THE PHOENIX.
IF the Phoenix can get enough support this year they intend to give their subscribers an exceedingly interesting season. Their series of performances will, I expect, be as much for the playgoer as for the antiquary, for if The Beggar's Opera and Marriage-a-la-Mode are any criterion, our forefathers' " best sellers" prove just as entertaining to us. The first of their plays is to be Otway's famous Venice Preserv'd; this is to be followed by Volpone. It will be very interesting to see how a popular play which is intolerable to read shows on the stage. After the New Year they hope to act The Witch of Edmonton, which they mention in their prospectus as not having been revived since the closing of the theatres in 1642 ; and then Dryden's version of the story of .Antony and Cleopatra, his All for Love, and lastly Bartholomew Fair, a play whose " learned sock " has also never allowed me to read it.
Mr. Montague Summers, the secretary of the Society, says :-
" We feel that it is not too much to claim that by producing these masterpieces we are doing a great service to English literature. The playa of Jenson, Dryden, Congreve were not written for the library shelves, where they have been allowed to remain too long to our national discredit, but they were written for the theatre, and it is there, we contend, they ought to be seen."
In this we think he is abundantly right, for no budding play- wright should fail to see as many of the old masterpieces acted as possible. We leave grown tired of the Scribe technique, and some of us feel that one Ibsen does not make a summer. Our writers are feeling for a more romantic, a more imaginative type of drama. At the moment most of the writers of this type of play (for instance, Mr. Masefield) show a certain weakness in technique, but stowed away in our book-eases we have examples of dozens of different styles in stage presentation which we could employ for the new ideas that we want to express, and for which the technique that we see in our theatres at present is not suitable and our invented technique inadequate. Why should we go without the help of our forefathers in our fmnblings after a drama which will be expressive of the ago ? There is no danger that we shall copy the old masters, for we have an entirely different order of ideas to express ; but to be of any use we must see the old masterpieces acted—we shall learn only their defects from them if we merely read them.
Surely we might club together to produce these plays ? Here is tho Phoenix, willing to undertake all the tiresome work of organization and to charge us, after all, what are extraordinarily low prices for our seats. For five productions for stalls or dress circle only £4 4e. is charged for two seats—it costs more to go to Chu Chin Chow or His Lady Friends—and £2 12s. 6d. for two seats in any other part of the house. But, of course, it is only by a fairly wide co-operation that wo can have the benefit of such extraordinarily low prices. If the Phoenix fads perhaps no one will ever have the courage to try revivals again.
TARN.
Previous page
