In their novels they demand a certain minimum of probability, truth to life, credible characterization and decent writing. An impossible story, in which the personages are so many dolls, moving in obedience to the laws of an absurd and outworn convention and expressing themselves in a grotesque, tumid and ungrammatical English—this would disgust them. But to a play answering precisely to this description, they will flock in their thousands. They will be moved to tears and enthusiasm by situations which, in a novel, they would find merely ludicrous. They will let pass, and even fervidly admire, language which any one with the slightest feeling for the use of words would shudder to see in print.
It was over this strange anomaly that I used to ponder during those hideous evenings at the theatre. Why does the penny novelette disgust, in book form, those who delight in it when exhibited on the stage? Put succinctly, that was the not uninteresting problem.
Mr. Bernard Shaw has said that it is easier to write a novel than a play; and to show with what horrible facility a novelist can spin out into pages of thin description what the dramatist must compress into a few lines of dialogue, he re-wrote in modern narrative form a scene from Macbeth. Admittedly, Shakespeare stood the comparison very well. For it is certainly easier to write a bad novel than a good play. But on the other hand, it is much easier to write a bad play that will be successful—even with a quite intelligent and discriminating audience—than a bad novel that will take in readers of the same class. A dramatist can ‘get away with’ a play in which there is no characterization subtler than caricature, no beauty of language less coarse than ranting rhetoric, no resemblance to life—only an effective situation. The novelist cannot
This fact was recently impressed upon me (yet once more) when I went to the theatre in Parma—not, alas, the great Estensian theatre, but a gimcrack little modern playhouse—to see the Italian version of one of Sir Arthur Pinero’s plays—His House in Order it is called, if I remember rightly, in English. I confess that I thoroughly enjoyed the performance. English Higlif, as seen through the eyes of an Italian touring company was worth coming far—all the way from England—to study. And the comedians were admirable.
But I marvelled, as I listened, that a piece so entirely empty—for at Parma the unconscious humour and the good acting were merely accidental additions to the blank original—could have been, could still be, such a success. And as a hard-working novelist, I envied the lucky playwrights who can turn out a popular and even highly esteemed piece, in which the personages are either wooden puppets or caricatures, the language rant, and the plot a succession of those cheap epigrams of circumstance known as ‘situations.’ If I were allowed to make a novel out of only these ingredients, I should congratulate myself on having got off uncommonly cheaply.
What makes it possible for the dramatist to put so little into his plays, and yet successfully ‘get away with it,’ is, of course, the intervention of living interpreters. If he knows the trick—and one learns by practice—the dramatist can pass on to the actor the greater part of his responsibilities. All that he need do, if he is lazy, is to invent effective situations and leave the actors to make the most of them. Characterization, truth to life, ideas, decent writing and all the rest, he can resign to the writers for print, secure in the knowledge that the public will be too much taken up with the antics of the players to remark the absence of these merely literary trifles.
For it is the players, of course, who reconcile an otherwise relatively discriminating public to the sad stuff which finds its way on to the stage. It is for the sake of the comedians that occupants of the stalls who might, if they were sitting by their own firesides, be reading, shall we say, Wells or Conrad, or D. H. Lawrence, or even Dostoievsky, are content to put up with the dramatic equivalent of the penny novelette and the picture-paper serial story; for the sake of the living, smiling comedians; for the personal touch, the palpitating human note.
If acting were always first class, I could understand people becoming hardened first-nighters—or shouldn’t one rather say ‘softened’? for the contemporary theatre is more relaxing than tonic, more emollient than astringent—becoming, then, softened first-nighters. A fine piece of acting is as well worth looking at as a fine performance in any other branch of art.
But good actors are as rare as good painters or good writers. Not more than two or three of the very best appear in every generation. I have seen a few. Old Guitry, for example. And Marie Lloyd, the marvellous, rich, Shakespearean Marie, now dead—alas, too soon; car elle était du monde où les plus belles choses ont le pire destin. And Little Tich. And Raquel Meller, marvellous both as diseuse and cinema actress, the most refined, the most nobly aristocratic interpreter of passion I have ever seen; une âme bien née if ever there was one. And Charlie Chaplin. All men and women of genius.
Such perfect performances as theirs are of course worth watching. And there are plenty of smaller talents, not to be despised. I am as willing to pay money to see these comedians interpreting nonsense as to pay to see a good play badly acted (and it is extraordinary how actor-proof a really good play can be). But why any one should pay to see a poor, or even very competent but uninspired piece of acting in conjunction with a bad play—that is completely beyond my powers to understand.
Hardened—I beg your pardon—softened first-nighters to whom I have put this riddle have never been able to give me very satisfactory answers. Your true first-nighter, I can only presume, is born with a passion for the theatre; he loves it always, for its own sake, blindly (for love is blind), uncritically. He pays his money at the box office, he leaves his judgment in the cloak-room along with his great-coat, hat and walking-stick, and takes his seat, certain that he will enjoy himself, whatever may happen on the stage. The stuffiness and the crowd, the dark, expectant hush and then the apocalyptic rising of the curtain, the glitter and the shining, painted unreality—these are enough in themselves to make him happy. He does not ask for more. I envy him his easily contented mind.
The End
