The Infant Phenomenon
Fame
Birmingham Hippodrome, 1996
Love them or loathe them, child actors have been lisping lines on stage for centuries. Charles Dickens immortalised the breed in Nicholas Nickleby, even though on that occasion his aim was to satirise the less talented kind of brat who might have been the victim of its more unscrupulous elders.
All Lads Together
From the early 16th century, companies of boy actors had been popular at Court. The longest surviving band were the Children of the Chapel who, in the early 1600s, attracted even larger audiences than their adult counterparts. As they became quasi-professional they even began performing not just ‘school’ plays but major works by Jonson, Lyly, Dekker, Middleton and Marston.
Boys appeared regularly on the Elizabethan stage in female parts (female actresses were unheard of in Britain until the Restoration), and Shakespeare and his contemporaries must have had full confidence in their abilities otherwise they would never have entrusted them with such complex roles as Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Juliet, Gertrude or Ophelia.
But the sight of young lads strutting their stuff, frequently cross-dressed, also provoked a Puritan backlash which could express itself in highly dubious terms. A diatribe of 1568 entitled The Children of the Chapel Stript and Whipt (!) talks of “the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs and gorgeous decking of their apparel”. The performance had obviously left this spectator in two minds as to which of his passions, indignation or desire, was the most inflamed.
Roscius Reborn
But the life of a strolling player of any age was hard, and many youngsters burned themselves out quickly. How much more pressure, then, must have been put on the so-called child prodigies? Around the turn of the 19th century there was a brief flurry of reincarnations of Roscius, the Roman actor whose name had become synonymous with all that was good in stagecraft. Master William Betty, or the Young Roscius, was only thirteen when he gave his Hamlet at Drury Lane in 1804, and his Norval in Home’s Douglas even impressed Hazlitt. But as he grew older and possibly less cute, his public went off him. They hissed his Richard III, his father subsequently squandered his fortune, and he eventually died in obscurity.
The Dublin or Hibernian Roscius, Gustavus Vaughan Brooke, also made a success of Young Norval at the age of fourteen, but in later life fell prey to his own dissipation. In an attempt to rehabilitate himself following a spell in Warwick jail for debt, he set out to tour Australia again, but was drowned when his ship went down in the Bay of Biscay.
Ellen Terry began her long and triumphant career at the age of eight with the Keans. Although she frequently felt exhausted rehearsing with the grown-ups until five in the morning, she still maintained that she grew up a “strong, healthy and happy child”.
“Hi, Mum!”
Even in this century there is a place for the talented youngster. Noël Coward’s age was still in single figures when he first stepped into the spotlight, and modern pantos frequently use teams of children to supply crowds or choruses.
Still, to really get the best out of a child actor, it is probably advisable to be related to him or her. An anonymous critic in 1822 had this to say about Clara Fisher, one of the few infant prodigies to carry her talent into the adult theatre: “That she is a clever, bold and ready little girl no one can deny – that she would have been much better in her bed on Thursday night, at nine o’clock, than on Drury Lane stage it is most certain. And I doubt if she is as young as she looks!”
It's true what they say: you need a hide like a rhinoceros to work in the theatre – even if you are only six.
PS
As I was copying this up from the programme it originally appeared in, my fingers momentarily fumbled on the keyboard and I found I had inadvertently typed bots instead of boys.
The ramifications of such a flub in the real world are, alas, already being felt. At the time of writing there is an ongoing debate about the long-term implications – moral, ethical and financial – of entertainment companies ‘buying’ the lifelong right to a performer’s likeness, to deploy it in whatever form the owner desires. AI voiceovers are already all over the interwebs, and while one can usually spot something which has been electronically manufactured from nothing more passionate or committed than a line of computer code, those inflections and tonal qualities and tricks of emphasis are going to get more authentic all the time. And the same goes, more worryingly, for physical replications as well. Very clever people with very evil intentions are already capable of creating news reporters proving your favourite pop star leaves the toilet seat up, or your favourite actor likes to smear Marmite on their private parts. And as the saying goes, a lie can be halfway round the world before the truth can get its bots on. Boots on. These days, once a thing has been said, it’s been said for ever, and there are many more people who are likely to believe it than there are those able to effectively refute it to the victim’s satisfaction.
It’s sad but true that for a depressingly large number of people, a lurid fantasy is always going to be so much more entertaining than a dull platitude whose only saving grace is that it happens to be true. Some people in the know have already predicted that one day AI will destroy us. I think the time has come for all good people to come to the aid of humanity and fight this scourge. The first thing we need to agree on is a password. First pet and mother’s surname, anyone? Oh no, that’s your porn name isn’t it? 123456DownW1th@I it is then.