The other from Sir Laurence Gomme, the secretary to the London County Council, will have been appreciated by Alexander and his wife for another reason than unconscious humour. It speaks sufficiently for itself, and fitly ends this short chapter on the share which he took in the public life of the County of London.
DEAR SIR GEORGE ALEXANDER,
You will permit me to offer my sincerest congratulations upon your distinction. To those of us who believe in the drama as one of the best means of educating people to a sense of beauty and proportion this compliment to you comes very closely home. Please ask Lady Alexander to allow me to include her in my congratulations and I am sure the whole staff at Spring Gardens feel glad that such a distinction should have come to so distinguished a member of the Council.
Yours very truly,
LAURENCE GOMME
Perhaps, however, there is a still more fitting end in a moving letter which Alexander himself wrote in answer to Pinero’s congratulations. These two men had been, in spite of quarrels and disagreements, the moving spirits in the enlargement of the theatre; and whatever good work either of them did, in the best of it they were linked together. Alexander’s letter was written at Pont Street on June 26th, 1911:
MY DEAR PIN,
Your letter is dated 21st June. I ought to have answered it sooner. I have written to many friends, but I find it difficult to say what my heart dictates, to you. I am deeply sensible of how much gratitude I owe to your “written words” — you have enabled me to win distinction, and money too, and these two things mean a lot in our short lives. That my good luck is pleasant to you is a delight to me and my wife and I send you our dear love, and every token of a sincere regard.
Yours affly.
GEORGE ALEXANDER
CHAPTER XI
The Thunderbolt and Mid-Channel — A great revival of The Importance of Being Earnest — Alexander and his company — Alexander as Alfred — Evelyn in Money — Bella Donna — Pygmalion
DURING THE YEARS of his Municipal service Alexander produced two more plays by Sir Arthur Pinero — The Thunderbolt and Mid-Channel. Both of them were acted exactly fifty-eight times, so that each of them meant a Toss of a moderate kind. But there was no other similarity between them. The Thunderbolt was a play about a sordid family squabble over a will which had disappeared. The characters were, with one exception, inhabitants of a small town, greedy, jealous, with a fallacious assumption of prosperity which at all costs they must keep up — characters, in fact, by Henry Arthur Jones. Amongst them stood the illegitimate daughter of the dead man, a girl who was more distressed by the idea that her father had shown so little love for her than by the loss of his fortune. The Thunderbolt was the confession of one of the family, a poor music-master, that his wife had destroyed the missing will. It was not, to be frank about it, a sufficiently interesting story. The subject was the sort of subject which Balzac might have seized upon, and out of its very sordidness and squalor extracted some grim and uncompromising picture of triumphant greed. For the greedy would have triumphed in the Balzac story, the daughter would have been thrown out to fend for herself as best she could. She would have failed as an artist and sunk to the gutter, whilst the greedy would have ended in a blaze of provincial glory, mayors and aldermen and councillors without a qualm of self-reproach to trouble the gross contentment of their bellies. But the personages in The Thunderbolt were too weakly a lot, the girl who was to be their contrast was too colourless; and for once in a way the play at the St. James’ was not satisfactorily cast.
Mid-Channel, on the other hand, ranks with Iris, or next to Iris, as the most sincere and acute piece of analysis which Pinero gave to the theatre. It did not depend upon the social conditions of the moment which within the passage of a lustrum may make your work old-fashioned. It did not pivot round a since-discarded theory as The Doctor s Dilemma pivoted about the opsonin test. It was a truth in any age. Pinero used in order to expound his theme, a trope for which he had a great partiality. Between Dover and Folkestone and the French coast stretches a shoal, Le Colbart, or The Ridge. Pinero places it in mid-Channel although the Varne shoal is a mile or so nearer to the centre of the passage. But both are noticeable for strong ripples both at spring tides and neaps even when the weather is fine, and if the wind be against the tide or the weather stormy, both will be boiling with breaking seas. Between the Channel passage and matrimony the commentator in the play — Peter Mottram, a character acted by C. M. Lowne — draws his parallel. Half-way across, there will be discomfort, dislike of one’s fellow passengers, a perception of their faults and of the blemishes in their appearance, an inability to endure them. Half-way through married life is half-way across the Channel. The discomfort will be the matter of a few minutes, so long as the passengers understand that they are on the Ridge, that they are in mid-Channel, that in a few minutes their ship will get steady again and their discomfort vanish. The play is the dramatic analysis of two who did not understand. There is some admirable comedy and some lines as amusing as Pinero ever wrote. Mrs Annerly’s statement for instance: “And Goodness knows I’ve no ambition to appear in the Divorce Court again — I hate the hole”. But the play was a tragedy, and its author shirked nothing which could heighten its poignancy. It ended in suicide. One can say that it began to end in suicide in the very first scene.
