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A Note on the Theatre.

Wellington has a new Theatre. This may not, of course, be a very disturbing discovery, but our new Grand Opera House has been heralded as the finest in Australasia; also, as being absolutely up-to-date. Unfortunately, it is neither the one nor the other. Already in Wellington we possess a better theatre. If, for our sins, we have to spend an evening at His Majesty's, we at least have the satisfaction of being in a place more or less aesthetically satisfying, but at the new Opera House we are continually confronted with paintings of an extremely annoying variety; surely twirlywhirly roses flung indiscriminately upon any square foot of wall space do not constitute the heights to which our ideas of mural decoration can rise.

As for the up-to-dateness of the Opera House, that is another myth. In Europe to-day, with the exception of the cinema palaces—and in Germany they too can give us a start, and beat us—there is not a decent theatre which is not built on the one floor principle. When it is realised that every person in a theatre should be able to obtain a complete view of the whole stage from approximately the same angle of elevation—and it can be done—this type of construction becomes essential. Wagner recognised this when he had his theatre built at Beyreuth, so the idea can hardly be called of even recent origin; and yet we are assured that our theatre is absolutely up-to-date! Here, from the heights of the gods we can obtain most fantastic and original perspectives of the heads of the actors, but that is hardly what we go to the theatre for.

Of course, so long as we are satisfied with stage settings which aim at realism, but which achieve merely a rather grotesque travesty of it, there is not much need to trouble about trifles of this variety; but one of these days we shall awake to a knowledge of what the more adventurous spirits have been doing in Europe for the last ten years; then, perhaps, we shall begin to feel sorry.

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The art of the Theatre is as seriously to be considered as any of the other arts, and it is perhaps the only one in which a University College can be of really definite service. We have to look no further afield than Adelaide to appreciate the truth of this.

Surely we cannot afford to neglect the work of men of our own time and our own country. What do we know of Synge, of Shaw, of Yeats and Galsworthy, Granville Barker and Stanley Houghton, to mention only a few? And as for dramatists of European reputation like Strindberg, Maeterlinck, Brieux, Hauptmann, Thoma, Schnitzler, the Russians, and the rest of them, why, we haven't even heard of them. Here is a chance for us to effect a change in this strange state of affairs. Are we willing?

—L.F: