§
Alexander, on the occasion when an album commemorative of his twenty-five years of management was presented to him on the stage of the St. James’ Theatre on the afternoon of February 4th, 1915, dwelt with pride on the number of English authors whose work it had been his privilege to present. It was, indeed, a constant theme in the speeches he made and the interviews he gave. There were, however, two notable exceptions from his list of names: J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw. Barrie’s plays were presented as a rule by Charles Frohman, who was a theatre manager on both sides of the Atlantic. He was the lessee of the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, and with what was practically a stock company, including Harry Irving, Gerald du Maurier, Irene Vanbrugh, and Dion Boucicault as producer. Alexander, however, had in his possession for a time one play by Barrie named Two Kinds of Women. There was a project to produce it at matinees with a star cast. But the project came to nothing and the play was subsequently placed in the evening-bill at another theatre, under another title. I think it was under Arthur Bourchier’s management at the Garrick Theatre that the play was seen, and that it was then called The Wedding Guest. But that is a conjecture.
With regard to George Bernard Shaw information is more positive. At some time during the run of Bella Donna Shaw and Alexander met between the acts. It must have been early during the run. Alexander asked for a play. Mrs Patrick Campbell wanted to play a cockney part. The suggestion must have happened to correspond with a theme which Shaw had already in his mind. For he began upon Pygmalion that very evening. By the month of June, the play was sufficiently complete for him to propose that he should read it to Alexander and Mrs Patrick Campbell. Apparently Alexander wished to hear it first of all by himself, and did so. He was delighted with the play, but was convinced that its success must depend upon the performance of the part of Eliza. He made a suggestion that that part could be played upon other lines than those upon which Shaw had worked. Shaw thought over the suggestion and disagreed with it. Anyone but Mrs Patrick Campbell would upset the balance of the whole play. If Eliza were watered down, Higgins would become a brute. The kind of bullying which was intended was that kind which is a way of making love. But the relations between Alexander and Mrs Patrick Campbell were now strained. They had been acting together throughout the run of Bella Donna and he definitely did not want to rehearse or act with her again. The plan, therefore, for the moment came to nothing. George Bernard Shaw expressed a hope that later on he might turn out something else for the St. James’ Theatre, and Alexander replied with a grateful appreciation that the play had been read to him, and an admiration of the masterly way in which it had been read.
By this time the long run of Bella Donna had ended and the play now in the bill was a translation of La Flambée, a tense and stirring drama by Henry Kistemaeckers which had run for a year at the Porte St. Martin Theatre in Paris. Ethel Irving, an actress of appeal and force, had made a remarkable success a year before in The Witness for the Defence. She had left the company, before the run of the play was over, to fulfil an engagement to tour in Australia. She had now returned and in The Turning Point, as the adaptation was called, she took the leading woman’s part. The character which Alexander played, that of Colonel Felt, and hers, that of his wife, were both of them strong and emotional. The couple had drifted apart; he, an Officer of Engineers responsible for some new fortifications on the frontier, had taken to gambling, she to a lover. A tragic incident made it essential that Colonel Felt should establish an alibi and it was the wife only who could help him. Out of this necessity came a renewal of passion and an escape from the peril in which Colonel Felt was placed. The two parts gave to their representatives great acting opportunities and both actor and actress made the most of them. Monsieur Kistemaeckers, who was suffering acutely from rheumatism, was forbidden by his doctor to cross the Channel and attend any of the early performances, but an account which he received from an eye-witness filled him with joy and he transcribed the account ecstatically:
During the intervals of the third performance at which I was present, I caught the conversations of my neighbours. The unanimous opinion was that Sir George Alexander had revealed a power which made him actually England’s greatest actor and surprised even those who most appreciated his fine talents. In the second act and in the third his art reached a pitch which will draw all London. Since Irving’s day there has been nothing seen like it upon the boards.
