CHILDREN'S PLAYS
THE hold of the Pantomime on the affections of the public is possibly as strong as ever it was, but the character of those entertainments has been slowly changing and with it the character of the audience. Professedly I suppose the Pantomimes are for children, but except that almost any entertainment will amuse children, owing to their extreme curiosity, there is little in the modern Pantomime that seems to have been devised for them. In fact, the Christmas Pantomime has of late years come to have a particularly sophisticated and adult savour, which is to be noticed in the treatment of the old fairy-tales—one or other of which, in name at least, still forms the basis of every Christmas Pantomime, although in a shape that would scarcely be recognised by the compilers of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
This is particularly noticeable in the metamorphosis of the Witch who, fatigued by the possession of mysteriously terrible powers, dwindles into the obscene-faced mother-in-law. The sere old woman who turned the seven white-horsed princesses into low stones, over which the moss crept slowly, has become a gin-inoculated Widow Twankey, who dances like a man and gloats over the highly-successful love-affairs of her son as leading to more and better drink.
Pantomimes have always been less concerned with the imaginative, the more-than-human, than with the extraordinarily actual. Some will remember the artillery bombardment which was introduced one Christmas during the war into a Pantomime at Drury Lane, which was, if I remember rightly, superficially the story of The Sleeping Beauty. It was good fun that bombardment, much better fun than are the majority of these topical excrescences, but one felt that it had been introduced because the principal comedian had got bored with the comparative sober quietness of that land of imagination in which the inhabitants of a fairy-tale progress as if seen in a glass darkly. He had, therefore, deliberately pulled the story out of its semi-supernatural country into the limelight, and was rewarded by instant mirth and vociferous applause from nine-tenths of the audience. Only a few children hesitated, feeling the pangs of a violent up-rooting, a being torn out of a land, through which they had been slowly but with intense delight travelling, into a mass of gesticulating faces ranged in circles watching the elaborate and apparently comic contortions of two small grotesque figures on what was obviously the stage.
I have no doubt at all that the instincts and judgment of children in these matters is far superior to that of the majority of their elders. The steady vulgarisation in the theatre of fairy-tales originally the inventions of adult minds of phantasy and sensibility superior to the general is a record of the debasing influence of the mass of the inhabitants of our large cities, who are dissatisfied with less than an instant reaction to the efforts of those whom they pay to amuse them. They are too restless to submit to sit quietly and by slow degrees receive the heritage of beauty accumulated by the ambages of minds whose devious and amazed wanderings are like the apparently directionless perambulation of bees who are, without pause, gathering honey.
Sinbad the Sailor, Aladdin, Ali Baba—whatever they be, the essence of these Pantomimes is something grosser than any fairy-tale, and, whether borrowed from the brothers Grimm, or Andersen, or any other source, their fragile and mysterious beauty is roughly obliterated to give place to an obvious rough-and-tumble humour and crude topicality of the kind that not one in a million could miss. Of course the somewhat "hearty" atmosphere of Christmas-time is not conducive to fineness of vision. The subtler outlines in which resides the beauty of a fairy-tale, a girl, or a mountain are not to be grasped by eyes slightly dazzled with the inner glow of good feeding—that glow which has more heat than light. It is a time when a joke has to be obvious to be seen, and the propensity to enormous girth perceptible in the most popular characters of Pantomime may have a similar origin; but I speak from a painful experience when I declare that for a Christmas Pantomime nothing can be too crude, too stale, too trivial to be funny, and that the best condition in which to go to the Pantomime would be that in which you could see simultaneously the largest number of Moons.
The Change in the Pantomime
The Pantomime has become a sort of Christmas Revue, and parents in large numbers have ceased taking their children to these entertainments, appealing as they almost exclusively do to the "grown-up." In their place we have had of late years a large number of children's plays, of which Sir James Barrie's Peter Pan is the best known. It is years since I saw Peter Pan, but I was, I remember, greatly taken with it, and went during that season five or six times. Part of the attraction it had for me lay in the charming personality of Peter himself, as played by Miss Pauline Chase, whose postcard portraits I bought in large numbers and gazed on adoringly for long intervals in the seclusion of my own room. But the very fact that the play gave scope to a young actress to embody a figure of such originality and charm as Peter must be accounted as a virtue in the author.
