The exemplary theatre

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

THE history of a book's writing has an interest for its author, when (the worst over) he is able to recall it, that he can hardly expect its readers to share. But in the origin and development of the ideas which I have tried to express in "The Exemplary Theatre" I do seem to find a significance sufficiently impersonal for their recording, perhaps, to be pardonable.

The history begins, then, about twenty years ago at a meeting held in some drawing-room in the further West End of London. My memory is not more precise; nor does it distinguish who was present. But the meeting's object — the object at least that emerged — was to consider what steps could be taken towards the foundation of a national theatre, and its result the appointment of a committee to draw up a scheme. From this point my memory grows clearer. The committee consisted of Gilbert Murray, A. C. Bradley, Spenser Wilkinson, William Archer, Hamilton Fyfe, and — longo intervallo — my humble self. It met several times at Spenser Wilkinson's house and discussed at some length and, as was to be expected, with great learning the principles that should govern the establishment and conduct of national theatres in general. Spenser Wilkinson, I remember, was most apt to turn for a solution of our difificulties to the practice of the ancient Greeks. I trust I sat silent. I was impatient — the scheme seemed likely to be long in coming to birth. I am sure I looked forward to a national theatre in being within the next year or so. I have since thought, as the sequel will show, that our theorizing need not have been wasted.

VX PBEFACE

But one morning William Archer arrived at my rooms in the Adelphi and delivered himself somewhat to this effect:

"We must get something on paper. What you and I have to do is to draw up a practical scheme, and these other fellows may amend it if they know how."

He had only to command me, so we set to work, and the result — to which, I should add, his contribution much outweighed mine — was a considerable mass of detail which we named "A Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre." My memory becomes vague again. I presume the scheme was submitted in some form to the responsible committee, though I am quite sure that the parent meeting was never reassembled. The committee probably gave up the ghost at being challenged to pronounce upon the subscription prices that should be charged for a second performance of Measure for Measure, whether and when a third scenic artist should come on the pension fund, and the number of charwomen that would be wanted. Archer and I were left proudly alone with our offspring.

We then proceeded to self -suppression : first in favour of seven godfathers — I must name them : Henry Irving, Squire Bancroft, J. M. Barrie, Helen d'Oyly Carte, John Hare, Henry Arthur Jones, and A. W. Pinero — and contingently in favour of any beneficent millionaire to whom their good word might recommend this magnificent opportunity. It should be his scheme for £350,000 or so. There were no offers. The benevolence of the godfathers availed nothing. I fancy some timid approaches were made to the Government. But tariff reform — or the tariff reformer rather — was at that time Mr. Balfour's amply suflBcient trouble, and his interest, so he is reported to have said on the broaching of the subject, lay rather in classical con-

PREFACE Vll

certs with the prices at twopence, fourpence, and sixpence. I fancy, too, that candidates for baronetcies and the like were not quite so numerous then; besides, £350,000 much overtopped the market-rate.

I recall, amid the barren complaisance with which the scheme was greeted by the few who took the trouble to read it, one piece of harsh and pertinent criticism from Bernard Shaw.

"It's no good," he said, "for no one with the youth and energy to get such a theatre started would do a hand's turn for the sake of such a musty Ust of plays as you put down. The old drama or the new drama may serve you, but old-fashioned drama's the devil."

We had apologetically ruled out of the specimen repertory Ibsen and Hauptmann and Shaw himself, and a few others (Brieux had slipped in, though), on the ground that it was no advanced theatre we were designing. So that, with a little heat. Archer replied that as quite notorious Ibsenites, Hauptmannites, Shavians, etc., we had made this great sacrifice as a pledge of good faith. To which Shaw only answered that if we hadn't the courage of our opinions we deserved to be ignored.

We were. But that was to have contented us if only the millionaire woid^- have fathered the already well godfathered scheme. ' And Shaw's criticism, if pertinent, was partial. But it raises one interesting issue. Does not a little self-seeking do more to promote public confidence than a disinterestedness which will either be suspected as hypocritical or condemned as half-hearted?

Some years later, however, when Archer and I had travelled together to America and were discussing in New York a not dissimilar project, there blazed up in London — public meetings, press paragraphs, and all — a movement to establish a national theatre as a tercentenary monument to Shakespeare. And

VUl PREFACE

we returned to find the committee, to which we were added, disposed to adopt our scheme as at least a preliminary text-book. It had, I think, by this time been published, was no longer anonymous, but remained as disinterested as ever.

