CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Hicks--Hicks--and Nothing but Hicks

It is a matter of very small importance either to Seymour Hicks or to anybody else that I regard him as capable of the finest acting on our stage. It merely gives a keynote to what is written below, if you should be kind enough to read it.

I never really knew Seymour until we went to Australia on the same ship, and if you want to know anybody well, go through that very disagreeable experience, and nothing will be hidden from you. I had of course met him in London, we had eaten together, drunk together, and had feverish conversations in his dressing-room when he had arrived late for his Act and was endeavouring to put on grease paint at the rate of greased lightning.

But all that goes for nothing. Wait till you have eaten stale fish and bottled cream at the same table for six weeks, till you have been bitten by mosquitoes at Colombo and rolled together in the Australian Bight, till you have been bored silly by the ship’s wits and driven almost crazy by the ship’s sopranos--wait till you have done all those things, and somehow managed to come through them smiling, and then you can certainly call a man a friend.

Admiration is never a bad basis on which to start a friendship, and I passionately admired the artistry of Seymour Hicks. Only recently I had seen his performance in _The Love Habit_, and my eyes were still dazzled by his performance. The accomplishment of the man! The tricks! The diabolical cleverness! Watch him _listen_, for example. There is no more difficult or less understood art on the stage than this one of listening, and when you have seen Seymour listening, you have seen the whole thing, inside out, upside down, backwards. The head slightly forward, the eyes fixed on the speaker, the whole body set in a poise which seems to suggest a question mark that gradually straightens itself out as the question is resolved, to end as a mark of exclamation. And the face! As each sentence is uttered, he seems to hear it for the first time. A tiny flicker at the mouth, a faint narrowing of the eyes, an almost imperceptible wrinkling of the forehead ... if I were an actor I should go and hide my head in shame after such an example of virtuosity.

And yet, with the exception of _The Man in Dress Clothes_, things seem to have gone wrong with him lately, while mediocre artists have made messes of plays which he might have transfigured with his genius.

One of the first things he ever told me was the truth about _The Man in Dress Clothes_--the play which was changed, in one night, from a failure to a success owing to the intervention of Northcliffe.

‘Funny thing, isn’t it, what the Press can do for a man?’ he said to me one day. We were gliding silently one evening down the long, straight reaches of the Suez Canal, and the atmosphere of desert and clean-washed sky seemed to lend itself to conversation. ‘Take _The Man in Dress Clothes_, for example. It had been running for three weeks when Northcliffe saw it, and up till then it had been an absolute failure.’

‘Why did Northcliffe come at all?’ I asked.

‘Max Pemberton. He told him about it, and Northcliffe wrote me a letter saying, “Dear Mr. Hicks, I don’t usually like plays, but I will come to yours.” He came to a matinée. After the first Act he sent a special messenger down to Carmelite House to order some of his staff up to the theatre at once, and when I went to see him after the second Act he said to me:

‘“These gentlemen have just been instructed to boom your play, Mr. Hicks. It’s the best play I’ve ever seen. There will be a photograph of it in every edition of the _Daily Mail_ for the next month, and a paragraph in the _Evening News_ telling London that London has got to come and see it.”

‘And, by Jove, they did come to see it. On the next day, in the _Evening News_ appeared an article about my play headed “The best play in London,” and the same night the receipts were multiplied five times over. It became almost embarrassing. I used to get almost afraid of opening the Northcliffe papers to see what they had written next. All the same, it kept that play running for a year, and I am eternally grateful to Northcliffe for that.’

One of the most interesting conversations I ever had with him was, of all places, at the Sydney Zoo. Not that the Sydney Zoo is like ordinary zoos. It is very superior, in fact almost beautiful. It lies above the eternal blue of Sydney harbour, looking over the waves to where the white houses and red roofs glitter in the sunshine. There are wattle trees to give you a touch of yellow (how I wish Australians would call wattle by its proper name--mimosa) and there are flame trees to give you a touch of scarlet. And the animals in this particular zoo do not seem to be in the zoo at all, for there are not cages, but pits. So that there is a fine thrill waiting for anybody who does not know this, for all the animals look as though they are about to leap out to devour.

The zoo had nothing to do with our conversation, but I cannot dissociate it from its surroundings. Seymour was standing in front of a paddock containing a number of kangaroos, which leapt about, disdainfully regarding the stale monkey-nuts which were thrown to them by sticky children. The kangaroo does not eat stale monkey-nuts. I have no idea what he does eat, but he does not eat that.

He gazed absently at the kangaroo for a moment, threw it a peppermint drop, and said:

‘Of course the only critic who’s going to be of any use to the English Theatre to-day is the man who talks about the _acting_.’

‘You mean the acting before the play?’ I said. ‘I love talking to you, because you agree with everything I say. You may say that the star system is overdone, but no star, if he _was_ a star, has ever done anything but good to the theatre. He ennobles everything he touches.’

Seymour nodded. ‘Look at Edmund Kean. Columns and columns of Press cuttings I’ve got about him. They really criticized in those days. They watched every movement, every gesture, they listened to every intonation of the voice. They put him through a third degree of criticism.’

