ENGLISH DRAMA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19500, 8 June 1925, Page 10

ENGLISH DRAMA.

IS IT DECADENT? ATTACK BY MR BEANSBY WILLIAMS. WHAT MR ARNOLD BENNETT THINKS, (From Otwi Own Correspondent.) LONDON, April 7. Mr Bransby Williams, the impersonator of Dickens characters, who recently toured Australia and New Zealand, la full of condemnation for the London stage. Fresh from the dominions, he is evidently struck with the change that has taken pla-ce in his absence, and he considers that drama as presented today is decadent. In a speech at the Manchester Rotary Club he launched an attack on the morals of the drama. . “Some of the plays in London,” he laid, “are such a scandal, such sexual tosh, ana show such degeneracy, that. I can only call it a cesspool Since he had come back from abroad he had been positively staggered to find an entire chorus with naked limbs. Was this a change for the better? The subject is popular, and one may expect to • find many further expressions of opinion. Mr Arnold Bennett is the first to take up the cudgel, and in an article in The Daily Express he -asks; ‘ls real ale worse than the stage?” , . •’Only the world-notorious hypocrisy of tne Anglo-Saxon,” he says, “would pretend that the spectacle provided by the law courts is entirely unrepresentative. Now the stage has been at its old business of holding the mirror up to nature, and the episcopal, histrionic, and other guardians of the peace of mind of the British public have inevitably protested, with their cußt.oma.ry_ violence and fatuity, against the horrid sights seen in the mirror. And as usual they blame the mirror. . . “The stage apparently is a cesspool ox morbid, decadent, and unsavoury plays—all of them.false to beautiful life and representing nothing whatever but the toulncaa of the authors’ hearts and the venality of the authors’ purposes!. “SPRING- CLEANING” AND “THE * VORTEX.” . “Three plays have been especially singled out for abuse, two English and one American. Of the two English plays little need be sa ! d, for they have both very successfully withstood the onslaughts of the sfilx* advertisers, and have achieved security. In both sin is scourged ar.d sinners come to grief. As for the human material in. them, is anybody acquainted with life going to stand up and say, for instance, that he has not met—yes, and shaken hands with —all the types introduced into the brilliant opening scenes of Mr Lonsdale’s ‘Spring Cleaning'? Such types swarm around us to-day. “In Mr Noel Coward’s ‘The Vortex’ there is a mother who is freely unchaste and a son who takes drugs. Anything unheard of heie ? Are mothers exempt from undisciplined passion? Has nobody ever seen a young dope-fiend? Come with me to lalf a dozen of the smartest restaurants and mixed clubs, and I will show you such types sprinkled all over the place, t ' DANCING MOTHERS.” “Of course, it is dangerous in this country for a writer to lay hands on the mother (and, of course,' ‘Hamlet’ is a morbid, decadent, and unsavoury play). Mr .Noel Coward was audacious. But his audacity is as naught compared with that of MeSora iSelwyn and Goulden. the American luthors of the third play, ‘Dancing Mothers.’ (What a terrible innuendo in that title!) ,For they have made the mother their main theme and caused her to behave as an ill-used woman well might behave. “ The American mother had a nusband who lied to her, deceived her adulterously, grossly neglected her, and did all he could to ruin her influence over a misguided daughter. The American mother had » daughter of tender years, who flouted her, defied her, lied to her, neglected her, and came home half-drunk of an afternoon. (Such things have been known even in Britain.) “The American mother, exasperated too far, breaks out into nfght-life and enslaves a famous lady-killer. She decides to abandon her husband and daughter and to go to Europe with a woman friend in a steamer in which the enslaved lady-killer is also travelling. The husband , and daughter appeal powerfully to her. Of course, she w;il yield. She must yield. But she doesn't yield, she goes. And that is the end of the story. " The pother has been and is immense. Daughters have indeed refused to take their mothers to the Queen’s Theatre. And so on. It has all been very funny, for the reason that the only important point is seldom or never debated. The only important point is: Have mothers behaved as the mother in the play behaved, under similar provocation? And to this there is only one answer: They have —and ficquently under far less provocation. The rest is irrelevant. RETICENCE OF AUTHORS. “For my part, what I wonder at is not the outspokencimeas but the reticence of our authors. They might have said much m-re than they did, and still been well within the mark of truth. Society may be in a worse or a better state to-day than it was wueu the London stage presented scores of French farces such as 'Pink Dominoes.’ I cannot judge. But I will assert positively that real life can show plenty of pictures worse than anything in any modern play. 1 “The assaulted dramatists have simply called our attention to certain social tendencies; they have brought us up with a jerk. Knowing human nature as they probably do they will not expect to bo thanked. All they can reasonably ask for is to bo heard. Th»v are being heard. An excellent thin£, The Daily Express, in a leading article, admits that Mr Bennett’s logic is perfect but he has fallen into the easy error of thinking that what the mirror reveals must be life. “Our playwrights agree with him. They keep holding the mirror up to every festering sore, every foul growth (‘“social tendencies, Mr Bennett calls them), and their justmeation is that they are holding the mirror up to life.IT PA/S. “Reduced to its most practical level, it would seem that the case can be put in this way. There is always a profitable market for indecency. Every newspaper knows that the three million circulation mark could be attained by filling its pages with pornographic details. The theatre manager and the theatrical author realise that the same condition, in a more restricted ratio, exists in the theatre. To say that the present rush of sex plays ia a sincere attempt to scourge humanity for its sins is to scantily the playwrights at the expense of common sense. , . . ~ . , “The West End theatre is in the grip of a ‘decadence’ boom. Before it passes—as it must by ‘reason of its very violence—the English stage and English standards will have been soiled and English life travestied and libelled. “But it pays. That is the real unanswerable reply to any attack which may be Launched against it.” ..... _ As already announced. Messrs Williamson (Ltd.) have bought the Australian rights of “Spring Cleaning,” and this play will be staged in the Commonwtealth before the end of the year. WHY GIVE THE PEOPLE FILTH? "We are faced with the fact,” writes Sir Gerald du Maurier, “that what was the problem play is now the sox play; that Lord Quex,’ once scurrilous, is now, in bir Arthur Pinero's own words, ‘for the nursery. “The public arc asking filth; tire younger geheration are .knocking at the door “of the dustbin. Are we going to give them what they ass for ? Decadence in unattractive; but sex is so attractive. The modern mind requires that love should be leprous, in a blue mask, that Cupid should Itvear bats’ wings, and carry a cocktail shaker instead of a bow. If life is worse than the stage, should the stage hold the mirror up to such distorted nature? . “Is to be caddish, ribald, pornic. bestial, the only way not to bore on the stage? Can one not rule it out before even cads and pornography become a bore? The beauty that is in most things, as gold is in mud, can still bo found for the looking. If people are really so squalid in their lives that they want filth served up to them on the stage, why give it them? Naked truth cannot be exploited on the stage; the mirror must be a little finer than the reflection, because the stage is compressed, like the mirror, into a narrow compass. It can only give the actual unvarnished present, not the softening past. If Mr Bennett took the real characters be speaks of from their night clubs he would hear their story—what childhood perversely led, or what husband drunk or diseased led such a one to such a pass, and he would forgive them. You cannot forgive stage figures; they are only there for an hour. “What the public want just now is excitement,. cruelty, decadence. The warning of Zeppelin was the first sign of it. One said of the warning, ‘How terrible!’ but if no Zeppelin came, 'What a bore!’ “Lot us unwind, or evolute, go to the natural opposite of things, when to be simple is thrilling—much more ■ thrilling—when Yorkshire pudding is terribly exciting and one goes into ecstasies if it rains.”