BILL GRAHAM
This essay is one of a series of memory-pieces which the author is currently writing.
The passing of the Empire has found its distinctive images on the screens of movie houses: a colonial governor, the feathers of his military head-dress blowing in his face, shaking hands with the new nation's beaming leader; the cheering, yet-to-be-blood-stained millions in India; minor Royalties raising the flags of optimistic, palm-fringed republics. None of these occupies the foreground of my memory. Nor, even, does the prim form of Vincent Massey in the late Lord Tweedsmuir's Windsor uniform (a perfect fit) being sworn in as the first native-born Excellency. Rather, centre-stage for me, and much earlier, stands the figure of an actor taking his final curtain; all the Empire's mighty crumbling crammed within the wooden '0' of the Walker Theatre in Winnipeg.
My father's judgement made my first play Hamlet, good luck made it Sir John Martin-Harvey's production and force of circumstances made it the eighth of March, 1924, in that same theatre, whose stage would give me inklings of what life might be, again and again, over the next ten years. Built by C P Walker at his own cost, it had opened in 1907. Walker's daughter remembered that it '. . . did not try to look like the Taj Mahal, the Alcazar, Santa Sofia or even a Florentine Palazzo. It was, quite candidly, a theatre.' In this it did, however, echo the theatres of London, the heart of Empire.
I remember the proscenium arch, a triple frieze of maple leaves and electric light bulbs within rosettes, all done in plaster with, by my time, a brownish hue that it would be immodest to call old ivory. We had arrived in good time, so I was able to examine the seats, the decoration and, especially, the fire curtain. To a twelve-year-old it looked like velvet, draped and tasselled, incredibly rich. The little pit orchestra began sounding 'A's, the footlights came up and the scene-painter's illusions began to play on me. The rich, draped velvet turned, in the flick of an eyelid, to paint. Again it was velvet, and then again it wasn't. My inexperienced eye took some time to settle finally that it wasn't. It was only paint. This was not a source of disappointment, but of wonder at the skill. Then, to quiet the chatter and rustle of an assembling audience, the house lights dimmed, the fire curtain rose, revealing the act drop. This became for me, over the years, the definitive theatre curtain.
It was a brownish, tapestry-like affair with a dim, rather lifeless woodland scene in the centre, and beneath it a cartouche containing the quotation,
And this our life,
Exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees,
Books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones,
And good in everything.
I did not see anything incongruous in it, I only fretted at the clumsy internal rhyme that has continued to bother me over the years. Ruth Walker considered this '. . . a most extraordinary quotation to put on the curtain of a theatre which, if it is to exist at all, must be a very public haunt indeed.'
After an interval, the footlights dimmed, gradually changed to blue, and with a hiss the curtain rose. There was a sense of arriving as the silhouetted battlements and sentries became clear against the star-shine of the sky. Then the first words, 'Who's there?' and we were away. How easily the illusion was created.
When that act drop rose, that other world revealed was simply an extension of the one I occupied. All that transpired there was possible to me. When Hamlet died I recognized mortality for the first time and didn't turn to look at my father beside me lest I might seem to be remarking on the deaths of fathers. Claudius had so lately said, 'But you must know your father lost a father, / that father lost, lost his I followed mine out of the theatre that night heavy with this new knowledge. Fortunately, there was no need to hide it, because we were immediately in a shuffling crowd of his acquaintances, all in white-tie because they had been sitting downstairs. My father was only upstairs in the dress circle. The fact that I knew he considered these the better seats did not relieve the schoolboy snobbish discomfort that replaced the mournful glow in which I had drifted down the stairs.
The last scene of the play is still as vivid as it was that night: the return to the high battlements where four captains lifted Hamlet's body, sharp against the darkening sky as the cannon sounded. It has stayed with me, never to be displaced by the much more powerful and imaginative works of genius that have since come my way.
What we had seen on the Walker stage was a thoroughly professional production, a vividly realized illusion. But we had seen something else: the afterglow of the tradition of the actor-manager, stretching from Burbage, who was Shakespeare's Hamlet, with only a seven years' break between Betterton and Garrick, right down through Macready and Irving to the actor on the stage that night. We had seen the last disciple of Irving, and would later see the tattered remnants of the 19th century repertoire. And in a way, although, of course, we could not know it, we had seen also the dying glow of Empire.
