The VWA Shakespeare’s birthday party was, of course, a bit different this year. It was held in July at St Mary’s, Paddington Green – and huge thanks to everyone at St Mary’s for their generous hospitality. What made the church an appropriate venue for a Shakespeare’s birthday party was its association with the great Shakespearian Sarah Siddons (1755-1831).
Siddons was tall, statuesque and famous for her expressive eyes. She specialised in tragedy roles, especially those that featured wronged mothers. Siddons’s first London appearance for Garrick at Drury Lane was a disaster but after honing her skills in the provinces she became a star, known for intense, majestic acting which used Neo-classical ideas of posing and romantic emotional force. Her approach to performance included, unusually for the time, making sense of her character by engaging with the whole script of a play. For example, when playing Constance in King John she would sit with her dressing room door open, listening as Constance’s young son Arthur was captured, threatened and then fell to his death. This helped Siddons prepare to go on and perform Constance running mad with grief.
Siddons was particularly famous for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth, a woman regicide, and played this a role at a time when many in England were watching with horror the regicide being enacted across the Channel in France. Siddons played Lady Macbeth many times even when she was visibly pregnant and she tried to avoid performing her as a ‘fiend-like queen’ (Malcolm’s description). For Siddons, it was Lady Macbeth’s conjugal love and ambition for Macbeth which led her to goad him towards regicide; once the murder was committed, she collapsed. In 1812, at Siddons’s farewell performance, in Macbeth, the audience refused to allow the play to continue after her final scene, the sleepwalking scene. The curtain came down and there was uproar until Siddons came onstage, in her own clothes, to make a very emotional farewell speech to the audience.
Siddons told Samuel Johnson that Katherine of Aragon in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII was her favourite role. Our President, Nickolas Grace, read us one of Katherine’s speeches from 2.4. – a scene indubitably by Shakespeare not Fletcher – where Katherine is on trial because Henry wants to divorce her. Katherine’s predicament is reminiscent of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; both women are foreigners, put on trial, persecuted and have done nothing wrong.
Siddons also played Hamlet several times over three decades but only in the provinces and never in London. She died in 1831 in London and 5000 people attended her funeral. At Saint Mary’s, Siddons’s gravestone remains in good condition beneath a wrought iron canopy. Inside the church there is a tablet in her memory. And as you walk to the church from the nearest tube station, you pass Siddons’s statute, which has recently been restored after it lost its nose.
Liz Schafer
