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"Dramatic Actualities."

(By W. L. George).

This book contains four essays on modern drama, with special reference to plays intellectual and plays popular. We must confess our dislike of the term "intellectual" as savouring too much of pedantry and priggishness; but for lack of a better word we must be content to apply it, as Mr. J. M. Synge has done, to the "play of ideas." Our intention here is not to be critical, but to allow Mr. George to speak for himself, and so we have quoted freely and at length from what we consider one of the sanest books on modern drama and the attitude of the public towards it.

In his first essay, "Some Dramatic Criteria," Mr. George deals with the apparent failure of those whom he calls the intellectual playwrights. This failure is due partly to technical faults. They are

"As a body guilty of ten crimes : the shadowy plot, the play without a climax, hypertrophy of atmosphere, sentiment (sometimes), garrulousness, the exaggerated type, inveterate gloom (sometimes optimism), obscurity, length, and shapeless purpose."

There is undoubtedly a great amount of truth in this. Mr. Granville Barker's tragedy, Waste, is by no means helped to its conclusion by the dreary conversation of "a cabinet in distress." Nor can we imagine a successful production of Major Barbara—successful, that is, from the box-office point of view. It is necessary in drama to have action, and again action; it is also necessary that the plot should move logically towards its climax. No amount of brilliant dialogue will compensate completely for absence of action in drama.

Another reason for the failure of the modern intellectual drama is that the average man does not find it sufficiently light for him—

"He cannot submit for three hours to the grinding misery of Justice, The Silver Box, or Waste; his demand is for one of his page 42 familiar friends from the legitimate drama—the comic butler, the Colonel with a catchword, the widow who has seen better days. He wants them; he misses them!"

We think Mr. George comes much nearer the truth in his essays on Plays Unpleasant and Religious Drama. But why plays "unpleasant?" The answer is because they are real.

"The primary objection to the unpleasant detail is fundamentally an objection to reality. For reality abounds in unpleasant rather than pleasant things, let the romanticists say what they will . . . But the English desire for pleasure is strong enough to persuade the public to take any mental food, provided it be—pleasant. In the sex play the unpleasant is almost invariably the frank. Take, for instance, Les Trois Filles de M. Dupont, where is discussed the position of three women, the one unmarried, wretched, and dried up; the second ill-mated and subjected to an ignominious sex-thrall; the third free and disreputable. That, in the public view, is an unpleasant play . . . This is the attitude which prevents the performance of Mrs. Warren's Profession and of Champions of Morality; the Public is agreed to recognise the features of these plays as evil, but' it will not allow them to be discussed . . . In the same group is Esther Waters, one of whose scenes—the baby-farm—has been pronounced a blot on the play. Everybody knows that baby farms exist, but hardly anybody likes to have them thrust before his eyes. What the public will not tolerate is the shock to its self-complacent certainty that these dreadful things happen only in newspapers . . . The chaste-eared do not consider whether an evil should be analysed within one act or eight, whether full discussion is useful and incomplete discussion noxious; they prefer to assume that all discussion is harmful, and that it should be burked. Thence sprang the opposition to the physiological education of the young, the library and dramatic censorship, the cloaking of all dangers connected with sex. It is an unreasoning opposition, and it is not prepared to reason."

The average Briton feels, too, that religion is a thing apart which the stage should not touch.

"Though agnostics are not lacking and Laodiceans a national majority, the English seem to think they must keep their hands off religion in general, and the Christian religion in particular. Indeed they respect that which they despise, and, in a delicious spirit of paradox, believe that which they disbelieve."

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Religious plays are very few in number, and if we examine them, the case for their banishment from the stage seems very poor indeed. Take one case—The Showing-up of Blanco Posnet.

"An entirely absurd idea prevails that all references to the deity must be couched in the inflated language of the early 17th century: that is ridiculous. When Blanco Posnet reluctantly and almost angrily accepts God, he says, 'He's a sly one. He's a mean one. He lies low for you. He plays cat and mouse with you. He lets you run loose until you think you're shut of Him and then, when you least expect it, lie's got you.' This is not irreverent. No reasonable person can expect a cowboy hedonist, a poetic scallywag such as Blanco, to express himself otherwise. He is saying substantially the same thing as the Fifth Jew in Salome: 'No one can tell how God worketh. His ways are very dark.' Blanco is not irrexerent; indeed, he is passionately reverent; he is vanquished; he has faith. Those who do not understand this are stupid people, therefore people who have no rights. . . ."

From the consideration of the religious drama and objections to it, a large question arises—

"If religion cannot stand battery, can it stand at all? Can it be more than an embalmed corpse? If it crumbles, then it cannot be founded on a rock . . . It should be the pride of the church to be attacked. I imagine a church more militant welcoming aggression, serene and secure in its consciousness that no human thing can harm it."

We hartily recommend Mr. George's book to all students of the drama.