularly staying at the Compleat Angler inn by the river. Following the sinking of the Lusitaniain May 1915 in which Frohman was one of the 1,198 who died, Haddon said to the New York Times:

Up and down [the High Street] Mr Frohman used to love to walk, dodging in and out of the stores, where he would purchase unconsidered trifles as an excuse for chatting with the shopkeepers.

Chambers made the journey to the port of Queenstown (now Cobh) in County Cork, Ireland, in order to identify and retrieve the body, writing to his sister Agnes in Sydney:

I went over to Queenstown with Lestocq, his London manager, to get Frohman’s body. We crossed the Irish Channel at night with all lights out on account of the German submarines … It was the saddest quest I was ever upon … We bore him to Liverpool and sent him to New York … Just before the ship went down he said to a girl friend of mine, who was fortunately saved, that ‘after all, death was only a beautiful adventure.’

Last photograph of Charles Frohman, taken on board the Lusitania, 1915

New York Public Library

Pepita Bobadilla, photographed by Bassano, 1917

Elisabeth Kumm collection

Pepita

The Saving Grace is dedicated to his new love, Pepita. On 29 October 1920 he married the musical comedy star, Pepita Bobadilla. Haddon was 59, she 28. Although she was advertised as having been born in Ecuador, her real name was Nelly Louise Burton, born in Hamburg, the illegitimate daughter of an English mother and a German officer father.

Haddon’s health declined and she took care of him until his death, apparently from stroke and heart disease, at 61 in London on 28 March 1921. There was a funeral service at St George’s Hanover Square in London—among the congregation Sir Arthur Pinero, Charles Hawtrey, Lady Wyndham and Lady Tree. He was buried at Marlow, where he had had some of his happiest times with another Nellie and with Charles Frohman.

There is no evidence that he ever embraced the ministry of his Baptist parents or of the ‘Prince of Preachers’, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, after whom he had been named. The British playwright-actor Seymour Hicks (performing in Melbourne in 1924) discussed the death of Haddon Chambers with Melba at her house, Coombe Cottage at Coldstream:

For a fellow countryman of hers, Haddon Chambers, she had the greatest admiration as an author, and was very fond of him as a man … Long after I had finished telling her all I could about her mutual friend, she sat silent, looking through the rose-covered pergolas of her lovely garden out into the bluest of blue Australian skies.

Pepita had his final play, unfinished at his death, completed in 1922, acting in it herself at the Savoy Theatre in London. He had written The Card Players for her, but it was not a success. It opened on 26 April, running for 29 performances with Pepita (as Eileen Ashfield), produced by Dot Boucicault. The following year, she was to marry Sidney Reilly, the celebrated ‘Ace of Spies’—on his part bigamously (or even trigamously).

Haddon had died intestate, effectively leaving everything to Pepita, although how much remained is unclear. In his biography of Reilly, Richard B Spence asserts that she inherited ‘an income of at least £2,000 a year’. This may have been true initially, but if it was based on ticket and book royalties, that amount would have declined rather precipitously as the years went by. Without any substantial supporting evidence, Spence also speculates that Pepita may have met Reilly earlier than she disclosed and that there may have been foul play involved in the sudden death of Haddon Chambers.

Haddon’s friend, the American theatre director John D. Williams, in an appreciation of Chambers’ life in Century Magazine (December 1921), wrote that Haddon

… publicly entertained two generations and privately fascinated hundreds of men and women of two worlds. He was irresistible as a companion, the chairman of the committee on fun, wherever he was, a fascinating magician in epigrams … a citizen of the world, at home wherever he found himself, but especially at his best as the play-boy of England and America.

The younger writer Somerset Maugham wrote a less glamorous, somewhat bitchy remembrance in his A Writer’s Notebook following Haddon Chambers’ death:

At the first glance he looked a youngish man, but presently you saw that in reality he was old, old … He had the reputation of a Don Juan, and this he valued much more than any that his plays had brought him … The only art in which he seemed at all interested was music … It exasperated him to have his best play, The Tyranny of Tears, ascribed to Oscar Wilde … I see him lounging at a bar, a dapper little man, chatting good-humouredly with a casual acquaintance of women, horses and Covent Garden opera, but with an air as though he were looking for someone who might at any moment come in at that door.

Why have Haddon Chambers’ plays not (thus far) survived in performance, particularly in his home country? I think there are a number of reasons. Even in his own lifetime, his work was more successful in Britain and America than in Australia. Australian audiences have in modern times found it hard to take English high-society plays—though it must be said that Robert Brough ‘the greatest actor-manager Australia had known’, had made a career of just this in the late nineteenth century, introducing Australian audiences to Pinero, Oscar Wilde, J.M. Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome … and Haddon Chambers. Although he often talked about it, he never returned to Australia. This is a poor long-term career move if an artist wishes to be remembered there.

It is clear that, with the exception of Wilde and Shaw, late Victorian and Edwardian plays were finally swept from British stages with the arrival of ‘kitchen sink’ in the 1950s. It took several decades before managements would risk them again. Gradually there has been a return, with actors and directors finding ways to make these plays speak to us now, prominent amongst them Pinero’s Trelawny of the ‘Wells’and The Second Mrs Tanqueray, and Harley Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance and The Madras House.

It remains ironic that, while eight of Haddon Chambers’ plays are now in print (2021),¹ his work remains unexplored and unperformed. What of the remainder of the scripts? Most, if not all, reside in typescript form in the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship archive at the British Library.

1. C. Haddon Chambers plays in print (2021): The Open Gate, Captain Swift, The Idler, The Tyranny of Tears, The Awakening, Sir Anthony, Passers-By, The Saving Grace

Appendix: Plays by C. Haddon Chambers

One of Them 1886 (one act); The Open Gate 1887 (one act); Captain Swift 1888; Devil Caresfoot1889 (adapted from Rider Haggard’s Dawn); The Idler 1890; Love and War 1891 (adapted from the French); The Honourable Herbert 1891; The Collaborators1892; The Queen of Manoa 1892 (with WO Tristram); The Old Lady 1892; The Pipe of Peace 1892; The Fatal Card (with RC Stephenson) 1894; John-a-Dreams 1894; Boys Together (with J Comyns Carr) 1896; In the Days of the Duke (with J Comyns Carr) 1897; The Tyranny of Tears 1899; Blue Roses 1901 (staged privately); The Awakening 1902 (adapted from the French); The Golden Silence 1903; The Head of the Family (with Paul Kester) 1903 (incomplete? not staged); A Modern Magdalen (adaptation) / Dolores 1902; The Younger Mrs Parling 1903; Sir Anthony 1906; The Thief 1907 (adapted from the French of Henri Bernstein); Suzanne 1910; The Best Girl 1910 (musical comedy with music by John L Golden) (incomplete? not staged); Passers-By 1911; Tante1913 (adapted from novel by Anne Douglas Sedgwick) / The Impossible Woman; The Great Pursuit 1916 (revision of The Idler?); The Saving Grace 1917; The Card Players 1922

References

Stephen Alomes, When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999

Ann Blainey, I am Melba: A biography, Black Inc., Melbourne, 2008

Elleke Boehmer (ed), Empire Writing: An Anthology of Colonial Literature 1870-1918, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998

Michael R. Booth (ed), English Plays of the Nineteenth Century: III Comedies, Oxford University Press, London, 1973

Katharine Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History,Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

Robin Bruce Lockhart, Reilly: Ace of Spies,Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1967

Kate Carew, ‘Charles Frohman opens his heart at Kate Carew’s private confessional’, New York Tribune, 25 August 1912

C. Haddon Chambers, ‘The American Producer who Lived at Marlow’, New York Times, 17 October 1915

C. Haddon Chambers, ‘Thirty Years of Playwriting’, New York Times, 13 October 1918

Percy Colson, Melba: An Unconventional Biography, Grayson & Grayson, London, 1932

Noel Coward, Present Indicative, William Heinemann, London & Toronto, 1937

Maisie Dubosarsky, ‘”Interesting, and unlike other people”: 19th-century popular Australian writers Haddon Chambers and Rosa Praed abroad’, BA honours thesis, University of Sydney, 2009

Sarah Engledow, ‘Suave’, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2010

