CREATIVE THEATRE

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1034, 26 July 1930, Page 24

CREATIVE THEATRE

American s Belief In Future of Stage GROWTH FROM PRESENT RUINS —A

Roy Mitchell, who has been interested in the experimental theatre for many years, and who believes a new theatre more beautiful and finer in every way than the old, will grow out of the ruins and wrecks of the present theatre, has written extensively, lovingly and prophetically of his hobby in “Creative Theatre.” His book Is illustrated by 17 wood-block geometrical projections by Jocelyn Taylor, his wife. Setting out the purpose of his work the author says:—“This book is for those who can believe in a new kind of theatre arising out of the present one. It is for persons who are pledged neither to the theatre as it is, nor yet ! as it has been, but to the protean [ soul of the theatre which is immortal as the soul of man and will take as many forms according to the necessities into which it is projected.” Mitchell calls the men who seized the theatre and made it merely a money-geting machine, thereby nearly killing It forever, aliens, and he believes, passionately, “that the national theatre of America will not be of one city, but of many aities, each metropolitan to its own territory.” And curiously he believes burlesque is the real school of native art. “it is our one native growth,” he says. “With disreputable little scripts, silly songs and the shabbiest of scenery, burlesque goes ou year after year creating comedians. When our high-art producers of revue and muiscal comedy run short of comic motion do they make more? No, they do not know how. They dip down into burlesque aud bring up the Jolsons, the Cantors, the Errols, Bernards, Cooks, Manns, Arlingtons, Wrothes. “Burlesque, like the heroic little workshop it is, does not repine It remembers how it made the others, so it rolls up its sleeves and makes some more.”

Mitchell proposes a theatre with a great school attached, a working school, somewhat along the lines of that which the New York Theatre Guild tried to create, the abandonment of which he says came about because “when they saw their graduates peering at them over the footlights of rival producers they disbanded the school.” He believes in a modified sort of repertoire, not exactly like that which Eva Le Gallienne has made successful. His idea is for a theatre to grow in a big city, to be a centre, and to serve the country around it, and naturally Mitchell believes the director is the soul of a play, greater than the play or the actor or the scenery. He insists that a play is not the book, but “the motion which director and actors have distilled from the book.”