The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1913. THE DRAMA OF IDEAS.

Timaru Herald, Volume XCVIII, Issue 15162, 4 October 1913, Page 8

The Timaru Herald SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1913. THE DRAMA OF IDEAS.

The .type of play which "Milestones" and "Man and Superman" will introduce to Timaru this week-end represents the latest of three stages in the development of drama. The same three stages can be noted in the development of literature not written for the stage. Originally the drama was religious. It's characters were i the gods and heroes of the old Greek stories, or the personages of the Old Testament who knew God. Later, when a secular drama sprang into existence, it took the same- subjects as the secular literature which came into being just before it. Tales of Boccaccio and. histories of Plutarch made plots for Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What was good for the romance and good later for the novel was good also for the play. Action was the material of tL? drama, and as all the world. lovob a lover, feels for his distress and rejoices in his triumph, the love interest was worked to distraction by the dramatist and novelist alike.-

But all the varieties of action that can form plots for a novel must be exhausted, after ' they have been exploited for a few hundred years, and the varieties of actjQn that can be adapted to the stagnate still more limited Even new varieties of characters, £8 demonstrated to the outward

view, must be difficult'to ;dispoy=;r or invent. So Meredith has given' us a new fiction, concerned not with action, but with mental analysis and criticism, and Mr i Wells and others a still later fic- , tion, whose chief object is to demonstrate ideas and theories. Coincidently a school of dramatists, of whom the most important is Mr Bernard Shaw, have given a new and similar development to their'art. Mr Shaw's plays ace not plays of action. Most of them have hardly any movement. He has called them the " drama of ideas," and the advantage of ideas over action, for the purposes of the drama or of fiction, is the advantage of infinity over limitation. In so far as he distrusts and loathes romance, insists on putting all conventions to the test of his own reason, hates all shams and pretences, and believes that these form "the main part, which should be abolished, of the civilisation of the day, one may agree or disagree with Mr Shaw's ideas. His merit lies in the remorseless logic with which he urges them, the vigour with which he attacks the opinions lie thinks harmful, the new light he throws on questions which most people take for granted, his powers of wit and raillery and discovering the ridiculous side of things._ His comedies are really discussions, which does not mean that they are not dramatic. He gets his dramatic effects by his own means, 'and humour, although of a sardonic kind, is never wanting. "Man and Superman " he calls "a comedy and a philosophy." It is a humourous development of the idea, which Kipling has expressed brutally in a doggerel line, that "the female of the species is more deadly than the male." She is more deadly, in Shaw's view, first developed by some German philosophers, because' the female is always the instrument, conscious or unconscious, of the ".life force," the law of nature which forces her 1,0 find a mate, and makes man a helpless object in her toils. But, since this philosophy may aoX appeal to all,, the author explains that he has "not been spar ag of such lighter qualities as 1 could endow the book with for the sake of those, who ask nothing from a play but ari agreeable pastime," and no one can afford a pastime better than Shaw.

Mr Arnold Bennett's play of " Milestones " marks a much' less departure from previous types, but ,_a departure for all tliat.' JEis motive, developed with constant humour ,_ sense, and Subtle observation, is not'a love motive, but the conservatism which grows on all men with their years. The play : covers three, generations, and its contrasts are derived from the impatience shown by fathers for their <swn youthful enterprising, ■•whenwit- is • repeated in their: and from the:, changes in manners, tastes, the behaviour of juniors to their seniors, and especially ■ the new "position won by women, in a period of sixty years. In all this there is much more,, vital subject for a drama than in nine-tenths of the artificial elaborations of three-party passions and intrigues of which the stage had reason to feel tired before the new., school of dramatists turned to other subjects . :