Our Stage and Its Critics Part 3

No doubt we have been advising our cousins quite wisely as to what is likely to please them, for if we learn nothing else by our labour we certainly get to know what kind of play and performance is to the taste of other people.

Sometimes one asks oneself what truth there is in the jaded critic theory. It cannot be pretended that a man who goes to the theatre three times or so a week pays each visit in the hopeful state of mind or with the expectation of intense enjoyment possible to those who only patronize the playhouse now and then and pick their pieces. Indeed, he very often sets out with the knowledge that he is going to pa.s.s a dull evening. If he is unable to guess that, his experience will have told him little and his capacity is small. Moreover, he cannot be expected to take such pleasure in the average play as if his visits were rare, and what has been said about the play necessarily applies to the acting.

Sometimes when watching a work of common quality, a painful idea comes into one's mind, and we wonder how people, compelled to see it night after night perhaps for half-a-year, can endure the strain. What, for instance, must be the sufferings of the conductor or of a member of the orchestra at a successful second-rate musical comedy; of a stage manager compelled for months, one after another, to direct a brainless farce? Of course the people lumped together in the technical term as "the front of the house" have a remedy, and after the first night or two only appear in the auditorium when the curtain is down, or, to be more accurate, just before it descends, when all hands are expected to be on deck.

There are critics that resemble the person who denied that any beer could be bad, and would sooner pa.s.s an evening in a theatre watching a mediocre play acted in a style no better than it deserves than at home in a well-stocked library. They resemble the journalist in a story by Balzac who, when blind, haunted a newspaper office and revelled in the smell of printers' ink, and they have been known for their own pleasure to pay a second visit to a piece on which they wrote a condemnatory criticism. In fact, they have the curious mania for the theatre which induces many people with no talent for acting to abandon comfortable careers and starve on the stage--or at the stage door.

That the critic's sufferings in the playhouse are considerable is incontestable, and they are keener at the performance of works of mediocrity than when watching very bad plays. Fortunately there are two sides to every hedge. When the play has any touch of originality, or even novelty, our pleasure is far keener than that of the unsophisticated, and we often perceive originality or novelty where the public notices none. A whole field of enjoyment is open to us in the triumphs of technique which is almost untrodden by the general public.

Our poles of pain and pleasure are farther apart than those of the Man in the Street. There have been pieces and performances concerning which the praise of the critics, or some of them, has seemed mere raving to the ordinary playgoer. Several actors and actresses whom we prefer to some of the popular favourites have been banished from London by the indifference of Londoners, and there are "stars" beloved in the theatres who irritate the observant because they have never learnt their art, and nevertheless triumph by mere force of personality.

No doubt the critics, so far as acting is concerned, often--very often--fall into an error and censure acting which does not move them yet impresses the audience, forgetting that it is the advantage and disadvantage of the actor that he need only affect, and must affect, those before him, and that to move only a minority of a normal audience is to act badly. One may write but cannot act for posterity, and therefore the actor, the pianist, the violinist, and the like should not be grudged their noisy, obvious demonstrations of admiration.

Does the critic really get jaded? Is it unfair that the "jaded" critic should deal with the average play? In answering the latter question one should consider whether the notices of the younger critics, too fresh to have become jaded, are more valuable than those of the veterans. Perhaps the two questions should be treated together.

Most critics do get jaded. The critic is jaded when he is saturated with theatrical impressions and cannot take up any more, when new pieces merely recall memories of old pieces or are disliked and distrusted because they do not. After a certain age, varying with the individual, all, or almost all, of us gradually move towards a condition of repugnance to new ideas--a repugnance that becomes hatred when they are inconsistent with the old theories that have grown to be part of ourselves as well as of our stock-in-trade; and when this movement has gone far we are "jaded," are unfit to estimate the value of new ideas; we are still competent to apply the old theories to plays and acting based on them, but of course c.u.mber the ground and r.e.t.a.r.d progress. In youth, having few theories of our own or that have cost us enough labour in acquirement to seem very precious, we tend to be over-hospitable to new ideas and accept dangerous guests.

The notices of the veterans, even of the jaded, upon the average work are sounder, as a rule, than those of the young hands, because the latter very often mistake things merely new to them for things actually new, and they are kinder for the reason that the writers know how great are the difficulties in the way of writing plays from a novel standpoint and of getting them produced when written. There is less violence in their views.

Happy the critic during the years when he is old enough to be cautious about accepting new ideas and young enough to be enthusiastic concerning them after careful consideration, when he is so mature as not to desire to stagger the orthodox by the impudence of his opinions, and sufficiently youthful to be willing to shock the conservative by the audacity of his views. He may then seem jaded because he is not easily moved, but will be quicker to give encouragement to sincere effort, to perceive talent imperfectly manifested, and to appreciate technical triumphs than when he was younger and yet able to welcome novel ideas even if they a.s.sail cherished theories.

