Volume 1 — DRAMA

A LIVING CORPSE

THIS section opens amid a furore for improving the Drama in this country. Leagues have sprung up, with imposing committees of enormous length, and are canvassing for money and members with considerable success. A Conference of the Theatre, lasting a fortnight, was held in the summer at Stratford-upon-Avon for the first time in history, at which actors, dramatic critics, trade unionists, authors, publishers, newspaper proprietors, theatrical managers, voice trainers, poets, scenic artists, school teachers, clergymen, and one bishop expressed day after day their intense determination to have more drama and better drama than we have ever had in England before. This assemblage of people, whom as one of them I may perhaps be permitted to call without offence fanatics, may have appeared to the detached onlooker to have been of very little use. The Conference melted away, leaving the British Drama League and the Arts League of Service still without sufficient money to do any of the practical things without which the gathering of conferences and the sitting of committees are merely occasions for the ventilation of private grievances.

But the Conference could never have been held if there were not, widespread through the country, a genuine passion for the theatre far more extensive and far stronger than it had ever been in England during the whole of the nineteenth century. There are no statistics available to give us the percentage of the population who were regular theatre-goers during the last century, but it was certainly very small, and everyone knows that it has increased enormously during the last ten years, and has probably even doubled again during the war. This is a fact which is generally overlooked, but which really provides us with the soundest basis for hope. What is the matter with the theatre in England is mainly that there is not enough of it. Nearly all its faults and shortcomings may be put down to deficiencies of matériel, both structural and human. There are not enough theatres, those in existence are obsolete, cranky, ill-ventilated, absurdly constructed, badly placed buildings, an eyesore to passers-by, a hell of discomfort for 90 per cent. of the audience, a death-trap for actors. Only a fanatical human passion for the theatre could drive people into such places away from the comparative comfort of their own firesides. There are not enough actors, and those that survive the barbaric tortures of rushing week by week from one cold and slatternly apartment-house to another, always arriving in their next provincial town on the dismallest of Sundays, generally find that they are the one spark of life in the place, and end, like Sir Henry Irving, by expiring in their miserable and draughty dressing-rooms. The English provincial town in its dreariness and dirt awaits the coming of the actor much as the Esquimaux in winter await the coming of the sun, but the actor during the day when he is free wanders through its streets as Virgil wandered by the banks of the Styx—forlorn, and like a man among shadows who have no commerce with him, but belong to another world. It is no wonder that they become more and more divorced from their fellow-creatures, more and more inefficient, more and more lacking in zest for experiment and enterprise, until neglected and isolated the profession sinks, with bright exceptions, to a level of illiteracy, incompetence, and sloth that lately even in London moved a commercial manager like Mr. Cochran to express his astonishment.

But the municipal councils, which are the civic committees of the townspeople entrusted with organising their social life, cannot remain for ever indifferent to their duty in face of a growing popular demand for the theatre; that is why I point to the enormous increase in the number of habitual theatre-goers as our strongest basis of hope. Or if they do so persist private enterprise will inevitably step in, as it did in the case of so many electric-lighting, tramway, gas, and water undertakings, build up a profitable theatrical business, mulct the town annually of thousands of pounds in profits, and ultimately will have to be bought out by the municipality at an inflated price. As Mr. Granville Barker pointed out in an extraordinarily able speech at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the people's greatest need is to become articulate. Art means nothing if it does not mean giving speech to the people, and the art of the Drama is the most democratic, the most popular, the most wide-reaching, the most easily understood, and the most stimulating, because the most social of all the arts. There was a time, and it is not so very long ago, when primary education in its most rudimentary, that is to say, its school form, was left to private enterprise, and if private enterprise could have done it at all it might possibly have done it better than the nation; but every argument that can be used in favour of teaching everyone to read and write applies still more forcibly to giving the people a real education. It is far too important and too urgent to be left to the chance provision of speculators out merely to make profits for themselves, and it is to enlighten public opinion on the subject that these leagues have primarily been founded. But let me not be mistaken. There can be no intention of priggishly educating the people in the "higher drama." We must carefully discriminate between advocating for theatres—municipal, if possible, but if not, private—and advocating for the performance of plays by any dramatist or school or coterie of dramatists. The Drama is a much bigger thing than Mr. Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, or anyone else, and what has always prevented these movements from gaining popular sympathy has been their lack of breadth, their curious fascination for pedants and cranks. Almost every decent, sane human being will appreciate and support a demand for a theatre to enlighten the dismal misery and boredom of the winter evenings of his native town and to take him out of the narrow groove into which he will inevitably stick if left alone with his books and his relations; but he will not support a scheme to ram down his throat obvious propaganda.

