IIIOTHER THEATRES

The National theatre which I have described was not, of course, the only kind, though it had many imitators; and I shall now pass to some others, beginning with that which I think will most interest readers of the present day, but which was rarely mentioned in the polite society of the age. This was the Cathartic Theatre, where people went to be cured of the passion of love. In our day, as has been for many generations past, we often refer to love-sickness but it is half in jest, and there are few of us who do not think the undoubted pains of the state amplyrepaid with its joys. Its dangers, however, now only beginning to be recognised, were fully taken into account in 2,100, for it was seen that the claims of society were incompatible with an emotion then relegated to the songs of derivative poets. Already we know that the battle between the self and the ideal social self gives rise to the most frightful diseases, but in our day we only try to cure the unhealthy symptom instead of going to the root of the matter and abolishing the cause. At this time, though the malady was well in hand, its approaches were so insidious that patients going to a doctor for what they thought was one sickness would often be surprised by a diagnosis which convicted them of love, and would later be seen entering theCathartic Theatre with shamed faces or that air of studied indifference we assume when we do not wish to be noticed, thinking that by this method we shall appear to have no face at all.

The theory of this theatre was very simple; and this too, I was proud to think, had been foreshadowed by writers of our own time, one of whom had written, “We have lost the orgy, but in its place we have art,”[7]and another “Poetry acts as a physician.”[8]The aim of the performance was to break down the obstacles we wrongly oppose to our thoughts in rude attempts to fit ourselves to social life, and so allow to drain away those impulses which in any really harmoniousnature should never be set up. I must warn the reader of this age not to confuse the method with one of ‘sublimation’ as we say, for this involves the ‘will,’ a fiction of which the futility had long been exposed. It is true that I did not very clearly grasp these matters, which are too far beyond our time—just as Dryden would, perhaps, have found it hard to grasp the true subtleties of Expressionism—but I hope I do not err in saying that an element of vicarious fulfilment also entered into these dramas, on the ground, which no one will contradict, that it is the function of art to provide what everyday life denies us. The name of the theatre, I found indeed, had arisen from that reading of Aristotle which confuses the meaning ofCatharsis with that of ‘purgation by excess’: for even in those days the Faculty of Medicine was not always happy in the names it chose for the ills and remedies it invented.

[7]Havelock Ellis,Affirmations.

[8]Robert Graves,Poetic Unreason.

The authorities were, of course, fully aware of the risks run in using such a specific, and its abuse was hindered in the same way as we curtail the buying of opium and other drugs, which wrongly applied prove harmful; and a man was only able to buy a ticket if he showed a paper signed by a doctor to declare him a fitting subject. Medical men were themselves allowed to buy as many tickets as they liked, and a large percentage of the audience was always composed of them, because they wished to observe the effects of the cure upon their patients. It wasnot without difficulty that Fabian was able to get us the needful pass, and it was only after representing to the authorities that any account of their age which omitted so beneficial a device would be very faulty, that I was granted it.

Before entering the theatre Fabian told me to abandon myself freely to any impulse to laugh, as that was a condition of perfect purging: and of this I was very glad, for I have often, not only before, but since my visit to this time, felt the pain of constraint at light plays, especially if I was with relatives, or else friends with whom I did not wish to become too intimate. But what was my surprise to find, instead of the fescennine jesting I was prepared for, a play I had already seenin Manchester, a drama of the most correct sentiment by one of our notably respectable, even titled playwrights, which might call forth smiles and tears alternately, but not those crude outbursts of mirth I now heard on every side. So little was I able to enter into the spirit of the thing that after the first act Fabian took me out, whispering to me that my callous behaviour might have the worst effect upon the patients seated near me. He seemed to think my bearing had been of set purpose, and only grudgingly gave the explanation I longed for, which was that the people in these times saw a wealth of allusion lurking beneath the innocent phrases; and that what the audience so much relished and admired in our author was the simplicity with whichhe had hidden the ‘latent content’ under the ‘manifest.’ When I protested my belief that nothing had been more remote from the writer’s mind, Fabian looked coldly at me, as though he were sure I was trying to dupe him.