‘And he came out triumphant?’

‘Not always. Pretty often. Anyway, what I mean is, they concentrated on the _acting_, and they set tremendously high standards. Look at half the critics to-day. They don’t care a damn. They spend half their time in an analysis of the play itself, which interests nobody, and then they say that somebody or other was “brilliant.” It’s wrong. A critic ought to have two ink-pots, vitriol and gold. And he ought to be jolly sparing with the gold one.’

‘The very first thing that struck me about the theatre,’ I said (I wanted, you see, to encourage him to talk), ‘when I began criticism, was that we were too afraid of being theatrical. Now, I like a theatre to look like a theatre, to smell like a theatre, to feel like a theatre. I don’t like a theatre that looks like a church or a town hall. I like....’

This conversation is beginning to sound like a dialogue in the deceased _Pall Mall Gazette_, but I really don’t mind. Seymour agreed with me, and said:

‘I’d far rather see somebody come on and say, “Gadsooks. My mistress has forsaken me,” and say it as though he meant it, than see a young man in a beautiful dinner-jacket light a cigarette, and mumble, “Oh really, Flora seems to have gone off with Rupert,” as though he were saying, “It’s a rather cold morning, isn’t it?” The last thing an actor should fear is to be thought theatrical. When a really good actor of the old school came on he struck an attitude. He bounced. He filled the stage. You said, “By God, here’s an actor,” and you jolly well watched what he did. Irving for example.

‘Irving realized the enormous importance of a first entrance. Look at his King Lear. Heralds approach. A train of soldiers. More heralds. The suspense increasing every moment. You can almost feel him coming. You lean forward in your seat, awake, expectant. And then--enter Irving, slowly, with a falcon on his wrist. Now that’s _acting_. That isn’t any nonsense about being life-like or trying to look as though you weren’t an actor. As soon as a man does that, he _doesn’t_ look like an actor, because he isn’t one, and never will be, and his place is in the thirtieth row of a cinema, watching glycerine run down Mary Pickford’s cheeks.’

There is more sound sense--I _could_ call it profound wisdom, but I won’t--in those remarks than in half the nonsense that is written to-day about ‘realistic’ plays and ‘realistic’ acting. You might as well talk about ‘realistic’ music and praise a composer who sits down at the piano and tries to imitate a waterfall.

One night I was dining with Ellaline Terris and him, and it suddenly occurred to me to tell them the plot of a rather gruesome short story which had come into my head a few days before. When I had finished Seymour said, ‘My word, what a play!’ In fact, everybody said, ‘My word, what a play!’ And there and then we hunched ourselves round the table and began to talk it out.

Of course, we never did talk it out. That is why it is so charming a memory. But Seymour can teach one more about play-making in a few hours than most of the books (or, indeed, the plays) in the world. And people seem to be interested in play-making. They like to know ‘how it is done.’ So here goes.

The first thing that he talked about was the absolute necessity of deciding exactly who the characters _were_. It sounds obvious enough, but if you have ever thought of writing a play you will probably remember that you thought of a woman in a certain situation, and beyond the fact that you knew she was good, bad, or merely improper, you did not know the first thing about her.

But, before we decided on a single line, we had to make those people real people. We had to know not only what their lives were, but what they had been, and why. In other words, we had to delve deep back into the past (long before the period of my short story), into the drama of the past, in order that we might approach the drama of the present with minds forewarned.

And then, when we had decided who the people were, we had to decide exactly what the story was. All this sounds fantastically obvious, but I assure you, it is not so obvious as it sounds. Take again your own case, if you are an amateur playwright, as I feel convinced you are, you have probably thought of it all in _Acts_. You have said the first Act will be set in an attic, and will end with the arrest of Joseph on a charge of some vice--(naming your own favourite one). The second Act will be in a ballroom, in which Joseph’s fiancée will spurn the Duke. And the third Act will be in a court of justice, where Joseph is declared innocent. It is all wrong. You mustn’t do that. You mustn’t even think of the theatre at all. You must think of life, of what is happening to these people in the open air, in bed, when they are asleep, when they are in their baths. Think of them as real human beings. And then, when you have decided what they are doing, what they have done, and what they are going to do, then go at it for all you’re worth, and be as theatrical as a Christmas fairy, and good luck to you.

And the other thing I learnt during those hours after midnight in which we sat conspiring together, was that not a line must be written before the construction is absolutely water-tight. You have to build a play--a good play--like a jigsaw puzzle. Every little bit must fit. There must be so much this, and so much that. There must be a place for everything, and everything in its place. If you dribble into dialogue too soon, you are done. God help you, for you will be like a ship without a rudder, and you will lose your way in a sea of talk, blown by the winds of every passing mood.

It sounds prosaic. There is nothing of the thrill, which comes to those who dash to their tables at midnight, and write out passionate speeches in which perfect ladies declare their innocence and imperfect women their guilt. But, after all, the greatest fun, I should think, is seeing your play _played_. And the impromptu, passionate sort of play doesn’t usually get beyond the paper on which it is scrawled.