The wariness of a biographer would naturally incline him if not to suspect altogether, at all events to repeat with hesitation, the transports of an author who receives an indubitable proof in the form of fees that his work has been acclaimed in a foreign land. But fortunately a hard-headed playgoer with a long and trained experience of men and letters has added his own unbiassed evidence. G. W. Smalley wrote to Alexander on the night when he saw the play:
My nerves are all unstrung after so many sensations and thrills and I nevertheless look back on my evening with pleasure; and on yours as a performance quite new to me and I thought to the house. The face was never more mobile; the expressions succeeded each other from one second to another, the differences clearly marked: the sum of the whole a complete record of emotions and mental processes.
You seem to have kept all the French text; which is perhaps too leisurely for the British mind and could be cut. But the stage handling of the whole left little room for criticism and the suspense lasted to the end. I should think you had a goldmine. Miss Ethel Irving had very fine moments and inspirations, and I thought I had never seen a piece more thoroughly rehearsed; the master hand in it all through.
The Turning Point ran through the autumn and into the new year of 1913. At the close of the run Alexander once again left his own theatre, this time to play at the Palace Theatre a one-act play written by Max Beerbohm, whose sharp and fastidious pen has been too seldom employed in the service of the stage. Alexander played in A Social Success for a month to the great pleasure of his audiences, and meanwhile produced at the St. James’ Theatre a musical version of the story of Turandot. Alexander drew a large fee of £2400 for his month at the Palace Theatre. But one must multiply that figure by two and a half before one reaches the amount which Turandot engulfed. It was a German medley by Karl Vollmoeller, who with Reinhardt had enjoyed a success at the Palace Theatre with a pantomime half melodrama, half farce, and all fantastic, called A Night in Venice. Turandot was gorgeously mounted, with Evelyn D’Alroy in the title-role of the Princess, a long cast and a much longer train of armoured warriors and embroidered courtiers. It ran for twenty-seven performances to average takings of between £60 and £70, and resulted in a loss of over £6000. No such disaster had occurred before in the history of this management, which was now nearing its twenty-fifth year. Once only £3000 had been swallowed down by the costly production of Much Ado About Nothing. Twice £2500 had been lost. In Days of Old and The Eccentric Lord Combermere were the unhappy occasions. But in the majority of the cases where the balance was adverse, the loss was under £1000. The Princess Turandot, however, was notoriously a difficult person. Her three riddles had cost the heads of a good many of the suitors for her hand. It was in her tradition to penalise the manager who provided her with a lodging. Karl Vollmoeller was gracefully remorseful and thankful for the care which had been lavished upon his work. Alexander fell back upon a short revival of Lady Windermere s Fan, and that play, with a comedy Open Windows, by A. E. W. Mason, carried him comfortably to the close of his season.
It was now the summer of 1913. During the past twelve months he had bought a meadow at Chorley Wood on the edge of the Common. There he had Jmilt himself a house and laid out a garden. It was furnished by this summer and for the rest of his life he and his wife made much use of it. It was a charming house, arranged with a separate suite of rooms for them on the first floor. It was within easy reach of the St. James’ Theatre and gave them a greater privacy and fresher air than they could get in Pont Street, and the opportunity of welcoming their intimate
friends to a place of quiet and rest.
He had been knighted i» the summer of 1911, and on October 17th of 1912 he had conferred upon him the Honorary Degree of LL.D. at the University of Bristol. Lord Haldane of Cloan was the Chancellor, and amongst those presented to him with Alexander for the Degree were Sir Francis Younghusband, Sir William White, later the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Alfred Hopkinson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Manchester, the Bishop of Bristol, and Earl Roberts of Kandahar.
Three years afterwards, when the war was at its height, Pygmalion cropped up again. The play had been done at His Majesty’s Theatre with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Higgins and Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza. It had run for fifteen weeks with very great success, but it was more than possible that its appeal was not exhausted. A revival during the autumn of 1916 at the St. James’ Theatre was considered. Bernard Shaw was cordial but in no hurry for a revival, and above all anxious that at this time of stress a play of his should not disappoint financially a man with a theatre upon his hands. For whatever reason, Alexander let his theatre for the autumn and appeared only on January 25th, 1917, in The Aristocrat, a play by Louis N. Parker. He had the assistance of Genevieve Ward, Mary Glynne, Lennox Pawle, Charles Glenny, and young Dennis Neilson-Terry. This was the last play in which Alexander acted, and it is pleasant to record that it received the welcome and enjoyed the prosperity which attended upon the St. James’ Theatre up to the outbreak of the war.
