Ellen Terry: ‘All Divine Things Run on Light Feet’

Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph of Ellen Terry at the age of 16

Ellen: I’ve never understood why ‘theatrical’ should be a term of abuse… Nobody says of music that it’s too musical, why then do they say of theatre that it’s too theatrical?

Recently, I very much enjoyed ‘Grace Pervades’, a new play by David Hare that reflects on the nature of theatre and the acting life. (The Theatre Royal, Bath. Now over, but there’ll be a London transfer to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket from April 2026.)

Irving: Did you know that in Shakespeare there are seventeen ‘no’s to every one ‘yes’?... All his power is in the negative.

We meet Henry Irving (Ralph Fiennes), the towering figure of the nineteenth century British stage. He is lofty, awkward and gloomy, has a leg that drags slightly, and a deep voice that pronounces ‘god’ as ‘gud.’  

Irving: My critics accuse me of being dour… An evening in my company can on occasions be very grim.

Irving has built his formidable reputation on Shakespearean tragedies and historical pageants. And he is rather dismissive of modern writers like Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw.

Irving: Too small. Too petty. Not large enough… People arguing isn’t theatre. People making points. 

Irving, planning to establish a new theatre company at the Lyceum in London (‘A company of equals in which I am the boss.’), enlists Ellen Terry (Miranda Raison) to join his players. She, by contrast with the great actor-manager, is cheerful, spontaneous and talkative; and her performing style is light, airy and understated.

Ellen: People say, ‘Oh she’s so natural,’ as if I were making no effort. It infuriates me…They don’t seem to realise floating is a technique.

Terry refuses to be a slave to tradition. In preparation for playing Ophelia, she visits an asylum, and she proposes to break with convention by playing her mad scene in white. She also tries to persuade Irving to put on more of Shakespeare’s comedies.

Ellen: Nobody needs to be told that life is terrible. They know it already. Tragedy is for people who don’t understand life and need it explained to them. Comedy is for those who already know.

Though very different characters, with very different approaches to their craft, Irving and Terry strike up an enduring partnership, which makes the Lyceum venture a roaring success. Terry is even emboldened to offer Irving some advice.

Ellen: I have a feeling that your acting could be improved if from time to time you directed your gaze at the other actor.

I was taken with Terry’s description of her own naturalistic acting style. 

Ellen: I put in just as much effort as anyone else, but I aim to excel at not letting it show.

For Terry, ease, grace and spontaneity are fundamental to her technique. 

Ellen: Myself, I never leave the dressing room till the last possible moment. I put down the newspaper I am reading, or the light novel, I fly down the stairs, sometimes I confess I even take the banisters, and then at the last possible moment – I pass. I pass from one world to another. I cross the invisible line between the real world and the imagined. 

In the field of commerce, it’s quite common for executives to make very public displays of their effort and industry. Confronted with a crisis, they are overwrought, melodramatic, histrionic. Their stress is contagious, their pessimism infectious. And inevitably they have an adverse impact on morale.

Ellen: I don’t regard actors who sweat and spit as especially accomplished. Grunting and heaving. That kind of behaviour belongs more properly on a building site.

I have always admired those who display calm under pressure, who radiate positivity and poise; cool-headed confidence and serene unflappability. I worked for many years at BBH with the incomparable Jon Peppiatt. He made every problem seem soluble, every barrier passable, every goal possible. As AA Gill wrote of the work of PG Wodehouse:

‘Success is not achieved, it is underachieved.’

John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, 1889, Tate Britain, London, UK.

Henry Irving is widely credited with making theatre respectable in Britain. A hard taskmaster, at the Lyceum he raised standards of both performance and staging, significantly increasing the numbers of actors, stagehands and designers. Motivating his staff with better pay and lavish parties, he was also a master of publicity, cultivating the press and royalty. In 1895 he became the first actor to be awarded a knighthood. He died in 1905, aged 67, having suffered a stroke at the end of a performance of Becket at the Theatre Royal, Bradford. Legend has it that his last lines on stage were ‘Into thy hands, O Lord, into thy hands.’ 