That actor, held so affectionately in memory, was born one hundred and thirty years ago, in 1863 and in a country far more distant then than it is today. However, its culture, at the time I encountered this Hamlet, was almost suffocatingly close. Even the account of Harvey's youth was studded with names I knew. His father sent him to the rich and witty librettist, W S Gilbert, for whom he was building a yacht. Gilbert directed the boy to .take lessons from a retired member of Macready's company; another of his father's friends gave Martin a letter to Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and Henry Irving's general manager. Stoker put him on the payroll, and Martin then began, at the age of nineteen, fourteen years of walk-ons and feeder parts in the hierarchical, glamorous and solemn Lyceum company.
When we were young, in Winnipeg, and infected by the theatre, this part of his life seemed a fantasy. At the age of twenty-five, he and some colleagues formed the Lyceum Vacation Company, touring in the summer 'by permission of Mr Henry Irving.' The great man gave them not only his permission, but his prompt books, sets, costumes and properties without fee. The company was a success from its first engagement. Then began six joyful years of acting the great roles during six weeks holiday and returning to a steady job, usually announcing 'My lord, the carriage waits,' and planning the next tour. This experience formed Harvey and, in a sense, destroyed him. It showed him the quick, easy way to the provincial heart and mind, blinding him to the more demanding standards of the capital. London's loss proved to be Canada's gain; provincial and colonial tastes naturally have a powerful family connection.
At this time Martin married a member of the company, Nina de Silva, and the young Harveys began looking for a play that would set them off on their own. The turning point came in Chicago during Irving's tour of 1897-98. Nina settled on Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, and they worked out an adaptation on the writing paper of the Hotel Normandie on Michigan Avenue. Back in London, in amazingly short order, they found a playwright, financing and a theatre, strangely enough the Lyceum itself, which was vacant, Irving's star having begun its slow fall.
In February of 1899 The Only Way opened to generally enthusiastic reviews, a fashionable and delighted audience, only, as so often happens, to be followed by poor houses. The poor houses continued on tour, and the Harveys found themselves famous yet barely scraping by. After another failed season in 1900-01 with plays of a kind already outmoded in London, and when Harvey had actually pawned his watch, a chance-met friend urged him to try the provinces again with The Only Way. 'We opened our tour in Newcastle, played to crowded audiences there and at every subsequent city, made a handsome profit the first week, and have never looked back ... we have always possessed a public to encourage and support us in the British provinces.' Before long Harvey had acquired the title of 'King of the Provinces' and was in the iron grip of success.
The Only Way never failed him. By 1921 in Liverpool he had played it 2,000 times with some eight or nine years of performances yet to come. Even the London public eventually relented, and there it played to as many as 3,000 people a night. The closing lines entered our stock of useful phrases, solemnly intoned in incongruous situations: 'It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.' At times in high school, in Winnipeg at least, Dickens's lines were attributed to Shakespeare.
Harvey's great provincial popularity encouraged him to emulate Irving in 1903 and make a tour of the eastern States, an audience he thought he knew. The results were dire. In a panic his backers shipped him up to Canada. Here he found the transatlantic counterpart to his beloved provinces. It was ten years before he was able to make another Canadian tour, but it confirmed the promise of the first and, in his own words, filled his coffers. The First World War intervened, but as soon as shipping was available, in the fall of 1919, he was back in what proved to be his second kingdom, another 'happy region.' When Martin-Harvey returned, knighted by the king and with a magical hyphen in his name, added by himself, he was, in Canadian eyes, the great aristocrat of the theatre. The following eleven years were blissful for star and audience alike. We packed his houses just as did the provinces, and he gave us in return plays with starring roles; plays, that is, that kept him on the stage all evening.
Even more, he gave us double roles. He played the two main characters in The Corsican Brothers, both Lesurques and Dubosc in The Lyons Mail, and used a double in The Bells. We gasped, 'How does he do it? each time he made his unbelievable entrances while, to all intents, he was still on stage in the other character. There was always a job for Gordon McLeod who was exactly of his height and build. The audience was deeply contented. It submerged itself in the taste of the past. It must be understood this was no exercise in nostalgia; this was our taste, too. Apart from Shakespeare, the plays were warhorses long overdue for retirement: The Lyons Mail (1851), The Corsican Brothers (1852), The Bells (1871), David Garrick (1886), or adaptations of established works like The Only Way and A Cigarette Maker's Romance from Marion Crawford. Even his commissioned pieces, like The Breed of the Treshams, were safely historical. They, and he, were a comforting link with the Old Country and a romantic past we had never known, a reassurance that the Empire had weathered the storm and that we were still in touch with the world's centre.
