THE STAGE SOCIETY.
IN Herr Ernst Toiler's Man and the Masses the Stage Society at the beginning of the week gave an impressive performance of a very impressive play. It is interesting, in connexion with what I have said above, to compare Herr Toiler's method of treating a Sociological theme with that of Mr. Galsworthy. Mr. Galsworthy's treatment (in such a play, for instance, as The Skin Game) is purely realistic, but though he presents to us characters intended to be human beings, he reduces them, under the iron hand of his thesis, into hard types.
Herr Toiler's method is the reverse. His treatment is symbolical and his characters, which are confessedly types, are charged with an emotional intensity which raises the theme to the plane of poetry—of universality. His types, in fact, are more than, not less than, human. And lie shows us not actual occurrences but the distillation from the actual 1 which is the essence of poetry. The conflicts of ideals and ' opinions are abstracted into choruses which speak in unison-- choruses of soldiers, workmen and workwonaen, farm hands, convicts, bankers. In three of the pictures (for the play is presented in seven pictures) the symbolization is effected by presenting the dramatic moment as a dream : one of them, for example, is a dream of the Stock Exchange in which the members act as automata, while in the foreground below them (as in some of the other pictures) lie the masses, a chorus of weary, sprawling forms, figuring humanity in subjection to inhuman system.
The play is harsh, brutal, terrible, but undeniably fine, for the emotion is real, profound and intensely human. It shows convincingly the immense possibilities of the so-called expressionist drama.
The production was certainly one of the Stage Society's triumphs. Miss Sybil 'Ihorndike and Mr. George Hayes gave remarkably fine renderings of The Woman and The Nameless One (the mouthpiece of the Masses), and Mr. Milton Homier was good as The Husband. Quite exceptionally good, too, were the scenery and dresses, the dances and -the lighting effects : each expressed and reinforced the symbolic and poetic atmosphere of the play.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG.
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