THE AMATEUR DRAMATIC MOVEMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 201, 26 August 1930, Page 6

THE AMATEUR DRAMATIC MOVEMENT.

The notable success which attended a, playwriting competition recently held by a London literary weekly affords fresh evidence of the great growth which the amateur dramatic movement is making in Great Britain. To meet the needs of the amateur movement dramatists have been turning their attention more and more to the writing of one-act plays. The professional playwright has, however, a rival in the field. The number of aspiring dramatists is so large that when the editor of "John o' London's Weekly" offered a prize of fifty guineas for the best original one-act play he received 3400 manuscripts. The response alone was gratifying, but more so was the standard achieved by the amateur authors. In the course of their report the judges (Miss Sybil Thorndike and Messrs. Cedrie Hardwicke, G. W. Bishop, R. C. Sherriff and Geoffrey Whitworth) said: "The 3400 plays submitted for competition were remarkable evidence, both in number and in quality, of the virility of the amateur dramatic movement. Such a magnificent response should deepen the faith and quicken the enthusiasm of those who have laboured so long in the service of the amateur stage. \ It should also stimulate public interest in the movement's possibilities. Above all, we hope that "the competition has given competitors greater confidence in their power and will encourage them in further efforts at self-expression. We were asked to examine only a proportion of the entries, but the standard of those which passed through our hands was unusually high. Serious""" subjects outnumbered comedies by at least four to one and were generally the better in quality. There were farces in plenty, but the scarcity of genuine comedy-situa-tions was disappointing. From the men competitors, as was perhaps to be expected there were scores of war plays and hundreds of post-war plays. The authors of many of them need to be reminded that realism and propaganda do not necessarily possess dramatic value. There was not much originality in the situations in this section, but the dialogue was natural, and, generally speaking, tlio characterisation was good. Another feature of the competition was the number of dialect plays sent in, particularly plays in the Scottish, Irish and Cockney dialects. Here, again, the character drawing was creditable, but we were bound to remember that dialect plays have only a limited appeal. Some competitors placed too wide an interpretation on what constitutes a one-act play. We were asked in one instance to accept two changes of scene, and one change was fairly common. There is a precedent for this in Barrie, but while we hesitate to lay down a hard and fast rule, we think it preferable that the action should either be continuous or broken only by the fall of the curtain to denote the passage of time."

A Russian producer who has produced a number of plays with English amateurs in recent years has expressed the opinion that amateurs ,take their work much more to heart and are much less selfish than professionals. They have a strong advantage over "actors"—the fact of being "inexperienced," which makes it practically impossible for them to see the theatre from the "stagey" point of view, and forces them to use their imagination and to express themselves on the stage not in terms of theatrical experience but from the experience of their own lives. The same producer has said: "I think that the amateur movement in England and in the United States is already sufficiently strong and widespread to threaten the professional theatre. I have seen amateur shows in the provinces of the United States and England better acted and better produced than many an elaborate professional production in New York and London. It is possible that the '.Renaissance of the Theatre' will come through the amateurs, whose keenness, disinterestedness unselfishness and sincerity are so necessary for the professional theatre of to-da.v." i —W.M.L.