16 
LAND 6? WATER 
December 26, 1918 
me THeATRE 
By W. J. Turner 
THERE is no idea more widely held than the idea 
that yoti can learn the technique of an art like 
you can learn the multiplication table or the use 
of logarithms. Writers will expound the prin- 
ciples of dramatic writing as dogmatically as any 
schoolmaster teaching Euclid, drawing up sets of rules, to 
infringe any of which is disastrous. Yet, again and again 
enormous success has followed on a complete disregard for 
all the laws so authoritatively laid down and backed by such 
strong precedents. Only the other day a German general 
stated that by all the rules of war the Germans should have 
got to Paris in 1914, and he confessed that their defeat was 
due to the French soldiers continuing to put up a stiff resist- 
ance when according to the best theory they should have 
been helpless through exhaustion. 
The young playwright is still hampered by the superstition 
of the actor, the theatrical manager, and the self-elected 
expert, who chng to recognised formulae of dramatic con- 
struction, who quote Jefferson to instruct you that an audi- 
ence should never be kept in the dark as to the true state of 
all matters connected with a play, and will then instance 
the screen scene in The School for Scandal as an example of 
the great effect obtained through the audience's knowing 
what is unknown to Sir Peter Teazle, forgetting the great 
efiect obtained by precisely the opposite course in the first 
act of Lady Windermere's Fan and in many of Ibsen's 
plays. 
There are still dramatic agents who will inform you that 
all they require to judge if a play is likely to be acceptable or 
not is a bare scenario written on a sheet of notepaper. This 
is making a fetish of plot and situation with a vengeance, and 
is substituting the foot-rule for the brain. It is perfectly 
absurd to imagine that a bare outline of plot can give anyone 
a true conception of a play. Take the plot of Macbeth: 
a Scottish noble and his wife murder their king, he becomes 
king, has his enemies killed to make his throne safe, sees the 
ghost of one of his victims, and is killed by another noble. 
What could one possibly gather from that— except that it 
was not a comedy ? And Macbeth is a play that is full of 
action and particularly easy to describe ! It may be stated 
as a fact that the better the play the less possible will it be 
to obtain an adequate idea of it from an outline of the action, 
however full. 
Another notion that needs exploding is the notion that 
action is of the first importance. I remember once seeing a 
play at a London theatre in which there seemed to be about 
ten Red Indians. Red Indians in the house, Red Indians in 
the garden, Red Indians up the chimneys and under the beds 
—never was there such a concourse of wUd, whooping Red 
Indians ! And action ! it was all action, and I was never 
so bored in my life. " It is all ver^' well for you Red Indians," 
I muttered to myself. "You, I see, are having a fine time ; 
but where do I come in ? " 
It is not the action that matters, but the imaginative value 
of the situation. What couH be more dramatically effective 
than the meeting of Helen with Monelaus after the fall of 
Troy in The Trojan Women of Euripides. To what a pitch' 
our emotions are raised all through the dialogue ! How we 
hang on every word of Helen's long speech, some seventy 
hues of verse, wondering how she will justify herself ! How 
we tremble in expectancy of Menelaus' sentence ! How our 
mmds are divided by Helen's pleading and Hecuba's 
denunciation I The dramatic gifts of an author are best 
revealed by what he can make of such a situation. Can he 
extract the last ounce from it, or will he pass rapidly over it, 
just scratching the surface ? In a word, has he imagination 
—the first, second, and third requirement of a dramatist as 
It IS of the poet and the novelist. The difference between the 
poet and the dramatist is that between nature and human 
nature. A power of moving us by our imaginative treatment 
of landscape in verse will make a poet, but not a dramatist. 
A drama is a relation between two or more people exposed 
by the people themselves in a space of a few hours. That is 
the classical drama. The whole technical difficulty consists 
in getting the people to do it themselves. In some of Maeter- 
linck's plays the dramatic relation is between human nature 
and nature ; but, whatever development may come in the 
future, we can be sure that the mainstay of drama will bfr 
human nature. 
