The English Theatre

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22949, 29 January 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

The English Theatre

IN „ -ecent article widely read here in uondon, Mr. James Agate made an impassioned plea for the revival of the serious play in England. It was one of Mr. Agate's characteristic articles. He set out to review a light comedy— I think it was called "Yes and No"—and after mentioning it in the first paragraph he did not return to it. Instead, he composed a prose lament on the decline of the Img-. lish theatre, making serious moan of the fact that the modern play is a trifle—(l think he had a French word for it)-and that mostly it was a pretty poor trifle. Mr, Agate was on a good wicket, for it is perfectly true that, the London theatre is in an extremely debilitated condition, as a glance down the outertainments column" of Ihe limes will prove. You begin with the "A s," the Akhvych, the Ambassadors and the Apollo. At the Aldwyeh. there is a play by lan Hay, "The Housemaster." now past its four hundredth performance. Jan Hay is mildly amusing. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say moie. Insignificant Frivolity At the Ambassadors is the play Mr. Agate so elusively reviewed, "Yes and No." 1 have not seen it —one develops in. London the knack of "smelling boredom from afar." At the Apollo is "London After Dark." It is all about a ride on a bus in which people are jolted backward and forward (terribly funny to watch), and a charity matinee at the cinema (in which there is one good line, where the male lead comes out of the cinema and savs: "Don't make such a row—they can't sleep a wink in there") and a murder all-cleared-up-in-the-last-aet (with the female lead safely in the male lead's arms when the curtain falls). . If you go down the list, with a few exceptions the titles tell the same tale of insignificant frivolity. "It's in the Bag," "Crazy Days," "A Spot of Bother," and so on. Of course, these plays do not pretend to he anything they are not. They are an evening's entertainment to be taken in the mood induced by a good dinner, a bottle of wine and a mind not at the moment perplexed by the subtleties of Signor Grandi or the blustering of Dr. Goebbels.

Do Not Seem to Matter They are, quite simply, means of escape, and crowded audiences would seem to testify that they are fairly effective means* of escape. The significant thing, however, is that there are so many of them that the London theatre is almost wholly given up either to frivolity or sensation. You get inside the walls of the theatre and you are in a kind of Fun Fair, wholly unrelated to the world outside. There are, of course, so-called serious plays. Mr. J. B. Priestley is responsible for' most of them, for at one time he had three such plays running at the same time. Air. Priestley has "come niloovenr n metaphysical, after reading Dunne's "Experiment with Time." Ho is interested in the problems of reincarnation. of our having been here before, of the possibility of free-will in a time-dimension which turns over on

Tragic Waste of Dramatic Genius

Sy PROFESSOR W. A. SEWELL, Auckland University Collegi who is at present visiting London

itself and- moves forward or unwarf-f-a kind of spiral. ~ v™

Pretty problems they are, worked out with a great deal of inontaL# genuitv. Somehow or other, in th« world of Shanghai and Almeria, thev do not seem to matter. . ' vf

Then there is "Autumn," at which---it is impossible- at the moment to jjetipS a scat. Judging from the reviews, t®:f is a particularly "strong" play, full 0 f dramatic situations, it concerns— t quote the reviews—a blind husband v whose wife has,,a lover who falls in W with her step-daughter. 1 am sure that there are highly-moving eniotionkl scenes in this.play, for Miss Flora Bobson, the finest English emotional • actress of our day, is making a great ' success of it. I am also -certain that® there is no . reason wFiy this play should have been produced in 1937 rather than, say, 11)07. '

This dearth of good plays involves a tragic waste of dramatic genius. THft-r-London stage is full ol good actors anctf ft actresses. I do not suppose there ever has been a time when there were so many superbly-talented men and women available for producers in London. One thinks of John Gielgud (wiio is playing in Richard 11., not for the sak« of Shakespeare but for the sake' of $, Gielgud), G'edric Hardwieke, Ralph Richardson, among the men: Flora 1 Hobson, Mania Vanne, Edith Evans' (who does not seem fo be playing at the moment), Margaret. Rawlings f among the women. Must be True to its Age

All great drama is topical: it criti." cises the contemporary scene, it is tho mark of great drama —and of much drama that is not so great—that it could not have been born in any other time, that it takes up and makes lucid! the varied currents of the contemporary mood.

Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, even Mr. Shaw may be for all time—but they were also and to begin with for their own age and their own people. I Jo not mean, of course, that great drama must necessarily mention the topics of contemporary thought or thu events of contemporary history. Shakespeare's Roman plays are just.aj topical as his "Hamlet" or his "Merry Wives." , f

'Mr. Shaw's "St. .Joan" is a&l'topical as "Mrs. Warren's Profession."] mean simply that a great play must be in all senses true to the age in which it was written. >

Even Air. Noel Coward's plays are serious and significant in a war in which none of the London plays td-dav is either serious or "significant: for they all express some element in postwar neurosis, it is this which distinguishes Mr. Coward from Mr. Ivor Novello and Mr. Michael Arlen—with either of whom he might otherwise hare been confused. Real World too Grim The Jx>ndon theatre is topical in neither sense of the word. Not a single play in the West Knd to-day deals with a subject of immediate i'ut«rest, whether social or artistic. Perhaps the drama of the real world is a little im grim, a little too urgent for t/ie Eng. lish playwright. You can be witty and amusing as Mr. Shaw was about "the Ys-o&ian Question or about Getting Msrrisd. You can even make dr«r.a as fciali; worthy did about prison reform and industrial strife. Air-raids and poison-gas and the bombardment of defenceless towns are more difficult material. One would have thought.' however, that the terrible moods of men to-day and their unremitting fears would have