The actor-manager,

by Leonard Merrick

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Leonard Merrick was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick the "novelist's novelist."

Reviews

[Neale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leonard Merrick, who failed as an actor, loved the stage as only a spurned lover could. He was always at his best when writing about the theatre, and ‘The Actor Manager’ is one of his most theatrical books.

It begins, in classic Merrick style, with a young actor and actress meeting in a highly unromantic chop-house on Christmas Eve. Their impecunious and unglamorous lives are contrasted painfully with their glowing and idealistic theatrical dream-lives. It is made clear that such dreams are bound to be disappointed.

But Merrick is too humane a writer too punish his characters harshly (he is no Gissing): or rather, he punishes them with success rather than with failure, while making it clear that their success is a quirk of fortune, and that for the vast mass of struggling dreamers there is no such luck. The young actor breaks through, becoming the titular ‘Actor Manager’, but his very success brings him into contact with the sordid realities of the theatre, the follies of love, and the moral dilemmas of the ‘new’ man and the ‘new’ woman.

The book is all very ‘modern’ for its time, and observed with meticulous realism. These very strengths may make it seem ‘dated’ to some modern readers. But when a taste for Merrick is acquired – perhaps it is necessary to love the theatre, and to be of a melancholy disposition – it is not easily lost.