Two recent plays divide thus:
| Candida | The Silver Box | ||
| Act I | 27 pages | Act I | 27 pages |
| Act II | 24 pages | Act II | 27 pages |
| Act III | 21 pages | Act III | 21 pages |
The plays just cited are of very different lengths: Kismet[42] took nearly three hours in performance; Candida[43] and The Silver Box[44] are so short that they force a manager, if he is to provide an entertainment of the usual length, to a choice: he must begin his performance late, or allow long waits between the acts, or give a one-act piece with the longer play. Yet it is noteworthy that in all these plays except Steele’s, the first is as long as any other act, or longer, and the last act is the shortest. However, the only safe principle is that of Dumas père already quoted: “First act clear, last act short, and everywhere interest.”
In proportioning the whole material into acts, it should be remembered, of course, that the time allowed for a theatrical performance ranges from two hours to two hours and three quarters. Five to fifteen minutes should be allowed for each entr’acte unless the usual waits are to be avoided by some mechanical device. Figure that a double-spaced type-written page takes in acting something more than a minute, though necessary dramatic pauses and “business” make it difficult to estimate exactly the playing time of any page. Speaking approximately, it may be said that a three-act play of one hundred and twenty typewritten pages will fill, with the entr’actes, at least two hours and a half. In apportioning the story into acts the first requisite is, then, that the total, even with the necessary waits between acts, shall not exceed the length of time during which the public will be attentive.
The length of each act must in every case be determined by the work in the total which it has to do. Since pre-Shakespearean days, the artistry of the act has been steadily developing. Until circa, 1595, what dramatists “strove to do was, not so to arrange their material that its inner relations should be perfectly clear, but to narrate a series of events that did not, of necessity, possess such inner relations. It is much to be doubted whether any thought of such relations ever entered their heads.”[45] Influenced particularly by Shakespeare, the drama from that time has steadily improved in knowledge of what each act should do in the sum total, and how it should be done. The act is “more than a convenience in time. It is imposed by the limited power of attention of the human mind, or by the need of the human body for occasional refreshment. A play with a well-marked, well-balanced act-structure is a higher artistic organism than a play with no act-structure, just as a vertebrate animal is higher than a mollusc. In every crisis of real life (unless it be so short as to be a mere incident) there is a rhythm of rise, progress, culmination, and solution. Each act ought to stimulate and temporarily satisfy an interest of its own, while definitely advancing the main action.”[46] Each act, then, should be a unit of the whole, which accomplishes its own definite work.
Here is Ibsen’s rough apportioning of the work for each act in a play of which he was thinking.
Do you not think of dramatising the story of Faste? It seems to me that there is the making of a very good popular play in it. Just listen!
Act 1.—Faste as the half-grown boy, eating the bread of charity and dreaming of greatness.
Act 2.—Faste’s struggle in the town.