John Hetherington, Melba: A Biography,Faber and Faber, London, 1967

Seymour Hicks, Night Lights: Two Men Talk of Love and Ladies, Cassell, London, 1938

Eric Irwin, Dictionary of Australian Theatre 1788-1914, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985

Isaac F. Marcosson and Daniel Frohman, Charles Frohman: Manager and Man,John Lane / The Bodley Head, 1915

W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook,Heinemann, London, 1949

Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories,Thornton Butterworth, London, 1925

Moran, William R (ed), Nellie Melba: A Contemporary Review, Greenwood, Westport CT, 1985

Agnes G. Murphy, Melba: A Biography,Doubleday Page, New York, 1909

Roger Neill, Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2000

Roger Neill, ‘Bertram Mackennal, patronage and the performing arts’, Bertram Mackennal, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007

Roger Neill, ‘Melba: Melba’s First Recordings’, Historic Masters, London, 2008  

Hesketh Pearson, Beerbohm Tree: His Life and Laughter, Methuen, London, 1956

Margot Peters, Mrs Pat: The Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell,Hamish Hamilton, London, 1984

Leslie Rees, The Making of Australian Drama: A Historical and Critical Survey from the 1830s to the 1970s,Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1973

George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre: A Survey, Oxford University Press, London, 1956

Russell, Henry, The Passing Show,Thornton Butterworth, London, 1926

Elizabeth Schafer, ‘A tale of two Australians: Haddon Chambers, Gilbert Murray and the imperial London stage’ in Playing Australia: Australian theatre and the international stage (Vol 9 Australian playwights),Rodopi, Amsterdam-New York, 2003

Richard B. Spence, Trust No One: The Secret World of Sidney Reilly,Feral House, Los Angeles, 2002

Nellie Stewart, My Life’s Story, John Sands, Sydney, 1923

J.C. Trewin, The Edwardian Theatre,Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1976

Irene Vanbrugh, To Tell My Story, Hutchinson, London, 1948

Pamela Vestey, Melba: A Family Memoir, Phoebe, Melbourne, 1996

J.P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1890-1899, 1900-1909, 1910-1919, Rowman & Littlefield, Maryland, 2014

Peter Whitebrook, William Archer: A Biography, Methuen, London, 1993

John D. Williams, ‘A Play-Boy of Two Worlds’, Century Magazine, New York, December 1921

A.E. Wilson, Edwardian Theatre, Arthur Barker, London, 1951 

Acknowledgments

With grateful thanks for help of all kinds:

Elisabeth Kumm of Theatre Heritage Australia; Pamela Botha, Melbourne; Christine Chambers, great-niece of Haddon Chambers, Little River, California; Maisie Dubosarsky Fieschi, Paris; Christine Egan, Fort Street School Archives, Petersham; Kathryn Johnson, the British Library; Tony Locantro, Barking; John Wilson, Cheltenham; Sophie Wilson, King’s Sutton; Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant, Sydney; Theatre Museum, University of Bristol

© Roger Neill 2021

This is an expanded, revised text, now with illustrations, of an essay originally published in Quadrant magazine, July-August 2008 (with kind permission), https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2008/07-08/haddon-chambers-and-the-long-arm-of-neglect/

Bertram mackennal was fascinated by the theatre and theatricals throughout his working life. Australia’s first world-class sculptor was born at Fitzroy, Melbourne in 1863, son of Scottish immigrant parents, his father John Simpson Mackennal becoming an established archtectural sculptor in Australia in the 1860s/70s, and Bertram’s first teacher in his studio.

In 1878 he started studies at the School of Design of the National Gallery of Victoria, where fellow students included another sculptor, Charles Douglas Richardson and artists Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Rupert Bunny, and in 1881-82 Mackennal, Richardson and Roberts left Melbourne for London.

Bertram Mackennal, 1924. Photo by Walter Stoneman.

National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Lyric Muse, 1888, by Bertram Mackennal

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

To London and Paris

There the three young men shared a studio and Bertram met several of Britain’s leading sculptors, including Hamo Thorneycroft and Alfred Gilbert, plus members of the emerging group of New Sculptors, including Harry Bates and George Frampton. Australian artists with whom Mackennal socialised in London (and later Paris) included Roberts, Bunny, John Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and ‘Anglo-Australians’ Phil May and Charles Conder.

In 1883 Mackennal studied at the British Museum and started at the Royal Academy schools. His first known work was of his friend and fellow sculptor, Charles Douglas Richardson. During the following five years he left London for Paris, where, probably in 1888, he met and worked in the studio of Auguste Rodin, introduced by the Australian impressionist John Peter Russell.

In 1884 he married Agnes Spooner and the following year their daughter Henrietta was born. In England in 1888 he produced the first of a long line of theatrically-related works, a delightful bronze head of Euterpe, The Lyric Muse. Appropriately she is the muse of poetry and music, joy and pleasure, and is often represented, crowned with flowers, holding an instrument, in this case a lyre.

Head of a Woman [Mary Anderson], 1888, by Bertram Mackennal

Private collection

Mary Anderson as Galatea in Pygmalion and Galatea, 1884. Photo by Henry Van der Weyde, London.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Also in 1888, Mackennal, twenty-five years old, sculpted busts of two great American actresses who were appearing in seasons in London. First came Mary Anderson (1859-1940), who played both Hermione and Perdita in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Talefor 166 nights at the Lyceum Theatre—by far the longest run of that play, before or since. She was a major celebrity. The Morning Post earlier described her appearance in glowing terms:

Miss Anderson’s beauty is of a Grecian type, with a head of classic contour, finely chiseled features, and a tall statuesque figure, whose Hellenic expression a graceful costume of antique design sets off to best advantage.

Mackennal’s portrait, executed twice,¹ echoes this description, the head confidently modelled. Born at Sacramento, California, as a child Mary Anderson was inspired by Edwin Booth’s Richard III, and her first role was Juliet. She continued with Shakespeare in London, where she became a great favourite. At the time of the sitting for Mackennal, he was working as a designer for the Coalport china company in Shropshire, from where he would visit friends – and work—in London from time to time.

Marble bust of Genevieve Ward, attributed to American sculptor Joel Tanner Hart (1810-1877)

Royal Shakespeare Company collection

Genevieve Ward in Forget-Me-Not, c.1880

From Genevieve Ward: A biographical sketch, Osgood, Boston, 1882

The second great American actress to be sculpted by Mackennal in 1888 was Genevieve Ward(1832-1922), who followed Anderson at the Lyceum in a new play, The Loadstone, specially written for her but unappreciated by the London press.

Born in New York a generation before Anderson, Ward was educated in France and Italy and had career as an opera singer before marrying a Russian aristocrat, Count Guerbel, and switching her attentions to drama. She became famous in England as Lady Macbeth, Volumnia in Coriolanusand Queen Margaret in Richard III.

She toured Australia for Williamson, Garner and Musgrove in 1884-85, opening at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne in Merivale’s comedy Forget-Me-Not, followed by Sydney Grundy’s The Queen’s Favourite, later becoming a celebrated Lady Macbeth.

Finally retiring aged 82, Ward was the first actress to be created DBE. Genevieve Ward’s name appears on the list of Mackennal’s sculptures made by his grandson, Colin Kraay, but its whereabouts is currently unknown.

Return to Melbourne

In 1888, Mackennal and his family returned to Australia so that he could fulfill a commission to execute relief panels for the façade of the Victorian State Parliament.

The fact that Mackennal had made busts of such major theatrical stars as Anderson and Ward may well have given him the credibility to approach others in Melbourne. The sculptor quickly became part of the vibrant artistic and theatrical scene there. In her memoirs, Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta observed:

Life in Melbourne seemed very exciting and my parents met many interesting people. We were living in a colony of artists, writers and theatricals. They told me that there were excellent plays at the Princess Theatre.²

Mackennal rented a small flat and studio on Swanston Street in Melbourne and appears frequently in the letters of the artist Tom Roberts during this time. Arthur Streeton wrote later that while Mackennal was in Australia the sculptor had hosted Bohemian suppers on the last Friday of each month—a young English actress, Janet Achurch, among the guests, as well as Streeton, Conder and Felix Meyer.³

Plaster and terracotta relief of Janet Achurch, c.1890, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Janet Achurch as Nora in A Doll’s House, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

It was while living in Swanston Street that Bertram Mackennal created his portrait of Janet Achurch (1854-1916). She was a well-regarded young English actress from a theatrical family. Her first engagement had been with Genevieve Ward’s company in London and her range extended from the Fairy Queen in pantomime to Lady Macbeth. However, it was in the year prior to the creation of Mackennal’s portrait that Achurch became famous—with the opening of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in London in June 1889.

