BOOKS OF THE DAY
Poet, Prophet and Playwright
"Do not we English hear daily for the last twenty years that the Drama is dead ? " The question was Carlyle's. Today Peter Ustinov finds "the theatre suffering from an ossification of the tear-ducts, a cold in the heart, inflammation of the tongue, and ohronic constipation," while Eric Bentley writes that "the theatre at present fulfils only one precondition of renaissance: it is dead." Capitulati6n to the conservative taste of the public, which allows the theatre to be hag-ridden with naturalism ; diversion of creative. artists to the cinema's cause ; the marketing of theatres "as if they were tipsters' pitches at a race-course," are all alleged to have contributed to the theatre's imminent demise Authors are criticised for being hacks of commodity rather than tebels for art—and yet, like other men, they cannot ignore bread-and-butter considerations.
Mr. Coward, Mr. O'Casey and Mr. Priestley have been in the last twenty years skilled morticians handling the theatrical corpse. Mr. Coward must have done well out of the job, is notably less prolific than the others, and appears to spend much of his time in South Sea islands. Mr. Priestley farms in another island nearer home, from which he emerges to make impassioned political appeals to the middle-class, whose income range, it would appear, is now raised to include the Attorney-General's £10,000 a year. Mr. O'Casey has judged the commercial market less fortunately. His plays are presented in Sweden before London sees them, and, when London gets the opportunity, it gives them short shrift. And yet, of this trio of sitters-in with the corpse, Mr. O'Casey alone has to his credit at least three plays which are likely to command a more than ephemeral life, and which have claims to be literature as well as drama—Juno and the Puyeock, The Plough and the Stars and The Silver Tassie. The strength of Mr. O'Casey is the strength of the Elizabethans. In an age nurtured on the slick telegraphese of the cinema and of Mr. Coward's dialogue, he gives memorable language. Whether it is Juno's last great speech with its rhythmical repetition, or the prodigal loveliness which he lavishes on minor characters, who leap to life as a result, it is the language, which stabs straight to the sensitive hearts of those who still have ears with which to hear. There is a huge concentration of richness here. Mrs. Foran has no great part in The Silver Tassie, but one speech makes her unforgettable: "I forgot the blasted steak an' onions fryin' on the fire! God Almighty, there's not as much as a bead of juice left in either of them. Even the gospel gunner couldn't do a little target practice by helpin' the necessity of a neighbour. I can hear the love for your neighbours almost fizzIin' in your hearts."
Only O'Casey in our times can rise to the big tragic scene. Nora's madness raging against Bessie's singing of "Lead, Kindly Light," lives in the memory. He blends realism and expressionism, is endlessly fertile of idea, and always seems to have more material than can be squeezed into the pint-pot of a play. Yet his plays are carefully constructed and not jerry-built. In Coward smart epigram hopes to conceal vacuity of feeling ; in O'Casey poetry points the passion of the vision which is the play's initial inspiration. He is the master of "that swift sympathy which quicks the world." • Where his contemporaries appear as minnows playing in a placid stream, he seems a whale moving with easy confidence in the deepest waters.
Mr. Priestley has lately been sensitive about critics who have used "quotations from old articles or humorous essays wildly torn from their context." Yet words which he himself wrote about Charles Kingsley seem so appropriate to Volume II of his plays that, despite his animadversion, one dares to quote. "So many of these novels with a purpose, dictated as they were by the noblest feelings, seem poor faded stuff now. They were frequently written with an eye to an immediate effect, and the warm partisan, hoping to enlist opinion on his side, is rarely in a fit state to create a work of art." Whatever the case of Kingsley, this would certainly seem to be true of Mr. Priestley. Polonius would have to lengthen his list to include all the types of drama essayed here—" an immortal comedy," "a farcical tragedy," "a farcical comedy," "a comedy of broadcasting," "a topical comedy," "a discursive entertainment." Their author is versatile, copious, inventive and never guilty of writing a slack line. Her can bring character to life and can on occasion command that magic which is the essence of theatre. But his plays, though often concerned with man's social shapeliness, never seem the product of profound thought and feeling. The impression is rather that of magnificent journalism expressed in terms of the stage.
Mr. Coward has fewer pretensions and has achieved more success. This volume contains some of his brilliant work in revue form, and its publication wOuld be justified if only for recalling the happiness of This Year of Grace and Words and Music. Act II of Fallen Angels, unnecessarily guyed in the current production, raises a laugh in reading as it did when it was originally played by Miss Bankhead and Miss Best. Jane Cowl's delivery of one of the best curtain lines of our time, "I've always hated that damned thing," as she smashed the Venus de Milo with a volume of Proust, was unforgettable, but Easy Virtue had been forgotten as the well- constructed play it is.
The pessimists about the theatre may be right. But Carlyle's gloomy prognostications came to nothing, and Tom Robertson's Caste was soon to perform artificial respiration on the ailing body. The corpse in Synge's Shadow of the Glen gave a sneeze which embarrassed those who hoped to profit from the death. The dramatic corpse may well do likewise. JOHN GARRETT.
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