MR. GRA-NVILL.E-BARKER ON THE THEATRE.* WE may agree with the
main contention of Mr. Granville- Barker's book or we may disagree with it ; we may be in favour of the establishment of the " Exemplary Theatre," complete with two playhouses, with schools of acting, decor, pro- ducing, dancing and so forth attached to them, or we may doubt whether there would ever be spirit enough to inspire so enormous an artistic institution with life. About two aspects of the present book, however, there can be no sort of doubt. First place, it is very ill-written; and second place, scattered about its pages are some of the most informing obilerdicla about the theatre in all its aspects that have ever been set down in black-and-white. These casual remarks, dropped by the way, make the book one which nobody connected with the theatre can afford to miss. Mr. Granville-Barker is an excellent play- wright- a very good actor, a first-rate--perhaps a matchless— producer, and the reader feels that these comments and analyses are the fruit of years of practical experience. Now, there are two sorts of practical experience. A man may have long experience of bringing into being thoroughly bad plays by means of tho- roughly bad productions. These are the men who have kistuilly written the books, but here is a book written by a man who has produced thoroughly good plays thoroughly well.
What a pity that a book with so much in it that is valuable should be so badly written. It has been said many times that the good novelist or poet is not necessarily a good playwright. It is also pretty clear that the good writer of dialogue eannot necessarily write prose. - Here is a passage apropos of Pinero's farces. The italics are mine :- " They were eminently English. Here he may be said to have taken the Robertson tradition left derelict, and hand- somely renewed and improved upon it. But when he turned to social drama the French influence was waiting to overcome his companies. Perhaps he himself had not wholly escaped it. He was trying new ground, and a touch, now and then, of the hand of Dumas file may have made it feel firmer. And in any case there were, in this respect, many weaker vessels of play- writing than he ; so the general effect upon the interpretation of plays was unmistakable."
There is a good deal in this style in the book, which, for the most part, seems all the time less a piece of prose than a long monologue. But to turn from faults to virtues, here are some examples of the admirable pieces of scattered wisdom " It is simple, if you can draw character in dialogue at all, to draw it in dialogue that is both sustained and consecutive. One differentiates the terms , because so many dramatists in practice do not. For fear of letting a character, slip from their grasp they will fill up every crack of its development, so to speak, with words ; and thus they rob it of life past any actor's recover- ing. For words are but a part, at times the minor part, of the true dialogue."
He who has read manuscripts of young dramatists will know this fault—a fault, by the way, which Mr. Zangwill often commits. Here is something for the poet to ponder:— "Reading and writing, it must be remembered, are, for artistic, purposes, nothing but labour-saving devices, and therefore very subject to abuse once an unconscious use of them has been acquired. Art is concerned with the operation of human spirit upon human spirit, through the medium of an amalgam of sense and brain."
Apropos of staging Greek, Mediaeval and Elizabethan drama, he says :— " The strict Elizabethan should contend that an open-air • The Exemplary Theatre. Br B. Granvrne-Barker. London : Matto and
Windom!. Re. not .
theatre and the Greek language are the only allowable means of interpretation, while the advocates of the modern staging of Shakespeare should be content to soe Euripides subjected to all the tests of realism—as sometimes they are. But it comes to this : what degree of translation will tho plays bear—much is inevitable—and of what degree of translation of mind is the audience capable ? "
The knowledge of the man at the street corner must not be our criterion. As to the physical structure of the theatre, Mr. Granville-Barker has a great deal to say that is interesting. On the whole, he disapproves of the revolving stage and other such devices, which he groups under the name of stage machinery. He approves a plan by which a proscenium arch, with its " picture stage," can be used alternatively with the Elizabethan apron form. As to the auditorium, he disapproves of the seats being ranked in long, straight rows ; this, ho says, gives an excellent view of the stage, but invites no friendly relations in the audience towards each other. Again, he would have every stage so designed that plays could be performed in daylight. It is
curious that the producer of the Midsummer Night's Dream of gilded fairies protests against too much glorification of the
scene-designer's art. I think that here Mr. Granville-Barker is trimming the boat before it has begun to heel over. We may have to protest against the encroachment of Gordon Craigism iu twenty years' time, but for heaven's sake let us
allow that tide to rise to the full and cast up its treasures before we try with moles and breakwaters to keep it back. After all, it is not as if we have only a definite amount of energy in a theatre and only a definite amount of attention power in the audience. To protest that good dicer distracts the onlooker from the acting is nonsense, for if it obtrudes when it should not it has ceased to be good ddcor, and we are all united in our dislike of bad aeon But the fact of the matter is that
roughly, the auditor necessarily has his eyes glued upon the stage during the whole course of the play ; part of the time he is consciously " looking," but all the time he is unconsciously being affected by what is staring him in the face. This fact should be exploited to the full. Whether we wish to produce effects of uncouthness, of beauty, of horror, or of any other subtler states or attitudes of mind we may desire, what the eyes of the auditor rest upon is bound to be a large factor in the complete sum of his attitude—especially his emotional—towards
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