Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

An

form or other it will be there. You will, if you analyse your feelings, be brought to some sense of responsibility for the conduct of the entertainment as a whole. exhibition of giggling bad manners by one of your neighbours can easily put this to a test. If you do not protest, you will at least feel ashamed.

6

But, watching a Movie,' what does its foolishness matter? The actors are far away, both in space and in time. What consideration need be shown to their flickering images on a screen? Equally, what enthusiasm can such images arouse, except in the minds of children (of whatever age) to whom illusion still is life and the discretionary enjoyment of art a thing unknown? This environment of irresponsibility may add to the cinema's popularity in an irresponsible age. But one doubts whether an art that cannot stimulate emotion and that asks for no more judgment or support from its audience than is involved in their paying or not paying, their staying or going, can ever take a very deep hold. One might even find refuge in fogeyism and question its right in the outcome-whatever æsthetic efforts may be spent in preparation-to be considered an art at all. But, art or no art, if the cinema is in the future to steal some part of the theatre's thunder, what had the theatre best do about it? We see well enough how the industrial part of the question is being answered. Landlords, dramatists, and actors are putting money in their purses while they can. What pre

paration, though, is the indisputable art of the drama making for a generation that is perhaps growing up to think of a play in relation to a Movie as the children of 1880, riding in express trains, thought of a coach-andfour?

If an art may have a policy it would seem as if the first thing needful were the envisaging of what the drama can do unapproachably, of what it can be at its best that neither kindred arts nor pseudo-arts can be. For in this must lie its strength to face a future, however ambiguous. Its history has been marked by defections, from which, in some ways it has gathered strength. Dancing and music deserted, to set up on their own account as ballet and opera. Drama on the whole does better without them.

Certainly, late in the 17th century it struck up one doubtful alliance with the scenic art, by which it has benefited a little and suffered a lot; the Artist (with a capital A) being a difficult partner to keep in his place, once he has scented the footlights, and an appeal to the thing seen being ever the simplest to make. Four boards and a passion, it has been said, are all the equipment that drama needs, and it is a saying to be taken to heart. Here are the things that drama has never surrendered; her unrivalled riches. First, the fellowship set up between actors and audience on the strength of the fellowship of imagination between the actors themselves. Next, the power of the spoken word. And in these two things the power and the quality of the art must lie.

[ocr errors]

Now it is worth noting, incidentally, that the final framing-in of the picture stage (which preceded by a generation the invention of the pictures') led in time to the loss of that emotional intimacy by which our 'classic' drama had re-inforced doubly and trebly its poetry and humour. The discovery of the loss was tardy; partly because the poetic play and 18th-century comedy dropped out of fashion just then, partly because actors of authority, who knew what the old ways were, adapted them skilfully enough to the new conditions. Even so there was much critical mourning over Macbeths that were not what they used to be, and Schools for Scandal as dull as ditch water.

This is worth noting because it points so directly to the reliance once placed-apart from any virtues in the play itself-upon the relation between actors and audience. This relation bred (unfortunately for the drama as a whole perhaps) a race of actors who, by cultivating it, could make the very poorest play attractive-even as a music-hall comedian can now keep his audience in a roar over nothing at all. But, æsthetically, it was not of necessity an unworthy relation. No one can read of Garrick and Mrs Siddons and Kean; of King and Mrs Abington and Palmer; no one can have seen a William Farren play Sir Peter Teazle according to tradition, and suppose so. And it would be idle to pretend that in erecting the barrier of a complete illusion between actors and audience the art of the theatre has lost nothing,

whatever it may have gained. The arising of a generation of actors that feel as helpless upon the apron at Garrick's Drury Lane (which just from the actor's standpoint keeps all the advantage of Shakespeare's Globe) as they would in the ring of a circus, will involve the disappearance of Shakespeare and Sheridan from the stage, except as excuses for pageantry or academic exercises. This disappearance has indeed seemed imminent; it still may be. Here and there the mechanical remedy has been applied, when old plays are under treatment, of breaking down the illusion by providing an apron stage and encouraging the actor to come out upon it and be a Garrick,' so to speak. But the trouble may not be quite so simply curable.

And what of the modern drama? It is as useless to expect the playwright of to-day to go back on the 'illusionary' theory as it would be to ask Mr Sargent to paint like Giotto. Besides, this would be to imply that in the illusionary stage we have nothing to be grateful for. We have much. One need not muster names, or even suppose that the playwrights who have flourished during the last fifty years and whose work measures up in average quality with any the theatre has seen could not have done as well-though they must have done very differently-working to another technique. The 'could' and 'should' argument in matters of art is always exasperatingly futile, whether it bears on the past or the present; whether, as in this instance, it is how Shakespeare ought to have written for footlights and scenery, or Ibsen might have constructed Hedda Gabler for the bare boards of the Globe.

