On another day I was taken to see a fairfusser at work on an old-fashioned play which was to be ‘acted,’ in our sense of the word, by students. He made his actors rehearse a scene; and then all sat down on chairs and took up stereoscopic glasses. Immediately, at the other end of the room, two coloured films appeared, exactly reproducing the movements of the actors, while at the same time a gramophone repeated the words they had uttered, in such a manner as to seem to come from the mouth of each actor who spoke. With the glasses the illusion was complete, and I could hardly believe I was not re-dreaming the scene I had just witnessed, except that the producer could stop the play at will, or even go back to a phrase or gesture to point out the errors of voice or movement of which the actors had been guilty. He could also show how a gesture would be more effective if performed at a greater or less speed; and how admirable this method was I could judge from the looks of pleasure or mortification on the actors’ faces as they saw themselves displayed.
There was one handsome young actor who seemed by his vehemence and assurance to be more talented than the rest, and to him I asked to be introduced, that I might learn his views from him. He led me aside, and with great earnestness explained to me how experience had shown that one could not take for granted the least intelligence in an audience. Words, he said, conveyed nothing to them unless accompanied with appropriate action: and this he ascribed to the fact that an audience was a crowd, and therefore followed the normal law of mass psychology in being much stupider and more primitive than a single person. The actor, therefore, had to deal with the simplest objects or ideas, indicating them by a kind of airy drawing. The connection between them, the grammar or the syntax as it were (so he was kind enough to phrase it for my understanding) was portrayed by the actors’ emotion as expressed in gesture or tone. That was why plays with few words were better than plays with many words, as in the latter case the number of gestures became very tiring both to the eyes of the audience and the muscles of the actors. He had a noble, yet reasoned, scorn for any player who stood still and with hardly a movement allowed sentences merely to trundle out of his mouth, and he considered his place could very well be taken by a gramophone.
To illustrate the stages of his art, he took me to a room to see a young actress practice an easy passage, and I was much gratified by the manner in which she expressed by gesture the meaning of the words she was uttering; and I could not but admire the subtle difference she made in pointing to the floor when she said in one case ‘down’ meaning merely downstairs, in another the infernal regions. The same variation was introduced in her rendering of ‘up,’ and I did not fail to note that each gesture emphasised a new beauty in her arms. She also practised some ‘tone-work’ as they call it, and for my benefit declaimed an old-fashioned line “To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,” and it is hard to imagine, as it is impossible to describe, the frigidity she put into the word ‘cold,’ or the horror and loathing with which she vivified the word ‘rot,’ so making their meaning quite clear to any audience.
My actor friend afterwards told me that she had sadly bungled the word ‘obstruction,’ because she had not yet reached the year in which abstract terms were studied; and being himself nearly at the conclusion of that period, he gave me a finished version of the line “The quality of mercy is not strained,” which quite transported me, and which I should not know how to praise sufficiently. The gesture for ‘quality,’ initially too simple, was raised to a high state of complexity by the young man’s genius, and I should no doubt have understood it perfectly had I been more used to the method.
I later asked the young woman if such interpretation did not involve work almost too arduous, since nothing is more tiring than to bring one’s ideas to the level of common minds; and she told me that though the intellectual labour was harder than in any other profession, their task was lessened by the fact that so few authors had any idea of what they really meant that the actors could substitute such phrases as lent themselves more readily to their temperament.
There was another actor, with a mobile mouth and masterful manner, whom I saw practising for his thirty-third performance of a part, and therefore engaged in working out a thirty-third reading. I was amazed at this, which is so contrary to our own method, but was soon persuaded of its rightness. For a work of art, this actor said, did not exist apart from the observer—it was a collaboration; and as no observer was ever twice in the same mood, he could never experience the same sensation from the identical thing. One might say, to adapt the words of an old Greek sophist, “No man can go to the same play twice.” He then went on to argue very brilliantly that since the actor made the work of art, was indeed himself a piece of it, his share of the collaboration was to make it on each occasion as different as possible from the last, so as to help any observer who might come more than once to any play. (He knew several ladies who had been to see him no less than seventeen times in the same character). This also had the extra advantage of avoiding that dull monotony—for what is art without an element of surprise?—so often to be seen in our actors, who think they have achieved a final rendering, and attempt day after day to repeat a thing which can never really occur even twice.
I was much satisfied at what I had seen and learnt at the Academy, but was made slightly melancholy by the thought that if ever I should return to my own time, I should find our actors and actresses much below the level of what I had come to expect from their calling.
III
OTHER THEATRES
The National theatre which I have described was not, of course, the only kind, though it had many imitators; and I shall now pass to some others, beginning with that which I think will most interest readers of the present day, but which was rarely mentioned in the polite society of the age. This was the Cathartic Theatre, where people went to be cured of the passion of love. In our day, as has been for many generations past, we often refer to love-sickness but it is half in jest, and there are few of us who do not think the undoubted pains of the state amply repaid with its joys. Its dangers, however, now only beginning to be recognised, were fully taken into account in 2,100, for it was seen that the claims of society were incompatible with an emotion then relegated to the songs of derivative poets. Already we know that the battle between the self and the ideal social self gives rise to the most frightful diseases, but in our day we only try to cure the unhealthy symptom instead of going to the root of the matter and abolishing the cause. At this time, though the malady was well in hand, its approaches were so insidious that patients going to a doctor for what they thought was one sickness would often be surprised by a diagnosis which convicted them of love, and would later be seen entering the Cathartic Theatre with shamed faces or that air of studied indifference we assume when we do not wish to be noticed, thinking that by this method we shall appear to have no face at all.