He had always a remarkable flair for the actress who was standing on the threshold of theatrical fame, and waiting for just the right cue to make a startling entrance. On this occasion Alexander spoke it to Evelyn Millard, whose beauty and appealing tenderness were undoubtedly of the greatest value to the play. Alexander himself at that time was superlatively fitted to play the dual rôle. He could be romantic in modern clothes, and romantic in costume, and in this play he had to be both. His good-looks, his appearance, his humour and high spirits gave at once the impression of a youth who goes into a high adventure for a lark. And the change to a man called upon to fight not only against his living corporeal enemies, but against all the temptations of passion for the salvation of his soul, was made with an emotional restraint which was true and sure. He won the whole-hearted admiration of his public and the praise most valued by an artist of those who worked in the same field. Pinero, as acute and wakeful a judge as could be found, generous with his applause when it was deserved but unhesitating in his censure when it was not, wrote:
We had a delightful evening in witnessing The Prisoner of Zenda. It is a charming piece and most brilliantly put upon the stage. You and I must talk much about it when we meet: I watched everything with great care and am full of appreciation of the excellent work of actors and authors. I don’t think you, as an actor, have been seen to greater advantage in any play you have produced. I compliment Mrs Alexander, too, upon the ladies’ dresses. They are most beautiful.
And from the host of Alexander’s friends congratulations poured in. The character of Princess Flavia was no less dramatic than that of Rudolf Rassendyll. To use the modern jargon, they were neither of them static. Her awakening to the change in the King who courted her; her surprise, her suspicion; the political betrothal transmuted magically into love; her renunciation when at last she knew the truth — all these elements built up a character which was inevitably sympathetic, if presented with sincerity and charm. Evelyn Millard had both those qualities and was well matched with Alexander. The adventuress and mistress of Michael, Duke of Strelsau, the Black Elphberg, Antoinette de Mauban, was played by Lily Hanbury who had been borrowed from Beerbohm Tree. Herbert Waring was the Black Elphberg, W. H. Vernon the Colonel Sapt, Allan Aynesworth the young English artist, Bertram Bertrand, Arthur Royston the Fritz von Tarlenheim, whilst the very important part of Rupert of Hentzau, “the boy who came so nigh to beating me”, as Rassendyll describes him in the book, was filled by Laurence Cautley.
It is worth while here to print two letters written to Alexander by the adaptor Edward Rose. For they illustrate the relationship which remained firm between Alexander and the authors whose plays he produced, after the strain and the squabbles of rehearsals. The play had its première on a Thursday evening, and the first letter was written on the Sunday preceding it:
Sun: 5 Jan: 96
.. 36 UPPER ADDISON GARDENS, W.
MY DEAR ALEXANDER, I am not very good at saying things, but I must try to tell you how very deeply I feel the way in which you have given yourself to this production of The Prisoner. I have never seen anything like the unselfishness, and the care and patience, and the constant intelligence of your stage-management; and your manner has made the most trying rehearsals a pleasure — it has been so easy to suggest anything, and everyone must have felt that his or her interests, however small, had the fullest consideration. I am only glad to think that this sort of thing repays itself in the result; and very very glad to believe that — whatever is the fate of the play — you will yourself make the greatest personal success you have ever had.
I felt this so strongly that I had to write, now that my share of the work is over. I shall come round to see tomorrow’s rehearsal, but not to interrupt. Now I’ll make my final suggestion: comedy, comedy, comedy wherever possible!
I got a hint from the Wilson Barrett play. I think the moon might quite legitimately have travelled a little way round the heavens during Act 4 — so that from Hentzau’s exit its light is falling on the place where Flavia will finally stand, and we shall end with a beautiful picture of the girl’s white figure. Don’t you think so?
Do start the rehearsal with Acts 3 and 4, and go through them with the object of getting speed all round, while you are fresh; then walk the rest!
Thank you a thousand times!
EDWARD ROSE
The second letter was written on the morning following the production:
36 UPPER ADDISON GARDENS, W.
— Wed: 8 Jan: 96
MY DEAR ALEXANDER, —
My first letter on this beautiful desk must be written to you — not only to thank you for it (as I did most imperfectly in the midst of the tumults last night) but to thank you once again, and not for the first time nor the last, for all that it commemorates. What that is, you can’t know because you can never see what I saw last night — a presentation of my play I think as delightful and complete as any author ever saw of his own work. It was an added and a very great pleasure to find that the climax of the play at last gave you your chance — and to see how you seized it, and how the audience leaped at it!
Ever yours,
EDW. ROSE
Both letters are printed, not because they are unique, but because they were usual. From R. C. Carton, John Oliver Hobbes, H. V. Esmond, Stephen Phillips, Haddon Chambers, just such letters came on the eve of and on the day after the first performance.
