Wherever flows London stone the slits exist. A deep, dark archway out of Surrey Street dives under the Norfolk Hotel; follow it, go down Surrey Steps, and you shall come to a water-gate, on which you may yet lean and smell the tar of Henry Fitz Alwyn’s barge. Another slit, behind the Alexandra Hotel, will lead you through Old Barrack Yard (I do not know what barrack) and past low, industrial cottages, to the petrified splendours of Belgravia. I wish I knew them all, for I discovered yet another last week, after overlooking it for over sixteen years. It is called St James’s Market, and leads off the Haymarket, towards the neat elegancies of Jermyn Street. That does not sound promising; yet, lost among the backs of warehouses and restaurants, there stands a long, low house coated with green plaster; it is a workshop, but some sense of fitness had bidden the workers relieve its green walls with claret curtains. I choose to be sure that in this house Axford tried to imprison Hannah Lightfoot, until the fair Quakeress fled to her Georgian lover.
And follow the green spot on the map, on the borough map, that cares so much for the borough, so little for the town. The borough map will lead you to green fields where flourish the sardine tin and the wild hyacinth. It will lead you to a churchyard, itself buried between theatres and shops, behind St Ann’s, Soho, where King Theodore of Corsica has laid his insurgent bones. It will lead you behind the solemnities of South Paddington into the vast churchyard behind the little Chapel of the Ascension. This is open to you all day; there you will find sparse graves, vast lawns and, under the trees, friendly seats where you may dream of death, or, if you prefer, of loves that will companion you to that bourne.
II
PLAYGROUNDS
CHAPTER II
PLAYGROUNDS
It is strange that the theatre should matter in a nation such as ours, which has gained a reputation for liberalism and tolerance, being tolerant because it cared for nothing, and liberal because it understood little. The vogue of the theatre reflects the character of urban England, which is as frivolous as that of urban Italy is dour; because it is the symbol of pleasure, easily attained and still more easily digested, it can always find room in the newspaper, where the affairs of the nation flicker and the claims of art are unmet. For let there be no confusion: art and the theatre are not the same thing; almost one might say that if a play possesses artistic quality it holds a passport to eternity, with this difference, that many things lost in eternity are remembered. A little more may be said of this further on.
London has always been a city of theatres, perhaps because we have, for many centuries, laboured under the Puritan tradition: its bitterness has attached to the theatre a glamour foreign to it in hotter lands. When you open a book of memoirs by an Italian, a German, or a Russian, you may be sure that it will consist in portraits of politicians, biographies of cocottes, stories of riots and coronations, but if at Hatchards you peer into any volume called My Life, or something like that, you will almost invariably discover that the greater part of the author’s life seems to have been employed in meeting Sir Henry Irving, or waiting outside the Adelphi on first nights. The theatre, you see, is wicked and winning; the most august of the augustine, Messrs Coutts and Co., stamp upon their cheques their old sign: ‘At the “Three Crowns” in the Strand, next door to the Globe Theatre, A.D. 1692.’ I will wager those three crowns that no bank manager would ever think of advertising on his cheques: ‘Next door to Westminster Abbey.’ Why this should be is not entirely explained by the Puritan tradition, and it is still less explained by the London theatres themselves, nearly all of them, the meanest, dirtiest, dingiest, fustiest, frowstiest edifices in the country. This is true, whether you pass from Drury Lane, that cave of winds, to ‘behind,’ at the Kingsway, where the oldest rabbit would get lost. Indeed, our theatres must have been influenced by the Puritan tradition, for everything has been done to hide their addresses in the papers, to make their doors invisible, their seating suitable for a Christian martyr. There is not in London a pre-Boer War theatre the pit of which is not summed up by Rutland Barrington’s song: ‘You bark your shins, you bang your head, your knees are up to your nose in bed ...’ and so on. They are so arranged that people delicately place their feet in the small of your back, so that nobody can enter the middle of a row without disturbing it, or leave it without infuriating it; as for the rakes, in spite of the matinée hat, I suspect that they have been planned to encourage expensive transfers. Of course, the worst theatres are those which are known as the ‘good old’ ones. There is no such thing as good old. There is nothing but bad old, and the theatre is an example. It must have been that heathen god, Good Old, invented Covent Garden. Good Old got it up in red and gold (Good Old would); Good Old planned the slips, which on one side let you hear all the strings and on the other all the brass. Good Old says it is cheap for half a crown. Good Old planned Drury Lane and laid it down where no buses pass. And, no doubt, Good Old handed over what was then Her Majesty’s Theatre to Shakespeare as dramatised by Beerbohm Tree.
Some of the old London theatres, it is true, are a little less repulsive because they are not quite so large. Thus, the Haymarket, the Royalty, and in a queer, insidious way old Sadler’s Wells. Sadler’s Wells has gone; there to-day upon the film cowboys race and rescue, and negroid heroines register their emotions, but not long ago it was one of the few pleasant places Good Old had bequeathed us, with its hemicycle of plush-backed stalls, its little boxes lined with an inch of lush and half an inch of dirt, its heavy red hangings, favourable to lovers, its preposterous plays of love, gold, faith, patriotism, and banana falls. You see, at Sadler’s Wells, Good Old dated back to about 1780, while at most of our theatres he has brought himself up to date, say to 1860, and has grown respectable; it has not agreed with him. When we consider the few new theatres that have been built, such as the Scala, the Little Theatre, the Ambassadors, we are sure that the old cannot be brought up to date. Like most old institutions, the English theatre can be reformed only by dynamite.
As in many human things, architecture is at fault. The playhouse is evolved from the Roman circus. But the circus offered a performance without scenery, which could be seen from all sides. When scenery came, it grew impossible to show the play except from one side, so as not to give away the mystery; thus we obtained the semi-circular auditorium, which would be quite satisfactory if it did not result in a perpetually partial view for one half of the audience. The old play was mainly pantomimic; when the play grew more articulate it became impossible to hear the words very far, and as the theatre could not spread outwards it spread upwards. Then chaos came, for rakes had to be so arranged as to enable people to see, and yet packed close under another tier. The result is sardines.
Indeed, when we consider what it labours against, it is remarkable that the theatre should be so healthy. Every year, well over half the plays that are put on enjoy less than six weeks’ run, and if it were not notorious that bankruptcy is a profitable trade one would wonder how managers live. The managers seem to have done everything to achieve financial suicide. Especially during the last twenty years; notably stimulated by Mr Charles Frohman and Mr George Edwardes, they have indulged in an endless competition in expensive staging. It grew quite common for a play to cost £5000 to stage, and much more was spent sometimes. Now, that large sum was risked, not invested, and so the unfortunate manager had to pay his backers a heavy toll. I am sure he was entirely wrong, for audiences prefer plays to scenery, and Mr Cochran, one of the few managers who remembers that once upon a time he was a public, has proved this by staging a successful revue for about £150. Do not believe that I am a highbrow; I do not suggest that A Little Bit of Fluff should be staged without scenery, but with curtains (though there is a lot in curtains, if discreetly drawn), but I do suggest that the more elaborate the scenery, the more the play is overlooked. Perhaps that is what the managers desire, and judging from the condition of modern drama, perhaps they are right. But I attribute to the managers no such profundities of psychology. Rather would I say that they know what the public wants, and one thing they know well: the public wants certain actors and wants them passionately.