Granville Barker on Theatre: Selected Essays 9781474294836, 9781474294843, 9781474294867, 9781474294829

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Editorial Note
Part 1: The Art of the Theatre
Chapter 1: Repertory Theatres
Note
Chapter 2: Notes on Rehearsing a Play
Note
Chapter 3: The School of ‘The Only Possible Theatre’
Note
Chapter 4: The Production of a Play
How plays are now thrown on the stage
The scratch company
The hurried rehearsals
The limitations of the human medium
How physical action brings study to a standstill
The mysterious process by which the actor identifies himself with his part
The dramatist’s method, which the actor must follow
Never commit words to memory
The mystery of identification again
Productions must be born and not made
The two categories of a play’s action: The conscious action
Unconscious or sub-conscious action
Automatism and self-consciousness
Pure conventionalism
The mystery yet again, the actor surrenders himself
And the final struggle
Note
Chapter 5 The Heritage of the Actor
Note
Chapter 6 On Translating Plays
Note
Chapter 7 Hints for Amateurs on Rehearsing a Play
Note
Chapter 8: The Natural Law of the Theatre
The rule of the ancients
The way of initiation
The literary record
The physical ‘laws’ of the Greek theatre
The physical factors of the Elizabethan stage
The illusionary theatre
The dramatist’s partnership with the actor
Drama close packed with life
Can a play be too good?
Note
Chapter 9: A Word About Form
Form of one kind and another
The planning of Greek drama
The retrospective method
Ibsen’s dramatic economy
The linking of past and present
The drama of ‘being’
Chekhov
Note
Chapter 10: Quality
Honesty in art
The industry of education
The industry of literature
Industrialized authorship
Industrializing scholarship
Quality is needed …
… and the need is great
Note
Part 2: Other Theatres
Chapter 11: Two German Theatres
Note
Chapter 12: Introduction to Maeterlinck Plays
Note
Chapter 13: At the Moscow Art Theatre
Note
Chapter 14: Tolstoy Introduction
Note
Chapter 15: Ibsen’s Centenary
Note
Chapter 16: The Coming of Ibsen
The moral shock
The Ibsenites
The middle-class view
The critics
Note
Part 3: The Future of Theatre
Chapter 17: The Theatre: The Next Phase
Note
Chapter 18: Reconstruction in the Theatre
Note
Chapter 19: Some Current Difficulties
Why many gallant efforts at reform have failed
The cautious capitalist
Practical difficulties for ‘practical’ managements
The way out of the difficulty
Old methods and new drama
The good businessman and the theatre
The integrated audience
The pyramid of policy
The theatre’s duty towards the drama
The theatre’s duty towards itself
Drama and democracy
Note
Chapter 20: Amateur Interest in Drama
Note
Chapter 21: Speaking to the Young
A moral exercise
A drama of enduring worth
Enduring art
Note
Editors’ Postscript: A Question of Reputation
The Barker legend
What ifs
Harley and Helen
Helen and the theatre
The most productive time of Barker’s writing life
After 1924
Consumption in the 1920s
Barker’s reputation before 1924
The Barker/Shaw relationship
The creation of the Barker legend
The hyphen
Shaw and Helen
Conclusion
Principal writings of Harley Granville Barker
Plays
In translation
In translation with Helen Granville-Barker
Short stories
On theatre
On Shakespeare
Published correspondence
Miscellaneous
Index

Citation preview

Harley Granville Barker was a playwright, director, producer, actor, essayist and theatre visionary. Born in London in 1877, he had little formal education and joined his mother in her recitals from an early age. His first recorded appearance as an actor came in Yorkshire, in the north of England, aged thirteen. In the same year, he attended Sarah Thorne’s theatre school at the Theatre Royal, Margate, in the south of England. His breakthrough as an actor came eight years later when he played the title role in Shakespeare’s Richard II. By this time, he had co-authored plays with a fellow actor, only one of which was performed, and he was branching out on his own as a writer. In 1900, he began directing for the Stage Society, a non-commercial playproducing body, and appeared for the Society as Marchbanks in the first London production of Shaw’s Candida. For the Society, he also directed the first production of his own play The Marrying of Ann Leete in 1902 and created the role of Frank in Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Along with Shaw, Barker was a member of the Fabian Society and deeply involved in the theatre reform movement, co-writing with William Archer in 1904 the pioneering book, A National Theatre. Barker took the chance to test his theories when in conjunction with the business manager J.E. Vedrenne he ran groundbreaking repertory seasons at the Royal Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907, and then moved to the Savoy Theatre. During these seasons, he married the leading actress Lillah McCarthy and later went into theatre management with her. He directed the first production of his own play The Voysey Inheritance at the Court in 1905, and would have directed the premiere of his play Waste at the Savoy if the play had not been banned. It eventually appeared in a production he co-directed in 1936. Barker tried to mount repertory seasons at other theatres before the First World War, notably at the Duke of York’s, where he staged the premiere of his play The Madras House in 1909, and the St James’s. His three Shakespeare productions at the Savoy, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night (both 1912) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914) were considered revolutionary. In 1915, he produced with McCarthy and directed a repertory season in New York; and on tour in the United States he staged innovative open-air productions of Euripides. The war broke his attempts to establish a repertory theatre in Britain and also saw his divorce from McCarthy. A new future, artistically and personally, beckoned with his new wife, Helen Huntington, a poet and a novelist, whom he married in 1918. Barker now dedicated his life to writing. As well as translating Spanish plays with Helen, he completed two new full-length plays, The Secret Life and His Majesty, numerous essays, articles and reviews, a major book on the theatre, four others based on his lectures, and his Prefaces to Shakespeare. He died in Paris in 1946.

Richard Nelson’s recent plays include a three-play series called The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family and a four-play series The Apple Family (both for The Public Theater in New York), as well as Farewell to the Theatre (Hampstead Theatre), Nikolai and the Others (Lincoln Center Theater) and Conversations in Tusculum [Public]. Other plays include Frank’s Home, Rodney’s Wife, Franny’s Way, Madame Melville, Goodnight Children Everywhere, The General From America, New England, Two Shakespearean Actors, Some Americans Abroad and the musicals, James Joyce’s The Dead (with Shaun Davey) and My Life With Albertine (with Ricky Ian Gordon). He wrote the screenplays for the films Hyde Park-on-Hudson and Ethan Frome. Nelson has received a Tony Award (Best Book of a Musical for James Joyce’s The Dead), an Oliver Award (Best Play for Goodnight Children Everywhere), two other Tony nominations, a second Olivier nomination, two Obies, a Lortel Award (James Joyce’s The Dead), a New York Drama Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Writers Award. He is the recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels Master Playwright Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he is an honorary associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has produced ten of his plays. Colin Chambers, a former journalist and theatre critic, was literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company (1981–1997), and since 2014 has been emeritus professor of Drama at Kingston University. He is co-author with Richard Nelson of Kenneth’s First Play and Tynan (both produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company), and he edited Making Plays: The Writer-Director Relationship in the Theatre Today by Richard Nelson and David Jones. He adapted with Steven Pimlott Molière’s The Learned Ladies (The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon); he selected and edited for performance Three Farces by John Maddison Morton (Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond); and he adapted David Pinski’s Treasure (Finborough Theatre, London). As well as editing and contributing to the Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, he has written extensively on the theatre, including the books Other Spaces: New Writing and the RSC, Playwrights’ Progress (with Michael Prior); The Story of Unity Theatre; Peggy: the Life of Margaret Ramsay, Play Agent (winner of the inaugural Theatre Book Prize); Inside the Royal Shakespeare Company; Here We Stand: Politics, Performers and Performance – Paul Robeson, Isadora Duncan and Charlie Chaplin; and Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History.

GRANVILLE BARKER ON THEATRE

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GRANVILLE BARKER ON THEATRE Selected Essays

HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER EDITED BY COLIN CHAMBERS AND RICHARD NELSON

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Imprint previously known as Methuen Drama 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY, METHUEN DRAMA and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This collection first published 2017 Collection copyright © The Estate of Harley Granville Barker Reproduced by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Harley Granville Barker Editorial Matter © Colin Chambers and Richard Nelson, 2017 Colin Chambers and Richard Nelson have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as authors of the various introductions, notes and commentaries of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-9483-6 PB: 978-1-4742-9484-3 ePDF: 978-1-4742-9482-9 eBook: 978-1-4742-9485-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Cover design by Louise Dugdale and Eleanor Rose Cover photograph © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements  ix Introduction  x Editorial Note  xii

PART ONE  THE ART OF THE THEATRE 1 Repertory Theatres (1909)  3 2 Notes on Rehearsing a Play (1919)  13 3 The School of ‘The Only Possible Theatre’ (1920)  23 4 The Production of a Play (1922)  35 5 The Heritage of the Actor (1923)  53 6 On Translating Plays (1924)  75 7 Hints for Amateurs on Rehearsing a Play (1929)  87 8 The Natural Law of the Theatre (1931)  97 9 A Word About Form (1931)  113 10 Quality (1938)  121

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PART TWO  OTHER THEATRES 11 Two German Theatres (1911)  135 12 Introduction to Maeterlinck Plays (1911)  145 13 At the Moscow Art Theatre (1917)  151 14 Tolstoy Introduction (1928)  157 15 Ibsen’s Centenary (1928)  163 16 The Coming of Ibsen (1930)  167

PART THREE  THE FUTURE OF THEATRE 17 The Theatre: The Next Phase (1910)  177 18 Reconstruction in the Theatre (1919)  189 19 Some Current Difficulties (1922)  195 20 Amateur Interest in Drama (1922)  211 21 Speaking to the Young (1946)  217 Editors’ Postscript: A Question of Reputation  227 Principal Writings of Harley Granville Barker  253 Index  256

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for help and permissions: David Aukin; Berg Collection, New York Public Library; Anne Blecksmith, Huntington Library; Erica Burnham, University of London Institute in Paris; Helen Bynum; Eric Colleary and Ariel Evans, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin; Tara Craig and Jennifer B. Lee, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library; Brianna Cregle, Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; Fisher Library, University of Toronto; Emma Golding, Guardian News and Media Archive; Helen Gush, Victoria and Albert Museum; Susan Halpert, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Marianne Hansen, Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections; Michael Hughes, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Kingston University Library; Cheryl Kohut, Tucson Medical Center, Arizona; Jane Noble; Michel Pharand; Deidre Pirro; Billy Rose Collection, Performing Arts Library, New York Public Library; Rebecca Russell, Rice University Library; Steven Salpeter, Curtis Brown; Adrienne Sharpe, Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Society of Authors, on behalf of the Harley Granville Barker Estate and Bernard Shaw Estate.

INTRODUCTION

‘I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.’ So begins Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, perhaps the foremost essay on the nature of theatre, its place in the world and its necessity that the contemporary theatre has yet to produce. Brook’s revelatory book looks to theatre as not just a medium for a message, but perhaps a profound message in itself, in other words, an art form that has its own set of rules and rights, and where part of the job of theatre artists must be to probe theatre’s mysteries, unlock its rich secrets. For those of us who grew up with Brook’s essential book, the theatre could never again be less than a world to explore, as opposed to a vehicle to get where we wanted to go. More than fifty years before The Empty Space, Harley Granville Barker, like Brook, a highly experienced theatre practitioner, began writing about the nature of theatre, both its theories and its practicalities in the present, in the past and even in the future. His arguments can be specific – the necessity of repertory, as well as deeply theoretical – the desire for a theatre where being would replace doing. In making our selection we chose to exclude Barker’s better-known and readily available essays on Shakespeare as well as those on the need for a National Theatre, which was established in Britain in the 1960s. Instead, we have focused on his writings about the art of theatre, which appeared periodically over decades – some as published lectures, others as newspaper items or articles in now-forgotten journals and still others as chapters in Barker’s one effort to organize his thinking about theatre into a book, The Exemplary Theatre. We have divided the essays we have chosen into three parts: ‘The Art of the Theatre’, ‘Other Theatres’ and ‘The Future of Theatre’, and we present them chronologically within each part. ‘The Art of the Theatre’ covers Barker’s efforts to articulate his understanding of the essence of theatre, both in very practical terms

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(what the ideal theatre should be and how it should function) and in deeply aesthetic terms (the nature of the art, of acting, the actor, the experience with the audience). Here we find him arguing for a theatre of profound immediate intimacy where he imagines a play – to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle – from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do; to set up, that is to say, the relation by which all important human intimacies exist.1 ‘Other Theatres’ concerns essays and introductions Barker wrote about theatre in other countries and about other theatre people’s work. Here he re-evaluates and often rethinks his understanding of theatre and theatre-making as he confronts the work of Maeterlink, Ibsen and Tolstoy, and the productions of Reinhardt and the Moscow Art Theatre, where on seeing The Cherry Orchard in 1914, he wrote: ‘I had not believed till then that there could be perfection of achievement in the theatre.’2 ‘The Future of Theatre’ includes various cris de coeur by Barker as he lays out his hopes for a future theatre, one that he can envision but has yet to see, both specific in its details and passionate in its urgency: ‘Art is not mere entertainment, although it can be most entertaining. It is a moral exercise, although it need never be depressingly solemn. It should leaven the daily life of a community. It frees men’s imagination, and controls it.’3 The essays in this book were written by a man fully engaged in every element of the theatre, in its craft, its compromises, its humanity and its profession. Written with the wit of experience and an insuppressible joy of this art, these essays reflect the thinking of a man committed to the future of theatre, the theatre’s place in society and its moral responsibilities. It is our hope that this book will reintroduce to a new audience one of the greatest theatrical theorists of modern times. Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers, 2017 ‘The Heritage of the Actor’. ‘At the Moscow Art Theatre’. 3 ‘Speaking to the Young’. 1 2

EDITORIAL NOTE

In preparing this anthology, we have edited Barker’s writing, often quite heavily, to avoid repetition and now-obscure references, and to present his thoughts on theatre in the clearest way. We have changed producer to director, as during his time a director was normally called a producer. However, for ease of reading, we have left Barker’s use of the masculine to stand for all, which was common in his day, and we have standardized certain spellings, such as Stanislavsky and Chekhov. The footnotes, which we have kept to a minimum, are ours. We have added contextual notes to help place each item and a postscript, ‘A Question of Reputation’, to reclaim Barker’s legacy. Unless otherwise stated, all extracts are taken from British publications.

PART ONE

THE ART OF THE THEATRE

The dramatist … for his chief medium has no less than the living breathing bodies, the active minds and vibrating nerves of men and women themselves.

1 REPERTORY THEATRES A civilised man needs a home; a sensitive nature needs change. To complete the civilisation of the drama homes are needed for it; for its sensitive interpretation there must be constant change. That is a text for what I mean to be nothing better than the driest of sermons upon the phase of theatrical progress which we are now entering. I am sorry, but penalties attach to true interest in any art, even in an art so democratic, so limelit, as the art of the Theatre. An enthusiast, unless he is to remain a mere clapper of hands, must take the trouble to understand something of the technique – he must gain some knowledge of the anatomy of the Muse, of those dry bones which her prophets and priests, either by prayer and fasting, or dancing and delirium, make to live. I knew of an old lady (the story is not mine, I steal it from a distinguished dramatist) who always went to a certain theatre because the street of it was ‘so quiet for the horses.’ Perhaps the majority of playgoers drift to one entertainment and another with even less reason. At the most they demand beforehand the name of the leading actor or actress. This illuminated figure they will remember, and since it is written that what you ask that you get, nothing more, I am far from saying that there will always be much else worth remembering. So for the moment I address the minority of playgoers. I prefer addressing minorities (and it’s just as well): one can make them hear better. I think those playgoers to whom the drama – and especially the modern English drama – is becoming one of the forces which go to form that world of ideas, grave and gay, in which we must pass not the least important part of our lives, will not co-operate less effectively in its progress by taking the trouble to understand broadly how the theatrical machine is working now-a-days, what repairs it needs, what the new wheels and cranks – especially the cranks – are expected to do for it.

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We have now in England a school of actors as highly trained in the good manners of the stage as any comedy of manners can require, well trained also in the expression of certain emotions. But – the vicious circle again – the cause and effect of their training is the same. And it is not only a vicious but a narrowing circle in this case. Carefully train your actor to do certain things mechanically well, then as carefully write your plays to make no further demands on him than this training will respond to, not only will he learn nothing fresh, but in time even what he has learnt will grow stale to ineffectiveness; while newcomers to the school set to learn a living art by dead rote must start stale and grow ineffective even to extinction. It is so obviously true of the art of the theatre as of any other that mechanical perfection is fruitless. But surely the dramatist is the most favoured of creative artists. While the novelist must be content with a medium of print and paper, the painter use pigment, and the musician have only brass, wood and catgut, however transformed and glorified, he for his chief medium has no less than the living breathing bodies, the active minds and vibrating nerves of men and women themselves. They are not scientifically exact instruments, actors and actresses, and (as I have been pleading) their virtues turn to vices if you try and make them so. The art of the dramatist is, to a much larger extent than seems to be understood, the art of dealing with this human material; while, of course, the art of production is merely the elaboration of this side of the matter. So it is a roughly true test of a good play that it makes good acting, as they say. But now must come a momentary consideration of what one means by good acting. If it is not puppet-playing (as aforesaid), neither is it showing-off. This school-boy phrase expresses exactly, I think, the vice to which any actor may most easily fall a victim. Encouragement towards its indulgence varies from the equally childish adulation of an audience to the more subtle inducement offered by the poverty of material with which a dramatist may have provided him. I never met a good actor yet who did not think more of his part than of himself. I suppose the best acting is attained when a man can surrender to his part every ounce of his personality, when we in the audience get all of him and perhaps all of the part too. But the surrender is the thing. Even when the dramatist has been obviously inferior to his exponent – the actor can still surrender himself to the idea of a part. In playing a part an actor, to my mind, binds himself in honour to be faithful to that temporary alter ego. The very

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moment that, for the sake of some fancied self-advantage, he is false to it, a cultured audience will detect (even unconsciously) the insincerity, and from that moment the right illusion – not the childish delusion about scenery and make-up, virtue and vice, but the true illusion of art, fails. I think that most of the vices of our modern acting lie under one of these two heads. Either the actor is exploiting himself to the detriment of the play, or to cure that evil the dramatist-director has evolved a discipline of employing men and women to polish the bare bones of his play to the detriment of their own artistic vitality. Which apportions the blame very nicely. What we want, then, it seems, are plays that will compel the actor’s interest in something besides that mental lookingglass he carries about with him; directors who will think more of the spirit than the letter of a performance, and a system which will encourage us in these virtues, not compel us towards the opposite vices. A system is a convenient whipping boy, I know, but a system does master everything except genius, and however precious that one enterprising wandering sheep may be, one legislates for the ninety-nine that stay lawfully at home. The long run itself perhaps has had some good effect on the theatre: it has widened the circle of the public, it has put the managers on a sounder financial basis, but its good effects are by this well outworn. It is the completing arc of the vicious circle; it almost necessarily involves the mechanical, the insincere – all the vices I have been trying to condemn. I return to my text. A play must have a home, an actor must have variety. Only the repertory system – the opposite of the long run – can provide either. A repertory system is the next step, is a necessary step in the progress of English drama. Can a play have all the attention and care that is now lavished upon its production in a good theatre and yet lack the benefits of a home? Some people may not appreciate the metaphor, but as it is true, I think, that the average man is less himself, surrounded by the artificial comfort of a hotel – telephones at every turn, a winter garden and an everlasting orchestra – than he is in the simpler place with its work-aday atmosphere that he calls home; so it seems to me that a play is not most vital because of ad hoc luxuries of brilliant company and setting that it is planted amongst. A hotel is well enough for a holiday, and there are holiday plays that do best with hotel treatment. But a home is a place good, bad or indifferent by virtue of a certain spirit that prevails there. And a play, I believe, will be most alive and keep most alive in

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such a home as a repertory theatre makes for it and no other quite can. Granted a dozen material disadvantages: comparative poverty, imperfection of service; let a play be worse mounted, worse produced, worse played – and here I testify to what I have seen – still, if the work has been done for it in that homelike spirit of corporate life which a repertory theatre creates, and without which it must perish, that play will be more vital than the squandering of money and time and talent could make it elsewhere. Not to mention the fact that while not everyone makes enough money to go to hotels, no one counts himself any one much until he has a home. If the population of the country were reduced to the hotel-going class we should be in a bad way. Our plays in England have almost been reduced to those that make money enough to put themselves up at the fashionable theatre-hotels. The repertory theatre must provide for the drama that can only afford a home, and the backbone of the drama it will be found to be, I think. We have to provide in this country for many services that are somewhat less than popular. Put the matter to such a vote as the fate of a play hangs on and we should be spending our money on cakes and aeroplanes while bread stayed unbaked and streets uncleaned. The bread and highway drama wants looking after in like case. Actors must have variety. Nobody can play the same part, and play it well, eight times a week. They, unless they are stage-mad or successmad, will cry out for variety (there is a sound tradition amongst actors that one should be working all the time), but what they are really asking for is simply rest – physical and nervous rest. But not even the least exacting part can be played more than four times in seven days with benefit either to the part or the player. Now a director of plays has, I find, to struggle constantly against one temptation: to get everything, at any cost, just so. With a long run in prospect, the certainty that after production the actor will gradually become mechanical, and with ample time before production to see that at least the mechanism is perfect, the temptation is overwhelming. The opposite conditions of repertory will as automatically lessen it. But in any case it should be resisted. To my taste, if acting cannot seem spontaneous, it is nothing. It can only seem so by the actor coming fresh to his work, his whole personality like a sensitive plate, which he exposes untouched to the light of his conception of the part. The image

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produced, valuable according to the rightness of the conception, will vary from time to time according to the condition of the plate, but each time it must be a fresh image. A director’s business is to help an actor in the study of his part, especially to help him find the relation of his part to the whole play; at later rehearsals to constitute himself as far as possible an ideal audience, registering each effect or each failure, and a critic analyzing the causes. Let the director, in fact, do all he can beforehand in grouping this sun-picture, the performance of a play; but let him not touch the plates, not anticipate the final process. That is Nature’s contribution to Art and his manipulation must mar it. So people enunciate, as a rule unwittingly, a rather profound paradox when they say that acting cannot be taught. Certainly in the theatre or dramatic school there is no more futile way of learning how to act than learning acting. An actor’s work, except for that small portion of it done under the eyes of the public, should be nothing but preparation; as a student, the general preparation of voice and movement and gesture, till his body really has become a medium of expression absolutely under his control; as a student (and for ever after), the preparation of his mind – sadly neglected, as a rule, it seems to me. The histrionic mind fully developed carries a very particular equipment. It should be introspective, stopping short of self-consciousness; it may be sympathetic without principle; it must be observant, especially of the commonplace things that are apt to pass unnoticed; it must cultivate especially the power of induction – all dramatic interpretation is founded upon induction. I do not attempt to exhaust the list of qualities – all I want to affirm is that for the interpretation of modern drama a histrionic mind is becoming a more important asset than a histrionic body, and it is lamentable how few students, even if conscious of the existence of such a thing, pay any attention to its development. The time of general preparation past, the fruitful part of his work will be in the particular preparation given to each new part. And another general criticism that may be levelled at the English theatre of today is, not that either preparation or performance is bad, but that the proportion of time that a successful actor must give to performance compared with that given to preparation, is in itself somewhat stultifying to his art. A repertory system tends to rectify this. A repertory system, indeed, widens the opportunities of the theatre to actors, to playwrights, and to the public. Surely for the sake of all

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three we want a theatre or two where the test of success will be not to have produced as few plays as possible in a year, but as many. Shakespeare must become familiar to the stage. At present he is a fetish of a by-gone age to whom from time to time managers, actors and public think it well for the sake of their reputations to make a mighty effort to pay an unreal devotion. Go behind the scenes of a theatre a few days before a Shakespearean production – you would think that Judgment Day was at hand. And yet there are no simpler plays than his to do, or see, if they are done straightforwardly in the right spirit. There is no better foundation for actors and audience to build each their share of the art of the theatre on, than joy in such whole-hearted stuff as Shakespeare moulded from and gave to Elizabethan England. Then we must have new plays seen as easily – I am inclined to say – as we have books published. At any rate we want to get the theatremanagers into the play-producing habit and playgoers into the habit of going to plays. Not such paradoxes, these, as they sound. A repertory theatre must be a place frequented by people who take an interest in its work as its work, not visited occasionally for the sight of a popular success. Candidly, to my mind, while the broader development of the drama depends on the success of a repertory system, that success will depend upon being able to sustain in the present army of playgoers, and more importantly to arouse by its wider appeal in a wider circle than that, some such interest. Its work must be vital, must be normal, not precious nor artificial. It must spring from the vitality and normality of managers, playwrights and actors. It must be in the closest relation to the everyday world around it, for it can exist only by forming part of the everyday life of those who are making that world. For some years I have been studying as dispassionately as may be the theatrical situation, and I conclude that the establishment of a repertory system is not only desirable but inevitable. Not to the exclusion of every other method of presenting plays, far from it; but as a necessary compensation for the loss which every other method seems to inflict on the drama. Nothing happens by accident, of course, and the demand of the public for certain plays which apparently only a repertory theatre can supply, is one that has been carefully fostered. It has been fostered, some say, by a band of revolutionaries. That may be. But repertory theatres do not mean any sudden revolution of the drama. Nor is it to be wished they should, since revolution in its turn would

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mean reaction. All that the most popular mutineer need hope for is that some wide-awake admiral will give him just one turn at the wheel; if the fleet’s course is deflected that is enough. In the mid-nineteenth century the British drama had really headed on the rocks. Since then many good mutineers have helped set a course for her. When we call for repertory we help to steer her just one point further out. The action and reaction of the new system upon the new drama that has created it and the newer drama that it will create, may not be utopian (no system alone can create Utopia), but at least it will make, I think, for sanity and health. [1909: From The New Quarterly, vol. II, no. 8, November]

Note In this article, one of Barker’s earliest, he assesses what is required to keep the art of the theatre alive and fresh, and, focusing on the critical role of the actor, he argues a repertory theatre system is desirable and inevitable, not to the exclusion of other methods, but as a necessary compensation for the loss which other methods inflict upon drama. The repertory idea was being championed by a small group of enthusiasts whose circle Barker joined in the late 1890s. Though only in his early twenties, he soon became a prominent activist in the two key and associated groups that briefly lay at the heart of the British theatrical reform movement: the Socialist Fabian Society and the independent playproducing organization, the Stage Society. When Barker wrote this article, he was still a member of the Fabian executive committee and had lectured on the repertory system for the Society. Barker had already written about the repertory system. In 1904, he had co-authored with the critic William Archer a book for private circulation called Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre; the book was made public in 1907, and in 1930, after Archer’s death, Barker wrote an updated version on his own. In this 1909 article, Barker not only draws on the ideas expressed in his lectures and the National Theatre book but does so, more importantly, on Barker’s practical experience. He had been performing since childhood, became a professional actor in his teens, and, for nearly a decade, had been a major name on the London stage. He was known, among other roles, for his portrayals of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II and for his creation of leading parts in the plays of Shaw. He was also lionized for his artistic leadership of and directing in seasons at the Royal Court and Savoy theatres with the business manager J. E. Vedrenne. These celebrated and pioneering experiments, which established Shaw as the leading playwright in Britain, were ad hoc and could not be run on strict repertory lines, but nevertheless they inspired others to try. In a speech marking the end of the Court seasons, Barker acknowledged the

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shortcomings but said they had ‘opposed to the long run system the short run system’ which ‘may prove the artistic necessity’ of a repertory theatre. In the year this article was written, a repertory theatre was founded in Glasgow to join those in Dublin and Manchester, and Barker gave them a lecture, ‘The Citizens’ Theatre Ideal’. Despite the financial disaster of his time at the Savoy Theatre, he was encouraging others and was full of plans to create his own repertory theatre. In 1908, he had travelled to the United States with a view to running such a system in New York but found the theatre being built for the scheme too large. In 1909, he was in discussion with various people about founding a ‘rep’, and, following a successful premiere production by him of John Galsworthy’s Strife at the Duke of York’s Theatre, he negotiated with that theatre’s commercial manager Charles Frohman to run a repertory season there the following year. While on tour, Barker had come close to death with typhoid fever at the end of 1908. He spent much of 1909 writing. Along with this article, which he wrote during the summer when he was preparing evidence to the parliamentary committee on the censorship of drama, he had a short story ‘Georgiana’ published, had his first volume of plays published (The Marrying of Ann Leete, The Voysey Inheritance and Waste), and finished a stunning new play, The Madras House.

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Finality in acting is death.

