WOMEN AND THE THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 166, 10 April 1926, Page 17

WOMEN AND THE THEATRE

THEIR INFLUENCE ON

A week or two ago, during an interval in the performance of All the King’# Horses,” a well-known and successful theatre-manager turned to me and said, “Just look at the pit. did so. “Hardlv a man in it! he continued. I looked and saw a tightlywedged mass of young women, brighteyed, and slightly hysterical, with here and there, like rare currants in a bun, a disconsolate man looking lonely and Jost, and painfully' aware of his position, as the police court reporters like to say of respectable criminals. . . ■ Ou the following night, at St. Martin’s, where Sir Patrick Hastings s play was being done for the first time, the same odd"sight was to be observed. 1 he pit in this theatre is much smaller than that of the Globe, but the preponderance of women over men was maintained.

The same may be said of nearly every theatre .in London, writes St. John Irvine in an English exchange.. Broadly speaking, the modern theatre lives on women. Manv of the men to be seen in queues outside West End theatres, are there for commercial reasons. they hope to sell their places to women who will turn up at the last moment. lam told that an enterprising gentleman actually hires men to do this. ... ■ , . . Now, why do women predominate over men in the theatre, especially in the cheaper parts? Is the theatre a feminine entertainment rather than a masculine one? I should dislike to think so, but no one who is acquainted with theatrical matters will dispute my assertion that if women were suddenly to abstain from playgoing, almost every manager in London would crash into bankruptcy. If the play has become a feminine thing it .is because women have made it so. I do not say that this is a bad thing, although I am disquieted by it, but I do say that it has profoundly altered the character of the theatre, and may be responsible for some of its troubles. In three hundred years the English theatre has changed from one in which all the players and the entire audience w*ere men to one in which women are overwhelmingly in the majority. In the time of Shakespeare there were no women ’ in the theatre at all, either on the platform stage or in the auditorium—if one may use that word about a place which was not in our sense an auditorium. Women did not appear on the English stage until the time of Charles the First, and then they were hissed out of the town for the French hussies they were. It was not until the second Charles came to the throne that they were permitted to act in public, and the immediate results were of a sort to cause scandal to nice-minded persons. •

There were verv few women’s parts in Elizabethan plays. Count those in Shakespeare’s for yourself. . . . What is more important is that the plays predominantly were tragic plays. . . . But in our time comedy is all the rage. Young women will not look at tragic plays. There are., of course, individual women who will do so just as there arc individual men who wear jumpers and are addicted to knitting; but women in the mass, and especially young women, will not consent to see a tragic play. And since women are

PLAYS AND PLAYERS.

the majority of playgoers, managers have to cater for their taste or lose their monev. It is true that there ate more women titan men in England-, but they do not exceed men in the pro”o tion of nine to one, and we are obliged to conclude, therefore, that their excessive preponderance in the theatre is due to the fact that men have either Jost their taste for plays or have been driven out of the theatre by the kind of plays which are commonly offered to them. I doubt if it is true that men have learned to dislike the theatre. My correspondence does not support this belief. And surely there is , something significant in the composition of the queues for “Henry VIII” and the productions at the Old Vic ? .'societies to increase the stature of the drama are nearly alwavs founded by men. Experiments in the theatre are nearly always made by men. Men, far more than women,'write plays. Drama seems, at all events up to tne present, to be a form of writing in which women fail to get -anywhere near the level of abiiltv of men, although they compete on terms almost of equality with them in novel-writing. But, although the drama continues to be written chiefly bv men, the nature of it seems to be dictated by women. This sort of play, and this alone, shall men write if they are to attract our patronS'iiat brings me back to the young person in the pit. She carries into the playhouse an enthusiasm that is very heartening to the players and to the dramatists. I like the warm waves ot interest and excitement that flow from the pit to the stage, bnt I could wish tliat they were swept over more worthy things; that all the enthusiasm were not expended on trivial pieces and pieces that are incredibly untrue to life I do not desire to see our stage filled with gloomv plavs or plays that are headache with their intellectual powers; but I do not desire to see a more catholic distribution of interest among P The young persons in the pit spend their d’avs in writing letters dictated bv ageing and fattening men—this sort of thing: “Yours of the L6th ult. to hand and note remarks.” To escape from the monotonv of that life they rush to the playhouse, where they demand that lovely women, beautifully and expensively dressed, shall be courted and pursued bv handsome men, beautifully and expensively dressed, and murmuring at all hours or the day indelicate epigrams. That is romance. What an ironic commentary on our progressive times! When I see the excited young persons in the pit. clamorously greeting beautiful actresses and handsome actors as they take their seats in the stalls on first nights I am disinclined to jeer at them. I hat is their wav of expressing the craving we all have for light and colour ano bcautv and loveliness. It was only anothe- form of that desire which took men oft to the Crusades.

Of the English widows who received war pensions 96.500 had re-married up to the end of last October.

London's police force is smaller to'l<>V than it was in 1911. In that year there were 19,898 men in the Metropolitan Forces; now there are 19,306.