Ellen Terry was Irving’s leading lady for more than two decades. Touring extensively with him in Britain and America, she was much loved by the public, and was immortalised in a painting by Sargent. After Irving’s death, she performed the plays of Shaw and Ibsen, appeared in silent films and lectured on Shakespeare’s heroines. Her career lasted nearly seven decades. She is particularly remembered for her naturalistic style. In ‘Grace Pervades’ she quotes Friedrich Nietzsche:

‘All divine things run on light feet.’

'On the roller coaster ride
That my emotions have to take me on,
I heard a newborn baby cry
Through the night.
I heard a perfect echo die
Into an anonymous wall of digital sound,
Somewhere deep inside
Of my soul.
A natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature.
Don't judge yourself too harsh, my love.
Or someday you might find your soul endangered.
A natural beauty should be preserved like a monument to nature.’
Neil Young, 'Natural Beauty'

No. 530

Robert Moses, ‘Trapped in a Dream’: How a Leader Can Go from Hero to Villain

Robert Moses, urban planner. Roosevelt Island, New York, 1959.Credit...Arnold Newman/Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery

Moses: The dynamo of capitalism is restlessness. Nothing is ever enough. For us, nothing is ever settled. We are always on the move.

I recently watched ‘Straight Line Crazy,’ a fine new David Hare play about the urban planner Robert Moses. (The Bridge Theatre, London until 18 June)

Moses: Once Americans cease to believe they can remake America better, then it ceases to be America.

Though he was never elected to any public office, Moses was often described as the most powerful man in New York. As head of the New York City and Long Island State Parks Commissions between 1924 and 1963 (along with holding many other official roles), he built a system of 627 miles of expressway, connecting the city to the great outdoors. He created bridges, parks and swimming pools.He led the construction of the 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs in New York and helped persuade the United Nations to locate its headquarters in Manhattan. 

Moses: A leader makes the mood, he’s not a victim of it.

Moses began his career with an avowed intent to improve the lives of ordinary city dwellers. But he ended it a pariah - criticised for the destruction of communities to make way for his road schemes; for his unwavering commitment to the car; for his refusal to embrace mass transit; for his disregard for public opinion.

Moses: Your principal error is this: to imagine that the people’s views are of any importance at all…We must advance their fortunes without having any respect for their opinions.

Moses provides a case study in how a leader’s resolute commitment to a vision can evolve into intransigence and anachronism; how a hero can over time become a villain.

Moses: People may not like me, but they need me… I’d rather be right and alone, than be soft and with other people.

Robert Moses with a model lower end of Manhattan and the bridge with which it is proposed to connect Battery Park with Brooklyn, March 1939. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The play focuses on two significant years in Moses’ life: 1926 and 1955.

We begin with a young Moses planning a scheme to build two big expressways across Long Island. Alert to changing social needs and aspirations, he wants to give New Yorkers access to the region’s woods, open spaces and beaches.

Moses: The people have discovered a new occupation. It’s called leisure. And one day it will be as popular as work.

Long Island is peaceful, sparsely populated and controlled by a few aristocratic families who are united in their opposition to his scheme. Moses has learnt that in order to get any project off the ground, he needs to be comfortable with confrontation and conflict.

Moses: People characteristically revolt against any innovation…Nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved without initial resistance.

Indeed Moses is prepared to press ahead with road construction ahead of attaining final sign-off.

Moses: Once you sink that first stake, they’ll never make you pull it up. Public work relies on one thing. Impetus… Anyone can argue about where a freeway ought to be. But it’s pretty damn hard to argue about where it is.

Moses is highly intelligent, hard working, rational and uncompromising. He has fixed views, and is particularly convinced of the liberating power of the motor car.

Moses: People like cars. You own something and you’re in control. That’s a nice feeling. When I was young, America was sitting there, like a tin can. The car was the can opener. Still is.