But it will be owned that this latest period of development in drama has been the playwright's period, not the actor's. Has it not often brought actor and playwright to odds, now openly, now-for good reasons of bread-and-butter-as politely as you please? Once, at a public dinner, Ibsen was congratulated upon the magnificent parts his plays provided for their interpreters. The old gentleman scowled terrifically. 'Parts!' he said, when he rose to speak; 'I do not write parts. I create men and women.' On the other hand, could the talk of actors gathered together at many a private dinner during the last forty years be recorded, it would rise

to Heaven as the discordant wail of a crushed and desolated race.

The quarrel, I repeat, may seldom be particularised. A theatre is the happiest of workshops and its controllers have to learn that happiness is a necessary part of its efficiency. And, as I have suggested, in practice these conflicting interests are accommodated by a compromise. Let there be so much sheer interpretation of the part I have written, so much exploiting, my dear Mr So-and-so, of your personality. Never, of course, is it put in so many words, or even thought of with so brutal a clarity. And where the domination of either author or producer on the one hand, or of actor on the other, is perfect and unquestioned, no overt difference will be detected. The author murmurs approvingly from the shrouded stalls, or the actors obediently note that they are not only to do but to feel this and that and no more. Five minutes-five seconds!-at a rehearsal or performance will tell the experienced observer which regime is in force. Some rehearsals, doubtless, run their course upon a basis of conflict to a goal of haphazard performance. If the play is a success-and good plays and bad plays, bad performances of them and good ones, succeed and fail equally-no one concerned asks any questions. If it is a failure, the author feels, Ah, if my play had had a chance. . .!' and the actors either 'Ah, if I'd only had something to act . . .!' or 'If they'd only have let me act it!' It is a stupid quarrel. And what is its result, in ensuing or suppression, for the playgoer? That good actors often prefer bad plays; and that good plays are too often deplorably badly acted

[ocr errors]

If this is the dramatist's day, he will be wise to consider the actor, not as a mere appendage to his work, but as its very life-giver. Let him realise that the more he can learn to ask of the actor the more will he gain for his play. But asking is giving. He must give opportunity.

An author may have a thesis to expound or an exciting story to tell. A pamphlet will serve him for one and a novel for the other; or if the matter be all excitement, there is, as aforesaid, the cinema. A play has far other, far wider, artistic purposes. Aristotle laid it down-with that positiveness which in an ancient Greek is supposed, for some reason, to silence all Vol. 240.-No. 476.

E

ITINER—ANx izumace wien must not be thought of VITEV 1 de representation of character, that the netas mi ct me and cf a tragedy; and the

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

To prove this apparently,

18 juder without action there cannot A vien is zovicasy true. but that there TUT DE VENE WA. In some logical sense, no

[ocr errors]

iwe may very dn afair it would be. R Jas do not read their Aristotle, est DIY HIC endrer of having to differ from um. Er der I remember that every great play of the at NITIDES And more holds its place in THE JỂ Maricter and not of plot. Why do we go to 23 2017 TINc ve rady like again and again? (And 20121 7873 the test: in masie, in painting, in ira Share the story re-told us, however moteusy I may be so It is the elucidation of siseseter tinc ices not pal: and it is in this-all virtusy sil that is able allowed for-that the actor's tinis is in ask and its true achievement. As with the setor, so with the playwright; construction and the rest of it are as learnable as is good speaking and the muss of painting the face; but either he can create men and women in terms of dramatic action or be cannot. And nothing else finally counts. He need nct. bowever, with Ibsen, disdain to think of them as parts to be played That was in its time, perhaps, a wholesome protest against the actor's egoism. But it has become-frankly-s piece of snobbery and no more. For now as always it is the power of the actor, adopting the speech and setion of the author's imagining, to elucidate the character in the terms of his own personality that gives the thing that apparent spontaneity of life which is the drama's peculiar virtue.

We speak most appropriately of reviving an old play; and new actors do in a very real sense give it new life. The fact that (if it has been, to begin with, vitally conceived) it is capable of being interpreted in the terms of another set of personalities (as indeed it may be to some degree variously treated by the same actors time after time) is the chief reason why we can go back to it, not merely as we go back to a familiar novel or poom, but often to receive-though expectancy is rash

« VorigeDoorgaan »