CHAPTER XII
The finance of the St. James’ Theatre
WHILST ALEXANDER WAS in his first year of management at the Avenue (now the Playhouse) Theatre, his manager bolted with the cash. He took what was in the till, £700, and retired to Mexico, where he remained for the rest of his life. To a young management, which if not still in long clothes was not yet upon its legs, the loss of so much money might well have been fatal. It was as bad as stealing a baby’s arrowroot. It was natural therefore that, when Alexander moved on to the St. James’ Theatre in the autumn of 1890, he should take steps to prevent a recurrence of such a disaster. The accounts were audited frequently, and a summary of each year’s Profit and Loss was entered in a book from which the financial condition of the management could be read and estimated almost at a glance.
From this book quotations have already been made in reference to particular plays. But it may be of interest now to take a wider view and compare in slightly greater detail the continuous management possible for an actor in those days before the war with the in-and-out system which later conditions entail. For there are signs that the in-and-out system is coming in its turn to an end and that the actor-manager will be seen again sooner than seemed likely a year or so ago. The weekly expenses then were kept well within £900, and these expenses included not only the actor-manager’s salary as an actor, but a sufficient proportion of the rent to enable the theatre to remain closed without loss during a reasonably long summer vacation and an annual reasonable outlay for repairs.
A vague phrase “overhead charges” is much in use in the theatres of to-day, and covers a whole crop of expenses which arise from multiple managements. Alexander held a direct lease from the owners. His business manager was directly employed by him and he was the only man responsibly employed upon the theatre’s business. There was only one interest in the theatre, and there was therefore only one needed to safeguard it. The business manager had an adequate staff, but that staff was directly employed by Alexander. Salaries, of course, were lower; but it is a mistake to attribute the present rate of increase, as is so often done, to the insatiable demands of the actors. It is true that young people in every profession, actors like the rest, claim more opportunities of enjoyment and more of the modern facilities than their predecessors did. They want their small motor-cars and their golf-courses, and they are no longer content that acting should be their only form of exercise. A more spacious life is the proper aim of any man though he may be a little premature and impatient in demanding it. But there were other causes than a more modest scale of living which kept salaries at a lower level. Short runs make high salaries. A play before the war could be moderately successful. An actor could be acting for fifty nights where to-day he acts for five. There were, of course, complete fiascos in those days, but not so many. Then he could play cricket: now he must play tip and run. A continuous management meant very often continuity of employment; in play after play at the St. James’ Theatre the same names recurred in the cast. Moreover the income-tax was lower. In the present practice, salaries are inevitably higher. In the actual production of a play in a theatre run by an actor-manager, the cost was less, for the scenery and furniture belonged to the theatre, accumulated as the number of the plays produced increased, and at a comparatively small expense could be altered and repainted to fit the proper setting of a new play. The result can be seen in such instances as the following. Alexander could produce an elaborate play like The Turning Point with a production cost of £1500, a lengthy cast which included, besides himself, Ethel Irving, J. D. Beveridge, Godfrey Tearle, Athol Stewart, and Lettice Fairfax, pay author’s fees of £1300, and on a run of no more than a hundred and eleven performances, clear a net profit of £2561 and a florin. Of course he whipped his plays off before they began to lose the money which they had made. It is the great argument for a continuous management directed by an actor that he has plays which in an emergency can be revived, and it was better for author and actor-manager that a play should be capable of revival than that it should be killed outright by too prolonged an iteration. I am taking only the years between 1890 and the summer of 1914, the first twenty-four years of Alexander’s management of the St. James’ Theatre. For with the outbreak of war, circumstances so fantastic arose, and so swiftly a new habit of mind became natural to the people of England, that parallels between those years of confusion and the equable smooth years which preceded them are out of the question. Comparisons of figures may be amusing but they have no lesson.
