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

by Edward Fordham Spence

It is a misfortune that in the case of cleverly constructed dramas the uncritical members of the playgoing world, whilst half-conscious of the fact that the preliminary circumstances are not being told to them in the clumsy method now out of date, fail to get the full amount of pleasure from the technical skill exhibited. Take, for instance, what in this respect is perhaps the masterpiece, Rosmersholm. Few spectators consider it closely enough to appreciate the wonderful skill shown in conveying to the audience the vast number of facts and ideas necessary to explain the exact relations between Rosmer and Rebecca West when the play begins. However, it is hardly worth the while of the casual playgoer to study the structure of dramas sufficiently to appreciate fully such marvels of technique—the marvels are very rare.

Something might be said in favour of plays—and it was said by Prosper Mérimée—in which no knowledge of the previous histories of the parties is necessary. It is doubtful, however, whether there exists any specimen of this class of drama, and perhaps it is impossible completely to comply with such conditions.

Whether much or little is told to the audience of the things that have happened and the characters before the play begins, the last act in the ordinary drama is of an extravagant importance in relation to the whole. It has been said, with a fair amount of truth, that anybody can write a good first act, and that most plays fail towards the end. Instead of putting his confidence in the maxim "Well begun is half done," the author must rely on another which may be expressed as "Well ended is much mended."

The question how to bring a play to a close has been terribly difficult on very many occasions to the dramatist. There are various kinds of conclusion, most of them more or less formal or conventional. For instance, everyone knows what will happen towards the last fall of the curtain in the peculiarly exasperating species of drama founded upon a misunderstanding which in real life would be cleared up in five minutes, but on the stage remains unsolved for three hours or so. Countless plays end with a definite engagement of young sweethearts the course of whose love became rough at the close of the first act, or with the reconciliation of youthful spouses who quarrelled in the earlier part of the piece.

This, of course, is the so-called "happy-ever-after" ending: in most cases the comedies of this type are so artificial that few of the audience take sufficient interest in the characters to think of them as people who live after the play, and to notice the fact that the sweethearts are from their nature unlikely to live happily together, or that the young husband and wife, on account of their dispositions, are certain to quarrel within a week of the reconciliation. Plays of these kinds are essentially unimportant. Nobody cares very much how they end provided that the curtain falls not later than at a quarter-past eleven.

Real tragedies, whether of the classic, modern or romantic type, end in death or deaths. Obviously there is no other solution in most cases. Perhaps in real life Hamlet would have remained letting I dare not wait upon I would until his mother and stepfather died in the ordinary course of nature; without any amazing interposition of Providence, Romeo and Juliet might have healed the quarrel between their hostile houses and established a large family of little Montague-Capulets, and so on; but one accepts the proposition that such outcomes would be contrary to the essential laws of the existence of such plays.

Difficulties grow when we come to comedy that seeks to represent, however timidly, the life of real human beings. The bold dramatists who endeavour to represent a slice of life—Jean Jullien invented the phrase—find more difficulty in the beginning of their plays than the conventional writer: to bring them to anything like a full stop is a very rare achievement. A great many end at a comma, a semi-colon is noteworthy, a colon superb, and very often one has a mere mark of interrogation at the last fall of the curtain. Of course a full stop sometimes is achieved, for instance in the case of The Second Mrs Tanqueray; but Iris ends with something very much like a comma, and The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith can scarcely boast of more than a colon.

Ibsen has not always been successful in coming to his conclusions. In a sense A Doll's House might be called a failure: the case is one of the note of interrogation, and the audience is left in a mood of dissatisfaction, since, being deeply interested in the character of Nora, it is intensely curious to know what she will do next. Homes have been broken up and friendships wrecked by discussion upon the question, though it must be admitted that most of the quarrels concerning the play have been upon the irrelevant question whether the child-wife ought to have left her husband and children. One half of the disputants fail to see that the fact that she does abandon them is the catastrophe and not the conclusion of the comedy. In An Enemy of Society and A Lady from the Sea the author has been remarkably adroit in getting to a definite conclusion.

On the other hand, one sees that even such a master of his craft was forced to call death to his aid in many cases; for instance, Hedda Gabler, The Master-Builder, Rosmersholm, John Gabriel Borkmann, and When we Dead awaken. In nearly all of these the death is not accidental but inevitable. The Wild Duck has a tragic death in it which is by no means conclusive; indeed, it is a horrible humour of the work that the last idea of all is the suggestion of a continuing tragic comedy.

The inconclusive conclusion is unpopular. There is a strong craving in the public to have plays nicely rounded off, and this is a serious obstacle to writers who seek to represent real life, which seems to have a sort of prejudice against rounding-off human affairs neatly. In a vast number of cases the great crises in human life are followed by a tedious kind of dragging anti-climax.