CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A Defence of Dramatic Critics

A little while ago Mr. Philip Guedalla (that squib who never stops fizzing) annoyed me very much by making rude remarks about dramatic critics. He said that they looked like waiters or conjurers. I should not in the least mind looking like some waiters I have seen, but he was not referring to face or figure. He was being sartorial. And when Guedalla is sartorial, God alone knows what will happen.

He referred to the ‘dingy uniform’ of this ‘Sad Guild.’ It struck me as slightly vulgar and entirely inaccurate. I would match my own exquisite waistcoats (you know the sort--nothing at the back and a broad pique in front) with Mr. Guedalla’s any day. It would be rather an entertaining match. I can imagine our respective laundresses panting for days beforehand, and I can see us strutting round and round, examining each other for the faintest sign of a wrinkle.

But it is not of clothes that I would write, but of dramatic criticism, and the only excuse I have for holding up an imaginary Guedalla by the scruff of his neck is because of that phrase ‘Sad Guild.’ It is a childish, facile, meaningless phrase. It calls up the stale conventional vision of rows of gloomy faces, ‘like Micawbers waiting for something to turn down.’ It is the sort of phrase that an unsuccessful playwright might use, to excuse his failure. As if critics, by some Satanic grace, were gifted with power to fool _all_ the public, in _all_ the theatres, _all_ the time.

I am a dramatic critic. I know of no sad guild. I have yet to wear a dingy uniform. Every time that I go to a theatre it is with a heart beating high in hope. Every time that I open a programme and read that ‘the curtain will be lowered for thirty seconds in Act II to denote the passing of a hundred years,’ I tremble with the satisfaction that only make-belief can give. Every time I read that Mr. Clarkson has sold a few more wigs, my being trembles with delight. To be a dramatic critic does not imply that one must be old and shrivelled and pessimistic.

I was absurdly young when I began. And I didn’t care a damn. If love of the theatre was any qualification for criticism, then I was qualified with the highest degrees. My first toy was a toy theatre. In the misty days of the late King Edward VII I have laid for whole seasons on my small stomach putting pink heroines and black villains in their proper places. I have burnt candles for footlights as ardently as any human saint burnt candles for sacrifice. I have drawn thunder from a tin can and lightning from a piece of tinsel. And at school, when I should have been engaged on more orthodox matters, I have routed out ancient books on the theatre--as Æschylus knew it in Greece, as Goldoni knew it in Italy, and, in dreams, have fought my youthful battles on those vanished stages, made mock love with adolescent passion, closed my eyes, and been, in rapid succession, hero, heroine, cynic, clown, every emotion tearing my young heart to tatters.

If you please, therefore, Mr. Guedalla, protrude your pink tongue, apply your blue pencil to it, and erase that phrase about the sad guild in its dingy uniform. It is unworthy of you, for you can fizz very prettily, at times.

I forget the name of the first play which I was ever called upon to criticize, except that it was a worthless ‘comedy’ in the West End by somebody who was evidently not fit to produce even a one-act sketch. But with what infinite conscientiousness I attacked my task! I went armed with pencils, one of which I produced from time to time in order to scribble furtively on the back of the programme, trying not to be seen and yet half hoping that somebody would see me, and realize that I really was a dramatic critic. However, it was exceedingly difficult to work under such conditions. One had rather to bend down and crumple one’s waistcoat (which would bring one perilously near the condition of ‘sad uniform’), or else content oneself with a few desultory scrawls which were usually illegible at the end of the performance.

From such scraps, at first, was the criticism written, late at night, while the echo of the drama still seemed to hover in the air. But after a time I learnt that far the best criticisms were written entirely from memory, at least a day after the play. Sometimes, if there was a première on the night in which we were going to press, it would be necessary to dash into the office and write half a column in twenty minutes, surrounded by the buzz and clash of great machines printing late editions. But criticizing in those circumstances was dangerous--very dangerous. So elating, so intoxicating is the atmosphere of the theatre, that a good actress seems transfigured, for the moment, into a great genius. Not until the morning comes do we realize only too often that she is just--good.

For every capable play I saw--not great, but well-constructed and interesting--I must have seen, at a very charitable estimate, twenty bad ones. A mysterious thing the theatre. Entirely incalculable, one would imagine, for the average run of men. I have asked myself time and again, during the last year or so, by what dark process certain plays have ever been born at all. I have sat back in my stall, in wide-eyed innocence, listening to the sort of dialogue that, one imagines, takes place during the meat-teas of our lesser lunatic asylums, endeavouring to be interested in situations that contain nothing new, nothing dramatic, nothing vital in any way whatever. And I say why? Why?

I ask myself the same question during the _entr’acte_ in the bar, with its warm humanity, its grotesque barmaids, its sparkling taps and glasses. Here, where life is throbbing and intense, where the presumably evil passions of those who have not drunk are offset by the soft desires of those who have, the drama which one has just been observing seems infinitely petty--the _dramatis personæ_ as ghosts blown willy-nilly across a desolate stage by the winds of nonsense. Again I wonder why?