2 NOTES ON REHEARSING A PLAY It is strange how meekly art will stand to be arraigned at the tribunal of commercial arithmetic. For however liberally interpreted are the laws there administered, she is not in nature amenable to them. She will never have the virtues of the industrious apprentice or the conscience of the ledger clerk. If she is to be ruled, to her well-being and our benefit, it must be by another code and before another court. But the dominance of the financier is so over us all that to talk in other terms is scarcely to be understood, and in a world where life consists not of ‘the four elements,’ or even of eating and drinking, but in the more Malvolio-like occupation of paying bills personal and national, it is hard to conceive how the moneymaker’s evil can be anybody’s good. Not that one need deny certain virtues that the dominance of the financier has forced upon the art of the theatre. But as with all alien bondage, the more efficient, even the more liberal-minded it is, so, in a sense is it the more complete and devitalizing. To take one instance, its effect upon the method of getting plays ready for performance; a trifling instance, but worth study, if anything in the technique of the theatre is worth it. To the financial mind rehearsals of a play are capital expenditure and should be measured accordingly; measured generously, perhaps, with an ample allowance of margin for error, but measured; so many weeks, so many dress rehearsals, production without fail by such and such a date. It is true that by such a method all may go well. No errors in designs or cast; the actors may respond unanimously to their drill, even the better because an inevitably nearing day of production and judgment whips them the more desperately into that final rush of

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enthusiasm which it is to be hoped will in turn affect their audience and create at least the atmosphere of success. Success or limbo! The choice fits well with the attempt to combine mechanical efficiency with galvanic life. One watches the financial mind philosophically attempting through a long course of trial and error (mostly error) to discover how this desperate choice is made – by critics, public, or by mere luck, no evidence certainly of it being according to any merit or demerit in the work itself – without suspecting that even such a success is valueless (how explain to the financial mind what is meant by such a contradiction?) and such a method at its best a mistake. For a play in the final completion of its appearance is a living work of art, a blending moreover of many human factors; and the laws of its begetting and being are not reducible to the simple arithmetic of working days or the compound addition of monetary cost. Stanislavsky, the dominant personality of the Art Theatre in Moscow, was once asked by the present writer how long he liked to rehearse a play. ‘Till it is ready,’ he said, and that is a final answer. Let us sketch a plan for its getting ready based strictly upon the nature of the task. The dramatist brings his manuscript to the theatre. In parenthesis it is just worth noting that this was not always the beginning of things. Plays originate in acting. But in these days, for most practical purposes, the dramatist has been evolved. This alliance with literature, however, leads in most cases to the leaving of the manuscript at the theatre as well – when it passes into the hands of the director. He also has been evolved; partly by the alienation of the dramatist to literature, more by the growing complexity of the processes, mechanical and other, in the theatre itself. There are purists who deny his right to existence, but some co-ordination is needed, and he is probably less to be dispensed with than is the conductor of an orchestra. Then comes the casting, the choice of designers, the writing of music, and what not, all of which must be settled by the powers that be according to their powers. A discourse could be written upon the internal management of theatres, but this is not it. The casting though will first depend upon the general choice the theatre has made between creating the best possible company and selecting a cast from it for every play, and choosing for each play the best individual actors from

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wherever they may be found. In that general choice is involved much argument, which comes in the end to this: if your love of the theatre centres upon the emotional virtuosity of particular actors you will be ready – and you will be compelled to sacrifice to its exploiting the ideal of a perfect unity of effect, never to be attained, it is true, but always to be striven for by those for whom the whole is greater than the part, the play and its interpretation than its interpreters, the theatre itself than any members of it. Needless to say upon which side of this fence the present writer is to be found. He is for the theatre, the play, the commonwealth of effect, and he holds it proved beyond doubt that the ‘team work’ of a well-practised company serves this cause better than the most brilliant temperamental despotism, with the most spirited and loyal support. In any case, the plan that follows rests upon this conviction. Rehearsals begin. They begin with study which must be mutual study; the actor who sits apart to learn his words and ‘form his own conception’ is a nuisance and offends against the first law of the theatre and the last – cooperation. The cast should be formed into a committee upon the play, sitting to discuss it with the director as chairman. The rules of procedure can be simple. The director discusses every scene, for he is interested in them all; an actor must only discuss those in which he is personally concerned. The chairman may closure a debate, and no doubt he will have to closure many. On the other hand, some actors may find it hard to formulate their ideas in argument; they are used to arriving at them instinctively, emotionally. Instinct, if it has not degenerated into mere habit, is a good guide, and a director will be wise neither to out-argue such a one, nor let him be out-argued. Such a one will be equally wise to learn to argue if he can, to temper his instinct with reason. Ability to express yourself is certainly a step towards expressing the intention of the author. But just as seventeenth-century music teachers used to lock up the instrument on their departure, and carry off the key, so should the actors leave their parts on the committee table and cease to worry about them till they all meet again. The task of the committee should be to arrive at a common understanding and a unity of intention about the play. How long will this take? It depends upon many things, primarily upon the sort of play it is. There are plays that call for little discussion, mainly for the practice of those subtle athletics in which every actor should be teamed (in themselves they are the best kind of training), pantomime, and the

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simpler sorts of poetic and melodrama. Much beauty in them, much pleasure to be gained from them by audiences that are young, feeling young, or wanting to. There are, of course, the pretentious bastard varieties of all kinds which seem to invite discussion, but will not stand up under it. A week in committee would most advantageously destroy belief in them; for it must be confessed that the taste for their flashy effects is apt to originate with the actor; if he scratches their surface, fertilizes it with the easiest of his own emotions, a quick crop of something can be raised. Such plays parallel the cheap fiction which appears and disappears month by month in certain magazines, harmless enough perhaps if it did not debase the market and oust the finer genuine products, if it did not consume and waste so much energy and means. But for the play that attempts some comprehension of life, it is, let it be remembered, not the plan of action but the plan of thought that needs to be most firmly laid, for from plan of thought plan of action will at the right moment develop itself with surprising ease. Upon that moment it needs the tact of the director to decide; there are no rules for telling when talk ceases to be fruitful, but the moment’s approach should be as obvious as to a hostess are signs of restlessness among her guests. It will have been his skill as a chairman so to have conducted the discussion that its profit has been equalized among the cast; so that the same moment – to be quite the right moment – finds them ready and just a bit impatient to add movement to words, to leave their study for the stage. Wherein will a company differ, brought upon the stage with their minds soaked in the meaning of a play, and coming fresh to their parts eyes glued to books, marking movements, positions, fitting themselves to an arbitrary mechanism for all the world like figures in a clock-work toy – whatever method is right, this surely is ineptitude itself; later the experienced actor, selecting the admirably rounded pegs of his technique (aggrieved a little if the holes in his part are not as uniformly round), the emotional actress prospecting in this wilderness for purple spots of emotion, asking ‘What shall I feel like doing here?’ while the minor ‘parts’ wait vaguely about and wonder where in every sense of the phrase they do come in! What wonder that the director, after watching this for a little, with production nearing, grows tyrannical, insists – ‘This you think, this you feel, that you do! Some sort of unity he

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must obtain, and quickly, for to put a play into action upon a stage is to pour it into its mould; after two or three weeks’ unchecked rehearsing it will have set unchangeably but for details, without such a mauling being given it as will leave bad marks. But bring your company to the stage absorbed in the play, in tune with each other, and the results are very different. To begin with, their most instinctive movements will now have meaning. The director need have decided beforehand only upon the barest skeleton of action, and if he can have left all but – say – the backbone of that to grow in his mind and be suggested to theirs during the committee discussions, it will be the less arbitrary, the less of a drill, the more a collaboration with the actors themselves. And he can start very soon to play his own present part in the combination, that of ideal audience. The very opposite of the drill sergeant in method as in aim. To say that one strives for perfection in art and wishes never to attain it is no paradox, it is only to assert the intimate relation of art to life. To sit while the action of a play grows, goes its own way, not insisting on this or that – for in art as in life how many good roads to a given point there are – caring only that the roads are good, testing sympathetically step by step that the way is its own. If the mutual study has been lively, fruitful, has generated as it should have, the motive power, then the actors need only follow their inclination while the director works, for a little, patiently, by elimination: ‘No, that does not quite express it. Try again.’ His simple rule at this stage will be that though in the last instance he may veto, say definitely what is not to be done, he may never dictate what is to be. It will be seen that this implies no finality, no rigid rule of effect; and it is meant not to. Finality in acting is death. A book must be finished with, or a picture, but the moment an actor ceases to vary his part he should stop playing it; he has, in fact, stopped playing it; repetition is not acting. The director’s problem then is how to shape the play stably but not statically, to give it what will be a living form. We are indebted, again to Stanislavsky, for a rule of thumb solution. Establish, he says, a certain number of fixed points, rendezvous for the players, physical or mental, where they may be sure of meeting. Let there be enough of these to ensure that the action never drifts awry. You will need more in scenes of crisis and quick movement than in those of exposition and discussion, but always keep them as few as you can,

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for they tend to multiply unawares. Between these points actors must encourage themselves to wander, they must resist habit. But upon this solution one thing depends and another follows. The actors must so far have mastered the technique of their art as to have it unselfconsciously at command. If a man has to think even for the fraction of a second how to express an emotion or an idea, he cannot stop to do so during a performance, his attention must be free then to concentrate solely on the idea itself, a double effort will be fatal to all appearance of spontaneity. If he is so handicapped, then to make his work seem spontaneous he must, paradoxically, fix beforehand every movement, every gesture. One needs, therefore, accomplished actors. And it follows that a constant close repetition of performances will force upon actors, however accomplished, a repetition of effects. For two reasons they cannot stand up against mere iteration. If the part is a trying one, the emotional strain will be too great. No man can act Hamlet eight times a week, he can at best repeat it. And with a minor part all one can do is so soon done that to do it over and over without change one must in defence of sanity come to do it automatically. It would drive one mad to have to think out a new way of shaving oneself every morning, or to a convenient suicide with a final cut. But a repertory theatre (though this is yet a further argument) is the only theatre worthy of the name. Repetition will even tell adversely upon the quality of the rehearsals. It must be open to the director to suspend them, or to return to committee. If the study has not done its work, if the company is stiff, at a loss, or at odds, he will be wise to do so in any case. This is by no means a plan guaranteed to work smoothly. The reward of discussion is not always agreement at first or at last, and you cannot have your actors both free and bound. Differences must be even encouraged, to a point. If they are irreconcilable someone must retire; it will usually not be the director. But he will be wanting in the first attributes of his post if with all this scope of method and time he cannot at a pinch so interpret the actor to himself that they both agree at least with the third party to the dispute, the play. For though loyalty of co-operation is vital, only a minimum of agreement is necessary. Plays – being in themselves contests of character – may actually benefit by a tactful, regulated diversity of opinion. All this does not seem very revolutionary. It is not, it is not meant to be. It contains no patent devices, but art does not deal with patents, only with a patient individual adaptation of means to end. The production

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of a play is one of the simplest of things if one but remembers that the glory of the art of the theatre is that more than any other it works in a human medium, and therefore in an incalculable one. A play is indeed a microcosm of society. The laws of its being are – does it sound odd to say so? – moral laws, the guiding one that only in the fullest expression of each individual will the whole be expressed and only by mutual thinking in terms of the whole will each one of us find his place and fulfil it – yet another paradox and this time a truism too. One has but to think of the play in terms of life, to extract from it, to illustrate by its means all its content of those things that by light or shade give life its value. Never try for this effect or that, those things will come; but when the meaning of the whole seems clear, when it has achieved in fact a life of its own – admit the public and take as little notice of them as possible. The tribunal of their understanding and enjoyment will be no commercial one either. Quite rightly they will care nothing for cost in money or effort, the right way or the wrong way of preparing. They will value the result in terms of its vitality; all said and done, art’s only gift to them. [1919: From The Drama, vol. 1, no. 1, July]

Note In this article, Barker returns to the issue of keeping theatre alive and focuses on one of the many problems created by the commercial theatre – the deadly strictures it places on rehearsal. Arguing that theatre is a human medium and a play a living work of art, he examines how to organize a healthy preparation for performance and in particular looks at the role of the director in the process. Even with the limitations he had encountered in the professional theatre of his time, Barker managed to create as a director a recognizable style of production that relied on ensemble playing. He became the most famous director in Britain and, through his productions, helped establish the role of director as a distinct function in the English-speaking theatre. Like the idea of the repertory theatre, the idea of the director as a separate artistic as opposed to managerial function came from continental Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. Although Barker’s near-contemporary and fellow theatrical radical Edward Gordon Craig described himself as a stage director, the term generally used, and used by Barker, was ‘producer’. (As noted before, the term ‘producer’ has been changed to director throughout this book.) As Barker implies in this article, the relatively new role of director was not universally accepted. Many actors, steeped in the old conventions, resisted new ways of working, and, unsurprisingly, Barker’s own practice combined the two

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extremes of the role: the enabler and the despot. When he wrote this article, he had not only the Court and Savoy seasons to his directorial credit, but also his work at the Little and Kingsway theatres and elsewhere, his further experiments in repertory, for example, at the Duke of York’s and St James’ theatres, and his three history-making Shakespeare productions at the Savoy in 1912 and 1914. He was also reflecting on experiences from abroad: he had discussed rehearsal methods with Max Reinhardt in Germany and Konstantin Stanislavsky in Russia and had directed in the United States, including innovatory open-air productions of Euripides. During the war, Barker went through a painful divorce and remarried, visited the front in France to write a book on the work of the Red Cross and worked in Intelligence. He was profoundly disturbed by the conflict. He had given up acting and was only occasionally to return to directing. In 1919, he was reshaping his life with his second wife, Helen, and concentrating on his writing; as well as this piece, he wrote an article, ‘Reconstruction in the Theatre’ (see pp. 189– 91), continued work on a seminal book, which was published in 1922 as The Exemplary Theatre (see pp. 35–50 and 195–207), and began a wonderfully rich and dense new play, which became The Secret Life, published in 1923.

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What should the modern training of our actor be?

3 THE SCHOOL OF ‘THE ONLY POSSIBLE THEATRE’ The greater part of the present lot of successful English-speaking actors do not know their business; they never learned it because they were not caught young and trained. For what they particularly do not know are its rudiments, those foundations of the art which apparently you cannot acquire at all after a certain age with any chance of so absorbing them that they become a part of the natural instinct of their possessor, with which equipment alone the maturer taking thought by the actor for his parts will have its full result. Frankly, while the actor of small parts of whom you ask little but the technique of expression to make them effective has not got it to give you, leading actors for whom technique is the mere medium in which the important part of their work is done are seldom in better case. They are intelligent perhaps in ways that their forbears of a generation back may not have been – but their right thinking, their right feeling is as often as not fatally clogged in its outflowing by a voice they can’t manage, a face that seems to need moving by hand, and a body they hardly dare move at all unless by the mere violence of its movement they think they can mask the lack of all fine expression. And for them there’s no present remedy; their muscles and joints are set and that’s all about it. One is mostly driven in a modern English play simply to request them ‘not to act,’ (it isn’t at all what one means, which is really not to act like that) to be content with their giving an ‘intelligent reading’ of the part. That at least gives the play a chance, but the general result is to make the English theatre very dull.

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What should the modern training of our actor be? One postulates that he be caught young. But immediately this proposition follows: that the beginnings of an actor’s training are proper to all education whatsoever. They are, in a phrase, nothing but a training in the less individual means of self-expression, the arts of speech, of movement, of the understanding of tune and rhythm, bereft of which we are, in a word, a less civilized people. No need then to mark your actors off from their fellows so very early. What I rather would have is the theatre school, a centre from which the teaching of these amenities can radiate. Why not? For it immediately would give to the theatre that position in the life of the community both of privilege and responsibility upon which I feel sure its true well-being must be founded. I am not indeed afraid of saying that ideally I see the theatre more as a part of the school, the flower of its teaching, the crowning example, specialised, professionalised, of its endeavour, than the school a mere hidden appanage1 of the theatre. That, no doubt, is to re-adjust rather drastically one’s view of education as well as of dramatic art looking to the future of both. Practically, however, there is no doubt that the work of a dramatic school could at this moment be extended far beyond the scope of any theatre’s immediate use for it and with great benefit both to the theatre and to general education if one might count upon the puritanic prejudice against actors and acting being finally removed. Paradoxically there could also be no better way of removing it: no better way either of removing the remaining grounds for it than by letting in the good common air of the outer world and its robuster demands upon the often over-heated atmosphere of the theatre itself. For the school’s immediate use to the theatre, we can, perhaps, lay down two principles: the school must not – even when its work is most specialized – so much teach acting as the component parts of acting. Therefore (the second principle) it should cater for and may expect pupils whose final destiny will not be this and may not be any theatre, who yet will not have wasted their time of study. Obedience to the second principle is, though it sounds otherwise, the theatre’s immediate concern. For what is the most obvious drawback of the ordinary dramatic ‘academy’? A provision made for the maintenance of a dependent.

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That it is beset by a crowd of stage-struck young ladies who come possessed by that shallow enthusiasm which is the bane of all art, and to the onslaughts of which the poor theatre seems peculiarly liable. The raising of fees will not keep them out; their parents, to be rid of their restlessness, thankfully provide the fees. Examinations do not exclude them, they have an abounding crude vitality which carries them lightly over such fences, and once admitted, they mount the first steps of the students’ ladder with great facility – the casual looker on at this phase would really think something was to come of it all. But then – to change the metaphor as they, too, seem to change – like locusts they occupy the land only to feed on it. A solid block of mediocrity, they exhaust the resources of the school and the vitality of the teachers, pass out, pass on to a sham career, a brief career, or none; at last probably to marriage and cheerful reminiscences of the time when they ‘studied for the stage,’ or to some greyer industry and the bitterness of regrets. There is no complete escape from this class of student and out of any such crowd can be picked a real artist or two, but the methods of such a school as this should be primarily designed to reduce these ladies as soon as possible to a position of appropriate impotence. They are not easily discouraged though. They work well, and only the harder when their most secret heart begins to tell them (they deny it frantically) that work is all in vain. The matter is not arguable. And who is to decide in each case where the best craftsmanship should end, where artistry must begin. We cannot all have genius. Has the theatre no room for craftsmen? Many with not that claim encumber it only too successfully now. This they would say even when driven to admit that study has brought them only to the knowledge of what they ought to be able to do. The greater gain then over the theatre itself, if such a school can cover a wider field than technical training for the stage, for some of these quite honest students might thus be more easily deflected towards other and fruitful careers. Let us deal with a negative disadvantage under which the ordinary dramatic school suffers and which thus we should avoid. Comparatively few men make a first choice of the theatre as a career. They tend to drift into it at various stages of their disappointment with other callings. This is not to be wondered at, and the status of the actor, economic and social (in the true sense of that word) will need a lot of bettering before one can conscientiously advise any young man

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to respond to its call. There has been, however, within my recollection a great improvement from the theatre’s point of view, I will not venture to say in the class of recruits, but at least in reform of the old habit of regarding the stage as a soft job and a refuge for the otherwise incurably wastrel and incompetent. For any study that might possibly be needed – solvitur ambulando;2 they gaily assume. The tag is appropriate since the aspirant mostly begins his career as a walking gentleman. This improvement, we owe, somewhat, I believe, to the slightly more generous attitude towards the theatre which university authorities and the like have lately assumed. But it is noticeable in America (which easily leads the way in the making of the serious study of the modern drama at least a permissive part of a university education) that a young man who has worked at Harvard or Yale sees himself as a playwright or theatre director, a scene designer may be, much less often as an actor. Acting is not yet on any count a sufficiently attractive and dignified calling and nothing will finally serve us in obtaining the right sort of recruit but to make it so. The school has its share, if a minor one, in doing this; and particularly by providing teaching which will serve other ends than the theatre’s immediate own can it draw within its orbit potentially first rate actors, and persuade them when it turns out they could become so, to a career to which otherwise they would be sensible enough to give the go-by. I should be inclined to admit no one under the age of fifteen. Even then the curriculum must deliberately discourage any neglect of the pupil’s general education which, presumably, will be proceeding elsewhere. A two-hour daily attendance at the less specialized classes would be ample enough beginning at such an age of the study of acting. It would not provide a very swift test of a pupil’s ability to excel, but a swift test at that age or any other is in most cases very misleading. Such a beginning, even if there were to be no continuance, would not be a waste of time either to the pupil or the school, and it is just such a course of study that may so strengthen dormant dramatic powers as to show that they are worth serious cultivation, strengthen them the better for developing them slowly. The boy or girl with parents to be persuaded, the parents with equally intractable children would find this a profitable compromise. It is solved by walking, that is, by doing it.

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Finally, young men and women destining themselves for those public careers – which are nearer akin in their methods than they will otherwise than condescendingly admit, to the theatre – or the church, the bar, politics, or teaching might well in the course of study apt enough for these (study quite stupidly neglected now) discover that they themselves were apter for the theatre. This may seem more like the devising of a trap. I cannot admit it. There are men enough at the bar, in the church, in politics, so-called successes, too, with nothing but their histrionic qualities to recommend them. The theatre might be the better for them, though this is not certain. Their present careers are not. The theatre would not be the worse for gaining men whose dramatic powers were but an evidence of solider purpose and deeper vision. If it is not a worthy calling for them and their kind, we must make it so. We should not try to teach acting, mainly because in any right sense it cannot be done. The attempt, made through the medium of coaching pupils in parts or plays, soon degenerates into the teaching of stage tricks. Personally I would put off even any practice of the art as long as possible. I would, so to speak, lead my pupils to the actual brink of partaking in a play, lead them round and round it, not till the last possible moment let them plunge in. For, once the plunge is taken, from that time forward, they ought strictly speaking to swim unaided. I would let them do every possible thing but act a part, and I do not believe that the deprivation would hurt them. The sustained restriction of study to the quite general subjects of voice production, elocution, oratory, dialectics, eurhythmics, music and to the more particular ones of dramatic literature, theatre history, dancing, fencing, costume, would have this advantage: it would keep the school a heterogeneous body of young men and women, more interesting, more competent as a body, from whom, too, I believe it would be easier to pick out the sound student whose talent was likely to mature, than from a closely competing few, depending upon luck in their allotted parts, or upon their more showy qualities (which, anyhow, in an actor, cannot escape the most cursory judge) to make their mark. And when specialized study did begin, I would make it as difficult as possible. I would set the pupils to learn how to make the Platonic dialogues dramatically effective. I would set them such hard tasks in criticism as to remember just what an actor did with a part, to expound why he did it, to contend where he succeeded and failed. I would make them read passages twenty different ways, learn

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to pitch on a note in their voice with the accuracy one is tapped on the piano. The greater ease there is to be in practice the harder must be the study. To delay specialization helps meet another difficulty which besets most dramatic schools which are not run merely for the profit to be extracted from any and every pupil. Too large a proportion of the enthusiastic young ladies and gentlemen who see a theatrical career for themselves have the habit of cooling off and dropping out when their course of study is but half or a third completed. In a school, which specializes its work from the beginning, there is no thorough remedy for this. Even if an entrance examination be a satisfactory guide to a pupil’s ability to carry through a whole course it cannot test his willingness to do so. Nor is a pledge of real value, for a pupil grown half-hearted is what one most wants to be rid of. But a delay in specialization allows for, and even encourages, the falling out of the weaklings. One should aim, I feel sure, for a small surviving band whom the discipline of a hard technical training has only strengthened in their desire for the promised land of their art, whose choice of it is to the last possible moment kept a little free by their association with fellow students working with other ideals and for other ends. Then give them a year of practice in acting plays, of close daily association with a living theatre, of intensive study of modern dramatic work and they will be fit for graduation. Study that involves the rehearsing of plays must naturally be conducted less on the lines of the ordinary class than of the seminar. And once the pupils are emancipated from the thraldom of solely technical work I should incline to give them as much freedom as possible, to postpone indeed the appearance of a teacher at these classes altogether until he can take his place as constructive critic of work well under way. The classes should be modelled upon the lines of the productions in the theatre itself where it is to be hoped the dictatorial director will not be a phenomenon. If the pupil director (who should either be nominated or elected by the class for each set of school rehearsals) does develop on those lines at least he will do so without the help of any arbitrary prestige. He must naturally be invested for the time with proper powers, but this will be his chance to learn how to manage without using them. For the rest of the class practice in acting will be the surface benefit. It must be remembered that for all the prohibition of acting in the earlier stages (and because of that) they’ll have been doing a lot of it in

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private before their looking glasses, and now there’ll be an accumulation of startling effects that they’ll be burning to try on each other. All the better. But the greater importance of these classes will be the practice in cooperation, that peculiarly theatrical virtue, unique in its completeness, unique in its absolute necessity. If the students are keen and keyed up by long technical training these classes should be pretty battle grounds. Again, all the better. The sharper the differences the more instructive the result of their final adjustment, the more obvious the penalty of failure to adjust them. For results, of course, or confessions of failure, must now be insisted on, the real problems of turning a play into a finished product lacking nothing but the audience must be faced. As director of a school I would give the students all the freedom possible and criticise them as harshly as I could. Harsh criticism won’t hurt, if it is only occasional. Working among their fellows they’ll not be depressed or overwhelmed with modesty when a teacher’s back is turned, even if it afflicts them momentarily to his face. Students, during their last stretch of study, should be in close association with the theatre itself. This is important. They must begin now to measure themselves against the older practitioners; they must accustom themselves to the pace at which good professional work is done; they must, if possible, experience an audience, though not yet experiment upon an unwarned one. But this last suggestion raises a larger question – raises two in fact. It will be economical for the theatre to use the school-students to ‘walk on,’ to use them as, at any rate, the core of the crowds that various plays may need; advantageous, too, to the students up to a point, but only to the point at which it will not occupy an unfair amount of their time, or keep them hanging about at rehearsals, learning that most undesirable lesson of all, how to be idle while other people work. There should, on the whole, be a rule against their playing even small parts during their time of studentship. It would be a good rule, even if it were wise to make exceptions to it now and then. There is another sort of mutually advantageous service which the more advanced students could perform. I have referred elsewhere to the difficulties involved in the experimental production of plays. There is much to be said from the students’ standpoint for including in the final year of specialised and intensive study and rehearsal work the preparation for private performance before their critic-teachers, of plays

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which are themselves so experimental in form or content that they may miss their chance with the general public. I have always held it to be the special mission of the amateur to follow the side paths left deserted; wilfully or inevitably, by the professional. The student, too, may find advantage off the beaten track. The stern technical training we have arranged for him should have largely served to give him that grounding which practice in the classics has been generally supposed to provide. Personally I object to the classics being so misused by students or actors. Nothing so vitiates one’s taste for Euripides and Shakespeare as to have been party to reciting their fine passages as exercises in elocution. If classics are to be kept alive, and we, as their expounders, alive to them (an almost necessary pre-condition) nothing is more important than to preserve for them a freshness of eye, ear and mind. Therefore let the student approach them only as and when he approaches other plays. Even then it might be well to fend him during his studentship from the more famous and hackneyed examples. I would sooner he studied Troilus and Cressida than Hamlet; All’s Well than Twelfth Night; the Hecuba than the Hippolytus. Not in any attempt to pervert his judgment but only with a view to the priceless advantage of his ultimate approach to the really great works with a mind as little rutted as possible into the commonplaces of their treatment. One must not, of course, let him fling himself upon examples of classic work so second rate that they bore and defeat him. But, in any case, and always if a good technical training has been provided, we need not attach too much importance to large doses of the classics. They are more natural meat for maturer years and the great thing is not to blunt his love for them. And for this final term of study in which he has to find himself before, on his emerging from his egg of study, the public finds him – with the same precaution against letting him loose upon work too second rate or puzzling, the same remarks apply to modern drama; but for rather different reasons. The last year’s work in the school will be purposely suffused as deeply as possible in the atmosphere of the theatre itself. Now there must exist in any theatre favourite, perhaps famous, actors with their own methods and mannerisms; and, for the student, the tendency to copy them will be great: increasingly great, if the latter becomes an understudy, not much diminished even if he goes to play these same parts at another theatre. It is a truism that one copies

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nothing from an artist but his faults. It may need emphasising that the same bad effects – the transmission of the individual methods of half a dozen popular actors in an ever widening circle of impoverishment – will result from a study of the current output of plays in dramatic schools unless very definite precautions are taken to counteract them. If a class of students in their final year happens to be showing a genuine co-operative independence of idea, it might be instructive to give them some play from the current repertory to rehearse, with the expectation of their helping to break the already hardening traditions of its performance – instructive both to students and authorities. Apart from this chance I should be disposed to let the student’s work among themselves at plays like in kind perhaps, but differing in example from those which were the everyday occupation of the theatre. If, then, in their last year, they give a third of their attention to the less familiar classics, a third to modern plays of recognized quality but not for the moment in local favour, and a third to experimental work their energies will be healthily and fully fed. But, even from the student’s point of view, I should attach most importance to the experimental category. He must not (as aforesaid) be confronted with mere apprentice work, which by its crudeness and inequality will nullify any attempt at its interpretation. But difficulties are to his advantage, and disregard, in the result, of the current laws of public taste of no consequence at all. Acting, in its superficial aspects, is a deplorably easy art and as it rests upon an immediate popular appeal the temptation even to the most conscientious artist, once an audience has been admitted to collaboration, to round his efforts with the circumference of their applause is very great. It is, of course, the task of the rehearsals (when that distracting tempter, the public, is absent) to nullify this. The good rehearse – the man who does genuinely take this opportunity of ‘digging himself in’ to the character he is studying, does not merely spend his time noting how he can best make this effect or that – will in a sense never cease rehearsing: for performance after performance will find him still developing his part. But the habit of work for its own sake is so worth cultivating, the benefit of considering cause – and cause below cause – with confidence that the right effect will follow, is so great that the student period, when effects need count for little, is of all others the opportunity for firmly planting this supreme artistic virtue; and nothing is more positively important. Nothing is more negatively so than to warn

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the student from the excusably attractive but slippery path of attempt to emulate a successful man’s success by imitating, or even improving, on his method. These should be the poles of the school’s teaching. To sum up: the aim of the school should be not only to provide the theatre with recruits, but, in casting its net as widely as possible for these, to relate its work to the outer world of education. Half, more than half, of the material for the art of acting is the power of personal expression which is the common need of everyone whose work involves appearance in public (I should say myself that it was the common need of everyone else besides). If it follows that many young men and women would be the better equipped for their life work by a study of the principles of the art, it is a complementary truth that the longer a would-be-actor can carry on his studies in the company of those whose interests are wide and actual, the better for his art in the future; the better equipped he will be as an interpreter of actual things. [1920: From The Drama, Chicago; vol. 10, May, June and July]

Note In this article, Barker explains why he thinks the majority of English-speaking actors do not know their business and why the English-speaking theatre is in general very dull. He outlines what he believes to be necessary for theatre to overcome these deficiencies and express the new drama, in particular in the training of the modern actor. Returning to one of his favourite themes – keeping theatre alive – he argues that a theatre school should be inextricably linked to the outer world and, in an apparent paradox, that trainee actors should be put off ‘any practice of the art’ for as long as possible. Barker has a firm view on the hierarchy of quality (e.g. Shakespeare at the pinnacle, Hamlet better than Troilus and Cressida), and, though writing in the idiom of the time, in which the masculine stands for all, he embraces both men and women as recruits to his imaginary school and calls for the net to be cast as widely as possible. Barker had little formal education and appeared with his mother in public recitals at an early age. He was sent to a theatre school in the southeast of England when he was thirteen (two years younger than the earliest age he suggests in this article). He learned by testing in practice, by doing (‘solvitur ambulando’, as he puts it in this article), and uses his considerable experience as actor and director in describing how the school might be ordered. He wrote a lot about actor training, from passages in the National Theatre book in 1904 to large swathes of The Exemplary Theatre, which he was still working on.

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This article appeared in America, a country with which Barker had enjoyed close ties since his first visit in 1908, when the English theatre thought he might stay there. He had family in the United States (cousins on his mother’s side), and in 1918 he married an American. During the war, he directed a season in New York before setting out on a US tour with radical open-air productions of Greek plays; he lectured there, sometimes for the Drama League of America, and included one on ‘The Promise of an American Theatre’; he also directed his own adaptation of a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, and wrote stories as well as his short play Farewell to the Theatre while there. At the time of writing this article, his wife Helen had bought a Jacobean mansion in Devon, 160 miles to the west of London, but they had not moved in as it was being refurbished. They had been in the United States to see Helen’s mother; he had given a lecture at Harvard University early in 1920 and had become an associate editor of The Drama, the monthly magazine of the Drama League of America, for which this article was written. It appeared in three parts in consecutive issues.

What more wonderful instrument has man to play upon than is this living self.

4 THE PRODUCTION OF A PLAY How plays are now thrown on the stage Conditions of play production in any such theatre as we are envisaging bear no relation at all to the methods that are thrust upon the managers and directors in money-making theatres today. For the simple sake of the contrast, however, it may be well first to envisage these. The moneymaking (and losing) manager finds himself, at best, with a building he can call his own and a few constant collaborators. The rest – play, company, scenery, dresses – are brought together to be welded to a whole for the occasion only; the entity will be dissolved and its material scattered when the occasion is over. For good or ill, then, the manager must work upon very constricted lines. He has, it is true, in theory the widest possible choice of a cast for the play. Anybody in the world that’s available may be had – at a price. But in practice – competition plucking the first fruits of talent – the freedom to choose among a swelling crowd of people with whose work you cannot be very intimate and to whose methods of work you are inevitably more or less of a stranger, is a doubtful blessing. It means much to the director to be familiar with the ways of an actor he is to direct; it will often save him needless anxiety, friction, false starts, wasted time; it will mean even more to the actor himself, who is apt to be as nervous as a new found cat at rehearsal – if he is not it is no good sign. So, for all their freedom of choice, managers tend to select people they have worked with before. The London stage in particular is accused, from time to time, of being a close corporation. It is. And it is only broken up by the advent of new

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managers who bring some knowledge of new actors with them. The system has, indeed, many of the limitations of the old stock days and none of their advantages.

The scratch company But the company collected will still be, at best, a scratch company. For, though the manager may know them, though they may in the round of their work have met each other more or less often, they certainly do not come together now with any corporate sense; they are, at best, artistic acquaintances. Observe, then, that the foundation of a good performance, which is just this corporate sense, has to be laid at the very same time that the superstructure – the work upon the play itself – is being built. A manifest impossibility. The acting of the average play today is all superstructure – and mostly façade! If it gives one no sense of stability of intention, of there being in the whole thing any abiding worth of idea (for though the play’s execution cannot abide, this may), it is mainly because the performance is not built upon this deeper sub-conscious understanding among its actors.

The hurried rehearsals Moreover, since the company have been brought together for this one production only no time must be lost. Rehearsals must be hurried on day by day. To pause for reflection or to correct a mistake is a costly business. If the production is a very simple one, if no demands are being made on the actors but to repeat, with a few variations, the physical and emotional posturings to which they and their audience are accustomed, some success may emerge. But the best that can be expected from such a preparation is a general hard competence of execution when the way is plain, and, at any complexly difficult moment, either a helpless clinging together for safety or a plunge into bustling bravado. For the rest, the individual actors and actresses will take care to rouse what delight they can by the exercise of their personal charm; exercising it, though, as often as not directly upon the audience rather than primarily upon the play. They have their excuse. To surrender this personal power

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to whatever unity of effect can be gained in three weeks’ work or so among a strange company might be to lose it altogether, and to get nothing in exchange – so thinks the theatre-wise actor; therefore, while rehearsals go forward he holds it carefully in reserve. There will be some genuine co-operation in the duologues, no doubt. It is necessary, and not very difficult, to work up a sort of mutual responsiveness in these; for the rest, each for himself and the critics take the hindmost! But this is not to vivify a play. It is at the best but a setting up of its bare bones, and we can be thankful if they are straightly articulated. External elegance may be exhibited, and while our eyes and ears are sufficiently entranced our minds may seize detachedly upon the bare meanings of the author’s text. But no wonder we rise in aesthetic rebellion against the theatre. For of that fine interplay of visualized character, of (shifting the metaphor) the living tapestry of pictured thought and emotion into which the stuff of a play can be woven in its acting, what have we seen? Hardly a beginning. Nor by any such means could we hope for it. Yet so used are we to the shackles of the present system that in all the advocacy of the reform of the theatre – from the training of actors to the capturing of audiences – one finds no apparent realization that (the proper production of plays being, indeed, the mainspring of the whole matter) this is not a way by which any homogeneous work of art can be produced at all. We need to think the whole matter out again from the beginning.

The limitations of the human medium One word of warning, however. The medium we work in is human, so there can never be a perfect production, nor is there such a thing as an ideal cast; nor should we even try by circumstantial safeguards to make our play’s performance fool proof. In any theatre there will arise, when certain plays are under consideration, the practical question: can we command an inspiring or even an adequate Lear or Oedipus, Peer Gynt, Cyrano or Undershaft? If we for the time being cannot it may be more sensible to hang up those plays. But, again, as what we look for is interpretation, not realization, so with most plays a faithful and lively interpretation of the whole will always add more in value than we shall lose from individual inability to do full justice physically and emotionally

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to one or two parts. The unity of our interpretation will be the best measure of our approach – not to perfection, about which empty word and teasing thought we should not even bother ourselves – but to selfcontained vitality.

How physical action brings study to a standstill Once you get to rehearsing the action physically and your actors are occupied with their movements and business – it is impossible for them to build up their parts in such a scheme with a continuously abiding sense of the value of the whole, even if this has been arbitrarily formulated by the director, annotated for the actor line by line and impressed upon him note by note. One wants no such arbitrary method; a director even now resorts to it only in desperation. To suggest, to criticize, to co-ordinate – that should be the limit of his function. Even plays that seem to need the exactitude of orchestration must still, as far as possible, grow healthily and naturally into being. We must never forget that to put a play into action on the stage is to pour it into its mould; once there it tends very quickly to set. If the performance of such plays as these is not to become mere repetition of ritual they must be kept fluid and experimental in their preparation till appearance and purpose both, fineness and sincerity united, can be relied upon for the tempering. In nearly all plays (except, of course, those of pure mime) the physical action is extraordinarily unimportant, the mental and the emotional action all in all. Delay, then, in entering the physical phase should not trouble the experienced actor. He has no business to be agitating his mind at rehearsals (much less at a performance) over physical movements, unless they are such matters of gymnastic as fighting, dancing, or the rough and tumble of farce. His training should so have equipped him that all such things come without thought; come one way or another, with one way as right as the other. His thought he needs to match with the play’s thought, and it is not so often he’ll have any to spare.

