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The Tearle Brothers |
by Shauna Mackay |
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Edmund and Osmond Tearle were men who held the whole of Shakespeare in their head. Surviving theatre programmes prove it.
On June 18th 1887, Edmund Tearle began a week of eight (including Saturday matinee) different Shakespeare plays at Blyth Theatre Royal.
How the blazes is that humanly possible?
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They ran their own professional touring companies, sometimes jointly, often separate. Family ties and strong bonds were important in a tradition with such peculiar hours of work, poor social credibility and manic mobility. An actor or actress with a company would play hundreds of different parts in hundreds of different plays in hundreds of different towns. What apprenticeships they served.
Their fondness for Blyth and its people ran deep. Where else would they get The Cowpen Colliery Brass Band parading through the streets playing a selection before 7.30pm curtain rise in honour of their opening performance? How the mothers must have appreciated that as they tried to get the bairns to sleep, eh? Osmond performed a benefit concert in aid of the inadequately insured Richard Fynes when his theatre was burned down. |
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How played-out, how bone-weary knackered, they must have felt at times.
Did Blyth offer them some much-needed R&R?
One likes to think that knowing Shakespeare by heart must help a man to recognise an honest friend when he sees one.
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