THE DRAMA
The Americans are nothing if not fiercely and incorrigibly theatrical.
It is true that they have only one pose, namely, the pose of being
gloriously and unaffectedly American. Yet in all the large issues of life
they display a strong sense of the stage, they revel in the more obvious
situations, and they have an innate love of a good curtain.
These facts are strikingly illustrated in the American law courts,
where all small matters are managed on the lines of comedy, and all
large matters on the lines of hot and lurid melodrama. The recent Thaw
trial may be taken as a typical case in point, so far as melodrama is
concerned. The speeches of counsel on both sides might have been written
specially for the Adelphi Theatre, and every gesture of the rival
declaimers would seem to have been modelled on the style of the adipose
itinerant actor who plays “Othello” in penny gaffs.
So far as the real stage is concerned, the Americans are to be credited
with quite a number of startling innovations. They were the sole
inventors of the Deadwood Dick kind of play, which involves the tooling
on to the stage of an ancient and battered mail coach, accompanied by
feats of unthinkable skill with the shooting irons. I believe, too,
that they were the only begetters of the drama that has for its central
attraction a real set-to between bona-fide bruisers, who fight with the
gloves off and punish one another for all they are worth under American
rules.
Then, of course, I must not forget to mention the world-renowned “Tank
Drama.” It appears that an American manager happened once upon a time to
find himself in a second-hand galvanised iron store. Here he discovered
an enormous iron tank which he found could be purchased for a song.
In a fit of abstraction, and in pursuance of the American tendency to
buy anything and everything that can be had dirt cheap, he purchased
the tank. And having it on his hands and no particular use for it, he
hired a dramatist to write a play around it. To this woolly genius a
tank of course suggested water and high dives and swimmers, and before
you could say hey, presto! Mr. Manager found himself in possession of a
sensational, if somewhat humid, melodrama, the like of which had never
before been seen on any road.
The Tank Drama toured the States for years on end, to the approval and
delight of American audiences, and for anything I know to the contrary,
it is still running, the tank itself having by this time, no doubt, grown
a little leaky.
In England the public is familiar with melodramas in which the principal
part is taken by steam-rollers, circular saws, fire-engines, and other
pieces of mechanism. The Tank Drama, however, was the progenitor of
them all. It was from the Americans, also, that we learnt to grace our
melodramas with the presence on the stage of real live cows, racehorses,
ducks and geese, faithful dogs, dancing bears, blue monkeys, and educated
asses.
The American public prides itself upon the rapidity with which the
national dramatists, from Clyde Fitch or Augustus Thomas to David Belasco
or Theodore Kremer, can turn out almost any species of dramatic work to
order. On the production of a five-act tragedy recently in New York,
it was announced that the author had written “the whole contraption”
in under the twenty-four hours. I can well believe it. The majority of
American plays that come to us on this side bear unmistakable indications
of having been written in haste, and with a single eye to getting through
with the labour. This is no doubt due to the circumstance that American
managers have a mania for producing new pieces, and that the average run
of such pieces is exceedingly short. Authors do not feel it to be worth
their while to take pains, particularly as the majority of them have to
subsist by dressing up in dramatic guise some new and big mechanical
invention or some cause célèbre or tragedy in real life or some stupid
story, which happens to have caught on, but which they know cannot in the
nature of things keep the stage for more than a few weeks.
Although one is continually hearing of the triumphs of this or that
American actor or actress in Shakespearean parts, it is a solemn fact
that the average of Shakespearean acting in America is very much below
that of any other country in which Shakespeare is consistently played. I
cannot, of course, forget that America produced the late Mr. Phelps and
gave us Miss Mary Anderson, whom all the world admired. But these are the
exceptions. The rule is that the American actor who plays Shakespeare is
a bull-necked, unlettered mummer who has served his apprenticeship to the
circus business or to the plumbing, and roars out Shakespeare’s lines
with a nasal intonation and an absolute lack of understanding. Nine out
of ten American actors ought to carry a net with them.
I am aware that it may be contended that the foregoing aspects of the
American drama are things of the past, and that in all essential respects
the theatre in America is nowadays on an equal footing with the theatre
in England. In a considerable measure, this may be so, due, no doubt,
to the mixed beneficence of the blessed brotherhood: Frohman, Klaw and
Erlanger.
Yet there can be no getting away from the fact that the American plays
and American companies that are from time to time brought to London for
our edification fail woefully to interest us.
