LANGUISHING THEATRES.

Evening Post, Volume LXXII, Issue 66, 15 September 1906, Page 13

LANGUISHING THEATRES.

+. I wonder, with gentle melancholy (says Max Beerbohm, in the Saturday Review), what is tho future of our drama. Throughout the past year there has been, indeed, no lack of playe. Play has succeeded play, frantically, stumbling over the- prostrate body of its predecessor, quite unheeded by the public. Failure has been piled on failure, and most of the failures have bsen well merited. It would be cheering to suppose that the public has been educated above the kind of thing which managers offer to it, and that success awaits any manager who shall offer ifc something good. But, even if there is " a largo enough intelligent public to support half-a-dozen theatres devoted to good contemporary drama, tho outlook is not, I think, rosy. Where is the good contemporary drama to come from? About a year ago, the sanguine and ingenious Playgoers' Club instituted a competition for hitherto unrevealed dramatists. Complaints had often been made about the' indifferonco of managers to any work not signed by a practised playwright. It had often been suggested that masterpieces were flying around,, merely unable to find an inlet to the stage. r Having regard to the enormous number of people who do write plays, and do send them to managers, It seemed quite reasonable to suppose that some of these plays might happen to have merit. They might not be technically good. They might, moreover, have no chance of commercial success. But the e&pecial object of the Playgoers' Club was to discover, and hand over to Mr. Philip Carr for production, a play that had, at any rate, the savour of life in it. I myseft was a member of the reading committee; "and, soon enough, huge parcels began to be delivered at. my door. I remember the agreeable tremor with which i broached the first one that came, and Razed at tho six or Feven plays that it contained Was thero a masterpiece among them? It was presently plain that not one of them came nearly up to mediocrity. The other parcels that followed were no more inspiriting. I waded, waded, ever so 'conscientiously, through them; yet found not ono scene, not one character, that, was not a weak imitation of this or that current theatrical convention. I thought it rather hard that I should have such bad hicki ' But subsequently it appeared that 1 was no exception on that reading committee. Some of the members had, indeed, thoujjht it worth while to pass on to others a fsw of the plays received, but without hnarty commendation, and rather in the spirit of men wishing to b& confirmed in their judgment that tho thing wasn't good enough. The whole affair, so promising in its inception, ended with the committee's lugubrious announcement that they had nothing to place in Mr. Philip Carr's hands. As there is, apparently, no chance of a crop of interesting plays, it is perhaps superfluous to speculate as to whether the public's taste in plays is improving What does the public really want? It evidently wants very little of anything. Perhaps the reason is that too much 's offered to it. Thsre are too many theatres. In the old days, before the suburbs had theatres of their own, the few metropolitan theatres throve well enough But what chance is there for a plethora of metropolitan theatres, pitted against a plethora of suburban theatres?, I am told that during the past year even the suburban theatres have not been faring well. But, to explain this fact, no one could v-snture on the hypothesis that the suburban population had been drifting back to tli* metropolitan theatres. The record of these theatres during, the past ycai shows that they are, with few. exoeption6, losing their hold even on the metropolis. •I do not think any one_ will deny that what the playgoing public likes best of all is something akin to the art of the music-hall. Yet I am told on good authority that even musical comedy has been, on tho whole, languishing. 1 believe that the only way to revive public interest in the mehopolitan theatrcb would bo to abolish, oay, lwo-thirdj> of them. The theatrical game, as played at present, is up. It continues only as a survival. Within a faw years, quite twothirds of the theatres will be untonantcd. In moat eases, there, will have been tho usual desperate effort to convert thorn into music-halls. But there aro already too many music-halls. (Not even the music-halls have been thriving ns of old.) There th© deserted theatres will stand, pathetic monuments of misguided enterprise, happy hunting grounds of moths and mice; until tho ground-landlords of them shall have the sense to pull them down and. build up flats or hotels in their stsad. Tho only theattes that will survive aro tho£& which are directed with some definite policy, romo definite artistic ideal.