Before I endeavour to answer that question let me say that when I see a real play I do not go to the bar. I either remain attached to my seat in a state of trance, or else I go out by myself into the street, collide violently with the stomachs of large fat men, get splashed by motor-buses, and creep back, like a worshipper, just as the lights are being turned down.

We have still not answered the question, Why do such bad plays get produced at all? The chief reason, I believe, is that one of the most important people in the theatre is still paid rather less than the ladies who sweep the carpets. That person is the play-reader. Mr. Edward Knoblock was a play-reader before he wrote _Kismet_, and told me that he used to read something like three thousand plays a year, working all day and a good deal of the night, for some fantastically small sum, like two pounds a week. Yet, on his decision (and very often on his extra work in re-writing them), depended the expenditure of thousands of pounds, and the making or losing of a small fortune.

We have recently had a very illuminating illustration of the mentality of the play-reader. A woman who for twenty years has been reading plays for London managers (who, presumably, have been guided by her advice), suddenly wrote a play herself, in collaboration with a man whose name I forget.

The play was duly produced, and it ran, by a miracle, for a week. It was a farce, in both senses of the word. No adjective in any language can describe its dreariness. (I believe there is a word in Russian, which deals with a particular mental disease known only among grave-diggers, but I have forgotten it.) If a nonconformist father and a Baptist mother had produced a daughter of the lowest intelligence, who had sedulously been kept from entering the theatre until she was thirty, at which date she had been to a pierrot performance on a small sea-side pier on a rainy day at the end of the season, and had then returned with a splitting headache to record her impressions, that was the sort of play she would write. Ten sentences of it, in typescript, would have given the average reader a feeling of desolate despair that the human brain could conceive such banalities.

And yet, the author, for twenty years, has been (and to the best of my knowledge, still is) a form of despot before whom all aspiring young playwrights must make obeisance. She is the gate through which they must pass, the play-doctor who must pronounce them sound. It is all wrong. She may be a good mother, a brave woman, with a positive passion for dumb animals. But she never has, never will, and never can, be qualified to judge of any matter even remotely connected with the theatre.

With one notable exception--I need not name him--we know practically nothing about ‘scene’ in the sense that Mr. Gordon Craig uses the word. We use a lighting system as casually as we switch on a light in our own bathrooms. We stick chairs higgledy-piggledy all over the room, not realizing that in a play a chair is a perpetual _note_, a monotone perhaps, but still playing its part in the general harmony or discord. We have had one or two attempts at significant scenery in England lately, but the scenery was so significant that it entirely dwarfed the actors, who themselves were none too strong that they should be robbed of even a little of their personality. One had a sense of infinite sideboards, one was caught in the rapture that belongs to a really seductive sofa. And the play went to pot.

It has needed an American to show us what scenery can be. Need I say that I refer to Mr. Robert Jones’s designs for John Barrymore’s production of _Hamlet_? It is the most superb scenery I have seen in any part of the world--the soaring arch, lost in gloom, brooding, sometimes outlined in a sudden fretted splendour, tremendously aloof, like the gesture of some genius who alone fully comprehended the recessed mysteries of Hamlet’s soul. If I know the smallest thing about the theatre, that was great scenery--as great, in its way, as the play itself.

Writing of Robert Jones--who, as one of the most important men in the modern theatre, ought to be as well known in this country as Bernard Shaw is in America--makes me want to ‘have you meet him,’ because hardly anybody over here seems even to have heard of him at all. He is exquisitely erratic. I have spoken of the marvellous arch which he made for _Hamlet_, but I did not betray the secret of its inspiration. That came from Mont St. Michel. And this was Robert Jones’s method of getting to Mont St. Michel.

He was going to Paris with an old friend. By some strange freak they entered a train which was continually stopping at stations. After an hour or so it stopped at a tiny station, surrounded by fields of blue flowers, with hills beckoning in the distance.

‘Let’s get out,’ said Robert.

‘Let’s,’ replied the friend, who, with geniuses, always acquiesced.

They got out, seized their luggage. Outside was an old Ford car. The luggage was placed upon it.

Robert took out a map. ‘It is only a few hundred miles from here,’ he said, ‘to the sea. If we go straight across country we shall reach Mont St. Michel.’ He made a rapid calculation. ‘We should arrive at dawn. The towers will be rising out of the mist.’ (To the coachman)--‘Drive to Mont St. Michel.’

And by that fiery spirit was created the scene which, to me, is the only setting worthy of _Hamlet_.

It would be interesting to know the extent to which the censor has contributed to the present state of affairs. I think he is more objectionable as a distasteful symbol than as a functioning official. The obvious and natural idea that censorship in any form whatever is more immoral than the most indecent work that can come from a human brain has not yet penetrated our still medieval intelligences, but it is gradually becoming evident.

Professor A. M. Low, that brilliant young inventor, once said to me that in a few hundred years an umbrella will seem as monstrously absurd to our descendants as witch-burning seems to-day. The idea of censorship will, I believe, share the fate of the umbrella. If a dramatist wishes to express an idea by filling his stage with naked and debased creatures, it seems to me amazing that anybody should have the impudence to stop him. You are not forced into a theatre, any more than you are forced to observe the antics of dogs in the streets. You can stay away. You can....

But there. This is not 2125. It is 1925. One must wait--like the witches.