Into the next ten years' history of the Shakespeare National Theatre Committee I do not propose to go. Enough to say that when the tercentenary came England — and Europe — memorialized it in another fashion. I forbear the usual ironic comment upon the German patronage of our national poet. But I will record the bitterness of my realization — sharpened by the occasion — - of the theatre's utter and ignominious failure during the war to lift its head into any region of fine feeling and eloquence. It was sharpened still more by the thought that had our Shakespeare National Theatre been earlier brought to a safe existence that would surely have stood in significant honour above the disgrace.

Well, it is 1921, and the memorial committee is still whistling, and may whistle, for their money — and they need more than £350,000 now. This is not yet a country for the heroic dramatist to live in. And it is no use crying over the spilt years. So, personally, I have turned for comfort upon the subject during these last three or four, to a reconsideration of the theatre's whole position. And this book is evidence of such comfort as I have found.

If we had established our national theatre according to the idea of it commonly current ten to twenty years ago (and the scheme and estimates represents this not unfairly) we might well have set up something that did not truly or fully represent our national dramatic genius. We were stirred, for one thing, to an emulation of the Theatre Frangais, we were inclined to borrow useful items from the plans of the many good German and Scandinavian theatres. No harm

PREFACE IX

in that, once we have achieved an individuality of our own. But have we — in dramatic matters more important far than organization and machinery? We talk of the renaissance of our theatre; dating it, according to taste, from 1870, 1890, 1900 or whenever. And so, no doubt, we most allowedly may. But, for one thing, this is a renaissance of the written drama only. Acting — which is the theatre's original art — has by no means, if this book is in the right, yet adjusted itself to its new opportunity. And certainly the theatre, as a whole, has only begun to absorb the interesting and often typically English developments of the art of scenic decoration. Moreover, we are all still under the dominance of the well-made play. In our play-writing renaissance, if we broke from Scribe, we fell into the arms of Ibsen and have hardly yet escaped from them. Not that these embraces necessarily did us harm.

But to survey his heritage and to prosper its working a man must stand upright and feel his feet.

Now, it is obvious that the drama is, of all others, an intensely racial art; whatever the playwright may do, the actor cannot — and advisedly will not try to — translate or adapt himself. The genius of French acting is fitted to the well-made play — naturally, as the two things have developed together. Together, moreover, they may almost be said to represent with perfect fitness the genius of the French nation itself — reasonable, precise, rounded neatly and completely from cause to effect.

But does it follow that this form and method will be equally expressive of the characteristics of other races? It is noticeable, on the other hand, that the typical French actor turns from the foreign play if he cannot turn it to himself. Consider the work of three such dramatists as Shakespeare, d'Annunzio, Tchekov. Apart from all excellence of content, is

X PREFACE

not its salient quality — that thrust out for its interpreters to seize — racial expressiveness, and does not this necessarily dictate method and, finally, form? And now consider one or two points in the history of, say, the English and German theatres. In the eighteenth century the Germans borrowed largely from us — they swallowed Shakespeare whole. In the nineteenth they borrowed from the French, They assimilated Ibsen, they gave much original attention to organization and decoration. They have, indeed, a voracious dramatic appetite, and are little inclined to wait patiently for the slow growth of native product. But when this does, if with diflSculty, appear it is remarkable for rebellion, both in minor methods and larger form, against the borrowed models. In England, from 1660 onwards, foreign influence upon our theatre is apparent. Throughout the nineteenth century we borrow, indeed we often steal quite shamelessly, from the French: so shamelessly that our sense of "mine and thine" is gone, and we find ourselves, in our own despite, violently trying to convert the very work of Shakespeare and of Sheridan into the likeness of the well-made play. Our modem actors, bred to the borrowed drama, acquiesce. To the Elizabethan actor, though, Shakespeare's work, as Shakespeare wrote it, came naturally enough; he was one of them himself for that matter. And though we need not trouble to argue why Racine would have puzzled Burbage, and how — more to the point — Pinero and Galsworthy would have upset the Globe Theatre stage-manager completely, is it not true that while other English arts can show — for all incidental breakings — characteristic descent, the art of the theatre to-day is most characteristically un- English.'' The content of our plays may be native, but the form, as a rule, will be arbitrary and foreign, and will show little regard, or none, for the character

PREFACE XI

of the interpretation the play is to receive. What form does the English genius for self-expression most readily take? What dramatist starts by asking himself such a question? In lyric and epic poetry, in fiction, do we not tend, unhindered still, to run the Shakespearean gamut of rhetoric and metaphysic, to be allusive, to be passionate, seldom ironic, logical hardly ever? How should we expect to find English actors at their best, burdened with a method, crippled in a form, which, however excellent, is no development of their natural way of expression, is as foreign to that and to them as the words of a foreign language would be? The trouble is, it would seem, that the integrity of the English theatre has been destroyed. The dramatist can serve strange gods and can profit by it; the actor cannot. But harmony between the two there must be: because, for all the dramatist's importance, acting is not only the original art of the theatre, it remains its peculiar foundation. And it may be that the time lost in setting up our standard of a Shakespeare memorial will not have been time wasted if in it we can profit by this lesson which Shakespeare's own art so particularly teaches us.