The actress’s naturalistic portrayal of the proto-feminist Nora created both shock and admiration. Before the opening, Achurch and her husband, the actor Charles Charrington, had signed a two-year contract with the Australian theatrical triumvirate of Williamson, Garner and Musgrove, and it was their future Australian salaries that the couple mortgaged in order to première A Doll’s House in London.

Charrington and Achurch toured Australia and New Zealand from September 1889 to August 1891, becoming closely involved with the artistic communities in both Melbourne and Sydney. Charles Conder met her in Melbourne and according to Table Talk was commissioned to paint her (now untraced, possibly unexecuted) portrait.⁴ The Sydney-based photographer Walter Barnett, another friend of Mackennal, took a number of portrait photographs of her. Arthur Streeton met and became friendly with the actress and her husband—Streeton gave her his painting of Coogee Bay in Sydney. He wrote to Tom Roberts:

... I go and dine at Charringtons, at Woollahra, very often. They are fine people. She is a very artistic woman & all Sydney is running after her now…She is the most earnest professional woman I have ever met.⁵

The reaction of the press in London to this controversial play had filtered quickly to the colonies and the couple and their play already had a contentious reputation when they arrived in Australia. It caused rowdy scenes at the Princess Theatre in Melbourne when it opened on 14 September 1889.⁶

There are three known versions of Mackennal’s portrayal of Janet Achurch.⁷ All are relief portraits. Notable are a number of formal similarities with his later portrait of Sarah Bernhardt. Like the Bernhardt, Mackennal depicted Achurch in profile facing left. The artist’s text and lettering style is similar, inscribed vertically in front of the actress’s face. While the Bernhardt work is executed in low relief, the Achurch portrait is formed and in high relief. There are also differences in the conception of the portraits. Achurch is presented simply as a woman wearing a toga-like garment. Mackennal’s depiction of Bernhardt is more sophisticated, for with her fashionable contemporary dress, symbolic figure and heavy-lidded eyes she is presented as a modern woman.

Mrs Brown Potter, 1901, by Australian artist Theodora Cowan (1868-1949)

Tatler (London), 15 October 1901

Mrs Brown Potter, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

During the same year (1890), Mackennal also made a portrait bust, untraced, of the American actress, Cora Brown Potter (1859-1936), who was also touring Australia for the ‘triumvirate’, with her leading man, Kyrle Bellew (1855-1911). Born in New Orleans to a wealthy family, Mary Cora Urquhart married the New Yorker James Brown Potter in 1877 when she was eighteen. Cora became a leading member of the New York social set, in demand at parties for her beauty and her talent for recitations. In London in the summer of 1886, Mrs Brown Potter met Bellew, an English actor who had previously been a prospector on the Australian goldfields. Leaving her husband, she began a career on the stage with Bellew, a long and successful partnership. Together they undertook extensive world tours and it was while they were in Australia in 1890 that Brown Potter and Bellew met Mackennal.

Although in their dramatic styles the two actresses were quite different—Achurch the modern naturalist, Brown Potter the melodramatic beauty—it is noticeable that in other ways Brown Potter and Achurch had unexpected similarities: their plays and performances were contentious, and both represented the independently-minded ‘New Woman’. Nellie Stewart, a prominent Australian actor-singer of this period, described Brown Potter in her autobiography, My Life’s Story:

Mrs Brown-Potter was very beautiful in her slender and somewhat sinister style, but I don’t suppose that anybody will seriously pretend that she was a great actress.... Her voice, naturally husky… she worked to the point of stridency. She clothed her lithe body in such a way as to give an effect of snakiness. Long before the cinema, she was the first of the vampires.⁸

Table Talk applauded the new Mackennal work: ‘When Mrs Potter’s face is in repose the strength of purpose and determination show more strongly than when the features are softened by a smile, and Mr Mackennal has caught the more lasting expression admirably.’ The same publication later linked Mackennal’s portrait of the American actress to his next commission from a performing artist:

Mrs Brown-Potter’s arrival in Australia found him [Mackennal] an enthusiastic and discerning patron, and the beautiful actress gave him sittings for a bust, into which the young sculptor put some of his best work... After a sojourn in Paris, where Madame Bernhardt was as good as her promise to stand by him, he settled in London, and was invited by Mrs Potter to act as a sort of caretaker-guest for her London home during her absence on her second Australian tour.⁹

Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta recalled this period when her father was a ‘caretaker-guest’:

We arrived in London in early 1894, to stay at the house of the actress Mrs Brown Potter, in Abbey Road, St John’s Wood. It was a strange house, and not really suitable for my father’s work, so from here we had to look for a larger place.¹⁰

It seems likely that this relationship served as a conduit for Mackennal, enabling him to meet and obtain commissions from members of high society and artistic circles when he arrived back in England.

Kyrle Bellew, 1890. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Eugénie Legrand, c.1882. Photo by Albert Naegeli, New York.

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC

In 1891, still in Australia, Kyrle Bellew’s former wife, the French actress Eugénie Legrand, commissioned an untraced bust from Mackennal. Legrand had been married to Bellew, ‘the handsomest man in Melbourne’, in 1874 very briefly—she left him after twelve hours of honeymoon—but long enough apparently to conceive a son. The wedding between the beautiful couple had been celebrated with great ‘éclat’, according to Table Talk.Her acting career in Australia was substantially over by 1891. The sculptor wrote to Legrand on 3 August from the Hotel Metropole in Sydney:

I expect to begin the work in Melbourne next Monday … I told Madame Bernhardt that you had commissioned me to execute your bust in marble and she was very pleased. Madame has been most kind to me giving me her drawing room as a studio and posing three hours at a time. I should like with your permission to exhibit your bust in the salon at the same time as I do the busts of Madame Bernhardt and Mrs. Potter.¹¹

It is significant that in this letter Mackennal groups all three actresses together and quite clearly at this point intends to exhibit the three together at the Paris Salon.

Sarah Bernhardt in her studio with a self portrait bust, c.1878. Photo by Achille Mélandri, Paris.

National Portrait Gallery, London

Sarah Bernhardt, c.1892-93, by Bertram Mackennal

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

The French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was a bigger star than Anderson, Ward, Achurch or Brown Potter. Like those women, Mackennal not only created portraits of the actress but also socialised with Bernhardt and her company. The sculptor attempted at least three representations—a statuette in role as Cleopatra, a relief and a bust, but only the relief was ever exhibited, the statuette and bust being untraced.¹² It was the bust that was executed first, initially in Melbourne and finished up in Europe. It appears in a photograph of Mackennal’s studio in London c.1898. The surviving bronze relief, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1894.

The ‘Divine Sarah’ was the most celebrated actress of her generation, inspiring the leading writers of her generation to write many of her finest plays.  She was a global superstar who always performed in French. Her voice was ‘a golden bell’, her figure slim, her eyes dark. After her debut with the Comédie Francaise in 1862, she conquered London in 1879, New York in 1880, going on to open her own Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt in Paris in 1899. 

Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra, 1891. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Bertram Mackennal’s London studio, with his statue of Circe in the foreground and bust of Bernhardt behind

From The Sketch (London), 29 April 1896

 

She and her company undertook a major tour of Australia in 1891, brought by J.C. Williamson and presenting many of her most famous productions—La Dame aux Camélias,La Tosca,Adriana Lecouvreur,Fedora,Cleopatraand Jeanne d’Arc amongst them. And she gave the world premiere of Pauline Blanchard in Sydney. On a world tour, between May and August, she and her company performed in Honolulu, Samoa, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, before returning via the USA through Auckland. In Australia, she would play six different roles on consecutive nights, always to packed houses. 

When she first arrived in Sydney harbour, the photographer Walter Barnett and wife Ella boarded her ship prior to disembarkation, signing her up exclusively. Learned from his mother in Melbourne, Barnett spoke French. She sat for Barnett in Sydney and Melbourne and later in London—as she did for Bertram Mackennal. Without fluent French at this stage, it is unclear how Mackennal first met her. It may be that they were introduced by Eugénie Legrand.

