Arthur Wing Pinero
Sir Arthur Wing Pinero was an English playwright and, early in his career, actor.
Pinero was drawn to the theatre from an early age, and became a professional actor at the age of 19. He gained experience as a supporting actor in British provincial theatres, and from 1876 to 1881 was a member of Henry Irving's company, based at the Lyceum Theatre, London.
Pinero wrote his first play in 1877. Seven years later, having written 15 more, three of them highly successful, he abandoned acting and became a full-time playwright. He first became known for a series of farces, of which The Magistrate was the longest-running. During the 1890s he turned to serious subjects. The Second Mrs Tanqueray, dealing with a woman with a scandalous past, was regarded as shocking, but ran well and made a large profit. His other successes included Trelawny of the "Wells", a romantic comedy celebrating the theatre, old and new, and The Gay Lord Quex, about a reformed roué and a feisty young woman. A venture into opera, with a libretto for The Beauty Stone, was not a success, and Pinero thereafter generally stuck to his familiar genre of society dramas and comedies.
Although he continued to write throughout the first three decades of the 20th century and into the fourth, it is Pinero's work from the 1880s and 1890s that has endured. There have been numerous revivals of many of his plays; and some have been adapted for the cinema or as musicals. By his later years, Pinero was seen as old-fashioned, and his last plays were not successful. He died in London at the age of 79.
Life and career
Early years
Pinero was born in London, the only son, and second of three children, of John Daniel Pinero, and his wife Lucy, née Daines. Pinero's father and grandfather were London solicitors. They were descended from the Pinheiro family, described by Pinero's biographer John Dawick as "a distinguished family of Sephardic Jews who rose to prominence in medieval Portugal before suffering the persecutions of the Inquisition". Pinero's branch of the family fled to England. His grandfather abandoned the Jewish faith, became a member of the Church of England, married a Christian Englishwoman, Margaret Wing, and became a highly successful lawyer. His younger son, Pinero's father, also took up the legal profession, but was much less successful; Pinero was brought up in circumstances that were not poor but were not affluent. He attended Spa Fields Chapel charity school in Exmouth Street, Clerkenwell, London, until the age of ten, when he went to work in his father's office.John Daniel Pinero died in May 1871, leaving very little money. To contribute to the family income, Pinero continued to work as a solicitor's clerk, earning £1 a week. In the evenings he studied elocution at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institution. He and his fellow students staged several productions of plays, and Pinero became irresistibly drawn to the theatre. In May 1874 he abandoned the legal profession and joined R. H. Wyndham at the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, as a "general utility" actor. He made his professional debut in the small role of a groom in an adaptation of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.
Actor and rising playwright: 1874–1884
As a junior member of Wyndham's company Pinero quickly gained experience in a range of roles, supporting E. A. Sothern in Our American Cousin, and Charles Mathews in the Balzac adaptation A Game of Speculation, and graduating to larger parts such as Crosstree in Black-Eyed Susan. His engagement in Edinburgh came to a sudden end in February 1875 when the theatre was destroyed by fire. He was fortunate in being offered another provincial engagement, at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, Liverpool, where he began to be noticed by the press, gaining approving reviews for his acting in supporting roles. A production of Miss Gwilt, an adaptation of Wilkie Collins's Armadale, starring Ada Cavendish, was reported by the theatrical paper The Era as "a genuine triumph"; the play transferred from Liverpool to the West End, and Pinero retained his role as an elderly solicitor. The production was not the hoped-for success in London, but Pinero received good notices for his performance, and when the run finished after ten weeks he was immediately engaged by Henry Irving's manager, Mrs Bateman, as a member of the supporting cast for Irving's forthcoming provincial tour.Although the tour was uncongenial, and Pinero gathered some highly critical notices, he continued to work as a supporting actor to Irving for five years. He first appeared at the Lyceum, Irving's London base, in December 1876 and played a total of 21 parts there between then and 1881. His Shakespearean roles were Lord Stanley in Richard III, Rosencrantz in Hamlet, Guildenstern in Hamlet, Salarino in The Merchant of Venice, and Roderigo in Othello. In a revival of the melodrama The Bells, with which Irving's name was already synonymous, he played Dr Zimmer.
