The real Australia

by Alfred Buchanan

For the reasons mentioned, English actors usually do well in this part of the world. The old country imposes now and then on the inexperience of the new one. It has a habit of sending here, not merely its second and third best, but its dead-beats and its derelicts. The celebrated English actor of the play-bills is, as often as not, celebrated only in the lively imagination of the entrepreneur who brings him out. He comes, however, with a certain flourish of trumpets and glamour of romance. The very fact that he hails from a distance of 12,000 miles is an aureole round his head. He can be sure of a good reception, of an interested, expectant audience. If he has any colourable qualities, they will be loudly, even rapturously, applauded. If he is very indifferent, or if he is unspeakably bad, he will scarcely be told so—at least not at first. The worst he will receive from the critics of the great “dailies” will be a kind of faint questioning, a troubled note of uncertainty, a dim reminder of some one else who played the part differently. They may damn him with faint praise; but they will be loth, at the outset, to do more. The fact that the actor is understood to have won applause in England goes for a good deal, and the commercial and social instincts of the big papers go for rather more. A few of the week-end journals may bark out vituperation, but they do not really count. It is well known that they are just as likely to attack the supremely good as the atrociously bad. In the long run, it may be—and perhaps before very long—audiences will fall away from the imported actor who is manifestly fourth and fifth rate; for Australian play-goers are not naturally dull. They are, however, under the spell of foreign associations; they are influenced, to a greater or less extent, by newspaper criticism; and they have unquestionably given a number of well-boomed and press-belauded visitors better support than, on their merits and by comparison with the local substitute, they deserved.

So far there has been no American invasion. The plays and the topical allusions in vogue south of the Line are either English in origin, or filter through an English channel. Productions hailing from the United States have made their appearance and have fretted their hour, but they have not succeeded in leaving a lasting mark. One reason is, that the associations and atmosphere of the land of the dollar are not sufficiently familiar. What do we know in Australia of the Bowery? What do we know of Fifth Avenue? What do we know, or care, for the Waldorf, or the Astoria? The local colour of Fleet Street, of Westminster, of Petticoat Lane, and of Kensington, is, owing to numerous stage acquaintanceships, something with which every audience feels at home. But to talk to the average Melbourne or Sydney man of the streets and hotels and public buildings of Boston and New York and Philadelphia, is to talk to him in a foreign language. In the majority of cases he does not know, and when he does know, he does not care.

Another reason is, that the typical American production lacks depth and height. It catches something of what is flitting on the surface of America; but it forgets that America, though topographically a large place, is only a fraction of the intellectual and artistic world. The country has not yet its Sardou, or its Sudermann, or its Ibsen, nor yet its D’Annunzio, or its Pinero, or even its Henry Arthur Jones. A dramatist spoken of as the American Sardou made his bow in Melbourne a year or two ago, with a tragedy named Nadjezda. It was soon made manifest that he had not come to stay. Neither have such productions as A Trip to Chinatown or The Belle of New York, or Leah Kleschna, been responsible for much genuine success. The Yankee playwright is clever with words and indifferent with ideas. As to emotions, he has heard that they exist.

Yet there is one important, non-English product that has won a great welcome from Australian audiences. This is the American actress. She has not been able to acclimatise the works of her own countrymen; she has usually refrained from attempting to do so. Clothing her individuality in the language of Shakespeare and Sheridan, of Ibsen and Bjornsten, of Sudermann and Maeterlinck, of Sardou and Rostand and the Younger Dumas; heralded always by a tremendous flourish of trumpets, and accompanied usually by an astute stage manager; restraining her national prejudices and reducing her American accent to a few pretty words and phrases, she has been enabled to accomplish a great deal. The lady from the United States brings with her youth as a foremost asset. She knows that it is difficult to “star” through a continent without this ally. She has it proclaimed—loudly proclaimed—as part of her equipment. Everywhere she plays the Young American Actress. It is the first and the most effective piece in her repertoire. For the rest, she finds it advisable to cultivate a manner, and a certain distinction of style, when off the stage. Sometimes she is effusive, even demonstrative, and inclined to be gracious to interviewers. Sometimes she is magnificently cold and distant, with a coldness that is only comparable to the fierce warmth of the characters in which she revels behind the footlights. But always in Australia—whether she is on the stage or off it—she is acting, acting, acting. Stage-struck people send her flowers; infatuated people write her verses. She accepts them all and welcomes them all as tributes to her artistic success. She is brilliantly clever, with a cleverness that is all of the head. She gets a great deal, and she deserves what she gets.