However, having met, the first we hear of her relationship with him is that she wrote to the Argus objecting to the fact that Mackennal had only been awarded second place in a public competition organised by the National Gallery of Victoria for his sculpture, The Triumph of Truth.

Marie Tempest as Adele in An Artist’s Model, 1895. Photo by Window & Grove, London.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Melba in her garden near Maidenhead with playwright/partner Haddon Chambers (left) and Bertram Mackennal (right). Photo by H. Gude.

Private collection

Back to London

While Mackennal returned to Europe at the urging of Mrs Brown Potter and Sarah Bernhardt, it was not until 1896 that he again produced a portrait of a performing artist. The untraced bust of Marie Tempest (1866-1942) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896, and in a review of this exhibition in The Times the critic commented: ‘Mr Bertram Mackennal’s Miss Marie Tempest is a really excellent work.’¹³

Tempest was born Mary Etherington in London and educated in Belgium before studying music in Paris, then vocal at the Royal College of Music in London. Making her stage debut in 1885, she quickly established herself as a star in musical comedy. A friend of Melba, married three times, she toured Australia and New Zealand in 1917 and 1920 taking with her thirteen productions of comedies now long forgotten, it seems. She was created DBE in 1937.

Marie Tempest and her first husband, Alfred Izard, lived close to the Mackennals in St John’s Wood. Henrietta Mackennal wrote about her visits to their home in her memoirs:

Marie Tempest, I remember also visited us at Marlborough Hill. She was to be the leading comedienne of the English stage … She went horse riding most mornings, and often stopped to visit us, tying her horse up to a lamppost right outside our gate … She was not very beautiful, but a fascinating person, and I remember she had the most beautiful hands. Father did a bust of her, and before it was cast, she gave him a packet of letters from her present lover [Cosmo Gordon-Lennox], whom she later married, she begged him to seal them inside the cast where her heart would be. He carried this out, and one wonders whether they are still there today.

Tempest’s biographer Hector Bolitho names Mackennal as a regular guest at her house during this time.¹⁴ It is possible that it was Melba that introduced Mackennal to Tempest. In June 1900, Mackennal told an Australian friend that, for a long time prior to executing her bust, Nellie Melba had been an enormous support to him.

Referring to his success in London, Mackennal said: ‘I owe it all to Melba. She introduced me to all the big people and I held up their walls for years.’¹⁵ One of the ‘big people’ that Mackennal probably was referring to would have been Tempest. Mackennal’s commissioned bust stood in her house alongside copies she owned of his Salome and his Circe.¹⁶ 

In early 1896 Tempest was the leading lady in a musical comedy intriguingly entitled An Artist’s Model and it was while enjoying this success that Tempest commissioned Mackennal to sculpt her.

Another portrait commission that Mackennal probably gained through his connection with Melba is that of Mimi Ronald, née Ettlinger (from Frankfurt-am-Main), the first wife of composer-pianist-conductor Landon Ronald (1873-1938).¹⁷ They married in 1897 and it is likely that Mackennal’s portrait, again lost, dates from around this time. Mimi died in 1932. 

Nellie Melba had met Ronald in 1891, when he was a répétiteur at Covent Garden, becoming her accompanist for many years. We know very little about this portrait, recorded as a bust on Colin Kraay’s list.

Nellie Melba, 1899, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Nellie Melba, 1902. Photo by Walter Barnett.

National Portrait Gallery, London

At the end of the century, Mackennal came to perhaps his most important works in this series, two busts of Nellie Melba (1861-1931), completed in 1899. Had they known each other growing up in Melbourne? As already noted, Melba was the conduit for several of Mackennal’s commissions, including those of Marie Tempest, Mimi Landon Ronald and Ada Crossley. Agnes Murphy, Melba’s secretary and biographer observed:

It had become an established tradition with her to take a house on the River Thames, generally in the vicinity of Marlow, during the summer months…and to this cool retreat she always hurried at the close of her engagements in London, even after the opera... During these terms of river residence Melba did her utmost to make the place attractive for her colleagues in art, and there she loved to entertain them.¹⁸

Mackennal was one of these ‘colleagues in art.’ His daughter recalled:

It was there in Marlborough Hill that I first met Dame Nellie Melba, the great mezzo-soprano [sic] who often visited my parents. One year she took a large house at Henley for the summer, where she entertained. At that time she was always saying that she would like to be buried in the cemetery of the little church of Stoke Poges… In the church she sat and played the organ singing ‘Ave Maria’ in her superb voice… At a later date father completed a bust of her which was for many years on the stairs of the Covent Garden Opera House in London.¹⁹

Interior of Melba’s house at 30, Great Cumberland Place, London. The Mackennal bust may be seen on the left. Photo by W & D Downey, London. State Library Victoria, Melbourne.

Already recognised as the greatest opera singer of her era, in 1898 Melba had recently visited the composer Puccini at his home in Tuscany to study with him his most recent, so far unsuccessful opera, La bohème.²⁰ She performed Mimì in Philadelphia, then at Covent Garden in 1899, the year of Mackennal’s portrait of her, and later that year the diva performed the role at the Metropolitan in New York. Effectively it was Melba who made it the world’s favourite opera.

Melba’s portraits by Mackennal are formal and stately, perhaps reflecting the persona that Melba, now aged 40 and at the height of her career, wished to portray. She had decided that one of the two versions would be bequeathed to the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, her home town, the other to the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden where she reigned supreme. These portraits had a memorial role and it is significant of her esteem for Mackennal that she chose him to execute them. In a letter to the trustees of the National Gallery in Melbourne, printed in The Argus, she focuses on her patronage of the sculptor:

Last year I commissioned Mr Bertram Mackennal, the Australian born sculptor, whose work over here has created so much interest in the last few years, to execute a marble bust of myself with a view to its presentation to the Public Library [sic] of Melbourne. I have now to inform you that the work is finished…and I beg that you, on behalf of the trustees of the Public Library of Melbourne, will accept it from a daughter of the city, as tribute of her unfailing remembrance and affection. The bust, with its pedestal (which in itself is a work of art) will be forwarded to you within the next two or three weeks. May I, in conclusion, express the hope that I am not wholly forgotten in our beloved country.²¹

The version given to Covent Garden still stands at the head of the Grand Staircase—Melba on the left and (until recently) her predecessor the great Adelina Patti on the right. Sadly, in 1970, when an Australian film crew needed to see it, it was dropped, causing the head to be severed from the neck. It has since been repaired.

Of the version in Melbourne, Patricia Fullerton has written (in the Mackennal exhibition catalogue of 2007):

Elevated above eye-level on her pedestal, she looks every bit a prima donna, her imperious gaze surveying an audience before her. With hair swept up, head held high and turned slightly aside, the formality of the composition is softened, giving emphasis to her handsome shoulders emerging from the swirling drapery. A large art-nouveau brooch, in the form of a winged angel with lyre, clasps the knotted drape and draws attention to her throat and chest, alluding to her famed vocal cords and powerful lungs.

Ada Crossley on her marriage to Francis Muecke, 1905. Photo by Walter Barnett.

National Portrait Gallery, London

The portrait bust of another Australian singer, the leading concert contralto Ada Crossley(1871-1929), is also only known of through the list compiled by Colin Kraay. Unfortunately, as with others, it is currently untraced. Henrietta Mackennal says that on occasion Ada Crossley was mistaken for Queen Mary – a clue if the bust is ever to be identified.

Born in 1871 in Gippsland, Victoria, Crossley studied singing in Melbourne, initially traveling the 200 kilometres to her weekly lessons with Fanny Simonsen. Moving to London in 1894, she took further lessons with Sir Charles Santley, then in Paris with the great teacher, Madame Marchesi, who later told an Australian journalist: ‘Miss Crossley has a splendid contralto voice, there is no doubt as to her success. She is very intelligent, a hard worker and I consider her one of my best pupils.’²² 

Successful from her London debut at the Queen’s Hall in 1895, Crossley was much admired by Melba. For religious reasons, she never appeared in opera. It is probable that she also knew Mackennal through the diva. Mackennal’s daughter Henrietta writes of her own close relationship with the singer:

I became very friendly with Ada Crossley, the famous Australian contralto. She married a nose and throat specialist, Francis Muecke, he was best man at my wedding, and they lived near us in London.... Ada Crossley was a retiring type of person, not fond of public life or parties, in fact she even disliked going out alone, therefore she often asked me to go with her, sometimes to dine at the Carlton or the Savoy, then on to a first night or a concert.²³

It seems likely that the Mackennal bust was executed around the time of Crossley’s marriage in London in 1905. Her wedding was attended by over 500, including many London-based Australians. Walter Barnett, another Australian in London, took the formal wedding photography of her.

