THE THEATRE, as the late Miss Stein might so truly
have said, is the Theatre. I welcome the chorus of approval which has greeted the English Stage Company's opening at the Royal Court Theatre of a repertory season which will include plays by Angus Wilson, Arthur Miller, Ronald Duncan, and Nigel Dennis (all of them, to be sure, good writers, and at least one of them already known to be a dramatist of note). But 1 very much hope that when Mr. George Devine says 'Ours is not to be a producer's theatre, nor an actor's theatre; it is to be a writer's theatre,' this will not be taken to be support for that dangerous theory which holds that a languishing theatre can be revived simply by getting novelists and poets who have made their mark in fiction and verse to write for it. The theatre is. and inevitably so, a popular art—something which the star of that earlier Writer's Theatre, Mr. Bernard Shaw, whose first triumphs were achieved at the Royal Court, never forgot—and it can only be revived by people who do not forget that the theatre is the theatre, and not just a sideshow where 'good writers' can perform in their spare time. And so, while I wish the English Stage Company every possible success, I hope that it will never fall into the error of supposing that the theatre can be revived merely by pumping dramatised novels into it.
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