Ibsen Also Ran
It is as a student of English folkways rather than as a patron of the drama that I salute the much-publicised production of The Frog al the Scala Theatre, in aid of charity. Aesthetically, no doubt, it was inferior to those performances of Gammer Gurton's Needle in the open air, or of Pirandello in the Corn Exchange, to which properly constituted amateur dramatic societies so tirelessly devote themselves. It belongs to an earlier tradition of amateur theatricals, a tradition whose adherents have never heard of Stanislaysky or the commedia dell'arte and to whom Gammer Gurton's Needle sounds vaguely ' like an outsider in the Oaks. All the ingredients were right— a long, rather bad play, whose thirteen changes of scene were bound • to defeat the stage-management, however augustly reinforced : a cast of fifty. a fair proportion of them wholly devoid of histrionic ability: and an audience among whose motives for being present a thoughtful interest in the drama can hardly be said to have predominated. Transfigured though the whole thing may have been by a slight air of silliness, it was in its way an occasion; and if the pleasure which The Frog gave was felt less intensely in the front of the house than it was behind the footlights, that, after all, is nothing new in the old type of amateur theatricals.
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