I know there are people who object to fairy-tales. They have lately been greatly cheered by the public confession of Madame Montessori that she belongs to them. Apparently the essence of their and also of her objection to such seemingly innocent and delightful inventions of the human brain is that the most desperate need of children is for a steady inculcation of facts. Having schooled your child in facts—writes in a letter to the Observer the gentleman who knows the Secret of Human Power—in the pleasantest manner possible up to the age of, say, sixteen, then the lessons to be derived from fiction may be gently and cautiously dealt with. The spectacle of an adult dealing "gently and cautiously" with a fairy-tale is one of those which seem to have been invented as a subject for a Max Beerbohm cartoon; but it is curious that anyone should have such a narrow conception of reality as to think that it is compassed in material facts. How one is to present love, honour, bravery, beauty, virtue, daring, adventurousness, and all the other qualities of the human mind except by imaginative creation, when they are purely creations of men's minds, I cannot see. Perhaps these deluded realists imagine that they are abstract nouns. They would have us say: "Here, dear children, are a number of abstract nouns; contemplate them as you would marbles, but remember that they are not marbles or even peanuts but nouns. You cannot play with them, you cannot eat them, and what good they are nobody knows, but everybody is supposed to know their names, as there is no other way of distinguishing them one from another." This same champion of Madame Montessori's Anti-Fairy-Tale Campaign writes further in his letter to the Observer that Shakespeare's plays "were not written specially for children, but as morality incentives distinctly for adults." This is a pitiful notion for any intelligent adult to have, and one that no child with a mind not distorted by unnatural virtue could be expected to understand. It is most expressive of that horrible "seriousness" which seizes some minds like a cramp until the sufferer drowns himself in an ocean of blithering nonsense, refusing all the ropes which the onlookers on terra firma throw him, because their faces are convulsed with laughter. "Morality incentives"—to cling to the shocking expression of Madame Montessori's disciple—are of two kinds. They are either negative or positive. The negative class is the only one that an Anti-Fairy-Tale League could put in its syllabus. It consists of a series of ejaculations: Do not drink! Do not swear! Do not tell lies! etc. Drawn up in an amended form suitable for children, it might read like this:
(1) Do not drink your brother's ginger-beer.
(2) and (3), etc. Do not imitate your parents.
It may appear excellent advice, but virtue—as many religious teachers have suspected and modern science is proving—does not reside in turning oneself into a van-load of inhibitions. Virtue is wholly positive, it is an expression of the spirit. He that imagines virtue is virtuous, and no other. It is a fairy-tale that men are trying to live in the world, and it can only be expressed in art. There is no virtue in a mere exhortation to be virtuous. Nobody takes any notice of exhortations, and quite rightly; but men who have seen a vision will try to capture it. What the creative artist does is to give men a vision of virtue, of beauty (for beauty is virtue), and it is just this vision which the Montessori teachers would have us put behind the backs of children while they glue their eyes to material things.
Not only would this practice be pernicious, it would be impossible to carry out, for, brought to its logical conclusion, the theory would demand the abolition of the teaching of mathematics and of science, as well as of poetry and of drama; or rather it would reduce mathematics to the counting of beads, science to the naming of smells (a return to "stinks" from which the schools are just escaping), poetry to this sort of thing:
Last night in pulling off a sock
I gave my little nose a knock.
To-day in jumping to get up
I fell across my brindle pup.
That is to say, poetry would vanish, and as for drama, the only drama we could have would be by taking a proscenium into the park and putting it up in front of two lovers kissing on a seat; but the moment the lovers saw us the "drama" would cease, and we could not pay them to go on with it for our amusement, for that would be deception, that would be make-believe.