It was in vain that I pleaded with him to be allowed to attend another of these plays, one of later date, for Fabian would by no means recommend me for a pass, saying that the sense would certainly be beyond me. There was, however, another level of play of the same nature, designed for the stupider sort of people, such as members of Parliament, wardens of libraries, teachers in science or religion at the Public Schools, municipal architects and so on, for which, not without a contemptuous word, he recommendedme. He excused his own absence, however; for even, he said, if he could obtain permission, which he doubted, he would not care to go. And indeed, after I had seen the piece, I could not blame him. For determined as I was, this time, to behave with propriety, I allowed myself the license of which we are all guilty sometimes, when our conscience, or ‘censor’ to use the modern term, is off its guard; and laughing very heartily, I have since felt ashamed at my acquiescence in a remedy that must prove so greatly worse than the disease. The least things there were such as make us keep some of our Callot etchings locked in a drawer, and to leave certain portions of Mr Loeb’s excellent library in the original tongue, though some I am told,regard this only as an ingenious device to outwit the laziness of students. At all events, since I was not ill, the performance, I fear, did me no good: whether it would have done so in less happy conditions I am unable to tell, and I dwell upon it no longer, as in any case the experiment will not, I think, be tried in our day, even in the hospitals. Nor would I be convinced of the wisdom of the venture if it were.

In going about the streets I had often noticed, especially in the business quarters, what appeared to be shops or booths, not unlike those places one may see abroad, where men sit in rows to have their boots polished. Above them was displayed a sign on which was written “Two Minutes,” or “Thirty Seconds,” or some like period of time.I had seen the backs of men standing in lines, with pads clamped over their ears and their faces pushed forward into a sort of camera, and had supposed these retreats to be telephone boxes. I was much surprised when Ierne told me they were “Hurry Theatres,” and invited me to accompany her to one of them.

They were erected, as the name implies, for those without the leisure to attend longer performances, and were found very beneficial to brokers and such, who, hurrying from their offices to snatch their midday meal, could pause for the declared number of seconds, and gain, without waste of time, a modicum of ‘organised emotion,’ as Ierne called it; and this was often a great relief to them. Forwhen we are too much troubled by our affairs we may usefully go to art for escape or refreshment. There were a few booths in the more fashionable parts, for errand boys, journalists, and taxi-drivers, while it was found that those in the dentists’ quarter were much patronised: for in going to have our teeth seen to, if we do not like to be late, yet we shrink from entering the place until the last moment, although the waiting rooms are made homely and cheerful with time-tables, comic papers, and copies of Academy pictures. These theatres were also agreeable to those who had arranged to meet friends at a certain spot and were kept waiting, and some had even, in the early days, gained a notoriety as rendezvous.

The camera through which one looked was simply a stereoscopic glass directed on a double film screen, and the pads were the telephone receivers through which one heard the voices of the actors, which seemed to come from their mouths. The plays themselves were most dramatic in character, since their object was to endue the spectator with a highly disturbing emotion in a minimum of time. They were therefore very allusive, and I should have found it hard to understand many of them if the gestures and tones of the actors had not been profoundly striking. I grew to be fond of them and, indeed, with weakly emotional men, they readily become a vice; for when thrills are as easily obtained as cocktails, and as rapidly swallowed, if Imay use the term, they form a tonic as difficult to resist as any digestive, and are perhaps as harmful.

It would be useless for me to write down a typical drama, for the reader of to-day would not follow it, nor, for that matter, relish it more than he does those quaint old seventeenth-century plays where women dress up as men, and blood so freely flows. There were, indeed, a few from our own era, known as ‘classics,’ and sometimes acted as curiosities in the neighbourhood of museums, but the earliest of these must date, I think, from at least 1940, and was a comedy with the strange titleThe Psycho-Fans. A young man wishing to make a girl his bride, she puts him through a number of scientific, but comical tests, to prove hisworth and his affection: she was afraid, I gathered, that he might turn out to be an ‘introvert,’ and not at all a suitable mate for an ‘extravert’ such as she was. All I remember of the words is the opening of a sort of epilogue he spoke:

Oh had I wistBefore I kissed,That you were a Behaviourist....

Oh had I wist

Before I kissed,

That you were a Behaviourist....

Normally, however, these dramas aimed at producing dread, and I naturally avoided one which was advertised as “Guaranteed to make your soul writhe.” We are not yet made of such stern stuff as to derive courage to face the battle of life from art of this sort, though I have seen robust clerks stagger from these booths withwhite faces and a much increased zest for their humdrum labours. This being so, I had the temerity to suggest that one of these theatres might be installed in each government office for the use of civil servants, and am gratified to be able to say that my proposal was acted upon, only the Inland Revenue Department being excepted.

