The year is 1782, six years since Mrs Sarah Siddons made her disappointing debut at Drury Lane. The two patent theatres still hold sway. Drury Lane is under the management of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Garrick has died three years earlier. King George III has been on the throne for 22 years and is becoming reconciled to the reality of losing America to independence. He has not yet shown true signs of the mental illness he is later to become so well-known for.
In the meantime Mrs Siddons has spent those six years honing her art in the provinces, initially in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool and then Bath and Bristol, during which time she has acquired a considerable reputation, particularly in tragedy, including the title role in Hamlet. She travels everywhere with her husband, who is effectively now her business manager, and their two children.
And now here’s an astonishing thing: the theatres in Bath and Bristol were owned by the same man (John Palmer, not ‘Plausible’ Jack of the Royal Circus). During the season, which lasted eight months from October to May, Mrs S travelled between Bath and Bristol several times a week performing over thirty different characters in both theatres, often returning by coach overnight, and to cap it all, she was heavily pregnant at the time. Whether out of dedication to her craft or necessity, or most likely both, that is remarkable in itself.
She has been recommended to Richard Brinsley Sheridan many times by countless people over the years, but she has so far resisted the call to perform at Drury Lane partly out of pique, after her initial humiliation. When she finally succumbs, in 1782, it is – she claims – for financial reasons only
Her second appearance at Drury Lane did that rare thing that Garrick had done before her and Edmund Kean was to do after her: it set the town alight.
Sarah Siddons was not, at that stage in her career at least, over-brimming with confidence, especially after her previous ‘failure’. She was extremely nervous and did not believe her voice could fill the vastness of the Drury Lane Theatre. She was to play a part she’d played before, the title role of Isabella in David Garrick’s adaptation of the Thomas Southerne play The Fatal Marriage. It was a melodrama about a young woman who, believing her long-absent husband to be dead, marries again in order to provide for her son (played at Drury Lane by her own son), only to be confronted the following day by that same husband, at which point, mortified, she kills herself.
The reaction was instantaneous. It became known as ‘one of the celebrated nights in the English theatre, comparable only with the night Garrick took the town by storm in Richard III in October 1741’ [1], or years later when Edmund Kean played Shylock.
Mrs Siddons had audience members in tears, crying out, shrieking, even fainting. By the second night the whole town was fighting for a seat. William Hazlitt said of her, ‘She was not less than a goddess or a prophetess inspired by the Gods. Power was seated on her brow, passion radiated from her breast as from a shrine. She was Tragedy personified.’ [2]
It’s hard to imagine such hyperbole these days, but it is an indication if nothing else of the utterly extraordinary qualities of these superstar actors that they could make such an impact on their first appearance, on audiences and critics alike.
So what was it about Sarah Siddons that she is considered even now to be the greatest actress that ever was?
Portraits of her show her to have a strong face, not conventionally beautiful and certainly not pretty, with a large nose and heavy eyebrows. She was described by critics and onlookers of the time, as being ‘above the middle size’, with ‘sufficient muscle to bestow a roundness upon the limbs, and her attitudes are, therefore, distinguished equally by energy and grace . . . Her face is peculiarly happy, the features being finely formed, though strong . . . [and] so thoroughly harmonised when quiescent, and so expressive when impassioned, that most people think her more beautiful than she is.’ [3] They praised her voice, which could go quite unexpectedly from ‘a tender melancholy’ to a ‘piercing shriek’. They praised her naturalness, her authenticity, the extraordinary way she could convey what she was thinking through her eyes. ‘By her countenance alone,’ wrote one, ‘she could signify anger, revenge, sarcasm, sorrow, pride, and joy, so perfectly, that it was impossible to misunderstand her, though she had not spoken a word.’ ‘What is still more delightful,’ they went on, ‘she is an original; she copies no one, living or dead, but acts from Nature itself.’[4]
Here is perhaps part of the secret of all great actors and actresses: they are quite unlike anyone else. They don’t necessarily have to be mould-breakers, like David Garrick. They don’t have to be more beautiful or more graceful or more eloquent than their peers. But they do have to be distinctly different. Mrs S had something else – the ability to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse, by dint of her total belief in and dedication to whatever she was playing in at the time. And in the age – an age that lasted most of the century – of the melodrama this was saying something. As her one-time biographer remarked: ‘No performer was destined oftener than Mrs Siddons to expend superlative genius on the acting of indifferent dramas . . . Where there was little or no poetry, she made it for herself; and might be said to have become at once both the dramatist and the actress.’ [5] [6]
Here’s more irony: throughout her career and apart from Shakespeare most of the plays Sarah Siddons performed in were pretty mediocre. She specialised in ‘wronged women’ parts in what were described as ‘fustian melodrama’, none of which have survived and none of which would last a moment on a contemporary stage. That said, these plays obviously suited her talents. Whether she would have thrived as she did in another era with a different genre of plays we’ll never know.
