Pastiche and prejudice

by Arthur Bingham Walkley

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not a chocolatier. I have no vested interest in either Menier or Marquis. But I am a frequenter of the playhouse, and live, therefore, in the odour of chocolate. I know that without chocolates our womenkind could not endure our modern drama; and without womenkind the drama would cease to exist. The question is, therefore, of the deepest theatrical importance. I feel sure the British Drama League must have had a meeting about it. The advocates of a national theatre have probably considered it in committee. The two bodies (if they are not one and the same) should arrange an early deputation to the Food Controller.

Meanwhile the Lord Chancellor wantonly paradoxes. Evidently he is no playgoer. That is a trifle, and since the production of Iolanthe perhaps even (in the phrase of a famous criminal lawyer) “a amiable weakness.” But, evidently also, he is not a chocolate eater, and that is serious. I suppose, after all, you are not allowed to eat chocolates on the Woolsack. But there is the Petty Bag. It would hold at least 2 lb. of best mixed. Why not turn it to a grateful and comforting purpose? The Great Seal, too, might be done in chocolate, and as I understand the Lord Chancellor must never part with it, day or night, he would have a perpetual source of nourishment. It is time that the symbols of office ceased to be useless ornaments. Stay! I believe I have stumbled incidentally on the secret of Lord Halsbury’s splendid longevity. Ask Menier or Marquis.

But the present Chancellor has, clearly, missed his opportunities. Let him visit our theatres and there recognize the futility of his pretence that their primary business is to present drama. He will see at once that what he put forward as a main business is in reality a mere parergon. Drama is presented, but only as an agreeable, not too obtrusive, accompaniment to the eating of chocolate. The curtain goes up, and the ladies in the audience, distraites, and manifestly feeling with Mrs. Gamp (or was it Betsy Prig?) a sort of sinking, yawn through the first scene or two. Then there is a rustle of paper wrappings, little white cardboard boxes are brought out and passed from hand to hand, there is a dainty picking and choosing of round and square and triangular, with a knowing rejection of the hard-toffee-filled ones, and now the fair faces are all set in a fixed smile of contentment and the fair jaws are steadily, rhythmically at work. To an unprepared observer it cannot be a pretty sight. Fair Americans chewing gum are nothing to it. There are superfine male voluptuaries who do not much care to see women eat, even at the festive board. But to see scores of women simultaneously eating chocolates at the theatre is an uncanny thing. They do it in unison, and they do it with an air of furtive enjoyment, as though it were some secret vice and all the better for being sinful. The act-drop goes up and down, actors are heard talking or the orchestra playing, men pass out for a cigarette and repass, but the fair jaws never cease working. The habit of needlework, lace-making, and perhaps war knitting has given lovely woman that form of genius which has been defined as a long patience. They eat chocolates with the monotonous regularity with which they hemstitch linen or darn socks. It has been said that women go to church for the sake of the hims, but they go to the theatre for the sake of chocolates. And the Lord Chancellor, good, easy man, says the primary business of the theatre is to present drama!

No, its primary business is to provide comfortable and amusing surroundings for fair chocolate-eaters. The play is there for the same reason the coon band is at a restaurant, to assist mastication. That is the real explanation of recent vicissitudes in the dramatic genres. Why has tragedy virtually disappeared from the stage? Because it will go with neither fondants nor pralinés. Why the enormous vogue of revues? Because they suit every kind of chocolate from 4s. to 6s. per lb. Why is Mr. George Robey so universal a favourite? Because he creates the kind of laughter which never interferes with your munching. The true, if hitherto secret, history of the drama is a history of theatrical dietary. Why is the Restoration drama so widely different from the Victorian? Because the first was an accompaniment to oranges and the second to pork-pies. We live now in a more refined age, the age of chocolate, and enjoy the drama that chocolate deserves. There has been what the vulgar call a “slump” in the theatrical world, and all sorts of far-fetched explanations have been offered, such as the dearth of good plays and the dismissal of the “temporary” ladies from Government offices, with consequent loss of pocket-money for playgoing. The real cause is quite simple, as real causes always are. Chocolate has “gone up.”

