16 
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LAND fe? WATER October 10, 1918 
me THeATM 
By W. J. Turner 
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MR. ELLIS achieved notoriety as the author of 
A Little Bit of Fluff. I think it ran for two 
years, or some incredible time. I remember 
being taken to see it and feeling glad, in the 
middle of the performance, to think that 
some one else had paid for the seats. I pretend to no 
superiority on this question of fluff. A nice "fluffy" girl, 
like the one whose picture adorns the posters of the Gaiety 
show Going Up is as attractive to me as to any flying man. 
Often, as I get off the bus at the Gaiety corner, where I 
lecture to flag-sellers every month on "The Spirit of the 
Bayonet," I am tempted to steal one of those posters and 
take it home to my study to put alongside my bust of 
Beethoven. I am afraid, however, of the commissionaire, 
who looks as though he ought to be a sergeant ; he has 
been listening to me, and is growing more and more ferocious. 
I shall have to ask him if he would like to go to the front. 
But although "fluffiness" may be exceedingly attractive, 
a certain sort of joking and winking on the theme is very 
boring. There was a great deal of that sort of tiling in 
A Little Bit of Fluff. The married man taking a girl out to 
suppej-, and tehing his wife he is, working late at the office, 
is, perhaps, a comm.on enough occurrence in real life ; but 
needs handling lightly to be tolerable. .What humour there 
•is in it will be due entirely to the incident being unique, 
and this can only be contrived by an interplay of character ; 
the moment we get the feeling that we are seeing merely 
one day's, out of a year's habitual, trickery it becomes dis- • 
gusting. To deceive once is human, to deceive constantly 
is degrading ; therefore, there must be some exceptional 
cause, something to make us, at any rate, shghtly sym- 
pathetic. 
Then, the humour of bedroom scenes I find extremely 
thin. Just as some people are furtive about money, so some 
people are furtive about sex. We instinctively dislike a 
man who hums and hahs for about half an hour, and finally 
winds up with a request for half a sovereign ; so I loathe 
people who whisper, and nudge and giggle, and make oblique 
jokes about sex. What they have got in their dirty little 
minds, God alone knows ! Downright coarseness is a tliou- 
sand times better, just as it would be better to punch your 
friend in the head and say "lend me half a sovereign !" I 
■ am not narrow-minded on the subject. I have no sympathy 
with the people who hold up their hands in horror at the 
sight of girls arm-in-arm with soldiers in the Strand ; in 
fact, I think that the greater freedom of intercourse brought 
about by the war is all to the good. There is no greater 
enemy to lust than the free minghng of the sexes in the 
common daily work of the world ; it is then that the finer 
delights of comradeship, intellectual and physical, are appre- 
ciated and the taste educated. Anyone who lived in Latin 
countries will agree to the importance of this freedom. 
The one serious . enemy of vice — which, after all, is 
merely distorted virtue — is the extraordinary attrac- 
tiveness and passion of virtue itself ; mere negative 
inhibition hasn't got the ghost of a chance against it. 
The way to show up a bad joke is to tell a good joke — 
not to frown. This elementary truth has never entered the 
skuUs of many well-intentioned people. It is fashionable 
in certain quarters to point to the popularity of such plays 
as A Little Bit of Fluff, and this new farce by the same author, 
as examples of the complete degradation of the theatre in 
England. All hope of regenerating the theatre, it is said, 
must be abandoned until after the war ; and there is no 
very strong conviction that there will be much improve- 
ment then. This very week a writer in the Times Literary 
Supplement expresses his astonishment, in reviewing a book 
by an Army captain on the theatre, that "here was some 
one who in 1918 still beheved in the theatre ; found the 
theatre interesting, even important " ; and he comes to the 
conclusion that the author has not been in London during 
the last four years. It is undoubtedly true that you may 
generally look in vain at your morning paper to find a good 
play, but it is the absence of the first-rate rather than the 
presence of much bad work that gives the impression of 
bankruptcy. I doubt very much if the general standard of 
books published annually is any worse than the standard of 
plays produced ; and productions like The Loving Heart 
and Anthony in Wonderland, to name two which occur to 
me at random, were probably as good as sixty per cent, 
of the novels of their j'ear. Again, people will persist in 
judging plays from a literary standpoint. You have to 
judge a play from its effect on you in the theatre, and from 
that standpoint a play like A Week End will be seen to have 
merits that entitle it to rank at least with a Phillips Oppen- 
heim romance or a Sax Rohmer shocker. You guffaw with 
laughter during three-parts of it, you are never really bored, 
you never have the slightest inclination to go out and ask 
for your money back, and if the author's humour is not 
exactly subtle, the genius of the theatre adds many trans- 
forming touches so that you get as much pleasure from it 
as you would from a George Birmingham novel or an average 
Punch article, and far more laughter. 