The Calvinists of the Drama

I have sat for hours in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, watching the people. The most heterogeneous collection of persons imaginable assemble there. Washerwomen, soldiers, artisans, clerks, clergymen, navvies, all classes and ages. Some wander aimlessly about, some stand petrified before one picture for a quarter of an hour, some look only at portraits, others search for familiar landscapes, others again are attracted by historical interest. There is hardly one of them that would not probably earn the contempt of Mr. Clive Bell if he were to give Mr. Bell the reason of his enjoyment; but I assert with all the emphasis I can command that there is not one of them who has not gained by even ten minutes within that building something impossible to value and precious, beyond estimation. Can any human being go out of the dirt, the indignity, the ugliness, the noise, the formlessness of the modern city into the serenity, the colour, the dignity, the peace, and the beauty of the rooms of the National Gallery without a quickening of the spirit, however imperceptible? What is there in Trafalgar Square apart from the National Gallery which in any degree witnesses that man is more than an animal? True, there is St. Martin's Church, but the associations of the church—irrelevant if you will—adulterate and weaken its spiritual influence on men's minds to-day. But the National Gallery exerts a completely catholic and irradiating power on all who enter.

So does the theatre, even exactly as it stands to-day. I am in profound disagreement with those who raise up their hands in horror at the present state of the theatre where it exists. What causes me to join the chorus of Jeremiahs is the scarcity of theatres, their complete and utter absence in hundreds of large towns where they should exist, and the smallness of their numbers in our largest cities. My mention of Mr. Clive Bell in connection with the National Gallery was doubly relevant, for there is a set of high-brows connected with the theatre who have set their eyes so fixedly on an unreal and abstract perfection that they have become blind. They talk about Serious Drama in the same solemn, pompous and hopeless way that the Calvinists used to talk about salvation, and the mass of the people, cheerfully ignoring them, continues to go tranquilly to perdition. Ask anyone of these apostles of Serious Drama to show you one serious drama, and the odds are that they will say, Man and Superman or Ghosts or Justice. Well, there is something to be said for the authors of these three plays, although not one of them is a really first-rate dramatist, the equal of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Euripides, or even Racine, but for their followers—the dealers in the doleful realism of Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, and the London suburbs—there is in the main nothing to be said whatever. Their works are for the most part immeasurably inferior to the average London Revue, and to accuse the theatre of sinking into degradation because it prefers the wit, humour, beautiful dressing, vivacious dancing, and high spirits of an Ambassador's, Vaudeville, Pavilion, or Alhambra Revue to a serious, machine-made play by Mr. Sutro or two hours of mechanical dulness from someone I had better not name is simply to accuse it of preferring life to the undesirable "seriousness" of the tomb.

Influence of the Existing Theatre

It is not as if there were no drama better than the Revue or the Musical Comedy, but the stupidity of the high-brows, their dull acceptance of the solemn and the pompous, of anything in fact that is not bright or imaginative or stirring, but is sufficiently pretentious, does incalculable harm to that annually growing fraction of the public which, fully appreciative of Revue and Musical Comedy, is yet unsatisfied and is really thirsting for finer things. This public is continually essaying samples of the drama of the high-brows and is continually being driven back from such dry, unprofitable verbiage to those theatres where there is humour, wit, charm and beauty. And for this evidence of good taste it is roundly abused. I frequently wonder whether anyone of these misguided zealots has ever been inside the popular theatre, the theatre of the Musical Comedy. Have they any idea what a revelation of beauty it is to large numbers of the population? I dare to assert that in London the popular theatre has done more to develop and educate the taste of the masses in dress, furniture, and decoration than fifty years of propaganda from Ruskin, William Morris, and all their disciples. The theatre, of course, has learnt from the artists of all countries, but it has been the great cultural organisation which has taken the fruits of the artists' work to the people and opened their eyes.

In educating the senses the popular theatre has done and is still doing invaluable work; it is when it comes to educating the finer emotions that it fails so lamentably, though hardly so utterly as the high-brow theatre, in which there are no emotions but those of despair, disillusionment and derision. And yet it is strange that in spite of the general abuse of the low standards of London plays, on the rare occasions when a really fine play is put on it is generally met by the critics with a chorus of disapproval or the praise that damns. We have had a good example in London recently. Mr. Henry Ainley, by common consent our finest actor, begins his management of the St. James's Theatre with Tolstoy's The Living Corpse, the title being changed to Reparation, in consideration of the mental state of a public frightened out of its wits by the high-brows and the cranks. Tolstoy was a great man, and The Living Corpse is a fine play, a play that ought to have a great success; but do the critics say, "Here at last is a magnificent play, a play which everyone must see"? Not a bit of it. The general spirit of their notices is one of chilly respect for the famous name of Tolstoy, with an insinuation that the play would have been much better if it had been handled by a competent dramatist like Sir Arthur Pinero or Mr. Sutro. "What is the central theme? We are not quite sure," says the critic of the leading London daily. Is it a mere coincidence that on the same page that journal's musical critic, in reference to Prometheus, the work of Tolstoy's compatriot, Scriabin, one of the greatest of modern composers, says he does not understand it and, asking himself whether Scriabin was "sane or deranged," declares that he does not know? Here is a lesson for Drama Leagues, for it is almost certain that when we do get good drama scarcely anyone will know it.

