Madge Kendal

Madge Robertson, later Kendal, was born in Grimsby in Lincolnshire,[1][n 1] the youngest of the reportedly 22 children of William Shaftoe Robertson and his wife Margharetta Elisabetta, née Marinus.[4][1][5] Her father was from a theatrical family. He performed at eight theaters his family owned in towns in and around Lincolnshire and later became manager of the same. Her mother was from a Dutch family: her father taught languages in London, and she spoke English with no trace of a foreign accent. At the age of 17, she joined the Robertsons' company, meeting William, whom she married in 1828.[1] Their eldest child was T. W. Robertson, a dramatist who led the movement toward naturalistic acting and design in theatre.[6] Madge's elder sisters Fanny (1830–1903) and Georgina (1840–1913) became actresses.[7] A brother, Edward Shafto Robertson (1844–1871), became an actor.[8] The young Madge attended a music academy[9] and later recorded in her memoirs that her father continually educated her in literature.[10]

Lincolnshire theatres gradually became financially unviable,[n 2] and the Robertsons moved to London in the early 1850s, where William became joint manager of the Marylebone Theatre.[12] There, aged four, Madge played the role of Marie in the drama The Struggle for Gold by Edward Stirling, under her father's management.[13] Other child roles quickly followed, in The Orphan of the Frozen Sea, The Seven Poor Travellers (a stage adaptation of a story by Charles Dickens, in which she appeared as the blind girl, Jeannie),[14] Tit-Tat-Toe (a pantomime) and an old tragedy, The Stranger.[13]

The family moved to Bristol in 1855, where the young Madge played Eva in a dramatised Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which she had four songs. Her singing was much praised, and an operatic career seemed possible, but she contracted diphtheria, and her voice suffered after the removal of her tonsils.[15] Nevertheless, she played a singing role in A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Bath Theatre in 1863, starring the sisters Ellen and Kate Terry as Titania and Oberon, respectively.[1][16] Seventy years later Kendal recalled the production: "Even today I remember Ellen Terry's performance of Titania as a dream of charm. As girls we were 'Nellie' and 'Madge' to one another and 'Nellie' and 'Madge' we remained until her death".[17]

Over this decade, the Robertsons played steadily in provincial theatres. After Bristol and Bath there was a false start in Madge's career when she was engaged to play leading roles in the West End. In July 1865 she opened at the Haymarket Theatre, playing Ophelia to the Hamlet of Walter Montgomery. Her performance attracted favourable notice. The Era wrote:

Miss Madge Robertson … is youthful in figure, but thoroughly practised in her art, and has a bright, intelligent face, which seems capable of expressing every variety of emotion. The mad scene in the fourth act was rendered with much taste, pathos and discrimination, and the debutante obtained a conspicuous share of the honours of the evening.[18]

In the same Haymarket season she played Blanche to Montgomery's King John, and Desdemona to the Othello of Ira Aldridge.[19] But despite good business at the box office, Montgomery was not a top-rank star,[n 3] and the season did not mark a breakthrough in the leading lady's career.[20] Returning for the time being to provincial theatres, she rejoined her mother in Hull. There she played Lady Macbeth opposite Samuel Phelps.[21][n 4] After Hull she went with her father to Liverpool, where she starred in Shakespeare, Sheridan and modern plays.[23]

In April 1867 the Robertsons returned to London, where Madge appeared at Drury Lane, playing Edith Fairlam in The Great City, and then at the Haymarket in E. A. Sothern's company, appearing with him in Our American Cousin, Brother Sam, David Garrick and A Hero of Romance, and playing leading roles in two other productions there.[8] At the opening of John Hollingshead's Gaiety Theatre in December 1868 she played Florence in On the Cards, a comedy adapted from the French;[8][24] she also appeared there as Lady Clara Vere de Vere in Dreams in 1869, before rejoining the Haymarket company, at this point on tour under the management of J. B. Buckstone. She played Viola, Rosalind, Lady Teazle, Kate Hardcastle and Lydia Languish.[8]

The Kendals in the title roles of W. S. Gilbert's comedy, Pygmalion and Galatea

When the Haymarket company returned to London, Madge Robertson remained with it; a fellow member was William Hunter Grimston, who acted under the stage name W. H. Kendal. The two were married on 7 August 1869. She adopted his stage surname,[n 5] and after their marriage they almost always appeared in the same productions.[1] They remained at the Haymarket until the end of 1874, during which period she played the four parts listed above and seventeen other leading roles.[8] Among the new plays in which she starred were a series of "fairy comedies" by W. S. Gilbert: The Palace of Truth (1870, as Princess Zeolide), Pygmalion and Galatea (1871, as Galatea), and The Wicked World (1873, as Selene); in Gilbert's drama Charity (1874) she played Mrs Van Brugh.[27]