Personally, I preferred A Week End to A Little Bit of Fluff 
on account, mainly, of the character of the station-porter 
who aspires to be a great singer. This is a really comic 
idea, and in the hands of a good comic dramatist might 
have been made a great part ; but Mr. Elhs has done nothing 
more than think of it, and then leave it. It is worth remark- 
ing that the whole of the humour in this farce lay in the 
acting. There is no wit or humour in the lines, but Mr. 
Ernest Thesiger as the station-porter was extremely funny, 
and Miss Evelyn Roselle, as Sybil, only had to appear to 
set the house rocking ; she was so true to hfe that she did 
not seem to be acting at all. Mr. Sebastian Smith was also 
good. Of course, it is all very crude ; there is no enlighten- 
ment in your laughter, and five minutes after leaving the 
theatre you are almost certain to mutter "What trash!" 
and go home in a far from buoyant mood. But, then, that 
sort of thing happens even after the society of congenial 
friends. Has not Mr. L. Pearsall Smith described it in one 
of his incomparable Trivia, wjiere he says : 
The servant gave me my coat and hat, and in a glow of 
self-satisfaction I walked out into the night. " A delightful 
evening," I reflected, "the nicest kind of people." What I 
said about finance and French philosophy impressed them ; 
and how they laughed when I imitated a pig squeaUng. 
But soon after, "God, it's awful," I muttered, "I wish I 
were dead." 
The majority of people have experienced .this feeling more 
or less frequently when coming home from the theatre ; 
in most cases, they do not stop to analyse it, but vent their 
spleen on the weather or trains and taxis, and suddenly 
wish they had stayed at home or gone somewhere else. The 
explanation is, of course, that their emotions have been 
aroused without having been purged or satisfied, which is 
only done when something realN beautiful is put before 
them. On the rare occasions when they have seen some- 
thing noble, heroic, or beautiful, they find themselves going 
home exhilarated, treading on air. It is by this that you 
may always judge good art from bad. Good art enriches 
you, makes the world seem a thousand times more attractive, 
fills you with the sense of power, and gives a new meaning 
to everything. In a quite special sense it awakes you ; 
that is why it is enormously important and a factor in civilisa- 
tion impossible to overrate. From this standpoint, which 
really is the only one worth considering, A Week End is 
negligible ; but if it is a long time since you have laughed, 
by all means go to the Kingsway Theatre, and you will find 
there a good substitute for these amusements.' 
It will be interesting -to see what scrt of a run A Week 
End has compared with A Little Bit of Fluff; the ingredients 
are much the same, but the title of the latter play must 
have been responsible for half the seats nightly. I should 
very much doubt if A Week End will have as long a run ; 
for many people never read the notices in the daily Press, 
and except for these and the comments of friends, there is 
nothing to go by, except a play's title. Of course, there 
are many, and tliev perhaps are wisest, who simply decide 
where they shall have dinner and take seats at the theatre 
which is nearest. The obvious development is that rest; 
aurants should include in their table d'hote prices for 
dinner and seat at the theatre. The fact that you would 
never know where you were going would not matter in the 
least under present conditions ; and you would always be 
able to balance the dinner against the show. 