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The mysterious process by which the actor identifies himself with his part The phrase ‘to create a part’ is embedded in kindred nonsense, but in it there is sense, too. That the actor can add something all his own to the dramatic material he is given no one would deny. And if one must be disputing his claim to be called creative and original, let the dramatist at least remember that he, too, does but capture, to inform with something of his own life and pass forth again renewed, a brain-full of the ideas and passions which are the common possession of – which so possess – mankind. We are, indeed, interpreters all. Creation is not man’s prerogative. This admitted, the relation between the dramatist’s way of work and the actor’s will be worth investigating. An essential quality of any work of art is its homogeneity. For a staged play, then, to make good its claim to be one it would seem to follow that the actors must continue what the dramatist has begun by methods as nearly related to his in understanding and intention as the circumstances allow. And it is probably true that the staged play is a satisfying work of art to the very degree that this homogeneity exists. We have insisted upon the secondary importance of the physical side of the play’s interpretation, for all that in the end it seems to dominate the entire business, to the exclusion even, in innocent eyes, of the dramatist’s own share. It would be an exaggeration to say that it stands for no more than does the pen, ink, and paper by which the play was recorded, but quite just to compare it to the technical knowledge of play-making that the dramatist has come to exercise almost unconsciously. And it is likely that the near relation of method, which we want to establish, does lie in this mysterious preliminary process by which the actor ‘gets into the skin of his part’: for, indeed, all else that he does in performing it can be related to mere technique of expression. It is this mystery, then, that we must investigate and attempt to explain.

The dramatist’s method, which the actor must follow To begin with, how does the dramatist work? He may get his play on paper quickly or slowly, but the stuff in it is the gradual, perhaps the casual,

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accretion of thoughts and feelings, formed long before and now framed in words, or arranged into action, for the first time. How much of this process is conscious, and how much unconscious or sub-conscious, he probably could not tell you. If we say that the experiences are unconsciously or sub-consciously selected and consciously shaped we may not be far wrong. Wherein does the actor’s method follow this? Certainly no such process is to be found in the stuffing of his memory with words, and the whipping up and out of whatever emotions his repetition of them happens to suggest during the half-drill, half-scramble of the three or four weeks’ rehearsing, while he fits himself as best he can – his corners into all the other arbitrary corners – of that strange shifting Chinese puzzle which is called today an efficient and businesslike production. As a matter of fact no actor worth his salt relies upon this sort of preparation; he has other resources within himself. If he worked, as does the dramatist, in solitude, if he too were a fountain-head, his methods would be of only theoretical interest, our care but for the result. But his job is derivative and co-operative both. Therefore we must know the rules, if rules there are. We must consider certain constituents of the problem. With but a three hours’ traffic in which to manoeuvre all the material of a play, the longest part can but appear on the stage for a comparatively few informing and effective passages. To find the inferential knowledge of it that he needs the actor must search, so to speak, behind the scenes, before the rise of the curtain and even after its fall. This is a commonplace; and all actors who can be said to study their parts at all, not merely to learn them, do, instinctively if not deliberately, work in this way. But unless they do so in concert with their fellows they really more often harm the rest of the play than help the whole. For an isolated performance, of however great interest – if the rest of the acting is sagging, vague, helpless, unattached, or perversely at cross purposes – must distort the play’s purpose. No matter if the one seems to be right and all the others wrong. Nothing is right unless the thing as a whole is right. A play is founded upon conflict; the dramatist, to get the thing going at all, must bring his characters into collision, among themselves or with fate or circumstances. He must keep them all in an equally effective fighting trim; if he betrays one of them, denies him his best chance in argument or action, for all that it may open an easy way out of a difficulty, end a scene quickly, bring a curtain down with effect, the fabric will be weakened, the play’s action may be dislocated

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altogether. It seems obvious, therefore, that the play’s interpretation must be founded upon corporate study by the actors, which should begin as an argumentative counterpart of this struggle and develop through the assumption of personality into the desired unity with the play itself. Let us now consider how the unity is to be achieved.

Never commit words to memory It is to be hoped that the very subsidiary matter – which now bulks so largely – of learning the words of the play would be swamped in the process of argument. Words should never be learnt, for the result – as with action, if the play is brought to that prematurely – is that they harden in the mind as actualities when they should merely come to it as symbols. All solitary study whatever is (once again) to be deprecated. For to study the play, apart from studying your fellow-actors in the play, is to prefer dry bones to flesh and blood. There is much to be said for the method of the seventeenthcentury music-teacher, who locked up the instrument upon his departure for fear that his pupil might practise. Actors might well leave their books behind them on the table. It is in the untroubled intervals between meetings that ideas may make good growth and opposing points of view tend to reconciliation. That sort of solitary study by which, so to speak, with your mind quiescent, the matter in hand seems to study you is profitable enough. It is even, for most memories, the easiest way of assimilating the dialogue. A sensitive mind rebels against nothing so much as getting words by rote.

The mystery of identification again One hopes that even the most expert actors would not come to argue their way very slickly through this preliminary period. No play should move in an efficient straight line between first rehearsal and performance. This time of survey and discovery is the time, too, when the first tendons are being formed which will come to unite the actor’s personality with the crescent figure of the character itself. Here is the mystery; the gestation of this new being that is not the actor’s consistent self though partaking of it; that is not the character worn as a disguise; individual, but with no absolute existence at all, a relative being only, and now related alike to the actor as to the play. It will be slow in coming to birth: the more unconscious

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the process the better, for it does not work alike with everyone, never at the same pace, never to the same measure. Wherefore the director may discover that, to rally his team and to save them from a premature awareness of themselves and each other, it may be well once or twice to move from the table to the stage and engage in the business of a scene or two. This exercise should not last too long, nor should the scenes that are tried follow too much in sequence; for, above all things, the physical action of the play must not be defined while the thought and feeling that should prompt it are still unsure. But the shock of the change will be refreshing. It will check the too easy growth of an agreement, the creation of a unity of purpose based only upon words, whether they be the play’s or the actors’ arguments round and about the play. Quite literally the company should be allowed to feel their feet in the play, to stamp up and down and restore the circulation which too much talk may have slackened.

Productions must be born and not made The production itself must never be shaped before its natural form has declared itself. By shaping we are to understand, of course, not only the physical action of the scenes, but their mental and emotional action as well – everything, indeed, that could be regulated, were our play an orchestral symphony, by time signatures, metronome markings, sforzandi, rallentandi, and the rest, even by the beat of the conductor. It is tempting to compare conductor and director, but one must do so mainly to remark that their powers, if not their functions, are very different. To wield a baton at rehearsals only, and even then to have neither terms nor instruments of precision for explanation or response – the limitation is severe. It is better to remember that compared to music – and to a far greater degree in comparison with painting, sculpture, and poetry – acting is hardly capable of verbal definition. For by admitting the weakness, by abjuring fixation and finality, one can the better profit by the compensating strength, the ever fresh vitality of the purely human medium; and so the art will gain, not lose. Some fixity, however, there must be, for the practical reason, if for no other, that co-operation would be impossible without it. But there is the aesthetic reason too, and the theatre’s problem is concisely this: how to attain enough definition of form and unity of intent for the staged play to rank

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as a homogeneous work of art and yet preserve that freedom of action which the virtue of the human medium demands. Nothing is easier than to plan out a production in elaborate mechanical perfection, to chalk the stage with patterns for the actors to run upon, to have the dialogue sung through with a certain precision of pitch, tone, and pace, to bring the whole business to the likeness of a ballet. But nothing will be less like a play as a play should be. Here, too, it is the letter that killeth and only the spirit that giveth life. Even when such a poetical symphony as A Midsummer Night’s Dream demands for its interpretation a rhythm of speech matched by rhythm of movement – individual, concerted, contrasted – which can only be brought by skilful hard practice to the point where it will defy forgetfulness, all this must still be taken the step further to the point where its cumbering recollection is defied, too. Rehearsals, be it noted, have always this main object of enabling an actor to forget both himself and them in the performance. But preparation having been brought by one means and another to the stage when the play – now a grown, or half-grown, but still unshaped combination of the work of dramatist, director, actors – has acquired life enough to be about to go forward by its own momentum, our positive rules (if they are discoverable) must begin to apply.

The two categories of a play’s action: The conscious action We must now divide the action (using the word comprehensively) into two categories. To the first will belong everything that can be considered a part of the main structure of the play (again using the word comprehensively to express the play, not as the dramatist left it, but as it has been so far brought to fuller being). And everything so included must be capable of clear definition: its execution must not vary, it must rank for constancy with the dialogue itself. It is obvious, for instance, that the characters must come on and leave the stage at particular moments in particular ways; we may take it for granted, too, not only that at certain fixed times in fixed places certain things must be done, but done always with the same emphasis and intention. This is common form. And thus far (the inconstancy of its human medium always allowed for) the drama moves in line with the more static arts. Into this first category, then, will fall all

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ceremonial – the whole movement, for instance, of such a play as the Agamemnon. It will also hold the broad relation in tone and time between act and act, between scene and scene, and the emotional, no less than the physical, structure of the action of each scene, its muscular system, so to speak, as apart from its integument, blood and nerves. We should be right to rule into this category any features of the play’s interpretation which we hold must be common to every production of it. We might well include, too, all features which, peculiar to this one, called for and were capable of any definition which could be genuinely agreed upon by the interpreters concerned; the greater the number of them the greater the need of agreement, but the less easy its achievement. But these abstract terms become both too vague and too positive. We must cite examples, remembering, however, that no one will ever duplicate another and that as to each opinions may legitimately differ; such are the drawbacks to aesthetic law-giving. And, as we must quote a known play, we can but exemplify a second-hand approach to it. To take, then, the occasion of the screen’s falling in The School for Scandal as a simple case in point.1 The intention of the author is obvious and the tradition of its expression recoverable if broken; and it may not be practically worthwhile in this instance to do other than register both in the traditional form. But at each reproduction of the play there must be something like a fresh approach to the situation, and as that may – theoretically, at least, and tradition apart – dictate a remoulding of even the main lines of the interpretation, let us assume for the moment that we are wholly free. The treatment of such a situation must obviously be a matter of clear definition and, let us say, of honourable agreement among the people concerned. One uses this last epithet because it allows for the greatest possible freedom within the bounds of the understanding. You do not want, even for the sake of the most brilliantly concerted effect, suddenly to change your Charles Surface from a man into an automaton, nor must you dictate to your Sir Peter how he should feel and find his way, breath by breath, to this emotional trysting-place. If you do you will sacrifice to the second’s mechanical perfection the life and the liveliness of whole minutes leading to it and away from it. Certainly there must In this scene (IV, 3) Lady Teazle visits Joseph Surface at his house and hides behind a screen when her husband Sir Peter appears. He tells Joseph he thinks his wife is having an affair with Joseph’s brother Charles, who then arrives. As the scene unfolds, Charles innocently throws down the screen, only to reveal Lady Teazle. 1

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be mutual concern here for far more than the words spoken and the places occupied in the scene. But we only need to establish an identity of intention among the actors, so that they may make of the saliency of the moment a knot, so to speak, into which they may tie, simply and surely, those strands of the play’s purpose that they severally hold. A most expert feat, no doubt, if it is to be as perfect in its execution as its purpose, and one which can by no means be left to happy accident. But it will be most fruitfully achieved if there is no closer agreement upon means than is absolutely needed to compass the ends. And the closer the agreement upon the end – that is to say, the more skilled in sympathy the group of actors are – the less will the precise means be found to matter. In the production of plays, as in many other things, the art lies largely in discovering what not to do; and quite certainly the less you are ever seen doing the better. One could multiply examples and doubtless find better ones. But the constricting fault of most modern play production is to treat every possible moment with the utmost severity of regulation, and it is more to our main purpose to insist on the needlessness of nine-tenths of it. And we can do so inferentially by going on to consider our second category.

Unconscious or sub-conscious action If the first, for the sake of a single adjective, is to include all the conscious action of the play the second may be said to hold all the unconscious or – deferring to the psychologist’s lingo – the subconscious action. Into it, then, we are to bring everything in the play’s acting – movement, expression, emotion, thought – which may, without disturbance of the production’s structure or to the distraction of fellow actors, be carried forward in any one of fifty different ways. We say fifty, as we might say a dozen or a hundred, simply for comparison with the single way of the first category. And there may be in theory as good an aesthetic reason for exactly enumerating the fifty as there is for prescribing the one. There will appear, indeed, in our plan an indirect method of prescription of the fifty; for the sub-conscious self has still to be regulated. But practically what we are after is a consciousness of complete freedom. And though the freedom can never be quite complete, neither can any action in the first category be made perfectly accurate, for in each case the work is done in the incalculable human medium which defies (and

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perhaps despises) exactitude. We aim, then, through this freedom at an appearance of spontaneity. This may seem to some people a very little thing; if it does they have not a very discriminating taste for acting.

Automatism and self-consciousness The hardening effect of the ‘long run’ upon acting will be admitted. The art of acting has incidentally well-nigh been destroyed by it; for it has reduced art to automatism. It should be plain to anyone that no human being can act Hamlet eight times a week, if acting is to involve anything more than physical gymnastic. He must, to escape intolerable wear and tear, keep the finer parts of his human mechanism out of commission for at least two performances in every three. And the actor of Rosencrantz is brought to a self-defensive automatism for the very opposite reason. If he did not make himself into a machine, the little round of the part travelled over and over would reduce him to a state of histrionic imbecility. But the tendency to automatism, though lessened, is by no means abolished by the simple expedient of putting on a play three times a week instead of eight and letting the actors play other parts on the remaining nights. Other influences make for it: disciplinary rehearsals; or the actor’s own effort to build up, by one trial after another, the best possible performance, and having, as he thinks, attained it, then to register each item and try to preserve a constant combination of them all. If the actor anchors himself to this bit of business, to that intonation, even to a particular trick of thought or emotion which he finds he can command, his performance will become in time a mosaic of excellent fragments: disturb one, a dozen others are loosened, and then, with the oncoming of fatigue, the whole may begin to break up, for there is no vital principle to unite them. He may satisfy himself at some moment with a particular reading of a passage and then, by a stroke of his mind, be able to transfer his conviction of it to a subconscious self which will faithfully record and can later re-express the idea: his conscious mind thus being freed again for the larger view of part and play. But even so, when, in time, a mass of such detail has accumulated and is brought into action as a concrete whole by the sub-conscious mind, no inner conviction will be prompting it: it will be invariable and lifeless.

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Pure conventionalism The problem is no easy one. At one time and another an actor of Hamlet must try and live through the emotions of Hamlet. But if he were so spendthrift of his energies as to try to re-experience them all at one performance it would be long enough before he could rise to another. Some conventionalism of feeling is as necessary as is, for the sake of economy of thought, the reduction to rule of the play’s main movement. And we can conceive, no doubt, purely conventional acting of a very satisfying and beautiful kind, appropriate enough in its place. The ritual of the Mass is a performance of this sort, and most imaginative people prefer it to the ranting, personal appeal of a revivalist meeting. Greek tragedy, with its religious element, sustains conventional treatment well – our modern difficulty being mainly to establish an agreement between actors and audience upon the alphabet of its convention. But in the theatre of the last three hundred and fifty years the element of individual interpretation has come to occupy a dominating place, has developed in complexity and intensity quite beyond the compass of conventional expression. That is clear. And though we may lose thereby in dignity and force it is to be hoped we gain something in vitality and subtlety. We need interpreters, but it must truly be the characters of the play which they interpret. Working in full consciousness they cannot do it; self will be asserted. Identification of the actual with the imaginary, of the actor with his part, asking for a murderer to play a murderer and for a saint to appear as a saint, is as impossible as the fiction of personation is puerile. And so we are brought to the need for a creation in the actor of something like an integral sub-conscious self.

The mystery yet again, the actor surrenders himself In this creation a double process is involved: first the mental search and the provocative argument into and around the character and the play that we have described; then the sensitizing of the actor’s receptive faculties, mental and emotional, too. It should be a concurrent process.

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The emotional part of the sensitizing process is not so demonstrable. It is difficult enough even to define sympathy, and, in human relations, it is certainly a fatal error to try and cultivate it by prescription. But even in the world of make-believe one can affirm no more than this: let the actor surrender himself wholly to the idea of his part as it forms itself to his apprehension under the spell of this generous study, and there will, by his Muse’s grace, be added unto him, as fruit of the personal surrender, this mysterious second personality, which will be not himself and yet will be a part of himself. He will be wedded to his idea. We make poetry of such a relation between two human beings: we see or experience the shadow of it sometimes. In its fulness it must doubtless remain an ideal. Surrender to an idea robs no man of his birthright. In any fine playing of a part – of Imogen in Cymbeline, shall we say? – there is a power not the player’s own, and a beauty which certainly does not accompany her off the stage. Nor can the complete effect be accounted for by adding together the words of Shakespeare, the woman’s looks and voice, the theatre’s lights and scenery. Pick the whole thing to pieces, and you’ll no more find out the secret than you’ll find a soul in the body’s anatomy. If it does not lie in the surrendered self, and the possession for the time of the obedient body by the changeling idea, then where? Every actor has experienced, more or less, the sensation of being under his part’s control. Mind, there can be delusion as to this, with direful consequences. Letting yourself go, when no rounded and complete idea does control you, is like losing your temper, and may result, likewise, either in feckless screaming or a helpless inarticulation. Being soundly angry with anger’s cause behind you is another matter, as everybody knows. One may test and value the masterly sensation both in life and art by the extraordinary coolness and clarity of mind that should accompany it. Once you have learnt the secret; then, as you act a part so studied, while you may still choose what to do, you can feel assured that whatever you may do will be characteristically right. Impulse, moreover, to do this or that will not wait upon effort or for a particular call. Through the sensitive channel which the interpreter has now become will flow unchecked the thoughts and emotions generated in the part’s studying. These will have been shaped (we recapitulate); those of them upon which the play’s structure as a work of art depends, definitely and consciously – and they must not be vague or varying, and at each fixed point the interpreter

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must consciously control and direct them. He must, moreover, never let this side of the part’s playing escape his quite conscious control, or it will degenerate into automatism; and automatism will not do. But to the rest he need only sub-consciously attend. To demeanour, tones, gestures, and the like he need now oppose no mental bar. And as they shape themselves spontaneously they will be fresher and more vital; they will come and go with an ease which interposed calculation could only deaden and destroy. If the underlying idea is just and consistent, if the interpreter is physically trained and mentally and emotionally sensitized – if his faculties, that is to say, are sufficiently at one with his conception – then all that he does or can do will now have appropriate value and stand in right proportion to the whole. And this will be so even though the appearance of what he does may never be twice alike. Indeed, it never will be, because the process is in a very near sense natural and not mechanical at all. And it never should be if we are to take full advantage of the human medium. Far better, though, that this principle of change, thus kept constantly in flow, should not, half the time, be discernible in definite changes at all. No one wants a scene done differently every night. An actor’s response to a situation and a line, his own or another’s, may well seem to be identical six times out of ten. One only wants to be sure that it is a genuine response. There is a possible extreme of self-surrender to be noted and avoided. Against extra passivity the actor must be on his guard, or he will find himself, within this second category, the victim of automatism again. He must remember with what amazing swiftness, within such artificial limits as a play’s performance, habit is established. And unless the quiescence of the conscious mind helps the receptive, sub-conscious, emotionally expressive self to be only the more keenly alive – and, even when in complete physical quiescence, to be actively alive – the method fails. What is great drama but the repetition of words and the movements of men and women for an hour or two upon a lit and painted stage? And yet, by furthering with their best thoughts the thoughts of the poet, and more, far more, by yielding themselves utterly, body and spirit, as instruments to the harmony of the play’s purpose, a company of actors does bring to birth a thing of powerful beauty that was not in the play before, that is not in themselves, but has now some of the absolute virtue of fine music, some of the quality that can make small things great. There is honour in this art.

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And the final struggle Finally, a third factor in the theatre’s future is all-important. An audience there must be. Not the finest playing of the best play in the world can fully exist without it. Its presence is the logical extension of the co-operation between actors and playwright, and between the actors themselves, upon which the whole art rests. Not many steps further can the theatre even go than its audience will wholeheartedly follow. Nor should it wish to, for in this wider partnership is the art’s final strength. In the collective consciousness so formed by playwrights, actors, and audience we can gain from the acted drama an understanding of human relationships deeper and subtler than words and their reasoning can give. Sensitized by art, overtones are added to our nature’s scale. And what more wonderful instrument has man to play upon than is this living self? What greater capacity for an orchestration of humanity, with all its thoughts and passions, will he find than lies in a company of men and women highly attuned, performing a play? [1922: From The Exemplary Theatre, fifth section]

Note This extract is taken from the fifth section of the six sections that comprise the book, The Exemplary Theatre, which is Barker’s fullest account of his views on the theatre and came at a time when, with renewed energy after the war, he was able to reflect in a grand sweep on his wide experience as an actor, director, manager and playwright (extracts from the sixth, ‘Some Current Difficulties’, are also included; see pp. 195–207). The rest of the book covers other aspects, such as the aim of theatre and theatre’s educational side. In this section, Barker argues that in order to produce a homogenous work of theatrical art, the whole matter of the proper production of plays has to be thought out again from the beginning. As well as touching on the role of the director and the audience, he concentrates on the problem of the actor, of how to avoid repetition and maintain spontaneity. Many of his ideas echo those of Konstantin Stanislavsky, though both arrived at their conclusions independently of each other. Stanislavsky’s unhurried rehearsals, which allowed the development of nuanced and lively performances, confirmed Barker’s thinking. Barker first met Stanislavsky in 1914 and wrote about seeing his work at the Moscow Art Theatre in an article reproduced in this anthology (see pp. 151–4).

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Since his second marriage (in 1918) and the end of the war, Barker had been remarkably busy. As well as writing The Exemplary Theatre, he had become the first chair of the newly founded British Drama League, campaigning in particular for a National Theatre, continued lecturing, directed a Maeterlinck play in London’s West End, adapted with Helen Granville-Barker and directed The Romantic Young Lady by G. Martinez Sierra, translated and helped direct Deburau by Sacha Guitry, and written a short story, several articles, and The Secret Life, which was published the following year.2

 Plays by Gregorio Martinez Sierra were credited to him alone, but they were written in collaboration with his wife, Maria. 2

The art of the theatre is not a reasonable art.

5 THE HERITAGE OF THE ACTOR A play is material for acting. It may be far more, but it must be that to begin with. The actor brings it to a technical completion. This, no doubt, puts the matter from the actor’s point of view, and while the truth is indisputable, the emphasis of the statement may be misleading. Even so, this point of view counts; if only because, when we bring a play to the theatre, the actor’s is the last word in the matter – till the public has its say. If it be argued that the play is implicitly complete when it leaves the author’s hands, that the actor’s business is interpretation merely, that he can, in truth, add nothing to and take nothing away from the material a competent playwright has given him – There was once, in the seventeenth century, a gentleman, who, coming out of church on a Sunday morning, found a week-day companion sitting in the stocks. ‘What have they put you there for?’ he asked. ‘Getting drunk.’ ‘Nonsense,’ said the church-goer, who was a legally-minded man; ‘they can’t put you in the stocks for being drunk.’ ‘Zooks!’ said the unfortunate reveller. ‘But they have!’ It is useless to argue that actors can add nothing to and take nothing from the material the playwright gives them. The answer is that they do. This final part of the dramatic process, this putting of a play upon the stage, is, indeed, a distressingly incalculable thing. Certainly it is interpretation, but no other kind of interpretation quite compares with it. Musicians have instruments that are more or less mechanical to perform on; even singers are tied, stave by stave, to definite notes. Singers and players will tell us, however, that they should be left ample discretion.

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They may add that the meticulous method of writing music is quite modern, that composers of the eighteenth century and earlier were content to put down on paper what they considered the essentials, and to leave far more to the artistry of their interpreters. But let anyone familiar with play production ask himself what the final effect would be if the actors felt called upon to do no more than speak a speech as the author was good enough to pronounce it to them, trippingly upon the tongue. A certain regardless beauty might result. There are plays that, at first thought, would seem to profit by this treatment. Greek tragedy, with its use of mask and cothurnus,1 asks for its acting a voice and a presence, and little else; though, even so, it may be found that concentration upon this single means of expression rather heightens than diminishes a personality that can so express itself. But in a play which pictures human intercourse in accustomed terms, if the actor did not do something more than repeat its words with such understanding and emotion as they immediately suggested to him, pointing them with appropriate gesture, the result would be unbearably flat and quite unconvincing. What, then, is the ‘something more’ he is expected to contribute? His personality. What, then, is the extension of this in the terms of his art to be? Drama ranges from the austerity of Greek tragedy to the freedom of the Commedia dell’ Arte; and it is not for one manifestation of it, however respectable, however popular, to deny the validity of any other. The antics of Harlequin are not essentially different from the art that shows us Oedipus. But, to bring the question to a practical and a more or less topical issue, let us rule out both drama that is largely ritual and drama that is inchoate. Let us assume a play conceived by an author in essential completeness, and marked down for interpretation as minutely as words will do it. There is a story of an actress of genius who was being conducted through a rehearsal of her part by a director of great ability. ‘Miss –,’ he said, ‘you go here and there and here; and you do this and that and this.’ ‘Thank you,’ she replied, with perfect docility. ‘Yes, I think I understand. I go there and here and there, and I do that and this and that. And then I do the little bit extra, don’t I, for which you really pay me

Cothurnus was a thick-soled, high boot used in ancient Greek theatre.

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my salary?’ Or, as she might have put it, even more informingly, ‘Then I am the little bit extra which no one can teach me to be.’ The dramatist has a right to expect that any actor, of the required sex and of the right age and appearance – picked out of a list, called off the rank as it were – will be able to say and do with perfect efficiency whatever can be set down for him to say and do. This right, like many others, is often in abeyance. But, with the expectation fulfilled, the dramatist will still ask the actor to be something besides. At times, no doubt, this ‘being’ is offensive. We have all seen plays swamped by an elaborate exhibition of someone personality. We have, on the other hand, seen plays of the poorest sort enriched beyond recognition by the imposition – as upon one of those vague backgrounds used by Victorian photographers - of vivid characters, springing, if not from the imagination of the actors of them, then from where? Irving’s Mathias will certainly not be found in the original manuscript of The Bells. And if one is to be told that it was in some mysterious fashion innate in the story and the play as Erckmann-Chatrian and the adapter wrote them, one must ask further: was Coquelin’s conception of the innkeeper-murderer innate there too? If so, the authors had an uncommonly accommodating or a somewhat divided mind.2 The dramatist demands personality; an indefinable thing, and, alas, he is seldom content with the concrete specimen of it that he gets. It is amusing to watch him at rehearsal while he sees the characters growing quite unlike his own innocent idea of them. If he is altogether a novice, the fascination of seeing them live and move is usually sufficient compensation. But novelists turned playwrights are apt to be agonised by the phenomenon. Experience – and a little sympathy with the difficulties of the actor – will teach them how what is essential may be kept alive and true to the play’s purpose if incidentals are not rigidly insisted on. Does the author refuse to admit any such division? Authors, grown expert enough in the whole business to instruct each actor to a nicety, have been known to do so. They make their choice, then, between the letter and the spirit, and they may find that by insistence

The Bells was one of the major successes of the British actor Henry Irving and was adapted from a play by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian, who used the name Erckmann-Chatrian for the plays they wrote together. The French actor Coquelin also played Irving’s role of Mathias in London. 2

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upon the letter they have – for sensitive auditors at least – taken away the very life of the play’s performance. Not but that the author may suffer in a hundred ways by an actor’s freedom to inform his part with life. I can myself recall a performance in which an actor – well-intentioned too – gave what was rather a destructive criticism than a representation of the character he was playing. The author thought he had written a not unsympathetic hero. The actor proved conclusively to the audience that the fellow was nothing of the kind. He may have been right; but the author could not unreasonably have remarked that there were critics enough in the stalls and that it was not an actor’s business to do their work for them. Reverse the process; let the actor take a sordid character and invest it with distinction and charm, and still the author is not grateful. He will prefer the child of his fancy to this changeling, even though the changeling be a fairy. The work of the modern theatre, however, where authors and actors of average ability are concerned, is done, as a whole, upon the basis of a compromise by which the author provides essentials and the actor incidentals to taste. That modern invention, the director, is the honest broker brought in to effect it. It answers, doubtless; and the bulk of the work done under it may be pleasing enough. But is there no more to be said? For there is no future in a compromise. The theatre finds itself today, not in any more trouble than usual (it is always in trouble), but facing a curiously ambiguous outlook for the future. For two things have happened recently in England. Everyone has learned to read, almost everyone has taken to reading fiction (some of it disguised, as fact!). And the Cinema has become an institution.3 The first event did not rob the theatre of its devotees; there was no reason that it should. Theatre-going is a social act, though in England less so regarded than elsewhere; and the enjoyment of narrative is no good substitute for the excitement of mimic action. But cinema-going is a social act too, and – ‘Movies’; the very word spells action and excitement. Now it is too soon to say – it will always be too soon to say – how the art of the cinema may develop. There is no reason to suppose that, as industries, theatre and cinema cannot exist side by side, for the theatre has many resources (as we shall argue) that the cinema can hardly draw upon. But it is fairly certain that the story in action – that 3

Barker is referring to silent film.