The Prisoner of Zenda as a play repeated the triumphant success which the novel had won. It was a fine gallant story and Edward Rose had not spoilt it. The play ran for twenty-seven weeks, from January to July 18th, to houses which averaged £200 a performance. And this before the theatre was reconstructed and its seating capacity enlarged. Actually £40,530: 6: 7 was the sum taken in at the box-office. The scenery and the dresses were costly. Alexander had spent upon them more than that sum of £3000 which Mr T. Andros de la Rue had been ready to put up for Hamlet — £3356: 7:2. And the net profit on the run amounted to £9960: 10: 10. In addition Alexander paid himself his salary of about £80 a week. It is difficult to state it more exactly, for in the accounts the salary is set out in one lump sum for the season — and the season will include perhaps one or two plays with intervals between them, broken weeks, and a varying number of matinees.
But he had not nearly done with The Prisoner of Zenda. He took it on tour for eight weeks and reaped from it a net profit of £3486 118:7. He brought it back to London on October 20th. But by that time its momentary popularity was exhausted. It earned on its fifty-three autumn performances a further profit of £706: 8: 11 and was withdrawn on November 28th.
But even then it was not dead and done with. It took its turn in the bill in 1897. It was revived at the St James’ in 1900 and again in 1909. When the accounts of the twenty-six seasons 1890-1916 were made up and audited, the profit earned by The Prisoner of Zenda amounted to £18,132: 2: 2. This included the profits of tours, from sub-lettings and Alexander’s salary whilst acting in the play. It was one of the great successes of the management. The Importance of Being Earnest, owing to its triumphant revival in 1910, topped it by nearly £4000, Bella Donna by £7000, The Second Mrs Tanqueray by £4000. His House in Order stood by itself. It was the high-water mark of the management. It ran for fifty-seven weeks in London; two companies carried it through the provinces, Alexander toured it himself. It was revived for seventy-three performances in the autumn of 1914. But the guns were thundering upon Ypres and a people unused to great wars was preparing a vast army and manufacturing its equipment. The trials of an undisciplined wife in a house stiff with rules were not the entertainment for those days. Even so Alexander’s total earnings from that comedy rose to the sum of £36,638: 15: 4; and this though the author’s fees on the London performances were just simply half the profits.
CHAPTER VII
As You Like It — Harry Irving — W. P. Ker’s criticisms — Pinero: an appreciation — The Princess and the Butterfly — Pinero and Alexander part company — A
lexander’s domestic life — The Ambassador — A first night in 1900 compared with a first night to-day — Sir Squire Bancroft — The gallery
ROMANCE SUCCEEDED UPON romance, and it was in the fitness of that theatre where so much was fit that the better should follow upon the good. Shakespeare’s comedy As You Like It was acted upon Wednesday, December 2nd, 1896, and with the exception of one night when Alexander closed the theatre that he might be present at the Annual Dinner of the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, until March 20th, 1897. One hundred and fourteen performances were given with average takings of £200 a performance, so that the venture yielded a handsome profit. Apart from his regular lieutenants, H. H. Vincent, H. V. Esmond, who was then making up his mind to devote himself altogether to the writing of plays, Arthur Royston, Vincent Sternroyd, Henry Loraine, W. H. Vernon, Alexander strengthened his company with artists who bore famous names or were soon to acquire them. James Fernandez played the Banished Duke, C. Aubrey Smith, who once bowled for Sussex, afterwards headed the comedy company of the Haymarket Theatre, and now dignifies every film from Hollywood which requires an English gentleman, was the Usurper; H. B. Irving acted that ungrateful part of Oliver.
Harry Irving was a many-sided man, and though he rose to a high place amongst the actors of his time, it is doubtful whether he chose his profession wisely. He wrote in his youth an engaging Life of Judge Jeffreys on a plan the very opposite of that which is fashionable to-day. The mode now for the biographer is to strip his subject of those virtues in which time and custom have dressed him, and to show him off as something of a half-wit and a good deal of a rogue. Harry Irving dipped his brush in a pail of good thick whitewash and made of Jeffreys such a judge as we should all like to stand before when we are put upon our trials to answer for our sins; but I doubt but what Dame Alice Lisle would have chosen another and indeed any other at the Bristol Assizes, if she had got the chance. It is perhaps a little strange that Harry Irving should have been moved to so lenient a view of his hero, for he had a sardonic humour and was deeply interested in the study of crime. He was one of the half-dozen enthusiasts who founded The Crimes Club, and would never have missed one of its dinners at the Great Central Hotel, except under the direst compulsion. He was an admirable speaker and he wrote many lucid and penetrating studies of French criminals, whom he found more interesting than the variety which his own country produced. He was a man with a keen classical face which had a touch of Sherlock Holmes in it, and whether from indifference or deliberation I cannot say, in the street he looked the complete tragedian. He was the best of companions, for he had a sharp and at the same time a kindly eye for the oddities of people, and could reduce what he observed to a racy phrase. He could tell, too, a story against himself, the test of a good companion. For instance. He produced the tragedy of Hamlet, playing of course the Prince. With a desire to make vivid the scene upon the battlements, in the chill of a winter’s night, he set up braziers of coal at which the sentries warmed themselves. He had the deepest veneration for his great father and persuaded him to come and see him at a matinee. He was naturally extremely nervous about Sir Henry’s verdict and begged him to come round after the first act. “Well, Father,” he asked anxiously, “did you see anything to tell me?” He received the devastating answer, “Yes, my boy. I see that the streets are up in Elsinore.”