To come back to Australian audiences, it requires very little argument to show there is only one kind of play that really appeals to them. It is the kind of play that hovers about the confines of a socially fashionable, and morally unorthodox, world. It is edged round with impropriety; it is coloured, permeated, enlivened with what the immortal author of Bab Ballads calls “guilty splendour.” In the background are the lilies and languors of virtue, but in the foreground, placed there for the people to smile at and to condemn, are the raptures and roses of vice. The theme, no doubt, has endless variants: sometimes the end is tragic, and sometimes it is amusing; sometimes a majority of the commandments suffer, and sometimes only one. It is advisable that there should be a kind of supposed moral purpose running through the production. It is an advantage to have one or two high-minded characters as foils to the others; and as a concession to custom, or as a salve to the uneasy British conscience, it is always a wise policy to bring the immoral people to grief in the last act. But no one can pretend to deny that it is these latter—these fashionable rakes and brilliantly attired courtesans—who constitute the real attraction of the Australian stage to-day. If any one doubts this, let him attempt to run a theatrical season without them, and let him put on the boards a drama dealing only with conventional or with virtuous people. His downfall will be swift and convincing and sure.

For psychology, the typical Australian audience cares little. For poetry on the stage, it cares less. For blank verse it has no inclination. For sustained dignity it has no time. With intellectual fireworks it is but indifferently and partially amused.

Comedy that lies hid in delicate shades and nuances, comedy that is chiefly a matter of scintillating words and phrases, is not asked for by the multitude. Even the brilliancy of Mr Bernard Shaw at his best can command but a limited circle of admirers. Even the problem, considered merely as a problem, is devoid of drawing power. When it attracts, it attracts because of its dazzling pictures of luxury and licentiousness.

Tragedy requires to be carefully handled. It is only when it is decked out in certain robes, only when embroidered with certain trappings, only when set to certain music, that it will crowd the benches. The merely sordid themes have lost their hold, if they ever had one. An immoral play that persists in showing its characters in a garb of sackcloth and ashes has little chance of gaining an extended hearing.

One play that has had a marvellously successful run in Australia is entitled Woman and Wine. The name might just as appropriately have been given to nine out of every ten productions that have held, for any length of time, the local stage. Whether it is Camille, or The Second Mrs Tanqueray, or The Gay Lord Quex, or Dolores, or Zaza, or Quo Vadis, or Sweet Nell of Old Drury, or The Country Mouse, or The Marriage of Kitty, or The White Heather, or any other melodrama of the unfailing Bland Holt and Anderson pattern, the title might, with equal appropriateness, have been that of the popular piece of work already mentioned. A theatre-going public—any theatre-going public—is reached less easily through its intellect than through its senses. What wonder, therefore, that a management should find it advisable to stage Woman and Wine?

Caring only for one kind of play, Australian audiences are quite willing, in their restless desire for novelty, to coquet with others. That last expression of national boredom and ineptitude, musical comedy, has its following at the Antipodes. This form of amusement, like the others, is borrowed. It is doubtful whether Australian audiences would ever have taken to it, had they not been assured that it was regarded in England as the correct thing. Now that it has obtained a footing, it is found to have a certain attractiveness. It has become almost a rage. The reason is to be found in the circumstance that it relieves the onlooker from the necessity of having to think. This is a consideration that cannot well be over-estimated. For the rest, it boasts a number of shapely-looking chorus girls, and a funny man, whose business it is to be as mirthfully suggestive, and as suggestively mirthful as possible. There is also some music, but this scarcely counts. The comedy that is dubbed musical is not seriously vicious, but then it has nothing to do with virtue. The latter circumstance, combined with its gaudy colours, its short skirts, and its chorus girls, helps it joyously on its way.