Though Moses is reserved, socially awkward and wary of the public stage, he is driven by a fundamentally democratic urge. 

Moses: I’m in a hurry, and I’m in a hurry to help – to help the millions out there who have no access to a good life. And if a few fences get kicked over in the process, does that really matter?

At length Moses achieves his objective on Long Island with the help of a supportive Governor, a sympathetic New York Times and an amenable judge. 

The play then leaps ahead to 1955. Moses is proposing to put a four-lane highway through Washington Square in Manhattan. The scheme will alleviate traffic congestion in the area and create horizontal routes to match the existing vertical expressways.

Moses: What kind of city have we created where roads run up and down, but nothing runs across? …It’s an offence against logic and against reason.

Moses has little regard for the impact the development will have on the local neighbourhoods.

Moses: Things must exist for a purpose. SoHo has no purpose. Vitality is dependent on function. And when function decays, so does life.

However, Moses comes up against a group of community activists, foremost amongst whom is architectural journalist and writer Jane Jacobs. She challenges his view that the automobile should drive decisions about urban development. And she thinks he is ‘straight line crazy.’

Jacobs: Mr Moses is a man under hypnosis. He got hypnotized at the age of twenty-five by two ideas and they’re both delusions. First, he has this insane idea that the answer to the problem of too many cars is more cars. And second, he’s convinced the answer to the problem of congestion on our roads is more roads.

Jacobs believes cities are vibrant, organic ecosystems that should be planned from the bottom-up. 

Jacobs as chair of a Greenwich Village civic group at a 1961 press conference

Jacobs: Cities grow up. They just happen. Bit by bit. Hand a city to the planners and they’ll make it a desert. Hand it to the people and they’ll make it habitable. Robert Moses looks at the West Village and he sees a slum. I look at the West Village and I see a healthy neighbourhood. I see life.

We realise that Moses’ forceful, top-down style of leadership, which once made him so successful, now represents an impediment. He has lost touch with public sentiment. He’s a man out of time.

Moses: The people lack imagination. The job of the leader is to provide it.

Ultimately Moses is defeated by an alliance of middle-class campaigners, political progressives and broader public opinion. In the play his long-time colleague Finnuala Connell (a fictional character) summarises the cause of his demise.

Finnuala: Once you believed in cars because you thought they would liberate people. Now you force people into cars and you force cars onto roads because you want to be vindicated. It’s no longer about the people. It’s about you…You’re stuck. You’re stuck with an idea you had thirty years ago. And you can’t move on. Is there anything worse than being trapped in a dream?

Robert Moses provides a lesson for us all. Leaders need insight into cultural change, a vision that addresses that change, a strategy to deliver and the iron will to see things through. Moses had all these capabilities. But as the world evolved, his views remained the same. What once was self-confidence became arrogance; what once was resolve became intransigence. He loved progress, but only in the direction he envisaged. He liked to regard the city from a distance, from above: all grand schemes, expansive concepts and logical systems. But the broader his perspective, the less room it had for empathy and community. And in the end he was wrong.

This does not mean however that Moses’ opponents were entirely right. At the close of the play Jacobs reflects on the fact that theirs was a hollow victory.

Jacobs: Our efforts to preserve Greenwich Village and SoHo succeeded in transforming it into the most expensive piece of real estate in the world. What was once a community was cleansed of everyone but the rich. The Village was saved, but it was also destroyed.

[If you’re interested in learning more about this subject, I’d recommend the 2016 documentary about Jane Jacobs, ‘Citizen Jane: Battle for the City’.]

'Oh, can't anybody see,
We've got a war to fight?
Never found our way,
Regardless of what they say.
How can it feel this wrong?
From this moment,
How can it feel, this wrong?’’

