Dorriforth. I see what Amicia means.
Florentia. I’ll warrant you do, and a great deal more besides.
Dorriforth. When the appointments are meagre and sketchy the responsibility that rests upon the actors becomes a still more serious thing, and the spectator’s observation of the way they rise to it a pleasure more intense. The face and the voice are more to the purpose than acres of painted canvas, and a touching intonation, a vivid gesture or two, than an army of supernumeraries.
Auberon. Why not have everything—the face, the voice, the touching intonations, the vivid gestures, the acres of painted canvas, and the army of supernumeraries? Why not use bravely and intelligently every resource of which the stage disposes? What else was Richard Wagner’s great theory, in producing his operas at Bayreuth?
Dorriforth. Why not, indeed? That would be the ideal. To have the picture complete at the same time the figures do their part in producing the particular illusion required—what a perfection and what a joy! I know no answer to that save the aggressive, objectionable fact. Simply look at the stage of to-day and observe that these two branches of the matter never do happen to go together. There is evidently a corrosive principle in the large command of machinery and decorations—a germ of perversion and corruption. It gets the upperhand—it becomes the master. It is so much less easy to get good actors than good scenery and to represent a situation by the delicacy of personal art than by “building it in” and having everything real. Surely there is no reality worth a farthing, on the stage, but what the actor gives, and only when he has learned his business up to the hilt need he concern himself with his material accessories. He hasn’t a decent respect for his art unless he be ready to render his part as if the whole illusion depended on that alone and the accessories didn’t exist. The acting is everything or it’s nothing. It ceases to be everything as soon as something else becomes very important. This is the case, to-day, on the London stage: something else is very important. The public have been taught to consider it so: the clever machinery has ended by operating as a bribe and a blind. Their sense of the rest of the matter has gone to the dogs, as you may perceive when you hear a couple of occupants of the stalls talking, in a tone that excites your curiosity, about a performance that’s “splendid.”
Amicia. Do you ever hear the occupants of the stalls talking? Never, in the entr’actes, have I detected, on their lips, a criticism or a comment.
Dorriforth. Oh, they say “splendid”—distinctly! But a question or two reveals that their reference is vague: they don’t themselves know whether they mean the art of the actor or that of the stage-carpenter.
Auberon. Isn’t that confusion a high result of taste? Isn’t it what’s called a feeling for the ensemble? The artistic effect, as a whole, is so welded together that you can’t pick out the parts.
Dorriforth. Precisely; that’s what it is in the best cases, and some examples are wonderfully clever.
Florentia. Then what fault do you find? Dorriforth. Simply this—that the whole is a pictorial whole, not a dramatic one. There is something indeed that you can’t pick out, for the very good reason that—in any serious sense of the word—it isn’t there.