Playwrights on playmaking

by Brander Matthews

The other influence was external; it was the gradual modification of the ground-plan of the playhouse, a modification which resulted at last in the picture-frame stage to which we are now accustomed and to which all the plays of this century are necessarily adjusted. In size and in shape the theater for which Reade and Taylor composed ‘Masks and Faces’ was very like the theater for which Sheridan had composed the ‘School for Scandal,’ three-quarters of a century earlier; and it was very unlike the theater for which Sir Arthur Pinero composed ‘Mid-Channel,’ nearly three-quarters of a century after.

The theater of Reade and Taylor, and of Sheridan also, was a large building with a stage which projected in a curve into the auditorium, so that the proscenium boxes were in the rear of the footlights. This stage was only dimly lighted,—in Sheridan’s time with oil-lamps and in Reade and Taylor’s with gas-jets. The curve into the orchestra, far beyond the curtain, was known as the apron; and the most significant episodes of the play had to be acted out on this apron, remote from the scenery, because it was only when he was close to the footlights that the changing expression on the performer’s face could be seen by the spectators. As the actor on the stage was in intimate association with the audience, the playwrights did not hesitate to give him confidential asides and explanatory soliloquies to be delivered directly at the neighborly spectators; and they also provided him with the lofty rhetoric and the artfully articulated set speeches not inappropriate to a platform orator.

But in the course of the past half-century the scenic investiture of a play has become more elaborate, more precise, more characteristic and more realistic. The electric light has come to illuminate all parts of the scene with equal brilliancy, so that it is no longer necessary for the performer to advance to the front of the apron in order that his expression may be seen; and therefore the apron, being useless, was abolished. The curtain now rises only a foot or two behind the footlights; and the proscenium-arch is now made to serve as a picture-frame, through which the spectator gazes at the performers, who are carefully trained to “keep in the picture.” The playwrights, no less then the players, have been compelled to modify their methods; and they soon discovered that soliloquies and bravura passages were incongruous with the realistic set and with acting carefully restrained until it was afraid to get “outside the picture.”

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This change in the conditions of performance was brought about gradually, unintentionally and by the logic of events. None the less is it one of the most momentous in all the long history of the drama; and we may doubt whether its remoter results have even yet made themselves manifest. It is perhaps the chief cause why the Old Comedies have gone out of favor. They were composed for a different theater, to be performed by actors with a different training, before audiences with different expectations. The companies who were accustomed to act the Old Comedies and who were conversant with their traditions have been dispersed; and the actors of to-day would be ill at ease in these robust and florid comic dramas, but perhaps not more ill at ease than would be the spectators of to-day.

It is not that our actors are individually any less gifted than their predecessors of half-a-century ago, or that the art of acting has declined in the past fifty years; and we may venture the suggestion that the old time performers might be almost as awkward and as constrained in our modern problem-plays composed for the picture-frame stage as the contemporary performers would be in the Old Comedies composed for the apron-stage.

It may very well come to pass in the final quarter of this twentieth century, when the conditions of the theater have been still further modified (in ways we cannot foresee), that the best and most representative of the plays popular in the first quarter of this century will reveal themselves as archaic in method as are now the Old Comedies of the eighteenth century. If that should come to pass, some writer of 1970 may be moved to inquire into the reasons why the problem-play of 1920 has been banished from the boards.

(1919)

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