While in Irving's company Pinero wrote his first plays. He began with £200 a Year, a one-act comedy written in a single afternoon for a colleague to present at a benefit performance in 1877. The play was well received and was given several further performances, bringing Pinero's name a modest amount of publicity. His first full-length play, La Comète, was staged in a theatre in Croydon in 1878, and he wrote four more one-act comedies, staged in London in 1878–1880, playing in two of them – Daisy's Escape and Bygones – at the Lyceum. Another of these, Hester's Mystery, written for the comic actor J. L. Toole, ran for 300 performances at the Folly Theatre.
Pinero's profile as a playwright was further raised by The Money Spinner, a full-length comedy, first given at the Prince's Theatre, Manchester in November 1880 and then at the St James's in London in January 1881. The theatre historian J. P. Wearing regards the play as of particular importance in the history of the St James's, a theatre previously known more for its failures than its successes. Pinero's play was regarded as daringly unconventional and a risky venture, but it caught on with the public, particularly for the character Baron Croodle, a "disreputable but delightful old reprobate and card-shark" played by John Hare. The following year Pinero wrote the first of eleven more plays for the St James's, The Squire. It caused controversy by its supposed similarity to Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd.
After leaving Irving's company Pinero joined another well-known London management, Squire Bancroft and his wife Effie, who ran the Haymarket Theatre. For them he played the Marquis de Cevennes, Sir Alexander Shendryn, Hanway and finally Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals as part of a starry cast that included Squire Bancroft, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, Lionel Brough and Julia Gwynne. Pinero received mixed notices, some unfavourable, and others among the best of his acting career. This was his last professional engagement as an actor.
During his time at the Haymarket Pinero married Myra Emily Wood, who had acted under the stage name of Myra Holme, a widow with two children, Angus and Myra, from her first marriage. The wedding took place on 19 April 1883. There were no children of the marriage to Pinero.
Farces and drawing-room comedies: 1884–1893
With the exception of two adaptations of serious French works, The Ironmaster and Mayfair, Pinero's output between 1884 and 1893 consisted of six farces and five comedies. During this period he became particularly associated with the Court Theatre, where five of his farces were presented, with great success at the box office, between 1885 and 1892, beginning with The Magistrate. Wearing writes that in these plays Pinero "attacked facets of Victorian society by creating credible though blinkered characters, trying to preserve their respectability while trapped in a relentless whirlpool of catastrophically illogical events".Pinero told an interviewer that with the first of his Court farces, The Magistrate, he had tried "to raise farce a little from the low pantomime level". Instead of relying on the Parisian stereotype, revolving around potentially adulterous liaisons, he tried to create believable characters in credible situations. The piece played for 363 performances in its first run, the first play in the history of the Court to run for more than a year. When its star, Arthur Cecil, required a summer break, Beerbohm Tree deputised for him for three weeks. Three touring companies were needed to meet the demand for the play in the British provinces, and local managements in Australia, India and South Africa were licensed to stage it; Pinero travelled to New York for the American premiere, at Daly's Theatre in October 1885. He had turned 30 earlier that year. A retrospective review of his career published in 1928 pointed out that Pinero – who had recently celebrated 50 years as a West End playwright – achieved fame at an unusually early age: his contemporaries Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie and John Galsworthy were all in their thirties before their plays were produced in London.
Pinero's other Court farces – The Schoolmistress, Dandy Dick, The Cabinet Minister and The Amazons – ran for 291, 262, 199 and 114 performances respectively, an aggregate of 866. Their success was outstripped by that of the gentler comedy Sweet Lavender, which ran at Terry's Theatre for 684 performances from March 1888 to January 1890. This piece concerns an impoverished clerk, a bibulous but wise barrister, fraudulent bankers, a long-lost sweetheart and happy endings all round. It was billed as "a domestic drama", and was mainly comic, but, The Era reported, "there are scenes where the laughter is hushed, where smiles give way to tears, and where mirth is merged in heartfelt sympathy".