Exits and Entrances

by Eva Moore

Another point of his writing is that almost all the characters, where it is possible, have to depict a full range of emotions. Fun and pathos are in almost every part, every part is worthy of study, for by giving the time and thought to it the actor can come to realise the character in full, because behind the actual written word lies so much that may be found if it is sought for. That is due, I think, to the fact that Harry could, if necessary, have written the whole life of every character, because before he began to write he lived with them, as it were, for weeks.

In his plays—or, rather, in every act of his plays—you will find a great sense of completeness, not only in the actual “curtains” themselves, but in the construction of the act. As he says in The Wilderness, which George Alexander produced at the St. James’s Theatre, “the wheel has come full circle”. Take the second act of that particular play, which begins with Sir Harry Milanor bringing his uncle to the place in the woods where he, Sir Harry, played as a child. He begins to create an atmosphere of fairyland; he tells of how he stormed the pass, fought the elephants, killed the giants, and so won his kingdom. Then come the two children, who bring with them food for the fairies, and Sir Harry and his old uncle creep away. As the act goes on, mundane things come into the scene, but the curtain falls with the children again in the fairy ring, looking for the food which they brought the “good people”; it has gone, and the curtain falls with the children stating firmly, “I knowed they was hungry”. So, perhaps subconsciously, you wait for the next act with the spirit of fairyland and all that it means still with you. You have your belief in the good, simple, unquestioned things of life established, which is the author’s way of setting for his next scene.

Again, in the second act of Eliza, Monty Jordan sits reading plays for Vera Lawrence, whom Sandy is going to marry, and find her a theatre and a play to make her name, for she is an actress. You see Vera Lawrence as the centre of Sandy’s world; even his best friend is dragged in to work for her. So at the end of the act you find Vera Lawrence, her hair falling round her shoulders, to prove to Eliza that it is not a wig, while the latter stands nonplussed and dismayed. Vera is the “top note” all through the act, at the end as at the beginning; so your mind, holding the picture of the triumphant Vera, feels the same surprise as does Lady Pennybroke when in Act 3 Eliza enters, looking no longer a “sight, sticking in at the front and out at the back”, but quite charming, ready to conquer not only Monty Jordan, but Sandy Verrall. Act 2 has made the audience not only laugh at Eliza for what she is, but makes them contrast her with Vera, and realise how unlikely it is that she can ever enter successfully into the lists for Sandy’s affections, as she does eventually.

I suppose all playwrights have their favourite methods of gaining mental effects, and the “full circle” was one of Harry’s. He loved to have what are known as “good curtains”—that is, he loved a scene or act to end on a very high, strong note. Time after time you will find the act ends with some short sentence, but which is really the concentration of a long speech, so written that in a few words you get all the energy and determination, or all the pathos and tragedy, that a speech of many lines might have made less vivid.

For example, take the last act of Love and the Man (played by Forbes Robertson and Miss Kate Rorke), when Wagoneur comes to ask Lord Gaudminster if he may see his wife (who lies dead upstairs) and whom Wagoneur has loved.

“You won’t let me see her?” he asks, and Gaudminster answer simply “No.” Wagoneur turns and, half-blind with grief, gropes his way from the room. That is all! But could a speech of many pages be more eloquent?

Again, the last lines of the second act of The Dangerous Age (played by Harry and myself). Jack lies hurt, perhaps dying, after an accident; Bill, his brother, sits with Egbert Inglefield waiting for news. His mother, Betty Dunbar, has gone to London to say good-bye to her lover. Egbert Inglefield, who also loves her, knows this, though of course Bill, her son, does not. Bill comes to Egbert and says, “Oh, Eggy, I feel rotten”; Egbert, knowing that all his hopes are falling in ruins, says “So do I, old man!” Very simple, but the tragedy of his answer touches you far more than a noble speech would do at that particular juncture.

With regard to the plays themselves, and again I do not want to give a long list of them, but only to touch one or two which seems to me particularly typical of the writer’s philosophy. I remember that after his death one paper spoke of him as the “gay philosopher”, and I should seek long before I found a better phrase in which to express his outlook. His own attitude was “valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck”, and so he drew his men and women. They may suffer, and you suffer with them; but it is healthy pain, which looks towards the east for the sunshine of to-morrow which will bring alleviation. There is no feeling in your mind, as you watch them, that “things can never be better”, that misfortune is inevitable; except in Grierson’s Way, which was one of his earlier works, when the critics were still waiting for “him to grow old, and sensible, and happy”, as one of them said after the production of My Lady Virtue, which Arthur Bourchier, Violet Vanbrugh, and myself played at the Garrick.

He calls certainly 75 per cent. of his plays “Comedies”, but they are comedies which touch very often on tragedy. And in a sense he was right in so calling them, for comedy, properly speaking, is a comment on the imperfections of human nature, which causes amusement to those who understand men and manners. So most of his plays are comedies, though some of them rely on tragic incidents for their story.

I have spoken before of Harry’s fondness for the “redeeming feature” in even his worst characters, and how few really bad people he ever tried to draw! I think as he wrote, or earlier still, when he began to think about his characters, he acquired a certain affection for them, which made him wish to make them something less than the villains he had at first intended. Added to that, his dislike of unpleasant things, and you get some idea of why he wrote the type of plays he did. Even Mr. Clement Scott, who disliked his first play, Bogey, so intensely, wrote of him later: “Believe me, his two last plays, When We Were Twenty-One and The Wilderness, will be English classics when all the mock Ibsenism and sham exercise in society salacity are buried in the dust of oblivion.” So he gave the world what I think are not only beautiful plays, but essentially kindly plays.