THE O. W. VADE MECUM.
Question. Is it easy to become a dramatist?
Answer. As easy as anything else.
Q. What are the requisites?
A. A West-end theatre, a first-rate troupe of artists, a trained audience, and a personality.
Q. What do you mean by a trained audience?
A. An assembly accustomed to accept everything as wit, and to laugh at anything.
Q. Would such a gathering consider it amusing for someone to say "Flirting with one's husband is quite indelicate: it is like washing one's clean linen in public"?
A. Certainly; and would find much to admire in a dialogue given over for something like ten minutes to an exhaustive consideration of muffins.
Q. And what do you mean by a personality?
A. More or less—an insouciant manner, and a rather startling button-hole.
Q. Does the personality require a speech or a cigarette?
A. Neither now, as both have ceased to be the fashion.
Q. Given the requisites you have specified for creating a dramatist, what is the product?
A. A trivial comedy for serious people.
Q. Why give a play such a title?
A. Why not?
Q. Can a comedy occupying two or three hours in representation be entirely trivial?
A. Not to the members of the audience.
Q. And are they serious people?
A. That depends upon the condition of their brains and their capacity of enjoyment.
Q. Does the trivial comedy require a plot?
A. Nothing to speak of.
Q. Or characterisation?
A. No, for the same kind of dialogue will do for all the company—for London ladies, country girls, justices of the peace, doctors of divinity, maid-servants, and confidential butlers.
Q. What sort of dialogue?
A. Inverted proverbs and renovated paradoxes.
Q. Is this kind of dialogue entirely new?
A. Not entirely, as something rather like it has been heard at the Savoy for the last ten or twenty years.
Q. But is it good enough for a British Public?
A. Quite good enough. They will laugh when a London lady expresses surprise at finding flowers growing in the country, and roar when they hear the retort, that plants are as common in the provinces as people in town.
Q. But surely this vein of sarcasm, satire, or whatever it is, will some day be worked out. What can the dramatist then do?
A. Act upon precedent, and try something else.