Salome, 1895, by Bertram Mackennal

 Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Bertram Mackennal holding his sculpture Salome, c.1895. Photographer unknown.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Mackennal’s Other Theatrical Sculpture

If made in 1905, the Mackennal bust of Crossley is the last of his sculptures of living performers. However, he also made clear his commitment to the performing arts in other ways.

In 1897, Mackennal created one of his best-known works, Salome. This subject had inspired artists throughout the nineteenth century but producing it at the moment he did cannot have been an accident. Oscar Wilde was in prison, in disgrace after being found guilty of ‘indecency and sodomy’, his one-act play Salome, written in French for Sarah Bernhardt, remaining unperformed (indeed banned) in Britain and mocked by the press.

The fact that this was a courageous, perhaps even foolhardy, moment in time for Mackennal to present this piece at the Royal Academy has been overlooked. It calls to mind another moment when censorship had struck, the exhibition of his Circe at the RA in 1891, its riotous base beskirted in case visitors to the show should be corrupted. Wilde’s play was first performed in Paris the year before Mackennal’s work but had to wait until 1905 to be given in England (and until 1933 in Australia).

Mackennal depicts the moment when Salome, naked having performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ for Herod, thirsting to kiss the mouth of John the Baptist, sword clasped demurely behind her back, now demands her gift from the king: ‘In a silver charger.... the head of Iokanaan [John the Baptist].’²⁴

It is significant that he chose to be photographed later in life with Salome. In this carefully constructed photograph, Mackennal is depicted in an artist’s smock, thoughtfully gazing at one of his most successful theatrical works. A more apt choice for a sculptor who continuously celebrated the world of the performing arts would be hard to imagine.

Circe, 1893, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

The Dancer, 1904, by Bertram Mackennal

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

There is no evidence that Mackennal was a particular follower of dance, but in 1904 he created his only work in the field, one of his masterpieces, The Dancer.²⁵ By the end of the nineteenth century, ballet had reached a low point, with little in the way of innovation. At the start of the new century, a new star burst on to the scene, the American Isadora Duncan, and it was she that revitalised the genre, working mainly in Paris and London, dancing barefoot and endeavoring to recapture the glories of dance in Ancient Greece.

Mackennal’s Dancer is based on Duncan’s style. The pose is known as ‘épaulement’. While the legs and hips turn to the left, the shoulders and head arch fleetingly in the opposite direction. Rodin’s La Méditation, developed through several versions by the great sculptor between 1881 and 1896, addresses the same artistic goals, albeit more radically, and Mackennal may well have seen one of these in Paris or London.

In 1906, Mackennal was commissioned to create a memorial to Robert Brough (1855-1906), a London-born actor who lived and worked in Australia for the last twenty years of his life. Born into a famous theatrical family, Brough worked initially for D’Oyly Carte’s company, legendary first performers of Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1885, Robert and his actress wife, Florence Trevelyan, travelled to Australia, imported by Williamson, Garner and Musgrove, where they toured comedies.

Over the years they premièred in Australia many of the important playwrights of the day—Pinero, J.M. Barrie and Oscar Wilde amongst them. Brough died of a heart attack mid-season in 1906, the greatest actor-manager Australia had known, according to Beaumont Smith.

Tragedy Enveloping Comedy, c.1906-09, by Bertram Mackennal

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne—on long-term loan to the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Victoria

Robert Brough, c.1894. Photo by Falk [Walter Barnett], Sydney.

Falk Album, Theatre Heritage Australia

Mackennal was to use the Brough memorial’s theme, Tragedy Enveloping Comedy, again in 1911 for another man-of-the-theatre, W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911). He had also used this iconography in Bernhardt’s portrait exhibited in 1894. Gilbert was the writing half of the famous operetta team, Gilbert and Sullivan. His portrait of W.S. Gilbert was not modelled from life. Lady Gilbert commissioned this work as a memorial to her husband and the portrait was placed in All Saint’s, Gilbert’s parish church, near his home at Harrow Weald. It is unknown how Lady Gilbert knew of Mackennal, though both Mary Anderson and Marie Tempest knew Gilbert well and either may have suggested him.

Together Gilbert and Sullivan wrote the Savoy Operas, produced at D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre in London, their collaboration lasting twenty years. Successful throughout the English-speaking world, Gilbert’s great gift was in writing ingenious, pithy, satirical lyrics that set well to music. Gilbert also wrote straight plays, mostly comedies, before working with Sullivan—including Pygmalion and Galatea (1871), the story of a sculptor who wishes his statue into life as a beautiful young woman, one of Mary Anderson’s most successful roles, and Comedy and Tragedy (1884) written especially for Anderson.²⁶

W.S. Gilbert Memorial, c.1912, by Bertram Mackennal, All Saint’s Church, Harrow Weald. Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Facebook.

Mackennal’s portrait of Gilbert consists of a large portrait in relief in the centre flanked by figures of Comedy and Tragedy. As will have been noted, a recurring theme in Mackennal’s body of sculpture is the iconography of Comedy and Tragedy—the motif appearing both as masks and in figurative form. While this theme was quite common at this time, the repetition throughout his oeuvre might be seen as a motif for Mackennal himself.

The final work of art with a performing arts theme that Mackennal produced was his Shakespeare Memorial, commissioned by Sydney newspaperman Henry Gullett in 1914 (for the bard’s tercentenary) to stand outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales. A major work from the latter part of Mackennal’s career, he perhaps intended it to be a summation of his devotion to theatre and literature. As we have seen, Mackennal had sculpted Shakespearian actors from the earliest days—Mary Anderson, Genevieve Ward, Janet Achurch and Sarah Bernhardt. Surmounted by a full-length figure of Shakespeare, an amalgam of various known portraits of the bard, Mackennal depicted five life-size characters around the base—Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Portia and Falstaff.

Plaster cast of the figure of Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Memorial, 1925, by Bertram Mackennal. Photographer unknown.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Bertram Mackennal modelling a figure for his Shakespeare Memorial, c.1925. Photographer unknown.

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Shakespeare Memorial

City of Sydney Archives, Sydney

Shakespeare Memorial (detail) showing Falstaff

City of Sydney Archives, Sydney

Unfortunately, this important public memorial, ‘one of his finest works’ according to William Moore, now rests on the central reservation of the busy highway running from Macquarie Street to the Eastern and Southern suburbs of Sydney.²⁷ A less appropriate place—its back to the majority of the stream of oncoming traffic—for the finale of a great Australian sculptor who embraced the depiction of the theatrical arts would be hard to imagine.

