SIR HENRY IRVING ON THE DRAMA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11538, 24 November 1900, Page 2 (Supplement)

SIR HENRY IRVING ON THE DRAMA.

Sir Henry Irving journeyed to Woolwich lately to lay a memorial tablet marking the inauguration of a new theatre and opera house. In the course of his speech Sir Henry said: — I have never ceased to maintain that a well-conducted theatre is a necessary adjunct to your true civic life. You must have some satisfaction in the dramatic instinct that is in all, or in most of us, for I expect sometimes that certain censors of the stage are, unhappily, born even without it. That is a grave misfortune. But you who have the dramatic instinct cannot nourish it upon the ordinary incidents of your daily lives. You cannot have general elections every week. It is the function of the theatre to keep you from starvation. The acted drama holds the mirror up to nature. (Hear, hear.) I say the acted drama, because Shakespere, when he talks of showing the very age and body of the time, its form and pressure, obviously means this to be done through the medium of the stage. Well, there is a great variety of drama, and you constantly hear that this or that play is good, bad, or indifferent, and sometimes a legislator rises in the House of Commons and implores that body or the Government, or both, to intervene to save the playgoing public from some terrible corruption on the stage. People will dispute till doomsday about the moral influences of the drama, because any representation of human nature is sure to be the signal for alarm to everybody who thinks that men and women ought to be trained without any knowledge of life. Dangers there are, of course, in all exercises of the imagination. A great novelist has written a book to show the vicious influence of music. In the infancy of painting, it was the firm belief of religious teachers that art would corrupt the world if it were not severely limited to sacred subjects. You remember the scandal that befel the painter in Browning's poem when he turned away from painting angels,and produced lifelike portraits of the monks. They were greatly delighted at first— least some of them were—and then it was decided that this gift of portraiture was dangerous, and Fra Lippo Lippi was bidden to return to the angels. (Laughter.) Well, the dramatist cannot always be drawing angels, and the actor cannot always be playing them. Public opinion in regard to the stage is governed on the whole, I believe, by a robust commonsense, which rejects the notion that the theatre, if allowed to exist at all, shall be a place whore human nature must not be exhibited. No doubt there is a point where freedom becomes license, but I think you will find that it is not the license of the Lord. Chamberlain. The theatre of to-day does so much to brighten the lives of the people that it is entitled to the support of all the elements of sound citizenship; and it is because I see those elements so strongly represented in this gathering that I confidently predict for this playhouse in which we stand the success that the energy and capacity of its founder so richly deserves. (Cheers.)"