George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland

Abstract

Reviewed by: George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager by Lucie Sutherland Sarah Chambré Lucie Sutherland. George Alexander and the Work of the Actor-Manager. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. xiii+297 pp., $84.99 (hardback). Examining theater history and cultural practice, Lucie Sutherland provides in this work of forensic scholarship a many-faceted portrayal of George Alexander, one of the last great figures to occupy the role of actor-manager, which dominated and shaped the English stage from Richard Burbage's tenure of Shakespeare's Globe (1599-1613) through David Garrick's creation of the Garrick Theatre (1747-76) and continued with an array of famous names until the early decades of the twentieth century. Like his predecessors and peers, Alexander combined the roles of principal actor, producer, and financial director as actor-manager of the fashionable St. James's Theatre from 1890 until his death in 1918. Sutherland's detailed analysis of the financial and practical aspects of this management arrangement underpins a nuanced portrayal of Alexander's championing of new English drama with a constant assessment of its appeal to his diverse audience, segregated by class and ticket price. This book describes how Alexander's commitment to contemporary texts, nurturing of a new audience, and manipulation of their tastes by the creation of a St. James's brand was tempered by conservatism. This was partly innate, partly due to censorship but mostly the result of a cautious guardianship of his brand, defined with a careful and highly attuned eye to the fashionable occupants of the stalls and dress circle. Sutherland delineates the elements that contributed to this management style and challenges the image of Alexander as a rigid autocrat with particular attention to his collaboration with actors and playwrights. His emerging style and openness to serious new drama was shifted significantly by the events of 1895, of which Henry James's short lived drama Guy Domville (1895) was only one. Sutherland details the financial imperatives and the portfolio approach to Alexander's risk management. Increasingly, the actor-manager interspersed new works with revivals, safe romances, and market-tested offerings such as acknowledged authors or works that had premiered elsewhere. The need for long runs and this conservatively managed collaboration, exemplified by but not exclusive to Alexander, led by the [End Page E-8] time of the opening years of the twentieth century to a bifurcated marketplace—as the critic Dennis Kennedy describes it: "avant-garde suspicion of popular success eventually split [the market place] into two parts: the larger part got the audience but little lasting attention. The smaller part the critical and historical acclaim" (146). In many respects, the representative history so well reconstructed here mirrors the shifts in literary book publishing over the same period. In this history, James arguably placed himself in the wrong market for his work, although the successes of pioneers Oscar Wilde and Arthur Wing Pinero in the early 1890s might have seemed to augur otherwise. Sutherland's book is not primarily about James's play, which was only a brief episode in Alexander's career. He is quoted as reminiscing in 1909 about Guy Domville that "I was, and always shall be, proud, in spite of that particular audience's adverse verdict. It had a fair run, which satisfied me, for it attracted to the St James's that whole of intellectual London's audiences available for any theatre" (45). The author accepts the standard critical viewpoint that the construed failure was due to "the limited dramatic possibilities of James's text." The detailed scholarship contained in this book is nevertheless very useful for Jamesians interested in a re-evaluation of the play and consideration of its limited run in the context of Alexander's practice. The creation of the St. James's brand relied on elaborately realistic and spectacular staging, which entailed high fixed costs for a production, and success was thus reliant on long runs to create profit. The stratified audience composition meant that a play must have broad appeal, something that Guy Domville failed to offer. Sutherland demonstrates that rehearsal time was limited and that Alexander focused on choreography and mise-en-scène rather than dialogue...