His Unpaid Labours

Probably many of the craft have wasted a good deal of the last few first-nightless weeks in the trying task of reading plays, not the printed plays by dramatists of reputation, but the ma.n.u.scripts with which we, or some of us, are flooded. It is hard to guess why strangers should a.s.sume that we are willing to spend our time in reading their plays, but they do. Some apparently deem it to be part of our duties, and even believe that there exists a Government fund which pays our expenses of postages and stationery, for many of the amateur authors make no provision for the return of their work. Occasionally there comes a suggestion that we are really conferring no favour because the pleasure of reading the play will pay for our pains. Some imagine us to be agents for the managers. Even the proposal to pay a commission if we place the piece is not rare; now and then it is wrapped up gracefully, but frequently is expressed in the bluntest fashion.

Upon consideration of the batch lately waded through several things stand out. Firstly, most of them exhibit no trace of cleverness; so far as one can see the writers are people without any gift at all for writing--for writing anything--but are ordinary commonplace people who, unless their conversation is more brilliant than their written matter, would not be considered clever by their friends in everyday life.

They write farces or comedies, in an orthodox form, which contain a surprisingly small number of jokes or efforts at wit and humour. Their works have the air of being mere preliminary plays--the playwrights apparently have set out scenes and written dialogue intended to indicate the nature of the proposed piece with the view afterwards not, indeed of polishing, for there is nothing to polish, but of rewriting, putting in the vital pa.s.sages during the process. One cannot offer any useful advice to these people, save that of suggesting they should turn their attention to gardening or golf. They have only one fault, and it is that they have no quality. Such writers, as a rule, have at least one small quite useless virtue--their pieces are not ridiculously unsuitable in point of form for the stage.

A more interesting cla.s.s consists of authors who possess some talent and no idea how to use it. They write comedies which have some clever pa.s.sages, some lines witty enough to deserve a laugh, and exhibit capacity in character-drawing, but are not at all in an acceptable form.

A comedy in six acts, with twenty scenes, would not be considered for a moment by a modern manager.

We have returned in a curious way to something like the ideas underlying "the unities"; perhaps that statement is incorrect, but, at least, we have put upon our dramatists certain working laws almost as embarra.s.sing as the unities. The average playgoer has no idea of the skill involved in writing the ordinary successful comedy of the present time.

The modern dramatist has nothing approaching the licence of his predecessors. Construction was comparatively easy in the time of a Sheridan or a Goldsmith; not only were they allowed to use explanatory dialogue, in which A told B a number of things which B knew already, because the author desired the audience to learn them; but they were permitted to give direct statements of fact in soliloquies. Such licence has gone: asides are dead, statements of fact in soliloquies are only permitted in formal tragedies. Moreover, having the right to make almost an unlimited number of changes of scenery, they were enabled to present in action the facts which in our days have to be told to the audience in dialogue--dialogue written under severe limitations. In consequence, the mechanical difficulties of construction were then very small. Nowadays, except in the case of melodrama, complicated stories have to be told in three or four acts, with no change of scenery during an act.

Let anyone who doubts whether this creates a difficulty take an ordinary famous old comedy and rewrite it in a form in which it would be accepted as a new play by a London manager, and he will find the difficulty enormous. To the youthful dramatist this exercise is very valuable means of studying the art of construction. When, una.s.sisted by the work of former adapters, he has succeeded in converting half-a-dozen eighteenth-century comedies into three or four act comedies, without any changes of scenery during an act, and has used all the matter of the old comedies in his versions and yet avoided the employment of the soliloquy, or the aside, or the explanatory dialogue in which A tells B what B knows already, he will have learnt a great deal of his craft.

This explanatory dialogue is the sort of pa.s.sage in which a son reminds his mother of the date of his birth, and the profession of his father, and of the period when she sent him to school and so on.

It may be doubted confidently whether a change of style, which has increased so enormously the practical difficulties of writing acceptable plays, has been beneficial to drama. There are writers with wit and a sense of character who under the freer system of old days might have produced successful plays, but are never able to acquire the mechanical skill now demanded, and are kept off the stage by artificial regulations, some of them not based upon essential ideas of drama but in reality upon questions connected with scenery.

One cannot have many changes of the elaborate scenery nowadays employed in comedy, and the illusion sought and to some extent obtained by these costly, complicated sets makes the very useful carpenter's scene impossible. It often happens that incongruities and absurdities in modern plays are due to desperate efforts to overcome these difficulties. Scenes take place in the drawing-room that ought to have been out of doors; things are said that should have been done; and there are long pa.s.sages of dialogue where short scenes of action would be preferable.

