Man and Superman and Three Other Plays (7 page)

In 1893 the obnoxious post was occupied by a gentleman, now deceased, whose ideas had in the course of nature become quite obsolete. He was openly hostile to the New movement, and declared before a Royal Commission his honest belief that the reputation of Ibsen in England was a spurious product of a system of puffery initiated by Mr. William Archer with the corrupt object of profiting by translations of his works. In dealing with him Mr. Grein was at a heavy disadvantage. Without a license “Mrs. Warren's Profession” could only be performed in some building not a theatre, and therefore not subject to reprisals from the Lord Chamberlain. The audience would have to be invited as guests only; so that the support of the public paying money at the doors, a support with which the Independent Theatre could not afford to dispense, was out of the question. To apply for a license was to court a practically certain refusal entailing the £50 penalty on all concerned in any subsequent performance whatever. The deadlock was complete. The play was ready; the Independent Theatre was ready; two actresses, Mrs. Theodore Wright and Miss Jane Achurch, whose creations of Mrs. Alving in “Ghosts” and Nora in “A Doll's House” had stamped them as the best in the new style in England, were ready; but the mere existence of the Censorship, without any action or knowledge of the play on its part, was sufficient to paralyse all these forces. So I threw “Mrs. Warren's Profession,” too, aside, and, like another Fielding, closed my career as playwright in ordinary to the Independent Theatre.

Fortunately, though the Stage is bound, the Press is free. And even if the Stage were freed, none the less would it be necessary to publish plays as well as perform them. Had the two performances of “Widowers' Houses” achieved by Mr. Grein been multiplied by fifty—nay, had “The Philanderer” and “Mrs. Warren's Profession” been so adapted to the taste of the general public as to have run as long as “Charlie's Aunt,”
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they would still have remained mere titles to those who either dwell out of reach of a theatre, or, as a matter of habit, prejudice, comfort, health or age, abstain altogether from play going. And then there are the people who have a really high standard of dramatic work; who read with delight all the classic dramatists, from Eschylus to Ibsen, but who only go to the theatre on the rare occasions when they are offered a play by an author whose work they have already learnt to value as literature, or a performance by an actor of the first rank. Even our habitual playgoers would be found, on investigation, to have no true habit of playgoing. If on any night at the busiest part of the theatrical season in London, the audiences were cordoned by the police and examined individually as to their views on the subject, there would probably not be a single house owning native among them who would not conceive a visit to the theatre, or indeed to any public assembly, artistic or political, as an exceptional way of spending an evening, the normal English way being to sit in separate families in separate rooms in separate houses, each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma, cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude. The result is that you may make the acquaintance of a thousand streets of middle-class English families without coming on a trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation of the senses. The condition of the men is bad enough, in spite of their daily escape into the city, because they carry the exclusive and unsocial habits of “the home” with them into the wider world of their business. Although they are natural, amiable, and companionable enough, they are, by home training, so incredibly ill-mannered, that not even their business interests in welcoming a possible customer in every inquirer, can correct their habit of treating everybody who has not been “introduced” as a stranger and intruder. The women, who have not even the city to educate them, are much worse: they are positively unfit for civilized intercourse—graceless, ignorant, narrow-minded to a quite appalling degree. Even in public places homebred people cannot be taught to understand that the right they are themselves exercising is a common right. Whether they are in a second-class railway carriage or in a church, they receive every additional fellow-passenger or worshipper as a Chinaman receives the “foreign devil” who has forced him to open his ports.

In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word “home”), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time; and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then, let my plays be printed as well as acted.

But the dramatic author has reasons for publishing his plays which would hold good even if English families went to the theatre as regularly as they take in the newspaper. A perfectly adequate and successful stage representation of a play requires a combination of circumstances so extraordinarily fortunate that I doubt whether it has ever occurred in the history of the world. Take the case of the most successful English dramatist of the first rank, Shakespear. Although he wrote three centuries ago, he still holds his own so well that it is not impossible to meet old playgoers who have witnessed public performances of more than thirty out of his thirty-seven reputed plays, a dozen of them fairly often, and half a dozen over and over again. I myself, though I have by no means availed myself of all my opportunities, have seen twenty-three of his plays publicly acted. But if I had not read them as well as seen them acted, I should have not merely an incomplete, but a violently distorted and falsified impression of them. It is only within the last few years that some of our younger actor-managers have been struck with the idea, quite novel in their profession, of giving Shakespear's plays as he wrote them, instead of using them as a cuckoo uses a sparrow's nest. In spite of the success of these experiments, the stage is still dominated by Garrick's conviction that the manager and actor must adapt Shakespear's plays to the modern stage by a process which no doubt presents itself to the adapter's mind as one of masterly amelioration, but which must necessarily be mainly one of debasement and mutilation whenever, as occasionally happens, the adapter is inferior to the author. The living author can protect himself against this extremity of misrepresentation; but the more unquestioned is his authority on the stage, and the more friendly and willing the co-operation of the manager and the company, the more completely does he get convinced of the impossibility of achieving an authentic representation of his piece as well as an effective and successful one. It is quite possible for a piece to enjoy the most sensational success on the basis of a complete misunderstanding of its philosophy: indeed, it is not too much to say that it is only by a capacity for succeeding in spite of its philosophy that a dramatic work of serious poetic import can become popular. In the case of the first part of Goethe's “Faust” we have this frankly avowed by the extraction from the great original of popular entertainments like Gounod's opera or the Lyceum version, in which the poetry and philosophy is replaced by romance, which is the recognized spurious substitute for both and is absolutely destructive of them. But the same thing occurs even when a drama is performed without omission or alteration by actors who are enthusiastic disciples of the author. I have seen some remarkably sympathetic stage interpretations of poetic drama, from the achievements of Mr. Charles Charrington with Ibsen, and Mr. Lugné Poe with Maeterlinck, under the least expensive conditions, to those of the Wagner Festival Playhouse at Bayreuth with the most expensive; and I have frequently assured readers of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, and pianoforte students of Wagner, that they can never fully appreciate the dramatic force of their works without sensing them in the theatre. But I have never found an acquaintance with a dramatist founded on the theatre alone, or with a composer founded on the concert room alone, a really intimate and accurate one. The very originality and genius of the performers conflicts with the originality and genius of the author. Imagine, for example, Shakespear confronted with Sir Henry Irving at a rehearsal of “The Merchant of Venice,” or Sheridan with Miss Ada Rehan at one of “The School for Scandal.” One can easily imagine the speeches that might pass on such occasions. For example: “As I look at your playing, Sir Henry, I seem to see Israel mourning the Captivity and crying, ‘How long, oh Lord, how long'? but I do not see my Shylock, whom I designed as a moneylender of strong feelings operating through an entirely commercial intellect. But pray dont alter your conception, which will be abundantly profitable to us both.” Or “My dear Miss Rehan, let me congratulate you on a piece of tragic acting which has made me ashamed of the triviality of my play, and obliterated Sir Peter Teazle from my consciousness, though I meant him to be the hero of the scene. I foresee an enormous success for both of us in this fortunate misrepresentation of my intention.” Even if the author had nothing to gain pecuniarily by conniving at the glorification of his play by the performer, the actor's excess of power would still carry its own authority and win the sympathy of the author's histrionic instinct, unless he were a Realist of fanatical integrity. And that would not save him either; for his attempts to make powerful actors do less than their utmost would be as impossible as his attempts to make feeble ones do more.