Note

An earlier version of this essay, severely edited, appeared in the catalogue for the major exhibition of Bertram Mackennal’s work at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2007

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Patricia Fullerton, Elisabeth Kumm, Tony Locantro, Meri Machin-Roberts (2007), Michael Magnusson, Sophie Wilson

Endnotes

1. In National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and terracotta in private collection, Geelong

2. H. Mackennal, The Story of a Royal Sculptor, unpublished and undated, compiled by P. Kraay (1990)

3. Argus (Melbourne), 13 October 1931

4. A. Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2002

5. Arthur Streeton to Tom Roberts, early October 1890, in A. Galbally & A. Gray (eds), Letters from Smike: The Letters of Arthur Streeton 1890-1943, Oxford University Press, Australia, 1989

6. K. Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

7. Mackennal’s portraits of Janet Achurch:

i. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, c.1890, plaster, cast shellac, water-based emulsion paint casting, 57.8 x 47.6 x 8.5cm. National Gallery of Victoria

ii. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, c.1890, plaster, National Gallery of Australia (I understand that the NGA version was a copy created by Joseph Brown in the 1970s)

iii. Bertram Mackennal, Janet Achurch, 1890 bronze cast, 58.3 x 48.2 x 9.0 cm, Monash University Collection

8. N. Stewart, My Life’s Story, John Sands, Sydney, 1925

9. Table Talk, 18 October 1890 and 3 January 1901

10. H. Mackennal, p.

11. Bertram Mackennal to Eugénie Legrand, 3 August 1891, Lucy Bellew Papers, National Library of Australia

12. Société des Artistes Français, Salon de 1894, Cat. 3335

13. The Times (London), 25 May 1896

14. H. Bolitho, Marie Tempest, Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1936

15. Herald (Melbourne), 13 October 1931

16. Bolitho, p.96

17. E. Cundell, Sir Landon Ronald, in The Dictionary of National Biography 1931-1940, Oxford University Press, London, 1949

18. A. Murphy, Melba: A Biography, Chatto & Windus, London, 1909

19. H. Mackennal, p.13

20. B. & F. Mackenzie, Singers of Australia: From Melba to Sutherland, Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1967

21. Argus (Melbourne), 24 October 1899

22. Age (Melbourne), 22 December 1894, quoted in B. & F. Mackenzie

23. H. Mackennal, p.26

24. Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde, Salome, translated from the French by Lord Alfred Douglas, originally published 1894, republished by Dover, New York, 1967

25. Bertram Mackennal, The Dancer, 1904, bronze, 168 x 71 x 69 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales

26. S. Dark and R. Grey, W.S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters, Methuen, London, 1923

27. W. Moore, The Story of Australian Art, vol. II, Angus & Robertson, 1934

Selected Bibliography

Mary Anderson, A Few Memories, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1895

Ann Blainey, I am Melba: A Biography, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2008

Hector Bolitho, Marie Tempest, Cobden-Sanderson, London, 1936

Katherine Brisbane (ed), Entertaining Australia: The Performing Arts as Cultural History, Currency Press, Sydney, 1991

Deborah Edwards (ed), Bertram Mackennal (catalogue), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2007

Corille Fraser, Come to Dazzle: Sarah Bernhardt’s Australian Tour, Currency Press/National Library of Australia, Sydney, 1998

Noëlle Guibert (ed), Portrait(s) de Sarah Bernhardt (catalogue), Bibliothêque nationale de France, Paris, 2000

John Hetherington, Melba: A Biography, Faber, Melbourne, 1967

Eric Irvin, Dictionary of the Australian Theatre 1788–1914, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1985

Henrietta Mackennal, The Story of a Royal Sculptor, unpublished and undated memoir, compiled P. Kraay, 1990

Nellie Melba, Melodies and Memories, Thornton Butterworth, London, 1925

William R. Moran (ed), Nellie Melba: A Contemporary Review, Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 1985

Agnes G. Murphy, Melba: A Biography, Doubleday Page, New York, 1909

Roger Neill, Legends: The Art of Walter Barnett, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, 2000

Carol Ockman & Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (catalogue), The Jewish Museum, New York, 2005

Hal Porter, Stars of Australian Stage and Screen, Rigby, Adelaide, 1965

Joanna Richardson, Sarah Bernhardt and her World, Putnam, New York, 1977

Viola Tait, A Family of Brothers, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1971

Pamela Vestey, Melba: A Family Memoir, Phoebe Publishing, Melbourne, 1996

Genevieve Ward & Richard Whiteing, Both Sides of the Curtain, Cassell, London, 1918

On my secondvisit to New York I felt less like a stranger in a strange land, despite the fact that it was winter; and Arctic winds swept the streets. Even the dingy theatres seemed more friendly than when I first saw them in 1925, and this feeling was further enhanced through my meeting with people whom I had known in Australia and England.

The New York winter of 1934 (left), Cyril and Madge brave the cold in Central Park (right)

The Illustrated London News, 24 February 1934, p.277 & Cyril Ritchard album, National Library of Australia, Canberra

One of my first London acquaintances was Mr. John Van Druten, author of Young Woodley, There’s Always Juliet, and other successful plays, and here he was in New York for the premiere of Most of the Game, with Herbert Marshall and Edna Best in the leading roles. [1]

Playwright, John Van Druten. Photo by Carl Van Vechten.

Library of Congress, Washington DC

Playbill for There’s Always Juliet with Herbert Marshall and his wife Edna Best

Playbill Vault

After the first night on Broadway he had plenty of time on his hands, and with Cyril we made a trio of sightseers. In short trips about the city I learned something of the real depression affecting America. Crowds of out-of-work men and women thronged the streets day and night, aimlessly parading, and seemingly with all hope gone. They were mostly hard looking types, all of them with that ‘Yeah" and ‘So what?’ expression on their faces. Broadway was a favourite ‘beat’ . . . yet only a few blocks further East was Fifth Avenue with all its splendour and signs of wealth. There were no hungry looking men here. Instead glittering motor-cars purred along the street with well-dressed, clean-shaven gentlemen and beautifully gowned, bejewelled, and admirably made-up ladies as their passengers. Women visiting New York for the first time get the money-spending habit so badly in Fifth Avenue that they have to ask a policeman to remove them while they still have their car fare home.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The Russian Ballet was in season at this time, and Cyril and myself spent many dollars at the box office. [2] There were two ballets new to us The Beautiful Danube, set to the music of Strauss, and The Ballet School, with choreography descriptive of dancing. Danilova, whom I met some years previously as premiere danseuse in Waltzes from Vienna, was a member of the company.

Le Beau Danube with Edouard Borovansky as The Strong Man and Danilova as The Street Dancer (left); Alexandra Danilova (right)

National Library of Australia, Canberra & Private collection

My greatest thrill, however, so far as entertainment was concerned, was in an attempted visit to the premiere of Cecil B. De Mille’s picture, Four Frightened People. [3]New York, which takes its films very seriously, turned out in thousands and stormed the theatre entrances. Cyril and I managed to get in one doorway, and there we were jammed. I have never in my life seen such a vast crowd, nor such a huge auditorium. We seemed to be a mile from the screen in this wonderful theatre in Times Square. We had trouble about our seats, and after a terrible struggle with hordes of humans in a like predicament, eventually found ourselves in the street. Cyril fought his way to the ticket office and demanded his money back, and was quite disappointed to have it returned without a murmur of protest... It is a way they have in America, and are seemingly used to the procedure on first nights.

Movie poster

Internet Movie Data Base

Paramount Theatre, Times Square, New York City, 1934

Private collection

Paramount Theatre entrance lobby

Private collection

The proscenium—viewed from the upper levels

Private collection

Frank Lawton, who was playing in The Wind and the Rain, [4]Ethel Morrison, and Dorothy Purdell, well remembered by Australians, were others who visited me at the Gotham.

* * * * * * * * * * *

London. Back once more! The mere business of unpacking reduced the two years away by at least 20 months. From now on I carry a banner ‘Travel Cunard.’ The service is simply amazing. After the usual posing for photographs and waving at the cameramen, Cyril and I were introduced by a Cunard man to the chief of the Customs, and we were really so social that he blushed at the very thought of asking us to open our luggage. Instead he wrote mysterious little signs all over the trunks and things, and these acted like magic and just dissolved barriers right and left. [5]

The trip from Southampton to London was unbelievable for February. We had full sunshine all the way. It must have been a mistake—or perhaps the Cunard people were using their influence again. But even they could not alter dear old London, and sure enough we had glorious fogs and cold and sleet. In short, we were back!

I found my flat at Hanover Square full of flowers and friends, with a lift-man, a porter, a housemaid, and the manager all smiling welcome in the background. Things began to move at once. Vivian Buckley—who wrote that very successful book With a Passport and Two Eyes [6]—gave a large cocktail party for us. He had very thoughtfully gathered a great many of our old friends together. Everyone seemed very pleased to see us, and refused to believe it was two years since we had left. Not very flattering, perhaps, but London is like that. Time flies, people disappear for months and return, and you resume a conversation that was commenced before they left.

Travel writer, V.C. Buckley (a self-portrait)

The Badsey Society

Actor-comedian, Leslie Henson

Private collection

We were also bidden to a cocktail party given by Mrs. Claude Beddington. As usual, there were at least six languages being spoken very loudly in one room. Fortunately the room was gigantic. Then Leslie Henson gave a party for us at the Green Room Club. Everyone on the London stage was there, and our welcome started with the gallery girls, who were assembled outside. It was all very cheering, as Cyril and I had been suffering a little from the feeling that perhaps we had been quite forgotten.

