Featured Read: “The Empire” by Michael Ball, and the People You Never See

There’s a line in this book’s description that tells you exactly who wrote it.

Jack Treadwell arrives at The Empire theatre in 1922, walks into the middle of a rehearsal, and is instantly mesmerised. And then, we’re told, amid all the glitz and glamour, he learns that the true magic of the theatre lies in its cast of characters, both on stage and behind the scenes.

That last part is the tell. Anyone can be dazzled by a star. It takes someone who has spent their life in theatres to know that the real story is in the wings.

Michael Ball has spent roughly forty years in theatres. He is one of the defining figures of British musical theatre, and when he came to write his first novel, he wrote about the one world he knows better than almost anyone alive. It shows, and it’s the reason this book is considerably better than “celebrity writes a novel” might lead you to expect.

Here’s the setup. Jack Treadwell has come home from the Great War. He has fought in the trenches and returned with very little, and, prompted by a message from his mother, he presents himself at The Empire hoping to be taken on as a doorman. He knows nothing about theatre. He knows nothing about the power struggles playing out around this particular building. He is about to learn a great deal about both.

The theatre’s owner, Sir Barnabas Lassiter, has recently died. His widow, Lady Lillian Lassiter, a former showgirl, is now in charge, and a rival theatre owner has decided that this makes The Empire vulnerable, being a place he has always believed should have been his. He begins to squeeze: signing acts to exclusive contracts so The Empire can’t book them, applying pressure wherever he can find a seam.

Against that, the company. Stella Stanmore, the beautiful starlet. Lancelot Drake, the Hollywood heartthrob. Ruby Rowntree at the piano, keeping the music going. And Grace Hawkins, cool and competent and quietly indispensable, without whom the show would simply never happen at all. Ball clearly adores this last category of person, and if you’ve ever worked anywhere near a production of anything, you’ll recognise her immediately: the one who isn’t famous, isn’t credited, and is the only reason the whole enterprise doesn’t collapse.

There’s treachery inside the company. There’s a shocking secret waiting in the wings. And Jack, who arrived knowing nothing, has to work out what’s happening before the theatre he’s fallen for goes dark.

What gives the book its texture, though, is what sits underneath all the sequins. This is 1922. The men in this story have come back from the Great War, and they’ve come back damaged, some visibly and some not. One reviewer put it well: behind the glamour of showbusiness linger the shadows of the war and the murkier aspects of the age. That’s exactly right, and it’s exactly what the 1920s actually were. The frantic brightness of that decade was built directly on top of enormous, unprocessed grief. A theatre full of people determined to put on a show is not a frivolous image in that context. It’s a defiant one.

The reception was warm and the sales were real. It became a Sunday Times bestseller. The Reverend Richard Coles called it a wonderful book and a love letter to the theatre. Reviewers repeatedly note that Ball’s theatrical background gives the novel a depth and soul that simply couldn’t have been replicated without it. And it worked well enough to become a series, so if you take to these characters there’s more waiting.

Set your expectations correctly and you’ll have a lovely time: this is warm, atmospheric, character-driven historical fiction with a mystery running through it, not a literary novel or a taut thriller. It’s a book written by someone who loves theatre, about people who love theatre, for readers who’d like to spend a few hundred pages inside one.

And underneath it all is that quiet insistence that the people you never see are the ones the story actually belongs to. Which, for a man who has spent his career at the front of the stage, is a rather generous thing to write a whole novel about.

Enjoy the show.

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