If you look into the actors' prompt-books, the most frequent direction
which you will find is this: "Cross stage to right." It is not a mere
direction, it is a formula; it is not a formula only, but a universal
remedy. Whenever the action seems to flag, or the dialogue to become
weak or wordy, you must "cross stage to right"; no matter what is wrong
with the play, this will set it right. We have heard so much of the
"action" of a play, that the stage-manager in England seems to imagine
that dramatic action is literally a movement of people across the stage,
even if for no other reason than for movement's sake. Is the play weak?
He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending it out walking for its
health.
If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well as an
improvisation, we shall realise that one of its main requirements is
that it should make pictures. That is the lesson of Bayreuth, and when
one comes away, the impression which remains, almost longer than the
impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the
actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not
been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard
known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that
sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. But
here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does
not aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinck
should be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention; but I admit
that you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way.
The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier's company came over here to give
us some lessons in acting, I watched a little scene in "La Veine," which
was one of the telling scenes of the play: Guitry and Brasseur standing
face to face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and then
waiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in which the
whole temperament of each is summed up. One is inclined to say: No
English actor could have done it. Perhaps; but then, no English
stage-manager would have let them do it. They would have been told to
move, to find "business," to indulge in gesture which would not come
naturally to them. Again, in "Tartuffe," when, at the end, the hypocrite
is exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin simply turns his back on the
audience, and stands, with head sullenly down, making no movement; then,
at the end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the nearer
side of the stage, giving you no more than a momentary glimpse of a
convulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross, raging mood. It would have
taken Mr. Tree five minutes to get off the stage, and he would have
walked to and fro with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on one
face, so to speak, after another. Would it have been so effective, that
is to say, so real?
A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and
how not to do things. Their blood helps them, for there is movement in
their blood, and they have something to restrain. But they have realised
the art there is in being quite still, in speaking naturally, as people
do when they are really talking, in fixing attention on the words they
are saying and not on their antics while saying them. The other day, in
the first act of "The Bishop's Move" at the Garrick, there is a Duchess
talking to a young novice in the refectory of a French abbey. After
standing talking to him for a few minutes, with only such movements as
would be quite natural under the circumstances, she takes his arm, not
once only but twice, and walks him up and down in front of the
footlights, for no reason in the world except to "cross stage to right."
The stage trick was so obvious that it deprived the scene at once of any
pretence to reality.
The fact is, that we do not sufficiently realise the difference between
what is dramatic and what is merely theatrical. Drama is made to be
acted, and the finest "literary" play in the world, if it wholly fails
to interest people on the stage, will have wholly failed in its first
and most essential aim. But the finer part of drama is implicit in the
words and in the development of the play, and not in its separate small
details of literal "action." Two people should be able to sit quietly in
a room, without ever leaving their chairs, and to hold our attention
breathless for as long as the playwright likes. Given a good play,
French actors are able to do that. Given a good play, English actors are
not allowed to do it.
Is it not partly the energy, the restless energy, of the English
character which prevents our actors from ever sitting or standing still
on the stage? We are a nation of travellers, of sailors, of business
people; and all these have to keep for ever moving. Our dances are the
most vigorous and athletic of dances, they carry us all over the stage,
with all kinds of leaping and kicking movements. Our music-hall
performers have invented a kind of clowning peculiar to this country, in
which kicking and leaping are also a part of the business. Our
melodramas are constructed on more movable planes, with more formidable
collapses and collisions, than those of any other country. Is not, then,
the persistent English habit of "crossing stage to right" a national
characteristic, ingrained in us, and not only a matter of training? It
is this reflection which hinders me from hoping, with much confidence,
that a reform in stage-management will lead to a really quieter and
simpler way of acting. But might not the experiment be tried? Might not
some stage-manager come forward and say: "For heaven's sake stand still,
my dear ladies and gentlemen, and see if you cannot interest your
audience without moving more than twice the length of your own feet?"