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Art. 3.--THE PLAY'S THE THING.

IF discussion were medicine, how healthy, or how dead, the Drama would be! for the amount of talk, especially of printed talk, that goes on about it is prodigious. After politics and the world of books, it is the most pervasive subject of conversation. The critics not only say their say, but reissue their generally hurried opinions in volume-form, which must be widely bought or they would not be published. Dramatists reprint their plays with prefaces added to justify or explain them. Popular actors when interviewed or fêted, as often seems to happen on Sunday nights in the winter months, add their well-studied commonplace to the mountain; while successful actresses, hunted to their lairs by the cameras of the picture-press, deliver judgments upon 'darling old Shakespeare' in the intervals of posing by garden rockeries or among their week-end pigs. Yet, with all that, the tale is insufficiently told; for the reason that the ordinary playgoer he who pays for his seat in the theatre with its promise of recreative and artistic joy to come-has no effective voice in the discussion. He is not publicly heard, although he possesses the supreme moral right, through purchase, to express his views.

The conditions and prospects of the Drama to-day remain poor. As compared even with the recent times of Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham they often seem hopeless; but there are signs of change which the eternal optimist among play-goers may regard as promising; and although it will be a long day before the Stage can even distantly approach the position it occupied to the Elizabethans-when it was indeed a mirror to nature; an instrument of poetry and exalted patriotism, as well as the leading form of social recreation-we may feel that we have passed through the wilderness and can see hope glimmering upon the mountain-tops. Repertory is reviving. There is a renewed earnestness among the lay supporters of the Theatre, as shown by the institution of the British Drama League, which, if it is guided with imagination, may do much. Audiences, despite the horrid allurements of the Film and the real competition of Wireless, are showing themselves hungry for good

plays; and every good play, as has been proved by the success of the 'Beggar's Opera,' 'The Green Goddess,' The Way of the World,' 'The Farmer's Wife,' 'Juno and the Paycock,' and 'Outward Bound,' given the opportunity and produced with intelligence, appears assured of profit. Already the narrow reasoning of the commercial managers is disproved. Writing down the popular intelligence they provided rubbish, and the Stage languished. Any suggestion to those entrepreneurs, whose outlook on life seemed generally limited to the aperture of the box-office, that better fare would be appreciated by play-goers, was pooh-poohed; and so the many who love and support the Theatre were discouraged, rebuffed, and starved.

Undoubtedly, the primal cause of the recent and actual decay of the Drama was due to the influence of the merely commercial manager. The nobler traditions of the Drama were to him nothing. He took it that Shakespeare and the other 'highbrow stuff' did not pay; in the dangerous catch-phrase of the day, 'Shakespeare spelt bankruptcy'; so, generally, he left alone the plays which matter and are spiritual life-blood to the legitimate stage. He applied to the standard of the Theatre his own limited and material expectations and judgments. He took no risks; he had no enthusiasm. His voice was only heard in the land to complain of some personal pinch, as of the Entertainment Tax, which his customers paid like the lambs they are, or as to the restriction of the sale within the theatre of sweets and chocolates. Then, listening to the loudest laughter, he decided that the humours which produced that noise were of the right brand for his patrons. Not being a true judge of human nature he could not know that the noisest laughter generally comes from the emptiest mind; and that the truest appreciation of wit is not expressed through a guffaw.

Jingle and jazz out-elbowed most of the serious plays from the stages which the 'Pictures' had spared. To maintain the policy, an expensive policy, of costly frocks and favourite comedians who absorbed salaries equal to those of ministers, he had to raise the cost of seats, to a height prohibitive to many-and still he blamed that minor imposition, the Entertainment Tax, for it. More

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over, because his adventure is business beyond all things else, and mony a puckle maks a muckle,' he raised, directly or indirectly through his contracts, the prices of programmes; so that what D'Oyly Carte and Henry Irving gave for nothing, and elsewhere, once upon a time, cost no more than the penny or the twopence it was worth, often now costs as much as fourpence in the Gallery and the Pit-for a list of names, padded with discussions, as feeble as hens' talk, on the handwriting and casual opinions of stage favourites about anything and nothing, with funny paragraphs that would drive the ghost of poor Joe Miller back into its grave.

