One-Act Plays by Modern Authors

by Unknown

The characterization of the Player in Fortune and Men's Eyes begins at the moment that he enters the tavern, when Wat, the bear-ward, calls out:

"I say, I've played.... There's not one man
Of all the gang—save one.... Ay, there be one
I grant you, now!... He used me in right sort;
A man worth better trades."

Wat's verdict on the fair-mindedness of Master William Shakespeare of the Lord Chamberlain's company is borne out by the Player's own,

"High fortune, man!
Commend me to thy bear."
[Drinks and passes him the cup.]

The entrance of the ballad-monger gives Master Will an opening for a punning jest and, the action continuing, shows him sympathetic to the strayed lady-in-waiting, tender to the tavern boy, magnanimous to the false friend and falser love.

One method of characterization which the author allows herself to use in this play, no doubt to heighten the Elizabethan illusion, is rare in the contemporary drama: when this "dark lady of the sonnets" flees "The Bear and the Angel," the Player breaks forth into the self-revealing soliloquy, found so frequently in his own plays, and continuing as a dramatic convention until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.[3]

Characterization rests in part on pantomime. In The Little Man, the Dutch Youth is dumb throughout the play, but he is sufficiently characterized by his foolish demeanor and his recurrent laugh. The part of the Little Man himself is one long gesture of humility and dedication. In those one-act plays in which the old characters of the Harlequinade reappear, like The Maker of Dreams and The Pierrot of the Minute, pantomime transcends dialogue as a method of characterization. In the plays of the Irish dramatists, Synge, Yeats, and Lady Gregory, pantomime and dialogue contribute equally to the characterization, which is of a very high order, since all these dramatists were close observers of the Irish peasant characters of their plays.

Synge, especially, illustrates the following critical theory of Galsworthy: "The art of writing true dramatic dialogue is an austere art, denying itself all license, grudging every sentence devoted to the mere machinery of the play, suppressing all jokes and epigrams severed from character, relying for fun and pathos on the fun and tears of life. From start to finish good dialogue is hand-made, like good lace; clear, of fine texture, furthering with each thread the harmony and strength of a design to which all must be subordinated." A study of the dialogue of Riders to the Sea reveals just this harmony between the dialogue and the inevitability of the plot, the dialogue and the simplicity of the characters.

The dialogue in The Little Man is the very idiom one would expect to issue from the mouth of the German colonel, the Englishman with the Oxford voice, or the intensely national American, as the case may be. The characters, though they have type names, are, as Mr. Galsworthy would probably be the first to explain, highly individualized. The author does not intend us to think that all Americans are like this loud-voiced traveler, or all Englishmen like the pharisaical gentleman who gives his wife the advertisements to read while he secures the news sheet for himself.

The function of dialogue is the same both in the long and in the short play. For, of course, both forms have many things in common. For instance, as in the full-length play it is necessary for the dramatist to carry forward the interest from act to act, to provide a "curtain" that will leave the audience in a state of suspense, so in the one-act play, the interest must be similarly relayed though the plot is confined to a single act. In The Intruder, every premonition expressed by the Grandfather grips the audience in such a way that they await from minute to minute the coming of the mysterious stranger. The tension is high in A Night at an Inn from the moment the curtain rises. In Riders to the Sea, the beginning of the suspense coincides with the opening of the play and lasts. "They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me," says Maurya, and the audience experiences a rush of relief and a sense of release that the last words, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied," seem only to deepen.