Portishead, ‘Roads’ (B Gibbons / A Utley / G Barrow)

No. 369

Relative Values: Considering Collective Good in the Workplace

David Hare, 1979. Loveridge/Evening Standard/Getty Images

‘You think attitudes are all to do with whim. You understand nothing. Attitudes are all to do with character.’
Nrovka, ‘The Bay at Nice.’

I recently saw a compelling revival of David Hare’s 1986 play ‘The Bay at Nice.’ (The Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 4 May.)

We are in Leningrad in 1956, and Valentina Nrovka, a Russian artist, has been invited to the Hermitage to offer her opinion on the authenticity of a Matisse painting. 

Nrovka has had a fascinating life. She spent her youth living freely among the expatriate artists in Paris. She was taught painting by Matisse and had a daughter by a soldier who was just passing through. Then in 1921 she returned home to post-revolutionary Russia out of a sense of duty, of responsibility to the greater good. She now cuts a somewhat melancholy figure, disappointed by the flawed realities of the Soviet state.

‘Everyone here lives in the future. Or in the past. No one wants the present.’

Nrovka’s daughter Sophia meets her at the museum to seek help in arranging a divorce - a complex and expensive business within the Russian system. Nrovka, however, is sceptical of the durability of her daughter’s love for her new man, Linitsky.

‘We all have a dream of something else. For you it’s Linitsky. Linitsky’s your escape. How will it be when he becomes your reality? When he’s not your escape? When he’s your life?’

Nrovka is also more broadly critical of Sophia’s romantic talk of free will, rights and liberty. 

‘’I must be myself, I must do what I want…’ I have heard these words before. On boulevards. In cafes. I used to hear them in Paris. I associate them with zinc tables and the gushing of beer. Everyone talking about their entitlements. ‘I must be allowed to realize myself.’ For me it had a different name. I never called it principle. I called it selfishness.’

Whilst Nrovka is negatively predisposed to her daughter’s divorce proposals, she is happy to discuss the principles of painting that she learned from Matisse.

‘Each colour depends on what is placed next to it. One tone is just a colour. Two tones are a chord, which is life….No line exists on its own. Only with its relation to another do you create volume.’

We realise that Nrovka has applied Matisse’s artistic beliefs to her own life: she relinquished her individual freedom in pursuit of collective good; she chose belonging over independence; she found comfort in the context of shared homeland, culture and community.

Hare’s play resonated with me because Nrovka’s core arguments seem so unfashionable today. In the modern era we concentrate so much on self-help, self-improvement and self-actualisation; on individuality, autonomy and free will. We want to achieve our own particular goals, to realise our personal potential, to be the best that we can be. We all aspire to be a star performer, a hero or a headline act. We’d all like to play a leading role in our own movies. 

We talk less often nowadays about the rewards of shared success and collective accomplishment; about the benefits of belonging and participating; about team, comradeship, unity and kinship. 

And yet there are compensations to be found in mutuality and togetherness at work. There are consolations in subordinating the self to the collective. Indeed you could argue that in this age of interdependence it is only in the context of the group that we can ever attain individual contentment.

When investors seek to determine an asset’s worth, they don’t just look at its intrinsic value. They also take into account the value of similar assets, thereby establishing ‘relative value’. Maybe we should apply both intrinsic and relative perspectives to our own careers.

Reflecting further on Matisse’s creative practice, Nrovka observes that the great artist worked incredibly hard, finding inspiration in everything around him. When he was tired and needed to relax, he would put his palette down and go to the mountains.

‘You can’t paint a mountain. The scale is all wrong.’

'Here's my chance to dance my way
Out of my constrictions.
Givin' you more of what you're funkin’ for,
Feet don't fail me now.
Do you promise to funk, the whole funk,
Nothin' but the funk?
One nation under a groove,
Gettin' down just for the funk of it.
One nation and we're on the move,
Nothin' can stop us now.’

Funkadelic, 'One Nation Under a Groove' (G Clinton / G Shider / W Morrison / E Krause / F Harrison / T Kendrick / C Branch / O Johnson)

No. 227