There was one theatre which several young people told me was the best, but as it did not meet with general favour, I did not go there until the end of my visit, for I have always felt an abhorrence of what is at all precious, and avoided the highbrow and snobbish. It was quite a mean place, not in the capital but in a small provincial town, and was regulated by a fairfusser who had never been able to make hisway in a decent centre, owing to his poor skill in the art of advertisement.

The stage was much like that which we know, but though built in pleasant enough proportions was too simply decorated to be striking. The settings were so unobtrusive that at the end of a scene one could hardly say whether the framing had been good or bad, which I thought a pity, for one was in this manner robbed of a subject for conversation. The effects were obtained chiefly by the lighting, but unfortunately this was kept uniform throughout each scene, and thus one lost the pleasure of admiring the agility of the electrician, who nowadays, is, with his switches, as great a virtuoso as an organist with his stops. The most noticeable difference was the stage beingonly about two-thirds the size of ours, the reason for it that the actors were not people, but puppets, rather smaller than human beings.

I have always regarded these dolls as a mistake, for they must needs be anonymous, and how can one tell if the acting is good if one does not know the name of the performers? I think too, that if one is to have puppets at all, they should be either grotesque or fairy-like, and these were neither, resembling instead those early Egyptian or Indian sculptures we have so far out-distanced, or those Byzantine paintings, which, once thought beautiful, would look so oddly on the walls of Burlington House. I must confess that their movements were graceful, their deftness above that of any humanbeing, but not more so than one could imagine human beings capable of. They were actuated, not by strings, but by some invisible power, and everything they did seemed to be of such happy invention that one felt they had all nature at their command to use. But I detected a grave error in the way the fairfusser made the words issue from their lips, for they did not speak at all like actors, but simply and swiftly, as we all try to do in real life, and it is not for that we go to the theatre. Their speeches were so cadenced that they dwelt in the ear like a harmony in music, which is contrary to all experience, so that the characters did not seem like men ennobled, but, rather, fleshly embodiments of the thought or feeling it wastheir purpose to express. One enthusiast, eager to convert me, quoted to me the words of some foreign actress of our time:[9]“To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible,” which is cruel and absurd, and in any case should not have come from an actress. For these semblances of mankind by their remoteness banished all the accidental things which make a play realistic and warmly human, and all the personal emotion which makes us feel for an actor, and applaud him for the pain he has gone through. But we cannot feel for a puppet, or applaud him, even ifhe has played King Lear, for we know his sufferings were not real.

[9]Eleonora Duse (Ed.).

These plays were always made entirely by one man—for this fairfusser actually had one or two disciples—who directed each movement, whether of single persons or crowds, either tumultuous, or in the dances, which met with much applause, though they seemed to me even less comprehensible than some of the later Russian ballets which were lately in vogue for a short time. I was told he was always very careful about the ‘rhythmic order’ of the piece, whatever that may mean, and its groupings. All was done first on a little model, which in the end became a record repeated on the larger scale. For the voices he took human beings, going over and over eachphrase until he got exactly the tone he wanted, and these he recorded, timing them afterwards with the movements, so that the whole play went, as it were, by clockwork. Thus there was nothing spontaneous about it, and this is a fault, since art, according to many serious philosophers, is a kind of game, and thus, surely, if any notion of being drilled creeps in, the pleasure evaporates.

The same man also, as a rule, wrote the words, which did not remain in my memory because I understood them so little, seeing that they dealt with thoughts and feelings which in our day we take small notice of. That this must be so is easy to see; for every age concerns itself with a different relation of man to what is outside him. We arenow, to be sure, beginning to do what they were doing,[10]in dealing with man’s relation to man’s idea of what he is; that is, so to say in the plain words of Albertus Magnus, seeking “the causation of causes in the causes of things.” But these plays bewildered me, as I own without shame, for would not Dr. Johnson himself have been adrift at a play by Signor Pirandello? And since there was so much I could not fathom, I should only impart a false twist to the meaning however much I tried to give a true account.

[10]In 2,100 O. S.

But I fear these plays disordered me, for the unnatural is a sort of poison, and I have never since been able to feel real pleasure at any drama of to-day even in the best theatres inParis, New York, or London. Indeed I have almost conceived an aversion from our stage; and it is only the importunities of my friends that make me go to a play once or twice in a year, so as not to seem unsociable. If the choice is left to me, we go to the English version of a French farce, for these are usually free from any meaning at all: and if one expects nothing, one cannot be disappointed.

Transcriber’s Notes:Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

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