The Young Pretender by Michael Arditti

ARCADIA BOOKS, £14.99 REVIEW BY ALLAN MASSIE

The exploitation and abuse of child and teenage actors is nothing new. It’s as old as theatre and one wonders sometimes about Shakespeare’s boy actors. Other questions present themselves. How to handle fame at an early age? How to handle its withering? These are at the heart of Michael Arditti’s entrancing and disturbing new novel.

Written in the first person, it is the story of Master William Betty, who as a 12year-old boy actor took first the provinces and then London by storm in the first years of the 19th century. Hailed as “the infant Garrick” and “the young Roscius”, he played Hamlet, Richard III and other Shakespearean roles as well as popular melodrama. Beautiful and graceful, he also achieved great social success, admired by royalty and the Prime Minister William Pitt, while also arousing the jealous resentment of many in the theatre.

These triumphs are in the past when the novel begins with Mister – no longer Master – Betty embarking on a comeback six years older, ten inches taller and considerably stouter than when he retired and went to Cambridge University. His name and reputation will secure him engagements, but where people once flocked to the theatre in wonder, now they come only from curiosity, and where once he delighted, he is now soon met with disappointment or indifference.

He is driven to examine the days of his glory and to confront the dark side of his triumph. Did his father ruthlessly exploit him? Was his admired tutor, who

taught him his craft, also an abuser? Was his celebrity spurious? Were, he comes to wonder, his detractors right? At last he thinks, “I was not an actor but a sideshow.” It is a moving story, and Arditti tells it with understanding and engaging sympathy.

He also gives a rich picture of the theatre of the time, of inadequate and wooden rehearsals, and sketches out some truly dreadful-sounding plays in which Master Betty delighted his audiences. It is also a rich social picture, sometimes a harrowing one as when, for example, Master Betty is taken to view the lunatics in Bedlam. This, then, is a historical novel, and an admirably researched and re-imagined one, with moving scenes as when the mature Betty makes a greenroom visit to the veteran actress Mrs Jordan, longtime mistress of the future William

IV, mother of his ten children, two of whom were friends and playmates of Master Betty in his days of fame.

One is left wondering, like the narrator, whether his fame was built only on his curiosity value. Surely not. There was surely something genuine and much that was moving there. We have all seen remarkable performances by children and adolescents.

Arditti is a novelist who has always set himself new challenges. Sometimes he meets with a complete success, and The Young Pretender is surely that.