THE IRVING PROJECT
The starting point for this project is Henry Irving's late-Victorian production of The Bells, adapted by Leopold Lewis from Le Juif Polonais, the French melodrama by Erckmann and Chatrian. Produced at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1871, The Bells gave Irving his major breakthrough and first landmark role. Irving plays Mathias, a well-to-do innkeeper who is guilty of a brutal murder committed twenty years before the action of the play. The impending marriage of Mathias's daughter to the local constable reopens innocent speculation about the unsolved crime. Mathias, tortured by guilt, suffers flashbacks and endures a dream — or rather nightmare — trial in which he is rumbled by a mesmerist.
The play is a late melodrama and features melodrama's characteristic use of morally-delineated storyline, tableaux, musical punctuation and heightened expression. We will also research Irving's style of acting, poised between the dominant presumptions of melodrama and the bravura psychological complexities that he would develop in subsequent performances. Irving became the leading actor of his age, a household name and a pioneer of new realism in acting and new technologies in production.
Now, barely a hundred years later, he is little known except to theatre aficionados and scholars. However, recordings of Irving's voice exist, along with a wealth of pictures, portraits and contemporary accounts. We can piece together a fairly accurate portrayal of Irving's acting style from these records, and our early explorations suggest that the results are both fascinating and exciting. Of course the performance looks mannered and high-flown, but it has an immediacy and clarity that — in context of the story — are most powerful.
We want to explore a restaging of parts of The Bells, using Irving's idiom. We also want to explore the thematic material — a man riven by guilt at a past indiscretion — to see what sort of story it might tell today and what sort of moral universe it would exist within.
We imagine a piece whose central character is a contemporary actor. The actor is playing Irving in a TV drama-documentary. The actor has his own guilty secret that catches up with and destroys him. During the piece we will unravel issues to do with theatricality, melodrama, the performance of emotion, the 'reality' of feeling, and the nature of guilt in contemporary Western society.