VERSE IN THE THEATRE
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Mr. John Drinkwater has had an enviable and unique experience in combining theatre-craft and literature from day to day and year to year; if there were many men in Britain able to produce plays with the insight and technical imagination with which he has produced plays of his own our British theatre would be in a more fruitful state than it is ; so that when I began to read his strictures upon a recent recital of some dramatic poems of mine in your issue of November 30th I hoped that his experience might be going to illuminate a path other than his own.
In the main, however, and in spite of some sympathetic criticism of detail, he seems to me to take the line of those thinkers who, in .Whitman's phrase, " blame the tortoise for being slow." He would, in effect, have me and my helpers return to a theatre in which, as he admits, there is no room for us, .and choose that theatre rather than poetry. ; but our whole desire is .to base ourselves upon poetry, and if" we are to -be criticized in terms of the theatre it cannot reasonably be the theatre of actualism with which Mr. Drink- water has compromised and which he represents. For poetry is a stylistic form of speech, and cannot function completely under actualistic conditions.
A performance must expect to be judged by what its audience sees and hears, and not by its intentions ; but if we had known that he meant to assess and estimate our general aims and purposes on one performance we. should have asked him to see the dramatic poems we were presenting in the Theatre Inlime at Boar's Hill for which they were calculated and prepared, rather than in the unfamiliar and larger Metropolitan surroundings to which- we had not had time to adjust ourselves completely.
He might then have seen that some of the things which he condemns in us were not part- of our purpose ; and, also, that those who are attempting to rediscover a lost art must needs be experimental and tentative, and cannot hope to arrive
at their ends in the summary fashion which he apparently
expected.
His suggestion of a red-headed Highlander with a claymore, however, indicates clearly that if we do reach our desires we shall still be outside his sympathy, and that he is in
bondage to an' accidental realism which is not compatible with poetry or any -other type' of formal drama, and that
we definitely mean to disallow.
He is too expert and wise in the theatre's ways not to see that we desire a formal drama which does not exist now or yet ; he shows this by his criticism of our chorus in terms of the Russian ballet, but by this reference he also shows that he has not envisaged our problems. It is true that the Russian ballet is supreme in movement and that our experi- ments in choric movement are still necessarily in an early and incomplete shige ; but he misses the essential point that the ballet expresses itself entirely by movement, and that, if it were to attempt to express itself partly by spoken poetry also, it would probably be more at a loss than we are—and would certainly find that it needed quite a different kind of movement from that to which it has been accustomed, if only beeanse the movement would have to be subsidiary to and dependent upon the verse, instead of paramount as it now is. So that there is no counsel for us in his mention of the ballet (as there is little for us in his insistence on the realistic theatres) and no justness in his comparison. We did not hope that we could perform in one stage the journey m which we have set our hearts ; but we have still envisaged Kir own problems better than he envisages them for us.— Silverdale, Carnforth.
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