Letters to the Editor
VERSE IN _THE THEATRE
[To the Editor of the SmgcraToR.1
had postponed answering Mr. Bottomley's letter, which appeared in your issue of December 7th, in the hope that there might be further expressions of , opinion from correspondents, interested in the matter. I can now con- veniently reply to Mr. Bottomley's observations, and at the same time to those of Mr. Terence Gray contained in your issue of December 28th. In my article I expressed my deep admiration for Mr. Bottomley's gifts as a poet as hand- somely as I could. I also paid tribute to the high intentions of his efforts in the theatre, while questioning their efficacy in some respects. In return he has been good enough to say handsome things about me. So that we may leave it at that, and fight as friends.
In the first place; it is no use telling me that what may have been a poor performance at the Rudolf Steiner Hall was a fine one at Oxford. I am too old a hand at the game not to be able to recognize at a glance what effect a difficult environment may be having upon a company of players. If Mr. Hobbs goes in on a village wicket, he may be got out for a duck by a tenth-rate bowler, but he will handle his bat like a cricketer.
And then, what is this about poetry being a " stylistic form of speech " ? Certainly it is, but then so is the prose of Shaw and Galsworthy and Granville Barker, or, indeed, of any dramatist you choose to name. There is a difference in virtue between the style of one dramatist and another, but the word " actualistic " does not help us to define it. Some plays are beautifully written, others deplorably, but even the worst of them are not " actualistic " in the sense of being an actual representation of the speech' used by people in the haphazard of daily life. Every drama employs a conventionalized speech, but, allowing that there may be a world of difference between the use of it by a great poet and the use of it by a hick playwright, the difference in this respect remains one of degree and not of kind. And when against our great poet we set not a hack playwright but a master of prose, Mr. Bottomley's distinction becomes meaningless. Did Congreve use a stylized speech ?
Mr. Bottomley, in his own words, asserts that he and his collaborators in the theatre desire to base themselves upon poetry. That I believe to be a misguided intention. The only proper foundations for work in the theatre are good drama and good acting. At any time when poetry can successfully collaborate with these we may look for a golden age in the theatre. But when poetry in the theatre tries to usurp their authority it is heading for trouble.
Mr. Bottomley further tells me that I have compromised with this theatre of actualism." I have no defence to offer, as I think none necessary, but a word here, too, must be said. I long ago came to the conclusion, and made no secret of it, that the one place in the world where the artist cannot with any wit or wisdom be doctrinaire is the theatre. If a man is really determined to be a dramatist, he is foolhardy not to follow the example of all the great dramatists in history, in accepting the conditions of the theatre as he finds them and turning them to his purpose. Every great dramatist has also shown that in this there need be no sort of servility. The intelligent dramatist working in the theatre will put fresh life and his own understanding into the tradition that he uses. There are twenty European and American dramatists since Ibsen, who have done this in our modern theatre, to the infinite advantage of twentieth century drama. To charge them with compromise simply won't do.
If a writer, a poet, on approaching the theatre finds there nothing that he likes he can decline to have anything to do with it. But in doing so he denies himself the use of an instrument through which alone he can hope to make any impression as a dramatist. He may properly decide, as many of the greatest poets have done, that to be a dramatist on those terms is not worth his while. But, as I say, if he proposes to become a dramatist in defiance of those terms he will find himself beating his wings in a void.
And everyone experienced in the theatre must know that in all conscience these terms are elastic enough. I do
not know but that even to-day in our modern conditions they, might include poetry or, to speak more plainly, let us say verse, for that is what in this matter it comes to. But the terms do explicity stipulate first of all for competent drama and competent acting. With these alone the result may be second-rate, but without them the result in the theatre must be futility. Granted these conditions, there is hardly any kind of production that in our contemporary theatre is not possible in the ordinary way of business. A great play might for various reasons fail upon the West End stage, but it would not fail because it was a great play, nor has any great play ever been written in a mood of contempt for the theatre of its own generation. , Many, though by no means the majority, have been written in revolt, but they have not been written in sulks. If Mr. Bottomley and his friends would really come to grips with the theatre of their own time, they need have no fear that they would do work which, granted those foundations, proved to be too good for it. Nor would they find that the skill, the fundamental dramatic sense, and the immense discipline which have gone to the making of the Russian Ballet would be found wanting even if it were applied to the drama of Mr. Bottomley's desire.
Mr. Terence Gray, I note, also has his actualistic fancies, and he adds to them others of a two-dimensional, three- dimensional, and illusionistic nature. I do not wish to be discouiteous to a man who has worked" so sincerely for his ideals as Mr. Gray, and especially to one 'who is so kind as to regret my own apostasy, but this sort of thing, and there is a 'great deal' of it in modern writing about the theatre, reads to me as nothing but jargon. ' Mr. Gray's purpose in the theatre is exactly mine, and exactly that of anyother worker who has some conscience in what he does. We have both lived in some familiarity with the standard set by the great Wit of the world, and we both of as know that a drama which Can survive any contact with those standards is a work created by the dramatist for the purpose of expressing his own-vision or passion or observation-,' or all of these. And Surely the purpose of both of us in-the theatre must be to give that purpose the most adequate fulfilment within our power. We may differ as to the best way 'of doing this, but surely not as to our aim. I suspect that in detail I should attach less importance than Mr. Gray to certain aspects' of production, and more to others, but I am, for example, in full sympathy with his views as to the influence of building construction upon dramatic technique. It is a doctrine that I have preached for years, and one which I examined rather carefully in practice during the time when I was a daily worker in the theatre. But what kind of right has Mr. Gray, in his preoccupation with certain legitimate interests, to say that what he calls the neo-Georgian theatre, comprising, I take it, the dramatists from Mr. Shaw to Mr. Sherriff, is " decadent," is not art but just entertainment, and that it belongs to " the massed forces of trade, tradition and officialdom " that stand inertly in the way of progress ?
Finally, Mr. Gray wants " a stage three parts surrounded by spectators and having no apparatus of illusionism," while I still believe, he says, " in the theatre of unobtainable illusion." Why unobtainable ? I have been a constant theatre-goer for nearly thirty years, and unless Mr. Gray has some meaning for the word which is not revealed to me, illusion has happily been my common eicperience.—I am,
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