Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship - Archer William

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who write to an actor-manager's order--not for the true artist! He has a soul above all such petty considerations. Art, to him, is simply self-expression. He writes to please himself, and has no thought of currying favour with an audience, whether intellectual or idiotic." To this I reply simply that to an artist of this way of thinking I have nothing to say. He has a perfect right to express himself in a whole literature of so-called plays, which may possibly be studied, and even acted, by societies organized to that laudable end. But the dramatist who declares his end to be mere self-expression stultifies himself in that very phrase. The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself,[5] but the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is currying favour with an audience. That limit is imposed simply by the physical endurance and power of sustained attention that can be demanded of Western human beings assembled in a theatre. Doubtless an author could express himself more fully and more subtly if he ignored these limitations; the moment he submits to them, he renounces the pretence that mere self-expression is his aim. I know that there are haughty-souls who make no such submission, and express themselves in dramas which, so far as their proportions are concerned, might as well be epic poems or historical romances.[6] To them, I repeat, I have nothing to say. The one and only subject of the following discussions is the best method of fitting a dramatic theme for representation before an audience assembled in a theatre. But this, be it noted, does not necessarily mean "writing down" to the audience in question. It is by obeying, not by ignoring, the fundamental conditions of his craft that the dramatist may hope to lead his audience upward to the highest intellectual level which he himself can attain.

      These pages, in short, are addressed to students of play-writing who sincerely desire to do sound, artistic work under the conditions and limitations of the actual, living playhouse. This does not mean, of course, that they ought always to be studying "what the public wants." The dramatist should give the public what he himself wants--but in such form as to make it comprehensible and interesting in a theatre.

       Table of Contents

      THE CHOICE OF A THEME

      The first step towards writing a play is manifestly to choose a theme.

      Even this simple statement, however, requires careful examination before we can grasp its full import. What, in the first place, do we mean by a "theme"? And, secondly, in what sense can we, or ought we to, "choose" one?

      "Theme" may mean either of two things: either the subject of a play, or its story. The former is, perhaps, its proper or more convenient sense. The theme of Romeo and Juliet is youthful love crossed by ancestral hate; the theme of Othello is jealousy; the theme of Le Tartufe is hypocrisy; the theme of Caste is fond hearts and coronets; the theme of Getting Married is getting married; the theme of Maternité is maternity. To every play it is possible, at a pinch, to assign a theme; but in many plays it is evident that no theme expressible in abstract terms was present to the author's mind. Nor are these always plays of a low class. It is only by a somewhat artificial process of abstraction that we can formulate a theme for As You Like It, for The Way of the World, or for Hedda Gabler.

      The question now arises: ought a theme, in its abstract form, to be the first germ of a play? Ought the dramatist to say, "Go to, I will write a play on temperance, or on woman's suffrage, or on capital and labour," and then cast about for a story to illustrate his theme? This is a possible, but not a promising, method of procedure. A story made to the order of a moral concept is always apt to advertise its origin, to the detriment of its illusive quality. If a play is to be a moral apologue at all, it is well to say so frankly--probably in the title--and aim, not at verisimilitude, but at neatness and appositeness in the working out of the fable. The French proverbe proceeds on this principle, and is often very witty and charming.[7] A good example in English is A Pair of Spectacles, by Mr. Sydney Grundy, founded on a play by Labiche. In this bright little comedy every incident and situation bears upon the general theme, and pleases us, not by its probability, but by its ingenious appropriateness. The dramatic fable, in fact, holds very much the same rank in drama as the narrative fable holds in literature at large. We take pleasure in them on condition that they be witty, and that they do not pretend to be what they are not.

      A play manifestly suggested by a theme of temporary interest will often have a great but no less temporary success. For instance, though there was a good deal of clever character-drawing in An Englishman's Home, by Major du Maurier, the theme was so evidently the source and inspiration of the play that it will scarcely bear revival. In America, where the theme was of no interest, the play failed.

      It is possible, no doubt, to name excellent plays in which the theme, in all probability, preceded both the story and the characters in the author's mind. Such plays are most of M. Brieux's; such plays are Mr. Galsworthy's Strife and Justice. The French plays, in my judgment, suffer artistically from the obtrusive predominance of the theme--that is to say, the abstract element--over the human and concrete factors in the composition. Mr. Galsworthy's more delicate and unemphatic art eludes this danger, at any rate in Strife. We do not remember until all is over that his characters represent classes, and his action is, one might almost say, a sociological symbol. If, then, the theme does, as a matter of fact, come first in the author's conception, he will do well either to make it patently and confessedly dominant, as in the proverbe, or to take care that, as in Strife, it be not suffered to make its domination felt, except as an afterthought.[8] No outside force should appear to control the free rhythm of the action.

      The theme may sometimes be, not an idea, an abstraction or a principle, but rather an environment, a social phenomenon of one sort or another. The author's primary object in such a case is, not to portray any individual character or tell any definite story, but to transfer to the stage an animated picture of some broad aspect or phase of life, without concentrating the interest on any one figure or group. There are theorists who would, by definition, exclude from the domain of drama any such cinematograph-play, as they would probably call it; but we shall see cause, as we go on, to distrust definitions, especially when they seek to clothe themselves with the authority of laws. Tableau-plays of the type here in question may even claim classical precedent. What else is Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair? What else is Schiller's Wallensteins Lager? Amongst more recent plays, Hauptmann's Die Weber and Gorky's Nachtasyl are perhaps the best examples of the type. The drawback of such themes is, not that they do not conform to this or that canon of art, but that it needs an exceptional amount of knowledge and dramaturgic skill to handle them successfully. It is far easier to tell a story on the stage than to paint a picture, and few playwrights can resist the temptation to foist a story upon their picture, thus marring it by an inharmonious intrusion of melodrama or farce. This has often been done upon deliberate theory, in the belief that no play can exist, or can attract playgoers, without a definite and more or less exciting plot. Thus the late James A. Herne inserted into a charming idyllic picture of rural life, entitled Shore Acres, a melodramatic scene in a lighthouse, which was hopelessly out of key with the rest of the play. The dramatist who knows any particular phase of life so thoroughly as to be able to transfer its characteristic incidents to the stage, may be advised to defy both critical and managerial prejudice, and give his tableau-play just so much of story as may naturally and inevitably fall within its limits.

      One of the most admirable and enthralling scenes I ever saw on any stage was that of the Trafalgar Square suffrage meeting in Miss Elizabeth Robins's Votes for Women. Throughout a whole act it held us spellbound, while the story of the play stood still, and we forgot its existence. It was only within a few minutes of the end, when the story was dragged in neck and crop, that the reality of the thing vanished, and the interest with it.

      If

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