Choosing a play is no easy matter. Hundreds of things have to be considered. Will it please the public? Will it suit the company? If Miss So-and-So be on a yearly engagement and there is no part for her, can the theatre afford out of the weekly profits of the house to pay her a large salary merely as an understudy? What will the piece cost to mount? What will the dramatist expect to be paid? This latter amount varies as greatly as the royalties paid to authors on books.
As nearly every manager has a literary adviser behind his back, so almost every actor-manager has a syndicate in the background. Theatrical syndicates are strange institutions. They have only come into vogue since 1880, and are taken up by commercial gentlemen as a speculation. When gambling ceases to attract on the Stock Exchange, the theatre is an exciting outlet.
The actor-manager consequently is not the “sole lessee” in the sense of being the only responsible person. He generally has two or three backers, men possessed of large incomes who are glad to risk a few thousand pounds for the pleasure of a stall on a first night, or an occasional theatrical supper. Sometimes the syndicate does extremely well: at others ill; but that does not matter—the rich man has had his fun, the actor his work, the critic his sneer, and so the matter ends.
The actor-manager draws his salary like any other member of the company; but should the play prove a success his profits vary according to arrangement.
If, on the other hand, the venture turn out a failure, in the case of the few legitimate actor-managers—if one may use the term—he loses all the outgoing expenses. Few men can stand that. Ten thousand pounds have been lost through a bad first night, for although some condemned plays have worked their way to success, or, at least, paid their expenses, that is the exception and by no means the rule.
Many affirm there should be no actor-managers: the responsibility is too great; but then no man is sure of getting the part he likes unless he manages to secure it for himself.
Every well-known manager receives two or three hundred plays per annum. Cyril Maude told me that three hundred and fifteen dramas were left at the Haymarket Theatre in 1903, and that he and Frederick Harrison had actually read, or anyway looked through, every one of them. They enter each in a book, and put comments against them.
“The good writing is Harrison’s,” he remarked, “and the bad scribble mine”; but that was so like Mr. Maude’s modesty.
After that it can hardly be said there is any lack of ambition in England to write for the stage. The extraordinary thing is that only about three per cent. of these comedies, tragedies, burlesques, or farces are worth even a second thought. Many are written without the smallest conception of the requirements of the theatre, while some are indescribably bad, not worth the paper and ink wasted on their production.
It may readily be understood that every manager cannot himself read all the MSS. sent him for consideration, neither is the actor-manager able to see himself neatly fitted by the parts written “especially for him.” Under these circumstances it has become necessary of late years at some theatres to employ a literary adviser, as mentioned on the former page. All publishing-houses have their literary advisers, and woe betide the man who condemns a book which afterwards achieves a great success, or accepts one that proves a dismal failure! So likewise the play reader.