ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on Irving's origins in the mid nineteenth-century theatre. It presents a powerful case for the modernity of Irving's acting and its influence on twentieth-century practice. The book argues that, rather than being dismissed - ridiculed even - as some relic of an outdated style, Irving is arguably a prototype for the highly disciplined, physically expressive sort of actor that Edward Gordon Craig, V. E. Meyerhold, Jerzy Grotowski and others envisaged and hoped to create in the early twentieth century. It also presents the relationship was complex with offstage and onstage lives overlapping and drawing in their children - Ellen Terry's in particular, whose illegitimacy further complicated their situation and their mother's. The book describes an intricate, but ultimately circular, pattern in his account of Laurence Irving's adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.