It is obvious I owe my father's ghost a nod of recognition for his having chosen Hamlet from this rag-bag. He took me also to The Only Way, where his amused contempt for Sydney Carton's drunken joke about being wrecked in port rather perplexed me. I think, in retrospect, there was a hint of lofty tolerance in his smile as I described to him the visions of The Corsican Brothers and the dilemmas of David Garrick. His lawyer's scepticism was not common in Martin-Harvey's audience, and it is probably not altogether accidental that after The Only Way I was on my own. It would give me a pleasant little rush of pride to say that my father was reading Aldous Huxley or Scott Fitzgerald, that he had heard of Hemingway and liked or hated Main Street or Babbitt. I'm afraid the titles I remember around the house were An Amateur Gentleman, Sorrell and Son, If Winter Comes and Beau Geste. Who can put an author to any of those without a reference book? I don't know that my father's taste was altogether so much more advanced than mine.
Martin-Harvey's repertoire had something in common with cowboy movies: the boy never got the girl. Sydney Carton gave his life for the man who is loved by the woman he himself loves; David Garrick pretends to be a drunk to disillusion the woman he loves who will be disinherited if she marries an actor; Fabien, one of the Corsican brothers, avenges the honour of Louis and of the woman they both love who unaccountably disappears from the play. When the Cigarette Maker is restored to his title and fortune, the loving seamstress, who had sold her hair for his sake, faints in his arms, thus disposing of the final clinch. The King's Messenger, hero of Martin-Harvey's first (and deplorable) modern play, returns to Heaven, leaving Lady Martin-Harvey gazing wistfully after him as he vanishes into the dawning day.
Another thing these plays had in common with cowboy movies was their abysmal literary quality. According to his authorized biography, Harvey '... had been nurtured in the tradition of romantic acting, as exemplified in his master and idol, Henry Irving, and this was a tradition in which the actor counted as much as the play.' His dramatic taste was, at best, practical; his literary taste was, to say the least, doubtful.
This repertoire was exclusively costume. Like children, we (and he) still equated theatre with dressing up. Harvey recalled that historical, Shakespearean and romantic drama were Irving's continuous policy, expressing his love of the beautiful: 'This was the atmosphere which appealed to me, and which, indeed, I dreamed unconsciously of creating for myself.'
Harvey's 'love of the beautiful' did not extend to words or ideas, perhaps fortunately for his career as a popular actor. He chose plays solely for the strength of the leading part. He was an actor and that was what plays were about. He did two of Bernard Shaw's, to their mutual dissatisfaction. By his own statement he could not subordinate his gift to the requirements of a dramatist.
It amuses me to think of what I might have seen in those years if I'd been able to venture to New York: Sydney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted and The Silver Cord, O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude, and, then, at the end of the decade, Street Scene, Green Pastures, Hotel Universe, Mourning Becomes Electra and Of Thee I Sing (Baby). What a theatrical explosion lit those years in New York. However, we were only beginning to look in that direction. That city was not only foreign and intimidating, but vaguely 'cornmon,' a neat dismissal used only by our mothers.
Harvey's personal style, from his first independent production, was to shape his repertoire. Dickens's selfless Sydney Carton gave full scope to his talent for gentle resignation. Face and voice radiated the sweet pathos of unrequited love and noble sacrifice. Max Beerbohm commented unkindly on him '. . . with upturned eyes, and wearing ever that ethereally mystic smile. . .' Harvey developed an extraordinary ability to creep unobtrusively and modestly onto the stage in a manner that rivetted our attention. No actor ever in so self-effacing a manner claimed and held centre stage, abetted, of course, by the electricians, or 'lime-light men' from Irving's old Lyceum. Harvey praised their devotion to detail, quoting without a smile an incident at a rehearsal of Hamlet. 'You see, my man, I want you to concentrate your light on my hand at this moment, after the other lights are dimmed down.' 'Yes, sir, on which finger sir?'