And that is the secret of all the agitation about the 8 o’clock rule. The purveyors know that, once in the theatre, ladies must eat chocolate, whatever its price. It is a necessity for them there, not a luxury, and after 8 p.m., when the imported supplies are running low, almost any price might be obtained for the staple article of food on the spot. But why, it may be asked, are the imported supplies, in present circumstances, insufficient for the whole evening’s consumption? Simply because the chocolates eaten by women are purchased by men, and men are so forgetful. Besides they have an absurd prejudice against bulging pockets. Clearly “Dora” ought gracefully to withdraw the 8 o’clock prohibition. It would not only be a kindness to those meritorious public servants, the chocolate vendors, but be also a great lift to the languishing drama. Ladies who have emptied their chocolate boxes are apt to become peevish—and then woe to the last act. With still another smooth round tablet to turn over on the tongue (especially if it is the delightful sort that has peppermint cream inside) the play might be followed to the very end with satisfaction, and even enthusiasm. The Lord Chancellor may ignore these facts, but they are well known to every serious student of the chocolate drama.

GROCK

There must be a philosophy of clowns. I would rather find it than look up their history, which is “older than any history that is written in any book,” though the respectable compilers of Encyclopædias (I feel sure without looking) must often have written it in their books. I have, however, been reading Croce’s history of Pulcinella, because that is history written by a philosopher. It is also a work of formidable erudition, disproving, among other things, the theory of the learned Dieterich that he was a survival from the stage of ancient Rome. No, he seems to have been invented by one Silvio Fiorillo, a Neapolitan actor who flourished “negli ultimi decenni del Cinquecento e nei primi del Seicento”—in fact, was a contemporary of an English actor, one William Shakespeare. Pulcinella, you know (transmogrified, and spoiled, for us as Punch), was a sort of clown, and it is interesting to learn that he was invented by an actor all out of his own head. But I for one should be vastly more interested to know who invented Grock. For Grock also is a sort of clown. Yet no; one must distinguish. There are clowns and there is Grock. For Grock happens to be an artist, and the artist is always an individual. After all, as an individual artist, he must have invented himself.

It was a remarkably happy invention. You may see that for yourselves at the Coliseum, generally, though true clown-lovers follow it about all over the map wherever it is to be seen. Victor Hugo (and the theme would not have been unworthy of that lyre) would have described it in a series of antitheses. It is genial and macabre, owlishly stupid and Macchiavellianly astute, platypode and feather-light, cacophonous and divinely musical. Grock’s first act is a practical antithesis. A strange creature with a very high and very bald cranium (you think of what Fitzgerald said of James Spedding’s: “No wonder no hair can grow at such an altitude”) and in very baggy breeches waddles in with an enormous portmanteau—which proves to contain a fiddle no larger than your hand. The creature looks more simian than human, but is graciously affable—another Sir Oran Haut-ton, in fact, with fiddle substituted for Sir Oran’s flute and French horn.

But Sir Oran was dumb, whereas Grock has a voice which reverberates along the orchestra and seems almost to lift the roof. He uses it to counterfeit the deep notes of an imaginary double bass, which he balances himself on a chair to play, and he uses it to roar with contemptuous surprise at being asked if he can play the piano. But it is good-humoured contempt. Grock is an accommodating monster, and at a mere hint from the violinist waddles off to change into evening clothes. In them he looks like a grotesque beetle. Then his antics at the piano! His chair being too far from the keyboard he makes great efforts to push the piano nearer. When it is pointed out that it would be easier to move the chair he beams with delight at the cleverness of the idea and expresses it in a peculiarly bland roar. Then he slides, in apparent absence of mind, all over the piano-case and, on finally deciding to play a tune, does it with his feet. Thereafter he thrusts his feet through the seat of the chair and proceeds to give a performance of extraordinary brilliance on the concertina.... But I am in despair, because I see that these tricks, which in action send one into convulsions of laughter, are not ludicrous, are not to be realized at all in narrative. It is the old difficulty of transposing the comic from three dimensions into two—and when the comic becomes the grotesque, and that extreme form of the grotesque which constitutes the clownesque, then the difficulty becomes sheer impossibility.