Between then the first production at the St. James’, The Idler on February 26th of the year 1891 — Sunlight and Shadow, it should be mentioned, was revived for three weeks from January 31st — and the last before war broke out, a revival of An Ideal Husband on May 18th, 1914, Alexander produced twenty-seven plays which ended in loss. In three of these, Mollentrave on Women by Alfred Sutro, Mid-Channel by Arthur Pinero, and Turandot by Karl Vollmoeller, he did not act himself. And without doubt, in a theatre conducted by an actor who is to the knowledge of all playgoers his own leading man, his absence from the cast is a serious handicap. But there were twenty-seven plays which failed. Yet in only one year of the twenty-four did he manage and act for less than nothing. This was the year lasting from the summer of 1894 to the summer of 1895. His personal tour in the autumn of 1894 had brought in a net profit of £2205: 18: 9, and his touring companies a profit of £1298: 17: 5. In addition, he had let his theatre for a short time and received a rent of £448. But on January 5th, 1895, he had produced Guy Domville, and on February 14th The Importance of Being Earnest; on May nth The Triumph of the Philistines’, on June 20th a revival of The Second Mrs Tanqueray, and on July 4th a revival of The Idler. During that season he thus put on three new plays and revived two old ones, with the result that, even counting in his salary and his private investments, there was a dead loss of £517: 19: 6. There were one or two other occasions when the profit on the year was entirely due to the Provincial Tour in the early autumn.
It is a common saying that the provinces, from the theatrical point of view, are dead; that the cinema has killed the touring companies; that only some huge revue with witty comedians, catchy tunes, and a kaleidoscope of flashing legs can hope to make both ends meet, and that only in a few towns. But is not that due to the extinction of the actor-manager, who, coming with the prestige of his theatre and his latest play, gradually built up for himself a following in the country, which looked upon his visit as one of the social events of the year?
Alexander’s first tour, in 1891 �
� a short one of five weeks — brought him a profit of £49; his second tour in 1892 of ten weeks, £467; his third tour of 1:893, £2374. It is true that he had as his great attraction this year The Second Mrs Tanqueray in all its freshness. But the company was getting known for good plays, good acting, and good staging. It was acquiring a vested interest in the expectations of country playgoers. By the end of the century the autumn tours of twelve to fourteen weeks were bringing in, after all expenses had been paid, net profits of over £4000; and with the regularity of the returns from an investment in Government Stock. There are still some actors, like Matheson Lang and Martin Harvey, who, keeping their names known by their periodic visits with excellent plays and finished productions, reap their harvest in the provinces. But the background of the London theatre and the London play is naturally of immense value; and if the settled management returns in time to the London stage, confidence in the provinces will be restored and the popularity of the living play renewed.
The great profits, however, were made of course in London. Up to the summer of 1914 Alexander had put on at the St. James’ Theatre twenty-six successful plays and the returns from them were six times as much again as his losses on the plays which had failed. His House in Order stands at the head of the list, and easily. It earned, clear of every expense, £35,000. The much criticised Bella Donna came next with £25,748. It is odd that Bella Donna, so stripped of that gift for decoration which has made its author famous, should come to so high a place in the financial scale. The Importance of Being Earnest came third. It brought £21,942 into the banking account of the St. James’ Theatre. It was followed closely by The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which fell short of that sum by £600. The Thief came fifth in the list, Bernstein’s play translated by Cosmo Gordon-Lennox. Again it is strange that a play which has made so small a stir in the dramatic history of those twenty-four years should have earned more for the theatre than either The Prisoner of Zenda or Lady Windermere’s Fan. But the cast was small, and since the scenery required was not elaborate, it could be sent on tour at a smaller cost. The Thief earned net £19,460, The Prisoner of Zenda £18,132, and Lady Windermere’s Fan £15,631. All these sums, it should be understood, include the salary which Alexander paid himself as an actor both in London and the provinces. The net earning of those twenty-six plays amounted to a sum of £269,400: 12: 6.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 854