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extension of the narrative fiction, for which such a widespread taste has been cultivated – will remain the cinema’s chief aim, and that the theatre therefore will tend to be ousted from this part of its ancient preserve. It is instructive to examine the cinema’s dealing with material that has been or well might be used by the theatre. There is, very naturally, a revolt from the unities, from that ‘general oneness’ so dear to the heart of Mr Curdle4 – and Aristotle. Continuity of action, with the variety attendant upon it, is favoured as against the elaborate development of particular episodes. In so far, indeed, as the cinema is disposed to lean on dramatic technique at all, it returns rather to the cruder methods of the Elizabethan, even of the Mediaeval stage. Little is left for the imagination to account for. It is as if the scientific discovery, by which the swiftly revolving shutter makes the pictures appear to move, had laid down artistic law. The story is chopped up into little pieces, then cemented again into a long episodic line. The cinema has certainly revived the Mediaeval dumb-show and our delight in it. It is specially instructive to note, when a play is transferred to the screen, how much dialogue can be eliminated without peril to our understanding, or even to our enjoyment of the story. The skill of the director is very properly directed to removing what – the picture being now the thing – has become mere excrescence. It follows that plays which depend upon poetry, upon wit, upon analysis of character, are very weak vessels in the eye – in the brilliantly winking eye – of the camera. And, if there are degrees in the matter, this is truest of poetry, our great begetter of emotion in the theatre. The cinema deals in excitement; only by indirect means does it beget emotion. Hence, no doubt, its invariable accompaniment by music, for an arbitrary stimulus to the feelings. As an entertainment the cinema has one further difference; it asks no response from its audience. Go to a play, and unless you are insensitive indeed, you will be drawn to some sympathy with the actors. It may take the form of admiration (the form, no doubt, that actors prefer), it may be reduced to mere pity for fellow-creatures making such fools of themselves. But in some form or other it will be there. You will, if you analyze your feelings, be brought to some sense of responsibility for the Mr Curdle is a character in Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens who comments on the unities, which had been defined by Aristotle in his Poetics. 4

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conduct of the entertainment as a whole. An exhibition of giggling bad manners by one of your neighbours can easily put this to a test. If you do not protest, you will at least feel ashamed. But, watching a ‘movie,’ what does its foolishness matter? The actors are far away, both in space and in time. What consideration need be shown to their flickering images on a screen? Equally, what enthusiasm can such images arouse, except in the minds of children (of whatever age) to whom illusion still is life and the discretionary enjoyment of art a thing unknown? This environment of irresponsibility may add to the cinema’s popularity in an irresponsible age. But one doubts whether an art that cannot stimulate emotion and that asks for no more judgment or support from its audience than is involved in their paying or not paying, their staying or going, can ever take a very deep hold. One might even find refuge in fogeyism and question its right in the outcome – whatever aesthetic efforts may be spent in preparation – to be considered an art at all. But, art or no art, if the cinema is in the future to steal some part of the theatre’s thunder, what had the theatre best do about it? We see well enough how the industrial part of the question is being answered. Landlords, dramatists, and actors are putting money in their purses while they can. What preparation, though, is the indisputable art of the drama making for a generation that is perhaps growing up to think of a play in relation to a movie as the children of 1880, riding in express trains, thought of a coach-and-four? If an art may have a policy it would seem as if the first thing needful were the envisaging of what the drama can do unapproachably, of what it can be at its best that neither kindred arts nor pseudo-arts can be. For in this must lie its strength to face a future, however ambiguous. Its history has been marked by defections, from which, in some ways it has gathered strength. Dancing and music deserted, to set up on their own account as ballet and opera. Drama on the whole does better without them. Certainly, late in the seventeenth century it struck up one doubtful alliance with the scenic art, by which it has benefited a little and suffered a lot; the Artist (with a capital A) being a difficult partner to keep in his place, once he has scented the footlights, and an appeal to the thing seen being ever the simplest to make. Four boards and a passion, it has been said, are all the equipment that drama needs, and it is a saying to be taken to heart. Here are the things that drama has never surrendered; her unrivalled riches. First, the fellowship set up between

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actors and audience on the strength of the fellowship of imagination between the actors themselves. Next, the power of the spoken word. And in these two things the power and the quality of the art must lie. Now it is worth noting, incidentally, that the final framing-in of the picture stage (which preceded by a generation the invention of ‘the pictures’) led in time to the loss of that emotional intimacy by which our ‘classic’ drama had reinforced doubly and trebly its poetry and humour. The discovery of the loss was tardy; partly because the poetic play and eighteenth-century comedy dropped out of fashion just then, partly because actors of authority, who knew what the old ways were, adapted them skilfully enough to the new conditions. Even so there was much critical mourning over Macbeths that were not what they used to be, and Schools for Scandal as dull as ditchwater. This is worth noting because it points so directly to the reliance once placed – apart from any virtues in the play itself – upon the relation between actors and audience. This relation bred (unfortunately for the drama as a whole perhaps) a race of actors who, by cultivating it, could make the very poorest play attractive – even as a music-hall comedian can now keep his audience in a roar over nothing at all. But, aesthetically, it was not of necessity an unworthy relation. No one can read of Garrick and Mrs Siddons and Kean; of King and Mrs Abington and Palmer; no one can have seen a William Farren play Sir Peter Teazle according to tradition, and suppose so.5 And it would be idle to pretend that in erecting the barrier of a complete illusion between actors and audience the art of the theatre has lost nothing, whatever it may have gained. The arising of a generation of actors that feel as helpless upon the apron at Garrick’s Drury Lane (which just from the actor’s standpoint keeps all the advantage of Shakespeare’s Globe) as they would in the ring of a circus, will involve the disappearance of Shakespeare and Sheridan from the stage, except as excuses for pageantry or academic exercises. This disappearance has indeed seemed imminent; it still may be. Here and there the mechanical remedy has been applied, when old plays are under treatment, of breaking down the illusion by providing an apron stage and encouraging the actor to come out upon it and ‘be a Garrick,’ so to speak. But the trouble may not be quite so simply curable. David Garrick, Sarah Siddons, Edmund Kean, Thomas King, Frances Abington, John Palmer and William Farren were leading actors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 5

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And what of the modern drama? It is as useless to expect the playwright of today to go back on the ‘illusionary’ theory as it would be to ask Mr Sargent6 to paint like Giotto. Besides, this would be to imply that in the illusionary stage we have nothing to be grateful for. We have much. One need not muster names, or even suppose that the playwrights who have flourished during the last fifty years and whose work measures up in average quality with any the theatre has seen could not have done as well – though they must have done very differently – working to another technique. The ‘could’ and ‘should’ argument in matters of art is always exasperatingly futile, whether it bears on the past or the present; whether, as in this instance, it is how Shakespeare ought to have written for footlights and scenery, or Ibsen might have constructed Hedda Gabler for the bare boards of the Globe. But it will be owned that this latest period of development in drama has been the playwright’s period, not the actor’s. Has it not often brought actor and playwright to odds, now openly, now – for good reasons of bread-and-butter – as politely as you please? Once, at a public dinner, Ibsen was congratulated upon the magnificent parts his plays provided for their interpreters. The old gentleman scowled terrifically. ‘Parts!’ he said, when he rose to speak; ‘I do not write parts. I create men and women.’ On the other hand, could the talk of actors gathered together at many a private dinner during the last forty years be recorded, it would rise to Heaven as the discordant wail of a crushed and desolated race. The quarrel, I repeat, may seldom be particularised. A theatre is the happiest of workshops and its controllers have to learn that happiness is a necessary part of its efficiency. And, as I have suggested, in practice these conflicting interests are accommodated by a compromise. Let there be so much sheer interpretation of the part I have written, so much exploiting, my dear Mr So-and-so, of your personality. Never, of course, is it put in so many words, or even thought of with so brutal a clarity. And where the domination of either author or director on the one hand, or of actor on the other, is perfect and unquestioned, no overt difference will be detected. The author murmurs approvingly from the shrouded stalls, or the actors obediently note that they are not only to do but to feel this and that and no more. Five minutes five seconds! – at a rehearsal or performance will tell the experienced observer which John Singer Sargent.

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regime is in force. Some rehearsals, doubtless, run their course upon a basis of conflict to a goal of haphazard performance. If the play is a success – and good plays and bad plays, bad performances of them and good ones, succeed and fail equally – no one concerned asks any questions. If it is a failure, the author feels, ‘Ah, if my play had had a chance …!’ and the actors either ‘Ah, if I’d only had something to act …!’ or ‘If they’d only have let me act it!’ It is a stupid quarrel. And what is its result, in ensuing or suppression, for the playgoer? That good actors often prefer bad plays; and that good plays are too often deplorably badly acted. If this is the dramatist’s day, he will be wise to consider the actor, not as a mere appendage to his work, but as its very life-giver. Let him realise that the more he can learn to ask of the actor the more will he gain for his play. But asking is giving. He must give opportunity. An author may have a thesis to expound or an exciting story to tell. A pamphlet will serve him for one and a novel for the other; or if the matter be all excitement, there is, as aforesaid, the cinema. A play has far other, far wider, artistic purposes. Aristotle laid it down – with that positiveness which in an ancient Greek is supposed, for some reason, to silence all argument – that dramatic action must not be thought of with a view to the representation of character, that the incidents and plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. To prove this, apparently, he further remarks that without action there cannot be a tragedy (which is obviously true), but that there may be without character. In some logical sense, no doubt, there may – and a very dull affair it would be. But perhaps wise playwrights do not read their Aristotle, lest they should be in danger of having to differ from him. For they will remember that every great play of the last three centuries and more holds its place in virtue of character and not of plot. Why do we go to see a play that we really like again and again? (And return visits are the test; in music, in painting, in drama.) Not to have the story re-told us, however ingeniously it may be told. It is the elucidation of character that does not pall; and it is in this – all virtuosity, all that is learnable allowed for – that the actor’s art finds its final task and its true achievement. As with the actor, so with the playwright; construction and the rest of it are as learnable as is good speaking and the tricks of painting the face; but either he can create men and women in terms of dramatic action or he cannot. And nothing else finally counts. He need not, however, with Ibsen, disdain to think of

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them as parts to be played. That was in its time, perhaps, a wholesome protest against the actor’s egoism. But it has become – frankly – a piece of snobbery and no more. For now as always it is the power of the actor, adopting the speech and action of the author’s imagining, to elucidate the character in the terms of his own personality that gives the thing that apparent spontaneity of life which is the drama’s peculiar virtue. We speak most appropriately of reviving an old play; and new actors do in a very real sense give it new life. The fact that (if it has been, to begin with, vitally conceived) it is capable of being interpreted in the terms of another set of personalities (as indeed it may be to some degree variously treated by the same actors time after time) is the chief reason why we can go back to it, not merely as we go back to a familiar novel or poem, but often to receive – though expectancy is rash – a fresher, more vivid enjoyment than that which it first gave us. It is said in the theatre that no actor ever quite fails as Hamlet. That is truer than it sounds; moreover, it goes far to tell us why Hamlet is the most popular play in the world, not so much with actors, who can indeed fail quite sufficiently in it to be chary of the risk, but with the ever-changing, neverchanging public. Popular plays are plays that ‘act well.’ And the better a play and the better a part the more can an actor find to do in it, and the greater variety of acting will it accommodate. Modern drama, the actor may tell us, does not give him the chances that the old did. But in much of it there is more for him to do than he is apt to think. For he thinks of great acting too often in terms of the past; his mind stalks that apron-stage of Garrick’s. Or, worse, he thinks of it in vacuo. His secret heart asks for a play which shall be but a colourable preparation and excuse for his doing something emotionally tremendous. He wants to ‘capture’ his audience, he yearns (quite rightly) after that emotional intimacy with them which will bring them to crying when he gives the cue and laughing when he laughs, without ever asking the reason why. His instinct tells him indeed that the less reason has to do with it the more satisfying his job will be. Set him free, he feels, to appeal to the hearts of the people and all will be well. Again, he is right from his point of view. All will be well enough for that moment of triumph; and he is not responsible for the after-questionings of an audience convalescent from their attack of this Dionysiac disease. What was it all about? That has to be the author’s concern; and he may – or may not – have a reputation for sanity which he cares to preserve.

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In the day of the dramatist, therefore, the actor must not seek that sort of emancipation. He must – it is the only way in art – break to new liberty through fulfilment. Modern plays make demands on him that, he may often think, are less in degree than he deserves; but, as he may even oftener omit to notice, these differ almost in kind from the old demands. Until he has exhausted the possibilities there are he cannot justly reproach – well, he will not wisely reproach – the authors of his histrionic being (if now they have the whip hand of him) with not providing more. This is one side of the matter. Incidentally, we should never be angry, or even amused, if the actor, once the play is delivered to him, seems to look on it for the time being as so much personal adornment. Off the stage (if he is ever off the stage) he generally doesn’t; he is as often too humble-minded. On the stage, better really encourage him to do so. Assumption of character is a difficult business. It involves a quite desperate abandonment of self, a loosing hold of self-confidence, and a touch of arrogance may be a help and a little comfort. Certainly the actor whose performance is but a deferential protest that all this is really more the author’s affair than his, is not worth his salt. The modern dramatist’s side of the case begins with a justification, but ends, it may be, with a question. His demands on the actor do differ greatly from the old demands, and the actor has been slow to recognise it. One need not here try to trace the process of change. In such matters the march is often enough two steps forward to one back and to several sideways. But the landmark which divides past from present is a change in the convention of illusion; and from this, once made, change after change has sprung. Plays can be found that straddle the boundary; drama may come to recrossing it, or may pass on over another; it is possible to argue the difference away. But the plain fact is that the writer of today, setting himself to mirror some fraction of contemporary life in dramatic form, goes to work under technical obligations that a century ago could have found no application at all, that fifty years back were but emerging from the tangle of an older, a much worn tradition. If they are not to be stated in a phrase or in a dozen phrases, they are none the less obvious. One might try, not quite successfully, to round them in with a paradox by saying that the footlights which symbolise the illusion of the picture stage now destroy the very division between actors and audience that they first made. Drama’s aim has not changed. This is still

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to create an emotional intimacy between these two; only the means to the end have shifted, have indeed finally been reversed. For – paradox apart – by the old method the stage and the actor were brought into the midst of the audience, by the new the audience is lured in imagination on the stage; if it can be hypnotised, even, into forgetting that such a thing as a stage exists, so much the better. Wherefore the ‘realistic setting’ has been perfected. We have rooms that we may regard as our own, fires that crackle, lights that our fingers twitch to turn up or down, doors that shut and bang with a familiar sound. It is interesting to remember that the end of A Doll’s House – of the play which began this movement – was the banging of a door. To such realism naturally belongs realism, or – if one rejects that abused word – verisimilitude of speech and action and of the drawing of character generally. Now, cause and effect in the development of an art are hard to distinguish. Let us only say then, that these things have in turn been the occasion of a great change of content in plays. The actor must follow where the dramatist leads. Here he has hung back, he has protested, and he has had times of real and times of false enthusiasm for the new thing. He has often succeeded in coaxing the dramatist aside for an old-fashioned frolic. But, on the main path, he has had to follow. And the dramatist – this might be his protest – now puts him in a world which is sometimes far too like the real one to be at all amusing. He is expected to know what a bishop, a stockbroker, a politician, a Frenchman, a Lincolnshire farmer, or a Scottish professor really are like. He is asked, moreover, to devote himself, even by the complete suppression of himself, to exhibiting the commonplace and expounding the abstruse, not to murmur if, when the exhibiting and expounding suffices the purpose of the play, he is bundled unceremoniously out of it, not to complain if he can only find in the paper the next morning that ‘the performance was adequate.’ No wonder he thinks enviously of Edmund Kean and of ‘loud applause’ punctuating every few lines of a performance, and of the days when a Mercutio, after departing to die, promptly returned to bow to the cheering, while Romeo and the rest stood around and the play itself waited his triumph’s pleasure. A generation of actors has already grown up, perhaps, that takes its new leading-strings for granted; otherwise the consequent question would be put more insistently than it is. I will try to put it. Has the dramatist, busy reconstituting his own art to gain full advantage from

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this theatre of the new illusion, given enough thought to all that the art of the actor has to gain from it? Has, in fact, the art of the actor gained in these days of the dramatist’s dominance? And, if not, must not any gain to drama itself be but a very partial gain? There has lately been revolt against verisimilitude. The dramatists themselves look round for ways of emancipation. But the revolt has been led – oddly enough – not by the actor but by designers of scenery. The actor would have been wise to make the quarrel his own and to make it a quarrel of principle. His is the case, but he has let the best of it go to snatch petty advantages here and there. And the scene designer fights, not in his interest at all, but against him. This revolt against dry verisimilitude was bound to come. Objective truth is well enough; but without emotion and the beauty that springs from it, the theatre simply cannot continue to exist. Ibsen, the great protagonist of serious social drama, was a genius and a poet to boot; and in his later plays the poet is found bursting the bonds of the form the playwright has perfected. But of his followers, not many have been either geniuses or poets, and their work has often been dull – conscientious, but dull. And now we have the scene designer, and even the engineer of the electric light, raising the banner of beauty for beauty’s sake, and promising to restore to the theatre all the romantic glory it has lost with increase a thousandfold, if we will but surrender ourselves to their spellbinding, and if actor and dramatist both, like good little boys, will do as they are bid. It is a strange claim. Ibsen and Shakespeare in the shades must wonder indeed when it comes echoing to them that, for their work to have full value for the theatre, it must be made ‘expressionistic.’ Actors, remembering their great predecessors, must feel a little bored when they are recommended to be ‘presentational,’ or to wear masks, or, on occasion, to abdicate altogether in favour of marionettes. Already we have had Macbeth and Richard III interpreted by scenic symbolism – which riveted the audience’s attention no doubt, kept people awake wondering what they’d see next. But the actor of Macbeth must have reflected somewhat earlier in the play than is usual, that life was indeed but a walking shadow, and that he, perhaps, was an idiot as well as a poor player to be spending his sound and fury against such odds. Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out is too good a joke not to be taken in earnest sometime. Are we to have a company

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of mere human beings revolving round some mighty symbol of morbid indecision; a pillar of light, it might be, registering moods by ranging through the spectrum, with a little music to help? Seriously, there are more appropriate – would it be rude to say saner? – ways of restoring emotion and beauty to the drama. But unless they are sought for, we shall continue to be fascinated and bamboozled by this sort of thing. Scenery has its place in the theatre, and a sufficiently honourable one. Quite excusably, men of talent who devote themselves to its designing will spread their wings and test their power to its limits. But let them either leave plays and acting out of account altogether, let them, indeed, practise a new art of their own; or let them, their flights over, return to the bedrock fact, that the function of scenery is to be a background for the play’s interpreter, the actor. This is its place, and, finally, it must be content to stay there. The beauty of sublimated human emotion; that is the beauty which properly pertains to drama. Without this and its complements of wit and humour, drama will die, and neither brains in the playwright nor the splashing of paint will avail to save it. But there is no need whatever to suppose that the technique of the modern play of verisimilitude is outworn or that its gains to the dramatist must be abandoned in a search for beauty and emotional power. And the gain to drama itself will be entire if the actor can be brought to contribute more largely from his own peculiar resources, the resources of human emotion. Not how to stifle or supersede this in the name of his own new freedom, but how to employ it to new and to subtler purpose should be the dramatist’s problem. But – this must be recognized – it is the problem of a partnership. It will not be solved under the tyranny of dramatist or actor. In the lack of a fruitful recognition of this the scene designer has come thrusting in where really he has no business. His interference has resulted in a most beneficent improvement of bad scenery into good. But, if it is to be a question of the development of drama itself – no, no; let him mind his paint-pots. We may sense what is wrong, yet wisely be chary of dogmatising upon its putting right. Certainly it is futile to request dramatists to give actors better chances of acting, to turn out plays containing such and such ingredients in such and such proportion – as if the making of plays were one with the making of puddings or pills. And the actor’s practical difficulty – once he forswears the ideal of a tame dramatist who will

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make him a play as his cook makes him puddings – is that he must act what he finds to act. Once in a while arises the actor-dramatist who, like Molière, continues in both crafts. There are modern instances; in America, William Gillette; in France, at this moment, Sacha Guitry. Their work is noticeable, if for nothing else (and, Molière on his pedestal apart, it is often noticeable for a great deal else), for the nice adjustment of the play’s content to the actor’s opportunity. Otherwise, it may be no more in the best plays than in the worst – if by ‘best’ is implied a rounded completeness – that the actor will be able to explore the sheer possibilities of his art as the theatre of the new illusion defines it. He could more often, strangely enough, find the occasion in plays in which the dramatist has himself been impatient of the form chosen and has surcharged it with thought or with feeling. It is, in fact, to the dramatist’s experiments in the enlargement of his own art that the actor should look for the development of his. One practical difficulty immediately arises. The theatre, as we know it, provides small opportunity for experiment of any sort. There is always the audience to be thought of, naturally not interested in the art’s future, but expecting the entertainment offered to be both rounded and complete, however smooth, however bare with repetition the ways of it may be worn. In the event the public does have to put up with a good deal of experimenting. Playwrights and actors both are encouraged to give their apprentice hands practice at its expense to an extent that must make musicians, for instance, disciplined to a hard technical training, simply green with envy. They profit – though Heaven knows the theatre does not – by the public’s ignorance of an art which it sets out nevertheless to enjoy. A pity that there should be no more encouragement of true experimenting, by the art’s masters, not its apprentices. For, of all the arts, drama can live least in the light of theory. The dramatist may project his play in imagination pretty completely; the individual actor can at best say what he means his performance to be; few will be rash enough to forecast an exact result for any free and fruitful collaboration of a whole company of actors with the dramatist and among themselves. We are back to our first admission that this final process of the putting of the play on the stage is a very incalculable thing. And incalculable it must to some extent remain if its chief aim is to be the endowing of the play with anything we are to call life; for the term will escape aesthetic

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definition. We must join company with the musical critic who, in similar case, disposed of all argument by saying, ‘I know a good tune when I hear it.’ But no one who – with critical faculties equipped against mere fraud – has seen a play brought fully and freely to life on the stage, will ever again mistake the sham thing for the real; or ever again, one would suppose, be content with the sham; or, it is to be hoped, ever again, knowing the difference between the two, begrudge the actor his full share in the credit of the life-giving process. What, then, is the actor’s case; what should he claim from the modern drama; what has he to offer? The dramatist’s chief gain from the theatre of the new illusion and the conventions which belong to it, has been – at the price of some limitation of his power to project things in the doing – a great extension of resource in picturing things as they are. There was more need, as well as more scope, for physical action upon the older stage, even as there was for the spell-binding sway of verse. But by the new illusion the attention of an audience can be focused upon the smallest details without either words or action being used to mark them, light, darkness, and silence can be made eloquent in themselves, a whole gamut of effectiveness has been added. It has brought new obligations – of accuracy, of sincerity, of verisimilitude in general, as we have noted. Then gain and loss both must be reflected in the actor’s opportunity. His chances of doing are curtailed; in their stead new obligations of being are laid upon him. Can he not turn them to his profit? One is tempted to imagine a play - to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle – from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors of it would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do; to set up, that is to say, the relation by which all important human intimacies exist. If the art of the theatre could achieve this it would stand alone in a great achievement. Plays of an approximate intention do indeed exist; but in England at least, they have never come to their own – even to such limited popularity as might be expected for them. There are reasons for this; the best being that the plays are mostly not English products. And while an English actor may reproduce the doings of a Frenchman or a Russian with sufficient fidelity, we cannot expect him to make real to us such an abstraction as his ‘being.’ So we have usually had the plays with the best part of them left out.

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This opens up a line of inquiry worth pursuing for our present purpose. The dramatist must allow for the means of expression that come naturally to the people he is picturing. And expression is a racial thing. But when the influence of a technic of play construction spreads abroad, it is apt to affect plots, character-drawing and dialogue as well, everything but the actual language in which the derivative play may be written. For an instance, take the influence of French drama on English during the last century. We may rightly welcome for their good effect upon our native product French plays acted by Frenchmen, or even their translation; but a century’s crowding of our theatre with adaptations has left the English drama full of plots, situations, and figures that may – or may not – have some relation to life in France, but in England must rank as mechanism merely. The average farcical comedy with its rooms with four doors (French rooms, as well as French stages, do as often as not have four doors), peopled by distorted shadows from the world of the French provinces and the half-world of Paris, the grande dame, the père noble, the raisonneur! Now even when an Englishman passes fifty and it grows hard to stop him talking, he seldom becomes a raisonneur. The word and the habit are equally French. One result of all this, and not the least harmful, is that Englishmen have come to be thought of as a race of bad actors. Naturally they must seem so, when they are encouraged to deny their race in the practice of this most racial of all the arts. It is a nuisance for the English dramatist, no doubt, that his countrymen do not in the ordinary business – even in the extraordinary moments – of life express themselves with fluency. Well, it presents him with a difficulty he must learn to surmount. He can, of course, call convention to his help. But he must honestly develop the convention and not try to borrow one ready made. There lies one to his hand; and the well-developed use of it might provide at least a partial solution of our problem, might do much to help the actor to his heritage again. Englishmen are not glib, but the essential strength of poetic speech is a tradition with them. By which one does not mean, of course, that they lisp in numbers, or imply that on formal occasions they cannot be academically dull. But in the natural speech of the people there is often that power of expression and concentration of meaning which is the essence of poetry, even though the form be prose. And great English writers, from Shakespeare to Hardy, have

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known how to sublimate it and make it memorable. The speech of the Wessex peasant is not Mr Hardy’s invention, nor did Dickens conjure Sam Weller and Mr. Peggotty out of the void. And for as forceful a passage as any in Cymbeline, turn to the gaoler’s philosophy of hanging and his ‘O the charity of a penny cord!’ Indeed, whether it be in form of verse or prose, Shakespeare (once he shook free of the fashionable affectations of his time and but for falling later into some affectations of his own) did but take the common speech of the people of one class and another as material for his magic. And this seems certain. All dramatic dialogue needs to have something of this particular quality of poetry in it. It must be dynamic speech. Poetry and drama are organically akin even when they seem sundered both by subject and method. They are notably alike in this, for instance, that they call for economy of effect. Consider how short is even the longest play in comparison with a novel. The mere words of many an excellent part could be written with a fine pen on a postcard. The literary man’s failure at playwriting is due, nine times out of ten, to his dialogue being so obviously but a convenient means by which he tells his story and of no further value to the play; it is therefore of no value to the actor at all. If dialogue does not serve three purposes at least, to advance the story, to exhibit the one character and provoke the exhibition of another, it fails of its primary purpose, and the play will go floundering. Further, and most importantly, it must be charged with emotion. This lacking, the actor – unless he take matters so into his own hands that the play disappears in the process – is helpless. And one may hazard an assertion that the modern dramatist’s failure to provide due opportunity for his actors is oftenest this: he has discovered no sufficient substitute for the poetry and rhetoric in which lay the acting strength of the old plays. He may write excellent sense, and the audience, hearing it, will yet remain profoundly uninterested. Is the actor to blame? No; dramatic dialogue needs other qualities before it can be made to carry conviction. There is no solution, needless to say, in the dressing up of the play in poetic phrasing or the provision of a purple patch here and there. One must choose a medium and stick to it; only so can illusion be sustained. But the old dramatists did put into the hands – or, rather, into the mouths – of their actors a weapon of great, of magical power, by which, with little else to aid

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them, they could subdue their hearers to every illusion of a mimic world. Useless today to imitate its form, to fancy the strength lay in that. The essentials of it must be sought and somehow found. When found they are recognisable enough. Take any play and read two pages aloud. There can be no mistake. Tested by the living voice, either the language has life in it or it has not. A difficult medium, no doubt, to master, the prose of common speech which shall yet have the power of poetry. But it is what the actor asks if he is to command belief in his world of make-believe. To put it in a phrase then; if the actor is to come to his own in the new drama, something the dynamic equivalent of poetry must be given to him as material for his share of the work. Nor is this too hard a saying. The dramatist’s task – and the actor’s coming after him – is the building up and exhibition of human character, the picturing of men’s natures in the intimacies of their working. To this extent it is essentially a poet’s task and the means to it are essentially those a poet seeks. A play’s content may be what you will, matter for nothing but laughter; its dialogue may take any form whatever, from poetical imagery to the cracking of jokes. But it will be a good play or a poor one, a living thing or dead, in so far as we are brought to accept its inhabitants as fellow-creatures or left indifferent to them. This is true of high tragedy, and even the clown in the pantomime appeals to some innocent knavery in our hearts that would find it great fun to steal sausages, and to wield a red-hot poker that was not too hot. And magic is needed; the power of the spoken word is a magic power. But the art of the theatre is not a reasonable art. A play’s dialogue is an incantation, and the actors must bewitch us with it. They must seem, now to be the commonest sort of folk, now superhuman, and the form of their talk must fit them. But, for all appearance, it must ever be of a trebly-distilled strength. It must have this power of poetry in it. It must be alive with more than the mere meaning of words. In content and in form the modern dramatist has much advanced his art. But still, too often, the worthiest plays will leave us cold, respectful, when we should be deeply moved, or paying them instead of laughter a tolerant smile. What is wrong? This, for one thing, I suggest. The dramatist of the new dispensation has yet, as a rule, to learn both what to ask of his actors and how best to help them to answer the demand. [1923: From Quarterly Review, vol. 240, no. 476, July]

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Note Intended as a Preface to Barker’s play The Secret Life, which he finished in 1922, the text grew too long and was published separately in 1923, the same year as the play. The essay, reproduced in full, contrasts contemporary dramaturgical methods with those of earlier times and deals with the interlocking contributions of the actor and the playwright, the role of the audience, the distinctive features of the drama as opposed to other arts, its roots in a native culture and the nature of illusion and verisimilitude in the theatre. Barker uses the essay to comment on contemporary trends and, without mentioning names, touches on the writing of Chekhov (approvingly) and the visual approach of Edward Gordon Craig (more critically). In arguing for the modern sensibility, Barker also comments implicitly on his own plays: One is tempted to imagine a play – to be written in desperate defiance of Aristotle – from which doing would be eliminated altogether, in which nothing but being would be left. The task set the actors would be to interest their audience in what the characters were, quite apart from anything they might do; to set up, that is to say, the relation by which all important human intimacies exist. Among other things, this aesthetic vision marked out differences he had with his earlier collaborator, Shaw. Barker remained busy in 1923: as well as having The Secret Life and this essay published, the first three volumes of Players’ Shakespeare, with their nowcelebrated Prefaces, and the second volume of Martinez Sierra’s plays translated by him and Helen were also published, and he began his last published play, His Majesty.

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Not [just] words … must be made translatable if a play in its completeness is to be carried from one language to another.

6 ON TRANSLATING PLAYS The written text is not a play’s final and complete manifestation. This it will owe to its actors and their interpreting. They render it into sound and movement. If we nowadays forget to think of its text as something in the nature of an orchestral score, it is only because the notation is so familiar. For the written word – though how recently! – has come to be the commonest currency of mental exchange. Do we think of it any longer in terms of the speech it represents? But drama is an ancient art, and the traditional method of its reduction to a written record is, truly, for the adept only. Modern dramatists may try, for the benefit of the more casual reader, to enlarge this tradition, but they can hardly absolve him from the need for some technical knowledge of the art. In fact the further they go with their stage directions that seem to ignore the stage, the easier the play’s understanding is to be made for those who have no understanding of plays, the greater the danger of bastardizing the whole affair. The reader of a play should read it as a musician will the score of a symphony. He has, indeed, to imagine both sight and sound – the action of the scene as well as the spoken word. Even so, he can hardly predicate that collaboration so peculiar to the theatre – the quickening of the dramatist’s work not only by the actors’ interpretation, but by their very personalities. A play’s performance which was a mere intelligent repetition of the author’s words accompanied by the necessary action, its object merely to let the audience understand what was going forward, no more, would be a very lifeless business. But what do we find in the theatre at its liveliest? (‘Best’ will suggest high ambitions, with achievement ever lagging behind.) We find actors and audience in a concord which certainly no mere verbal, no mere intellectual give and

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take of the author’s meaning will set up. The play is being interpreted, and its meaning enriched in a dozen other ways. There is the emotional value in the very sound of words, the allusive value of familiar phrases, there is a whole vocabulary of demeanour and gesture, more or less developed in different nations and differing for each. Not words, then, alone, in the significance the dictionary allows them, but all this in addition must be made translatable if a play in its completeness is to be carried from one language to another. Then there are dramatic conventions to be counted with, and again each country will have its own. In modern drama – the so-called realistic drama – these do not differ much as between one European country and another, though within two generations they have appreciably changed in them all. But in most countries, at some time of efflorescence for the theatre, a convention for poetic drama was formed, fixed, and this has been handed down. The modern audience accepts it all but unconsciously. In England blank verse is the medium, and by long use and wont, it is a medium of sufficient clarity. We do not, that is to say, find Hamlet’s emotions the less credible for their conveyance in tensyllable lines. Now I cannot pretend to hear with a Frenchman’s ears, but I must suppose that Racine’s rhymed alexandrines are equally no bar to his spontaneous appreciation of Andromaque’s emotions or Phèdre’s. They are to mine. Nor do I think that the longest and closest devotion to Racine would render me as uncalculatingly responsive to his verse as I am – by birthright it would seem – to Shakespeare’s. We need look for no such devotion in the average playgoer. How, then, are we to give the full value of Shakespeare to a Frenchman, to an Englishman the full value of Racine? The French have been accustomed to render our blank verse into alexandrines. Other ways have been tried. I heard, while this lecture was preparing, of a Hamlet put from blank verse into blank verse; though unstressed blank verse must, one would suppose, prove a dull affair in delivery. Here, of course, lies the prosodical difficulty, in the change from a stressed to an unstressed language. The alexandrine may be the simplest solution of this, but the traditions of its dramatic use, its theatrical associations if you like, seem only to raise others. Turn to the Alexandre Dumas-Paul Meurice version of Hamlet.1 It is now out of First produced in 1846.

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date, but it held the field for many years. Dumas’ name is writ very large on the title-page, Paul Meurice’s very small, though this possibly belies their respective responsibility. Shakespeare’s name might well be writ there smaller still, for it is a very free version indeed. But whenever they think they will they try for translation gallantly enough. Hamlet: Save me and hover o’er me with your wings You heavenly guards! – What would your gracious figure? Queen: Alas! he’s mad. Hamlet: Do you not come your tardy son to chide That, laps’d in time and passion, lets go by The important acting of your dread command? Oh, say. This becomes – Hamlet: Sauvez-moi! cachez moi! célestes légions C’est lui. Queen: Qui, lui? Hamlet: Voyons – que voulez vous, cher ombre? Queen: Mon fils est fou! Malheur! Hamlet: Oui, mes lenteurs sans nombre Vous irritant – le temps passe, l’émotion S’éteint! je remets trop la sinistre action Que vous m’avez prescrite. Est-ce cela, mon père? What is wrong? It conveys the meaning, missing a point or two. But it conveys it too precisely; even as, to pick again almost at random – Rentrons. Toujours le doigt sur les lèvres, amis. Quelque événement sombre à nos temps est promis. Mais pourquoi le Seigneur, pour servir sa colère Prend il done un mortel quand il a la tonnerre? turns the Hamlet of – And still your fingers on your lips I pray. The time is out of joint – O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right!

