A Play And The Public

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Title:     A Play And The Public
Author: Arthur Symons [More Titles by Symons]

John Oliver Hobbes, Mrs. Craigie, once wrote a play called "The Bishop's Move," which was an attempt to do artistically what so many writers for the stage have done without thinking about art at all.

She gave us good writing instead of bad, delicate worldly wisdom instead of vague sentiment or vague cynicism, and the manners of society instead of an imitation of some remote imitation of those manners. The play is a comedy, and the situations are not allowed to get beyond the control of good manners. The game is after all the thing, and the skill of the game. When the pawns begin to cry out in the plaintive way of pawns, they are hushed before they become disturbing. It is in this power to play the game on its own artificial lines, and yet to play with pieces made scrupulously after the pattern of nature, that Mrs. Craigie's skill, in this play, seems to me to consist.

Here then, is a play which makes no demands on the pocket handkerchief, to stifle either laughter or sobs, but in which the writer is seen treating the real people of the audience and the imaginary people of the play as if they were alike ladies and gentlemen. How this kind of work will appeal to the general public I can hardly tell. When I saw "Sweet and Twenty" on its first performance, I honestly expected the audience to burst out laughing. On the contrary, the audience thrilled with delight, and audience after audience went on indefinitely thrilling with delight. If the caricature of the natural emotions can give so much pleasure, will a delicate suggestion of them, as in this play, ever mean very much to the public?

The public in England is a strange creature, to be studied with wonder and curiosity and I am not sure that a native can ever hope to understand it. At the performance of a recent melodrama, "Sweet Nell of Old Drury," I happened to be in the last row of the stalls. My seat was not altogether well adapted for seeing and hearing the play, but it was admirably adapted for observing the pit, and I gave some of my attention to my neighbours there. Whenever a foolish joke was made on the stage, when Miss Julia Neilson, as Nell, the orange girl, stuttered with laughter or romped heavily across the stage, the pit thrilled and quivered with delight. At every piece of clowning there was the same responsive gurgle of delight. Tricks of acting so badly done that I should have thought a child would have seen through them, and resented them as an imposition, were accepted in perfect good faith, and gloated over. I was turning over the matter in my mind afterwards, when I remembered something that was said to me the other day by a young Swedish poet who is now in London. He told me that he had been to most of the theatres, and he had been surprised to find that the greater part of the pieces which were played at the principal London theatres were such pieces as would be played in Norway and Sweden at the lower class theatres, and that nobody here seemed to mind. The English audience, he said, reminded him of a lot of children; they took what was set before them with ingenuous good temper, they laughed when they were expected to laugh, cried when they were expected to cry. But of criticism, preference, selection, not a trace. He was amazed, for he had been told that London was the centre of civilisation. Well, in future I shall try to remember, when I hear an audience clapping its hands wildly over some bad play, badly acted: it is all right, it is only the children.

[The end]
Arthur Symons's essay: Play And The Public

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