In his memoir he says nothing about voice, but clearly, he had cultivated his, and we responded. The Evening Telegram of Toronto wrote, 'his lines are presented faultlessly, melodiously, they convey the subtlest shades of meaning accurately.' The Winnipeg Evening Tribune and the Daily Star of Montreal agreed that his voice was 'an organ capable of infinite nuances' in, oddly enough, identical words. Overseas opinions differed. The Times described a Hamlet who 'turns all his vowels into musical notes and drops his consonants whenever he can because they interrupt the melody.' The Athenaeum said that his voice '. . . needs cultivation. Its intonations were at times broad rather than fine, and were, not to mince the matter, vulgar.' We would have been bewildered by this wincing assessment, but fortunately The Athenaeum had a limited, if any, circulation in Winnipeg. The tone of its severely discriminating critic was alien to us. We considered any 'standard' English voice and accent per se beautiful and correct. Also, our sense of class had been sadly attenuated by the years and miles between us and the ancestral hearths. 'Vulgar' was a word we seldom used except to mean 'dirty' as in a 'vulgar joke.'
Unhappily, when Martin-Harvey came over my horizon he was already in his sixties, so he was never the jeune premiere who had at first attracted the affectionate attention of London's critics, nor the matinee idol who had packed the provincial houses. We must accept the evidence of photographs and drawings for his youthful attraction. The Duchess of Rutland added him to her gallery (literal) of beautiful young men in one of her accomplished pencil drawings. As I look at photographs of the Martin-Harvey of the late Twenties I am delighted afresh by the artifice that regularly transformed that pouchy, elderly man into the youthful, melancholy but charming Sydney Carton. Apparently glamour is hardy.
According to Max Beerbohm, he did have it. On one occasion he warned that a man of Mr Harvey's glamour may lure the public to second-rate plays but he cannot keep them long. What attracted us, however, was fame and especially overseas reputation. He was unmistakably the Great British Actor. If there was at times a hint of condescension in his manner, it was not, I think, an aspect of his character. Rather, it derived from his long years with Irving. Deeply ingrained also was the English ideal of the gentleman, with its unassertive assumption of superiority, an ideal that was not to be questioned until the thunderbolt of Look back in Anger. This was no drawback. On the contrary, it allowed scope for acting. When Martin-Harvey descended to villainy, as in Richard III or as Matthias in The Bells or Dubosc in The Lyons Mail, it was clearly apparent that acting was going on, and we appreciated it with enthusiasm. The better we knew the roles, the greater the enthusiasm.
Among our special enjoyments were the curtain calls. Not for Martin-Harvey the democratic calls of today, with the whole cast linking hands in mutual appreciation of the applause bestowed equally on all. For him it was the coda of the performance, and to it he brought as much technique as he did to the role itself. The first calls were speedy, and the stage hand on the front curtain played a vital part. Martin-Harvey's solo curtain came when the cast had bowed to us and departed. It would be held until he sensed it was long enough, then he would turn to walk upstage just as the curtain swiftly fell. Our applause would build, and the curtain would as swiftly rise, catching him unawares. He would turn and walk down towards us once more as the curtain dropped again. Several repeats of this, and finally he would come downstage with his hands held out in a gesture of amazed gratitude that also had something of a benediction in it. This produced a renewed frenzy of applause. The curtain would stay down as long as it was felt safe and then soar to reveal him far upstage, slightly slumped, tired and caught quite unawares again. In a sort of gentle daze he would turn to us, look around the empty stage as though there must be someone else we were applauding, then put his hand to his chest as if to say, 'Me? You want me?' Gently, wearily, he would come to the footlights to speak to us, his faithful friends. A curtain would fall behind him, creating a sense of intimacy, just him and us. He spoke haltingly, in a little, frail, exhausted voice that carried to the gods. His face was drained, his posture fatigued, his movements tired, all as convincing as they were studied and contrived, and all demanding our sympathy and affection. Slowly, a little forlorn, he strayed off the stage, pausing at the wings for a brief gesture of farewell. We too, left, satisfied and warmed, the familiar ceremony perfectly performed.