In a large number of cases the ma.n.u.scripts we read are unacceptable because the authors have not complied with these requirements of the modern stage; and it is impossible for us, with the best will in the world, to reconstruct the works. We can only point out, regretfully, that they do not comply with these modern regulations, and we know quite well that the dramatists will be unable to make the necessary changes.

The modern system has had the great disadvantage of putting out of the range of the average writer of comedy a good many subjects that deserve treatment, but can only be handled with success by writers of great experience or those who possess remarkable gifts for the semi-mechanical work of construction, which are not necessarily allied to the higher qualities needed by the dramatist.

Of course, some of the ma.n.u.scripts are ridiculous: five-act plays that would not last an hour and a half upon the stage and three-act comedies which would require an evening per act; tragedies in rhymed verse not up to the standard of cracker poetry. It is difficult to understand how such things come to be written. The authors must sometimes go to the theatre or read plays, and therefore ought to know that their works are unsuitable, and that they are wasting money in getting their stuff typewritten. Presumably the phenomenon is somehow connected with the curious glamour of the stage. The person who would not dream of trying to cook a chop without some little study of the methods of the kitchen will try to write farce or comedy or tragedy and not deem it necessary seriously to consider the elementary laws governing such works.

His Letter Bag

Possibly the editor sometimes looks with curiosity at the envelopes of letters addressed to a dramatic critic at the editorial office. Let us trust that in the case of those envelopes obviously bearing a lady's handwriting curiosity is not tinged with suspicion. Letters directed to "The Dramatic Editor" are generally American, and contain statements of tremendous importance concerning, as a rule, people of whom one has never heard and requesting the critic to publish them in the next issue of "his" paper.

The doc.u.ments forwarded by the office are only a t.i.the of those which come to the critic officially, there being several ways of ascertaining addresses. Many consist of requests to read plays, and exhibit pitifully the strange blindness of parents. A number are almost according to a pattern and run about thus: "DEAR SIR,--Having been a constant reader of your admirable criticisms and sharing sincerely your views about the drama, now, alas! in such a deplorable condition, I feel that there is sufficient sympathy between us for you to be anxious to read the MS.

that I enclose and give me your _candid_ opinion about it ["candid" is generally underlined], and if you share the opinion that my friends entertain concerning its merits you will perhaps be of a.s.sistance to me in getting it brought to the attention of the managers." With this there arrives, unaccompanied by stamps for its return, some work of a hopeless character, often an indifferent specimen of the sort of mechanical farce which, even when good, amuses us little.

Occasionally a romantic drama is received. Once there came a really touching letter from a lady in great trouble on account of want of money, such trouble that she not only failed to enclose stamps for return of her MS. but did not use half enough to frank the heavy packet.

She felt sure that the novelty of her plot would make up for any trifling defects due to inexperience. The drama, which was full of "Gadzooks!" and the like, and Roundheads and Cavaliers, concerned Oliver Cromwell and Charles I., and included a plot to rescue the unhappy monarch on the scaffold, which was only frustrated by the direct intervention of "Old Noll," who, after a struggle, used the axe with his own hands. It had seven acts and thirty-three scenes.

We read scores of these pieces, and in most cases our "candid" criticism is not well received. Ere now the reward for the unpaid labour of five or six hours has been a postcard explaining that the author can well understand the deplorable condition of our drama, seeing how incompetent the critics are. There is, of course, another side to the matter. A few pieces--a very small proportion, alas!--have merit, and a few of the authors of the few pieces accept the unpaid critic's remarks reasonably.

Another crop consists of letters from indignant authors or players, which contain argument or abuse, or both. The epistles from authors in some cases are so interesting that it is sad to think we are too obscure to have a biographer who might use them. Those of the players have their humours, particularly when from the aggrieved actresses. One deserves to be mentioned; it stated that, reading between the lines, the lady understood the critic to suggest she was too old for the part of Juliet, and therefore sent a copy of her birth certificate.

It was only a _copy_--there was only _her_ word to show that it was a copy of _her_ certificate; in the law courts they will not accept your own evidence that you are a minor, even if you bring a certificate issued by Somerset House; they want proof of your being the person named in the certificate. If the letter had contained a photograph it would have shown that, although alleged to be only twenty-two years old, the lady weighed about 200 lbs., and had a large, flat face, with an inadequate pug-nose.

In a number of cases one is implored to come to the Pier Concert Hall at Flushington-on-Sea, or the like, because, "owing to your appreciative remarks about my performance as the Second Gravedigger in _Hamlet_, I am sure you would like to see my King Lear." These give a good deal of trouble, because it is difficult to decline without hurting feelings.