“You’ll see”, says Zoe, the woman of the marriage, “when I put an end to myself, it will be in the winter time.” But she commits suicide in the summer and under circumstances of horror which were fatal to the popular chances of the play. The scene was a bachelor flat at the very top of a high building close to the Albert Hall. The scene-painter and the lighting arrangements had managed to convey the impression of a cloudless golden day of summer. Through the windows of the sitting-room could be seen level with the flat the dome of the Albert Hall, and in the distance and far below the tops of the trees in Hyde Park. Outside the windows ran a balcony which served the two rooms. There was no way out of the flat at all except by the lift or the one staircase. Zoe was in this flat, when the sound of her husband’s voice on the threshold sent her running into the bedroom. The husband and the commentator had called on the young man whom Zoe might or might not marry if she got a divorce or was divorced. Zoe’s affairs were in an inextricable tangle. The husband and the commentator were to discuss the possibility of a reconciliation. The young man admitted that Zoe was in the flat, in the only other room in the flat. He opened the door and called to her. There was no answer. The husband imagined that she was up to some new trick. The young man standing in the doorway between the two rooms said in a voice of bewilderment, “I — I can’t make it out. She’s not there.” C. M. Lowne, who was on the stage when the words were spoken on the first night, tells me that an audible shudder went through the house. For there was only one thing which could have happened. And there can be no death more shocking to the imagination than that of a woman who flings herself from the balcony as high as an eyrie to crash upon the stone pavement of a London square. If any words were needed to drive the horror home there was the last line of the play to supply them, “She told me once it would be in the winter time”.
The likelihood that Mid-Channel would appeal to a wide public was of course diminished by the absence of Alexander from the cast. He happened to have arranged a tour for this autumn, but when the director of a theatre is also its chief actor and produces a play in which he is not acting himself, a doubt is inevitably raised about the quality of the play itself. In this case there seems to have been some misunderstanding. For immediately before its production, Alexander is found writing to Pinero:
I have read the play again. I wish I had been able to read it months ago, for then I could have told you that I could play B. [Blundell] and serve you well. At our interview, you will remember, I asked you “What about the husband?” You said he did queer things. He is interesting, however, affords a great acting opportunity, and would have greatly added to my reputation as an actor. The play is a
great tragedy, and will live when we are both cold. I am proud to think it is to be produced in my theatre. Bless you.
Yours ever, ALEC
Apart from the production of Mid-Channel, the most noteworthy event in the record of the theatre during these years was the second revival of The Importance of Being Earnest on November 25th, 1909. The events which had so prejudiced the judgment of the public against the play were now far off. The publication of such a masterpiece as The Ballad of Reading Gaol had had an effect too upon men’s minds. Indignation had softened into regret at the waste of a mind which had apparently not yet reached its highest power, contempt had shaded into pity. So, at last, the wittiest and the most joyous comedy of the generation came into its own. It was played for eleven consecutive months to crowded houses. Alexander, who had stood out of the cast of Mid-Channel, was once more John Worthing, the tearful mourner of his non-existent brother, and fortunately Allan Aynesworth was free to take up again the part of Algernon Moncrieffe and to resume over the muffins in the garden the debate on the morality of Bunburyism.
