For example, the main objection to the use of illusive scenery (in most
modern plays scenery is not illusive; everything visible is as real as
in your drawing room at home) is that it is unconvincing; whilst the
imaginary scenery with which the audience provides a platform or
tribune like the Elizabethan stage or the Greek stage used by
Sophocles, is quite convincing. In fact, the more scenery you have the
less illusion you produce. The wise playwright, when he cannot get
absolute reality of presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims
at atmosphere and suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative
illusion. The theatre, as I first knew it, was a place of wings and
flats which destroyed both atmosphere and illusion. This was tolerated,
and even intensely enjoyed, but not in the least because nothing better
was possible; for all the devices employed in the productions of Mr.
Granville Barker or Max Reinhardt or the Moscow Art Theatre were
equally available for Colley Cibber and Garrick, except the intensity
of our artificial light. When Garrick played Richard II in slashed
trunk hose and plumes, it was not because he believed that the
Plantagenets dressed like that, or because the costumes could not have
made him a XV century dress as easily as a nondescript combination of
the state robes of George III with such scraps of older fashions as
seemed to playgoers for some reason to be romantic. The charm of the
theatre in those days was its makebelieve. It has that charm still, not
only for the amateurs, who are happiest when they are most unnatural
and impossible and absurd, but for audiences as well. I have seen
performances of my own plays which were to me far wilder burlesques
than Sheridan's Critic or Buckingham's Rehearsal; yet they have
produced sincere laughter and tears such as the most finished
metropolitan productions have failed to elicit. Fielding was entirely
right when he represented Partridge as enjoying intensely the
performance of the king in Hamlet because anybody could see that the
king was an actor, and resenting Garrick's Hamlet because it might have
been a real man. Yet we have only to look at the portraits of Garrick
to see that his performances would nowadays seem almost as
extravagantly stagey as his costumes. In our day Calve's intensely real
Carmen never pleased the mob as much as the obvious fancy ball
masquerading of suburban young ladies in the same character.