On the facts mentioned in the foregoing statement, and in my evidence
before the Joint Select Committee, no controversy arose except on one
point. Mr. George Alexander protested vigorously and indignantly against
my admission that theatres, like public-houses, need special control on
the ground that they can profit by disorder, and are sometimes conducted
with that end in view. Now, Mr. Alexander is a famous actor-manager;
and it is very difficult to persuade the public that the more famous an
actor-manager is the less he is likely to know about any theatre except
his own. When the Committee of 1892 reported, I was considered guilty of
a perverse paradox when I said that the witness who knew least about the
theatre was Henry Irving. Yet a moment's consideration would have shown
that the paradox was a platitude. For about quarter of a century
Irving was confined night after night to his own theatre and his own
dressing-room, never seeing a play even there because he was himself
part of the play; producing the works of long-departed authors; and, to
the extent to which his talent was extraordinary, necessarily making his
theatre unlike any other theatre. When he went to the provinces or to
America, the theatres to which he went were swept and garnished for him,
and their staffs replaced--as far as he came in contact with them--by
his own lieutenants. In the end, there was hardly a first-nighter in his
gallery who did not know more about the London theatres and the progress
of dramatic art than he; and as to the provinces, if any chief constable
had told him the real history and character of many provincial theatres,
he would have denounced that chief constable as an ignorant libeller
of a noble profession. But the constable would have been right for all
that. Now if this was true of Sir Henry Irving, who did not become a
London manager until he had roughed it for years in the provinces,
how much more true must it be of, say, Mr. George Alexander, whose
successful march through his profession has passed as far from the
purlieus of our theatrical world as the king's naval career from
the Isle of Dogs? The moment we come to that necessary part of the
censorship question which deals with the control of theatres from the
point of view of those who know how much money can be made out of them
by managers who seek to make the auditorium attractive rather than
the stage, you find the managers divided into two sections. The
first section consists of honorable and successful managers like Mr.
Alexander, who know nothing of such abuses, and deny, with perfect
sincerity and indignant vehemence, that they exist except, perhaps,
in certain notorious variety theatres. The other is the silent section
which knows better, but is very well content to be publicly defended
and privately amused by Mr. Alexander's innocence. To accept a West End
manager as an expert in theatres because he is an actor is much as if
we were to accept the organist of St. Paul's Cathedral as an expert on
music halls because he is a musician. The real experts are all in
the conspiracy to keep the police out of the theatre. And they are so
successful that even the police do not know as much as they should.
The police should have been examined by the Committee, and the whole
question of the extent to which theatres are disorderly houses in
disguise sifted to the bottom. For it is on this point that we discover
behind the phantoms of the corrupt dramatists who are restrained by
the censorship from debauching the stage, the reality of the corrupt
managers and theatre proprietors who actually do debauch it without let
or hindrance from the censorship. The whole case for giving control over
theatres to local authorities rests on this reality.