Allan Aynesworth played in nine plays at the St. James’, and parts ranging from the artist in The Prisoner of Zenda to Gerald Harringay in Liberty Hall. But he was never better suited than in The Importance of Being Earnest. He had, natural to him, the finish of a light comedian of the first-class. He never took a sledge-hammer to drive in a bradawl; he knew just the strength of the tap which was necessary to send it home cleanly and neatly with one stroke. He had the quickness without hurry which those who had not watched the methods of John Hare, Charles Wyndham, Aynesworth, and Arthur Bourchier were accustomed to count the peculiar gift of the French comedians. He and Alexander together with Stella Patrick Campbell, Mrs Patrick Campbell’s daughter, and Rosalie Toller in the place of Evelyn Millard and Irene Vanbrugé. Vivian Reynolds as Canon Chasuble, Helen Rous as Lady Bracknell, and Alice Beet as Miss Prism, gave a performance which did not fall behind the original presentation of the play.
The Importance of Being Earnest was still being performed when Alexander completed his twentieth year of management at the St. James’ Theatre. On that anniversary he gave away to each member of the audience as a token of the occasion a specially bound copy of the printed play. He gave one to Allan Aynesworth with a letter written upon the flyleaf. From time to time one comes across foolish scraps of gossip which pretended that Alexander held himself aloof from his company and behaved towards them with a haughty disdain. Any man who has made any mark in the world must have sufficient character to have made also a good number of enemies and detractors, Alexander like the rest. Nobody sets out to pull down someone who is on the same level. He must be by a rung or two overhead before you can get a grasp of his coat-tails. Alexander had many friends outside the circle of his profession; he had a home life which occupied and contented him; he was not a great frequenter of clubs; he was naturally reticent and wore his St in its proper place instead of upon his sleeve. He was not of the dear-old-boy school. He was certain, therefore, to be charged with arrogance. But this letter will give a truer and a more pleasant picture of the relations which actually existed between himself and those who worked with him:
MY DEAR AYNESWORTH,
It is a pleasure to me to give you this little book in remembrance of our friendship, and our happy and successful association as manager and actor. It will serve to remind you, too, of your exquisite performance of “Algie”, which gave pleasure to the author, and the great British Public.
GEORGE ALEXANDER
Feb. 1, 1910
Another instance may be recorded. In the autumn of 1911 he produced a play called The Ogre by Henry Arthur Jones. It was a satire upon the claims of women. Playgoers may remember a scene in which the man of the household, acted by Alexander, nailed his riding-breeches, in place of a picture, above his mantelpiece. It was that kind of satire. These were the days of the militant suffragettes, of padlocks in Downing Street, and of the cat-and-mouse cure for hunger-strikes in gaol. Henry Arthur Jones was opposed to the movement. He was a genial, wholehearted defender of lost causes. So he wrote this play The Ogre. It was meant to be a comedy, but it had to be played as a farce and even then it was not one of its author’s many successes. I happened to drop into the theatre one evening whilst it was running and Alexander said to me: “I have got a young girl from the Gaiety in this play, who if she sticks to serious work is going to make a great name for herself. I’ll take you round and introduce you.”
He took me behind the scenes from his long dressing-room in the front of the theatre and presented me to a lovely slip of a girl with a shining helmet of golden hair plaited and braided down over her ears — Gladys Cooper. She got her real opportunity a few months later in the last act of the play by Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock, Milestones, and with her native ability and beauty allied to hard work, shrewd common sense, and a strong character, she went forward from that moment until she reached her present commanding position upon the stage.
