“A good deal more work for all of us, my lord.”
—Love and the Man.
The year 1894 found me playing in The Gay Widow, the first play in which I ever worked with Charles (now, of course, Sir Charles) Hawtrey. I do not remember very much about the play except that I wore most lovely clothes, and that Lottie Venne played “my mother”.
This year does, however, mark a very important milestone in our lives—Harry’s and mine; it was the first time we attempted management on our own, and also his first play was produced. We, Harry and I, with G. W. Elliott, greatly daring, formed a small syndicate. We took the St. James’s Theatre for eight weeks while George Alexander was on tour, and presented Harry’s play Bogey. (In those days all big London managers went on tour for a few months, taking their London company and production.)
First, let me say that, whatever the merits or demerits of the play, we were unlucky. We struck the greatest heat wave that London had known for years; and that, as everyone knows, is not the best recipe in the world for sending up the takings at the box office. As for the play, George Alexander said—and, I think, perhaps rightly—the “play was killed by its title.” It was a play dealing with “spiritualism,” in a limited sense. I mean that it was not in any sense a propaganda play; it had, naturally, not the finish, or perhaps the charm, of his later work—he would have been a poor craftsman if it had been, and a less great artist if the years which came after had taught him nothing—but Bogey certainly did not deserve the hard things which one critic, Mr. Clement Scott, said of it. He wrote one of the most cruel notices which I have ever read, a notice beginning “Vaulting Ambition”—which, in itself, is one of the bundle of “clichés” which may be used with almost equal justice about anything. To say, as Mr. Scott did, that I saved the play again and again “by supreme tact” was frankly nonsense. No actress can save a play “again and again by supreme tact”; she may, and probably will, do her best when she is on the stage, but if she “saves the play” it is due to her acting capacity, and not to “tact”—which seems to me to be the dealing gracefully with an unexpected situation in a way that is essentially “not in the script”.
However, the fact remains that Mr. Clement Scott unmasked the whole of his battery of heavy guns against the play and the author, for daring to produce it while he was still under fifty years of age; and, after all, it was rather “setting out to kill a butterfly with a double-barrelled gun”. Still....
The following night another play was produced, at another theatre, and on this play (not at all a brilliant achievement) Mr. Clement Scott lavished unstinted praise. On the first night of a third play, as he went to his stall, the gallery—which was, as usual, filled largely by the members of the Gallery First Night Club—greeted him with shouts of “Bogey”, and continued to do so until, in disgust, he left the stalls. After that night, Clement Scott always occupied a box! But the sequel! Some days after the production of Bogey, the President of the Gallery First Night Club called at our little house in Chelsea. I remember his call distinctly: our maid was “out”, and I opened the door to him. He came to ask Harry to be the guest at the first dinner of the club. It was, I think, when that club held its twenty-fifth birthday, that we were both asked to be the guests of the club—a compliment we much appreciated.
The play Bogey was not a success, but I should like to quote the remarks of the dramatic critic of the Sporting Times, which seemed, and still seem, to me kind and—what is of infinitely greater importance—just: “Ambition is not necessarily vaulting, and it is a thing to be encouraged and not mercilessly crushed in either a young author or a young actor. Nor when the youngster figures in the double capacity of author and actor is the crime unpardonable.... This is all apropos of an ungenerous attack in a quarter from which generosity would have been as graceful as the reverse is graceless.... It was remarked to me by a London manager: ‘I don’t know any actor on our stage who could play the part better than Esmond does’, and, upon my word! I am inclined to agree with him.... Bogey is not a good play ... but it has a freshness about it, an originality of idea which is not unlikely to prove unattractive to a great many.”
However, Harry Esmond tried again; and the row of plays on a shelf in my study is proof that he was only “baffled to fight better”.
In Bogey we had a stage manager, I remember, who should, had the gods taken sufficient interest in the destinies of men, have been a maker of “props” and a property master. He played a small part, of a “typical city man”, and his one ambitious effort towards characterisation was to ask if he “might be allowed to carry a fish basket”. He evidently thought all city men call at Sweetings before catching their train home!