Art. 4.-THE HERITAGE OF THE ACTOR.

It may be far more, but The actor brings it to a doubt, puts the matter

A PLAY is material for acting. it must be that to begin with. technical completion. This, no from the actor's point of view, and while the truth is indisputable, the emphasis of the statement may be misleading. Even so, this point of view counts; if only because, when we bring a play to the theatre, the actor's is the last word in the matter-till the public has its say. If it be argued that the play is implicitly complete when it leaves the author's hands, that the actor's business is interpretation merely, that he can, in truth, add nothing to and take nothing away from the material a competent playwright has given him—

There was once, in the 17th century, a gentleman, who, coming out of church on a Sunday morning, found a week-day companion sitting in the stocks.

""What have they put you there for?" he asked. "Getting drunk."

6.66

'Nonsense," said the church-goer, who was a legallyminded man; "they can't put you in the stocks for being drunk."

""Zooks!" said the unfortunate reveller.

have!""

"But they

It is useless to argue that actors can add nothing to and take nothing from the material the playwright gives them. The answer is that they do.

This final part of the dramatic process, this putting of a play upon the stage, is, indeed, a distressingly incalculable thing. Certainly it is interpretation, but no other kind of interpretation quite compares with it. Musicians have instruments that are more or less mechanical to perform on; even singers are tied, stave by stave, to definite notes. Singers and players will tell us, however, that they should be left ample discretion. They may add that the meticulous method of writing music is quite modern, that composers of the 18th century and earlier were content to put down on paper what they considered the essentials, and to leave far more to the artistry of their interpreters.

But let any one familiar with play production ask

himself what the final effect would be if the actors felt called upon to do no more than speak a speech as the author was good enough to pronounce it to them, trippingly upon the tongue. A certain regardless beauty might result. There are plays that, at first thought, would seem to profit by this treatment. Greek tragedy, with its use of mask and cothurnus, asks for its acting a voice and a presence, and little else; though, even so, it may be found that concentration upon this single means of expression rather heightens than diminishes a personality that can so express itself. But in a play which pictures human intercourse in accustomed terms, if the actor did not do something more than repeat its words with such understanding and emotion as they immediately suggested to him, pointing them with appropriate gesture, the result would be unbearably flat and quite unconvincing.

What, then, is the 'something more' he is expected to contribute? His personality. What, then, is the extension of this in the terms of his art to be? Drama ranges from the austerity of Greek tragedy to the freedom of the Commedia dell' Arte; and it is not for one manifestation of it, however respectable, however popular, to deny the validity of any other. The antics of Harlequin are not essentially different from the art that shows us Edipus. But, to bring the question to a practical and a more or less topical issue, let us rule out both drama that is largely ritual and drama that is inchoate. Let us assume a play conceived by an author in essential completeness, and marked down for interpretation as minutely as words will do it.

There is a story of an actress of genius who was being conducted through a rehearsal of her part by a producer of great ability. 'Miss,' he said, 'you go here and there and here; and you do this and that and this.' 'Thank you,' she replied, with perfect docility. Yes, I think I understand. I go there and here and there, and I do that and this and that. And then I do the little bit extra, don't I, for which you really pay me my salary?" Or, as she might have put it, even more informingly, 'Then I am the little bit extra which no one can teach me to be.'

The dramatist has a right to expect that any actor, of

the required sex and of the right age and appearance -picked out of a list, called off the rank as it werewill be able to say and do with perfect efficiency whatever can be set down for him to say and do. This right, like many others, is often in abeyance. But, with the expectation fulfilled, the dramatist will still ask the actor to be something besides. At times, no doubt, this 'being' is offensive. We have all seen plays swamped by an elaborate exhibition of some one personality. We have, on the other hand, seen plays of the poorest sort enriched beyond recognition by the imposition-as upon one of those vague backgrounds used by Victorian photographers-of vivid characters, springing, if not from the imagination of the actors of them, then from where? Irving's Mathias will certainly not be found in the original manuscript of 'The Bells.' And if one is to be told that it was in some mysterious fashion innate in the story and the play as Erckmann-Chatrian and the adapter wrote them, one must ask further: was Coquelin's conception of the innkeeper-murderer innate there too? If so, the authors had an uncommonly accommodating or a somewhat divided mind.