It was charming, too, when we went to the theatre and perfect strangers came to tell us how very glad they were to see us back. I am not writing this in any spirit of boastfulness, but to point out that the same loyalty exists in London as I always found in Australia. Much as I loved America, I do not think you would find that in a theatre there.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The first plays I saw were Mr. Whittington, with Jack Buchanan, [7]which disappointed me a little, though London seemed to like it, and Fred Astaire in Gay Divorce. [8] This was the piece that Billy Milton played in Melbourne. Then I saw Marie Tempest in The Old Folks at Home, which Melbourne recently found rather naughty, but very amusing. [9] Marie looked younger than ever. Also In the cast were Graham Browne, Margaret Rawlings, Frank Allenby, and Ronald Ward—all of whom will be remembered at odd times in Australia by some of the people who read this story of mine.

Elsie Randolph and Jack Buchanan in Mr. Whittington

Mander & Mitchenson collection

Fred Astaire and Claire Luce in Gay Divorce.Photo by Houston Rogers.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Cyril and I had two or three rather interesting suggestions about appearing in London. The main trouble was the little time at our disposal before we would once more be Australia bound. The newspapers every day were mentioning the Melbourne Centenary. The fact that Prince George then intended to go out undoubtedly gave the whole thing an added importance in London's eyes. I had an odd chuckle when I read that a prize offered for an Australian novel had been given, according to the Daily Mirror, by ‘Mrs. James Dyer, daughter of the Lord Mayor of Melbourne!’ I am sure no one appreciated that joke more than Sir Harold Gengoult Smith. [10]

After a week in London I found the queer old place was getting hold of me again. My first reaction to it had been annoyance at its mixed climate and its lack of what the Americans so love to call ‘creature comforts.’ In any case spring in the offing, and the certainty of summer in Australia when London was next wrapped in its winter blankets, drove such thoughts away.

The thing I had to fight most hard at that moment was an almost terrifying wanderlust. After more than two weeks I was still not quite unpacked, and I hesitated about taking the smallest trifle from my trunks and putting it in a permanent looking wardrobe.

I had to exercise the greatest control and fairly run past a Thomas Cook’s office, and my breakfast often grew cold while I read of winter cruises. The south of France called so strongly—so very strongly. And Spain was quite a new country to me, with the exchange in my favour. I found that for £27 I could go to Madeira and back. For less than £50 I could go to Portugal, to Brazil, and a thousand miles up the Amazon! The luxurious motor vessel Columbia could take me from Dover for a seven weeks’ sunshine voyage to the British West Indies, and the Spanish Main, including St. Lucia and Jamaica. I had to stop thinking like that before I threw everything to the winds.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Interesting contrasts were presented in two plays I saw at that time. The first was Richard of Bordeaux, with John Gielgud, [11]and the other was Reunion in Vienna, with that incomparable pair, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. [12]

Richard of Bordeaux disappointed me a little. It really was a beautiful production, but it could not live up to its advance publicity! I felt, too, that Shakespeare had said the final word about Richard II, and the music of his language made the other version rather trite. And I am not really a highbrow.

Programme for Richard of Bordeaux (left);  John Gielgud, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Barbara Dillion and Francis Lister in Richard of Bordeaux. Photo by Bertram Park. (right)

Programme Rob Morrison collection

For the Lunts I had nothing but praise. They are a grand pair, and can give anyone lessons in stage craftsmanship. ‘Finesse’ is the word to be applied to them.

Reunion in Vienna with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, from The Illustrated London News, 20 January 1934, p.102 (left); Programme design by Rex Whistler (right)

Programme Rob Morrison collection

The people who took Cyril to Reunion in Vienna had to use a great deal of influence to get seats. We had tried several times without success. We had been on our knees to ticket agencies just bristling with banknotes, trying to get in to that show, to the first night of Magnolia Street, [13]and to Escape Me Never, [14]with Elisabeth Bergner.

At that time I met two of the most interesting people I have ever known. They were Jerome Kern and Hassard Short. Kern wrote the music for Sally, The Cabaret Girl, Sunny, The Cat and the Fiddle, Show Boat, Music in the Air, and for Roberta, which we have recently done in Melbourne.  Short was the producer of Waltzes in Vienna and Roberta—the best man at his job in New York and London.

To be continued

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Published in The Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld.), Thursday, 11 April 1935, p.19, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article182036348 and The Mercury (Hobart, Tas.), Wednesday, 31 July 1935, p.3, https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/30098474

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Endnotes

Compiled by Robert Morrison

1. On 21 December 1933, The New York Times reported (on p.24) that: ‘John Van Druten, English playwright, arrived yesterday on the White Star liner Olympic in connection with the presentation next month of his play, Most of the Game, in which Herbert Marshall and Edna Best will have the leading roles. The author said he hoped to present here his play, The Distaff Side, before long.’ However Madge was mistaken in her assumption that the play received its Broadway premiere around the time that she and Cyril arrived in New York in mid-January, as The New York Times subsequently reported on 8 March 1934 that Basil Sydney would produce ‘John Van Druten’s Most of the Game, now being rewritten, with Herbert Marshall and Edna Best … probably … in the Autumn.’ In fact the next of his plays to open on Broadway was The Distaff Side, on 25 September 1934, and Most of the Game did not arrive there until 1 October 1935 (without Marshall or Best) when it flopped after a mere 23 performances. (Ref.: ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/john-van-druten-6910 )

2. The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s New York season played at the St. James Theatre from 22 December 1933 to 25 March 1934. In addition to Alexandra Danilova, the company’s principal dancers included Leonide Massine, Tatiana Riabouchinska, Leon Woizikowski, Nina Verchinina, Tamara Toumanova, Irina Baronova and David Lichine. Its repertoire of ballets included La Concurrence, Les Presages, Le Beau Danube, Petrushka, Prince Igor, Les Sylphides, Beach, Jeux d’Enfants and Scuola di Ballo. (Danilova had been the principal ballet dancer in the London production of Waltzes From Vienna at the Alhambra Theatre in 1931.)

3. Cecil B. De Mille’s picture, Four Frightened People was released in the US on 26 January 1934. It received its New York premiere at the Paramount Theatre, Times Square on that date.

4. The Wind and the Rain (by Merton Hodge) premiered at the Ritz Theatre, New York on 1 February 1934.

5. Passenger lists for the Cunard line of the period note that Madge and Cyril sailed from New York City on the S.S. Berengaria on 14 February and arrived in Southampton, England on the 21 February 1934.

6. British travel writer, photographer and lecturer, Vivian Charles John Buckley was born on 26 June 1901 in Brompton, London, the elder of two children of Charles Mars Buckley, a brewer, and his wife, Ida (née Fennings). He was the grandson of Mars Buckley (1825–1905), an Irish businessman from County Cork, who had emigrated to Australia in 1851, and co-founded the prominent department store, Buckley & Nunn (with Crompton John Nunn) in 1852, which operated in Bourke St., Melbourne for over 130 years, until it was taken over by David Jones in 1982. Charles Mars Buckley (1870–1946), the youngest of his eight children (who was born at the family mansion ‘Beaulieu’ in Heyington Place, Toorak) emigrated to England in the 1890s, marrying Ida Fennings at St Saviour, Chelsea in 1898. (Ref.: https://www.badseysociety.uk/people/buckley/vivian-charles and https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/200143915)

7. Mr. Whittington (music by John W. Green, Jack Waller and Joseph Tunbridge; book and lyrics by Clifford Grey, Greatrex Newman and Douglas Furber; additional lyrics by Edward Heyman) received its West End premiere at the London Hippodrome on 1 February 1934 for a total run of 300 performances, which included a transfer to the Adelphi Theatre, where it concluded on 20 October 1934.

