Laurence Irving (1897-1988) talked about his work as a stage and film designer for the Art Workers Guild in 1964. [See for his meeting Ricketts as a student, blog 690]. The Art Workers Guild was founded in 1884 by architects and designers in need of a meeting place for the fine arts and the applied arts. A great range of crafts - over forty in 1909, over sixty at present - has been represented in the guild, including type-design and photography. Members included C.R Ashbee, Arthur Gaskin, Emery Walker, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, Eric Gill, David Kindersley and William Morris. Walt Disney was among the honorary members. Men were long in the majority, but in later years women also became members, such as Judith Bluck and Mary Jane Long.
By 1964, when Irving gave his talk, the guild was no longer in the mainstream of artistic thinking, and was preserving values which were unfashionable. (A lot has changed since then.)
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| The Art Workers Guild at 6 Queen Square, London [Photo: Art Workers Guild, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license] |
From 1913, the Guild has been based at 6 Queen Square in Bloomsbury. Laurence Irving is listed as a member in 1933, but apparently only in that year. In his 1964 speech, he said that the secretary of the Guild asked him to deliver a lecture at the time, but he could not remember what he had spoken about. All he remembered was that George Bernard Shaw had sat in the front row - a lifelong enemy of his grandfather the actor Henry Irving. More than thirty years later, he again was asked to give a lecture on his work, which was announced in The Stage of 12 November 1964: 'Laurence Irving on Scene Changes, or, Thirty Years After'. The event was scheduled for the next day, Friday 13 November 1964, at 7 p.m. Admission was free.
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| 'Art Workers Guild', announcement in The Stage, 12 November 1964, p. 13 |
A typescript of this lecture is preserved in the collection of the University of Bristol Theatre Collection (Ref No BTC30/8/4/13). [See the catalogue description.]
The title partly matches what the announcement in The Stage gave as the subject - 'Changes of Scene', but the date for the lecture is given here as ‘November 18th 1964’.
Irving said that as a young student at the Royal Academy Schools, he wanted to stay as far away from the stage as possible and began his career in the field of graphic art. It was only in 1926, thanks to author A.A. Milne and composer Fraser Simson, that he was persuaded to design scenery and dresses.
I was thrice blessed in being able to assimilate the theoretical and practical teaching of three masters. Charles Ricketts, George Harris and Edward Gordon Craig.
In that order, because he owed the most to Ricketts. Shannon and Ricketts invited him as a student to drop by at one of their Friday night meetings at Lansdowne House, Lansdowne Road, Holland Park.
Ricketts was a master of stagecraft. In him were combined the gifts of scholarship, architectural boldness, a vivid colour sense and a feeling for abstract pattern that revealed itself in the noble simplicity of his settings and the characterisation of his costumes.
His keen intelligence, broad knowledge, playful humour and skillful fingers contributed to him being held in high regard as a designer, although he could not always be patient with actors or authors.
"Men of letters have no taste!" I once heard him cry in exasperation when a poet failed to grasp an effect he was striving for. He meant, I think, that writers have not necessarily the visual imagination that their words imply and yet do not readily accept the illustration of them by another.
Ricketts contributed immensely to the formation of Irving's theatrical convictions.
In his lecture, Irving said of Gordon Craig that he stripped the stage of irrelevant decorations, greatly influencing all designers after him, but that he could hardly ever put his theories into practice because he was not offered work in the commercial theatre world.
Ricketts, meeting him at the turn of the century, found him "too diffuse".
Irving said a designer should not distinguish between ‘serious and frivolous productions’, between tragedies and comedies, and that it was precisely the variety of genres and subjects that he had found so attractive about his work. Of importance to him was continuity in the collaboration between designer, director and theatre. But by the late 1920s, this was already a rarity.
Only about three Shakespearean productions of note were seen in London during those years and none of them (though two were splendidly designed by Ricketts) had much success.
Irving often saw the artist Rex Whistler at work, admiring his 'imaginative grace and technical mastery'. In his lecture, Irving further elaborated on the form of theatre and its influence on the relationship between actors and audiences.
Quotes are taken from: Ref No BTC30/8/4/13: Typescript for a lecture given by Laurence Henry Irving to the Art Workers Guild on 18 November 1964 titled 'Changes of Scene' (University of Bristol Theatre Collection).
[Thanks are due to Jill Sullivan, Assistant Keeper (User Services), University of Bristol Theatre Collection].