It began with Kean and ended with The Second Mrs Tanqueray and was nobly illustrated. Almost every page was enriched by marginal notes in Gramp’s handwriting. ‘My father recollected this performance.’ ‘I saw him as an old man.’ ‘Drank.’ ‘No good in comedy.’ ‘Mannered and puerile.’ ‘Drank himself to death.’ ‘Noble as Coriolanus. ‘ The most exciting of these remarks appeared in the chapter on Edmund Kean. ‘Old Hoskins’ it read ‘gave me Kean’s coat.’
The second parcel contained the coat. It was made of tawny-coloured plush-velvet and lined with brown silk that had worn to threadpaper and torn away from its handsewn stitching. Pieces of tarnished gold braid dangled from the collar and cuffs. It was tiny.
‘It’s very kind of Gramp,’ my mother said, ‘to give you Kean’s coat. You must take care of it.’
I wish we had asked him to write down the story of its coming into his hands. As far as I have been able to piece it together from memory, conjecture and subsequent reading, it should run something like this. ‘Old Hoskins’, who as I remember them, appears frequently in Gramp’s marginal comments, was a family acquaintance. He was the son of a Devonshire squire and became an actor of merit, often playing with Samuel Phelps. When a stuttering West Country lad called John Brodribb first came to London, Mr Hoskins, having seen him in an amateur performance, very kindly gave him lessons in speechcraft and technique and a letter of introduction to an actor-manager. In 1853 when Hoskins sailed for Australasia, young Brodribb changed his name to Henry Irving and went on the stage.
A few years later Mr Hoskins turned up in New Zealand and renewed his acquaintance with Gramp. It is in my mind that much of this was in the notes but they were so copious and diffuse and often so difficult to make out that I skipped a great many of them. Kean’s coat had been passed on to Mr Hoskins by somebody – Phelps? – and he gave it to my grandfather in gratitude for an obligation that he was unable to repay in any other way. It was an heirloom.
About thirty years after Gramp gave me the coat, Sir Laurence Olivier played Richard III in Christchurch. There are few, a very few, actors of today in whom there is a particular quality that is not a sport of personality or even, however individual in character, exclusively their own. Rather, one feels, it is a sudden crystallization, a propitious flowering of an element that is constant in the history of the English theatre: it appeared in Alleyn, no doubt, and in Garrick, in Siddons and in Edmund Kean. When the door on the prompt side opened in a New Zealand theatre and Crookback came on with his face turned away from his audience, this witness to the thing itself, the truth about great acting, was at once evident. When the final curtain had been taken I said to myself: ‘He shall have Kean’s coat.’ And so he did. Gramp was a good judge of acting: he would certainly have approved.
Vivien Leigh tried it on. She was small, slight and delicately shaped and it fitted her enchantingly.
As for the book, I shall relate what happened to it at the appropriate time.
One other of Gramp’s theatre stories sticks in my memory. When he was a very small boy he was taken with his father to call upon William Charles Macready in his dressing room. The production included a big crowd scene. Macready took the little boy by the hand and led him up to one of the bit-part actors who carried him onstage. All he could remember of this experience was being told by his father not to forget it. Stories about Macready abound, many of them authenticated by his own hectic diaries. Actors, perhaps obeying some kind of occupational chemistry, are frequently obstreperous but Macready takes, as we used to say, the buttered bun, for throwing ungovernable tantrums. I like best the stories that collected round his frightful rows in America. These culminated in a pitched battle
The second parcel contained the coat. It was made of tawny-coloured plush-velvet and lined with brown silk that had worn to threadpaper and torn away from its handsewn stitching. Pieces of tarnished gold braid dangled from the collar and cuffs. It was tiny.
‘It’s very kind of Gramp,’ my mother said, ‘to give you Kean’s coat. You must take care of it.’
I wish we had asked him to write down the story of its coming into his hands. As far as I have been able to piece it together from memory, conjecture and subsequent reading, it should run something like this. ‘Old Hoskins’, who as I remember them, appears frequently in Gramp’s marginal comments, was a family acquaintance. He was the son of a Devonshire squire and became an actor of merit, often playing with Samuel Phelps. When a stuttering West Country lad called John Brodribb first came to London, Mr Hoskins, having seen him in an amateur performance, very kindly gave him lessons in speechcraft and technique and a letter of introduction to an actor-manager. In 1853 when Hoskins sailed for Australasia, young Brodribb changed his name to Henry Irving and went on the stage.
A few years later Mr Hoskins turned up in New Zealand and renewed his acquaintance with Gramp. It is in my mind that much of this was in the notes but they were so copious and diffuse and often so difficult to make out that I skipped a great many of them. Kean’s coat had been passed on to Mr Hoskins by somebody – Phelps? – and he gave it to my grandfather in gratitude for an obligation that he was unable to repay in any other way. It was an heirloom.
About thirty years after Gramp gave me the coat, Sir Laurence Olivier played Richard III in Christchurch. There are few, a very few, actors of today in whom there is a particular quality that is not a sport of personality or even, however individual in character, exclusively their own. Rather, one feels, it is a sudden crystallization, a propitious flowering of an element that is constant in the history of the English theatre: it appeared in Alleyn, no doubt, and in Garrick, in Siddons and in Edmund Kean. When the door on the prompt side opened in a New Zealand theatre and Crookback came on with his face turned away from his audience, this witness to the thing itself, the truth about great acting, was at once evident. When the final curtain had been taken I said to myself: ‘He shall have Kean’s coat.’ And so he did. Gramp was a good judge of acting: he would certainly have approved.
Vivien Leigh tried it on. She was small, slight and delicately shaped and it fitted her enchantingly.
As for the book, I shall relate what happened to it at the appropriate time.
One other of Gramp’s theatre stories sticks in my memory. When he was a very small boy he was taken with his father to call upon William Charles Macready in his dressing room. The production included a big crowd scene. Macready took the little boy by the hand and led him up to one of the bit-part actors who carried him onstage. All he could remember of this experience was being told by his father not to forget it. Stories about Macready abound, many of them authenticated by his own hectic diaries. Actors, perhaps obeying some kind of occupational chemistry, are frequently obstreperous but Macready takes, as we used to say, the buttered bun, for throwing ungovernable tantrums. I like best the stories that collected round his frightful rows in America. These culminated in a pitched battle
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