THE THEATRE
PLAY, PLAYER, OR PRODUCER ?
IF you want to understand the problems which exercise the dramatic critic, you have nothing to do but to employ four of your evenings or afternoons these Christmas holidays in going to see one of the better modern revues (say, Charlot's or The Punch Bowl), A Midsummer Nights Dream at Drury Lane, The Philanderer at the Everyman, Hampstead, and the Ballet at the Coliseum. You will see then what are the pitfalls that lie in the path of anybody who tries to write anything more explicit about the theatre than the entry " a good evening " or " a bad evening," which he may confide to his diary. There is, of course, no end to general and particular discussions as to what is finally the be-all and the end-all of the art of the theatre. You go to a revue and hear silly songs and pleasant, commonplace little playlets. You are charmed. Again you may remember Duse as Magda or Sarah Bernhardt as La Dame aux Camelias, and in either case you say to yourself, " The art of the Theatre is the art of Acting, and nothing else matters." Then you go to the Coliseum and see how great dancers and choreographists and decor artistes can drop away from Diaghileff and yet leave his ballet in its pristine effulgence. You will decide then that what the theatre wants is a master brain.
A dozen other plays and entertainments will give you a dozen other judgments as varied. You will remember being charmed by The League of Notions, or perhaps you have read Gordon Craig or MacGowan's Continental Stage Craft, and you say the art of the theatre is a visual art, or you have seen King Lear and Candida indifferently done, and say that the playwright is the deciding factor. But with all these vacilla- tions there are very few people, however many hundreds of plays they had seen, who would not feel safe in praising before- hand, or otherwise taking on trust, a performance where first- rate actors were to perform a fine play. Yet at A Midsummer • Night's Dream at Drury Lane you may see eleven of the best actors and actresses in London, excellently cast, playing in a piece which is, if you like, unequal, but which is undoubtedly a work of astonishing genius and beauty. The effect is deplor- able. Very rarely surely has so much excellent material been thrown away. A French woman once wept as she walked through Covent Garden Market because all these beautiful vegetables were destined to be cooked " a l'eau," and it is with something of the housewives' , dismay when a pudding, for which larder and store-room have been ransacked, is spoilt in the cooking that the playgoer will view the tragic loading of the stage at Drury Lane. The acting parts have been cut to the bare bone ; only a vestige of story or characterization is allowed to appear through a tangle of Mendelssohn's music, fairy ballets, and flying effects. Neither lines nor actors get any chance at all. Mr. Basil Dean, the producer, and Mr. George Harris, who designed the dresses, have failed to provide one imaginative touch in compensation. That, you may say, is their misfortune and not their fault. But we can all help being pretentious, and, failing to evolve any new ideas, they have at the same time been too " highbrow '_ to resort to the -" splash " and grandeur and vital -vulgarity of the real pantomime. Over the whole of this production, the great Anarch, the Goddess of Dullness, has spoken her uncreating word. Nothing, surely, has been done with gusto, but everything because it was what the public was supposed to be going to like. Actors and actresses, Shakespeare, andl perhaps Mr. Dean and Mr. Harris themselves—everything has been sacrificed, a hecatomb to some abstract generalization. about what the public is supposed to want. From Mr. Basil; Dean's weary deference to the supposed frailty of his audience,, one would have turned with gratitude and pleasure to the, sort of work which Sir Herbert Tree used to do, work which we, have all of us abused in our day. Tree believed in the real, rabbits which he loosed upon The Dream. The trails of bran which they followed about the stage were trails of glory, to him. To him their introduction, though it moved us to hilarity, was a genuine step forward in the art of the Theatre,, and thus his Rabbits had a Reason. But what does Mr. Dean. believe ? Heaven knows. I believe in view of this and of; Will Shakespeare and Ilassan, that he is good at casting and; producing modern realistic plays.
Whence we turn with relief to the little stage, the small cast,, and the general unpretentiousness of Mr. Macdermot's pro-, duct ion of Shaw's Philanderer at the Everyman, a play in. which those two excellent players, Claude Rains and Dorothy Massingham, give the freshest, most vigorous and amusing performance imaginable. The Philanderer is not among the best of Shaw's plays, and it has " dated " a good deal—that is, it was better fun when it was written and will be better fun twenty years hence, and yet it is gay and lively with its irony and its wit and its brisk clashes of temperament., Mr. Felix Aylmer's Dr. Paramore is excellent. Miss Massing- ham's Julia is a beautiful and refreshing termagant. I was' hoping to be able to write in a rejoicing mood this week over the unusual fact that fourteen or fifteen of our best actors and actresses had at the moment got jobs. And over Miss. Massingham in a good part again I do rejoice. But for the eleven at Drury Lane ? They are eclipsed in this most sad.
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