The fact that Mr. Phillips should have deemed such a foreshadowing necessary shows how instinctively a dramatist feels that the logic of his art requires him to assume that his audience is ignorant of his fable. In reality, very few members of the first-night audience, or of any other, can have depended on old Angela's vaticination for the requisite foresight of events. But this does not prove Angela to be artistically superfluous.
See pp. 118, 240.
There is no special harm in this: the question of exits and entrances and their mechanism is discussed in Chapter XXIII.
This might be said of the scene of the second act of The Benefit of the Doubt; but here the actual stage-topography is natural enough. The author, however, is rather over-anxious to emphasize the acoustic relations of the two rooms.
For example, in his criticism of Becque's La Parisienne (Quarante Ans de Théâtre, VI, p. 364), he tells how, at the end o£ the second act, one of his neighbours said to him, "Eh! bien, vous voilà bien attrapé! O est la scène à faire?" "I freely admit," he continues, "that there is no scène à faire; if there had been no third act I should not have been greatly astonished. When you make it your business to recite on the stage articles from the Vie Parisienne, it makes no difference whether you stop at the end of the second article or at the end of the third." This clearly implies that a play in which there is no scène à faire is nothing but a series of newspaper sketches. Becque, one fancies, might have replied that the scene between Clotilde and Monsieur Simpson at the beginning of Act III was precisely the scène à faire demanded by the logic of his cynicism.