In London, quite lately we have been presented with two plays of American
extraction and rendered by American companies. One of them “Mrs. Wiggs
of the Cabbage Patch” to wit, at Terry’s Theatre, appears to have been
a success, from a monetary point of view, and nobody can witness it
without entertainment. On the other hand, it suffers from that pea-nutty
exuberance and thinness of interest which are so characteristically
American. The sentiment in it is of the floweriest and slobberiest sort,
the comedy forced and jerky, and the setting squalid and depressing to a
degree. It is said to be a transcript of life among the American poorer
classes, and herein conceivably it is instructive if not altogether
uplifting; for it indicates only too plainly that the hackneyed American
talk about “the full dinner-pail” and the general snugness and decency
of the existence of the American poor has precious little foundation in
fact. Of course, Mrs. Wiggs herself is made to exhibit singularly good
qualities of heart, and a certain shrewd and humorous wisdom. But the
rest of the characters—not even excluding the weepily-named Lovey-Mary
and Mrs. Wiggs’s troops of wild-cat children—are the kind of people whom
it sets one’s teeth on edge to meet. If, as I am told, America is full
of Cabbage Patches, I can only say that America should hasten to the
penitent form.
The other play of which London was adjured to expect great things was
called “Strongheart.” It ran for a couple of weeks or more at the Aldwych
Theatre, and was then taken off. “Strongheart” purported to give us some
highly realistic glimpses of American college life. There was a great
deal of American football in it, and a great deal of ra, ra, ra-ing about
it. There were also unlimited quantities of ra, ra rant. But the plot
exhibited the usual thinness, the construction was slack and loose,
and the characterisation feeble and colourless. If the company which
supported the handsome Robert Edeson in this particular piece is to be
taken as a fair sample, I feel free to conclude that in the lump American
actors and actresses are a reasonably poor crowd. Play as they would,
the men failed to convince us that they were persons of any particular
breeding, and the women said their lines as if they were in pain, and
walked through their parts like so many uninspired clothes horses. Of
course I know America has many gifted actors and actresses such as
William Faversham, James K. Hackett, E. H. Sothern, Julia Merlowe,
Olga Nethersole and Mery Mannering—but, as luck will have it, with the
exception of the second-named, who is a Canadian, they’re all English.
And so is even the inimitable Hap Ward. On the whole, I think America
will have to make some very serious strides in the dramatic art before
she can fairly hope to show England anything that is worth looking at.
When you turn to the music halls you find the American in equally sad
case. There is no performer of note on the English music-hall stage whose
training and experience have been American. From the other side we get a
few trick bicyclists, wire-walkers, high divers, and comic speech makers
whose pea-nutty witticisms are obviously culled from the comic papers.
They help to fill up the programme, without in any sense helping to fill
up the house.
It is in this connection that the Americans have made a practical avowal
of their pathetic inferiority; for they are said to have made contracts
with some of the leading English stars for appearances in America,
on terms which plainly indicate that the American managers must be
singularly hard up for talent and quite incapable of finding it in their
own country.
The fact is, that in this as in a variety of other matters, the
American’s cock-sureness and unblushing faith in his personal beauty
and powers have led him considerably astray. The American really
possesses scarcely any talent. All he can do is to boast and shout and
advertise. And having little or nothing behind him to boast and shout
and advertise about, he is bound in the long run to find himself at a
disadvantage. Half the actresses and female music-hall artists of America
are successful not because they can do anything, but because they have
been “boosted” into fame by the pushful, blatant manager. The sole
accomplishment of many of them is that they can undress prettily in full
view of their audiences.
For the rest they bolster up their position by extraneous escapades
rather than by art. They are harum-scarum, feather-brained young women
who for the most part would find it exceedingly difficult to get a living
by the exercise of their alleged smartness before an English public. And
as for American actors and music-hall men, the best that can be said of
them is that when they are not vulgar they are deadly dull, and the worst
that their real sphere of life is the American circus. I wish they would
all take to the Tank.
The average American theatrical man, invariably strikes me as being a
born circus-man, intended by nature to go around in a gaudy procession
by day and to fill up his nights showing off wild beasts and freaks and
Deadwood coaches. Unconsciously he does all his business and manages all
his affairs on circus principles. He is for ever beating the drum and
inviting the crowd to walk up and see the finest show on earth. The ideal
man of his private bosom is the late P. T. Barnum, who was the father of
advertisement and the originator of the fine art of “boosting.” It was
P. T. Barnum who said, or who got somebody to say for him, “When you have
anything good, keep on letting on about it, and you will get rich.”
The American business man has always considered that saying to be the
extreme height of philosophy.
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