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from a perplexed and passionate creature whose words are apt to be a bare, though beautiful, expression of all the turmoil within him, into a figure of self-conscious rectitude protesting with orotund dignity against the irregularities of fate – and of the plot. Throughout the translators seem to feel that above all things Shakespeare’s meaning, when they have fathomed it, must be made crystalline, that a logically-minded French audience will have no patience with a Hamlet who cannot go mad in a succinct and rational way. No need ever to suspect their Hamlet’s sanity. He is rather an explanatory essay upon Hamlet than Hamlet himself. And other translations of Shakespeare’s other plays are confounded by the same error. Whatever is not clear, it has been said, is not French. But the emotional strength of expression by which this Englishman gives intense and individual life to his characters will often involve him – legitimately, it could be argued – in obscurity, in allusive vagueness, in the thing half said, or said but as a symbol of the greater force of things left unsaid, and of things unsayable. Try to bring a method such as this to terms of exactitude and clarity, and whatever else may result, the emotion will be dissipated, the strength lost and character will be fatally flattened out. Dumas and his collaborator, however – and they had ample precedent – went very much further in adjusting Hamlet to what they felt to be French requirements. Those were the days of the romantic revival, and an off-hand treatment of Ophelia really would not do. So we find a scene added in which, plump upon the news that his father’s spirit is in arms, Hamlet is able to greet her with – ‘Quelle nouvelle aux cieux, dites moi, mon bel ange?’ Throughout the play, at every crisis his first thought is for his Ophelia. And the ending, as Shakespeare had left it, was evidently accounted hopelessly crude and confused. For after the general catastrophe the ghost reappears, and, upon appeal, condemns the Queen, Laertes and Claudius to various degrees of purgatory and damnation. Then Hamlet in turn asks what is to be his punishment for having been the death of four people when he was only commanded to kill one (oddly enough, for the first time he forgets Ophelia, who certainly makes five). This, of course, would be an entirely reasonable commentary on his proceedings, and

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it is of a piece with the translators’ whole attitude towards the play. The Ghost then informs him that his punishment is – to live! It may all seem very absurd, and nowadays, no doubt, French criticism would condemn it. But we can imagine Dumas, Meurice and the theatre manager in consultation. Hamlet was to be produced. So-and-so would play it excellently. The Ducis2 version? Quite outmoded. One wanted, besides, something nearer to Shakespeare than that. Simple translation? Then, if they ever considered such a possibility, would come the unanswerable arguments that it was quite impracticable. Could you ask a French actor to say this and do this, or expect him to feel at home on the stage and make his effect there if you robbed him of his alexandrines and tripped him at every moment in his accustomed deportment? Could you expect a French audience to listen to such things? Certainly it is an English play; they will look for something strange, a little barbaric. But Hamlet must command their sympathy. So must Ophelia. So, to the degree of mere understanding, must Laertes, Gertrude and the rest. It is true enough that if you cannot create in the theatre this atmosphere of sympathetic understanding, nothing can be done there. How can you create it in favour of characters, whose eccentricities of speech and behaviour must pass all comprehension? Carry this argument far enough and, as we have seen, it may oust Hamlet in favour of an amorphous creature that – but for the familiarity of a few quotations – we should hardly recognize. But carry it some little way we must if what we want is to provide for a French audience played to by French actors as nearly as may be an equivalent effect to that produced by English actors upon an English audience. I said just now that the French critic of today would probably condemn such cavalier treatment of the very plot and characters as Dumas and his collaborator indulge in. But at this very moment the repertory of a famous French theatre contains a Merchant of Venice which has suffered strange violence. Its Prince of Morocco might be modelled upon that admirable black-face comedian Mr Frank Tinney; unluckily he is not so funny. Portia would be in place in a Pears’ Soap beauty show; the reading of the character seems to stray between Helen of Troy and Nell Gwynne. While Shylock! – Shylock moves The version by Jean-François Ducis was published in 1769 and remained influential in the first decades of the nineteenth century. 2

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and speaks to the accompaniment of a sympathetic chorus of Jews and an imprecatory chorus of Christians. The end of the trial scene is an elaborate exhibition of his woe and his signing of the deed of gift (‘Signez, signez, signez,’ sing out the Christians). And he makes a final appearance at Belmont to strike Jessica in the face with it and to call her – I was really so thunderstruck at the apparition that I did not quite catch what he called her. Probably, however, I could not have repeated it to this academic audience. The curtain descended. The curtain, incidentally, had shown us a large reproduction of the frontispiece to the First Folio, and it had seemed to my disordered vision that at each descent the familiar wooden countenance expressed deeper and deeper alarm. And one could hear all around such praise of le grand Shakespeare – though uttered mostly in that tone of dutiful puzzled enthusiasm properly belonging to those who have submitted themselves to be bored for conscience’ sake – that I might really have been moved to protest, but for the chastening reflection that in England itself, and with no shadow of excuse, I had seen comparable outrages. But in no country and no language, of course – has Shakespeare to be translated into Choctaw? – is there excuse for such foolery as this; nor would any good director permit it, nor should any conscientious critic tolerate it. Let us come back to genuine difficulties. My own view is that experiment is needed. Actors and audiences both need jerking from the rut of the acceptance of blank verse as the only poetic medium, the one possible dramatic alternative to plain prose. And if the regular stage is too occupied earning its living, here surely is an opportunity for schools, for producing societies – and especially, perhaps, for those multiplying congregations of young men and women drawn together at the universities by their lively interest in living dramatic art. They should be particularly responsive to anything of the sort, for they are upon the spring tide of interest in literature and its forms. Happening upon their acting of plays I have often been struck by the beauty and flexibility of the speech. Further, the poetic drama in all its variety – folk plays, mystery, masque, plays written for university and school, Latin comedies, Greek tragedy – is of old tradition in England, though the current has been thin and intermittent, and its channel more often than not apart from the professional theatre. In poetic drama, if its aspect could but be widened and its bonds loosened, our native genius; creative and interpretative both, might still find its most genuine

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expression. ‘Realism’ and ‘the well-made play’ were imports. And if a young dramatist wants to experiment with metre and the like, translation, paradoxically enough, gives him good opportunity. He comes to a play with its content and structure already fixed. He is on a firm foundation. If one new way doesn’t do, it is no such great matter to try another, and the worst error need not mean utter disaster. Then there are the plays whose content, whose sheer meaning, is the obviously important thing, the modern, so-called ‘realistic plays’ of conversational dialogue, their conventions roughly the same whatever their country of origin. Nothing to be done, it would seem, but to render them phrase by phrase. No, nothing; but even so problems arise. There are phrases and words which resist all translation. The ever-recurring ‘Monsieur’ you must leave, or leave out. You’ll be wise to leave it out wherever you can. Few English actors can achieve its pronunciation, and unkind critics have broken their first-night nerve for the attempt. Then, a play’s whole intention may hang upon a phrase. Is it too much to say of a whole class of French plays that they have never yet been duly translated into English because neither the translators – nor the censorship – could discover and agree upon an exact intellectual and emotional and social equivalent for ‘Je suis cocu’? When the translated husband exclaims that he has been ‘betrayed’ by his friend, the whole affair shifts to another plane, its values are changed, and its moral – or if you like, its immoral – fabric falls to the ground. In the jerry-building that ensues, suggestiveness and its indecency are taken often enough for a substitute, and it is a poor exchange. This difficulty, it may be remarked, has only arisen since the eighteenth century; ‘cuckold’ flourished till then. There are signs of an escape from it. To many a passage one cannot, for quite extraneous reasons, hope to give the value of its original. Take this, from Jules Romains’s Doctor Knock. The translation (I apologize) is my own. The doctor is speaking: You cannot, of course, expect a family to set anyone aside for regular and constant treatment unless their income is at least 12,000 francs. That would not be reasonable. No, these things must be properly regulated. I sift people into four categories. To begin with, for families of 12 to 20 thousand francs income I provide a simple treatment – the very simplest – involving, say, one visit a week and fifty francs worth of medicine in the course of a month. And so on till we reach

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the first category and full treatment, for incomes of 50,000 francs and over – which will include four visits a week at least and about 300 francs a month spent on such things as X rays, radium, massage, analyzes and the usual drugs. Half the humour of that must pass us by if the francs in their thousands do not immediately picture for us the very sort of people who are mulcted of them by the enthusiastic doctor. No audience will be full of quick calculators into pounds sterling, especially in these days of an eccentric exchange. Some plays may even gain by a certain strangeness of habit. Time has begun to impose this to the full for us upon Ibsen’s social dramas. The people he wrote of were never familiar to us in externals, but attempts to make them ‘Norwegian’ were futile. The important thing about Hedda Gabler was that, as Grant Allen said, one took her down to dinner twice a week. When, therefore, we found her in her drawingroom of an afternoon suggesting to her guests – ‘Won’t you gentlemen go in and take a glass of cold punch?’ – whether memories of Mr. Pickwick and Captain Boldwig3 started at the phrase, I can’t say, but it was irresistibly funny. Nor did the trouble end there. Two minutes later we have Tesman with his – ‘Hedda, dear, cannot I give you a little glass of cold punch?’ And five minutes later yet says Hedda to Mrs. Elvsted – and, oh, how skilfully she had to say it to keep her English audience from giggling – ‘But now, my dearest Thea, now you must drink up a good glass of punch.’ And there was no escape. Punch, and cold punch it had to be if Ibsen said so. William Archer was right – from the most practical point of view – in his stern refusal to have any tampering with the text. For Ibsen In The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Boldwig pokes a dozing Pickwick to ascertain his name and gets the sleepy reply, ‘Cold punch’. 3

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puts not a thing in his plays – one may say almost literally, not a detail, however small – that he does not mean to make particular use of. Once play him false, and muddle upon muddle’s head may accumulate. Here are plays indeed, whose integrity of content must be kept, whatever else the translator may lose of them. But now that we see them as prewar, pre-motor-car, pre-telephone, pre-electric light, they are removed from us in time, place and circumstance almost equally, and they take on a new congruity, in which their purely dramatic qualities will have full scope. No more need to try and make them accountably ‘Norwegian’; the English world of 1890 is now as near and as far. But can change of time make the strangeness of Chekhov’s plays less strange to us? Here I believe we do reach the untranslatable. Strip the environment from Ibsen and the play’s hard core will remain. Start stripping it from Chekhov and one becomes a Peer Gynt with his onion. And, to make comparison with this other and earlier Ibsen, how much do we not lose of the first act of Peer Gynt itself if its atmosphere of folklore is unfamiliar to us! With Chekhov, if ever, the use of a much-abused word is justified; he is a master of atmosphere. One may say of his plays they are all atmosphere, and it will be something more than a phrase. For what verbal translation will effect, one might almost as well leave them in their original Russian. What are English actors and an English audience to make of The Cherry Orchard? For four acts the stage will be filled with fantastic figures saying commonplace things. So far from fulfilling, this directly contradicts and betrays Chekhov’s intention, which is to show to his audience familiar figures, who mirror in the haphazard conversation his allusive art makes poignant, the fantastic tragedies of their souls. It may well be the case of Chekhov that has brought Stanislavsky, his matchless interpreter, to shaking his head and saying: ‘Plays cannot be translated, and there is an end of it.’ And setting, as he sets up, a standard of simple perfection, one must agree with him. But translations there will be, and dramatic art, since it uses humanity for its medium, is imperfection personified. Wherefore we shall go on doing the best we can; and, on the whole, as it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate, if we will but admit that, perfection being unattainable, we must seek for each separate play the likeliest compromise, it is the best thing we can do. And rare exceptions will but prove the rule that dramatic translation is a matter of makeshift, serving only to remind us

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of that ideal intimacy of understanding at which the art of the theatre aims, between playwright, actors and audience, all three contributing by words, action and sympathy to what is, in its final effect, an indissoluble whole, not to be reduced to any other terms. [1925: From Essays by Divers Hands, vol. 5]

Note In the 1920s, Barker was active in the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), and became president in 1929. He edited a volume of essays for the RSL, contributed to another (see pp. 167–73, ‘The Coming of Ibsen’), and contributed to two volumes in the RSL series Essays by Divers Hands. This essay is one of those; it was first delivered in 1924 as a lecture for the RSL, and takes as its starting point the practical considerations of producing plays in translation, particularly the native roots and traditions from which they spring. ‘To begin with,’ writes Barker, ‘the written text is not a play’s final and complete manifestation. This it will owe to its actors and their interpreting. … If we nowadays forget to think of its text as something in the nature of an orchestral score, it is only because the notation is so familiar.’ Plays from other language and cultures – notably those by Ibsen – had been pivotal to the reform movement in British theatre that Barker helped spearhead. From 1900, he had directed and appeared in many such plays, by Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Heijermans, Euripides and Ibsen himself. Barker had often discussed the problems of translating with William Archer, the main conduit in Britain for Ibsen, and with Gilbert Murray, the champion of Euripides, whose versions he had directed. Barker had faced the problems of translating himself, both on his own and with collaborators, such as his friend and doctor Charles Wheeler, with whom he worked on Schnitzler, and Helen, his wife, with whom he translated three volumes of plays from Spanish by Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra and Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez Quintero. Barker translated from French Sacha Guitry’s Deburau and two plays by Jules Romains, Doctor Knock and Six Gentlemen in a Row. Barker returned to this theme in 1936 in ‘On Translating Greek Tragedy’, his contribution to Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray.

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7 HINTS FOR AMATEURS ON REHEARSING A PLAY Stanislavsky, that distinguished man of the theatre, was once asked how long he was accustomed to rehearse a play. ‘Till it is ready’ he answered, and the answer is final. Now Stanislavsky reached middleage as an amateur actor; and the Moscow Art Theatre that he then helped to found, the finest thing of its sort in the world, began as an association of amateurs. They are professionals now, they live for the theatre, and can be found, for that matter, still rehearsing the plays they produced twenty years ago and have played on and off ever since. All amateurs are not Stanislavskys, and Moscow Art Theatres are not to be brought to being every day; but any body of amateurs can free themselves from this tyranny – from the worst of it, certainly – under which professionals suffer. Except upon the eve of performance they cannot get and do not need the elaborate paraphernalia of professional rehearsals; prompting and furniture shifting can be a labour of love, and they can be generous of their time; they can do their utmost to give the play its due for its own sake without calculating whether this much more care for it will ‘pay’. And if they will not they should not be meddling with it at all. We say ‘amateur’ contemptuously when we mean a man out merely to make a quite gratuitous show of himself. When the word means, as it should, the giving an art whole-hearted service with no bargaining for reward, it is a very honourable term; and for any coming short in skill and polish there is added to the work instead that vitality – and the critic has little sense of the essentials of art if he does not appreciate it – which only whole-hearted, single-minded service seems

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to give. By virtue of this alone amateurs may keep an art alive when professionals are killing it. What sort of a play are amateurs of the theatre to choose? Here again, they have the advantage of professionals. They may rehearse a play, if they will, and never need to bring it to performance. For rehearsals are the real fun; performance is painful excitement, and to the audience not always exciting. Amateurs may shrink from performing King Lear, Agamemnon, Peer Gynt, Le Malade Imaginaire, The Way of the World; so might their friends in front from seeing them at it. But to fling themselves at a masterpiece for a month’s disinterested rehearsal may be most exhilarating; and it will be excellent training, besides. The average amateur will play modern comedy the better for having stretched himself at King Lear, for having loosened his muscles and developed his lungs a little. It may even teach him modesty, if he needs a lesson in that. The true amateur does not, however; for (yet again) he can afford to be modest, while the professional, with his living to earn, with managers to impress, must pretend, at any rate, to some conceit of himself. Such rehearsing of King Lear or Peer Gynt will differ from the preparing of a performance. With that in view one has to think, sooner or later, of a finished effect; and if the company cannot rise to the heights of the play, this must somehow be reduced to the measure of the company. Performance – with the need to convince an audience that we are in our proper persons the people we pretend to be – does finally reduce it to this; though a company of schoolboys may, on occasion, storm their way through a great play without any such deception in view, so little self-consciously, so little conscious, therefore, of their audience, demonstrating rather than acting it, that they no more compromise its high quality than a band of climbers belittles a mountain. This sort of rehearsing is good fun, then; and very good exercise, emotional, intellectual and physical; and it might well content the true amateur, the true lover of art for its own sake. The bigger the play chosen, on the whole, the better; and if the temptation to perform it finally proves too great, do it simply, that is all. Three boards and a passion, it has been said, are drama’s absolute need. See that whatever excess there may be in the staging, in scenery, costume and the like, does not outshine and shame whatever modicum of passion there is at command. But performance is the natural goal. To travel may be better than to arrive; but poor human nature craves for an attainable end to even the

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happiest labour. Besides – a practical point – people will sometimes, however misguidedly, pay to see a performance; and without one the fun may be too costly. A play chosen for performance must mercifully take into some account the capacities of the performers. Not that it need be a poor play because their talents are modest; on the contrary. Amateurs have little call to concern themselves with poor plays (they can urge no bread-and-butter plea for pandering to the lowest taste of the largest crowd); and none at all with plays that are deliberately, disingenuously, venally poor – if for no other reason than that these are usually the hardest to make effective in performance; for the dramatist is either relying on resourceful character creation in the actors to help out the poverty of his plot and dialogue, or purposely providing them with a mere scheme upon which they may elaborate their skilled professional tricks. On either count the amateur is apt to be left helpless and inept. No, above all things, choose a play with stuff in it. It may be simple stuff, crudely emotional stuff, highly intellectual stuff, or such sublime stuff as the few great plays of the world are compact of. But let it be alive; that is what matters. What is the test? One has to reply with the music critic, ‘I know a good tune when I hear it’. This sense to distinguish between what is live and dead in art, however embryonic the life, however well vestmented the corpse, is the one critical faculty worth acquiring. To the amateur interpreter of art, actor, singer, or whatever else, this difference makes all the difference. He has, in the main, his goodwill to contribute; stuff of life in the author will fructify this, and something lively will result from the combination. And if an amateur performance is alive, that is the great thing; we can do without the spit-and-polish virtues. But mere sophistication requires more sophistication for a complement. Then the result may be a brilliant professional parade; but amateurs can no more hope to achieve it than could Frontier tribesmen to troop the colour on the King’s birthday. Fighting in their own country, the tribesmen do pretty well, though. To decide upon a play, open a copy of it when you are in a wholesomely receptive mood. If the characters leap from the pages, all’s well; if you miss the meaning of a speech and find yourself promptly re-reading it, all may still be well; if after a little the speeches rattle in your mind like peas in a frying-pan, put it away. Either the play is no good, or you are not up to the mark (whether to your own mark or the play’s is yet another question; try again, if it is yourself you doubt). First and last, there is not a much better test.

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I think myself that amateurs may best concern themselves with the plays which, for one reason or another, professionals let alone. But this is a counsel of perfection, and springs more from a wish to see their work of some use to the drama as a whole than from thinking how they may most enjoy themselves. Nevertheless, if they want interested audiences and a little extra critical attention, the rule is not a bad one. For an instance, there is Fruits of Enlightenment (Tolstoy wrote it, by the way, for amateurs); simple scenery, a lengthy cast, no over-prominent parts, no virtuosity asked for. We have not a professional theatre in England which can afford to think twice of it, and it is not a supremely good play. But it has the stuff of life in it – nothing that came from his pen could fail to have – and it is full of fun. It comes to my mind because I have lately been studying Tolstoy’s plays; but there are dozens of others as fitting to be found. The play now chosen; what of its casting? One assumes the common honesty that wishes to give the parts to the people who will play them best. That relied upon, a certain regard must be paid to age and appearance as well as ability; but the key to the casting of a part lies in recognising its dominant characteristic, the thing that makes it stand out from the others, that gives it a necessary place in the play, and finding an actor who can emotionally and intellectually understand and illustrate that. Fasten upon the essentials in part and actor, and fit them; the incidentals will tend to look after themselves. Rehearsals begin. They should not be immature performances; that is the first thing to have in mind. They are occasions for the mutual study of the play. Far from encouraging a company to act, a director will need, as a rule, to prevent them trying to, before they know what the play and the parts are about. Beware of the actor who comes to a first rehearsal word perfect, his mind made up about every detail of his part. He embarrasses his fellows, who feel ashamed to be stumbling about so stupidly, and that alone is an offence against the community of interest implicit in all acting. What is worse, he is probably as good now as he is ever going to be. While the stumblers improve he will stay still. Later he will be a drag on them; and when rehearsals end in performance and their characters at last come to life and movement, here will still be this piece of competence, stale now with repetition, mechanical and dead; and the performance as a whole, if the part is a prominent one, will be like a man trying to step-dance with a wooden leg.

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Co-operation is the first and last law of the theatre. The dramatist needs the co-operation of the actor; nor will mere intelligent repetition of lines, nor even intelligent interpreting of ideas suffice. An actor must realise the part in his own person. To do this he must surrender himself to it, even as the dramatist surrenders it to him. But, says the adage, ‘What I gave I have’; and if the dramatist’s vision is never precisely fulfilled in the actor (but is the play as he finds he has finally written it all he first meant it to be?), thanks to the actor it has now form and substance, has been made flesh and blood; and the actor has not lost himself, what he is has been enriched. The better a part the more ways there are of playing it well; no one, it is said, ever fails as Hamlet. The actors of a play must co-operate, they must give and take; and if some seem to give more than they get, yet the account will work out fairly on the whole. Moreover, there is the mysterious over-plus, that excess of the sum of all the separate virtues, which corporate bodies, at work with a common aim, can gain. It gives regiments their fame; and schools; and a company of actors can earn it. Time and devotion are needed to make it a constant strength, but some touch of it will reward a single month’s self-forgetfulness for the sake of any play. The actors may not be fully conscious of it at the moment. Anxiety in performance may be too keen, the relief that follows and harmless pleasure in a little success may obscure the memory of it; but this virtue added unto them, this strength beyond their own, is what makes the actual acting of a play a thrilling thing. A director’s business is to plan and stimulate this co-operation. He must also see, no doubt, that the scenery is of the right shape and colour, the furniture placed usefully, costumes as they should be; but this is simple enough and comparatively unimportant. The acting is what matters. Cooperation must advance through several phases, intellectual, emotional, physical. They may well be taken in that order, and for a time kept separate, but not too strictly. The first thing is for the company to agree upon what the play in general means, and how the scenes in particular contribute to its meaning. Turn the cast into a committee to discuss it, with the director as chairman. Many a play, truly, will not stand up to the ordeal. An evening’s discussion may show it to have no meaning worth speaking of; but with such plays we have nothing to do. Procedure can be simple enough. The director may share the discussion of every scene, for he is interested in them all;

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the actors must confine themselves to those that immediately concern them. Some actors will feel themselves at a disadvantage in discussion; their natural approach to their parts may be instinctive and emotional. A director must not out-argue them, nor let them be out-argued. But at this early stage they will take no hurt by having their impulses brought up on the curb of why and wherefore; for these are the actors who are apt to sprint ahead of their fellows, and be primed for performance too soon. Moreover, they are the likeliest, when performance is in full swing, to be oblivious of what their fellows are doing, and to be gravelled then at any check or change. They are – to go to painting for a metaphor – natural colourists; their work will be made the solider by a little attention to form. If a man’s ideas are inchoate with emotion it does him no harm to try to express them in terms of reason. Discussion of the play will run naturally into reading it, and so into realising, in detail, its form. The act-division is obvious, and the main scene-divisions answer to chapters of a book; but within these are paragraphs and punctuation, which acting must discover and mark. The writing of a play is necessarily so thrifty that changes of mood and intention in the speakers, alterations in the drift of a scene, will often be hidden in pauses, noted only by the implication of a change in the cadence of sentences, when a novelist could make all clear by comment. The actors must give these things their emphasis and significance; they must shape the play right; for this is how the attention of an audience is held, and how it is kept from fatigue. Run your eye for five minutes over an old Latin script of undivided words, listen for ten minutes to a piece of music, with all the accents blurred, and you will know what fatigue formlessness can inflict. Now too is the time to proportion emphasis as between act and act, scene and scene. This too must obviously be a matter of general understanding and agreement; for once an actor becomes absorbed in his part his own scenes become all important to him and he will build up a scheme of them with its own rise and fall, its own climax. At later rehearsals and at performances he will not be coolly observant of what his fellows are doing. Now is the time to settle the relation of each part to the whole. The director in the chair must closure a discussion when it is ceasing to be fruitful. Argument for argument’s sake is not wanted, it will sterilise the whole proceeding. We are arguing with the play, so to speak, not

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with each other, and the sooner we can honestly reach common ground the better. We are aiming at intellectual intimacy as a safe beginning for the next, the emotional phase. This, when it is reached, merely means that the actors can now identify themselves with their parts. But let them sit on round the table for a while. The transition from ‘That is the sort of man he is’ to ‘I am the man’ cannot be made suddenly; thought and feeling must be linked by imagination. There are the mechanics of the matter to be considered too. Rehearsals usually begin with the actors upon the stage, their eyes glued to their books, noting where they go and what they do as well as what they say, and tumbling over the furniture while they note it. Stultifying to the last degree, and a sad waste of time, energy and patience! Never let an actor walk upon the stage till his book is out of his hands. Never set him to learn the words of his part either, if it can be helped. The words themselves are the last things he should have by heart. They are the means by which he must study the character; but he should put off, if possible, their final definition in speech till the character can speak them rather than he. And he should keep, too, from suiting ‘the action to the word, the word to the action’ while he can; for action helps to set speech in a mould. It follows, then, that the director must keep his company sitting round that table as long as possible, while the play’s words, as well as its meaning and emotion, soak into their memories. Better if he could make them leave their books on the table when they go home, not to worry about the affair at all till next time. They need not worry. If, while they have been at work together, they have been absorbed enough in the play, that semi-independent self which is the guardian of our emotions will be at work in the interval, more fruitfully at work for not being bitted and spurred by the mind; and it is just this self that we want to keep active. The company will grow restless at inaction, no doubt. So much the better! Physical action in a play should come of necessity, because it cannot be resisted, and for no other reason at all; it should be the actor’s last resort. But now is the time to plan the main lines of the play’s physical action, even some of its more significant detail, and to let the actors, as they sit there, imagine it, and imagine themselves carrying it through. They will find it easier, at first, to see these creatures they are giving life to moving here and there in the mind’s eye than to compel their own limbs – inured to mere private habits – to the task. And this is the chance given the actor to make the imagined figure complete and

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consistent – in thought, feeling and action too – before he sets it going in his own person, as he soon must. How soon the committee must rise for the last time and the table be shifted away is for the director to judge; it will depend upon the sort of play and the quality of the company. There are plays so dependent upon physical action that a dose of it may be necessary to clarify their meaning and stimulate the actors’ ideas; one can then go back to the table for a little. But such a play as Little Eyolf, as Maeterlinck’s Interior, as Shaw’s Candida, could be brought to the eve of performance without moving the actors from their chairs. There will, of course, be actors expert with their minds or quick to emotion, yet strangely adrift on a stage. There will be in every company some apt in one way, some in another; and no two plays will be alike, no two scenes in a play will yield to the same treatment. The director must be ready with a resourceful variety of treatment for scenes and actors both. When the company does get definitely upon the stage nine-tenths of the work should be done. The director has now only to make himself for a while the ideal audience, a highly sensitive, critical audience. Let the play find itself in action, let it integrate; no interruption to fuss over details! If these must be fussed over, consider them apart. At the play’s end, or at every act’s end should come comment, and possibly a little praise. ‘If that is what you mean, this is what you are expressing. Try again.’ For a golden rule: as much ‘That will not do’ as need be; never, but as a last resort, ‘Do it this way’. By now the play and its actors are one, and the whole affair is taking on a life of its own. If costumes are unusual, the wearers must have time to get the habit of them. Some care must go to make the grouping of figures significant in long focus. As to movement about the stage, the sitting and standing – the cabalistic ‘Business’ of the old prompt books (just that single word ‘Business’ and no more, very often), which seemed to say to the poor amateur ‘Now you balance three billiard-balls on the top of a cue’ – there should be no difficulty at all. Once the purpose of the doing has been agreed upon, why should the doing itself ask so very much consideration? There is nothing esoteric in acting. Everyone off the stage should be able to move so that it is a pleasure to look at them, speak so that it is a pleasure to hear them, and express themselves significantly, eloquently when they are roused, without being self-conscious about it. Why not? This is civilisation. And on the stage they need not be self-conscious, there is even less cause;

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for here they are expressing, not themselves, but a creature new-born in them of sympathy, understanding and imagination. It is in the evocation of this creature that the art of acting lies, and its difficulties. As with every art, we may range in it from simplicities a child can compass to subtleties and heights that only great gifts can reach. But if sympathy, understanding and imagination are the qualities its practice cultivates, it is a worthy art, surely. [1929: From ‘Hints on Rehearsing a Play’, The Amateur Dramatic Year Book, 1928–9]

Note Following the First World War, Barker increasingly believed that many aspects of the new theatre would be found among the amateur or semi-professional and community theatres rather than in the professional theatre, free, as they were, from the shackles of commerce and profit making. He championed this movement, and in 1919 became the first chairman of the newly formed British Drama League (BDL), which was the main vehicle in Britain for it. He remained an active leader for a dozen years, helping groups in large towns flourish, lecturing for the League and establishing and organizing the committees that ran the League’s programme as well as serving on some of them. In the United States, he allied himself to the equivalent body, the Drama League of America, which had inspired the founding of the BDL. He contributed this essay to The Amateur Dramatic Year Book in order to address a specific audience. We have changed the original title, ‘Hints on Rehearsing a Play’, to reflect this and to distinguish it from his ‘Notes on Rehearsing a Play’ (see pp. 13–19). ‘Hints for Amateurs Rehearsing a Play’ deals with practical issues relating to rehearsing and mounting plays. Again, Barker focuses on the actor. (‘There is nothing esoteric in acting. Everyone off the stage should be able to move so that it is a pleasure to look at them, speak so that it is a pleasure to hear them, and express themselves significantly, eloquently when they are roused, without being self-conscious about it.’) The points he makes are relevant to the art of theatre, whether amateur or not.

All arts are mysteries, the way into their service is by initiation, not learning

8 THE NATURAL LAW OF THE THEATRE The rule of the ancients The prophets of Aristotle have much to answer for. English drama at least, you may retort, has been little enough troubled by them. Still too much! Ben Jonson wrestled bravely with the ‘Rule of the Ancients,’ the artist in him at odds with the academic. He was not to be intimidated. ‘Nothing is more ridiculous,’ he says, ‘than to make an author a dictator, as the schools have done Aristotle.’ It is sound doctrine. Nevertheless, at any moment, I feel, in an age which runs rather to criticism than to unselfconscious creation, a new Aristotle, specializing in drama, may arise. So I will do my small best to counter him betimes by enforcing my point that such didactic criticism, which makes for the formulating of what come to be thought the principles of play-writing, is a mischievous thing. It must have this ill effect, if no other. The would-be dramatist is encouraged to think that he has only to pin up a set of rules like a recipe over his desk and to follow them and all will be well. But this is how puddings are made, not plays; not good plays, certainly, nor the best puddings for that matter. There must, of course, as in every human activity, be a certain order of things involved, there will be certain conditions to be fulfilled; but these will be found – so I mean to suggest to you – not to be laws of play-writing, but only the natural laws of the medium in which plays exist, the laws of the theatre, that is to say. The distinction is an important one. An artist must so master his medium that its use will be second nature to him, and the nearer he can come to complete freedom of expression the better. That is not, I hope, in itself, too dogmatic a statement. He will need all his energy for the realizing

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of the idea possessing him; whatever are the laws he must obey, he no more wants to be currently bothered by them than does a man sprinting a hundred yards by theories of kinetics or an orator by the spelling of the words he uses. And though obedience to a law of play-writing may become a second nature to him, it cannot be so elastic a law as not to form something of a barrier against his free use of the medium. And though the law comprehend all the potentialities of the medium – which is only theoretically possible – the dramatist will still be doing what he does without proof of why he does it. He will be working in a prison, however noble a one.

The way of initiation How, on the other hand, does one ‘naturally’ set out to be a dramatist? By the way of imitation, and of trial and error. Pens and paper are needed, and a large waste-paper basket. If one is young, and unless one is a heaven-sent genius, the craft of the business will be more interesting at first than the art of it. One will have admired models, but will soon be picking these to pieces to see if they could be put together better. One will write and destroy and write and destroy. But above all one will want to be in intimate touch with the theatre, behind the curtain or before it; and this intimacy will need to be developed till the pleasures of illusion are replaced by a more critical pleasure in the processes of the scene, till one finds oneself sitting there anticipating what dramatist and actors should do – and with this one is, and knows it, in one’s element, as the expressive phrase goes. That, I think, is the ‘natural’ way to master the dramatist’s art and to learn the laws of its medium the theatre. What are they, these laws? How far do they persist beneath the physical changes through which the theatre has passed from Aeschylus’ times to Ibsen’s, and how far must they change with them? Like many laws they are easier to obey than explain. They are simple in the sense that walking and talking are simple; babies learn, but it may take a blackboard and the higher mathematics to tell us just how the thing is done. Nor is the comparison inapt, for in their inception they reflect the capacity of human beings for emotional expression on the one hand and for sympathetic attention on the other; and this human part of the medium

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(the actor) and the audience’s relation to it have remained of dominant importance. But in their development they have been conditioned by every sort of circumstance. There will, for instance, be a pretty wide difference, of degree if not of kind, between what you can do effectively in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens, in Shakespeare’s Globe, and in the theatre for which Rosmersholm was written. They do not often get formulated by dramatist or actor (who know most about them), because this is not the ‘natural’ way of mastering them; and, once mastered, the less those who live by them are conscious of them the better. All arts are mysteries, the way into their service is by initiation, not learning, and the adept hugs his secret. Yet they need the discipline of criticism, which learning can impose, and none needs it more than does the art of the theatre. The primitive drama of dancing, singing and miming was mere anarchy. The Greeks gave it ritual form, but of this, as we find when we try to articulate it, little more than the skeleton has survived. The music and dancing of the chorus is lost knowledge. While the speaking remained the business of a single actor – the poet himself, perhaps – this also could be passed on by tradition, as the Homeric poems first were. It was only when actors and characters multiplied and the action was elaborated that the play began to be recorded and was resolved into terms of literature. But only the speech was recorded, even so, and in the simplest terms; the action, supposedly, would be well enough suggested by it. And what this was at times is as much lost knowledge to us as the singing and dancing of the chorus.