The Haymarket company disbanded in late 1874, and the Kendals then set up their own tour beginning in Birmingham in November. For six consecutive nights they appeared there in Romeo and Juliet, The Lady of Lyons, The Hunchback, As You Like It, East Lynne, Uncle's Will and Weeds.[8][28] Back in London in early 1875, they played Kate Hardcastle and Young Marlowe in She Stoops to Conquer at the Opera Comique, and went on to the Gaiety in As You Like It; the reviewer in The Athenaeum wrote, "One side of the character of Rosalind is shown by Mrs Kendal with admirable clearness and point. So suited to her style are the bantering speeches Shakespeare has put into the mouth of Rosalind, they might almost have been written for her", although the same critic missed "the underlying tenderness that more emotional artists are able to present."[29]

The Kendals joined the actor John Hare at the Court Theatre in March 1875, opening in a new comedy, Lady Flora. Hare had a comic character role, and the Kendals played the romantic leads, Flora and Harry Armytage.[30] She went on to play Mrs Fitzroy in Hamilton Aide's A Nine Days' Wonder, and then Lady Hilda in Gilbert's fairy comedy, Broken Hearts. She played Susan Hartley (a part she reprised in several later revivals) in Palgrave Simpson's adaptation of a French comedy, called A Scrap of Paper.[28] In September 1876 the Kendals moved to the Prince of Wales's Theatre under the management of the Bancrofts. There Madge played Lady Ormond in Peril, a carefully anglicised French comedy. She subsequently played Clara Douglas in Money, Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance and Dora in Sardou's Diplomacy, the last of which played for twelve months, in London and on tour. The Kendals returned to the Court, where they revived A Scrap of Paper in January 1879. In February, in her brother T. W. Robertson's adaptation from the French, The Ladies' Battle, the Kendals played the Countess d'Autreval and her suitor, Gustave;[8][28] in April she played Kate Greville in The Queen's Shilling, an adaptation of an old French comedy by Jean-François Bayard.[8][28]

The Kendals in Burnett's Young Folks at the St James's, 1883

Since its inception in 1835 the St James's, in an unfashionable part of the West End, had acquired a reputation as an unlucky theatre, and more money had been lost than made by successive managements.[n 6] At the invitation of Lord Newry, the owner of the freehold of the theatre, the Kendals and John Hare jointly took over the management of the house in 1879.[36] For the first time, the theatre's reputation was steadily defied. The new lessees aimed both to amuse and to improve public taste,[34] and in the view of the theatre historian J. P. Wearing, they achieved their aim.[37] Under their management the St James's staged twenty-one plays: seven were new British pieces, eight adaptations of French plays, and the rest were revivals.[34] Their first production on 4 October 1879 was a revival of The Queen's Shilling.[37] This was followed in December by Tennyson's The Falcon, based on the Decameron, in which the Kendals made considerable successes as Lady Giovanna and the Count.[1][28]

Wearing regards The Money Spinner (1881) as of particular importance to this period of the theatre's history, being the first of several of A. W. Pinero's plays staged there by Hare and the Kendals. It was regarded as daringly unconventional and a risky venture, but it caught on with the public. Other plays by Pinero given by the Hare-Kendal management at the St James's were The Squire (1881), The Ironmaster (1884), Mayfair (1885) and The Hobby Horse (1886).[37] B. C. Stephenson's comedy Impulse (1883) was a substantial success and was revived by public demand two months after the end of its first run.[34] The reception of a rare excursion into Shakespeare, As You Like It (1885), was mixed. Hare's Touchstone was considered by some to be the worst ever seen,[37] and W. H.'s Orlando was mildly praised,[38] whereas Madge's Rosalind, which had always been one of her best-loved roles, was again well regarded.[1] Among the company in these years the actresses included Fanny Brough, Helen Maud Holt and the young May Whitty;[34][39] among their male colleagues were George Alexander, Allan Aynesworth, Albert Chevalier, Henry Kemble, William Terris, Brandon Thomas and Lewis Waller.[34]

The Kendals, particularly W. H., became associated in the public mind with the transformation of the theatrical profession from disreputable to respectable. The actor-manager Herbert Tree said, "when I look at Kendal I know acting is the profession of a gentleman".[40] The Kendals imposed a high moral code on the members of their company both on stage and behind the scenes.[1] Another commentator wrote, "Mrs Kendal, one of the best artists of her sex on the London stage, is in private life the epitome of all domestic virtues and graces".[1] She was dubbed the "matron of the English theatre".[41] Also during the St James's years she learned of the case of Joseph Merrick, referred to as the Elephant Man. Although she probably never met him in person, she helped to raise funds and public sympathy for him.[1] In February 1887 the Kendals gave a command performance of Gilbert's play Sweethearts for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, the first such entertainment at a royal residence since Prince Albert's death more than twenty years earlier.[28]

