"A Midsummer Night's Dream."
I am not sure that Mr. Granville Barker's faithful followers are being quite kindly entreated by him. He happens to have a keen sense of humour and for some little while he has been trying, with a very grave face, to see how much they will swallow. This time, everybody else except the initiated can see the bulge in his cheek where his tongue comes.
The alleged faults of the old school, which the new was to correct, were (1) an over-elaboration of detail in the setting; (2) a realism which challenged reality. ("Challenge," I understand, is the catch-word they use.) Both these qualities were supposed to distract attention from the drama itself. The answer, almost too obvious to be worth stating, is that the grotesque and the eccentric are vastly more distracting than the elaborate; and that, if you only sound the loud symbol loud enough the audience has no ear left at all for the actual words. As for the "challenging" of reality the new school would argue that, as the stage is a thing of convention to start with—artificial light, no natural atmosphere or perspective, no fourth wall, and so on—all the rest should be convention too. The answer, again almost too obvious, is that, since the audience has to bear the strain of unavoidable convention, you should not wantonly add to their worry. And, anyhow, the human figures on your stage (I leave out fairies and superhumans for the moment) are bound to challenge reality by the fact that they are alive. If Mr. Barker wants to be consistent (and he would probably repudiate so Philistine a suggestion) his figures should be marionettes worked by strings; and for words—if you must have words—he might himself read the text from a corner of the top landing of his proscenium.
Hermia (Miss Laura Cowie). "I upon this bank will rest my head."
And the strange thing is that no one in the world has a nicer sense of the beauty of Shakspeare's verse than Mr. Barker. Indeed he protests in his preface: "They (the fairies) must be not too startling.... They mustn't warp your imagination—stepping too boldly between Shakspeare's spirit and yours." (The italics are my own comment.) He is of course free, within limits, to choose his own convention about fairies, because we have never seen them, though some of us say we have. Mr. Chesterton naturally says they can be of any size; Mr. Barker says they can be of any age from little Peaseblossom and his young friends to hoary antiques with moustaches like ram's horns and beards trickling down to their knees. And as many as like it, and are not afraid of being poisoned, may have gilt faces that make them look like Hindoo idols with the miraculous gift of perspiration. But he should please remember that the play is not his own. It is, in point of fact, Shakspeare's, and I am certain he was not properly consulted about the Orientalisation of the fairies out of his Warwickshire woodlands. You will be told that he has been properly consulted; that he himself makes Titania say that Oberon has "come from the furthest steppe of India," and that she too had breathed "the spiced Indian air." But on the same authority Mr. Barker might just as well have fixed on Asia Minor or Greece as their provenance. She charges Oberon with knowing Hippolyta too well, and he accuses her of making Theseus break faith with a number of ladies. Clearly they were a travelling company and would never have confined themselves to the costumes of any particular clime.
Anyhow, when at His Majesty's you saw Oberon in sylvan dress moving lightly through a wood that looked like a wood (and so left your mind free to listen to him), you could believe in all the lovely things he had to say; but when you saw Mr. Barker's Oberon standing stark, like a painted graven image, with yellow cheeks and red eyebrows, up against a symbolic painted cloth, and telling you that he knows a bank where the wild thyme blows, you know quite well that he knows nothing of the kind; and you don't believe a word of it.
But, to leave Shakspeare decently out of the question, I liked the gold dresses of the fairies enormously, so long as Puck—a sort of adult Struwel-Puck that got badly on my nerves—was not there, destroying every colour scheme with his shrieking scarlet suit, which went with nothing except a few vermilion eyebrows. I liked too the grace of their simple chain-dances on the green mound (English dances, you will note, and English tunes—not Indian). But in the last scene, where they interlace among the staring columns, their movements lacked space. Indeed that was the trouble all through; that, and the pitiless light that poured point-blank upon the stage from the 12.6 muzzles protruding from the bulwarks of the dress-circle. There was no distance, no suggestion of the spirit-world, no sense of mystery (except in regard to Mr. Barker's intentions).
The best scene was the haunt of Titania, with its background of Liberty curtains very cleverly disposed. As drapery they were excellent, but as symbols of a forest I found them a little arbitrary. I do not mind a forest being indicated, if you are short of foliage, by a couple of trees (in tubs, if you like) or even a single tree; but somehow—and the fault is probably mine—the spectacle of hanging drapery does not immediately suggest to me the idea of birds' nests. I am afraid I should be just as stupid if Mr. Barker gave me the same convention the other way round, and showed an interior with foliage to indicate window-curtains.