There are many people who object to Mr. Gordon Craig's 
scenes and stage settings on this ground that the^human 
element is made a secondary thing. It is no longer man's 
relation to man that is being dealt with : it is man's relation 
to nature, to his own imagination, to his environment. Look 
upon Mr. Gordon Craig's illustration of designs for Hamlet, 
and you feel that with such a setting Hamlet is no longer 
in the Court of Denmark, talking with Horatio, Ophelia, 
the actors, and the King and Queen, but seated in the gloomy 
vault of his own mind into which no ray of this world's 
sunlight has ever penetrated ; which is to say that Hamlet, 
as a human being, is dwarfed into insignificance, and all the 
other persons in the play fade away into shadows. No 
actors could ever retain reality in such surroundings ; they 
would sink into whispering ghosts. I grant" that the effect 
might be curiously vivid ; but it would not be Shakespeare's 
Hamlet : it would be an entirely new play, with a new motif. 
I think that it would be possible to create very interesting 
plays in this way. There is no doubt that we have not seen the 
last novelty in dramatic construction, and that there are many 
effects that no one has ever yet tried to get on the stage. 
The dramatist who has ideas in this direction wiU consider 
his setting as deeply as his people ; he will not leave it to a 
producer to stage his play according to whatever may be the 
fashion of the moment or according to any brilliant but 
irrelevant notion that takes roost in the producer's head. 
I grant that there will always be a large range of drama 
through which the producer may rove at will, giving first this 
interpretation and then that, much as musicians give different 
readings of the same composition — a perfectly legitimate and 
interesting occupation, since any work of art that is worth 
contemplating contains more than can be seen from a single 
point of view. It is a risky business, though, this inter- 
pretation. As in music, the result in the wrong liands is 
to interpret the play off the stage. This is an art in which 
the late Sir Herbert Tree was a great master. He would 
take Julius Ccesar and, instead of Shakespeare, give you 
Beerbohm and a crowd of "supers." Yet the producer with 
the right instinct can do the boldest things. Mr. Granville 
Barker, for example, who gave the fairies in A Midsummer 
Night's Dream gold faces, which was a very solid and concrete 
touch in so light and gossamer-like a structure ; but that very 
concreteness accentuated the dream-like quahty of the whole 
play and took yoff a step further away from reality. The 
first duty of a producer is to get the right atmosphere ; and 
it is in the creation of atmosphere that the dramatist of the 
future will be occupied to a far greater degree than he has 
ever been in the past. 
Except for a few plays by Maeterhnck, Yeats, and Chekov, 
there has been no serious attempt by modern dramatists to 
set men not against men, but against fate or some intangible, 
indefinable background ; to use them much as trees, or rocks, 
or the sky, or the moon, namely, as symbols or vessels carrying 
a meaning that cannot be expressed in direct speech. Yet 
the whole progress of the sister art of music has been during 
the last fifty years along these lines. Direct melody has been 
abandoned for shifting veils of harmony which reflect light, 
colour and meaning, just as clouds reflect sunlight and the 
shadows of woods and rain. The difliculty that confronts the 
dramatist is how to retain any significance for speech in 
scenes where the actors are used just as pigments in a landscape 
or individual notes in a harmony. Speech seems too direct 
a simplification, it is as incongruous as a strongly rhythmical 
melody like The British Grenadiers would be in L'Apris 
Mtdi d'tin Faune ; and we are driven to the conclusion that 
perhaps there is no future for the drama along this path except 
as something entirely different to what it is now, something 
more akin to pantomine with or without music. Thus the 
drama seems to fall betweentwo stools. H cannot depend 
entirely on words as poetry does, and it cannot depend on 
visual design and colour as painting does. The theatre of 
designers, like Mr. Gordon Craig, is, in its logical development 
the stage treated as a huge canvas upon which the 
producer paints his will, and where words are not merely 
superfluous, but as out of place as verse painted on a picture 
Both artists and poets, therefore, despise the stage ; they feel 
cnbbed, coffined, and confined, " but it is, nevertheless not 
impossible that these very hmitations wiU yet be niade 
in the hands of genius, a source of power. 
