Last week gave one an amusing opportunity of contrasting the merits and
the defects of the professional and the unprofessional kind of play.
"The Gay Lord Quex" was revived at the Duke of York's Theatre, and Mr.
Alexander produced at the St. James's Theatre a play called "The Finding
of Nancy," which had been chosen by the committee of the Playgoers' Club
out of a large number of plays sent in for competition. The writer, Miss
Netta Syrett, has published one or two novels or collections of stories;
but this, as far as I am aware, is her first attempt at a play. Both
plays were unusually well acted, and therefore may be contrasted without
the necessity of making allowances for the way in which each was
interpreted on the stage.
Mr. Pinero is a playwright with a sharp sense of the stage, and eye for
what is telling, a cynical intelligence which is much more interesting
than the uncertain outlook of most of our playwrights. He has no breadth
of view, but he has a clear view; he makes his choice out of human
nature deliberately, and he deals in his own way with the materials that
he selects. Before saying to himself: what would this particular person
say or do in these circumstances? he says to himself: what would it be
effective on the stage for this particular person to do or say? He
suggests nothing, he tells you all he knows; he cares to know nothing
but what immediately concerns the purpose of his play. The existence of
his people begins and ends with their first and last speech on the
boards; the rest is silence, because he can tell you nothing about it.
Sophy Fullgarney is a remarkably effective character as a
stage-character, but when the play is over we know no more about her
than we should know about her if we had spied upon her, in her own way,
from behind some bush or keyhole. We have seen a picturesque and amusing
exterior, and that is all. Lord Quex does not, I suppose, profess to be
even so much of a character as that, and the other people are mere
"humours," quite amusing in their cleverly contrasted ways. When these
people talk, they talk with an effort to be natural and another effort
to be witty; they are never sincere and without self-consciousness; they
never say inevitable things, only things that are effective to say. And
they talk in poor English. Mr. Pinero has no sense of style, of the
beauty or expressiveness of words. His joking is forced and without
ideas; his serious writing is common. In "The Gay Lord Quex" he is
continually trying to impress upon his audience that he is very
audacious and distinctly improper. The improprieties are childish in the
innocence of their vulgarity, and the audacities are no more than
trifling lapses of taste. He shows you the interior of a Duchess's
bedroom, and he shows you the Duchess's garter, in a box of other
curiosities. He sets his gentlemen and ladies talking in the allusive
style which you may overhear whenever you happen to be passing a group
of London cabmen. The Duchess has written in her diary, "Warm
afternoon." That means that she has spent an hour with her lover. Many
people in the audience laugh. All the cabmen would have laughed.
Now look for a moment at the play by the amateur and the woman. It is
not a satisfactory play as a whole, it is not very interesting in all
its developments, some of the best opportunities are shirked, some of
the characters (all the characters who are men) are poor. But, in the
first place, it is well written. Those people speak a language which is
nearer to the language of real life than that used by Mr. Pinero, and
when they make jokes there is generally some humour in the joke and some
intelligence in the humour. They have ideas and they have feelings. The
ideas and the feelings are not always combined with faultless logic into
a perfectly clear and coherent presentment of character, it is true. But
from time to time we get some of the illusion of life. From time to time
something is said or done which we know to be profoundly true. A woman
has put into words some delicate instinct of a woman's soul. Here and
there is a cry of the flesh, here and there a cry of the mind, which is
genuine, which is a part of life. Miss Syrett has much to learn if she
is to become a successful dramatist, and she has not as yet shown that
she knows men as well as women; but at least she has begun at the right
end. She has begun with human nature and not with the artifices of the
stage, she has thought of her characters as people before thinking of
them as persons of the drama, she has something to say through them,
they are not mere lines in a pattern. I am not at all sure that she has
the makings of a dramatist, or that if she writes another play it will
be better than this one. You do not necessarily get to your destination
by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey. The one
certain thing is that if you take the wrong turning at the beginning,
and follow it persistently, you will not get to your destination at all.
The playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath
out of life before he has suited it to his purpose, is at the best only
playing a clever game with us. He may amuse us, but he is only playing
ping-pong with the emotions. And that is why we should welcome, I think,
any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as it is
does not always come into the picture.