Ibsen led the modern play, where the modern novel followed it, to the investigation of character rather than to the unfolding of a story, and one suggests that readers who find satisfaction in the modern psychological novel should find the reading of modern plays to their taste for the reason that the dramatists, though they haven't in a play the same opportunities for analysis as the novelists find in their more spacious pages, are essentially "out for" the same thing.
The type of play one is here writing about is one which has not, in the past, flourished extensively in the popular theatres; it is the type known, rather obscurely, as the "Repertory" play. It was called by that name, probably in derision, and the Repertory play was held to be synonymous with the un-commercial play. Then queer things happened. "Hindle Wakes" broke out of the Repertory palisade, made dramatic history and, what from the amazed commercial manager's standpoint was even more startling, a fortune; "The Younger Generation" followed into the commercial camp; and in the rent profiteer's year of 1919, when managers seemed forced by ruthless circumstance more even than by inclination to play the safest game and to offer the Big Public nothing but repetitions of the tried and true, two plays from the Repertories came to town. "The Lost Leader" filled the Court Theatre in a very heat wave, and "Abraham Lincoln" took the King to Hammersmith—with many thousands of his subjects. So that it will not do to speak of plays as commercial on the one hand and Repertory on the other. Repertory has golden possibilities, if you don't expect too much of it. It would be fallacious to expect the same pay-dust from "Abraham Lincoln" as from "Chu Chin Chow." Nor would one expect Joseph Conrad to sell like Nat Gould.
Sincerity is a virtue possessed, as a rule, by the Repertory play, but it will by no means do to claim for this sort of play a monopoly of sincerity. The most popular type of drama (and the most English), melodrama, is rigidly sincere—to the confounding of the Intellectual. There is plenty of dishonest thinking and unscrupulous play-making, but not in popular melodrama. In melodrama which pretends to be something other than what it is, there is immediate and obvious insincerity, but there is no writing with the tongue in the cheek in downright, unabashed melodramas of the old Adelphi, and the present Lyceum type. It will not do to call the "highbrow" plays sincere, with the implication that all other plays are insincere, any more than they can themselves be sweepingly characterized as uncommercial. Sincerity, anyhow, may be beside the point, and the term Repertory play, though unsatisfactory, stands for something perfectly well understood. No definition would be apt to the whole body of Repertory plays, but one would like, diffidently, to suggest that Repertory plays are written by men and women of intellectual honesty who postulate that their audience will be composed of educated people—and that attempt at a definition fails. It has a snobbish ring.
And now, after generalizing about Repertory plays and reading plays, to come down to the particular instance of the Lancashire plays here printed. They are three of seven plays which their author has written about the people of his native county, and reasons for publishing them now are that nobody wanted to publish plays during the war, and that the author is an optimist about the future of Repertory. Which last is only a sort of reason for publishing some of Repertory's step-children—that, at any rate, the new men may know, if they care to know, these workaday examples deriving from the only Repertory Theatre in Great Britain which created a local drama. Though none of these three plays was, in fact, produced by Miss Horniman's Company, they nevertheless belong to the "Manchester School," which was a by-product of her Company.
The "Manchester School" was never conscious of itself, as the Irish School was. The Irishmen had a country, a patriotic sentiment, a national mythology; they had, so soon after the beginning that it seemed they had it from the first, the already classical tradition of Synge; they had in the Deidre legend a subject made to their hands, a subject which it appeared every Irishman must tackle in order to pass with honours as an Irish dramatist; and there was explicit endeavour to create an Irish Drama. In Manchester, so far were we from any explicit ambition to create a Lancashire Drama that we denied the fact of its creation. What reputation it had was not home-made in Manchester and exported, but made in London and America. At Miss Horniman's theatre in Manchester, there were so many bigger things being done than the earlier, technically weak plays of the local authors. And it is worth pointing out that the authors went (it was admirable, it was almost original in them) for their material to what was immediately under their noses; they took as models the Lancashire people of their daily life, and in their plays they did not always flatter their models. The models saw themselves in the theatre rather as they were than as they liked to think they were, and they hadn't the quixotry to praise too highly authors who held up to them a mirror of disconcerting truthfulness. It came upon the authors unexpectedly, as even something a little preposterous, to be taken seriously, to be labelled, heaven knows by whom, the "Manchester School," as if they had a common aim..
That, surely, is the significance of the "Manchester School," that the phenomenon and the hope. Miss Horniman established her Company in Manchester, with Mr. B. Iden Payne, a genius, as her producer of plays. What she gave to Manchester was perhaps more, perhaps not more, than the aftermath of the historic Vedrenne-Barker campaign at the Court Theatre; at any rate, she gave a series of Repertory plays—plays which had no likelihood of being seen in the provinces under the touring system—notably well acted; she demonstrated that drama was a living art, and in the light of that demonstration there outcropped spontaneously, un-self-consciously, the body of local drama now known as the "Manchester School." Whatever the individual merits of the Lancashire plays may be, whatever, even, their collective importance or unimportance, they have this significance of localization. Stimulated by Miss Horniman's catholic repertoire, local authors sought to express in drama local characteristics.
