5 SEPTEMBER 1931, Page 18

The Theatre of the People

" THE theatre was for the people and always for the people." So Mr. Gordon Craig, in one of those inaccurate aphorisms of his, meant to quicken our ideas by irritating our tempers.

He is an expert at this Socratic, gadfly dodge of stinging us out of accepted notions—whatever " we " may be : dramatic critics, perhaps, who see the drama as pure literature ; scenic artists, producers, who see it as scenery ; managers who try— how often in vain !—to make it a profitable speculation ; rationalists and writers of " sermons in jam " who, like Mr. Shaw, want to preach through it ; actors who, like most of the great ones of the eighteenth century, want to dominate it by a rhetorical convention ; realists who (as in the majority of London playhouses to-day) regard it as a matter of mere imitation, destined to reproduce average life. All, all are wrong !—as we gather from Miss Rose's sympathetic and occasionally obscure interpretation : none sees the Theatre of Visions, that Mr. Craig, a theatrical Zarathustra, has long seen and announced as near, nearer still—but never quite visible " on any stage."

Has Zarathustra, all this time, been under a delusion ?

We will not believe it. But a very long time it has been. For it was in 1903 that the son of Ellen Terry—S.O.E.T. for short—displayed his inventions at the vanished Imperial Theatre under the financially ill-fated management of the mother of Gordon Craig. And that is what elderly playgoers best remember of the new art, or the ancient art restored.

The interval has been spent largely in abortive offers to Mr. Craig to go there, and to come here, in order to exercise a free hand, which is, it seems, never quite free enough for one who will not work by halves. We must not call this.learned, yet whimsical, spirit a designer ; or a producer ; or an artist in any narrow sense. To call him a super-electrician would sound rude, though it might mean a good deal. We prefer to call him a poet—a " maker," an architect of dreams. This, we hope, will not offend him. Poets are often intransigent. They will not accept half a loaf. Shakespeare did. Shakes- peare compromised. But Mr. Craig will not compromise over Shakespeare.

Hence all the still visionary Macbeths, Hamlets and Tempests we prosaic moderns in England might have seen. Moscow has seen one, Copenhagen something ; Eleonora Duse once acted in a Craig vision of what Rosmersholm ought to look like, if only the world of cosmopolitan tours had understood that Ibsen was no provincial rationalist, but a poet sounding a note on the horn of death across vast rooms in a house of shadows. Certain creeping carpenters shaved or modified that scene to make it fit. A symbol ! Mr. Craig's ideas are always being " cut " ; utilized, borrowed in part. He is an influence, a floating voice. He is in danger of becoming a myth.

Strange, then, that one so contemptuous of current ideas, so aristocratic in his attempts to impose reforms upon the theatre, should talk of the theatre being " for the people." The phrase is ambiguous.

For what people ? For those who gathered under the walls of Athens or Syracuse to watch the Oresteia ? Not anyhow, for the select audiences who favoured Court masques or the Restoration drama. There was always a theatre not for the people. But if you want to read about the real historical " people's theatre " you cannot do better than proceed from Miss Rose's account of Mr. Craig's art to the never-resting Professor Allardyce Nicoll's amazingly well-documented study or encyclopaedia of the whole story of the spoken, the extemporal, or " mimic " drama through the ages.

From the Dorians, five hundred years before Christianity, past Rome, Sicily, Greater Greece, to the so-called secular drama of the Middle. Ages, doubtfully distinguishable, I think, from its rough religious farces, down to the Renaissance Comedy of Masks, indefatigably, with the aid of manuscripts, woodcuts, prints and pictures, travels the learned Professor, unbiassed, fairly assimilating and grouping thousands of facts ; yet, as the learned will, trying at moments to trace hazardous relationships and ancestries for Pantaloon and Harlequin, for Pierrot and Pulcinella.

Did these little masks or undergods of the ancient world take service in new guises with the Madonnas and Angels, or imps of a Christian age, as, in Heine's charming fancy, the upper gods did ? And did they live on, degraded a little, with diminished powers, as Searamouche and Columbine ? Very likely, for in art it is difficult to prove new beginnings ; and in this popular drama the laws of imitation, expounded by Tarde, are universal. The enquiry has for scholars—even for the amateur—an intense fascination. Was Harlequin the remote descendant of Hercules ? Perhaps. Yet it does not matter—to the people.

What is even more curious, and pathetic in its way, is the thought that, across the many centuries traversed in this fine volume, while grave doctors condemned, while theologians denounced, and also while the highbrows of each age despised or ignored it, ran this theatre of mimes and masks with which obviously Mr. Craig must sympathize. For it certainly was, all the time, a living theatre, getting its spontaneity from a continually fresh improvisation, from the rude spirit breathed into it by successive generations of artists whose words are long lost upon the air. And it is worth while adding that its methods have here and there touched and affected the legitimate stage. That not despicable old dramatist, Mrs. Cowley, says in one of her prefaces : " a comedy to please in the present day must be made, not written." She was thinking of " gags " and of actors' babble. But there is a deeper allusive meaning in her phrase.

It is not enough to write a play ; to deposit words upon paper. The play must be continually made by a collaboration of all the arts. I dare not affirm it, but I think that Mr. Craig and Mrs. Cowley would agree—before quarrelling !

RICHARD JENNINGS.