But further — and this is the encouragement of thought by which my share of the Scheme and Estimates has developed into this book — it may well be that just as Shakespeare made of drama something which outspanned all its then acknowledged powers, so we, gathering up tradition with understanding and measuring our power by our need, might make in our turn of the theatre something that would not only better, but quite transcend, its present service to us. Even in its complexity it is so simple an art, and the pleasure and the profit of it are so common a heritage. We have been setting, it may be, inappropriate limits to its destiny.

A

Chapter I: The Author's Prejudices, and Others'

The uses of dialogue — Dramatists all; and actors all — "The" profession — The theatre's appeal to — the mob — ( Should drama be accounted one of the - fine arts ? — The difficulty of ranking the theatre as a social service — The difficulty of using the _ drama in_education — Art'sl)verrafed''infliiehce — -^ TEe~tKeatre~as catspaw — The economics of the modem Enghsh theatre — Authority's obligation to the theatre — ■ The drama 's industrial difficulty is that an art shall not be an industry — Art as a gift to society — Society 's responsibiUty in accepting the gift — There is no such thing as a theatre in England -«Jhe larger idea of drama pp. 1-35

Chapter II: The Educational Basis Book learning and the educational claims of acting _

— The professional theatre's contribution — Pub- ' lie manners — The tradition of dur speech — The American language — The influences of chmate and of recent immigration — The drama as a microcosm of society^— The self-realization of a child

— The teaching of psychology — Democracy, the newspapers, and the whole art of fiction — Qualifications and temptations of the journalist — The pubKc 's self-defence — The artistic synthesis — ^ The popular attitude towards interpretative art — Theatre v. novel — The good audience — The educational use of drajg,a.i:r_T,bs.JEixemplaiy Theatre '

, — The break in the acting tracfition — Robertson- '^ Bancroft-Pinero — The Ibsen challenge — The "^ discredited art of acting — The need for a new virtuosity — The critics — The wrong sort of school

— The army of women — The unprofessional student pp. 36-95

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Chapter III: The Plan of the Theatre as School

The school 's scope — No children admitted — The broad base of the work — No teaching of acting allowed — The by-paths of the social "settlement" and the "community" theatre — The picked recruits — Playwriting classes — Stage decoration

— The co-operative study of plays — Critical and interpretative bias — Bringing the play to life — How the seminar works — The absorption of the interpreter by the play — "Strife" quoted as an example — TheUsteningpart — Theplacingof acharacter in the scheme of the play — The apparent development of plot from the characters and scenes themselves — Mass effect — Where student and interpreter part company — The misuse of the classics — The would-be actor admitted to the playhouse at last — Experimental work for students iu their last year — The Umits of a play 's use to the seminar

— Subsidiary school work; lectures, etc. pp. 96-143

Chapter IV: The Theatre as Playhouse

No definite boundary between playhouse and school — The sort of actor and actress this theatre needs — The rescue from vagabondage — The need of the actor to study more and perform less

— T he actor 's need of other work than acting — ^The destruction of illusion as a step to appreciation, -

— Our interest in interpretation the only one worth cultivating — The relation of the actors to the management of the theatre — The theatre as Uvelihood — The fallacy of administration by committee — An integrated audience and its representation — The political influence of the theatre as a public institution — A council at the head of affairs; its constitution; its work — The council as the conscience of the management — Where public blame should fall — The theatre 's director and his autocracy^j— Th^jchoice of plays — The dangers of institutio6alism —The need for a play -reader of unusual importance — The difficulties of experimenting in play production — The play-reader's qualifications and powers — A third voice needed

CONTENTS XV

in the choosing of plays — The fallacy of trying to get everything right at once — The librarian; the making of prompt books; the conserving of tra- ^

dition — The prompters themselves — The workshop — ^JThe amount of attention to be given to stage decoration ^ The easy way of visual appeal

— Artistic economy — The salutary influence of conventional staging — The need for agreement on convention between interpreters and audience — The workshop and collaboration — The workshop 's organization — Craftsmanship — The stranger designer — Machinery — The right sort of auditorium and the wrong — The differing requirements of the different kinds of drama pp. 144-206

