STUDY OF THE DRAMA

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 143, 20 June 1938, Page 6

STUDY OF THE DRAMA

A W.E.A. LECTURE

Continuing his weekly W.E.A. lectures on "The Drama of Yesterday and Today," Mr. R. Hogg spoke last week on fantasy and historical plays.

In plays of fantasy the characters were often ideal characters and the scenes were conjured forth from the romantic imagination of the writer. The playwrights iof the symbolic theatre did not endeavour to summon forth the great passions associated with high tragedy, but aimed to appeal to emotions of a more delicate and less tangible sort. Various elements of fantasy in the works of Maeterlinck, Barrie, and Lord Dunsany were instanced. The historical or biographical play on the other hand purported to deal not with imagined scenes and characters, but with actual incidents and characters from history. The great popularity of plays of this kind in recent years probably dates from the Increasing interest in biography since the publication in 1921 of Lytton Strachey's "Queen Victoria" and "Ariel," by Andre Maurois. Drinkwater had anticipated these biographies by the presentation in 1918 of his play "Abraham Lincoln," but in more recent years there had followed a succession of plays dealing with Richard 11, Clive, Gladstone, Napoleon, Parnell, Queen Victoria, and a host of others.

Many of these plays had been criticised on the grounds that ,-the characters were not truly represented but were merely the projections of the author's own idea of the historical personage concerned. Thus recently Hugh Ross Williamson had written and produced his play "Mr. Gladstone," which he. intended partly as an antidote to the presentation of Gladstone in Elsie Schauffler's "Parnell," and to what he considered a sentimentalised version of Queen Victoria in Housman's "Victoria Regina."

Historical plays had been further criticised because authors had frequently endowed the characters with thoughts, ideas, and points of view which were unlikely at the time they lived. Most historical and biographical plays of the present day attempt to show that the chief characters, though important figures, had the feelings and speech of ordinary folk. There is usually little poetry in the language and still less any attempt at period speech. A discussion and a play reading followed the lecture.