Those of us who are not by infirmity of constitution natural victims to every new fad that is advertised will take pleasure in anticipating a great growth in the supply of and demand for children's plays. They offer great scope for development, and will increasingly appeal to authors who have no desire to write the conventional stage play—a thing without imagination or beauty, a mere artificial contrivance to enable actors to exhibit their charm and skill. There is no possibility of getting literary men of the highest class to write the plays we see succeeding in our London theatres during the greater part of the year. They could not possibly have any interest in work of that kind, and they could not do it well, but the children's play is a much more elastic and adaptable dramatic form. To-day, for instance, even verse is used in successful children's plays, and managers do not demand for this purpose work so conventional and stereotyped as they require ordinarily. This Christmas there were three children's plays produced in the West End: Peter Pan, Once Upon a Time, and Where the Rainbow Ends. Of these only Once Upon a Time was new, and it was rather a series of fairy-tales—connected by the device of an elf telling the stories to a goblin who captured her—than an original work; but it was cleverly done by the author, Miss Wildig, and delightfully produced by Miss Edith Craig. I must confess to having enjoyed Once Upon a Time far more than most of the plays I had seen during the preceding year, but it was a pastiche not a homogeneous invention, and it contained an absurd and very irritating pseudo-patriotic melodrama called The Woman of the Black Mountain, as well as an extremely amusing and rather savage burlesque of certain marriage customs which are not yet quite extinct entitled The Bone of Contention. This latter would make an excellent sketch for a Revue, or possibly Mr. Oscar Asche will introduce it into Chu Chin Chow.
Demand and Supply
It is a great pity that the Pantomime has so degenerated now when it had got rid of much of the knock-about farcical element, of a great deal of the tyranny of the spectacular, and of the "transformation scene," because it is a form that offers great possibilities to the author, and if a genius came along he could do something wonderful with it. Even without a genius or without waiting for him a great deal could be done. If only those responsible for the annual Pantomimes at Drury Lane and the Lyceum would leave the beaten track for once and get into touch with the younger generation of writers and commission them to produce a Pantomime we might get a valuable addition to our dramatic literature. It involves very little commercial risk, and holds the possibility of an immense financial success, apart from other considerations. It may be asked why do not these young men write a Pantomime on their own initiative? But the answer is simple. Our young writers have no time to spend on work which has no prospect of ever being looked at, much less produced; besides, a Pantomime is essentially a thing for collaboration between two or three of them, and they are nearly all as busy as they can be with bread-and-butter journalism and with individual projects in those few spare hours that remain to them. There is, however, little doubt that they could produce a Pantomime which would draw all London for months, just as there is little doubt that the Pantomime and the children's play are the most promising and flexible of the dramatic forms which confront our young writers. The Revue may be thought to offer almost equal opportunities, and to be capable of development out of its present chaotic state, but it is rather more restricted by the fact that it has such a large public. To have the largest public is to have the least hope of commanding the attention of your audience sufficiently for them to appreciate what is not obvious. Besides, the Revue supplies a definite demand which does not change from year to year. It is a demand for pretty girls, pretty dresses, dancing and humour, and if there suddenly appeared among us a greater dramatic genius than any that has ever lived he would not be able to satisfy that demand as well as Mr. C. B. Cochran, Mr. André Charlot, or Sir Alfred Butt do. It is the minority that is not catered for in drama as it is catered for in literature. Where are the thirty-five thousand readers of the Times Literary Supplement in the land of theatres? They are scattered in twos and threes here and there, always dissatisfied and disgruntled. Whether at a Pantomime, at a Revue, at a Comedy, or at a Drama they find the entertainment a hundred per cent. below the standard they demand, and their only pleasure is an occasional Shakespearean production or a children's play. But they could be mobilised and brought together to support solidly and without the fickleness of the large public a theatre that gave them what they wanted. If the experiment were made with children's plays they would be reinforced by the thousands of parents who will not submit their children to the vulgarities of the latter-day Pantomime.
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The next performance of the Phœnix Society will take place on February 8th and 9th, when Dryden's Marriage à la Mode will be given.
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It is rumoured that Mr. Henry Ainley's next production at the St. James's will be Stephen Phillip's Paolo and Francesca, in which Mr. Ainley made his first success.