THE PIERROT OF THE MINUTE A DRAMATIC FANTASY IN ONE ACT By ERNEST DOWSON Performance Free
Reading edition
The Pierrot of the Minute, Ernest Dowson's only dramatic attempt, is touched like the preceding play with the glamour of the old régime. Its charming artificiality suggests the pastoral games to which the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XV's circle may have turned for relief after the formalities and extravagances of their life at court.
Dowson's play, written in 1892, is mentioned in one of his letters, dated October twenty-fourth of that year: "I have been frightfully busy," he wrote, "having rashly undertaken to make a little Pierrot play in verse ... which is to be played at Aldershot and afterwards at the Chelsea Town Hall: the article to be delivered in a fortnight. So until this period of mental agony is past, I can go nowhere." Anyone who has ever had to write something that had to be ready on a certain date will understand the quality of Dowson's emotion in this letter.
A recent critic who has studied the literary fashions of the group to which Dowson belonged and found that the members were addicted to the frequent use of the adjective, white, says: "Ernest Dowson was dominated by a sense of whiteness.... The Pierrot of the Minute is a veritable symphony in white. He calls for 'white music' and the Moon Maiden rides through the skies 'drawn by a team of milk-white butterflies,' and farther on in the same poem we have a palace of many rooms:
"'Within the fairest, clad in purity, Our mother dwelt immemorially: Moon-calm, moon-pale, with moon-stones on her gown, The floor she treads with little pearls is sown....'"
Granville Bantock, the English musician, composed The Pierrot of the Minute. A Comedy Overture to a Dramatic Phantasy by Ernest Dowson, which he conducted at the Worcester Festival in 1908. This music in whole or part may be used in connection with a production of Dowson's play.