The literary record Here is the first difficulty in bringing any but a contemporary criticism to bear upon the art of the drama; the literary record is never complete. It was not much more so with our Elizabethans than with the Greeks, nor is it, indeed, for a modern play, nor can it ever be. Speech itself will not always be written out in full. In one of the Coventry Mystery plays, so called, we find: Here Herod rages in the pageant and in the street also. And from other stage directions (as these plays were to be done by amateurs, not professionals, who would know what to do,

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they are full of stage directions) it is clear that he was meant, if not to speak, at least to howl more than is set down for him – even as Shakespeare’s very professional clowns were meant to, and they would not have been worth their pay to the theatre otherwise. That famous snub, they must have felt, was a little unfair; Shakespeare’s own plays might pull through without extempore funniments, but where would some of the others have been? For the Commedia dell’ Arte action was outlined and dialogue largely left to the actor. And one could find in melodramas being played in booths today what are called ‘carpenter’s’ scenes, in which, before a cloth showing a street or country lane or what not, the villain or the comic man is expected to improvise talk for the five minutes’ extra, it may be, which the carpenters need to turn the scenery behind from the baronial hall of the wicked uncle into the humble heroine’s cottage. The drama’s life has always lain in elemental things, in vehement humanity venting itself in a medley of action and speech, dance and song, and we do well not to sophisticate it too far. But it will always need discipline, or it would lapse into anarchy; and few laymen realize how much it ordinarily gets. A self-imposed discipline largely! The staging of a play is the working out of an elaborate scheme of co-operation in movement and emotional expression. If all this could be written down the full score of a modern opera would look simple beside it. In performance, with an audience for a reverberator, each actor knows that if he does not loyally stick to his part, the whole affair may at any moment get dangerously out of control. The reckless gaiety of burlesque must be counteracted by a very tyranny of control. The stage romps which quicken the pulses of those whose romping days are over will be the product of a drilling that would astonish a sergeantmajor. But the discipline which now concerns us is in the conversion of drama into literary form, the putting it permanently on record, the bringing it within reach of considered criticism; and the difficulty lies in the necessary nature of the record. Drama becomes literature, but as it has been something other it must now be something more than literature. The dialogue and stage directions which can be written down should somehow signify besides so much that cannot be; and it would seem to follow that the more of this expanded drama there is innate in them, the less complete will be the record.

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Why not – both for literary use and the instruction of actors – enlarge the record, describe not the room only in which a scene is to be played, but the unseen house which contains the room and the town in which the house stands? All this may be significant, surely. Why not write down, besides what the characters say and do, what they think and feel but leave unsaid? This will make matters easier for the reader and keep the actors from misreading their parts. Well, we are used to the editorial enscening of Shakespeare – and nothing has done more to distort and nullify the stagecraft of the plays! The fault is not Shakespeare’s, however. The argument for the yet fuller practice is persuasively set out in the preface to Mr Bernard Shaw’s first volume of plays, but we note that Mr Shaw has never followed his own advice very far. In effect, a little of that sort of thing goes a long way, and the arguments against more of it are just about those we should urge against an architect’s painting in perspective on the surface of his building. In each case a bastard art will develop, with architect and playwright letting essentials go hang for the sake of superficial effect. It is not so much that the bare literary record of a great drama is incomplete as that it is complex; and, if we lack the clues to its original presenting, it may be cryptic to a degree. The record will be close packed, that is one thing. The dramatist works within strict limits of space, and he must not waste a stroke. Even so, when we come to really considerable plays, the space available proves altogether too small for a plain parade of their whole matter. Some things have to be made unmistakably clear; the story and the main scheme of the conflict of character. Nor can the minor issues be let crowd and jostle the major ones, there must be a final effect of order and clarity. But to say all he wants to say the dramatist, we find, has been using two or three devices simultaneously, imposing one on the other, so to speak. And the multiple and complex nature of his medium allows him to do this. There is scene and its atmosphere and the action within the scene. There is speech with its double use, for the telling of the plain fact, for the playing upon our emotions by pure sound. And there is the weight of actuality which the very presence of the actors will add. A not too calculable factor, this last. Its nature will vary with the means of approach to the audience which a theatre provides, formal in Greek drama, intimate, as with the Elizabethans, illusionary as in our own. But from such variety of means a dramatist can weave work of a very dense and rich texture, that is clear.

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The physical ‘laws’ of the Greek theatre How much of the total effect of a play will be explicit in its literary record will partly depend upon the sort of theatre for which it is meant. I only know of one for which the record need be quite explicit; the theatre of the microphone. And in the recognition of this lies whatever future there may be for the broadcast play, unless television is to complicate the matter. But whatever the theatre, the less there is likely to be on the plain surface of the record of a play of any quality and the more underneath. It will be like the iceberg, floating one-ninth above water and eightninths submerged. Ideally, everything should be implicit in the record in this sense: set the play in motion and all the hidden things should come to light and life. We must be sure, though, that all the conditions of its staging and acting – even, strictly speaking, to the sympathetic attitude of the audience – are those that the dramatist provided for. Here opens the finally unbridgeable gulf between us and the Greeks, even between our day and Shakespeare’s. We can play the Agamemnon in the very theatre for which Aeschylus wrote it, but it cannot mean to us what it meant to his audience. We can rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe, but can we come to accepting its conventions as spontaneously as the Elizabethans accepted them? Not quite: but we can go some way towards it, can at least measure our distance from Athens, and arrive within hail of Bankside. The aspect of the record that reflects the play’s staging should be fairly easy to read once the ways of the theatre it belongs to are known, and these, again, we can partly deduce from the physical features of the theatre itself. Take the theatre for which the Agamemnon was written, open to the air, seating seven thousand people, with its large circular orchestra, and its long shallow stage backed by a wall for a sounding board – it had to be shallow if the sounding board was to be effective. On such a stage, and as seen by the further spectators, quick or complex movement will be quite ineffective. Only formal speech and gesture will tell, and all the action will look flattened as on a frieze. But the chorus has the orchestra to move in. Figures detached from a background, their manoeuvring can be elaborate in pattern to the point beyond which it would prejudice the effect of the lyrics and their music. Here then will be the main plastic contrast between the action on the stage and in the orchestra, and

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we find it put to very various and modulated to very subtle uses. The customary change is from the tension of sheer drama to the relaxing rhythm of the chorus movement, with the refreshment to the eye there will be in the shifting pattern of it. While this relieves the strain, the lyrics and their music can moderate (or can sustain in another form) the emotion. Then, a quickening of the chanting and the movement and a varying of the pattern may be made to re-stimulate excitement to the pitch at which the next dramatic passage must begin. But this division of the action is not invariable or precise. There can be dramatic action in the orchestra too, shared between actors and chorus, cast predominantly in lyric form, with (perhaps) music for a detached accompaniment. This is, in fact, the older method, and strict division between the dramatic and lyric marked the decadence of Greek tragedy. Easy to see why: unity of form is destroyed and the strength which lies in it. Very obviously a particular sort of stagecraft must be rooted in the opportunities of its particular stage. But I suggest that the whole fabric of a play’s artistry will ultimately rest here; and that not merely the more plastic beauties of Greek Tragedy as it lived and moved and can now be re-created only in imagination, but its more intrinsic qualities too, those architectural qualities of spacing, proportion, cumulative effect, of repose and ordered power, which are extant still in the literary record, fetch their origin from the physical conditions of the theatre they could best adorn.

The physical factors of the Elizabethan stage Now look at our Elizabethan stage and into the factors of its artistic problem. We have the inn-yard, which becomes, without essential change, the Globe or the Fortune Theatre. The dramatists of the time had a certain variety of inherited matter and method to choose from for imitation and development. There is the Senecan model. They all but wholly reject it. There are the old Moralities, looser of structure, with verse that was easier to speak, with allowance for the popular fooling of the clowns. This influence prevails, though the more obvious marks of it soon became indistinguishable. For one thing, the square platform thrust into the centre of the theatre will not conveniently accommodate the ‘Mansions’ which had localized the episodes in the Moralities, though something of the sort remains in the ‘Machines’ which occasionally

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serve a part of their purpose. Not to mention the cost of such splendid affairs, prohibitive if you are presenting, not one play a year, but two or three a month! For another thing, you cannot continue to gather subjects for your plays from the Bible; the Puritans give you trouble enough without that to add to it. Nor have you any such store of familiar legends as had Seneca and his exemplars to draw upon. Besides, you have an audience enfranchised by Reformation and Renaissance and romantically keen to hear about anything and everything under the sun. A play should tell a story, then, as fresh and exciting a one as possible; if it can tell two at a time, so much the better. Elizabethan stagecraft reflects, variously enough, these conditions and obligations. The forthright telling of the play’s story, the freedom with time and place which lets the dramatist rivet each consecutive link in it, the confidences of the soliloquy, the spellbinding rhetoric, the quick alternation of one interest and one group of figures with another – all this is adaptation to environment and the solving of a practical problem. And if the work was rough and ready, well it might be! The Greeks, writing their plays for a yearly festival, could discuss their art and meditate on it. The Elizabethans, one doesn’t doubt, discussed furiously, but a hungry public left them little leisure for meditation. If one man could not finish a play quickly enough, two or three more might be called in to help. Old plays must be polished up anew, and if their own authors wouldn’t or couldn’t do the job, anybody else who was on the spot was expected to oblige. This haste accounts, of course (if nothing else does), for the borrowed and re-vamped stories. And it is possible that we owe the full version of Hamlet to the fact that the Globe was closed during eleven months of plague, so that Shakespeare was less rushed than usual. Such a way of working would certainly make more for liveliness than discretion, for impulse and power, but for nothing like perfection of form.

The illusionary theatre Now turn from the projecting platform at the Globe to the framed picture of the modern play.1 What are the physical factors of the problem here?

Barker adds a footnote that the ‘ultra-modern play’ has come out of the frame again.

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The indoor quiet, the artificial light, and its concentration on the actors. Their isolation; for actors within a picture frame are in another world, a world of visual illusion. Not that you are free to paint any sort of picture there; its fantasy must be limited by the fact that human beings cannot fantasticate themselves beyond a point, and they have to form a part of it. Fantastic staging asks the abolition of the picture frame, for the breaking of this visual unity. But background made actual becomes a part of the play, and one begins to make dramatic use of it. In Shakespeare it seldom matters where exactly the characters are (when it does he takes care to tell us), and at times we might wonder if we stopped to think about it (though he does not let us) if he knows himself. But Hedda Gabler’s surroundings – she herself such a contrast to them – are very much a part of the play; so is the gallery, up and down which we hear – with his wife’s ears – and later with our own eyes see John Gabriel Borkman pacing. And as for the studio and that queer garret in The Wild Duck, there is as much dramatic life in it, one could protest, as in any character in the play. Here too is one reason why the skilled dramatist may concentrate upon one scene to an act, sometimes on one to the whole play. He increases the illusionary value of his characters by first establishing and then continuing them in convincing surroundings. One may rest too much upon the conviction to be carried by the actor’s mere embodying of a character. There is just as strong a disposition on our part to refuse to believe that the individual we see (and whose private name we have just read in our programme) is Hedda Gabler or Hjalmar Ekdal, and their continuance in identical surroundings does something to counteract it. When the curtain first rises and we see an actress ‘sitting in an easy chair by the window, and crocheting a large shawl which is nearly finished’, it is by a certain effort of goodwill that we accept her as Miss Rebecca West. But when it rises on the fourth act, and there she is standing in that same room, with her cloak, hat, and that same white crocheted shawl, finished now, hanging over the back of the sofa, we may, if we are superior people, smile a little at the shawl, but Rebecca West will be, by now, very much more real to us – and our smiling will be one sign of it.

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The dramatist’s partnership with the actor The other aspect of the literary record, the apparently quite explicit part of it, the dialogue by which the actors tell the story and interpret character – however simple this may seem on the surface, may be complex enough beneath. And here occurs the cardinal part of the dramatist’s problem: how best to provide for the collaboration of the actor. Collaboration it has to be. Interpretation understates the case. This applies better to the musician, whom bar and stave permit to infuse just so much of his personality into a performance and no more. But more is demanded of the actor. It was all very well for that aristocratic amateur Prince Hamlet to ask his visitors to ‘Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue …’, but if actors did no more than this performances would be pretty dull – as no one knew better than that hardy professional, Shakespeare. He could have given the First Player a good answer to that sententious sermon had he chosen. I have been tempted by the thought that he allowed him to stand listening with a polite but ever so slightly ironic smile. But I confess that I cannot discern it in the record. Much more than interpretation is asked of the actor. He has to embody the character. Not, let us be clear, to suppress his own personality in favour of another of the dramatist’s invention. This is a common fallacy; but such a method produces only an ‘animated puppet’ sort of acting. It may just do for minor parts, but you could not play Hamlet or Othello so. The character as it leaves the dramatist’s hands has to be re-created in terms of the actor’s personality; and the problem for the dramatist is how to write it so that he may prevent it – his character – from perishing in the process. Some characters do; but there may not have been very much in them to begin with. Some plays are created mainly by the actors. The story will be the dramatist’s (perhaps); he will plan out the action and arrange the exits and entrances; and this – though anyone can learn to do it – is a skilled business enough. He will write the dialogue and it will be spoken more or less faithfully. But a play’s essential life lies neither in story nor construction, nor mere words. All these may be effectively assembled and yet leave a blank, which the actors with their personalities will have to fill. There are many varieties and degrees of this contribution. They can range from such a conscious creation as was Henry Irving’s Mathias in The Bells (and that this was his creation and not the dramatist’s is

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proved by the fact that out of the same material Coquelin modelled a wholly different character) to the lively charm with which some pretty girl may invest a little love scene. It is all legitimate acting; for the actor is required – within the limits of a due regard for his fellow actors and the main purpose of the play – to ‘make the most of his part,’ and to do so he must make the most of himself too. How can the dramatist ensure that the essentials of his part in the business will remain and will prevail? You notice, I hope, that I have dropped into the argument this ‘essentials.’ Because the first thing to be determined is what these are – and are not. It is futile, for instance, to try and make them consist – except very generally – of the outward appearance of a character, or of tricks of speech and manner (this is not so true of pure farce, in which the dramatist may be drawing not characters, but conventionalized caricatures). Such things are the actors’ concern. One sign of the amateur playwright is his despair when the heroine he has fancied fair-haired and blue-eyed presents herself brown-eyed and black-haired, or if the comic man wants to change a prescribed stutter to a giggle. One has watched him swayed between delight at his creatures taking form and disgust because the form is strange to him. If he is concerned in the casting of the play he can insist on such things if he thinks it worthwhile. But (this is the point) if he sacrifices any of his scanty resources to the weaving of such inessentials into the substance of his play – why, in doing the actor’s share of the business he will be leaving the actor to do some part of his, which, perforce, he has left undone. Nor are the essentials of a character likely to lie in those wise things the dramatist himself may want to say, the little sermons, the epigrams noted down before he had thought of the character at all; nor in the journeyman service of helping on the plot. And the more it is charged with such matters the more the actor will be found making it all his own. It would seem indeed as if this collaboration were less an alliance than a rivalry; and there is some truth in this. The history of the theatre could be viewed as a never-determined struggle between dramatist and actor for pre-eminence. We should then note several salient things about it. With the actor in the ascendant the contemporary drama is generally lifeless. Remarkable plays are not written by taking the actor at his own valuation, and by giving him merely what he likes best to do. But neither are they by men who take other plays for a model and know nothing

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at first hand about the actor’s art at all. The great periods in drama, the periods of renascence and development, have almost invariably been dominated by dramatists who knew so much of the theatre and of actors and their acting that they had no illusions left about them. And their way of dealing with this rivalry has been to provide for the actor, perhaps what he liked to do, but always with far more of it than he could easily manage to do, and sometimes with what it was apparently quite impossible to do. These dominant dramatists – Aeschylus who led on his chorus and may have acted too; Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière; Ibsen with his years of spade-work in the theatre at Bergen before he came to revolutionizing modern drama; Racine, Strindberg, Chekhov (a diverse trio), less directly, but still pretty intimately tied to the theatre.

Drama close packed with life This excessive demand upon the actor is an inevitable development. For here, as we said, is the dramatic form, which cannot effectively be enlarged beyond certain limits. Therefore, if he has an over-plus of matter or much complexity of character to disclose, the dramatist must pack it tight, and upon whom but the actor can the extra burden to the square inch fall? The limits are fairly strictly defined. When Swinburne writes a Bothwell 15,000 lines long – nearly four times as long as Hamlet – while upon the surface of the literary record it is drama and has passages which might prove magnificent in a theatre, we cannot for this reason alone quite call it a play. Much more than custom is involved; questions of human endurance, and of the springing of the immense span. Can such a bridge be made to bear? Packing may be a good thing in itself. Mr Bernard Shaw has proved himself a most practical dramatist (to the confounding of the wiseacres), and when he writes Back to Methuselah he at least makes five plays of it instead of one, and with more stuff in them, truly, than one might find in another man’s fifty. But is it all dramatic stuff, one asks; and has all that is dramatic in it been scrupulously dramatized? One remembers the man who wrote such a long letter because he could not find time to make it shorter. We must allow men their methods; but might not Swinburne’s be a play and Mr Shaw’s a better play if the floods of emotion in the one and the intellectual

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abundance of the other were purged and refined into just about a quarter of the space? All great art would seem to be close packed with life. There is need of the discipline of form, and perfect work, work to the very level of greatness, can be done contentedly within its bounds. The artist who wantonly transgresses them and needlessly emancipates himself wastes and loses all force of expression. But with high creative power the form always seems to be super-charged to just short of bursting point. Sometimes it will be burst in pieces altogether, and then fresh form must be found. Now drama, as we have seen – with humanity itself for its medium – has unusual need of discipline; and this close packing of matter and emotion is discipline of the finest kind for both dramatist and actor, and produces a form far more vital than any regularity of construction can. How to do the packing, enforce the discipline and endow the result with effective spontaneity; that is the problem. They say you can detect the true poet in the very first line of a poem. Certainly one of the signs of the true dramatist is that his characters, at first sight, seem to leap from the pages at you. And one of the tests of the fully achieved character is – paradoxically enough – that it can be given a dozen different personalities and interpreted from nearly as many different points of view, and yet remain essentially the same character. It is said that no actor ever fails as Hamlet. The truth in this would seem to be that Shakespeare has somehow contrived to distil so much humanity into the fiction, that at a touch, at the lively speaking of a line, it wells up and overflows; he has shown so many sides of the man that no actor, unless he be the veriest stick, can fail to reflect a few of them. The better the actor, of course, the more of Hamlet he can give us; but – we now reach an interesting crux – can any actor, and in a single performance, give us the whole?

Can a play be too good? Performance – though we may demand an ideal one – is surely the legitimate test of a play. If the best of what there is in it will not then emerge, must it not be ranked with symphonies that should not be played, plans for houses never to be built, ships that look noble in harbour

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but are useless at sea? Turn from Hamlet to A. C. Bradley’s study of Othello. It is masterly interpretative criticism, not least so in its qualities of sanity and honesty. Not for Bradley those brilliant discoveries of the treasure you first plant there yourself! There is nothing in his argument that cannot be justified by a plain reading of the text. But, fresh from his extraordinary expansion of the characters of Othello and Iago, do we not ask: Could any two actors convey all this to us, in its breadth and subtlety, by performance? And if the answer is No, as I think it must be, are we not then driven to the conclusion that there must be something radically wrong with the art of drama itself? We have been used to facing this dilemma in King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, and even in the pretty fantasy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But Othello is admittedly a most practical play; all that can be said against it from this point of view is that it is a superlatively good one. But if the same difficulty is innate in it –? Can a play, as a play, be too good? That would be an absurd conclusion. I suggest a rather different explanation, which has this encouragement about it, that it is, at any rate, not a conclusion. For though we may none of us be able to rise to the writing of an Othello, we do not want for a dramatic beacon the sign ‘bad plays are best.’ In art there is always a paradox involved, and here is the drama’s. Just because it employs this inevitably imperfect medium of humanity it must always be an imperfect art. And its strength must lie, not in logical conduct and regularity of form, but in employing to the full this rebellious human medium. In this collaboration and its fruitfulness is drama’s essential life. Form of some sort, with its discipline, there must be. Here follows the paradox. Set the actor impossible tasks and he will do better by them than by the possible ones; let him be himself to the utmost, he will the better be Hamlet or Othello or Lear. There are no laws for living abundantly, nor any rules for writing plays with this magic in them. But we can detect the magic where it is, and even discern sometimes how it has come to be. [1931: From On Dramatic Method, first Clark lecture]

Note Barker was invited by Trinity College, Cambridge, to deliver the Clark Lectures for 1930. The five lectures were published the following year, and the above essay is taken from the opening one (see pp. 113–18 for the fifth). They give

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the lie – as does the rest of the selection from the appropriate period – to the notion that Barker was lost in scholarly isolation after the First World War. Given in the highest of academic circumstances, the lectures are rooted in practicality without diminishing their intellectual content. The lecture we have chosen explores the nature of theatre, the relationship between craft and art, the role of experiment, and the demands of the form. Barker rejects the idea of external or fixed rules for playwriting and insists on the discovery of the natural laws (so to speak) from within the medium of theatre itself. Barker remained critical of his own writing while taking enormous pains to strive for the perfection he knew was unattainable. Across the title page of an early play, Agnes Colander, he wrote this thought nearly thirty years later: ‘I suspect this play (I’ve been glancing into it) to be very poor. It should certainly not be published. It might well be destroyed.’ A couple of years on, he added: ‘It should be destroyed.’ It was not published, but nor was it destroyed; Barker kept it bound in his library in Paris. His thorough approach can be seen in the time it took to write The Secret Life and His Majesty – around four and five years, respectively – and that, post-performance and publication, he rewrote The Voysey Inheritance, The Madras House and Waste, and also revised his book on the National Theatre as well as the Shakespeare Prefaces. In the years immediately preceding the Clark Lectures, Barker remained busy and attached to practical concerns. He had re-written his banned play Waste in the hope of a licence and a production – the former was forthcoming but not the latter; he had a new play, His Majesty, published; he had continued translating Spanish plays with Helen, assisted in a production of a double bill from this output, translated Six Gentlemen in a Row by Jules Romains and written further Prefaces to Shakespeare’s plays, an Introduction to Tolstoy’s plays (see pp. 157–60), and more articles; he had joined the advisory committee established following the destruction by fire of the theatre in Stratford upon Avon to offer guidance on the building of a new theatre, judged a competition to design a National Theatre and become president of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Shakespeare Association.

A drama rather of being than doing.

9 A WORD ABOUT FORM The well-made play connotes ‘construction,’ for long a bugbear to all earnest students of the mysteries of dramatic art. There were those laws that must never be transgressed; the plot must be unfolded thus or thus, the scène à faire1 placed here or – possibly – there, some element of surprise must be included, and catastrophe and peripety stand ready to answer the bell! By my thesis these things matter not at all. There are no such arbitrarily right ways and wrong ways. There will be the physical conditions of the theatre for which the play is written. The dramatist must take account of these as the sculptor of his material, as an architect of the site on which he builds. For the rest, a play can be well put together or ill, as a story may be told clearly or a picture clumsily composed. There will be the best way (more or less) to do it; but this will be innate in the theme, and should be proper and peculiar to the theme, as much so as anything else about it.

Form of one kind and another Though there may be no fixed laws of construction, yet a play can have beauty of form. Every artist feels after form and fine proportion, if for no other reason than that they make for clarity of expression. And the maturer the artist, the more concerned he is likely to be with this, for he will have more to put into his play or his picture or his symphony, and the greater need, therefore, to order it clearly. This beauty in drama is, I think, manifested very much as it is in other arts, the peculiar means allowed for. It is a question of harmony mainly, of just proportions, significant emphasis, congruities and arresting contrasts, of an ultimate

A scene regarded as obligatory in a particular genre.

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integrity. The likening of one art to another is a tricky business; but in the beauty and power of their form, and so far as this may be isolated, instructive comparisons could be made between the Agamemnon, the temple at Paestum, the Delphi charioteer, Leon Cathedral, King Lear, Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and Beethoven’s Mass in D, and a fuller understanding of them be reached than by measuring each against some lesser achievement of its own kind. Form and the meaning of it will certainly differ greatly as between one kind of play and another. Shakespeare’s concern with it is not so obvious as Racine’s or Ibsen’s; but we had better not conclude from this that he is not concerned with it at all. Ghosts and the Agamemnon have structurally more than a little in common. But Ibsen is not consciously imitating Aeschylus. Both likeness and difference belong to the plays’ themes and to the nature of the theatres, with their points of difference and likeness, for which they were destined. Shakespeare’s form is apparent mainly in terms of power. He works by means of contrast between character and character, by tension and relaxation, climax and anti-climax, by changes of tone and pace, by every sort of variation between scene and scene. We could illustrate the form of King Lear by a chart, a sort of temperature chart, with plot and sub-plot and characters marked by ink lines of different colours, zigzagging up and down and crossing and re-crossing; the rise and fall to show volume of emotion, while a separate line could mark increase and decrease of pace. We can rightly call this form, I think, for all that it is form in motion. We are conscious also, in these maturer plays, of a fairly elaborate character scheme of likenesses and contrasts, but this is the nearest we seem to get to any spatial plan. Any kind of play, of course, could be charted in this fashion, but not many so eloquently. Take one of Racine’s. The character zigzags would be less abrupt and significant. The single plot-line would run on a curve. But what we may call architecturally the play’s ‘lay out’ – an important factor both for plot and character scheme – could not be shown at all. The simplicity of the method, the few characters, the unity of subject and place, and the so-called unity of time, all enable Racine to give us, as the action proceeds, a sense of the plan of the play as a whole. He can space it out effectively, proportion becomes of value, and less immediate contrasts can be made to tell. He can appeal a little to our judgment as well as to our imagination and feeling.

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The planning of Greek drama This conveying of a sense of plan is, of course, a chief legacy from classic Greek tragedy. To the Greeks, we are told, right proportion in dramatic structure was everything. If it is the physical conditions of the theatre which largely determine the method of the play, what was it in the Greek theatre which gave dominance to form? We have the chorus and its orchestra to begin with. The constant presence of the chorus will alone make for regularity of structure in a play. The actors are few and their effective action is limited, so this will not much disturb it. (There is also the influence of the play’s subject; one cannot tell a well-known tale for the sake of sudden turns and surprises.) We can see, I think, the natural law of such a theatre developing towards straightforward simplicity, clarity, and breadth of effect. No artist works against a natural law, for his work gains strength only by obedience to it. Here will be the masses of the play; chorus and dialogue. The dramatist’s art will lie in giving the regularity proportion, and to the monotony as much variety as will not decrease its strength.

The retrospective method It is a far journey from Aeschylus to Ibsen and his school, and one could make instructive pauses by the way. But it is interesting – without teasing the comparison – to place the two sorts of play side by side; because Ibsen, inheriting the mechanically well-made play, once again gives it vital form. Few dramatists, or novelists either, set out to tell a story explicitly and consecutively from A to Z. They may begin at, say, D; and, backwards to A, what has happened will be implied. By the normal retrospective method one begins perhaps at M (measuring, of course, rather by the importance of the events in the story than by the mere number of them, or by time) and has as much to recall as to recount. Its advantages are obvious. It makes for concentration (a great advantage in a play, where space is limited), and for the relating of causes to effects very immediately and pertinently. But the difficulties involved are considerable.

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Unlike the Greeks, Ibsen has to deal with a story which nobody knows. In place of the helpful chorus he inherited the confidant, a device long clung to, nakedly and logically by the French, familiar in England as ‘Charles, his friend’ (the female of the species, a Lucy or Maria, as vapid as the male), latterly tricked out with varying disguises and excuses for existence. A stale device, for which Ibsen soon had no use. He could not spare space nor dissipate his play’s strength upon characters with no vital interest in the action; he allows himself a parlourmaid or so at most. He is the great dramatic economist. His plays are fairly short, you may say. Yes, but so highly charged with dramatic purpose, with his peculiar blend of thought and feeling, that not much more of it at a time would be bearable.

Ibsen’s dramatic economy The resources of Ibsen’s theatre are fairly homogeneous; dialogue, action, and painted scene are keyed together to the same sort of prose exactitude. This is a convention like any other, though we call it realism. His task is to develop its expressiveness without breaking its integrity. By simplifying the scheme of a play’s visible action (its reminiscent action will be another matter), in its scenic setting, in the number of the characters, in singleness of subject, he can make both its plan and its atmosphere effective. In Rosmersholm, for instance, we have the picture of the spacious old house constantly before our eyes, and the simple rhythm of the action – we soon become conscious of it – itself speaks of the quiet life that is led there; Rebecca’s constant presence (she has conquered this city of her siege to find it a dead city and she moves about it like a ghost), Rosmer’s aimless coming and going, the solitary visits paid by Kroll, Brendel, and Mortensgård – all this, without a word spoken, is eloquent. The simpler the scheme the more sensitive we shall be to its working, and form and proportion, then, are as important to Ibsen as to Aeschylus. They will indeed be more important, for in this theatre the focusing of the action is far sharper, and the slightest emphasis tells. If a Greek play could be said to have some of the attributes of sculpture, with few of these lost there is added now to dramatic art something of the quality of a picture, the least touches of light and shade can be made to tell.

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The linking of past and present Notice that the retrospective method not only involves something more than the telling of a story, but, as Ibsen practises it, something far subtler than the subsequent piecing of circumstance with circumstance, which is the technique of the highbrow-delighting detective tale. He so contrives that each revelation of the past event is linked (by cause or effect) to some turn in the revelation of character which forwards the immediate action of the play. This is a dramatic necessity. Progressive revelation of character alone, scene after scene of mutual confession, might not be a very seizing and would certainly prove far too self-conscious a business to be more than comically convincing. Action alone can reveal character in outline only, and may even obscure for the moment what is within; not to mention that with more than a very little character to reveal opportunities for action will give out. But relate the revelation to past action; and however enthralling, even in retrospect, this may be, it cannot obscure, it can only heighten and enrich the colours of the character now reflecting it. Balance and emphasis in the revelation of past events is as important as in the ordering of the immediate action.

The drama of ‘being’ Out of this retrospective stagecraft, with its absorbing of action into the revelation of character – and as the chief fruit – comes a drama rather of being than doing. But Ibsen, in his development of it, takes care to keep the essential qualities of the drama of doing too, the constant conflict, the minute-to-minute progress, the use of suspense and surprise, the ordering of the action towards climax and catastrophe. His purely technical triumph lies in converting all this to new use, while he sacrifices none of it. He screws it up, indeed, to a more rigid efficiency. He rejects the soliloquy. When the actor in the old theatre was in intimate personal touch with his audience soliloquy increased the intimacy and served admirably for self-revelation. It had long become a mechanical convention, employed by the playwright mainly to save himself trouble. It did not fit well into the realistic picture; people do not talk aloud to themselves, except at moments of over-mastering excitement, and

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then not connectedly. But this, I fancy, was not Ibsen’s decisive reason for abandoning it. The solitary, self-communing figure, speaking plain prose, removed from the audience and ignoring it in that other world of illusion, will lower the tension of the action; that will be one objection when a play’s construction is close knit. And with such a play as Rosmersholm, where the drama lies in the slow relentless revelation of the truth and the effect upon its hearers and on us – the confidences of soliloquy would discount its whole purpose, even to absurdity. But the play of being rather than doing will in its nature tend to a looser, less synthetic structure than Ibsen chose to allow it. A story of what people do, with its beginning and middle and end, its climax and catastrophe, may not be the best way of showing us what they far less definitely, if far more inherently, are.

Chekhov Ibsen’s followers in the drama of ‘being rather than doing’ did very sensibly relax their form; Hauptmann, Brieux and, in particular, Chekhov. His technical achievement was to find, after much experimenting, a form and method admirably expressive of his play’s content. He is no exemplar of realism as it has often been defined. He employs the soliloquy freely, but so discreetly that (in the later plays certainly) it does not destroy the illusion. His object is to show us people as they are, living – and necessarily moving; but action, in the usual sense of the term, is reduced to a minimum. Form of some sort he must have; he seeks it first in pattern and later in the relating of his characters to some central idea. In The Seagull the pattern is crude, the character combinations are repeated. In Uncle Vanya and The Three Sisters they are varied and suggestive. In The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard each character is related to and has a definite share in elucidating the play’s central idea. With Chekhov we seem to reach something very like static drama. Action, however, has not been eliminated. As with Ibsen, it is thrust into the past, but a more fitful and diversified light is thrown on it. [1931: From On Dramatic Method, fifth Clark lecture]

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Note This extract from the last of the five Clark Lectures offers a summary of as well as a coda to the thinking behind all of them. In particular, it forms a partner to the fourth lecture, ‘The Natural Law of the Theatre’ (see pp. 97–110). Barker moves beyond the importance of the physical conditions of theatre in shaping plays to explore the notion of theatrical form and proportion. He touches on the differences between Greek, Elizabethan and modern drama, and ends by contrasting the dramaturgical developments found in Ibsen, the master of dramatic economy, with those of Chekhov, whose ‘object is to show us people as they are’. Here, Barker builds on one of his major themes, a central vision that can also be found in ‘The Heritage of the Actor’ (see pp. 53–71): a theatre of being not doing.

Aesthetic honesty is but an extension … of moral honesty.

10 QUALITY I want to speak of the effect upon literature of the Industrial Revolution. We sometimes refer to the Industrial Revolution as if it were a thing of the past, over and done with. That is not so. The purely industrial part of it may be more or less complete – I do not know. But we are still working out certain secondary phases of it, economic, cultural, political, which are of larger consequence. It is still, by virtue of these at least, an active phenomenon, and by now worldwide, though it is – and hence much trouble – at differing stages of development in different countries. Modern democracy is its child (we may note that the two have not so far thriven apart). Capitalism was its foster-child, and grew to be its master. Since its inception all history has been coloured by it. Mankind may – it is possible – simply weary under the strain of keeping all this complicated machinery, material and human, in order. Did not some such weariness contribute largely to the decay of Rome? Perhaps liquidation by catastrophe looks for the moment likelier. But meanwhile there are no signs of popular distaste for the good things the Industrial Revolution has bestowed. On the contrary, the cry is only for more of them, both for their increase and their cheapening.

