Playing to the Gallery.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 11, 14 March 1908, Page 56

Playing to the Gallery.

A reverend gentleman who launched out a few days ago on matters theatrical condemned what he called “playing to the gallery.” But the context showed that he did not use the words in the ordinary sense, or in the sense in which I mean them now. He meant to condemn innuendo and meretricious suggestion, ■which it is my settled conviction appeals considerably less to the gallery than to the stalls and dress circle. In either case I doubt whether it is a majority that likes such adventitious aids to public support; but granted that it is at least a large minority, 1 think we may say that coarseness of a rather obvious and almost harmless kind appeals to the have-nots in the gallery, and that the nastier minded of the haves in the dress circle are the people par excellence who enjoy a risque hint, or a pointed innuendo. “Playing to the gallery” is, however, something much wider and less directly offensive than this. As I see it, it is little more than the application of strictly business principles to the sphere of art; the invoking of an important financial law which places money in the pocket of the manager who parodies the foundation law of democracy by catering for the greatest enjoyment—often far from the greatest good—of the greatest number:— “ J Die stage but echoes back the public voice; The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live.” It is only logical, if we blame the theatrical manager for securing his financial position that we should also condemn the popular novelist, the popular composer, the popular painter, all of whom meanly cadge for the suffrage of the ignorant by gaudy ornament, cheap effect, and extravagance of expression. Think of the poor hacks of novelette fame, who cynically, but not without a blush of shame, pen the heroics and the sickly sentimental rubbish that is to delight sweet but indiscriminate seventeen. Think of the men who began as hungry artists, and ended as well-fed exponents in a kind that they loathed

and despised. Do you hold that it was their choice—in face of the fact that to many of them it involved bitterness and even tragedy? Many of them—heroes in the fray—have gone to their graves, poor ami unknown, rather than shame their artistic conscience by worshipping this god of popularity. The public blames anyone but itself. It asks (and pays) for tinsel, and then grumbles that it is not given gold. Do you know that threequarters of the dialogue of a melodrama is literally filched from one play to another?—that Arabella, Countess of Leith, in “The Clot of Blood,” talks In phrases borrowed from a precisely similar lady in “The Dagger’s Point” or “A Mystery of Midnight”? Why? Because “Philip Smith, Esq.” (for some unstated reason, melodramatic managers always “esquire” their authors) cannot invent his own dialogue? Not a bit of it. It is true that “Philip Smith, Esq.,” is far from a genius, and that he is, indeed, nothing more than a mediocre hack; but he could write fresher stuff than that if he wrote as fast as pen can travel. But it PAYS to stage a play in which every character, every sentiment, every turn of the plot, shall be some slight variation on an eternal stereotype. That variation may be novel, but not one single point in the play must be really original—a mighty different matter—or it will never merit that supremely complimentary judgment that it is what the straphanger will call “all right.” The managers themselves know that such plays are rubbish, the Press knows it, and it is a commonplace with every discriminating playgoer; but the public demands it, and then rather ungratefully blames this “playing to the gallery” upon which it has insisted. But the evil is, indeed, as wide as life. Politician, canvasser, author or auctioneer—all suffer from this dreadful inclination to “ play to the gallery.” All play to that little weakness detected by Goethe when he wrote that the public, like women, must be told absolutely nothing but what they like to hear. And they do not like to hear originality (once more I distinguish from novelty) ; they hate intellectual compromise; and they crave to have their own whispered judgments hurled back on them with all the thunder and volubility of the orator who knows his game. And we can recognise

this little weakness without claiming the smallest superiority for ourselves. .Regard the matter as a question of evidence, and ask any man who really “ caters for the public ” —I don’t care whether it is in plays or novels or pictures—and he will tell you that the public only genuinely appreciates that with which it is familiar. To play to the gallery is merely to give people what they expect; to tell them what is already in their brain; to avoid shocking them by a fresh point of view; to pamper their preferences, and exaggerate their prejudices; in short to treat them like little children while pretending to treat them as grown-up men and women. And why disparage the public even on evidence? Because, Sir or Madam, there is no intellectual reason —I am afraid there are at present other reasons —why a public, as a public, should exist; and the most useful work any man can do in the general waste of his life is to persuade people not to belong to the public, but to themselves and to truth. It needs no high intellect, only moderate ideals and a fair allowance of mental independence, and the humblest of mankind can escape from the public and be himself. Then, although he may still mourn that the business man plays to the gallery, lie will have the satisfaction of knowing" that he at least is not there, but has promoted himself to a better seat in life’s theatre. He will laugh at catchwords, will resent being “catered for ’’ as one of that public as though he were a mere algebraical equivalent of a given fraction of a collective stupidity, and will claim the obvious rights of a sane and sober and critical individual. It may be necessary, also, to point out that there are not antidemocratic sentiments, although it should be obvious that it was the old order of things that made an intellectual “ public,” and despised it (not unfairly) afterwards. Democracy does not bring with it—or certainly will not eventually bring with it —an intellectual democracy, but an intellectual aristocracy; and “public opinion” will become less and less of a crude and simple aggregation of slavish thought and more and more of a proluce of indepe and more and more of a product of independent judgment. Possibly even that Utopian day will come when the gallery as we know it will be no more. “PIERROT, ’ in “Auckland Star.”