Domini Blythe
Theatre veteran discusses the extraordinary life of Fanny Kemble
Kemble, began her distinguished career in London’s Convent Garden Theatre, owned by her father Charles Kemble and became a great success known for Shakespearean roles especially her “perfect Juliet.”
Kemble and her father soon traveled to America, where her fiery performances continued to wow audiences. In New York, Kemble met and married charismatic Georgia plantation owner Pierce Butler and willingly gave up her theatre career. The fiercely independent Kemble has only learnt the family craft to bring in money for the household, so she reveled in the escape. Fanny Kemble's first love has always been writing, unlike her aunt, (legendary theatre doyenne Sarah Siddons).
Kemble's marriage to Pierce Butler ended in disaster when she witnessed planatation life first hand. She simply could not tolerate her husband's treatment toward his workers. Though Butler forbid her to do so, Kemble kept highly detailed journals about the conditions of slavery on Butler’s plantation which she witnessed everyday of her married life. After the divorce, Kemble returned to the theatre supporting herself by doing Shakespearean readings.
Blythe - "I feel Fanny Kemble is a very,very interesting play and it explores slavery on several levels and I think it speaks very much to the mess we are in this world today. I think of those questions at the beginning of the play - Fanny says ‘Slavery is a problem. Can we ever be free from what we have done?’ That applies totally to today. What does it feel like to be a problem speaks totally to today and what must it feel like to stand on a block and be sold, takes you to a very particular element of slavery but then the play also surprisingly takes you to Fanny’s own view of marriage as slavery."
Like you, I discovered that I wanted to know more about Fanny’s life.
"Well, that was what Peter Hinton and I hoped because one of the great challenges of this piece for Peter as a writer and me as an actress when we were talking about it in the early days of it, was there is simply so much that you can say about this woman. We knew we didn’t want a boring biography but what we decided was the best we could do, was to intrigue people enough that they would go out themselves and read because she is published. There are wonderful books about her. (Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars by Catherine Clinton) in addition to her own book Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation."
"That’s why this piece is a fiction based on the life of Fanny Kemble. I think what Peter has done so intelligently, is to use Fanny to talk about other things so that it’s not just a biography – because we couldn’t possibly do justice to her in a biography."
"I am going to do something with this and it will not be the end of it and I feel now that for the rest of my life, I am going to be reading around this period. I have another friend, colleague, who has another one woman show about Fanny Kemble that she wrote herself and I invited her to come to one of the previews and she was incredibly generous afterwards. She wrote me a little card before the show saying that is wonderful that I was doing it because the more people that knew about "Fanny K," the better."
"Then afterwards when we were talking, she said to me – ' Fanny Kemble has been the most marvelous companion to me for many years.' And that's how I feel. I feel she will now be my companion."
"I am going to make sure that I find out more and more and more about her. I always read her journal before I went onstage and she moves me. I cannot tell you, her capacity – she has two things that are absolutely extraordinary. She has the capacity to understand and feel someone’s else’s pain or her capacity to honestly describe her reactions which may not always be pretty or politically correct and then flip that. She describes an old slave dying on the floor of their wretched infirmary which was just an earth floor with nothing in it, just a few holes where windows were with no glass, just wooden shutters badly shut. She describes this poor man lying in his rags on the floor with his head on a pile of twigs dying with nobody around – just her - and she thought he was dead and then realized he wasn’t, but as she leaned over him he did die. She describes that and also the full knowledge that she’s been supported by that poor man’s labour. Then she can walk home and she can describe the sunset and the vegetation and she’s completely able to get in touch with the beauty of that and she says it herself. It’s what saved her – her capacity for beauty and for pain."
Domini Blythe as Fanny Kemble
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