8. Gay Divorce (music and lyrics by Cole Porter, book by Dwight Taylor) had its London premiere at the Palace Theatre on 2 November 1933 for a run of 180 performances concluding on 7 April 1934. Fred Astaire and Claire Luce reprised their lead roles from the original New York production, which had premiered at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 29 November 1932 for a run of 248 performances. Its Australian premiere was given by J.C. Williamson Ltd. at the King’s Theatre, Melbourne on 23 December 1933 for a season which ran until 16 February 1934 in a production directed by Charles A. Wenman with dances by Edward Royce, jun. British star Billy Milton made his Australian stage debut in the male lead role of ‘Guy Holden’ and Sydney actress, Mona Potts stepped up from the chorus to take on the female lead role of ‘Mimi’ at two days’ notice when British leading lady, Iris Kirkwhite fell and sprained her ankle at a rehearsal. (In his opening night curtain speech, Billy Milton paid tribute to Miss Potts for having mastered five dances, forty pages of dialogue and three songs in two days.) Miss Kirkwhite recovered from her injury in time to re-join the production for the Adelaide season at the Theatre Royal (from 21 to 27 April), the Perth season at His Majesty’s Theatre (from 19 to 26 May), the Kalgoorlie Town Hall on 29 May and the Brisbane season at His Majesty’s theatre (from 9 to 22 June) which played in repertory with revivals of The Girl Friendand The Quaker Girl.) Local cast members on the tour included Frank Leighton, Leo Franklyn, Elved Jay and Gus Bluett. (On their return to Australia, Madge Elliott and Cyril Ritchard subsequently took over the lead roles for the Sydney season at the Theatre Royal from 28 July to 12 September 1934.)

Photo by Bruno of Hollywood, 1935

Wellcome Collection

Marie Tempest, 1935. Photo by Bassano.

IMDB

9. The Old Folks at Home (by H.M. Harwood) premiered at the Queen’s Theatre, London on 21 December 1933 and played for 203 performances concluding on 23 June 1934. J.C. Williamson Ltd. presented its Australian premiere at the Criterion Theatre, Sydney on 25 October 1934 for a season concluding on 22 November. Its Melbourne season opened at the Comedy Theatre on 5 January 1935 and concluded on 21 February.

 ‘Old Folks at Home’ Tonight

Theatregoers are to see a large number of modern plays this year. The 1935 programme will open at the Comedy tonight, when The Old Folks at Home is given its Melbourne premiere.

An interesting fact is that this three act comedy is produced by Grace Lane, who also enacts the central character, Lady Jane Kingdom, a role in which Marie Tempest achieved a notable success on the London stage last year.

The play is a sophisticated drama of human life, with broad situations and exceedingly frank conversation. The theme underlying the whole story is that ‘the old folks at home’ know as much and are as capable as the young people who are apt to regard their elders with a good humored contempt for their tack of worldly knowledge.

Lady Jane Kingdom sees her strong-willed daughter (enacted by Jane Wood) and her son's empty-headed wife (Kathleen Goodall) whirling hopelessly in the frantic and purposeless eddies of young modernistic society, and saves them from themselves by her tact and understanding of life.

The Herald (Melbourne, Vic.), Saturday, 5 January 1935, p.24, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article245436944

10. Mrs James Dyer was the sister of Sir Harold Gengoult Smith, the Lord Mayor of Melbourne from 1931 to 1934. She served as Lady Mayoress on her brother’s behalf until his marriage to Cynthia Brookes (the daughter of tennis player Sir Norman Brookes) in 1933. As Lord Mayor, Smith chaired many of the organising committees for the 1934 Centenary of Melbourne. In her own right, Mrs. James Dyer founded the Victorian branch of the British Music Society in 1921, and acted as honorary local representative for the parent society (based in London) as well as honorary secretary of the Victorian branch. In addition she was president for five years of the Alliance Français in Victoria, and was one of the first Australian women to be awarded the Legion d’Honneur by the French government (amongst other such honours.) (Ref.: https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/smith-sir--harold-gengoult-15901; http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article140842392 andhttp://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article10957710 )

11. Richard of Bordeaux (by ‘Gordon Daviot’ pseud. of Elizabeth Macintosh) premiered at the New Theatre, London on 2 February 1933 in a revised version (having previously previewed at the theatre for two Sunday performances on 26 June and 3 July 1932) for a run of 463 performances concluding on 24 March 1934.

12. Reunion in Vienna (by Robert E. Sherwood) had its London premiere at the Lyric Theatre on 3 January 1934 and played for 196 performances concluding on 23 June. The Lunts reprised their roles from the original US production, which had played at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York for a run of 264 performances from 16 November 1931.

13. Magnolia Street (by Louis Golding and A.R. Rawlinson, based on Goldings’s novel) premiered at the Adelphi Theatre, London on 8 March 1934 for a run of 36 performances concluding on 7 April.

14. Escape Me Never (by Margaret Kennedy, adapted from her novel) premiered in London at the Apollo Theatre on 8 December 1933 starring Viennese actress, Elisabeth Bergner in her West End debut, and ran for 232 performances concluding on 12 April 1934.

Cyril Ritchard Filmography

• Danny Boy(1934) (British Dominions Films)—screenplay by A. Barr-Carson, Oswald Mitchell and Archie Pitt. Directed by Oswald Mitchell. Original music by Eric Spear, with lyrics by Frank Vincent. Cast included Frank Forbes-Robertson, Ronnie Hepworth, Dorothy Dickson, Archie Pitt, Fred Duprez, Denis O’Neil and Cyril Ritchard.

In production in May of 1934 at the Cricklewood Studios, the picture was first released in London in July 1934 and in Australia in May of the following year. Local critical reaction to the film was mixed, although Cyril Ritchard received praise for his acting in a supporting role, which gave little scope for his talents.

Picture Theatres

A tip-top programme of British films was screened at the Athenaeum on Friday, consisting of The Triumph of Sherlock Holmesand Danny Boy …

Danny Boy proved to be a musical film with a strongly emotional story, and as a film it bears evidence of a cinema quality which has not been sustained in some of the more recent British productions. This popular picture gives us glimpses of Cyril Ritchard in a straight role, and as a theatrical magnate he fills the bill with smoothness and poise. No doubt we shall see more of Mr. Ritchard as an actor in the future. As Pat Clare, Frank Forbes-Robertson is a romantic and vagrant violinist, and Ronnie Hepworth, as Danny, is delightful characteristically English in contrast with the too precocious types of boys which Hollywood has developed. The last close-up of him in the cabaret scene is irresistible. Dorothy Dickson plays the role of Danny's mother, Jane Kaye, the actress, and Leo Newman is cast as the manager. Musically, Danny Boy is interesting, but the recording is not up to the best standard.

The Age (Melbourne, Vic.), Monday, 20 May 1935, p.10, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article204354539

‘Danny Boy’

A well-drawn but inadequate sob-story, deficient in action and humor. A musical genius, estranged from the wife who loves him, wanders forth with their boy of 12 to fiddle in the streets. The streets treat him as they usually treat geniuses; meantime, the wife has become a Great Star. Her continued efforts to find her husband and child failing, she is tempted to love another man, when suddenly somebody finds the husband, tells everybody he is a genius and everybody believes it. All are happy, except the noble-minded lover, who goes forth like the Boy Scout, content with his day’s good deed. The acting is worthy of a better story. Frank Forbes-Robertson never faults as the genius. Ronnie Hepworth is another of those wonderful child performers who have come into the lime-light of late. Archie Pitt as the tough proprietor of the penny doss-house is the real thing. [Dorothy Dickson as] Jane Kaye looks well as the heroine. Cyril Ritchard, as the lover who wasn’t, has little to do, but does it well.

‘Shadow Shows’, The Bulletin (Sydney, NSW), 22 May 1935, p.40

Everyone’s (Sydney), 12 December 1934, p.104

Everyone’s (Sydney), 31 October 1934, p.7

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Additional sources

Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson, Musical Comedy: A story in pictures, Peter Davies, London, 1969

Ernest Short, Sixty Years of Theatre, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1951

J.P. Wearing, The London Stage, 1930–1939: A calendar of productions, performers, and personnel, 2nd ed.; Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland, 2014

Internet Broadway Data Base, ibdb.com

Internet Movie Data Base, imdb.com

The New York Times on-line Archive

‘The Shows of 1934’, Everyone’s (Sydney, NSW)—(Vol. 14 No. 772)—12 December 1934, p.112, https://nla.gov.au:443/tarkine/nla.obj-571101604

‘The Shows of 1935’, Everyone’s (Sydney, NSW)—(Vol. 15 No. 310)—11 December 1935, p.124, https://nla.gov.au:443/tarkine/nla.obj-552304594