Chapter V: The Production of a Play- How plays are now thrown on the stage — The scratch company — The hurried rehearsals — The Umitations of the human medium — Setting to work upon "A Midsummer Night's Dream" — How physical action brings study to a standstill

— The mysterious process by which the actor identifies himself with his part — The dramatist's method, which the actor must f oUow — Tension and conflict — Never commit words to memory

— The mystery of identification again ^— Produc- '

tions must be born and not made •*— The two categories of a play 's action : the conscious action — Unconscious or subconscious action — The Scylla

and Charybdis of automatism and self-consciousness — Pure conventionalism — The hmits of the personal appeal — The mystery yet again — The actor "lets himself go" — The danger of automatism agaia — ^^ Acting the art of sympathy — The childhood of the art — The demands of its adolescence PP- ^07-237

Chapter VI: Some Current Difficulties

Compromise and catchwords — The defence of the long-run system — Verdict: the long run guilty of the destruction of the art of acting — The short run little better — Why many gallant efforts at re-

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form have failed — The cautious capitalist — Practical difficulties for "practical" managements — The way out of the difficulty — Old methods and new drama — The good business man and the theatre — The integrated audience — The need for a budget — The pyramid of poUcy — A Shakespearean parenthesis ^ The theatre's duty towards the drama — The theatre's duty towards itself,— A few sample plays — Drama and democracy — The danger of the clique — The need for a leisured class pp. 238-270

Chapter I The Authors Prejudices and Others

ONE follows a calling for thirty years and forgets its comparative unimportance; how could it hold one otherwise? But, pleading its cause to the world, this is the first thing one must make a show of remembering. For a man of the theatre to write of the theatre as if nothing else mattered is only to invite from the man of the world that polite acquiescence which is deadlier than disagreement.

, This book is a plea for the recognition of the theatre j as _an educational force.jf It is addressed mainly to , people" whose present interest in the theatre is at best perfunctory. And its first chapter takes the appropriate form of a dialogue between a man of the theatre and a minister of education, and is an attempt to reconcile the general and particular points of view.

To begin such a book with a chapter of dialogue is more than superficially appropriate, for its whole purpose, as will be seen, is implicit in the virtue of this form of expression. We are to argue the educational uses of the dramatic method. Let both parties, then, put their present accomplishment in it to a preliminary test.

The Man of the Theatre — as is only fair — frankly exposes his bias. Why pretend in a book of polemic to be disinterested.'' It is bad enough that the technical questions involved will prevent the lay reader, half the time, estimating the honesty of the statements. The Minister of Education replies coolly, judicially. But now consider. Was the admission of bias a disguised appeal for sympathy? Is the reply only let seem more judicial that it may the safelier be made less so? Is the writer's whole show of accommodation only another form of special pleading? How far, in fact, does his art elucidate the truth of the matter, or is he deliberately using it to obscure the truth? If the reader can discover him at his tricks, so much the worse for him — if not for his art. If he cannot, so much the worse for the reader and the more need for a little education in this dramatic method! The more need, then, of this book. In one sense its writer is trying, of course, to get round his readers. Why ever else go to the unnatural trouble of writing a book at all? And he shows but a necessary confidence in his case by opening with this demonstration. Yet the 'gist of the case is that the dramatic form, if honestly used — which is to say in terms of an art, artistically used — is the vehicle for a very vital sort of truth. And this is its honest use. First, to have the courage, not only of the strength, but of the weakness of one's opinion. Not merely to be self -critical: there is little in that, it may lead only to dififidence. But to project the whole body of one's beUef into an individual shape, armed and sustained to the full. Then to attack it. Can such an attack be genuine; can one hit oneself in the face? Well, we must not look for a detachment, or an artistry, or an honesty that is superhumanly perfect. But the fact of projection makes aU the difference. We shall be tender of a guarded faith : but if it has had its fling, if we have set it free, so to speak, from reservation and control, we shall then be well content to fling back at it and to fling our best. For the harder we fling the greater its credit in sustaining our attack. We may take pride even in showing alien adversaries that we know its weak spots, naturally, better than ever they can. If it sustains our attacks it will certainly be invulnerable to theirs. And if, as it happens, we do demolish it; why, to do so, we must have formed a better opinion and a stronger belief. Such is the nature of the dramatic sense that we shall be glad of this rather than sorry. And the victory will be our own either way.

The drama's methods are the commonest in the world: they are the methods of everyday conversation. But they are worth study: the more that, becoming suddenly aware we ^ramatists have used them unknowingly for years, we actore aU may think ourselves natural masters of the art — which is first to deceive ourselves, and later probably to be deceived in turn, and so to come to the belief that the art lies in its deceiving.

