The Mystery of the Theatre

How Do Those People Who Like Good Novels Put Up With the Nonsense Which is Shown Them on the Stage?

ALDOUS HUXLEY

ONCE, in the course of an ill-spent life, it was my fate to go to the theatre some two hundred and fifty times in one year. On business, I need not add; one would hardly do that sort of thing for pleasure. I was paid to go.

By the end of the year—and for that matter, long" before our planet had completed its orbit around the sun—I had come to the conclusion that I was not paid enough; that, indeed, I could never be paid enough for this particular job. I gave it up; and nothing would now induce me to resume it.

Since then, my attendances at the theatre have averaged perhaps two per annum.

And yet, there are people who go to every first night, not because they have to, not because the griping belly must be filled, but because they actually like it. People who are not paid to go, but who pay, as though for a privilege.

Concerning this mystery, I used often to speculate—abstracting myself as completely as I could from the horrors of the present—during the most excruciating passages of the plays which I had to attend. Sitting all around me in the stalls—it was thus that I used to reflect— are several hundred prosperous and, as education goes, well educated people, who have paid to see this driveling play (for I am assuming that the play is one of the nine and ninety driveling ones, not the hundreth Back to Methuselah or At Mrs. Beam's). They are the sort of people who, in the privacy of their homes, would enjoy reading the better sort of novels, or at any rate, not the worst. Offer them a copy of a penny novelettes, suggest that they should read the serial in the Girl's Own Paper, and they will either laugh or be indignant. Their taste runs, in fiction at any rate, to higher things.

AND vet, these people who buy the thoroughly respectable, and even excellent novels of the thirdand fourthand nth-best sellers, will go to the theatre (under no compulsion, be it remembered) to see a play which is, from the literary standpoint, precisely on a level with the penny novelettes and Girl's Own Paper serial stories that they scorn, very rightly and naturally, to read.

In their novels, they demand a certain minimum of probability, truth to life, characterization, decent writing. An impossible story, in which the characters are so many wooden dolls, moving according to the laws of a ridiculous, and outworn convention and expressing themselves in a grotesque, flat, and ungrammatical English—this would disgust them. But to a play answering precisely to this description, they will flock in their hundreds. They will be moved to tears and enthusiasm by situations which, in a novel, they would find merely ludicrous. They will let pass, and even actually admire, language which any one with the slightest feeling for the use of words would shudder at if seen in print.

It was on this strange anomaly that I used to ponder during those hideous evenings at the theatre. Why does the penny novelette disgust, in book form, those who delight in it when exhibited on the stage ? Put succinctly, that was the not uninteresting problem. Let us examine it. Let us endeavour to penetrate this anomaly.

Bernard Shaw once said that it was easier to mite a novel than a play, and he re-wrote a scene from Macbeth in narrative form to show with what facility a novelist could spin out into pages of thin, picturesque description what the dramatist had compressed into a few lines of dialogue.

And no doubt it is easier to write a bad novel than a good play. But on the other hand, it is much easier to write a bad play that will be successful—even with a quite intelligent and discriminating audience—than a bad novel that will take in readers of the same class. A dramatist can "get away with" a play in which there is no characterization subtler than caricature, no beauty of language less coarse than ranting rhetoric, no resemblance to life—only an effective situation.

This fact was recently impressed upon me (yet once more) when I went to the theatre in Parma to see the Italian version of one of Sir Arthur Pinero's plays—His House in Order, it is called, if I remember rightly, in English. I confess that I thoroughly enjoyed the performance—more, very likely, than I should have done in England; partly because the Italian conception of English life was so exquisitely amusing, and partly because the comedians were excellent—better than the average company of English actors. But I marveled, as I listened, that a piece so entirely empty could have been, could still be, such a success. And as a mere hard-working novelist, I envied the lucky playwrights who can turn out a popular and even highly esteemed play in which nine out of ten of the personages are mere puppets, either without characters or else crudely caricatured, and where the plot is hardly more than a kind of epigrammatic trick. If I were allowed to make a novel out of only these ingredients, I should feel that I had got off uncommonly cheaply and congratulate myself.

What makes it possible for the dramatist to put so little into his plays and yet successfully "get away with it" is, of course, the intervention of living interpreters. If he knows how to do it—and one learns by practice —the dramatist can contrive to pass on to the actor's shoulders the greater part of his responsibility. All that he need do, if he is lazy, is to invent one or two effective situations, and leave the actors to make the most of them. Characterization, truth to life, thought, decent writing, and all the rest of it, he can safely resign to the mere writers for print, secure in the knowledge that the public will be too much taken up with the antics of the players to remark the absence of these merely literary trifles.

For it is the players, of course, who reconcile an otherwise relatively discriminating public to the sad stuff which finds its way on to the stage. It is for the sake of the comedians that occupants of the stalls, who might, if they were sitting by their own fireside, be reading, shall we say, Wells or Conrad, or even Dostoievski, are content to put up with the dramatic equivalent of the penny novelette and the picture paper serial story; for the sake of the living, smiling comedians; for the personal touch, the palpitating, human note. In a word, they go to the theatre for the acting.

AND if the acting were always first-class, I should understand very well why people should become hardened first-nighters—or shouldn't one rather say "softened"? for the contemporary theatre is more relaxing than tonic, more emollient than mentally astringent —softened, then, first-nighters. A really beautiful piece of acting is as well worth looking at as a beauiful performance in any other branch of art. But my complaint is that acting is so seldom first class. A good actor is as rare as a good painter—and how rare a good painter is, one need only go to the Salon des Independents to discover. Among the seven thousand canvases, are there ten really good ones? No; there are perhaps three. And how many really good actors are there in the world ?

I remember to have seen a few in my time. Old Guitry was the best on the legitimate stage. Most of the rest were of the illegitimate variety: Marie Lloyd, for example, the marvelous Shakespearean Marie, now, alas, dead (car elle etait du monde ou. les plus belles choses ont le pire destin); Little Tich, Frank Tinney, Charlie Chaplin. All geniuses. Which, of course, they almost necessarily must be. For to keep a whole theatre interested for half an hour by one's own unaided exertions is obviously a great deal more difficult than to walk in and out through the telling situations of a drama, where you are only one of a dozen collaborators. These perfect performances are amply worth paying money to see. And so is a perfect play, even indifferently acted (and it is extraordinary how actor-proof a good play is). But why one should pay to see a poor, or even (what is more common) a very competent but uninspired piece of acting, particularly in conjunction with a bad play—that is completely beyond my powers to understand.

Hardened—I beg your pardon, softened— first-nighters to whom I have put this riddle give me no very coherent or satisfying answers. Your real first-nighter, it seems, must have some queer, instinctive feeling for the theatre as such. The stuffiness and the crowd, the dark, expectant hush, and then the apocalyptic rising of the curtain, the glitter and the shining unreality— these things fascinate him.

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Luckily, however, there are a few good plays. There is Back to Methuselah, for example, w'hich for substance, beauty, and power is one of the capitally important works of. our time. It is for the sake of these, and for the rare great actors, that those who, like myself, have no instinctive passion for the stage, will go, half a dozen times, it may be, in the year. On the other evenings, they will prefer to sit at home with their books.