But this was many years after he played Oliver to Alexander’s Orlando. Young Robert Loraine, afterwards a fearless airman and now a leading actor in the United States; was the third of the brothers Jacques de Bois. Bertram Wallis was the Amiens; Julia Neilson the Rosalind. Fay Davis, long associated with the St. James’ Theatre, brought her light and sympathetic touch to the part of Celia, and Dorothea Baird, fresh from her triumph as Trilby, was, as Phoebe, nature’s no less than Alexander’s choice.
The play was seen by W. P. Ker, a great Shakespearian scholar and Professor of English Literature at University College, London, and he joined with the ordinary public in applauding the revival. He wrote in gratitude “for a very well-spent afternoon”, with one reservation:
It has been a great pleasure to me to be present at the production of As You Like It and I wish to offer my sincere congratulations. I admire the way in which the whole thing hangs together, and especially the way in which the pastoral character of the play is brought out. It is what I have been hoping to see for long past.
There is one great fault, as it seems to me, and I hope you will allow me to speak of it. I felt very strongly at the time, and cannot get over the impression, that the Cuckoo Song from “Love’s Labour’s Lost” has no business in this play, and that coming where it does it spoils one of the most delicate and subtle pieces of drama in the world. It scrawls over all the delicate lines, and puts the emphasis utterly wrong — it was all that Rosalind could do to get the scene back into the proper temper. It seemed to me to undo the whole effect that had been so admirably worked up in the earlier part of the scene. I am afraid that the audience thought differently, but my impression was a very strong one, and I hope that the point may be reconsidered, in the interests of a very beautiful rendering of the most attractive (I think) of Shakespeare’s plays.
Believe me, Sincerely yours, W. P. KER
For a year or two after this beautiful revival Alexander marked time. A play by Carton, The Tree of Knowledge, neither detracted from nor greatly added to its author’s reputation. A comedy was extracted from Pinero with much difficulty, but to extract a play from Pinero was always like taking out a very deeply rooted molar except that all the pain was experienced by the dentist. Pinero would oblige any manager by tearing up his contract, but he would not be hurried. He buried himself in his country house at North Chapel on the border between Sussex and Surrey and until the work was finished — not to his satisfaction, for I think that never happened, but as nearly to his satisfaction as he could hope to get — he would not budge. It would be to the manager’s advantage as surely as to his own that he should take his time. In a letter concerning his most successful play His House in Order, at a time when there was a strong and special reason to drive him along, he wrote:
I can’t hurry, that paralyses me. I have taken enormous pains over the thing, as I know you will believe; and when it is complete it will appear — I hope — as if it were a week’s work. Which is what I understand by technique.
In some instances, however, his labours produced an effect the very opposite. In the construction of his plays, I suppose that he was as great a master as the English stage has possessed.
I wish I could have sent you Act 3 — which is progressing famously — at the same time, so that you could have seen at the first glance how every hint and every clue contained in the earlier acts are followed up and rounded off.
He had a theme, a story, characters to tell it, and a plan, a sort of geometrical figure within the confining lines of which all had to be made natural and clear, so natural that a spectator should not be dissatisfied, so clear that he should not be puzzled. The sequence of scenes must seem inevitable; the people in an age which knows not “front-cloths”, must somehow come into the action of the play and be found upon the stage without calling the attention of the audience to the mechanism of their entrances and exits; and each word they speak must not only help to reveal their individualities, but must have an intention which will only be completely recognised when the story is at its end. I have never known a dramatist who did not ungrudgingly acknowledge that of this difficult art of construction Pinero was the supreme master in his generation. Foolish people catching at a phrase have used that mastery to diminish him. He was the craftsman, they say, and nothing more. Was there ever depreciation so witless? The man who could take a Dean who, not having a penny, offers a thousand pounds towards the restoration of his cathedral on condition that nine others do the same, and then finds to his dismay that there are nine others, and build out of his predicament so gorgeous a farce as Dandy Dick, is not to be relegated to the back benches of craftsmen. Is it not the power
to pluck the meaning out of the ordinary things of life and while keeping them true giving them universality and permanence which is the sign manual of the artist? The author of The Second Mrs Tanqueray, of His House in Order, of a greatly underrated play The Enchanted Cottage, to name only three, takes his place by right in that high class. I don’t know how many have read an unacted tragedy by Pinero called Dr. Harmer s Holidays, the story of a grim case of the nostalgie de la boue, but those who have will put down the cheap criticism that he was merely a first-class mechanic at its proper value.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 846