Alexander never grudged his praise when it was deserved. He was, I think, the least jealous man I ever knew. He never cut down another actor’s opportunity lest he himself should be outshone. You were at liberty to act him off the stage if you could, and he would help you to do it, if so the play required; and as an actor he could afford it, for he was a very good actor with a very wide range from farce to tragedy. Mannerisms? Well, yes! A twist of the mouth, a bending of the knees — those were his as other actors have others, and they would become accentuated, if he was harassed, or his part was not strenuous and left a corner of his mind free to worry over some little problem which clamoured for a solution. How good an actor he was was put to the proof in 1911, the year of His Majestés Coronation, when on May 17th, at a gala performance of Bulwer Lytton’s Money given at Drury Lane, Alexander acted the part of Alfred Evelyn. No bad actor could make anything human of that preposterous and theatrical prig, and few good ones. There was a galaxy of stars gathered together in Drury Lane on that night of May 17th, 1911. Sir John Hare resumed an old part in Sir John Vesey, Graves was acted by Sir Herbert Tree, Sir Frederick Blount by Cyril Maude, Captain Dudley Smooth by Sir Charles Wyndham, Clara Douglas by Irene Vanbrugh, Lady Franklin by Winifred Emery, Georgina Vesey by Alexandra Carlisle. Yet the performance which secured the greatest praise from good judges was the performance of Alfred Evelyn by George Alexander.
The part of Alfred Evelyn is one of the longest ever written, and for an actor accustomed to the idiomatic dialogue of the authors of to-day the character, with its stilted phrases and exuberant speeches, is as difficult to make tolerable as one can conceive. Nothing but complete sincerity would do it. But Alexander was an actor in whom complete sincerity was an outstanding quality. He had the curious dual gift of great executive art, the power to execute with complete absorption, and the power to stand apart at the same time and criticise the execution. “To make Evelyn possible to-day”, Henry Arthur Jones wrote to him on the morning after the performance, “is a great achievement”. And Charles Wylie Mathews, Director of Prosecutions, himself the son of a great comedian and an inveterate playgoer, declared in a letter:
I hear nothing but the very highest praise of your performance of Evelyn. From everybody, and from none more than John Hare, has come the opinion that it was masterly, and, amongst the many good things, perhaps the best you have done. May I tender my sincere congratulations?
Yet another tribute came to hand from an acquaintance:
I hope you won’t think me impertinent if I offer you my congratulations on your performance at Drury Lane.
One or two of your colleagues made no secret of the fact that they did not like their business, and I thought that one of them, at all events, played in that spirit: consequently you had more or less to carry the performance. It seemed to me that you did this with great gallantry.
These three letters were written by busy men, and busy men do not sit down to praise their fellow men, even though they be friends, without a strong convict
ion that the praise is deserved. A performance of the part of Alfred Evelyn — his intimate emotions displayed like lingerie in a shop window, his absurd test whether his friends liked him for himself or for his money bringing down the curtain of the third act upon a climax which is theatre and nothing but theatre — would ruin the reputation of half the leading actors of to-day. For the man who could play Aubrey Tanqueray, Hilary Jesson, and a score of such characters, to attack without shrinking the rodomontades of Alfred Evelyn, and to get away with them was, as Henry Arthur Jones declares, an achievement.
From the Ogre Alexander turned to an Ogress. A novel by Robert S. Helens, Bella Donna, had achieved so much popularity that a villa was named after it at Luxor. It was a story of an attempted murder on the Nile amidst scenes of glowing colour which R. S. Hichens had stippled point upon point with all his meticulous care and luxuriance of phrase. In transferring the novel to the stage a good deal of the atmosphere was inevitably lost. The episode in the desert on the edge of the Fayum, so important in the book, disappeared. The characters became a little thin. J. B. Fagan produced a workmanlike rather than a colourful adaptation. But it was workmanlike; the dramatic moments of the story were seized; Mrs Patrick Campbell played the part of Bella Donna — reluctantly but well — she refused it more than once and never liked it; Alexander himself acted the Jewish doctor Meyer Isaacson, who frustrates the crime. There were some tense and effective scenes and the play, though it could not be said to add to Alexander’s reputation, did nothing to detract from it. Bella Donna ran for thirty-four weeks, from December 9th, 1911, to August 1st, 1912; and, what with the provincial tours and the crowded houses at the St. James’, became one of the greatest moneymaking successes of the management.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 853