The dramatist demands personality; an indefinable thing, and, alas, he is seldom content with the concrete specimen of it that he gets. It is amusing to watch him at rehearsal while he sees the characters growing quite unlike his own innocent idea of them. If he is altogether a novice, the fascination of seeing them live and move is usually sufficient compensation. But novelists turned playwrights are apt to be agonised by the phenomenon. Experience—and a little sympathy with the difficulties of the actor-will teach them how what is essential may be kept alive and true to the play's purpose if incidentals are not rigidly insisted on. Does the author refuse to admit any such division? Authors, grown expert enough in the whole business to instruct each actor to a nicety, have been known to do so. They make their choice, then, between the letter and the spirit, and they may find that by insistence upon the letter they have-for sensitive auditors at leasttaken away the very life of the play's performance.

Not but that the author may suffer in a hundred ways by an actor's freedom to inform his part with life. I

can myself recall a performance in which an actor-wellintentioned too-gave what was rather a destructive criticism than a representation of the character he was playing. The author thought he had written a not unsympathetic hero. The actor proved conclusively to the audience that the fellow was nothing of the kind. He may have been right; but the author could not unreasonably have remarked that there were critics enough in the stalls and that it was not an actor's business to do their work for them. Reverse the process; let the actor take a sordid character and invest it with distinction and charm, and still the author is not grateful. He will prefer the child of his fancy to this changeling, even though the changeling be a fairy. The work of the modern theatre, however, where authors and actors of average ability are concerned, is done, as a whole, upon the basis of a compromise by which the author provides essentials and the actor incidentals to taste. That modern invention, the producer, is the honest broker brought in to effect it. It answers, doubtless; and the bulk of the work done under it may be pleasing enough. But is there no more to be said? For there is no future in a compromise.

And the theatre finds itself to-day, not in any more trouble than usual (it is always in trouble), but facing a curiously ambiguous outlook for the future. For two things have happened recently in England. Every one has learned to read, almost every one has taken to reading fiction (some of it disguised, as fact !). And the Cinema has become an institution. The first event did not rob the theatre of its devotees; there was no reason that it should. Theatre-going is a social act, though in England less so regarded than elsewhere; and the enjoyment of narrative is no good substitute for the excitement of mimic action. But cinema-going is a social act too, and-Movies'; the very word spells action and excitement. Now it is too soon to say-it will always be too soon to say-how the art of the cinema may develop. There is no reason to suppose that, as industries, theatre and cinema cannot exist side by side, for the theatre has many resources (as we shall argue) that the cinema can hardly draw upon. But it is fairly certain that the story in action-that extension of the

narrative fiction, for which such a widespread taste has been cultivated-will remain the cinema's chief aim, and that the theatre therefore will tend to be ousted from this part of its ancient preserve.

It is instructive to examine the cinema's dealing with material that has been or well might be used by the theatre. There is, very naturally, a revolt from the unities, from that 'general oneness' so dear to the heart of Mr Curdle-and Aristotle. Continuity of action, with the variety attendant upon it, is favoured as against the elaborate development of particular episodes. In so far, indeed, as the cinema is disposed to lean on dramatic technique at all, it returns rather to the cruder methods of the Elizabethan, even of the Mediæval stage. Little is left for the imagination to account for. It is as if the scientific discovery, by which the swiftly revolving shutter makes the pictures appear to move, had laid down artistic law. The story is chopped up into little pieces, then cemented again into a long episodic line. The cinema has certainly revived the Mediæval dumbshow and our delight in it.

It is specially instructive to note, when a play is transferred to the screen, how much dialogue can be eliminated without peril to our understanding, or even to our enjoyment of the story. The skill of the producer is very properly directed to removing what-the picture being now the thing-has become mere excrescence. It follows that plays which depend upon poetry, upon wit, upon analysis of character, are very weak vessels in the eye-in the brilliantly winking eye-of the camera. And, if there are degrees in the matter, this is truest of poetry, our great begetter of emotion in the theatre. The cinema deals in excitement; only by indirect means does it beget emotion. Hence, no doubt, its invariable accompaniment by music, for an arbitrary stimulus to the feelings.

As an entertainment the cinema has one further difference; it asks no response from its audience. Go to a play, and unless you are insensitive indeed, you will be drawn to some sympathy with the actors. It may take the form of admiration (the form, no doubt, that actors prefer), it may be reduced to mere pity for fellowcreatures making such fools of themselves. But in some