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

by Edward Fordham Spence

One might almost say there is none. A foreign management at the New Royalty Theatre produced a number of works mounted in a fashion that would horrify an ordinary West End London manager, and yet the rather daring season was really successful. So much the better. Probably if the cost of production of each play had been ten times greater nobody's pleasure would have been appreciably increased and the receipts would not have advanced perceptibly. It is doubtful whether the scenery for the baker's dozen or so of plays cost as much as is often expended by our managers on a single work.

Is there no lesson in this? Why, if an audience can be attracted, interested, and even delighted in the Soho house, though play and players are not aided by the expenditure of barrelfuls of money on the mounting, should it be deemed necessary to employ a small fortune every time a work is presented by our native managers? As far as I can judge, the French season, although triumphant, was not marked by the appearance of any prodigious star with whom we were not already familiar, nor were the new pieces of astounding quality.

The truth is that the assistance given by costly mounting is very little. The scene which by its magnificence causes a gasp of surprise loses all its effect after two or three minutes, and unless the play and acting are really meritorious the audience is quite as much bored when the mounting is splendid as when it is merely decent. Possibly it is even more bored; unwittingly it is affected by a sense of disproportion.

We all know that jewellery does not embellish a plain woman; that, on the contrary, after a minute or two, one ceases to gaze on the gewgaws and then the sight of the ugly face comes as something of a shock. Consider the jarring effect of a noble pearl necklace upon a scraggy neck, and, changing the figure, think how disappointing is a bad dinner served beautifully. There is a French phrase concerning a scanty meal on a flower-decked table that seems in point: Il m'a invité à brouter et je l'ai envoye paître. Sydney Smith, after a mean dinner served in a gorgeous room, observed that he would prefer "a little less gilding and a little more carving."

Mr H.B. Irving, in a lecture given at the Royal Institution, ascribed the alleged pre-eminence of actors during the Garrick period to the weakness of the current drama and the economy in stage-mounting, two matters that forced the players to tremendous exertion in order to hold the house, which, by the way, he believes to have been very finely critical. An audience is more truly observant of plays and playing when its attention is not distracted by considering the cost of the costumes, by wondering if the marble pillars are solid, by curiosity as to how the lighting effects are contrived, and by asking whether the play will run long enough to earn its initial cost.

Whether the large sums of money expended produce an effect agreeable to the trained eye is a little outside the topic. Yet it must be suggested that such beauty as the costly stage pictures present generally belongs to the category of the very obvious. This is not surprising; if a great deal of money is spent in order to produce a gorgeous spectacle, common-sense demands that the result should be to the taste of a vast number of people, otherwise the management must lose money. It would be idle to pretend that there are very many playgoers who possess fine taste, consequently the money must be lavished in order to delight people with a more or less uncultivated taste. No doubt a great deal of money may be spent on quiet details, and sometimes is, without the attention of the ordinary playgoer being drawn to the expenditure, but the case is exceptional. In plain English, it very rarely happens that the extravagant sums employed in mounting plays produce a beauty that appeals successfully to any people save those whose ideas of the pictorial art are bounded by the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. Moreover, consideration is paid to the fact that there are Philistines who will admire a thing merely because they believe it to be costly.

Certainly there is much to be said on the other side, or at least a great deal is urged by people who believe what they say. It has been pretended that Shakespeare would have been delighted by such productions of his works as we have seen in modern times, and have rejoiced in the pictures contrived by the scene-painter, costumier and others working under the direction of the producer. To this it has been objected that, though the pictures might have pleased him, he would have been disgusted by the fact that a good many of his beautiful lines have to be cut because of the length of entr'actes and occasional pieces of stage business designed in order to draw the attention of the audience to the beauty of the scenery.

The reply is made that a large quantity of the most famous passages in Shakespeare are descriptive of scenery, and would not have been written but for the fact that he had no other means of conveying his ideas to the audience. If there be any truth in this, one may be very thankful for the fact which coerced him into his word-painting. Certainly the world has profited by this compulsion, for millions who have never and will never see the theatre's efforts to represent Shakespeare's pictures have had infinite pleasure from the author's successful endeavours to realize his ideas by the force of words.

As I have already mentioned, Mr H.B. Irving ascribes the alleged superiority of the Garrick-period actors to their lacking the help of the fine scenery of notable contemporary dramas. It would seem to follow that in his opinion the alleged weakness of modern acting is due to the fact that the players rely too much upon the plays and scenery. Upon this aspect of the matter no opinion need be offered, but it may be said confidently that Mr Irving's theory applies to dramatists, and that the existing playwrights unconsciously become somewhat less self-reliant because they have such assistance from the producers.

The art of the theatre is the art of illusion and also of compromise, and no rule connected with the stage can be pushed quite home to its apparent logical conclusions: therefore one must have some amount of appropriate scenery, and costumes may not be flagrantly incongruous; but when once these modest demands have been satisfied the audience will be well content with mounting in which nothing more is involved if the play be well written and acted, and agreeable in style to its taste; and we know very well that some of the longest runs have been enjoyed by works produced at little cost.