The Kendals in Pinero's The Ironmaster as Phillipe Derblay and Claire de Beaupré

After a farewell season of revivals of their greatest successes the St James's partnership with Hare came to an end in 1889. The Kendals went on a short provincial tour, and later in the year they set out on their first American appearance, making their debut at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York with A Scrap of Paper, in October 1889. The New York Dramatic Mirror reported:

Everybody attended the American debut of Mr and Mrs Kendal … that is to say everybody that could get seats or standing room. … The reports of Mrs Kendal's skill as a comedienne were not exaggerated. Her art is as fine as old point lace, and yet it is laid upon a temperament so genuinely sympathetic and so pliant and transitional that there is no sign of effort, no direct exhibition of method in anything she does.[42]

At the same theatre the Kendals also presented The Ironmaster, to comparable popular and critical approval.[43] After a brief return to London they set off on a second and more extensive American tour with a larger repertoire. In October 1891 to May 1892 they made what they billed as their third and last American tour, playing in a total of thirty-five cities. They reappeared on the London stage at the Avenue Theatre from January 1893 in a repertory of four plays, and then toured the English provinces, adding to their repertoire The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which had recently premiered in London starring Mrs Patrick Campbell. The critic William Archer compared the two actresses in the title role:

What of Mrs Kendal's reading of the part of Paula? It is the work of an accomplished comedienne who has at her command all the resources of her art. Comparisons are odious, and I do not propose to compare Mrs Kendal with Mrs Patrick Campbell except on one point. She certainly puts a greater depth of feeling into the later acts, and on the whole (I should say) she does rightly.[44]

The Kendals then took the play to the US, where self-appointed guardians of morality condemned it, and audiences flocked to see it.[43] During the Kendals' fifth and last tour of the US, from September 1894 to May 1895, they visited more than forty cities, presenting The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Lady Clancarty, Still Waters Run Deep, A Scrap of Paper, All for Her and The Ironmaster.[43]

Herbert Tree's 1902 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor with Tree as Falstaff, Ellen Terry (l.) as Mistress Page and Kendal as Mistress Ford

On the Kendals' return to the West End critics and audiences welcomed them back enthusiastically. In June 1896 Bernard Shaw wrote:

Mrs Kendal should really be more cautious than she was at the Garrick on Wednesday night. When you feed a starving castaway you do not give him a full meal at once: you accustom him gradually to food by giving him small doses of soup. Mrs Kendal, forgetting that London playgoers have been starved for years in the matter of acting, inconsiderately gave them more in the first ten minutes than they have had in the last five years, with the result that the poor wretches became hysterical, and vented their applause in sobs and shrieks.[45]

Shaw judged that "her finish of execution, her individuality and charm of style, her appetisingly witty conception of her effects, her mastery of her art and of herself [make] her still supreme among English actresses in high comedy".[45] The biographer Richard Foulkes writes that the supremacy of which Shaw wrote was put to the test when Tree invited Madge Kendal and Ellen Terry to appear together in The Merry Wives of Windsor, as Mistress Ford and Mistress Page respectively, at His Majesty's Theatre in 1902. This was the first time Madge appeared in a production without W. H. since their marriage, and Foulkes speculates that her "unwonted exuberance and apparent spontaneity" may have been attributable to that fact. The Kendals continued to appear in popular plays without interruption until 1908, when they both retired, though she briefly emerged from retirement to reprise her Mistress Ford at the coronation gala of 1911 at His Majesty's.[1] In 1924 she made her first radio broadcast, opposite Viola Tree, in Granny's Juliet, and she later took the title part of her ancestor, Sarah Siddons, in a comedy, A Lesson from Mrs Siddons, together with other descendants of Mrs. Siddons, in a radio broadcast on 28 November 1931 to mark the centenary of Siddons' death[46] on the day that Tree took over her role.[47]

The Kendals had at least six children.[48] Two died young, and the Kendals became estranged from four others.[49][50] John Gielgud believed the blame lay with the parents, and reports Madge as reproaching herself shortly before her death.[51] W. H. Kendal died in 1917: his widow attributed his death to a broken heart caused by the scandal of their daughter Margaret's divorce.[52][1] In retirement, Madge Kendal became active with many theatre charities, becoming president of the actors' retirement home, Denville Hall. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1926.[1][53] In December, 1927 she presented the first award of the Kendal prize at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to actress Joyce Bland.[54] Kendal was awarded the freedom of her native town, Grimsby, in 1932, the first woman to receive that honour.[1][53]

Madge Kendal died at her home in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, in 1935, aged 87, after a long illness. She was buried at St Marylebone cemetery in East Finchley.[1][53][55]

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• Stedman, Jane (1996). W. S. Gilbert, A Classic Victorian and His Theatre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-816174-5.
• Wright, Neil R. (2016). Treading the Boards: Actors and Theatres in Georgian Lincolnshire. Lincoln: Society for Lincolnshire History & Archaeology. ISBN 978-0-90-358255-1.