It was for the production of such plays as Mr. Granville Barker's that
the Stage Society was founded, and it is doing good service to the drama
in producing them. "The Marrying of Ann Leete" is the cleverest and most
promising new play that I have seen for a long time; but it cannot be
said to have succeeded even with the Stage Society audience, and no
ordinary theatrical manager is very likely to produce it. The author, it
is true, is an actor, but he is young; his play is immature, too crowded
with people, too knotted up with motives, too inconclusive in effect. He
knows the stage, and his knowledge has enabled him to use the stage for
his own purposes, inventing a kind of technique of his own, doing one or
two things which have never, or never so deftly, been done before. But
he is something besides all that; he can think, he can write, and he
can suggest real men and women. The play opens in the dark, and remains
for some time brilliantly ambiguous. People, late eighteenth-century
people, talk with bewildering abruptness, not less bewildering point;
they, their motives, their characters, swim slowly into daylight. Some
of the dialogue is, as the writer says of politics, "a game for clever
children, women, and fools"; it is a game demanding close attention. A
courtly indolence, an intellectual blackguardism, is in the air; people
walk, as it seems, aimlessly in and out, and the game goes on; it fills
one with excitement, the excitement of following a trail. It is a trail
of ideas, these people think, and they act because they have thought.
They know the words they use, they use them with deliberation, their
hearts are in their words. Their actions, indeed, are disconcerting; but
these people, and their disconcerting actions, are interesting, holding
one's mind in suspense.
Mr. Granville Barker has tried to tell the whole history of a family,
and he interests us in every member of that family. He plays them like
chessmen, and their moves excite us as chess excites the mind. They
express ideas; the writer has thought out their place in the scheme of
things, and he has put his own faculty of thinking into their heads.
They talk for effect, or rather for disguise; it is part of their keen
sense of the game. They talk at cross-purposes, as they wander in and
out of the garden terrace; they plan out their lives, and life comes and
surprises them by the way. Then they speak straight out of their hearts,
sometimes crudely, sometimes with a naïveté which seems laughable; and
they act on sudden impulses, accepting the consequences when they come.
They live an artificial life, knowing lies to be lies, and choosing
them; they are civilised, they try to do their duty by society; only, at
every moment, some ugly gap opens in the earth, right in their path, and
they have to stop, consider, choose a new direction. They seem to go
their own way, almost without guiding; and indeed may have escaped
almost literally out of their author's hands. The last scene is an
admirable episode, a new thing on the stage, full of truth within its
own limits; but it is an episode, not a conclusion, much less a
solution. Mr. Barker can write: he writes in short, sharp sentences,
which go off like pistol-shots, and he keeps up the firing, from every
corner of the stage. He brings his people on and off with an
unconventionality which comes of knowing the resources of the theatre,
and of being unfettered by the traditions of its technique. The scene
with the gardener in the second act has extraordinary technical merit,
and it has the art which conceals its art. There are other inventions in
the play, not all quite so convincing. Sometimes Mr. Barker, in doing
the right or the clever thing, does it just not quite strongly enough to
carry it against opposition. The opposition is the firm and narrow mind
of the British playgoer. Such plays as Mr. Barker's are apt to annoy
without crushing. The artist, who is yet an imperfect artist, bewilders
the world with what is novel in his art; the great artist convinces the
world. Mr. Barker is young: he will come to think with more depth and
less tumult; he will come to work with less prodigality and more mastery
of means. But he has energy already, and a sense of what is absurd and
honest in the spectacle of this game, in which the pawns seem to move
themselves.