Honesty in art In literature, for instance, a pendulum seems to swing between the didactic and the doctrine of – as it used to be called – art for art’s sake. A generation or two back it could be said of most of our poets and imaginative writers – though there were notable exceptions – that they were not interested in politics. Now the reproach might rather be, to the more notable of the younger of them, that they are interested in nothing else.

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The one extreme is, no doubt, as bad as the other. But (in parenthesis) were I a professional critic, having to follow up a young writer’s rising reputation, place him among his fellows, and choose between his faults and theirs, I think I should be lenient – not, of course, that he would care a pin for my praise or my blame – with this latter fault for a while. It is, at least, the fault of a generous nature. And if the man is a poet – either in the more limited sense of the word, or in the larger one that he writes by the canons of poetry – and if he has the root of the matter in him, he should learn after a little to reconcile the evangelism which consumes him with his duty to his craft and his loyalty to his art. If he does not or will not, the fault carries its penalty with it. Work cast in artistic form, yet deliberately disloyal to the canons of art, will, for all its forceful cleverness, if it is of literary kind, go the way of yesterday’s newspapers, of things – no discredit to them, since their purpose and standard are different – written to be read and forgotten. Incompetent or dishonest craft is fairly easily exposed, since the chair or the table, the play, novel, or poem simply breaks down under strain. But disloyalty to art, like all sins against the Holy Ghost (into which category it falls), is a thing of many gradations and variations and alloys. It may be ignorantly committed. It may be made – one could name writers who so make it – a boast. It is hard to analyze; but the critic does no greater service to peccant author or confiding public than to expose it mercilessly, and help his readers to cultivate a sense of it. I remember – it is nearly thirty years ago – that when a member of the Parliamentary Committee on the Dramatic Censorship (not as a whole an aesthetically sensitive body) asked Professor Gilbert Murray what rule he would make for distinguishing a play written to exploit the mere riskiness of a subject and such a one, for instance, as Ibsen’s Ghosts (of which the Censor had rashly said it could never be licensed), he answered simply: ‘You can always tell an honest piece of work.’ Aesthetic honesty is but an extension of this particular form of moral honesty, which requires a writer not to choose a theme from base or interested motives, nor yet to turn it to their account. It is an extension of it, and it will prove besides – if our own aesthetic sense is keen enough – to be a test of it. For art and literature to be at their best the workers in them should, I suppose, be alive to matters of high and wide import. But equally, once the worker gets to work, these must be treated as the rest of the material is treated, and subdued to the

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conditions of literature and art. Finally, that is to say, art will be master in his own house. As to what sort or size of a house it is, the resort of a favoured few or open to all, what kind, what quantity and quality of goods will be found in it – into that question enters, the condition of a nation in general, and of its politics, economics, and the rest.

The industry of education The condition of literature and the intellectual situation in England today is, of course, largely the product of our system of education, which again is largely the product of the Industrial Revolution. When we criticize that century of educational endeavour either in part or as a whole we should do well to remember how complicated and how colossal was the task, to remember too that it had to be done in a comparative hurry, in a time of an unprecedented increase and of a rapid and irregular shifting of population, of readjustment of social classes, and the growth of new demands, and that it had to be done also – in an age of increasing political freedom – by persuasion and the reconciling of opposed interests and beliefs, not by dictation and their disregard. We shall then wonder, even while we criticize, that the thing was as well done as it was. Nevertheless, since it had to be ‘done’, and done in a hurry, and could not be left to grow, the methods, which prevailed in the newcreated and, as this rapidly became, the larger part of the system, were inevitably those which dominated that age. And today, when the system, still vaster in scope, is more generous in its methods, yet far more complex in its working, it is still dominated by those methods. I hope no one will think I am such a fool as to be decrying it altogether. It is an immensely creditable achievement; and the more so in this, that, though it is the child of a time of majority rule and of the doctrine of supply and demand, the quality of its supply has at least always bettered demand. But it remains an industry – with its economic standards, its competitive and material measures of success and failure, even though it is a State industry, with the dignity and privileges attaching to that. This has been perhaps inevitable. There may be no other way, in such a society as ours, of organizing such a huge piece of work; and the methods of a well-conducted industry are, in themselves and for their

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purpose, doubtless very good ones. But what we have to recognize is that from such methods, designed for mass-production, we can only expect a certain kind of product.

The industry of literature As to the concern of literature in the question; it is, naturally, for the product of this educational system that the writers of today have mainly to provide reading matter. If there are people who, after they leave school, literally never take up a book again, they at least read a newspaper. But literature has been affected from the beginning by the Industrial Revolution and its system of education. It is not true that you need books with which to teach at all. Better teaching may often be done without them, or with only a very few of them. The study of poetry and drama, and I should suppose of music, has for years been vitiated by its concentration on the printed page. But you do need them in quantities when you are teaching large classes and trying to cram into a mass of pupils between eight and fourteen years of age1 the most varied amount of information in the shortest possible time. And they are needed the more when the teachers are not very good teachers. And good teachers are at best hard to come by, and harder when the panel from which they are drawn is narrowed by the meagreness of the reward offered, and if the work is not only turned to drudgery but is ill-paid drudgery at that. And it is easier to teach the young to read than to think. (But what proportion of us even when we are old have ever learnt to do that?) One of the results therefore of mass education is the multiplication of books and the cultivation of the mere habit of reading them, and of an even worse habit of regarding them as useful machines which do our thinking for us. No stimulus here to the critical faculty of the reader, nor therefore – at one remove – to such quality of output from the author as may insure him against criticism! Throughout the nineteenth century every sort of circumstance conspired directly and indirectly to multiply books and newspapers; the telegraph and cable carrying news; lamp, gas, and electric light replacing the costly or ineffective candle to read by – until ‘Give me something to read’ was a phrase in every one’s mouth. And supply answered to demand; and another calling (to match that of education), the select The school-leaving age in Britain was fourteen when Barker gave this address.

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calling of the man of letters, the printer, and the bookseller, was transformed by the end of the century into a huge industry, employing, I suppose, something like a million people, with much capital invested in it. As an industry – organized upon the methods developed under the Industrial Revolution – it is no doubt admirably conducted. History may say that its healthiest moment, when supply and demand most naturally balanced each other, was passed somewhere about the beginning of this century. But what has been and is the result of all this to literature itself? How has its worth been affected by its submission to the processes of modern industry? It is admittedly difficult in any sort of production to adjust the claims of quantity and quality. One of the weaknesses of the earlier phases of the Industrial Revolution was its inability to do this. To nothing should quality be denied; and every article has an ideal quality proper to itself. But, having acquired the power to produce things in quantities, we exercised it indiscriminately, never considering that while massproduction may furnish us with excellent nails and screws and matches and matchboxes, the same process may not give us comparably good chairs and tables and carpets and such like enjoyable things. An error soon detected by John Ruskin and demonstrated by William Morris, those two essentially wise men, who deduced, moreover, the far graver fact – derided though they were for their insistence on it – that the quality of men forced to misapply their energies must deteriorate too. Said they: ‘the deterioration will be triple: in the quality of the thing mis-made, of the man who must mis-make it, and in the user of the mis-made thing’.

Industrialized authorship The individual author certainly still exists, and in large quantity. His photographs are evidence of it – even though they often seem to be taken ‘in character’. How is he affected, and how is the quality of his work affected, by the industrializing of his calling, by its submission to the rules of supply and demand? There are, of course, authors who conform to them easily enough, who set out in a businesslike way to supply what is supposed to be most in demand for the moment (the thing to be supplied in response to the ‘give me something to read’ demand), taking example by the latest best seller. Any publisher, I presume, can profitably distribute a certain quantity of such goods if they are competently manufactured

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and he receives them quickly enough. But upon these alone the market would quickly grow dull. For a stimulus to it, the exceptional thing is needed. Bring that along – be it exceptionally clever or exceptionally silly, exceptionally disgusting or even exceptionally dull, and, even if it be not very competently done, it is likely to find an opening. Then at least, you will say, with this industrial need to keep the market active, the exceptionally good thing gets its chance with the rest; and, by mere multiplication of opportunity, a better chance than formerly. That is true. And – you may add – if poor books demoralize the public taste, at least they perish; while the man of talent, given his chance, will ‘make good’ and his books will survive; and so on the balance we gain. But the thing is not quite as simple as that. The truly – not merely superficially – exceptional man may establish such direct relations with his public as Dickens did that he may disregard any system. I expect, however, that among the ever-increasing crowd of well-advertised authors and books – since, after all, public attention to such matters has its saturation point – this is becoming ever more difficult to do. But descend a step, and consider the case of the exceptional man, who yet cannot hope to emancipate himself from whatever system prevails. It is not, in practice, a temporary failure he has to fear. If the industrial system worked consistently it would be. But publishers – strange though it seems – are human beings even as we are, with passions and weaknesses like to our own. And when one of them has backed his opinion of an untried author to the point of publication he is far more likely, after a first failure, to tell him to try again (and the contract may, quite justly, enable him to do so) than to throw him over. No; it is in an immediate success that his danger lies. For with this the young author becomes a commercial asset, and it will be only fair to himself and the means that have made him one, to behave as such. He will find no difficulty in doing so. He may come to do it quite instinctively. He will note what it was that the reviewers praised. He will study – but being, as I say, hardly aware that he does so – how to keep his public by serving them next time the same dish with a new sauce to it, and the time after, perhaps, a new dish with the old sauce. And if he is industrious and conscientious he should at any rate much increase in competence. That, in parenthesis, is a benefit which industrial methods in publishing and education, with their competitive examinations and practical standards, were fitted to confer and have conferred on us;

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they have raised the general level of literary competence. Books – novels certainly – are, on the average, much better ‘done’ than they were fifty or sixty years ago. But competence, alas, does not connote quality; still less has it ever tended to be the hall-mark of genius. Every year we are given better historical novels than Walter Scott’s – as far as their historical competence goes. We could all undertake to improve occasionally upon Anthony Trollope’s syntax. And a few years ago a certain author – not otherwise, I believe, remarkable for folly – did prepare and publish a stylistically chastened version of David Copperfield. You can, of course, no more improve on a book by such means than you can perform a surgical operation upon a man’s character; and it is in its character that the book’s essential quality lies. It is true that those three men wrote at times very badly; and they could have learnt – as we all can – to write well. And it is better to write well than badly. And avowedly they wrote for their market. But they did not have to subdue themselves to the obligations of a crowded and highly organized industry, where the author is but one wheel in the machine, nor often, at that, the master-wheel. Yet he and his work – if we are considering simply the interests of literature – are what matter first, last, and all the time. And what is important in his work is its essential quality, its individual character. This, as an attribute of any literary value, is something that only a tithe of the writers whom a great publishing industry calls into being to feed its machinery can be expected to have in any case. But those that have it must cultivate it independently and uncompromisingly. The sense of friendly relations with their public may do no harm, if it is only the imaginative extension of wholesome human relations; nor the emulation which is but the recognition of a common ideal. But let them come no nearer to those competitive methods of the market, which are the life of trade, for they are the very death of art and letters.

Industrializing scholarship There is a third category of reading matter which begins to be affected dangerously by the latest workings of the industrial system – books of scholarship. This very description of them implies that they should be books of quality. What, up to now, have been the conditions of their production? There would be the one sort of writer of them who, protected by a private income, gave all his time to such work, and could

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give all that was needed. There might be, for another, the university don or the civil servant with his official responsibilities lying not too heavily upon him. There would be as well the publisher who, thanks to low costs, could invest capital in these – so to say – long-term securities, accumulate a distinguished list of them and be satisfied if he sold fifty copies of each of them a year. But costs have risen and are rising. And though certain publishers – at a sacrifice they have no right to make, nor would if they were really commercially minded – gallantly continue to do this, it is a question, and an ever more doubtful one, how long they will be able to. The industrial system, consistently applied, never has, and will not, produce these books for us. Look along your shelves and, if you know anything of the circumstances of the writers, you will see that 70 per cent. of the books of ripe and considered scholarship come from men who do not need to, and could not possibly, earn their living by writing them. And ask any well-established publisher to show you, not the books he sells, but the account books he keeps over a period of years, and I think you will recognize the danger. It is coming to be not so much a question of manuscripts refused, as of works unwritten. And the result may be – if the industrial system is left master in this field – the reduction of our scholarship to what the French call works of vulgarisation, and to fictional histories and sensational biographies, the stuff of them drawn from other men’s usually unacknowledged labour. Nor, of course, will there be much of that left to draw upon. There are compensations. The university presses take as generous a view of their duty as their finances allow. There are trusts which endow research and help publish its results. But none of these quite frees us from the industrial system, with its doctrines of competition and payment by results; whereas, of all forms of literature, of the literature of scholarship it is most true to say that the best of it is only produced when the work is done simply for its own sake.

Quality is needed … What can be the remedy here? The quality of our learning and of our choicer literature must be kept high. The aim of a liberal democracy is to level up the standards of the mass of the people, materially and culturally. But the minority has its claims too, and provision must be made for singular work and exceptional men. Democracy has so far

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been unwilling to do this. To have deprived one set of aristocrats of their privileges only to set about creating what would in effect be another! Why? Give every man an equal chance and surely the best will win; that has been the prescription. But what is meant by an equal chance? Ideally it should imply as much variety of opportunity as there will be variety in the characters and capacities of those who are to profit by it, and in practice it should approximate to this as far as possible. The less of this variety the less effective the competition, and the greater the likelihood that rather the worst may win; for the better the man the more nearly he will wish to follow his own bent. A true equality of opportunity our Democracies have not yet learnt how to give. And by their discouragement of the exceptional man, their carelessness for the interests of the minority, they are in danger of destroying the very individualism which they hoped to promote, upon which the system is based, and themselves as a consequence. For no system can long survive upon false pretences. The intellectual world of today is the work of yesterday’s exceptional men (and it is no fault of theirs that we do not live more in the light of it). The intellectual world of to-morrow is now being made – for it must be continually re-made – by the exceptional men of today, and the quality of it will depend upon the encouragement we give them in their task. No democracy need be jealous of such aristocrats. The only privilege they demand, a sufficient material security apart, is freedom to do their work for its own sake and to care for the quality of it above all. But this they must demand if it is to be worthily done.

… and the need is great And is not any question concerning the future of our democracy an important one at this present juncture? For we are confronted by a powerful anti-democratic movement, an effort, in more countries and under more names than one, to establish a political order of things so radically opposed to ours that the two, it has been challengingly said, cannot continue to exist together. There is much in the achievement of these dictatorships which we may admire, and they have at least most beneficially challenged that complacent acceptance of our own system as something automatically valid, in which their advent surprised too many of us. But a part of the price paid for this achievement has been,

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we note, the suppression of this very intellectual independence, for the value of which to the future of a nation I have been pleading. Which system, then, will the future justify? The lessons of history are hard to read. But here surely is one of them: that while discipline for its own sake, unquestioning obedience, and the development from these of a certain mass-efficiency, may give into the hands of a man who can wield it an immediately formidable power, yet this, when he weakens or departs, will crack; and then it will break and fall because the individual units of which it is composed have been left neither the will nor the capacity to maintain it. If this is so, a government which suppresses intellectual independence is providing for its own future extinction. On the other hand, does not the whole march of history show us the gradual advance of the individual in liberty and dignity of status? With many a set-back doubtless; after wars or political and economic disturbances, or with the bringing of less civilized peoples into the framework of a settled civilization. But these have proved episodes only; the march has been resumed. By which testimony, are not these Fascist, Soviet, and Nazi revolutions of today mere episodes, aberrations – though with much that may be salutary in them – from the main line of march? The liberal tradition we follow, by which the ultimate test of any social policy is that it advances the individual in liberty and dignity, has ancient and sacred sanction. But the future will certainly not justify mere lip-service to it in times like these. We either believe in our cause or we do not. If we do not the ways are plain by which it can be let drift to ruin. If we do, then where does its salvation lie? Partly, at least, in the quality and discrimination of its intellectual achievements. [1938: From Quality, presidential address to the English Association]

Note Barker gave the 1938 presidential address to the English Association, which published it later that year as Quality. The aims of the Association are to further knowledge, understanding and enjoyment of the English language and its literatures and to foster good practice in its teaching and learning at all levels. These aims are reflected in the content of the address, which does not specifically

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concern itself with drama but with the wider context of intellectual production and creativity and the relationship between aesthetic and moral honesty. Throughout his critical writings and plays, echoing contemporaries such as D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats, Barker wrestled with notions of excellence, spiritual and imaginative freedom, and ‘the ideal’, dissociated from the mundane, the habitual, the merely topical. In playwriting, Shakespeare embodied this romantic conception. Barker, however, retained his nose for the practical and his understanding of the importance of the conditions of artistic production. In this address he deals with the effect on art of the industrial revolution and of modern society. Art, Barker argues, will be master in its own house. ‘As to what sort or size of house it is, the resort of a favoured few or open to all, what kind, what quantity and quality of goods will be found in it – into that question enters … the condition of a nation in general, and of its politics, economics, and the rest.’ On the eve of the Second World War, he sets a liberal tradition that advances the freedom and dignity of the individual against totalitarian systems, and, in worrying about the direction of society, looks to the discrimination and quality of the intellectual achievement of that liberal tradition to help avoid a drift to ruin. Barker had become increasingly prone to illness during the 1930s but had kept working and travelling from his new home in Paris. He co-edited A Companion in Shakespeare Studies with G. B. Harrison and contributed an essay to it, gave two radio broadcasts on Shakespeare, and continued to write his Shakespeare Prefaces as well as to translate Spanish plays with Helen. He assisted in the direction of The Voysey Inheritance and Waste in London (both revised), lectured on The Study of Drama at Cambridge University and On Poetry in Drama at Oxford University, wrote more essays and introductions on a range of subjects and became director of the British Institute in Paris in 1937.

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PART TWO

OTHER THEATRES

Mechanical perfection is the beginning of the end in the theatre.

11 TWO GERMAN THEATRES We are to have our National Theatre in good time, and municipal theatres too, I hope. We need them; they will make for the security and dignity of dramatic art. We owe, I think, such public recognition of the theatre, not only to our intellectual self-respect, but to our moral health and safety. For the ethics of modern drama are the ethics of a vast number of men and women between the ages of seventeen and fifty, whether they are conscious of it or not. Surely it is worth a community’s while to keep some controlling hand on such a force. But those of us who advocate this public recognition of the theatre as a social service are much met with an appeal to remember how private enterprise has served the English drama in the past, is splendidly serving it in the present; we are asked to consider that it is in the very genius of our race to accomplish everything worth accomplishing by private enterprise and in no other way. I want, therefore, to describe the work of a couple of private enterprises in the German Theatre. One of them, the Deutsches Theater, in Berlin, does the drama as much service in play-producing year by year – I was going to say as much as all the West End London theatres put together, and really it would hardly be an exaggeration. The other, the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, does so much more than any provincial theatre here dreams of doing. But this, be it noted, is not the result of private enterprise alone in its self-asserted glory. Far from it: a very high standard is set by the State and city theatres. The moral I want to draw (moral first – story afterwards!) is that public endowment of the theatre, so far from discrediting and superseding private managements, will but stimulate

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them to greater and (in one sense at least) more profitable efforts. This has, I think, been demonstrably the case in Germany. I don’t want to use the term private enterprise ambiguously. The Deutsches Theater and the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus are private concerns inasmuch as no public statement is ever made as to their profits or losses. And it is freely said that the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus neither does pay its way nor is expected to. It has been established five years, it has an unsurpassed record, and I am told that rather than its record should be lowered its promoters would cheerfully lose – would insist on losing – a great deal more than what it is thought they may even now be investing in its future. This is, quite strictly, private enterprise. But in Germany putting your money into a theatre is apparently not thought of as a mere alternative to a gamble at Monte Carlo or on the Stock Exchange. With us a man is proud of endowing hospitals, or libraries, or colleges of science, or even concerts. But if he is caught financing a theatre he will speak of it as an amiable weakness, and probably try to put the blame on his wife. Until the theatre in England receives some public recognition there will be little credit in disinterestedly investing money in it. This at least from the point of view of the wealthy man, casting around rather vaguely for a way to exhibit the public spirit which he feels is the proper accompaniment to his wealth. I have always wished that the Government would somehow recognise the National Theatre scheme. It isn’t so much the Treasury’s money that is wanted, though that would be useful too, as the simple hall mark: public property. Let me now describe these two theatres as well as I can. First the Deutsches, which is in itself, by the way, not one theatre, but two. There are in the same building the Deutsches Theater proper and the Kammerspielhaus. Of the use and advantage of this more later. That it is a repertory theatre goes without saying, for no German theatre of any pretension could confess to being anything else. I fear that it is necessary to explain to English readers with rate and precision what a repertory theatre is. One would not have thought so, seeing that repertory theatres of a sort were common enough in England forty years ago. But I have found, not merely among the general public (and, after all, what interest should they have in the ways and means of a theatre?), but in people whose business it was to know these things, such astonishing ignorance, and in people whose business it was to

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write about them, such apparently wilful ignorance of the matter that I must be forgiven for once more writing down this A B C. It will be easier to proceed by negative. A repertory theatre is not an institution for producing plays successfully and removing them from the bill as soon as the public manifests a wish to see them. Nor is it a theatre for producing plays foredoomed to failure, though some do maintain that there is evidence in support of this definition. Repertory is not the production of one new play a week or a fortnight or a month. It is not the putting on of the ‘new’ drama; or the ‘uncommercial,’ or ‘intellectual,’ or even the ‘serious’ play. Nor has it anything particular to do with Socialism. It is not necessarily a philanthropic enterprise nor is it the idea of a lunatic. It is the putting plays in a theatre as books are put in a well-used library. A book must be upon the shelves that one man may take it down. Plays are hardly as portable as that. But a theatre so organised that, having produced a play and justified its production, it can keep the play reasonably ready for use while it is likely that five or six hundred people at a time will want to see it, is a repertory theatre. The whole organisation of the Deutsches Theater differs very considerably, though in degree rather than in kind, from any London theatre I know. The actors number about eighty. They are, of course, engaged by the season, and as a rule they remain for several years. The directing staff is numerous and important. There are two or three dramaturgen to read and advise upon plays, correspond about them, and do the literary work of the theatre generally. The designer of scenery and costumes is a permanent and a very hard-worked official. And besides these there is the Technische Leitung1 and all his necessary satellites. Your repertory theatre director must spend thought and money upon these roots of his enterprise if he wants it to thrive. Our long-run plays are liker to the cut flowers of the drama. One finds that German play-producing is much more methodical than ours. Go into some English theatres on the eve of a big production. Women are weeping on the stairs while strong men faint in corners; one would think the day of judgment were at hand. As, indeed, with the penalties attaching to an expensive London failure, in a sense it is. But when you must be rehearsing two or three plays at a time, and producing Technical director.

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them in quick succession, this sort of excitement has to disappear. Method must be substituted for madness. At the Deutsches rehearsals of plays are never crowded together. There are those definitely given to arrangement of the business. Then come intervals for study. Then the play is finally moulded. Nor need the date of the production have been fixed far ahead; it can be put on when it is ready. More work is done than with us, but not apparently at such unendurable pressure. I believe that the constant and varied rehearsal makes the actors more supple and readier in the preparation of a play. Now as to the quality of the results obtained. I think, no doubt, that when London has been ransacked for perfectly-fitting actors, and when three or four weeks of intent preparation have been given to the production of a play, there results a mechanical precision of detail, a trade finish, which no German theatre can equal. I feel inclined to add: Nor would if it could. But that may not be true. Even so I would limit this superiority to modern comedy. And for my own taste I question whether it is a superiority at all. Mechanical perfection is the beginning of the end in the theatre as in other arts. I fancy that those whose reputation grew in the attainment of this sort of thing in England have already begun to lament the decadence of acting. Well, is it not that part of the theatre’s art which their methods have most tended to kill? Repertory theatre acting, as I know it, is remarkable above all things for spontaneity and resource. And these supreme virtues which the London actor, after measuring out a part eight times a week for eight weeks (vain repetitions such as the heathen use!), finding himself in it more like a parrot than a man, though his manager and he may be rejoicing at full houses – these virtues, which he must try to flog back into himself, come easily and naturally, and, indeed (best way of all), of sheer necessity, to a repertory company. Again; an understudy’s appearance is not merely the emergency matter that it is with us. The exigencies of the programme (especially at the Deutsches, with its two theatres) are bound, as a play grows a little old in repertory, to bring about changes in its cast. After a while, indeed, a double east may he built up so that, besides being accident-proof, the play – a unit in these necessarily complex arrangements – becomes doubly useful. I fancy that an author may be assured of his original cast complete for one season at least. After that he is apt to beg you not to see his play on such-and-such a night as So-and-so will be playing (‘It’s an infernal shame’) in the other play. But this part of the system has

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many advantages beyond its mere convenience; not the least is that it gives the younger members of the company their chances, forces them on author’s and manager’s notice. What we should call ‘big’ productions are not much in favour. For one thing, they would be too unwieldy to form part of the general scheme. Not that you see shabby productions; unless, as aforesaid, the ‘bloom of time’ is upon them. But in the costumes, scenery, and appointments, you have the evidence that thought and imagination have been spent rather than money. Still, however simplified the production of the plays may be by the use of decorative and not realistic scenery, and by the absence of armies of supers, such a working of such a repertory needs stage-room and machinery and store-room that no London theatre can boast of. To these advantages also a repertory theatre is driven by necessity. The greatest practical difficulty in London would always be that of putting up a building sufficiently spacious. But it is a difficulty that must be overcome, for proper scenic accommodation and machinery are the very foundations of economy. With regard to this, it is worth while noting that the Deutsches Theater, though by no means out of the way, is not built upon a ruinously expensive site in a main thoroughfare. It makes, of course, no attempt to cater for the casual passer-by. Running two theatres instead of one, makes, I am convinced, for economy too, since it saves the management having to keep its actors standing idle. A modern repertory company must be a very large one if there is to be anything like a catholic choice of plays. The days are over when each play contained the regular lines of business into which the actors engaged for them could be thrust without thinking. A modern author wants a far wider range of personalities to choose from. Good acting costs money too, and actors in a repertory must be better, not worse, than their more specialised fellows. Thus the managerial problem is to prevent excessive waste of this expensive material. To have two theatres to spread it over is nine-tenths of a solution. To turn now to the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. Düsseldorf is, of course, one of the crack German industrial towns. It has neither Court nor Society to provide for it such theatres as there are at Munich, Dresden, Stuttgart, or Karlsruhe. One may parallel the Schauspielhaus there, then, with the sort of theatre one has the right to expect at, let us say, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, or Glasgow.

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Well, here is a new building designed for its purpose and upon as good a site as any in the city. The interior is, I think, quite unnecessarily ugly, but it is not vulgar and it is very practical. The offices, the stage, the scene stores, the school accommodation, the painting rooms, seemed to me as good as they could be. The amount of work done, its quality considered, is quite prodigious. Another thing was noticeable. The director had taken the intelligence of his audience for granted. He laboured no points, manufactured no ponderous situations, did not hesitate to have six different things going on at once when the general effect could be enriched thereby. The audience, by the way, had learnt how to be interested without interrupting the performance. There was very little laughter or applause, and I could not see that the actors were depressed by its absence. Moreover, the theatre issues its weekly magazine, price twopence, or if you spend twopence on a programme you find the two bound up together. I should like to reproduce entire the Spiel plan2 that is issued every week to be posted about the theatre and given to all concerned in the work. It supplies a bird’s-eye view of the whole organisation. I have before me now a plan of the week from November 13th to 20th. In the first column are the performances. There are to be three as usual on the Sunday. Though the Schauspielhaus has no second theatre as the Deutsches has, yet two or three times a week a play and its cast will be sent to appear some twenty or thirty miles away. Düsseldorf is the centre of a very populous district, and the theatres round welcome the company. There are apparently to be three new productions during the week. On Wednesday night, in place of a performance, there will be a reading from Maeterlinck’s new play, and a concert of modern French music. The second column shows stück-proben, which correspond to English rehearsals ‘without books.’ There will be three. The third column is for arrangier-proben, rehearsals ‘with books.’ There will not be any. In the fourth column are noted general proben, or dress rehearsals. There are to be five. The fifth column details the work of the school, the academy of acting and the study of the drama, which is attached to the theatre. Theatre schedule.

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What I think is noticeable about the school work is the insistence in its plan upon the fact that one does not learn to act merely by learning acting. There are fencing and dancing classes, of course, and there is œsthetik-gymnastik, which I take to be something between the study of gesture and the mimik that is also included. There are Technik classes, and Atemtechnik (breathing exercise, I suppose). There are lectures on costume. There are, indeed, several ‘rehearsal’ classes taken by the theatre director himself and the best of his directors. But we find besides lectures on philosophy, literature, and language. Now all this sounds very ‘German’ in its scope, and I have no doubt that the students take more kindly to the rehearsal classes than the philosophy. But I think it cannot be too strongly insisted that this is just what education for the stage ought to be. At one end of the scale, of course, one must have that training in the sureness and beauty of physical expression, without which drama, old or new, is intolerable; but at the other it is useless to expect illumination of the Ibsen and post-Ibsen plays (if of any others) unless actors can be taught – putting it broadly – to think. Unfortunately I could not attend any of the literature or technique classes. But I was allowed in to two or three of the school rehearsals, and I was struck, especially in one instance, by the way in which the students were made to criticise each other and themselves, to argue out the why and the wherefore of the scene they were working at. It was not enough, in the teacher’s mind, to have natural ability (though they had a good deal of that), they must know when and where they did ill or well. There is a refreshing air of youth about the Schauspielhaus. I believe that no one concerned in its management is turned forty. There is meaning in this. For there is an old gang and a young gang in the German theatre, and it is the young gang that inspires and brings to pass such work as is done here. The Schauspielhaus is self-contained, that is another thing. Plays come from outside, it is true; but beyond that, scenery, costumes, furniture, are not only designed in the theatre but made there under the designers’ eyes, so that as far as possible every detail shall go to form one harmonious whole. The double directorate of Louise Dumont and her husband, Gustav Lindemann, is surely a very happy arrangement. They seldom act now, for the work of management is heavy (the genus actor-manager as we know it does not seem able to flourish in Germany), but the two points of view, the two opinions, a man’s and a woman’s, checking each

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other, must make greatly for breadth and balance and sanity of policy. Thank goodness, in the theatre there is never any dispute as to women’s administrative capacities or their business equality with men. Well, these are two theatres worth travelling to Germany to see. I can discover no reason why we should not have their counterparts in England, a Deutsches Theater and Kammerspielhaus in London and a Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in any big city that wants it sufficiently. We have cultivated during the last twenty years as good material as they have, in plays, in acting, and potentially, in management. There now remains but the final step of organising these forces and setting them free from the warping struggle for existence in which they are being exhausted. Few now deny the gain to England that a soundly established theatre would be. Few who have studied the question will deny that the German method of public recognition and endowment, and of private endowment, is the only way for us to attain it too. How much longer must we wait for Parliament and the municipalities, and for private people anxious to do public service, to discover this and act upon it? [1911: From The Fortnightly Review, vol. 89, January]

Note Barker saw productions by the German Theatre in London, where he met the German actors, in particular Max Behrend, who directed Barker and whose productions were noted for their ensemble playing and attention to detail. Barker first saw a production by Max Reinhardt in 1906 and returned to Germany to see theatre there in 1910. The visit resulted in two unsigned pieces that November in The Times, ‘The Theatre Exhibition in Berlin’ and ‘The Theatre in Berlin’, and the following year the article ‘Two German Theatres’, which he had originally given as a lecture. This was the same year he directed and acted in Schnitzler’s Anatol in his and Charles Wheeler’s adaptation. Barker was offered the directorship of a German municipal theatre, and, according to his biographer, suggested to his wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy, they apply for German citizenship. Barker had believed in and lectured on the need for repertory and municipal theatre since joining the Fabian Society in 1901 (serving on its executive council from 1907 to 1912), and, in the context of the nascent repertory movement in Britain, writes here about two examples from the German theatre, the Deutsches Theater (Reinhardt’s theatre) and the Dusseldorfer Schauspielhaus. In 1911, he discussed Oedipus Rex with Reinhardt and coached McCarthy in the role of Jocasta in early 1912

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for Reinhardt’s London production of the play. Barker continued his interest in German theatre in 1913 when he visited the Dalcroze School in Dresden and saw the innovative lighting of Alexander von Salzmann and in 1914 when he visited Berlin on his way to Moscow. When the war came, Barker was not enthusiastic but supported it and wrote that his principal admirers were alien enemies.

Above all I hear the cool strong music of human voices at their purest.