Just as these curtain calls were part of a theatrical past, so were the sets. Martin-Harvey's sense of design had been formed at the Lyceum many years ago, when convincing actuality was the absolute requirement. In The Only Way, Dr Manette's garden in Soho, for example, was overhung by trees, their leaves fastened to netting, seeming each to hang in its individual space, an artifice which, while completely transparent, delighted by its ingenuity. The other productions, as I remember, had the same dusty, realistic look. In David Garrick, the walnut panelling fluttered when he climbed in a window and shook even more when Lady Martin-Harvey, cast against type as a faithful serving boy, followed, with some difficulty, over the window sill. The scenic style, his personality, his acting style and the plays he chose made an interlocking whole which, if one part were changed, would collapse into incongruity. Though the concept of 'Sir John Martin-Harvey, actor-manager' was in itself an anachronism, we children of the Empire were not aware.
The Hamlet that entered my memory in 1924 was, for him, a remarkable departure, inspired by Max Reinhardt, a producer-designer who excelled at spectacular simplicity. Harvey had made a couple of runs at Hamlet. His first '. . . in the old Lyceum manner,' for which the text had to be ruthlessly cut to accommodate the many cumbersome changes of scene, all 'authentic' Danish Medieval. Later, struck by the speed and fluidity of the play in rehearsal, without furniture and sets, he tried what he believed to be the method of classical Greece. Then, in 1911 he had a momentous luncheon with Reinhardt who sketched on the menu his own solution to the problem, what he called an 'horizon,' today known as a cyclorama. The entire rear of the stage was a vast concave hemisphere, before which could be flown simple suggestions of battlements, gravestones and trees, or curtains could be hung to indicate interior apartments. There were no cumbersome waits for scene-changes. The cyclorama, almost always in view, presented an expanse of sky whose changing colours kept us aware of time and the outside world. Harvey adopted this and produced a nearly uncut version of the play, performed without intermission. It was a box-office and critical success, although dismissed by The Times and a few others who could not forgive him his provincial acclaim. Harvey adapted the cyclorama to touring and it was this production that made me a happy captive of theatre.
Harvey's was a particular, undemanding style of theatre. Its audience was most forgiving of the plays and of the productions; as long as we had the star we were contented. And we were forgiving of the star himself. We forgave the occasional curtain calls between the acts and the rumours of the royal etiquette he had attempted in imitation of Irving, forbidding anyone in the company to address him without being spoken to first. We overlooked the political and social pronouncements that anticipated Col Blimp. We accepted the programme listing that showed everyone as Mr and Miss, including Miss N de Silva whose true identity was revealed in brackets (Lady Martin-Harvey). We even forgave his loyalty to her. Both her age and weight defied belief in the innocent maidens she usually played. The London critic, J T Grein, grimly wrote of her work, '. . . silence would be dishonest criticism.' As for the plays themselves, we had no idea what threadbare stuff they were. They came from overseas and that was good enough for us.
London had at first welcomed the young actor-manager with a generous kindness but seems, fairly soon, to have become disillusioned by his lack of development. After all, he remained 'Sydney Carton' from the age of thirty-seven until he was sixty-eight. The London audiences followed the critics. Only rarely did his London seasons pay.
When he offered The Only Way, Oscar Wilde, Shaw, Ibsen, Henry Arthur Jones and A W Pinero were already known, their plays were in modern dress. Granville Barker and Galsworthy were in the wings. Who, having seen Caesar and Cleopatra, could take seriously A Cigarette Maker's Romance even as an evening out? After 1918 the cocktail and cigarette holder superseded the fan and wine glass for gestures of sophistication; the gap between London and the provinces widened. What, after all, was an audience just discovering Chekhov to make of The Breed of the Treshams? His final production, The King's Messenger, was greeted with incredulity in London. In Canada, however, the Montreal Daily Star cried, 'This is a drama that lives, vibrant with truth.'
The provincial (and the colonial) is made uneasy by the intellectual output of the capital. Amid the jumble of novelties and surprising perspectives, how to tell the good from the fad? Safer to cling to the known than to risk the embarrassment of being wrong. So, while in London The Breed of the Treshams averaged only five hundred pounds a week, in Manchester it took over nine hundred.
