Henry Irving and Bram Stoker enjoyed a relationship which patently worked. Irving provided the star power and the driving force, Bram a bottomless well of loyalty and the administrative capability to keep the show on the road. Their comradeship was without friction or rancour and they remained on good terms for twenty-seven years until that final chilly night in Bradford. So let’s take a look…

One evening in 1851 the twelve-year-old John Henry Brodribb was taken by his father to see Phelps play Hamlet at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, and this was the night the young boy was converted to the theatre. He was born in Somerset and as a child brought up by an aunt in Cornwall. At fourteen he had been found a job…

Students of Henry Irving’s majestic reign at the Lyceum Theatre are, I think, prone to repeat three fallacies about him and his audience. First, that he was almost single-handedly responsible for, and indeed led, the theatrical boom of the late nineteenth century. Second, that he was a simple country boy with little interest in politics who was driven by a…

For the last four years the Society has marked the anniversary of the birth of Sir Henry on 6 February 1838 with a ceremony at the foot of his statue on Charing Cross Road, London, incorporating in it an attempt to place a wreath at his feet some nine or ten feet off the ground – not it must be…

Glancing again through Bram Stoker’s Reminiscences I was reminded that when Irving gave up control of the Lyceum Theatre there were ‘some eighteen years left’ on the lease. So who, I wondered idly, owned the freehold? And who held the freehold when he first became the lessee in 1878? I can now reveal, exclusively in these pages, that H.I.’s ground landlord in 1878…

Though Ellen Terry remains by far the most renowned of Henry Irving’s stage consorts a notable roster of younger actresses such as Lena Ashwell, Jessie Millward, and Ethel Barrymore also enjoyed the privilege of playing opposite the most formidable actor of his time. As ET aged her `usefulness’ to Irving waned. New plays with the Lyceum-style breadth of opportunities for…

This is an extended version of a talk given at the Society’s Buffet Luncheon held at the Savile Club on 27 October 2006. Polonius      My lord, the Queen would speak with you, and presently. Hamlet        Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel? Polonius      By th’ mass and ’tis, like…

In the 1950s Eleanor Farjeon saw John Gielgud play Benedick in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing five times. In her youth she had seen Henry Irving and Ellen Terry act in the same play at the Lyceum but she wrote about Gielgud ‘s performance, ‘The upshot is – and I confess it with the greatest reluctance – Henry Irving is…

Among the ‘big’ red-letter days for Charles Pooter, the Holloway city clerk whose daily life is recorded in George and Weedon Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody, was a ball at the Mansion House. Imagining that he and his wife would be mixing with the most elevated society, Pooter was astonished to meet at the Mansion House his local ironmonger, Farmerson.…

Our chairman Michael Sharvell-Martin has said that the first talk of an Irving Society was during the centenary exhibition at the Royal National Theatre in 1995. This was Curated by Brien Chitty the Society’s Secretary who perhaps had other matters on his mind at the time, not to recollect this specifically. But what our Hon. Sec. does remember is early…