She studied and re-studied the texts she performed in detail, and unlike some of her predecessors in performance she was completely immersed, to the extent that she insisted on leaving open the door to her dressing room so she could hear everything that was happening on stage.
Why did she keep working throughout the year with so few breaks? Whenever she was not appearing at Drury Lane – during the summer months for instance – she immediately zipped off to the provinces or to Dublin and carried on performing there. She claimed she did it because she needed the money, which is understandable up to a point as she did have a growing family - she had seven children in all, not all of whom survived childhood - and she was its major breadwinner. But there’s also a feeling that like many actors Mrs S did not feel quite a whole person except when she was on stage.
This was actually confirmed some time later when in her retirement she told a friend that on stage she found ‘a vent for her private sorrows, which enabled her to bear them better.’[7] This is a great insight into not just what made Sarah Siddons tick, but into the state of her marriage and her family.
Her success continued, and with it came criticism, of both her performance – which some claimed did not hold a candle to Mrs Pritchard – and to her offstage behaviour. This last was usually out of revenge or jealousy, as there’s no indication she was ever cruel or remotely badly behaved or anything other than generous. She did not socialise as much as some people would have liked, partly because of her shyness but mostly because her family was so important to her. She won the enthusiastic approval of King George and Queen Charlotte and was invited many times to Buckingham House (as it then was) to give readings.
But the part she truly turned into her own was Lady Macbeth. Later in her life she wrote a lengthy analysis of Lady M, emphasising the woman’s femininity, her complexity and her unbounded ambition, and pointing out that while her husband shows her obvious affection from the start she does not reciprocate in any way until very late in the piece. What had been lacking in previous interpretations, she claimed, was a realisation of Lady M’s sudden and profound feelings of remorse. Possessed of a higher intelligence than her husband and a greater sensitivity, this is the reason she loses her mind as a result of the murder of Duncan and he does not. Her death is sudden and unexplained: ‘The queen my lord is dead’. Just like that, and we are left to assume that, unable to bear the pain of remorse, she killed herself.
None of this sounds particularly ground-breaking to us now. Mrs Siddons it’s said did not play the character in the way she wrote about her, maybe because, according to Roger Manvell, ambivalence was not then ‘valued for its dramatical and psychological potentialities’. An audience brought up on melodrama was not yet ready for ambiguity or subtlety, you could say.
Coming next: The other Kemble
Sources
Actors on Acting, Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy
Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress, Roger Manvell
British Theatre, Simon Trussler, Cambridge Illustrated History
[1] Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress, Roger Manvell
[2] Actors on Acting
[3] Manvell
[4] Manvell
[5] Thomas Campbell, cited in Sarah Siddons, Manvell
[6] This inevitably leads me to something I have often discussed with fellow actors in the past: do you have to believe in the play you are performing? How does an actor cope with a play he or she knows is no good? In my case the answer was I had to fool myself into thinking the play I was in was good. When a boyfriend of the time came to see me in a play about Winston Churchill many moons ago and I asked him what he thought, he replied: ‘There’s nothing wrong that a new play with new actors and a new director couldn’t fix’. That was the end of that relationship. If you don’t believe in the words you’re saying and the character you are portraying you are lost, in my view. Personal discernment has to take second place to total loyalty and belief in the work in hand.
[7] British Theatre, Simon Trussler