Now, art is a social danger if it is a continuing untruth. Surely that does not attach an unreasoning importance to the matter if the practice of this art of the drama is as common as eating. And it is. We dramatize our lives; by no other means can we decide upon the parts we mean to play in them. We are actors all; but so many of us, setting out with the best intentions, neither know when nor why the performance begins to go wrong, and tricks to take the place of the fine interpretation we meant to give. Nobody hisses perhaps. But that 's the worst of it.

This book's plea for the theatre's salvation is a wider and simpler one than it would seem to be. Technical argument apart, it is a plea for truth-telling (a matter of great artistry) and for the cultivation of a faculty by which the common man may hope, as a rule, to know whether he is being told the truth about . things or not. Strange if dramatic art can successfully concern itself with such matters ! But if it can . . .

The Minister of Education But, my dear

sir, don't apologize. Every man worth his salt naturally makes high claims for his own profession.

The Man o/ the Theatre. I don't apologize . . .

though I'm readier for the moment with accusations

than claims. I recognize, to begin with, that the

^, theatre is not a profession. That was

^^^" . rubbed into me by a kindly editor when

profession ^ , , ... ^ . i i • j

Id written my first public words on

its troubles ... a letter to a newspaper. "Do you

mind being accurate?" he said. "There's a medical

profession, a legal profession. The theatre is . . . you

may choose half a dozen words for it." I went away

sorrowful and snubbed. The distinction had never

occurred to me, nor had the subtle contempt come

home of the journalists' joke (briefless barristers most

of them!) about "the" profession.

I imagine that I fixed upon "calling." One avoids the word "art" . . . though not to escape the Royal Academy's frowns. Actors, I agree, are absurdly sensitive. I suppose that even this generation of them is not quite free from the struggle to be considered gentlemen. It is mostly their relations, though, country clergymen and the like, that distressfully take up the cudgels. And that silliest of plays "David Garrick" — even sillier in its motive than the silly prejudices it mocks and appeals to — is but just out of date. Better to call the theatre a trade, except for the implication that people make money by it.

M. of E. But don't they?

M. of T. Out of it, yes. But by following the calling and practising the art of the theatre there is n't, for the great majority, much money to be made. In that it is as honourable as a profession, codeless though it be. No parson or doctor or civil servant could be, in practice, more disinterested than the average actor who has settled down to the life. But they are trade victims, if you like.

M. of E. And is that your first complaint?

M. of T. I shan't press it on their behalf. The bored and barren sympathy which the victim inspires is not at all what I'm after. I want to interest you in the theatre.

M. ofE. As . . . what? ^' M. of T. As social service.

M. of E. Interest on my part is to be official and to imply action, is it?

M. of T. Admission of the need for action.

M. of E. Then I must analyse your phrases carefully. You mean that it should be regulated aiS a social service ... as a civil service, do you?

M. of T. Not strictly . . . not altogether.

M. of E. No, since civil service became bureaucracy you 're not so eager to entrust your darling schemes to its care.

M. of T. Well, I'll own that I'm thinking of my average Englishman, who'd sooner have a bad bureaucracy than a good one ... it is a step nearer having none at all.

M. of E. But you were going to begin with complaints. Let us clear the ground of those first. What offends you most in the present state of

things? theatre's

M. of T. Fundamentally, I believe, that appeal to the theatre exists by appealing to the mob. the mob

M. of E. To the public. / M. of T. No, no ... if you mean to analyse my phrases I must pick my words. The public connotes something, if not organized, at least a little stable, does n't it? My first complaint is of the mob appeal, the mob standard of success, and the evergrowing confusion of purpose that results. In London, and very notably in New York, it is n't even a constant . . . it 's a shifting, hotel-haunting mob. Oh, a demagogic art, the theatre of to-day, if ever there was one.

A[. of E. That's the fault of a quality, surely, for democratic, as a normal description of it, would n't offend you, would it?

M. of T. On the contrary.

M. of E. Well, then, as to its proper method of carrying on. ... I sound old-fashioned, but I'm a weary bureaucrat myself and not over in love, it may surprise you to hear, with indefinite increase of bureaucracy. It takes many generations to train competent officials, you know. Heaven knows that so far we have n 't enough to go round. What 's wrong with the dear old discredited law of supply and demand to regulate the theatre by? Can't even you put up with it for a bit?

M. of T. Well, I admit that it must depend upon current appreciation more than does any other art, more even than music need, because of the greater expense and complexity of the machinery. Therefore degradation is easier . . .