*****

A society called "The Phœnix," with headquarters at Dudley House, Southampton Street, Strand, has been formed to revive plays of Elizabethan, Restoration, and later times. The following plays have been selected for early production:

The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), Marriage à la Mode (John Dryden), The Fair Maid of the West, Part I. (Thomas Heywood), Don Carlos (Thomas Otway), Volpone (Ben Jonson). The Duchess of Malfi will be given on Sunday, November 16th.

DRAMATIC LITERATURE

HEARTBREAK HOUSE, etc. By Bernard Shaw. Constable. 7s. 6d.

Mr. Shaw is one of the most consistent authors living. His readers know almost to a comma what he is going to give them every time they open his latest book. That is perhaps the chief reason why there has been such a falling off in Mr. Shaw's popularity of recent years. Another reason is, of course, the war; but it is strange that Mr. Shaw's opinions, or his particular way of expressing his opinion, during the war should have alienated and even made bitterly hostile men of wide knowledge and experience of his writings and his character who, if they could be persuaded momentarily to reflect without prejudice, would have to admit that what offends them now was precisely what offended so many others in the years before the war, when they on the contrary were Mr. Shaw's ardent champions or, at the very least, his apologists. It only goes to show how very far anyone of us is from being able to judge a man's work rationally once our own particular prejudice is touched. We are all raw somewhere, and woe to the man who touches us on the raw, for then all hope of dispassionate criticism, of Christian toleration even, is gone. It has been Mr. Shaw's most vivid characteristic that he has never lost his intellectual integrity. It is easy to be honest among one's enemies, but to be honest among one's friends is a virtue so rare, so uncomfortable, and outwardly so contrary to the spirit of fair play that it is not surprising it should be generally detested. Mr. Shaw has always retained what he believes, perhaps conceitedly, to be his right to say the worst that can be said of his dearest friends, and of the advocates of whatever cause happens at the moment to be nearest to his heart. However ruinous such conduct may appear to be to the immediate interests of the movement he is supposed to support, he will not abandon his right to forge weapons for the enemy more damaging than any discoverable by their own brains. When life or one's country or one's family is at stake, such conduct appears little less than devilish, yet Mr. Shaw has his right to express his opinions as lucidly and as pointedly as he can, and it may be that when we are far enough removed from the heat and blinding dust of the moment's conflict we shall realise that Mr. Shaw has been faithful to the truth that is in him, and if we have any reason to complain it is certainly not of Mr. Shaw, but of the God who made him.

It may seem that what the ordinary man would call, and call wrongly, Mr. Shaw's unreliability does not square with the assertion that he is consistent, and that his readers know beforehand exactly what Mr. Shaw is going to give them. But Mr. Shaw's consistency lies in his artillery, not in his object of attack. The enemy varies, but the same guns are always going off. In Heartbreak House there is at times all and more than all the old brilliancy. The dialogue of the first and third acts is concentrated, savage, and burns with an intensity that casts a dull imaginative glow over the play. The characters of the Hushabyes, of Captain Shotover, of the sham millionaire Mangan, of Mazzini Dunn, and the fluteplayer are drawn with a pen steeped in vitriol and, exaggerated as they are, they have a genuine imaginative reality deeper than most Shavian figures. There is a moral passion in this play gloomier and more savage than in anything Mr. Shaw has yet done, and an absence of that childish and inconsequent flippancy which so often mars his work. The other plays in the volume vary in quality from some excellent fooling in Great Catherine to a depressing mechanical liveliness, almost utterly without humour, in Augustus Does His Bit. The best of them is O'Flaherty, V.C.; but although it frequently makes one laugh one finds oneself, at the end, closing the book with that tired yawn that seems to be the fatal consequence of reading a great deal of Mr. Shaw at one time.

FIRST PLAYS. By A. A. Milne. Chatto & Windus. 6s,

I am not sure that I do Mr. Milne any injustice by asserting that the best thing in his first volume of plays is the Introduction, describing how the five plays came to be written. It is turned with that inimitable grace and lightness of touch which have made Mr. Milne famous as a journalist. Mr. Milne's charm and quaint humour need a certain space in which to display themselves. It would be fatal to hurry him or to try to straighten his meanderings and digressions, but that is exactly what the dramatic form does do. It is not that Mr. Milne cannot express himself in a few sentences, he can; but however few the sentences they will be allusive, indirect, full of parabolas and curves that seem to lead away but really come back to the point. These qualities are difficult to transfer to dialogue, especially when one is hampered by the consciousness of theatrical convention, and in his first effort, Wurzel-Flummery, after inventing that wonderful name, Mr. Milne fails entirely to get his own individual qualities into the play. The dialogue is in short, flavourless sentences that seem to have been shot out of a popgun, and the characters being mere lay-figures, the play is simply dull. The Lucky One is a much more ambitious and more successful experiment. The people are alive, but Mr. Milne is probably right in seeing no hope of its being produced. It is intelligence without frills or decoration; and, as he says, "the girl marries the wrong man." It is in Belinda that Mr. Milne is most successfully himself. Mr. Milne calls it an "April Folly in three acts." and that describes it exactly.

W. J. TURNER