Walter Sickert: A Life. Matthew Sturgis

       I THE UTILITY PLAYER

      I wonder all the managers in London are not after him.

       (Maggie Cobden to Dorothy Richmond)

      Sickert’s stage career got off to a false start. At the beginning of the New Year of 1879 he collapsed with a bad case of flu and was laid up for almost a fortnight. Although, as he wrote to his friend Pollard, he might have been able to ‘excel in all dying scenes, old men & anything feeble’, his availability was unknown. Instead he was obliged to channel his returning energies into schemes of his own. The days of his convalescence were spent – when not ‘feebly pottering about the neighbourhood with a stick’ – in devising plays. After toying with, and discarding, several ideas he decided to dramatize a novel by the German, G. F. Richter, and then mount a drawing-room production of it. Progress, however, was slow.¹

      He hoped, on his recovery, to see Mrs Bateman, who had recently taken on the management of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre; but the main focus of his ambition was fixed, unsurprisingly, upon the Lyceum.² Irving was now in sole charge of the theatre, opening his first production on the penultimate day of the old year, to the rapturous acclaim of his supporters. He had engaged, as his leading lady, Ellen Terry, and in her he found a perfect foil for his own greatness. Her acting was considered to have an unmatched candour, and an emotional depth that owed something to the vicissitudes of her early life.

She came of theatrical stock. The daughter of actors, four of her ten siblings were also on the stage. In 1864, at the age of sixteen, she had given up a successful career as a child star and contracted an ill-advised marriage with the already middle-aged and finicky painter, G. F. Watts. He had been captivated by her distinctive grace, and spent much of their short period together recording it in drawings and paintings. The rest of the time he spent in repenting of his decision to marry. He had hoped, as he put it, ‘to remove an impulsive girl from the dangers and temptations of the stage’, but he soon discovered that the stage could not be so easily removed from the girl. His new wife could create more than enough drama in a domestic setting. After barely a year, they separated.³ Ellen returned briefly to her family, before eloping with the mercurial architect and stage-designer E. W. Godwin. For five years they lived together happily in Hertfordshire, in sin and ever-increasing debt. Ellen bore two illegitimate children, Edith and Edward, before she was lured back to the theatre in 1874.^* Her relationship with Godwin did not long survive her return, but in 1877, after finally receiving a divorce from Watts, she married the actor Charles Wardle (who performed under the stage name Charles Kelly), and achieved the haven of stability. At the time of her arrival at the Lyceum she was thirty-one and considered by discerning judges ‘the most beautiful woman of her times’ – even if it remained a mystery just how she achieved this with her pale eyes, long tip-tilted nose, broad mouth, and ‘tow-like’ hair.⁴ Her presence at the Lyceum added a new lustre to the place. The adulation that had previously been fixed upon Irving alone became fixed upon her as well. She was one half of a twin-headed deity. And she was another reason for Sickert wishing to join the Lyceum company.

      At the beginning of March he reported excitedly that he was hoping for ‘something’ at the theatre. To prepare himself he went every night ‘to observe’.⁵ He also took up fencing lessons to improve his posture and fit himself for the swash and buckle of the high Victorian repertoire.⁶ Through a family friend he was introduced to Irving and put into contact with the person responsible for hiring the company’s ‘supers’ – the non-speaking extras needed for crowd scenes, stage battles, and general ‘business’.⁷ The Lyceum employed dozens, if not hundreds, of them. Most were mere drudges, ‘small wage earners’ adding to their income by taking on an evening job. But there was a select band of enthusiasts, known in the theatre as ‘Lyceum young men’ – ambitious trainees starting out on their theatrical careers. Sickert joined their ranks. The ‘Lyceum young men’ enjoyed certain small privileges. If any part required some modicum of intelligence or flair – or perhaps even included a line – it was given to one to them. They even had their own green room.⁸ It is not known in which production Sickert first ‘walked on’; but by the end of the month he was able to get tickets for Alfred Pollard and his sisters to attend the first night of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Lady of Lyons.⁹ For Sickert, at the age of nineteen, to be on stage with Irving and Terry was to savour the full glamour of the theatrical world.¹⁰

      Despite his lowly status he was acknowledged by Irving and treated with kindly consideration.¹¹ He also came to know Ellen Terry. She lived in Longridge Road, close to the Sickerts’ Kensington home, and sent her two children to the same advanced primary school attended by young Oswald and Leonard.¹² Walter developed a crush on her which she graciously indulged. In one letter to Pollard he boasted that he had spent an evening in her company, remarking complacently that friends had begun to suspect that there was some ‘MissTerry’ about his movements.¹³ On another occasion, after he had taken Helena to a musical soirée at a friend’s house, he made an impromptu call at Longridge Road on the way home, much to his sister’s delight and alarm.¹⁴

It was perhaps through Ellen Terry that Walter was introduced to E. W. Godwin. Despite their separation, he and Ellen had remained on close terms: he continued to design costumes for her, and to offer advice upon her acting.^* Godwin called at Pembroke Gardens early in the year, and soon afterwards invited Walter to dine with him and his young wife – the painter Beatrice Birnie Philip – at their elegantly underfurnished home in Taviton Street, Bloomsbury, where the white and strawcoloured drawing room was dominated by a life-size cast of the Venus de Milo.¹⁵ Although he continued to carry out occasional architectural commissions, Godwin had become increasingly absorbed in his stage work, designing, with a devoted regard for the details of historical accuracy, sets, costumes, and properties. (When asked to make designs for Wilson Barrett’s production of Hamlet,