Our Stage and Its Critics / By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

by Edward Fordham Spence

[The Second-hand Drama ]

For some time past people have been seeking an explanation of the weakness of our modern drama, of the fact that except in the byways of the theatre, and with rare instances on the highways, it is sadly unoriginal. Numerous causes have been suggested, and probably many have played their part. There is one element in the matter the importance of which has been overlooked—it is the mania for making adaptations. No one will deny that most of the adaptations make bad plays, and that a large proportion prove unsuccessful; and the making of them has an evil effect upon the makers. The matter under discussion is not adaptations for the English stage of foreign plays—a topic of great importance, for the lack of protection to the foreign dramatists during a long period was a great cause of the sterility of British drama; and the habit of importing has not ceased merely because the foreigner acquired the right to payment. Many a playwright who might have become an original dramatist had all his power of imagination and invention atrophied through disuse.

Nowadays we import less than formerly, but our playwrights still produce the second-hand drama, getting their material ready-made from novels, and they suffer in the same way as their predecessors, and injure their natural gifts. This is not an entirely new thing. It may be suggested that Shakespeare was one of the most persistent of adapters. He may very well be left out of the question. Such genius as his has its own laws and privileges, and cannot very well be brought in as an element when discussing the procedure of much lesser men, and yet few critics will deny that in some instances his plays were injured by his following too closely the course of his original. Perhaps in his case the gifts of imagination and invention were sometimes dulled because he was to such a great extent an adapter.

The idea of the novelist may inspire a dramatist with an idea for a play, but the novelist's treatment of his idea hardly ever supplies the dramatist with useful materials. We have had scores of radically bad plays adapted by clever men from good novels. At first sight it looks as if the playwright would gain an advantage from using ready-made materials, but careful consideration and experience show that this is not the case; he is overwhelmed by excess of material, and his task of selection is appallingly difficult.

Moreover, his material is all in the wrong form, and has to be transformed—and the process of transformation requires great skill.

For it must be remembered that the methods of the dramatist and the novelist as a broad proposition are entirely different; and when the playwright is dealing with a long, finely-written, complex novel he can hardly expect his adaptation to bear a greater resemblance to the original than that of an easy pianoforte transcription to one of the later operas of Wagner.

One need only consider any of the novels of Dickens and the stage version that impudently bears its name to see how entirely crushed the dramatist has been by excess of material—like a Tarpeia by the gifts of the enemy—by difficulty in selection, and in transformation, and recollect that the product has almost always been an inconsecutive story, unintelligible to those unacquainted with the book, destitute of the peculiar atmosphere of Dickens, irritating to lovers of the novel because pet characters have been entirely suppressed or cut down nearly to nothing, and only recognisable in many cases as a version of the original on account of costumes, names, make-up, scraps of eccentric dialogue, and general trend of the mutilated story.

Now, seeing that there are upon record a vast number of adaptations that have failed, a number that bears a proportion to the successful far higher than the proportion of failures in original works, it seems worth while to consider for a little what is at the bottom of the matter, since to do so may prevent some playwrights from wasting their time and other people's money.

First, one may ask why so many dramatists indulge in the rather inglorious work of adaptation. No doubt there is one great advantage in producing an adaptation of a successful novel. A large mass of ready-made advertisement exists: of the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands who read a popular novel, a very large proportion feel curious to see it upon the stage. Consequently the adaptation starts with the enormous aid of having been advertised very effectively on a big scale. This element alone is not sufficient to command success; for if the piece is indifferent, if the critics condemn it, if the reception is unfavourable and the unofficial opinion of playgoers is hostile, it can do little to save the work, since the readers of the book get the idea that the dramatist has made a mess of it and they keep away, and so of course does the general public.

It is, however, commonly believed that it is easier to manufacture a play from a book than to write an original drama. People imagine that the playwright, finding characters, plot and incidents ready-made in the novel, can produce the piece with less trouble and difficulty than if he has to look for them at large. This is a delusion founded upon the failure to perceive the radical difference between the technique of the novelist and the dramatist. It is true that in some cases adaptations have had enormous success: one might take two modern instances, The Little Minister and Sherlock Holmes. The latter really confirms these remarks. The general public would fancy that in the stories of "Sherlock Holmes" there are plenty of effective plots. The ingenious authors of the play were shrewd enough to perceive this was not the case; consequently they merely used certain characters from the tales and invented an entirely new story. Later on Sir Arthur did find one story suitable, and The Speckled Band has been successful as a lurid melodrama at the Adelphi and the Globe.