MAID OF FRANCE[35]
By
HAROLD BRIGHOUSE

Miss Horniman could hardly have foreseen the development of a Manchester school of dramatists as the outcome of her experiment with repertory at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester, because her purpose was to produce good plays irrespective of geographical limitations. But the fact is that the project was a source of real inspiration to a group of young Lancashire writers among whom may be mentioned Allan Broome, Stanley Houghton, and Harold Brighouse. There is no plainer illustration of the relations between the audience and the play, or between the theatre and the play, or between the actor and the play than the dramatic activity that followed the establishment of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and the setting up of Miss Horniman's experiment in Manchester.

Although in this collection, Brighouse is represented by Maid of France, a play with no local Lancashire coloring, first given on July 16, 1917, in London, not Manchester (it was later produced at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York, beginning April 18, 1918), he has up to the present time written seven plays about Lancashire. He has been particularly successful in one-act drama; Lonesome Like, The Price of Coal, and Spring in Bloomsbury have been popular here and in England. B. Iden Payne, who directed productions at the Gaiety Theatre for some time, says: "In all Harold Brighouse's plays there is in the acting more laughter than one would expect from the reading." A number of Brighouse's plays have been published; in the introduction to the latest volume,[36] he writes: "In another age than ours play-books were a favorite, if not the only form of light reading.... The reader mentally producing a play from the book in his hand looks through a magic casement at what he gloriously will instead of through a proscenium arch at the handiwork of a mere human producer." This playwright's attitude toward the reading of plays, with its appeal to the imagination, is one justification for a collection like the present one.

Brighouse is himself a Manchester man, having been born in Eccles, a suburb, on July 26, 1882. He was educated at the Manchester Grammar School. Until 1913 he was engaged in business, carrying on his literary work at the same time, but in that year he gave himself up exclusively to writing. Besides plays, he has written fiction and criticism. During the Great War, he was attached to the Intelligence Staff of the Air Ministry.

MAID OF FRANCE

The Scene represents one side of a square in a French town on Christmas Eve, 1916. The buildings shown have suffered from German shells, except the church in the center which stands immune, protected, as it were, by the statue of Jeanne d'Arc which stands on a pedestal, surrounded by steps in front of it. The church is lighted up within for the midnight mass, but it is its side which presents itself to one's view, so that the ingoing worshipers are not seen. The statue is of the Maid in her armor. It is nearly midnight on Christmas Eve and the lighting, which should not be too realistically obscure, suggests faint moonlight.

Paul, a French private in war-worn uniform, stands by the steps, gazing adoringly at the statue. He is a charmingly simple, credulous man, in peace a peasant. To him there enters from the right, Blanche, a flower-girl, in a cloak, with a basket of flowers. In face and figure, Blanche must resemble the statue. She is a pert, impudent, extremely self-possessed saleswoman, burning, however, with the fierce light of French patriotism which, almost in spite of herself, is apt to get the better of her. Ready as she is to trade upon Paul's mystic reverence for the Maid, familiarity with the statue has not bred contempt in her. She stops by Paul, offering her flowers with a cajoling smile.

Blanche. Will you buy a flower, monsieur?