THE VARIETIES OF THEATRE MANAGER
The Laughing Audience has assisted several theatre operators, including local authorities, in the recruitment of managers. We can advise on job descriptions, advertisements, search and assist at interviews. Paul Iles has also acted as mentor to several junior and middle managers in theatrical organisations. Please contact him to discuss your requirements.
Playwright T.W. (Thomas William) Robertson (1829-1871) contributed several articles on ‘theatrical types’ to the London weekly, Illustrated Times. This sketch (1852) is a mine of information about person specifications for chief executives in mid-nineteenth-century theatre:
The Actor Manager of thirty years ago was a man of totally different type to his successor of the present day [1850s]. He was an intensely clever, bustling, wrong-headed, highly appreciative fellow, fond of his authors, his company, his orchestra, his scene-shifters, his supernumeraries, and all that belonged to the little world he ruled. During the rehearsal of a new piece he would swear horribly and stamp on the stage till the soles of his feet tingled again. On the night of its production, attired in his character-dress, he would be here, there and everywhere - assisting the actors in the adjustment of their wigs, finding fault with the coiffure of a soubrette, discharging the prompter, imprecating every portion of the anatomy of his stage-manager, helping a carpenter in the ‘setting’ of a rock-piece, challenging his leading tragedian to mortal combat on the morrow, making speeches to the audience to appease them for the long delays between the acts, and conducting himself generally like a lunatic in fancy costume; but, the piece over, he would raise the prompter’s salary, ask his stage-manager to join him in a bottle of champagne, treat the carpenters to beer, invite his leading tragedians to dine with him on Sunday, and thank his generous and liberal public for once more cr-r-r-r-owning his humble efforts with their kind approval. The first to recognise merit in an aspirant, he was the last to listen to the grumbling of a fastidious author or a tyrannical stage-manager. Beloved by all tragedians, comedians, carpenters, callboys, sceneshifters, and supernumeraries, his funeral presented a long procession of grateful and weeping mourners, well dated all the events of their lives from his death, and who said constantly, ‘When poor Yorick was living he would never,’ etc ‘Alas! poor Yorick!’
Hie over the last five and twenty years to the present caterers for the public! The change is great, and, like many other changes, the reverse of an improvement. There are so many varieties of the species that our limits will only permit us to touch upon a few....
The Commercial Manager is a very common type...and is willing to exploit opera, ballet, equestrianism, and Shakespeare... He takes an entirely commercial view of all things – Ramo-Samee Indiarubber Peruvians, real water, the legitimate drama, speaking pantomime, or pantomimic tragedy – so that it bring the ready sixpence.... He prides himself greatly upon his practical commonsense, distrusts manuscripts, fears authors, places great reliance upon his costumier and property-man. His conversation is not choice, except as regards oaths, which are of a raciness and full flavour that would do discredit to an irate cabman. Although he professes a high respect for dramatic literature, he judges of the merit of a drama like a butterman - by its weight in paper. He is a great man for bargains, and will buy a quantity of damaged velvets for a fabulously small sum, after which he will search for an author to write him a piece for the velvets. ‘Lovely velvets - make any piece popular them velvets would,’ says the Commercial Manager. The drama found, if it fail he despairs of the prospects of the theatre. Publics are so fickle nowadays. ‘Who would have thought that with them velvets any piece could fail?’
The Commercial Manager is a great financial genius, and cuts down salaries and expenses to the very lowest scale. He is also fertile in expedients for stopping a night's salary from his employees, and was the original inventor and introducer of that wonderful piece of economical meanness, a Complimentary Benefit, which means a benefit for the Manager, on which occasion the actors, actresses, sceneshifters, supernumeraries and all give their services gratuitously....
Lastly, the C. M. is very litigious, and always involved in lawsuits; in fact, an attorney is laid on to his establishment like gas, and picks out holes in engagements and flaws in arrangements for his clever client's interest. The Actor Manager is a good second or third rate sort of artist, who forces himself into a prominent position by taking a theatre, and, by carefully stewing down the abilities of the authors and actors he employs, and mixing with his own their mental and artistic porridge, makes his weak water-gruel talents thick and slaby. Just now the stage is terribly plagued by various sorts of these self-sufficient entrepreneurs.
There is your Tragedian Manager, who kindly puts Shakespeare right, and explains what that erring author really meant; and there is your High Comedy Manager, who knows three Lords to speak to, and once met a Countess at a ball, and is in consequence a great authority on fashionable life; and, like Goldsmith's bear-leader, can’t abide anything that is low. These two varieties are very fond of teaching young actors how to act, and so successful is their tuition, that very often a promising young comedian from the provinces has in six difficult lessons been tamed and tortured into the ineffective and passionless delivery which forms so valuable a setting to managerial mediocrity. Another of these peculiarities is remarkable. They seldom, if ever, engage an actor or actress taller than themselves. An engagement at their theatre depends more on inches than genius. No mere actor should be taller than his manager. Banquo should always be smaller than Macbeth, and the jeune premier rôle shorter than the grand premier role. Height, like individual talent, must be kept down to one regulation standard. In regard to their well-disguised servility to the gentlemen who notice the theatres in the daily and weekly papers, actor-managers are no means more open to animadversions than either the commercial or invisible ones...
There are many other varieties of Managers, too many for us to give a full and particular account of; many well-meaning, kind-hearted and honourable gentlemen, the sort of men who require no detailed description, for the good of all classes are alike.
What can induce anyone to encounter the endless turmoil, the dissatisfaction, the risk, the anxiety, the incessant wear and tear, both mental and physical, which are inseparable from the management of a theatre? It must be one of three controlling impulses which entraps so many into this devouring maelstroom–lofty emulation, an enthusiastic passion for genuine art, or love of power; which last enthrals the human species as rats are subdued and fascinated by prussic acid and oil of rhodium. The arch-enemy of man angles with many baits, but he catches more unwary victims with power than with any other lure in his magazine of temptations. It has been often said, and truly, that a theatre represents an epitome of a kingdom, a microcosm or miniature of the great globe itself, a condensed edition of humanity, combining within its narrow limits all the complicated machinery, all the mingled passions, propensities, antipathies, conflicting interests and jarring feelings, which are exhibited on a more expanded scale in the political and moral legislation of a mighty empire... John William Cole, The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, London, Richard Bentley, 1859, Volume I, pp. 24-26:
A manager of a theatre is a tolerably potent monarch, on a small scale, as far as power is concerned; that is, the power to order, direct, and control the internal economy of his little dominion, as swayed by judgment or -prejudice. He may do good or evil, justice or injustice, and render those under him happy or miserable, to a considerable extent, according to the bent of his disposition, which may be benevolent or capricious, kind or cruel, mild or vindictive, long-suffering or impatient under contradiction. He is not compelled by the constitution of his kingdom to have either ministry or cabinet council unless he pleases; and can dismiss or rule without them if they interfere with troublesome suggestions, or run counter to his wishes. He can make a law, if one is wanted on an emergency, without waiting for the forms of a debate, or the cavils of opposition. He has only to say, ‘let this be, le Roi le vent,’ affix sign manual, send forth the edict, and the Sultan’s Firman is not more implicitly acknowledged by well-disciplined subjects. Mutiny is almost unknown, as a special article in the Codex Dramaticus provides that disobedience of lawful orders, or misprision of rebellion, is followed by constant discharge, without benefit of remonstrance.
Tragedian actor-manager Charles Kean (1811-1868) was lessee of the Princess's Theatre, London from 1850. He frequently toured the provinces, as in this playbill for Hamlet, 1860, at the eponymous Leeds theatre. See the Leodis collection of Leeds playbills here.
