LONDON’S STAGNANT THEATRICAL SEASON
BY ALAN DALE
London has begun to howl sensationally about the American Theatrical Syndicate, and to discuss the possibilities of its invasion of London.
Of course this is the warm season, when snake stories and sea-serpent legends are distinctly in order. Therefore the machinations of the American Theatrical Syndicate have made good reading, and plenty of space has been given to the subject. One journalist has suggested that the playwrights of England and the United States form a league, destined to break up the trust, very much after the style of the Authors’ Society in France. “Why should they not form themselves into a society,” asks this writer, “for the protection not only of their own interests, but of the interests of the theater, of the interests of the actors, and of the interests of the public? As the trust snaps up an actor when once his reputation is established, so it deals with dramatists. Once a dramatist has made a mark, the trust practically buys him up; that is to say, it makes him an offer outright for all his work to come. That is part of the infernal system.”
All of which is quite good, and true, and logical. It reads remarkably well, with just the spice of wholesome plaint that one loves to excavate. After a month of continuous theater-going in London, however—from the Strand to Piccadilly Circus, and from Piccadilly Circus to Shaftesbury Avenue—I can’t help reflecting that if the syndicate or any syndicate had been let loose in London this year, with the option of cornering everything in sight, the fact remains that there is scarcely a production in London worth transplanting. Furthermore, the fear that an American invasion would deal a death-blow to London art seems absurd. I haven’t found any art to death-blow.
Nearly everything that London writers have said of the syndicate is true, and, perhaps, not stringent enough, but—with an accent on the “but”—how it could possibly harm London goodness only knows. Never has theatrical entertainment in the English metropolis been at a lower ebb. A few of its features will be done in New York this year, and they will prove exactly what I have said. English playwrights seem to be suffering from too much money, for they apparently lack the stimulus to struggle. That money may, of course, have been contributed by American managers, who buy “pig-in-a-poke” fashion, but if that be so, there are not enough “independent” playwrights to form a society. As for leaguing themselves with American playwrights—well, puzzle: find the American playwrights.
The saddest case of perverted humor I have sampled in a very long time is that of J. M. Barrie’s play—or whatever it chooses to call itself—entitled “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire,” at the Duke of York’s Theater. Barrie must, indeed, be very “comfortably fixed,” for no other condition could conceivably call forth such a miserable guy on the theater-going public as this “three-act page from a daughter’s diary.” Naturally it has attracted a good deal of attention, for Barrie has done noble things in his day, and “The Little Minister” still lives as a monumentally delightful achievement. But “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” is a “satire” built on such a weak and irritating foundation that it is difficult to consider it except with contempt—which is a cruel way of looking at Barrie.
The heroine, or central figure, or point of attack, in “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” is a romantic young girl, who has been to so many “matinées” that she has grown to look upon life as a theatrical performance. At first you think that Amy Grey is going to be extremely amusing, as she chats satirically of her life, with her boon companion—another matinée fiend. Amy’s father and mother return from India after an absence of a good many years, and Barrie plunges into a plot.
The stagestruck girl has always heard that when a woman visits a man’s rooms at midnight there are illicit relations that should be immediately broken up. She hears her mother promise to call upon Stephen Rollo at midnight, and assumes, with much girlish glee, that her mother needs rescuing. The entire motive of “Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire” lurks in Barrie’s effort to be funny around this cruelly topsy-turvy, and rather nauseating, idea.