Another branch lies in the simple request from people with whom one is unacquainted for introduction to managers whom one does not know.

Fortunately there is another and a pleasanter side. There are letters that we prize, and unfortunately cannot quote, from authors, generally young authors, with thanks for words of encouragement, particularly in relation to unsuccessful work that seemed to have been unlucky; and there are letters from actors and actresses, speaking with grat.i.tude--grat.i.tude unearned, since only duty has been done--for words of praise which have helped to get an engagement or at least to give courage where hope had grown faint. They must be difficult letters to write, since it is clear that the writers generally feel doubtful whether they ought to be written. An ingenious phrase from one of them may be quoted: "I can hardly be taking a liberty in giving a harmless pleasure to a stranger, and I am sure from what I have read of your criticisms that it will be a pleasure to you to know that you have given great comfort and encouragement to one whom you deem worthy of praise."

Last of all are letters from persons who are or profess to be impartial critics of our criticisms, and desire to cause us to change our opinions. An unimportant article--a second-hand article borrowed from Charles Lamb--concerning the effect, on the stage, of Shakespeare's dramas has brought in a respectable revenue to the Post Office, whilst correspondence concerning the wickedness of praising problem plays, however interesting, must have substantially helped some stationers to pay their rent. Fewer but far more exasperating are the epistles in which people express their hearty agreement with opinions which we have never expressed, and give praise and encouragement to us for attacking inst.i.tutions that we do not think undesirable or defending conduct really deplored by us. Even the obscure are often misunderstood.

CHAPTER III

THE DRAMATIC CRITIC

An Attack upon him

After careful consideration, and almost taking the trouble of rereading some of my little essays, we have failed to discover exactly why the letter set out hereafter was written. Apparently the articles have been a little bitter concerning what some of us call commercial drama, even rather ferocious about a recent crop of plays.

Certainly it seems well that the other side should be heard, that the middle-cla.s.s sensualist--perhaps "the average hedonist" is a better translation of "_l'homme moyen sensual_"--should be allowed to express his views; for one is disinclined to attach importance to the Philistine observations in the theatrical trade papers or in the interviews with managers. At the same time, some doubts are possible concerning the letter; it seems to contain some implicit evidence that it was concocted by somebody holding a brief, by a person accustomed to controversy; it is written on the Sports Club notepaper, and merely signed "A Middle-Aged Pleasure-Seeker."

"DEAR SIR,--I have read a great deal about the theatres in _The Westminster Gazette_, signed by 'E.F.S.' I take in the paper because I disagree with its views on all topics--particularly the drama--and I like to hear the other side. Why have you not got a sense of humour?

Why do you not cease flogging that dead horse, the British Drama? Do you think you can flog it into life? Do you believe that British Drama, as you understand it, ever did live, or ever will? I don't. There is too much common sense in London.

"Why do you persist in girding at Mr Tree because he gives beautiful scenery instead of what you think fine plays? Lots of people enjoy his entertainments. I don't myself, for I agree with you that Shakespeare and Phillips are tiresome. I notice, by the way, that you even begin to gibe at the scenery and suggest that it is not beautiful because it is too pretty, which is a mere paradox, and of course absurd. Why do you keep howling against melodrama and musical comedy?

"Above all, what grounds have you for supposing that we can have, or ought to have, a drama based upon true observation of life? Every one of us, every day of his existence, is the hero of a drama based upon the true observation of life, and a very tiresome drama too, as a rule, and we all want to see dramas in the theatre that take us out of ourselves.

You seem to think that we can and ought to have a drama like the novels of Meredith, which I believe n.o.body ever reads, or the pictures of Whistler, that are simply ridiculous, or the ugly music of Strauss--I don't mean the one who writes waltzes.

"Even a.s.suming that there are people who like such novels, or pictures, or music, your case is none the better, for ordinary people don't get trapped into being bored by them, and such works can live without general support, whilst drama has to appeal to the bulk of us, and you cannot stick over the proscenium-arch some phrase such as 'Philistines will be irritated.'

"Of course there are people who think drama ought to be educational, and preach moral lessons, and so on. Well, the popular drama is pretty moral, except, perhaps, musical comedy, which does seem a little topsy-turvy in its lessons; and the Censor prevents politics being introduced or religion being attacked. Every attempt to teach what you would call moral lessons must fall because we know that after all the play is not real. I confess that the romantic and the sentimental rather bore me; but you cannot expect a fifty-year-old stockbroker to be sentimental or romantic. My wife and daughters enjoy that sort of thing, and they simply worship Mr Lewis Waller, of whom I get a bit jealous at times.