In short, the fact that a skilfully written play is infinitely more adaptable to all sorts of acting than ordinary acting is to all sorts of plays (the actual conditions thus exactly reversing the desirable ones) finally drives the author to the conclusion that his own view of his work can only be conveyed by himself. And since he cannot act the play single-handed even when he is a trained actor, he must fall back on his powers of literary expression, as other poets and fictionists do. So far, this has hardly been seriously attempted by dramatists. Of Shakespear's plays we have not even complete prompt copies: the folio gives us hardly anything but the bare lines. What would we not give for the copy of Hamlet used by Shakespear at rehearsal, with the original “business” scrawled by the prompter's pencil? And if we had in addition the descriptive directions which the author gave on the stage—above all, the character sketches, however brief, by which he tried to convey to the actor the sort of person he meant him to incarnate, what a light they would shed, not only on the play, but on the history of the sixteenth century! Well, we should have had all this and much more if Shakespear, instead of having merely to bring his plays to the point necessary to provide his company with memoranda for an effective performance, had also had to prepare them for publication in competition with fiction as elaborate as that of Balzac, for instance. It is for want of this process of elaboration that Shakespear, unsurpassed as poet, storyteller, character draughtsman, humorist, and rhetorician, has left us no intellectually coherent drama, and could not afford to pursue a genuinely scientific method in his studies of character and society, though in such unpopular plays as
All's Well, Measure for Measure,
and
Troilus and Cressida,
we find him ready and willing to start at the nineteenth century if the seventeenth would only let him.

Such literary treatment is ten times more necessary to a modern author than it is to Shakespear, because in his time the acting of plays was very imperfectly differentiated from the declamation of verses; and descriptive or narrative recitation did what is now done by scenery and “business.” Anyone reading the mere dialogue of an Elizabethan play understands all but half a dozen unimportant lines of it without difficulty, whilst many modern plays, highly successful on the stage, are not merely unreadable but positively unintelligible without the stage business. The extreme instance is a pure pantomime, like “L‘Enfant Prodigue,”
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in which the dialogue, though it exists, is not spoken. If a dramatic author were to publish a pantomime, it is clear that he could only make it intelligible to a reader by giving him the words which the pantomimist is supposed to be uttering. Now it is not a whit less impossible to make a modern practical stage play intelligible to a reader by dialogue alone, than to make a pantomime intelligible without it.

Obvious as this is, the presentation of plays through the literary medium has not yet become an art; and the result is that it is very difficult to induce the English public to buy and read plays. Indeed, why should they, when they find nothing in them except a bald dialogue, with a few carpenter's and costumier's directions as to the heroine's father having a grey beard, and the drawing-room having three doors on the right, two doors and an entrance through the conservatory on the left, and a French window in the middle? It is astonishing to me that Ibsen, who devotes two years to the production of a three act play, the extraordinary quality of which depends on a mastery of character and situation which can only be achieved by working out a good deal of the family and personal history of the individuals represented, should nevertheless give the reading public very little more than the technical memorandum required by the carpenter, the gasman, and the prompter. Who will deny that the result is a needless obscurity as to points which are easily explicable? Ibsen, interrogated as to his meaning, replies, “What I have said, I have said.” Precisely; but the point is that what he hasn't said, he hasn't said. There are perhaps people (though I doubt it, not being one of them myself) to whom Ibsen's plays, as they stand, speak sufficiently for themselves. There are certainly others who could not understand them at any terms. Granting that on both these classes further explanations would be thrown away, is nothing to be done for the vast majority to whom a word of explanation makes all the difference?