IGNORING "TECHNIOUE."

New Zealand Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15551, 7 March 1914, Page 4 (Supplement)

IGNORING "TECHNIOUE."

AMERICA'S NEW MOVEMENT.

The vogue of Walt Whitman with the non-American world has never been hurt by the fact that ho was quite innocent of the technique of poetry—at least of the accepted technique of accepted poets. Whatever stumbling-block this limitation provided seemed to fall only in the way of Whitman's fellow countrymen. His case is in some senses parallelled by the i younger successful . playwrights of j America, who, whether they know it or not, are successful just because they have no technique. This fact is pointed out by the English playwright, Mr. W. Somerset Maugham, who has just, termii nated a visit to the United Mates; but j he put it in a form a little more polite j in saying that "there are as many techniques as there are successful plays." Of course the dictum will strike tho schools and universities as ternblv perverting, for, as the New York Sun points out, they, in league with many literary periodicals, have been attempting to manufacture _ writers by teaching them 'technique.'" Mr. Maugnams conclusions against this practice, the Sun further suggests, " may produce somewhat of a shocic upon rising authors who are being shown exactly how to produce ' the great American novel' or ' the great American ■ play ;' still in the long run such outspoken views i will do much toward putting a vast amount of literary buncombe to rout." Here is what Mr. Maugham said to an interviewer for the New York Times :— " The native American play is an admirable product, for three reasons—for tho freshness of its material, the veracity j of its representation, and its splendid j variety of speed in performance, and, of course, tho greatest of these is freshness

i of material, for new matter put upon the j stage is to the theatre what new blood is to the human body. Influence of Democracy. " For. these virtues In native playwriting 1 really believe America has to thank nothing else than American democracy, but by democracy I mean democratic taste in the selection and the use of material for play-writing, and a democratic hospitality on the part of audiences to give just as respectful a hearing to the author who is an obscure nobody as to an* established celebrity. Your democratic search for material for plays is splendidly liberalising to the whole craft of playwriting, for it finds plots in stones, comedies in running brooks, and plays in everything; it does not stipulate, as in the old days of the craft, that the material of a play shall bo thus and so; that it shall be ordered and arranged this wise and that, and that in its final form it shall take any particular shape; but rather it sensibly goes on the assumption that any or all human character in conflict with environment, thriftily manipulated in writing, will generate a good play, serious or comic, as the matter in hand may be. Ignoring Old Fashions, " Always most is done for the theatre and for play-writing by the mind fertile in ideas, but unhampered by precedents; i that is, the man who does the unusual and striking thinghis very amateur lack of so-called technical equipment lends freshness to every character or' plot he touches. Within the last month I have seen American plays that have, each in its own way, smashed dozens of supposedly ironclad laws' for ' play-writing. These plays have been by writers whose work succeeds because they fortunately do not know that it has always been a rule that no play, in performance, must ever deceive its public, or they have been plays by writers whose hands were never stayed by such other old-fashioned laws as that there must never be an empty "stage during a performance, that every entrance and exit of every character must be accounted for, , that any and all of the dramatic unifies need be" observed, that consistency of . characters can no snore reasonably be demanded of the theatre than of life, or that one may not ever 1 interchange media, comedy with farce or farce even with tragedy, in the composi- ! tion of a play. "In _ short, the splendid technical fact recognised by American playwrightsand, in fact, by the best playwrights the world over—is that there is no such thing as a technique of the drama. ' There are as many technics as there are successful | plays; just as there are as many audiences as there are seats in a theatre. Every plot calls for its own technique. The methods employed in the making of one play are no more likely to succeed in the making of another than that my clothes are apt to fit you. Plays are concerned with the objective in life; the subjective has its place, but it must always be subordinate, as in life. But it is no more possible to expect a given set of laws for play-writing to work out in the dramatic or comic moulding of one mass j of objective plot-matter as well as with I another as it is to expect that any two given individuals in life can be assumed to act precisely the same, even under the same circumstances."