Alan Strachan

Not always a saint

Sybil Thorndike: A Star of Life, by Jonathan Croall

On her sole experience of sharing a stage with Sybil Thorndike the redoubtable old dragon, Marie Tempest, found all her scene-stealing tricks foiled by her co-star. Hear- ing of Thorndike’s later damehood she muttered: ‘That’s what comes of playing saints’.

Thorndike was, of course, always associated with Saint Joan from her first portrayal of Shaw’s heroine in 1924 through revivals at home and overseas to her final encounter with the role in her eighties on radio, that matchless voice still silver-toned. Other saints included Teresa of Avila along with women carrying a nimbus of sanctity or the mystic — Katharine of Aragon, Edith Cavell and a memorable Mrs Moore in a stage version of A Passage to India. But in her astounding seven-decade career, from repertory under Miss Horniman in Manchester to the emergence of the National Theatre, she played a huge range of roles in farce and grand guignol, as well as the Greek roles — Medea, Hecuba, Phaedra — which stamped her as the great tragedienne of her era.

Always she was a pioneer, even when an established star, never happier than during the second world war when touring Welsh mining villages with her director husband, Lewis Casson, in Medea and Macbeth. Sybil began her career in the days of the Edwardian actor-manager, touring Shakespeare in North America in Ben Greet’s company, playing many outdoor venues (Greet, ever mindful of the box-office, was convinced, during one Canadian alfresco matinee, that two latecomers had slipped into the back row without paying — they were discovered to be two bears). She became a lifelong champion of the thrust stage — ‘I love to see the audience’ — and the ensemble-ethic.

This questing spirit survived into extreme age. She had always opposed censorship and responded positively to much of post-1956 theatre from Look Back in Anger and The Caretaker to Jesus Christ Superstar.

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