The provincial public was loyal to Martin-Harvey as a family friend and took pleasure in the act of loyalty to a favourite. His glamour was not disturbing: there was nothing sexual in it, nor in his plays. One could, and did, take maiden aunts or children to any production, a strong recommendation. Long queues at the box office became fixed components of his tours. If any evidence of his standing were needed, it was provided some thirty years later by my Aunt Ada, whose Evangelicalism forbade her entering a theatre. As I left her house in Bolton to go to London in response to a summons from Tyrone Guthrie, she said, 'If you must be an actor, be a good one, like Sir John Martin-Harvey.' Canada responded identically, giving him some of his record houses. The United States remained, as before the war, impervious to his glamour. One pair of figures is enough to dramatize the difference. In Chicago, with a population of one million, a week of his acclaimed Oedipus, produced by Reinhardt, took $6,900. Winnipeg, a quarter of its size, paid $11,400, and the season had to be extended by a week. Martin-Harvey was so firmly rejected by the States probably for the very reason that he was so warmly embraced in Canada. We were duplicates of his British audiences. We were the sons and daughters, grandchildren, nephews and nieces, brothers and sisters, even uncles and aunts of those who flocked to see him in Glasgow and Hull. The plays were familiar ground to us with their echoes from our English literature classes and reflections from illustrated histories. Their idealized, usually hopeless, and never consummated love did not disturb our still-rural Evangelical consciences. We were safe in his hands.
We were at home with him not only because we were provincial, but because we were also colonial. A function of a colony is to reinforce imperial power by reproducing the mores of the homeland. Sir John, who came to us with an aura of Empire, helped us do our duty. Colonials not only love their common past, but memory is personally important to them; memories of 'Home' flesh out their parents' conversation and identities. They also furnish at second hand much of their own. My mother's Lancashire childhood is part of who I am. Everything came to us from across the Atlantic. In my father's house were sets of Dickens, Macauley, Scott and Stevenson and even Lord Cromer's multi-volume Modern Egypt; there was nothing from the States save Brett Harte and Mark Twain; the only Canadian was Sam Slick of Slickville.
Those born just before the Second World War find it difficult to take in how powerful the Empire was in our unconscious minds. The Union Jack flew wherever flags were flown. In the amateur theatre we spoke with English accents, because that was the theatre. We all knew people who referred to Britain as Home, even though, sometimes, they had never been there. The newsboys selling the afternoon papers shouted, 'Old Country football results.' The well-to-do sent their daughters to London to be presented at court, and silver-framed photographs of the debutantes in feathers and train, taken in London by Dorothy Wilding of course, stood on most grand pianos, often two generations of them. There were no competitors for Ovaltine, for Eno's Fruit Salts and Yardley's brilliantine. The Mirror and the Daily Express each bound the week's issues into Overseas Editions that came across the Atlantic in six days and were on sale at most news stands while the news was fairly fresh, in colonial terms. There were people who read no other papers. I remember being sent from the table for impertinently remarking that the Prince of Wales wouldn't make a good king because he was always falling off his horse and breaking his collarbone. After all we had a vested interest in the monarch because our passports described us as British citizens.
My father had a little travel talk, 'Our Old England,' suitable for most occasions, and in demand for years: 'I say advisedly, our old England because England belongs, not only to those bom on her happy soil, but to all of us.' His great grandfather had come from Scotland to Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century, his grandmother and mother were New Englanders.
Today, this immediate colonial past is often difficult to accept. It tends to bring conversation to a halt, or turns it into a dialectical confrontation. But, that is how we were, and observing our current embarrassed anxiety to expunge the colonial experience, the question arises whether the Union Jack on Ontario's flag and the statues of Queen Victoria in public spaces are any more demeaning than the ubiquitous Golden Arches or the civil forces of occupation commanded by General Motors, General Electric and General Foods. At least there was legitimate family connection overseas.
Martin-Harvey brought us a happy, family-style theatre right up to his terminal tour in 1932, when the company dragged itself from thin to thinner houses. Something had happened, and I do not think it was the Depression alone, nor Famous Players buying up all possible theatres to reduce the competition for their movie houses, nor the transforming addition of dialogue to movies. I think that a younger generation was subconsciously aware of the growing debility of the British connection. We, affected by the nationalism of the Liberal Party and the Dominion civil service, began to reject imperial influence. This was also, perhaps, a covert way of undermining parental rule.