Happily, the ascendancy of the merely commercial theatre is being broken, and thanks to the truer taste of the public and to the companies of actors who have proved their love for the drama by doing repertory work, here and there, for a salary not talked about, the play-house is showing prospects of regaining a strength it has not enjoyed for twenty years. It is not merely a pay-box strength; it is that of appreciation, quality of performance, and adventurousness of ideas. Repertory theatres have been, or are in being, at Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Plymouth, Hampstead, Oxford, and elsewhere; and although it must be a long time before such variety and versatility is attained by these pioneers of the new day as was shown by Samuel Phelps, sixty years ago at Sadler's Wells, when he would play on succeeding nights such diverse parts as Hamlet, Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, King Lear, Bottom, Virginius, and Tony Lumpkin; yet a weekly change of programme is a worthy ideal which, after a time, is bound to win the reward of profitable audiences.

We must, however, have genuine actors able to act; and true in their acting, for the first requirement of the dramatic, as of all other arts, is sincerity. That is the only sure means of carrying an illusion over the footlights. With sincerity an audience will accept a golden curtain as yellow sands and a wooden chair as the sufficient furniture of a throne-room. For the play is the thing; and to give to it frankly and full-heartedly all the powers and possible qualities of acting and production, is the least that is due to the artistic truth. The

artistic truth! That always must be the ultimate aim and test. Yet how badly often, even in the best regulated' theatres, is it neglected! Producers should remember that to win the verisimilitude they are asked for, the stage must be kept as distinct as possible from the auditorium. It belongs to the world of illusion. Applause should be the only communication between actors and audiences, other than the words and emotions of the play itself. The proscenium arch should be something more than a structural detail, for it is the frame of a separate life, the open doorway to another existence, to a world of enchantment. How carelessly, how wantonly, are this distinction and this reticence often disregarded!

The first monstrous custom to be abolished should be the curtain-call. I remember the first time that I suffered the shock of that outrage on the truthfulness of a play. Cleopatra, in the beautiful person of Mrs Langtry, had come to her end. The evening had not been exhilarating; but, as always, the lovely simplicity of the incomparable death-scene had carried the audience to the heights. The ultimate lines of the play were cut, so that the curtain should fall at once on Cleopatra's last words; yet hardly had its fringes touched the boards, than 'the serpent of old Nile,' without any invitation whatsoever, was standing, asp in hand, before the footlights, bowing and smiling as if not only had she not just then tragically died, but that positively she had been spending a rather amusing evening. It was a sin against Shakespeare; it ruined the effect of the play. Yet that instance was nothing to what the practice has come to nowadays, when actresses and actors have been photographed and paragraphed into a notoriety altogether out of keeping with their human values. Apparently not even an act can be ended without the characters who appeared in it, whether dead or alive, dukes or chambermaids, returning to the stage, if they happen to have left it, to stand bowing in a stiff and regulated line, with a gradual retirement of the lessimportant until the stars' are left for the ultimate handclaps.

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Possibly my worst experience of this wanton spoiling of the illusions in recent years, because it so badly wounded the sincerity of an earnest play, was with an

otherwise admirable production of Mr Galsworthy's 'Justice' at the Court Theatre. The performance was in all respects so finished and truthful that actually when the audience had applauded the speech of the defending counsel, I looked for a rebuke from the judge, with the declaration that there must be silence in the court. It was a triumph of sincerity and art. And then, at the end of the scene, the curtain was raised to show criminal, accusers, and counsel, with even the judge in his high seat, standing and bowing. At once the play was voided of sincerity, and his lordship, the learned gentlemen, the poor forger, the jury, were converted into mummers and painted puppets, and were no longer the living reality their art had asked them to be.

It seems that everybody's doing it! No matter how deeply the emotions are stirred, no matter how complete the triumph of the illusion, back we are brought at the end of every act from Elysium, from Illyria, from Bethnal Green, from the centre of illimitable seas-to the narrow compass of the crowded Pit; and simply because those high souls were not really communing with the eternal verities, or living the brave, poor life so cunningly depicted. No, they were merely play-acting, making pretence. What fools we feel that we must have become to get lost in an illusion and made to feel pride, or grief, or mirth, or doubt, through that now-evident organised sham! The dramatic is the only art that wilfully destroys its effects. I beg producers to insist on an absolute rule, that no such interruptions shall be tolerated until the course of the play is run; and then that the parade shall be not with the scenery as background but before a plain curtain, so that those of us who want to avoid what usually is a boring spectacle may depart.

If there are calls so clamorous as to be irresistible at the end of an intermediate act, then, until the public has learnt better, let the concluding tableau be continued, or the action carried a stage further as sometimes has been done. Do not let the actor come out of his characterisation even for a moment, as, though we are moved by the titanic woes of King Lear, a victim on an universal stage, colossal and timeless, it is not reason enough for us to be bothered by the presence of the particular

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