WHAT MAKES A PLAY?
English Managers Tell of the Methods They Employ In Estimating Value of Manuscripts.
Not long since the Grand Magazine, of London, held a symposium of opinions from the leading English managers on the elements in a play which determined their acceptance or rejection of it. It cannot be said that the result may be read with much profit by the aspiring playwright. Doubtless those managers who, according to a footnote, declined “for one reason or another” to discuss the methods which governed their choice, were wiser in their day and generation than those who did. For, after all, it is a gamble. And what’s one man’s meat may be another’s poison.
Take, for example, the assertion of Frederick Harrison, of the London Haymarket. He declares:
“I must be quite alone when I read a play, secure from interruption, and read it through at a sitting, and rapidly. If it will not bear rapid reading there is generally something wrong—incoherence of story, clumsiness of dialogue, or something that detracts from the probability of success for the play.”
Contrast this method with an incident vouched for in the Dramatic Mirror by the popular playwright Haddon Chambers, on his recent visit to this country. Speaking of one of his most successful plays, he said:
“Mr. Beerbohm Tree had the piece three months before he ever looked at it. Then, one day, I managed to read him the first two acts. The following day he was slightly indisposed and very courteously put me off. I saw him go into the Turkish bath, followed him, finished the reading then and there, and had the work accepted.”
Lewis Waller, the actor-manager, practically gets no further in the course of half a page report than telling the kind of play he does not want—ordinary melodrama or a farcical comedy.
Frank Curzon, who rivals Charles Frohman in the number of theaters he manages, and who is now a partner with James K. Hackett in “Mr. Hopkinson” and other ventures in America, says, on the other hand:
“When I read a play, I do not care to which class it belongs. If it hits me hard enough I produce it.”
The recipe for George Edwardes, the great musical comedy producer, is first an idea that shall be simple in character but capable of elaboration in a way that shall give striking opportunities to the members of his company. Often the locale or the background for the piece is selected long before the plot is attached to it.
W. H. Kendal, who frequently used to visit us with his wife—a sister of the late Tom Robertson, the teacup and saucer playwright—insists rather indefinitely that the characters shall live before him and that their story shall interest him.
Tom B. Davis, another musical comedy expert, in whose theater “Florodora” was brought out, thinks that the plot is not of supreme importance, but he wants the low comedian woven into the story in such a way that when the lovers find themselves in a predicament the audience shall know that it is he who will help them out. He also deems it advisable that “a dramatic situation shall be led up to in the finale of the first act, in which the baritone and the prima donna shall be the central figures.”
Altogether, Mr. Davis is the most explicit in his rules of any of the bunch, for of the two remaining entries for the Grand’s symposium, Fred Terry—who originally produced “Sunday”—sums up the order in which the interesting factors in a play should be put as, first, Heart; second, Heart; third, Heart, and Cyril Maude, the English Little Minister, confines himself to the statement that he would not choose a gloomy play.