WRITING OF PLAYS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21130, 12 March 1932, Page 9 (Supplement)

WRITING OF PLAYS.

DANGERS OF NATURALISM. BEHAVIOUR LESS DRAMATIC. A statement that the art of writing plays had come to a dead-end in England was made by Mr. Alastair Cooke, speaking at tho Manchester Playgoers' Club last month. Tracing the history of English plays, he said that the Elizabethans were a very joyous and exuberant people. They wanted passion; they did not want senti mentality. They were not afraid of their own emotions as many are to-day. His theory was that Shakespeare had a complete command of what they had come to know as expressionism and of what (hey had come to know as naturalism. Moreover, lie alternated these in verse and prose. lie thought Shakespeare was the last person who had this complete command of two techniques. With the Restoration, drama became a caricature of life in the courts of Charles 11. Then, in the eighteenth century, plays were written for a special audience, the most sophisticated, in the best sense of the word, that England had ever known. By 1770 tho idea of how people ought to behave had set. Goldsmith and Sheridan wrote of life as if ought to be lived; their plays were written at a remove from life. After that came the collapse of English play-writing. The interest of the nineteenth century in sin could only produce melodrama. Then came Ibsen with tho play of ideas, plays that wero thoroughly abused in this country, and, just before the war, tho Manchester school insisting on complete naturalism. Noel Coward got down to questions of conduct after the war, and did it with naturalism, making people speak as in real life. " Private Lives " was written almost in monosyllables. Mr. Cooke said he felt that the completely naturalistic play ought to be written in phonetic script or else produced only by the author, so badly could everything go astray by wrong emphasis on a single word. That was tho crisis in play-writing. The naturalistic play had come to a dead-end. It was written completely out. The problem of the day was to deal with the complexity of people living normally not on the plane of temper. Behaviour had become less dramatic since tho war. Plays of tho half-world, of people who were abnormal, war plays, tho return to tho primitive or the historical excuses afforded by a return to the 1840's were just side-stepping. He thought producers would have to find a new way of getting the play awnv from the drawing room, where it appeared to have come to a rest.