When I saw Martin-Harvey's last performance in Winnipeg, The King's Messenger in 1932, I was not the wide-eyed twelve-year-old who had been absorbed into Hamlet's tragedy in 1924. As I remember that occasion some sixty years later, the theatre was a quarter full. There had been no curtain calls between the acts and a single chilly, perfunctory one at the end. We were gathering our coats, preparing to leave, as the curtain surprisingly came up. A few of us dutifully applauded. The curtain came down and rose again in almost complete silence. There was a little embarrassed applause as it continued, to our bewilderment, to go up and down to no applause, as though it were operated by a machine, as, in a sense, it was. At the last curtain, Martin-Harvey and Miss de Silva stood together, hand in hand, on the bare boards of the stage in the almost empty theatre, looking small, pathetic and somehow lost. The glory of the old tumultuous surges of applause had gone.
A stubborn phenomenon had finally run out of time. Martin-Harvey's long defiance of the twentieth-century theatre had ended. The canvas leaves trembling in Dr Manette's garden, the walnut panelling that flapped when a door was slammed, the shameless spots that followed the star wherever he moved, the whole had become a silly thing, apart from Shakespeare and the authentic personality of the actor, and he was, like the plays, already an historical oddity. The Hamlet that had permanently entered my memory had been superciliously dismissed by the Athenaeum: 'Mr Harvey's Hamlet was not nearly so bad as one had reasonably expected it would be or as other performers have actually been. And if nevertheless, it was bad, it was bad in a rather unusual way.' Still, the absurd pageant of Martin-Harvey's tours, with their sold-out houses, was not a contrived thing. It flourished on strong cultural roots. There was no promotion department, no subscription campaign, no group bookings, no hungry advertising budget as big as production costs. Martin-Harvey's audiences needed no persuasion. He came to us with the imprimatur of the Mother Country. On the level of unconscious, cultural response, the applause that greeted his annual progress across the country looks, from this distance, like the last spontaneous public demonstration of the colonial attitude.
There was something vice-regal about his speeches to Canadian Clubs and Empire Clubs and the excitement that greeted him in every town and city. He was an emissary from the Mother Country in the eyes of the public in a way that the Governor-General could never be. The latter came from the King. Martin-Harvey came from Home.
I do not think that the imperial mini-court at Rideau Hall, with its feeble fringe of provincial lieutenants-governor and modest, domestic Government Houses across the country, ever touched the popular imagination. They were never actually 'there.' The Vice-Regal Drawing-Rooms shared a world of illusion with what went on behind the footlights in the Walker Theatre. The uniforms, the pageantry, the ceremony of the curtsey at the presentations were part of a ritual, as was the curtain-call; but there was this difference, the curtain-call was graced with the true presence.
Drawing-Room and theatre were equally insubstantial, and they faded in the light of common day. And for the Empire, common day indeed was dawning. As I remember Sir John and Lady Martin-Harvey taking their last curtain, I seem to see, as through a transparency, across the years, the shadowy farewell of another theatrical couple, His Excellency the heavily decorated and glittering Field Marshal, the Earl Alexander of Tunis and his Countess, the last of the imported Excellencies. A feeling of pleasant and amused melancholy, of eheu! fugaces labuntur anni, seeps into my remembering mind. How fluidly times change. How inevitable it seems that the actor's final forlorn tour should be in 1932, the year after the Statute of Westminster received royal assent and, for the Dominions, the Empire effectively ceased to exist.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BEERBOHM, Max. More Theatres. London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1969
DISHER, M W. The Last Romantic, the Authorised Biography of Sir John Martin-Harvey. London: Hutchinson, 1948
EDGAR, George. Martin Harvey, Some Pages of His Life. London: Grant Richards, 1912
GREIN, J T. Dramatic Criticism 1900-1901. London: Greening & Co Ltd, 1902
HARVEY, Ruth Walker. Curtain Time. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1949
MARTIN-HARVEY, Sir John. Autobiography. London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co, 1934
Athenaeum, London 25 Feb 1899 and 2 Jan 1920
Daily Star, Montreal 12 Jan 1932
Evening Telegram, Toronto 8 Jan 1924
Evening Tribune, Winnipeg 10 Feb 1932
Gazette, Montreal 12 Jan 1932
Times, London 9 May 1916
The author would like to acknowledge the editorial advice of J.T. Wills, Ph.D. (Toronto).