There are no two questions in the writer's mind, nor, he thinks, in anybody's, as to whether local drama is or is not a good thing. It is more than ever good in to-day's special London conditions, but it was always good in and for its own locality, and very good when it broke away from home, travelled to London and introduced to Londoners authentic representations of natives of their country. It brought variety where variety was needed. Not all the plays of the "Manchester School," of course, have travelled. One or two, indeed, hardly travelled across the Gaiety Theatre footlights, and in the case of a few others, mostly one-act plays, there was never the least chance of their emerging from Lancashire owing to the fact that they were written deliberately in dialect. A most racy little piece, "Complaints," by Mr. Ernest Hutchinson, with its scene laid in the office of an Oldham spinning-mill, is a case in point. One doubts, even, if the comparatively urbane Manchester audience grasped the whole of its idiomatic dialogue. But these are the extremes of local drama, and generally, the Lancashire writers have avoided dialect as, in the first place, impracticable, and in the second place, disused, except (to quote Houghton) "amongst the roughest class in the most out-of-the way districts." Accent is not dialect though possibly originates in it. Even when one wishes to use dialect one must not, for stage purposes, write it as it is spoken. The dramatist selects his material from dialect as he selects his larger material from life. Dramatically correct dialect is literally incorrect; it is highly selected dialogue which indicates, but does not obscure, and the true dialect dramatist is not the man who exactly imitates the speech of a district, but he who most skilfully adapts its rhythms and picks out its salient words. Synge invented an Irish dialect which is false in detail and infinitely true in broad effect, and the "Manchester School," faced with the same difficulty, has solved it in the same way, hoping, though without much confidence, that the Lancashire cadences it adopted and used in its very few dialect plays may sound to alien ears as aptly as the language of Synge's Irish sounds to our own. Though you may search in vain the dialogue of Mr. Allan Monkhouse's plays for local characteristics, the "Manchester School" has as a rule indicated by the use, in greater or less degree, of local idioms that the speech of Lancashire has a well-marked individuality; but dialect, as a distinctive variant of the national language, can hardly be said to exist in Lancashire.
One labours the point a little in order to make clear that the "Manchester School" had no accidental advantage, over writers who lived near other provincial Repertory Theatres, in the existence of a language whose dramatic literature they felt urged to create; there was no such language. And its absence makes a curiosity of the fact that from Manchester alone of the Repertory centres has any considerable body of local drama emerged. (Dublin is another matter; one speaks here of Great Britain.) Other Repertory centres, like Birmingham and Bristol, must have local characteristics: Liverpool is, geographically at any rate, in Lancashire; and Glasgow has a language of its own. None of these Repertories was sterile, but even Birmingham, despite Mr. John Drinkwater and "Abraham Lincoln," was economical in creativeness and fathered no local drama. Must the conclusion be that the Manchester atmosphere has, with its soot, a vitalizing dramatic principle?
Possibly; but a less fantastic theory is that Manchester had Miss Horniman, and other Repertories had not. Again one insists that the Lancashire plays were a by-product, and a by-product only, of Miss Horniman's Company. Who in their senses would go to Manchester expecting to evoke a local drama? And if she had gone there with a prejudice in favour of poetic plays, it is more than likely that no local drama would have been evoked. Modern Lancashire is industrial Lancashire—one forgets the large agricultural oases, while nobody but map-makers and administrators remembers that a slice of the Lake District is in Lancashire—and industrialism does not inspire the poetic play. Miss Horniman began, on the contrary, with a season whose best productions, though it included Maeterlinck, were Shaw's "Widower's Houses" and McEvoy's "David Ballard." Those two productions seemed, rightly or wrongly, to fix the type of play preferred by Miss Horniman's Company; it happened—let us call it realistic comedy—to be the type by which the life of Lancashire could be best expressed in drama and the future authors of the "Manchester School," most of them of an impressionable age, some of them already fumbling their way to dramatic expression, seized avidly the type and the opportunity. They were not so provincial as to have to wait for Miss Horniman to come to be introduced to Shaw: but there are worlds of difference between reading Shaw, even between seeing him indifferently produced, and a Shaw play transmuted by the handling of such a producer as Iden Payne. It is putting the case without hyperbole to say that Miss Horniman's Company was an inspiration.
The Repertory whose "note" is the poetic play will probably evoke no local drama, because, until we get the village Repertory, local drama is the drama of the modern town, wherein the stuff of poetry exists, if at all, only as a forced revival of folk-lore. Anything can be great poetry to the great poet; one speaks here of the average playwright, the observer of his fellow man in a provincial town, seeking his medium of expression in drama; and such a man is unlikely to find it in the poetic play or to find encouragement and inspiration from a Repertory where poetic plays are visibly preferred. It is almost to be said that Miss Horniman's Company and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre stand for rival theories of the drama, but not quite; they have too much, including Shakespeare, in common.