AMUSERS OF THE PUBLIC

Evening Star, Issue 22031, 17 May 1935, Page 12

AMUSERS OF THE PUBLIC

THEATRICAL MOSEY MAKERS Grade Fields, the stage and screen star wiiose ideal life is living in a caravan in old clothes on ten snillings a week, is to earn £160,000 for her him work in the next two years. The reason is the certainty of her appeal, but it is also symptomatic of the present entertainment boom. The theatre is also enjoying it, and successful stars and managements are reaping rich rewards, writes Stephen Watts, in the •Sunday Express.’ Lights flickering gaily and expensively over-30 facades in the West End proclaim nightly the’ most prosperous theatre season London has had for many years. Who are the people reaping the rich rewards of this abundance in the show business ? Here are the success stories of some of them. Ivor Novello, forty-two-year-old bachelor, actor, author,. composer, producer, tops tho bill for output, versatility, and sheer hard cash profits. Hia all-round income, including royalties which reach back to the day when he tapped out ‘ Keep the Home . Fires Burning’; with one finger on his mother’s piano, is somewhere near the £30,000 a year mark. In tem years he has written eleven successful plays. Novello makes no bones about his objective. It is popular success. . ; . . _ Since his first big hit with The Truth Game ’ he has never stopped. ‘ Murder in Mayfair ’ has done well, and in a few weeks ‘ Glamorous Night opens at Drury Lane. It is the. first Lane, production to have one man as author, composer, and leading man. And in the midst of his .activities Novello found time to sell a song, ‘Forest Echoes,’ to the Drury Lane pantomime. , Jack Buchanan cannot be far behind Novello. His income for years lias been around £25,000 a year. It onay seem strange to include him in this list when he is not playing in the West End. But one of this quiet, delicate, forty-four-year-old Scot’s sec-, rets is his country-wide: appeal. ‘Mr Whittington ’ is a good example. It made its debut as the Christmas attraction in Glasgow thirteen months ago. Then it ran most of 1934 at two West End theatres. : In that time Buchanan made two films and conducted the affairs of the Leicester Square Theatre, which he* owns. He went into partnership with Auriol Lee to present a Van Druten Allien, when 'Mr Whittington’ was still taking £4,000 a week, be - whisked it off on tour again. 'When Buchanan came to London jiist over twenty years ago as a chorus boy, to the disgust of his family, and after a more orthodox if less spectacular beginning as an auctioneer, he gave himself five years to make. good. PRIESTLEY’S SUCCESS.^ J, B. Priestley is the most significant new force in the: theatre of recent years. Nobody knows how much be earns. I have heard £50,000 • a year dismissed as a gross uader-estimat©. But, of course,, not all that comes from the theatre. , ± Priestley did not know the prompt corner from the other one when Julian Wylie started to stage ‘The Good Companions.’ But he absorbed the new craft as blotting paper does ink. . * * * , -r Actors inspire him. He wrote Laburnum Grove ’ after seeing /Edmund Gwenn play Jess Oakroyd. While it was setting up new records Tor the little Duchess Theatre, Priestley became a director of the theatre. _ * When it came off he had ‘ Eden End ’ ready to take its. place. ‘ Laburnum Grove * has made, a hit in New York, and two companies are touring He saw possibilities in a young Irishman’s play, ‘The Moon in the Yellow River,’ when it was produced privately. He bought a half-share in it, and put it on at the Haymarket, where it still is. * When Basil Dean puts on the new Priestley comedy he has bought, and the play this industrious Yorkshireman has written for Ralph Richardson and Victoria Hopper goes into the Duchess in a few weeks, Priestley. will be drawing royalties from ;six theatrical sources. • , . , . Alec Rea is one of the unseen big men of the moment. He owns the little St. Martin's Theatre. Its recent record is amazing. , That queer, much-discussed play, • The Green Bay Tree,’ packed it for months. Now ‘ The Wind and the Rain ’ is transferring to a bigger, theatre, the Queen’s, after performing the same feat since October. 1933. More than a quarter of a million people have seen this simple, pleasant comedy. There are no stars in the cast. The highest salary. is in the £3O to £4O area. The whole production could not have cost more than £SOO to put on. Rea, a rich man already, has made a new fortune out of his genius for scenting big money in what looked like, little plays. Leslie Henson would have to be in this list even if he were only an actor. But he is a producer: and manager as well.

His last two productions at the Strand—‘Nice Goings On’ and ‘Lucky Break ’—have been winners from the first night. When he works for an independent management Henson rates £4OO to £SOO a week salary. With his other interests that figure mounts at present to about £I,OOO a week. Just over:2o years* ago, when he was being paid £4 a week as a minor comedian. he was fired'for. asking for a 10s a week rise. The same management was paying him £BO a week a few years later.

Gladys Cooper is remaking her for tune.

Her venture in . actress-management at the Playhouse was not a success 1 . Now she is clear of that millstone. It was the last play she did.at the Playhouse that turned, the tide. That was ‘ The Rats of Norway,’ stage version, of a novel by an unknown young man called Keith Winter. Raymond Massey produced it for her. Now she and Massey are in partnership with Winter’s second play. ‘ The Shining Hour,’ which has passed its 170th performance at the St. James. Jack Eggar is the great unknown of this group. He comes from South Africa. He backed his faith in the show, ‘ Jill, Darling!’ ift the Saville for which the libraries made a £25,000 deal. ' ■