Programmes
BY MOTH.
LOMB people, whm they go to the theatre, keep the 1,-7 programme. They have always kept the pro- gramme. Somewhere at home they have got a drawer full of programmes, yellowing. I have never been able to understand the mentality of these people.
I admit that the possession of any document which may be said to be yellowing is a matter for satisfaction. Why this is so I do not know. But when you come across an old letter: or a newspaper cutting, or (that most incrimina- ting of relics) a prize essay on " My Favourite Author," written at the age of twelve, and when you find that what was once a spotless white is now a rather sickly yellow, you cannot deny that you feel, however faintly, a pleasur- able thrill. It can hardly be pride. It certainly ought not to be surprise. I suppose it is really is kind of shadowy delight at finding oneself equipped with one of the stock stage-properties of sentiment ; one is vaguely gratified because something in one's possession has under- gone a natural process which confers on it, by association, a certain dramatic value.
But the feeling is too slight, too ephemeral, and too an, formseen to provide a motive for keeping useless papers in a draWer. You do not lay down prize essays as you lay down port. There is not the same solicitude ; you do not look so far ahead. And even if you did have some specific object in view, the preliminary stages, however chromatic, of decay are not a worthy or sufficient goal. There should be some nobler, or at least some more practical purpose in your mind.
Sometimes there is. There are certain types of docu- ment the hoarding of which may be condoned, if not applauded. An incomplete match-card may recall a great emotional experience, giving, as it were a statistical snapshot of that crisis in the second innings. A race-card might conceivably be useful for purposes of reference and research. A Hunt Ball programme, with the names of your partners pencilled on it, is likely to have untold senti- mental value : and is still more likely to be indispensable as an index eapurgatorius if you are ever in that part of the country again. The pamphlet, given you in 1928 by a gimlet-eyed lady in Oxford Street and announcing the End of the World for August of that year, is, though clearly unreliable as well as obsolete, at least a curiosity.
But there is no valid reason for keeping your theatre programme. You may offer excuses which sound specious enough ; but they will not do. You may, for instance, allege that, like most of the things I have mentioned above, your programmes will 'one day come in handy for purposes of reference. This is not a tenable hypothesis, unless you have written down somebody's telephone num- ber on the back of one of them. The memorable per- formances to which their pages are an index you will remember anyhow : who gave them, and in which parts. Those that were not memorable the programme will not help you to reconstruct. Suppose, for example, that Miss DesirSe Huxtable, whom you vaguely remember to have sustained a minor role in that much-discussed comedy The Wren Goes To It, enjoys in later years a meteoric rise to fame. Wishing to crystallize your im- perfect memories of this actress (in order to be able to say without any shame at all that you had always prophesied a great future for her), you turn up your programme of The Wren Goes To It. The programme tells you that Desinie Huxtablc played "Mrs. Scott." That, and nothing more. Alas for the modem fashion in play-bills ! One hundred, two hundred years ago, it would have been " Mrs. Scott (friend to Lucy)," or " Mrs. Scott (a creature of the Duke's)," or even more categorically " Mrs. Scott (a comical old fishwife, conceiving herself to be in love with Charles)." To-day you find none of these aids to memory. The name " Mrs. Scott " suggests nothing. She may have been the hero's mistress or his Member of Parliament : she may have been a governess or a go- between : she may (it was a modern comedy) have been all four. The programme does not help you.
It is not in its nature to help you. The programme is an agent of anticipation rather than a repository of data. Like, as often as not, the title of the play, it is designed to whet your expectations. Its manner is enigmatic, non-committal, and tantalizing. Its function, ostensibly to giVe useful information, is in reality to provide a tempting basis for conjecture. When we note, for instance, that Act I takes place in " Harold
Blowforth's Rooms in Balliol College. Midnight," whereas Act II will transport its to " A Small Coastal Town in Italian Somaliland," we can be reason-
ably sure that in Act I Harold (as undergraduates will) does something which he will be sorry for afterwards; for—slight though our knowledge of Italian Somaliland
is—we feel instinctively that it is unlikely to have been chosen as a setting for any emotion other than Remorse. It is accordingly reassuring to observe that in Act HI we and (God willing) Harold will be back in " The
Drawing Room of Sir Hector Blowforth's House in Loamshire."
The programme is an intellectual aperitif. And, regarded from this point of view, much the most satis- factory part of it is the bit at the end where acknow- ledgement is made to firms or individuals who have supplied the more unusual and complicated of the properties. " The machine gun used in Act II has been supplied by Messrs. Barrage's, Ltd." (" Aha ! " we decide, " a Brush with the Natives ! ") How astutely we make deductions, and how we enjoy doing it ! " Miss Bil- berry's mortar-board . . " ? What was a girl student doing in Balliol at midnight ? (For we know that in Acts II and III, under the fierce sun of Italian Somaliland or the scarcely less torrid Philistinism of Loamshire, a mortar-board would be a dangerous anomaly.) The Grand Piano we place in Act III, and the Theodolite in Act II : for a surveyor in Loamshire would be like a coastguard in Bohemia. (Our companion, poor fool, is expecting to see the Theodolite in Act I. She thinks that Theodolites are a small but very hysterical religious sect ; there was a girl at school with her, she says, whose sister was a Theodolite.) But what of the Stethoscope ? Where does the Xylophone come in ? What coup de thedtre depends for its success on the Bath Salts, so graciously supplied by Milady, Ltd. ? And why are they at such pains to tell us who made Miss Bilberry's going- away dress if not to throw us into a frenzy of speculation as to why, and with whom, the heroine is going to go away from what ?
It is all very cleverly done. Too cleverly, in fact ; for by the time the curtain rises we have each evolved, with the help of the programme, exactly the kind of drama we want to see, and ten to one we find the author's version of his own play markedly inferior, suiting neither our tastes nor our mood. So to keep our programme, and take it home and put it with others in a drawer, is to hoard the symbols of disillusionment. Not only is this a silly thing to do, but there are plenty of better ways of doing it.
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