12 INTRODUCTION TO MAETERLINCK PLAYS The English-speaking peoples should get into the habit of reading plays. Poetry and the Drama are bracketed together in catalogues, and the bond between them is more than the occasional overlapping of their forms. They are at their best not only in form the most concentrated but in spirit the most vital of literary arts. They are perhaps the ultimate test of an imaginative writer; they are certainly the ultimate test of an imaginative reader. And imaginative readers send up the standard of a whole country’s literature. Now those of us whose reading extends at all beyond the daily paper read poetry now and then or can at least pretend to a knowledge of it, and even the daily paper has its verses; the cause of poetry is won. The cause of play-reading is worth advocacy. Read a play: you are kept strictly to the point of the matter its author has in hand, he will not swell your mind with descriptions of sunsets or the colour of the heroine’s eyes or the hero’s boots; it is his business so to tell you the story that it fructifies in your mind in the telling. The words must be pregnant with more than their casual meaning. They must be a key which admits you, if you are alert to follow, into the peopled world of the play. When you analyze in the cold print the apparently meagre means by which the vision was created you become conscious – and a little proud, perhaps, as a good reader should be – that you too have shared in the work of imagination. I am inclined to think that all good plays are plays good to read if better to see, but I do not press that point. I do insist though that there is no such thing as the play good for the study but not for the stage. That phrase fails to cover a multitude of incompetencies. A play is

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either dramatic – that is, fit for the test of the Theatre – or it is nothing much. But here is involved a big question that must not be begged. The Theatre. What Theatre? Not of necessity the one we know – the best or the worst of it; at the worst with its pinchbeck vulgarisms, at the best with its many prejudices and limitations. By no means. In that case would not Aeschylus and Euripides be put back to the study? Are they not as a rule – to our great ill-luck? No fault of theirs, as the test of their own time has shown. Therefore when Maeterlinck called these three plays which follow three little dramas for marionettes and gave them first to the public written not acted – well, it is worthwhile to stop and consider what he may have meant. He was guilty, I fear, of irony. If he had said with literary superiority, ‘These are too good for the Theatre,’ the lordly actors and managers would have had their answer ready, ‘Not a practical dramatist! He confesses to failure.’ He said rather, ‘I won’t trouble your high and mightinesses. These trifles are beneath you. Give me some little wooden figures and the author’s voice shall be heard.’ In truth Maeterlinck needed for his plays a theatre far other than the one he could then step into for a franc or two, far other than any he has found since, in this country at least, one is sorry to say. As you read these plays – and how apt they are at setting your imagination free! – what pictures, what sounds do they call up? I have always had before me a scene, harmonious, reposeful, decorative simply, something Burne-Jones might have painted; not of rococo realism, gaudy and glaringly lit, strong drink to the jaded optic nerves of a crowd over-wearied with pleasure or work. I see figures, stilly moving, of a calm spiritual beauty, half in shadow; not ebullient, painted, popular personalities. Above all I hear the cool strong music of human voices at their purest. Maeterlinck, we are told, has no ear for music. That means – for a man who has written nothing else – that any chord is rough against his ear. He asks for the simple single melody of speech. Beauty of speech is still far enough to seek on our Theatre of today. Given a medium that would grace and not mar them, Maeterlinck’s plays are real plays, it is the Theatre at fault, not they. But with the modesty of genius he did not say so. It is wonderful with what sureness he fixed upon a perfect method of expression. These plays are not the earliest; but his dramaturgy – all his own or derivative hardly at all – was not five years old when he

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wrote them. He means to speak of the great facts of life; birth, love, and death. He chooses symbolism, the only way of saying much in little. He chooses the drama, since by that art more than any other one can vividly select and isolate humanity from its surroundings. But it must be a drama of the simplest stage-craft, plays unfussed in the building; they must be shaped like fine outline drawings. And he chooses to write in prose because dramatic poetry is almost of necessity restless, rhetorical, egotistic – at some moment the cock will crow. Ancient Pistol must have been a two-edged jest to Shakespeare. So, I think, we arrive at the bare technical Maeterlinck the dramatist. I hate pointing out beauties. I have had many a fine view spoilt for me by the officious guide. Personally I prefer a lonely walk. I may be grateful for guide-posts, but not too many of them, and for as many dangersignals as may be absolutely needful. So let the reader of these plays find out their beauties for himself. I shall say as little of them as possible, though this, of course, will be resisting temptation. If I were to issue one small warning it would be this. Don’t try to prove their symbolism as if it were sums in arithmetic. To the practically-minded it is a dangerously fascinating game, this reducing to common terms these poet’s fancies. But the last link in the chain will elude you and you may find that by thinking of it too much you have missed the meaning of the whole. Cursed be he who reads even a dictionary for mere information. I confess to liking Alladine and Palomides the least of the three, with a suspicion that I may end by liking it the best, as one’s taste in painting is apt to grow more primitive – one goes back by steps through Botticelli and Masaccio to Giotto. Alladine and Palomides is distinctly Giottesque. I own at first reading to have been irritated by the lamb, probably because of the legendary Mary’s relations to that same animal. Maeterlinck, I daresay, is not haunted by such a metrical foolishness. I have got over it. I begin to delight in this and the other half-queer things; the corridor with its endless arches and innumerable doors, the consciously childish pedantry of some of the phrases. I think he must be in a bad way mentally who can ever see anything ridiculous in a childish imagination, for is it not purest, the freest of any? And there are the things that Maeterlinck knows how to make memorable; he sets the flowers in his garden with the utmost care. ‘I love you, too, more than her whom I love;’ the pathos of ‘My tears fall because I am a woman;

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but women’s tears, they say, are not painful.’ ‘It was the light that had no pity.’ Are such sentences anything apart from their context? I can no longer tell, for the art of the dramatist has stamped them on my mind. Interior brings us nearer to the work-a-day world. To any dramatic student this play must be a delight if only for the way in which the old stage device of dumb show, debased these many generations past to burlesque uses, is here transmuted, freed even from its convention, and turned to such moving account. It did not escape the eye of Maeterlinck, the unpractical dramatist, what an appeal there was to us, and to something primitive about us, in the inarticulate. Life seen by looking into a lighted room, the removal to a contemplative distance not only of the tragedy, but of the effect of the tragedy, the use of the distance, and the medium of the speakers, spectators themselves, to soften the strain emotionally that it may become more spiritually poignant in us – it is a master-stroke of technique, if there were nothing better to be said of it. But there is far better. I find a more manly wisdom, a greater courage in it, than in the other plays; than in others besides these other two. Though the characters we hear speak are developed but in relation to these that we only see, one of them at least, the old man, is rather the more than less individual and beautiful on that account. He, so near death himself, yet so unselfishly alive, so full of care for the living! It seems to have haunted Maeterlinck at one time, this imminence of death. He won’t deal round about with it, finding false comfort in half-believed promises of a happier hereafter. As he is more poet than philosopher he does not (in these early plays at least) face with any rejoicing the inevitable, but he uplifts for us a sweet, human dignity, acquiescent to sorrow, to be purified not warped by it. Interior has its unforgettable sayings – ‘Something new must come into our ordinary life before we can understand it.’ ‘Everyone bears in his breast more than one reason for ceasing to live.’ Others are less detachable; it is a shame to quote them. It contains, too, one nicely calculated effect. Appreciation of it in print might almost be put down as a test of the play-reader. It you can, in the moment, mentally couple action and words and grasp the significance of ‘No one comes to the middle window’ then, I think, you have the dramatic instinct all right; you are a satisfactory reader of plays. I do not know how true it is that The Death of Tintagiles is (or was) its author’s favourite play. It has greater beauties and is less perfect

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than others; that looks as if it might be or have been a favourite. But it is marked out especially by being a passionate play. It seems as if it were not Maeterlinck’s nature to be passionate; even in Tintagiles the passion is a woman’s. One may captiously point out the imperfections, a vagueness of meaning here and there, when the tension of the tragedy is too great for one’s mind to be charmed or relieved by the delay to resolve it, but the very grossest faults would be pardonable to a man who could write the best of Tintagiles. If all his other work were swept away this alone would place him on a pedestal. How much longer will the English Theatre boggle at Maeterlinck? The Blue Bird has won it, armoured, though, in pantomime toggery, but responsible wiseacres say that, even so, such things are not done twice. We need a change of system to give his plays their true opportunity and a change of heart in our actors. We need the change in public taste which the reading of such plays as these will help to bring about. [1911: From Introduction to Three Plays by Maurice Maeterlinck]

Note Barker directed three Maeterlinck plays in the early years of his career (two of which are included in the collection for which Barker wrote this Introduction). The influence of the Belgian playwright is discernible not only through them and other of his plays but also through his volume of essays on life, art and theatre called The Treasure of the Humble. Echoes of Barker’s advocacy of a theatre of being not doing can also be found in Maeterlinck’s writings. Barker’s Introduction looks at the plays not only to write about the significance of Maeterlinck but also to examine the nature of theatre and the importance of training a new generation of audience if the new drama is to flourish.

Then I saw Chekhov played.

13 AT THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE ‘You’ve missed Hamlet,’ said my friend, as I got out of the train at Moscow. This was – when? A few days before Lent, 1914. I had missed Hamlet and The Brothers Karamazov and the sight of several other plays, by quite foolishly forgetting that Lent would close the theatres. So instead of coming straight through to Russia I had been spending time in Berlin, seeing Reinhardt’s Shakespeare. Not wasting time. I could admire whole-heartedly the full colour, the relentless vigour of the work and much in it besides. While if they missed – those bold Berliners – some of the sweetness of my English Shakespeare, some of his careless tolerance, some of his sheer spiritual beauty – well, people find what they look for and only that! But I was angry; ‘for,’ said I, ‘Berlin from London is a 24 hours’ journey, but when shall I find time again to travel to Moscow?’ Moscow is nearer to me now than Berlin will ever be. What a change it was from the Deutsches to the Art Theatre! Two little talks I had can illustrate it. One of Reinhardt’s men had said to me, ‘We can’t get the actors nowadays – the Falstaffs and Hotspurs, they’ve all turned into respectable married men interested in their homes and politics and what not.’ I said, ‘You should keep them in cages, feed them on raw meat, exercise them on the chain.’ Stanislavsky was telling me a week later that what he always needed was a company of good citizens. ‘Acting is not acrobatics, but the expression of life; and of life at its normal not less than at its moments of crisis. And how are they to express what they do not understand?’ Then I saw Chekhov played.

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I saw The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. Well, I had not believed till then that there could be perfection of achievement in the theatre. Twenty years of rough and tumble stage work in London had driven me not only to accept the limitations of my trade but to exaggerate them, sometimes, forgetting my dreams, almost to boast about them. That infinite variety of human material with which the director of plays must work, varying in itself, moreover, from day to day – a glory to him that he works not with dead stone or paint, an added glory that, as the work grows, it escapes his hands, that his work, indeed, is to set it free! ‘A play never is cast right and never will be,’ was what one said. ‘The hurry of production. Macbeth is due on Friday week, but there are scenes and scenes to get right yet. Well, worry at the worst of these, or the most important; the others must stay wrong.’ I have postponed a play a bare week and my business manager has nearly wept at the cost and the complication. Let me use the space I have only in writing my memories of those two Chekhov plays. Of the others I saw – Molière’s Le Malade Imaginaire, Maeterlinck’s L’Oiseau Bleu, Goldoni’s La Locandiera – I could speak, no doubt, with more critical judgment, since my own English detachment from their originals is, though different, no further a one than Stanislavsky’s. I even saw one performance, liking neither play nor production, and was glad in a way to be able to test my joy in the others by this contrast. But on a week’s acquaintance with the work of such a theatre who can criticise constructively? There may be some value though in the record of a simple surrender. Chekhov in his native place was to be accepted unquestioned. I had studied the plays of course. I had been tempted to try my hand at producing them, but my instinct told me that more material was needed than even the exactest translation of words could supply, and when I saw these two I thanked my instinct indeed. I remember, after that performance of The Three Sisters, re-reading the book in my room at the hotel. It was like reading the libretto of an opera, nothing more. The acting had been the music, yes, as much, I felt, the life and soul of it as that. Not in an ‘operatically’ emotional way, not, certainly, in any sense of individual display, but rather that it was harmonized as fine music is into a unity of effect by which themes and players are given not less value but more and more meaning, not less, as parts of an ordered whole. And, just as music dwells with one, I can still

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recall the interwoven scheme of that first act, its comings and goings, the clustered meal table at the back, the quiet talk on the balcony. Then the scene at night time with its atmosphere of broken rest. Then the last act with its held-back message of death; with that sound of the marching regiment and the gate closing on a separation which is to be death, too, in its kind; with that central figure of the three sisters, who has neither loved nor lost, truest figure of tragedy. If I had to name the most telling stage picture I have ever seen, I think it would be that final moment in the play when, with hardly a word said, just by a bringing together of those three, just by a look in the woman’s eyes, the depth of the whole play’s meaning is bared to you. Who was the chief painter of it? Chekhov, Stanislavsky or the three actresses? As it holds you, and for long after, that is a question you forget to ask, and there is a part of its triumph. But I went to The Cherry Orchard I confess a little eager to note how it was all done. For I had my lesson to learn. Here is work where character counts far more than theme, where at least the strokes of personal painting are stronger, the colour of character more deeply dyed. So I judge from finding that I think of the play and its meaning most easily in terms of its people. One salient effect in my memory of the acting of it lessens all others. He has bought the cherry orchard, he, Lopakin, the peasant, the son of a serf. And he boasts and boasts, while the merriment of that party still jangles in the background. And there stands Madame Ranevskaya at the table listening, till at last she drops into her chair and the curtain falls. Madame Chekhov was playing the part and, released for the moment from the play, I remember I drew a long breath, as one does, in a sort of sympathy with an actress who has been through a big emotional scene. And then I glanced back over my book. There were Lopakin’s speeches printed large and long which had seemed but a clattering interruption to the main passion of it all. I found that Madame had not spoken a single word. Yes, I did want to know how that was done. But these are not tricks, is the answer. The doing of that, and of things like that, is an integral part – of more than the doing – of the very being of the whole theatre. It is because plays are produced there when they are ready – are born, not aborted, as Stanislavsky says – that they are living things, that their power over the audiences (such audiences sitting to such fare) is the amazing power of interpreted life. It is because that Moscow stage is not an arena where some ‘leading man’ carries all before him, not a

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hothouse where the ‘leading lady’ seduces an excited public, that it is not a Russian plaything, but a power in Russia and a part of Russia’s true power in the world. These things come not save by prayer and fasting. Some twenty years of single-minded service can the Moscow Art Theatre look back on. The makers did not search first for profits, they waited quite patiently for that token of success to come. They may sometimes make a failure that their public will applaud and crowd to see – few artists escape that ill-luck. They seldom make a success on which their public turns its back. In their freedom from fear of that is the reward of patience and of the so single-minded service of their idea. What idea? The very simple one that you must think of art in terms not of profit or success, but of life and of normal life – as, if you also wisely think of life in those same terms, you will. And that life interpreted through art has double power. And that the theatre served aright, keenly, sweetly, merrily with passion and thought, its gifts given and taken in their own kind, for their own sake, is not the least life-giving of the arts by which we both live and know we are alive. [1917: From The Manchester Guardian, UK, 7 July; and The Seven Arts Chronicle, US, vol. 2, September]

Note Barker’s visit to Moscow in 1914 made a deep impression on him, and the Moscow Art Theatre replaced the German theatre as his benchmark. He met Stanislavsky, to whom he refers in several articles, and brought back a sizeable collection of photographs and programmes from the trip. Barker wrote about his experience of the Moscow Art Theatre in The Exemplary Theatre as well as in this article, which offers a passionate account of his visit and of the value of Chekhov and Stanislavsky. On seeing The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, Barker wrote: ‘I had not believed till then that there could be perfection of achievement in the theatre.’ He praises the Moscow Art Theatre for pursuing a simple idea ‘that you must think of art not in terms of profit or success, but of life, and of normal life – as if you also think wisely of life in those same terms you will’.

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14 TOLSTOY INTRODUCTION One play alone, The Power of Darkness, suffices to set Tolstoy high among modern dramatists. It belongs to the year 1886. It is the earliest of the plays that he thought worth preserving (unless the little morality, The First Distiller, antedates it). Before this, in 1863, he had written a short dramatic sketch called The Nihilist, a mere charade done for the amusement of some house party; and, about the same time, a full-length comedy, The Contaminated Family, which he offered to the Imperial Theatre in Moscow. They have lately been exhumed and published, but neither find nor deserve place in this volume. The Contaminated Family, however, has some interest to the student of Tolstoy. It is farce rather than comedy, slapdash to a degree, and crude in its stage-craft; but a farce of character, not of mechanical trick, and abounding in vitality, abounding too in humanity and good sense. For twenty years after this he seems to have left play-writing alone; then, during the last twenty years of his working life to have returned to it time and again, if never wholeheartedly. He had reasons enough now for keeping clear of the theatre. And not for him, we may be sure, the timidity or snobbery of ‘closet-drama’; if he wrote plays they were to be acted! But there was the censorship, which could be relied upon to mutilate them. There was the question of fees. Latterly, as we know, he would take no pay for his work; and the Imperial theatres, bound by regulation (a little mischievously too, perhaps), turned over the fees he refused to the improvement of the ballet. This was to make Tolstoy, in his own eyes, a procurer to the devil. Yet he felt a special desire to express himself in drama; how, indeed, should so vivid a medium not appeal to so pregnant a mind? He wrote

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Fruits of Enlightenment for his family and their friends to act; it is just such an occasional trifle as we might expect from the author of War and Peace, a full-fledged comedy with thirty-one characters in it! Given afterwards to professionals, it had, in Russia, much success. Later still he wrote The Live Corpse, but would not have it acted in his lifetime lest, he said, he should be tempted to spend precious time in its revising; the best strength of those last years must go to the preaching of his evangel. At intervals, for recreation, he would work upon The Light Shines in Darkness; but he left it (fittingly enough, as a piece of autobiography) still short of a last act when he died. Another little morality, The Cause of it All, and a rough draft or two, hardly to be put among ‘written’ work, complete the tale. The work published posthumously may seem at a first glance (all allowance made for incompleteness) merely poorer work, the output of a slackened interest and failing powers. We had better not so dismiss it. Look more closely, for instance, into The Live Corpse and its method. It lacks vitality, so much is true. No character leaps to life, as old Matrëna and the rest leap from the scenes of The Power of Darkness. But the work is frugal rather than poor; the bare simplicity is deliberate, and the missed dramatic chances are oftenest things rejected. Tolstoy’s genius has not failed him. Is he, then, turning his back on it of choice? Among the more important matters for which play-writing and its like were put aside was his treatise What is Art?; and his uncompromising answer to the question throws some light upon these later phases of his own art. It is a tremendous treatise. He gave fifteen years of intermittent thought to it and much care to its writing. It indicts as corrupt and worthless nineteen-twentieths of the art we are trained to admire, and his own achievement at the time is dismissed, but for a couple of short tales, in a contemptuous footnote. He is guilty of a little clap-trap. The descriptions of an opera rehearsal and the performance of Siegfried are good fun enough. But Wagner’s scenic pretentiousness can be parted from his music and its drama, tightly though he welded the three. And if opera convention is sophisticated, yet beneath it lies innocent makebelieve; nor are Mime’s tights and the yellow boots of a chorus of Turks more ridiculous, probably, in the eyes of the Angels than were Tolstoy’s own trousers and boots. His history is often suspect in its simplicity. Religious art, he says, did not survive the Renaissance; he had only

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to turn to Spain, to El Greco, Zurbarán, and Montañés to find proof to the contrary. He makes exemplary mincemeat of a dozen aesthetic theories – chopped line enough already! But when did art with any life in it wait upon theory, for good or ill? All this apart, however, the indictment is a deadly one, and any artist might do well to read it through once a year, to be satisfied that his work held an answer to the worst counts in it, at least. Not that Tolstoy will have any answer but his own; he no more asks you to argue with him than does the prophet Isaiah. An artist’s business, he tells us positively, is ‘to make that understood or felt which in the form of an argument might be incomprehensible and inaccessible’; he must aim at infecting people with a feeling which he himself has experienced, and if the feeling is not genuine the effect of it cannot be; there are three necessary virtues, and three only, in artistic conception and expression – individuality, clarity, and sincerity. How true, one exclaims; how simply sufficient; and what a surfeit of rubbish the wind of such a doctrine would sweep away! No artist but for very shame’s sake would contribute his to the rest! But Tolstoy is not content. Real divided from sham, artistic good from bad, he must divide moral from immoral too. For art (he goes on to say) cannot exist to itself alone, it must be judged by the positive good it does or means to do. He allows for mere ornament; but even this is not to please us by its intrinsic beauty, we must find our pleasure in the pleasure the artist had in making it. With this exception, all art must be religious. It must unite men to God; if not directly, then indirectly, by aiming to unite all men in brotherly love without distinction of race or culture. For here, and nowhere else, lies true religion. So we must seek no enjoyment that the simple and unlearned cannot share. We must – in final analysis it comes to this – exchange the Ninth Symphony for a penny whistle. The doctrine of the clean sweep has its own appeal; the most Laodicean1 of us may turn to it at times, weary of subtleties and saving clauses. But this sweeps clean indeed; it sweeps our most admired art away, and much with it, of which this art is but the mirror and the echo; and Tolstoy means it to. He did not on this occasion add ‘lest worse befall’; but he might well have done. For where is the Russia now that prompted his wrath, whose rulers were its betrayers? He had Indifferent.

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a most ‘universal’ mind, but he was Russian to the core; and in the meeting of those extremes lay his strength, in failure to reconcile them his weakness. He fulminated against the men and women of his own class who bought art and degraded it to their amusement, only asked that it might help them forget their forgetfulness of their duty to God and their fellows; and certainly he drew up no practical programme of social reform. But prophets seldom do. Yet the clean sweep proved practical enough when another prophet arose, when the evangel was Lenin’s. Lest worse befall! For a last ironic question: given a single choice between his and Tolstoy’s, which evangel, all consequences considered, would Russia have chosen? Which should we choose? We English do not put ourselves such posers, unless in idle irony. Our Puritan poet and prophet is Milton, who sees a revolution come and pass, and sits out his old age amid the ruin of his hopes of it, in classically detached repose. We still shed aesthetic tears over empty niches and shattered glass (which Milton could not see; nor would he, probably, have spent much breath in mourning them) and are shocked at the verger’s tale of the stabling of horses in the choir. But is the spirit of the men who meant to make sure that neither priest nor king nor any suborned art should stand again between them and their God quite strange to us now, though Cromwell’s statue fronts Westminster Hall? We are not for extremes; and how fond we are of saying it! A balance-sheet – the word has gained a sort of sanctity! We like, what’s more, to itemize our virtues and our failings; and if we seem weak here to try, at least, to do a little better there, for this is how one shows a profit in the end. So Tolstoy’s thirst after righteousness, and – to regain the narrower ground – his vowing of art, letters, and science in Christian humility and simplicity to the service of God, sets us shrugging. We today, in our westward-looking world, are made one with another rather in the bonds of commerce than of Christ, says the cynic. They seem the more tangible. But it still remains to be seen whether an art, and whether the society it represents, too honeycombed by sophistication, will not, for all its affability, crumble and collapse. We may protest against Tolstoy’s remedy; but what is our own? [1928: From Introduction to Plays by Leo Tolstoy, vol. 17 of the Centenary Edition of his works]

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Note Barker’s Introduction assesses the merits of Tolstoy’s dramatic output but argues it cannot be seen in isolation from his treatise What is Art? In commenting on this work, Barker pursues his idea of the moral imperative in art, and writes: ‘The teacher must have his doctrine pat, but the artist sets out to discover truth itself with each new book or play or picture he begins. In a single devotion to that search lies art’s integrity; let him respect this, and though the result may make the simplest show, some flush of a deeper truth may be manifest through it. The search is never-ending, and the search itself is the thing.’

[The plays of Ibsen] began a Reformation; the acting of A Doll’s House and Ghosts was as Luther’s nailing of his thesis to the church door.

15 IBSEN’S CENTENARY In the centenary of a man of action we celebrate the past; whatever the shadow his name still throws, we are passing swiftly or slowly out of it. But the man of letters may be more alive than ever; in his work the essential part of him. Ibsen’s, however, has for us a past besides, more exciting than most of its sort, and significant still. The events of his mainly uneventful life Sir Edmund Gosse has recorded; and, as admirably, William Archer has annotated the plays. Something remains to be said, perhaps, of their advent in England, of their impact on the English theatre; then, more importantly, of the effects of this, that are still visible today. Piety demands the honouring of those that marched in the Ibsen ‘movement’; crusaders, as divergent in faith and aim as crusaders generally are. Foremost among them, of course, is Archer, whose ‘unwearying friendship’ Ibsen himself might well gratefully praise, as in one of his letters he does. Without that courage, unselfishness, and supreme good sense which were Archer’s, the ‘movement’ would have steered a more eccentric and an unhappier course. Neither sneers nor abuse – nor the embarrassing enthusiasms of more perfervid disciples! – ever unsteadied his calm polemic. Sir Edmund Gosse, most urbane of crusaders, must in those ‘roaring’ nineties have sometimes felt mildly surprised to find the lyric poet of his earlier discovery now labelled a teacher of ‘the aestheticism of the Lock Hospital,’1 and himself included among those ‘lovers of prurience and dabblers in impropriety who are eager to gratify their illicit tastes under the pretence of art.’ If ever in those days he turned over old letters he may have smiled with something of the grimness of his eminent correspondent to re-read Ibsen’s thanks for that first introduction to the English public, ‘… whose characteristic practical ability is blended in such a remarkable manner Lock hospitals specialized in sexually transmitted diseases.

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with a purity and nobility of the emotional nature and a generosity of sentiment which makes the whole nation a nation of aristocrats – in the best sense of the word’ – with ‘muck-ferreting dog’ for the mildest of the phrases he might look to find some of the nobly emotional aristocrats flinging about in whatever newspaper he next took up. What gains have we gathered in to enjoy today? Preparing this article, I look down the advertisement columns of The Observer and, but for a little centenary flutter, one might suppose Ibsen’s influence to have died out. It is not so; nor, incidentally, must one confuse the London theatre at this moment with the English drama. It is not so, for his influence is still potent, apart from the acting or neglecting, the liking or disliking of his plays. Ibsen’s social dramas split the English theatre in two, and the breach is not yet healed; it seems, indeed, to be wider than it was before the war. They began a Reformation; the acting of A Doll’s House and Ghosts was as Luther’s nailing of his thesis to the church door, and the fighting that followed, pro-Ibsen and anti-Ibsen, had an almost religious bitterness. From one point of view this was deplorable, yet it was hardly to be avoided. To say that Ibsen brought brains into the English theatre, into a vacuum, which for too long its nature had shown no signs of abhorring, may be a mere rhetorical quip. Intelligent men enough were at work for it; but the tacit understanding was that, entering its service, you left the realities of life and your views about them outside. At most they could be let sneak in romantically disguised. And here was this be-whiskered, spectacled monster, not only outraging the decencies himself (he, at least, was a foreigner, thank God!) but obviously opening the theatre as an arena in which all our native cranks out of Bedlam and all the revolutionaries un-jailed might soon be battling about politics, morals, religion – what a fate for the quiet haven in which such pretty fairy tales were told! The danger to decency and morality apart, how could dramatic criticism survive such a revolution? Could a man be expected to leave a theatre at 11 pm – or even at 5 pm – and make up his mind upon the problems posed by A Doll’s House, or Ghosts, or The Wild Duck in time to write an entertaining column about them for next morning’s paper? (In truth he could not, and still cannot be.) Fortunately, as Ibsen was immoral, you need not argue against him, you had only to shout him down. And surely, surely, the great heart of the British public would never throb to such discordant strains as his!

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For Ibsen not only brought new ideas into drama, he made new departures in the art of playwriting, and so, inevitably, new calls upon the art of acting too. He was the most conscious and deliberate of writers. He seldom discussed his work; but we find him telling his publisher in the letter sent with the MS. of The Wild Duck that in its method the play ‘differs in several respects from my former ones,’ and, he thinks, ‘may very probably entice some of our young dramatists into new paths; and this I consider a result to be desired.’ The parts will appeal, he hopes, to the actors, for they ‘will well repay the trouble spent on them,’ but ‘the study and representation of these characters will not be an easy task.’ [1928: From The Observer, 18 March]

Note Barker appeared in one Ibsen play (The League of Youth, 1900) and directed three (The Wild Duck, 1905; Hedda Gabler, 1907; and The Master Builder, 1911). He wrote this piece to celebrate the forthcoming centenary of Ibsen’s birth (20 March), and in it Barker examines the influence Ibsen has had on the drama and in particular the English theatre. For Barker and his circle, the fight to produce Ibsen, and to produce him properly, was central to the fight to reform the English theatre.

The plain fact was that the coming of Ibsen struck fear into the hearts of the parents and guardians of … British drama.

16 THE COMING OF IBSEN It was delayed till 7 June 1889, and the circumstances were modest to a degree; but the production of A Doll’s House ‘for seven performances only’ at the Novelty Theatre – the name not inappropriate; it is now the Kingsway – proved to be the most important dramatic event of the decade. Ten years before the play had made Ibsen renowned throughout Scandinavia and Germany, his more literary repute already being high there, and after it had come Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Wild Duck and Rosmersholm, each in its kind a challenge and an achievement. But to England, France, Italy and America he was still hardly a name. William Archer recounts suggesting viva voce to some editor (Edmund Yates, was it?) an article on Henrik Ibsen. ‘Who on earth is he?’ was the answer. By the time the seven performances at the shabby little Novelty were over – lengthened to twenty-four, such was the amazing noise they made! – he was good copy at least. He was ‘the talk of London’ – of literary London, that is to say, of the few dozen people who write, and the few hundred who read its weekly reviews. Add a few hundred more up and down the country and we have the common measure of such sensations. But there was an unwonted potency about this one. Something startling had happened in a theatre!

The moral shock Ibsen’s was a powerful and disturbing mind. Encountered in his own tongue – so they say that know – he ranks high as pure poet, but had the theatre not been his battleground his impact upon his time could hardly have been so violent as it was, in England, at any rate. Ghosts, one admits, must have been accounted scandalous in any guise. We flatten our voices a trifle and circumlocute the unpleasanter part of

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its subject even now, unless we are very strong-minded indeed. But why should Nora’s exit from her doll’s house, slamming the door, have given 1889 such a moral shock? In 1880 Germany, no doubt (I admit ignorance of the Scandinavian situation), Herr Schmidt und Frau – when she had helped him into his coat and handed him his hat – must have gone home with something to ponder over. But surely in 1889 England, land of a seven-year-old Married Woman’s Property Act, women were emancipated enough – if they wished to be. Surely that revolution was all over, bar the shouting. But this was just it! There is much conservative virtue in the if; and while in England we take our revolutions calmly, one, by process of law, every twenty years or so, what we do our best to bar is the shouting. Keep quiet about them, and the average man and woman, in a Devon or Hereford village, in the City, in Balham, in Middlesboro, busy with bread-and-butter affairs, will be long in realizing they have occurred. Newspapers are more bought than read, and who can quote last year’s Times? But here was the shouting. The English theatre is the home, not of lost causes and their dignity, but of those that have been irrevocably and blatantly won. When you find a new idea in the theatre it must be current coin indeed. This, partly at any rate, accounts for the shock and the rumpus. There had been women enough in England, before Ibsen’s Norwegian Nora was born or thought of, to whom her poor little revolution would have looked very small beer. Nor, unless they were most provoking – unless, that is to say, they insistently advertised their opinions by their conduct: be a freethinker or a free liver, but not both at once, please! – did society always conspire to hound them down. The Victorians were not consistently Victorian. No age is consistent, except in the smaller history books; and few human beings are, fortunately, until they are dead. George Eliot was not treated as, in more patently shameless times, Mary Wollstonecraft had been. She saw to that; and distinguished ladies, irreproachably married, found themselves dropping curtseys to her when presented. Certainly, you did not give your fifteen-year-old daughter, along with The Mill on the Floss, the information that its authoress was living in sin with Mr. George Henry Lewes. But if you had to tell her story – she was a genius; that fact was an important part of it, and her conduct, therefore, bore no more relation to yours than, say, Cleopatra’s home life, so colourfully pictured by the immortal Shakespeare, did, as the legendary old lady said leaving the theatre, to that of ‘our own dear

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Queen’. This Nora, though, with her little household, her work-basket and her Christmas shopping, her children and her bank-manager husband – caricature though he might be, Norwegians all of them in their outlandish ways! – this was still far too like Balham to be pleasant. And was the flag of domestic revolt to be set flying there?

The Ibsenites But self-consciousness was the bane of the Ibsen ‘movement’. There never need have been such a thing, in its more aggravating aspects, had we only possessed – as we still do not possess! – a sensibly organized ‘theatre for adults’ where the plays could have found a normal place. Not, for a while, Ghosts; here, as we said, there was bound to be trouble. Though Ibsen protested, as did his saner interpreters, that he had no social mission, that he was a poet and so to be judged, this one play had been a deliberate challenge, a dramatic challenge, at any rate. He meant, and he boasted it, ‘to move some boundary stones’, to stake out the drama’s claim to deal frankly with the darkest tragedies of this modern life that it pretended to picture. Significantly, he cast the play into austerely classic form, and behind their mask of commonplace the characters are as heroic as any Greek could have made them. Moreover, he took particular pains, he tells us, to keep the author as chorus, or any shadow of him, out of the scheme. Not for two years, even in the one half Europe that acclaimed him, would any theatre face its staging. Then its challenge was won, and it became the emblem of the drama’s new freedom. In England in 1891, it was given a technically private performance at the Royalty Theatre, Soho; and the wrath of God and the Police was called down by an indignant press upon author, translator, actors and everybody concerned in sullying that chaste district and England’s atmosphere with this ‘drama of the Lock Hospital’1 – one of the choicer phrases flung at it. The Lock Hospital itself – did the critic observe? – happens to stand, a stark sardonic reality, a few yards up the street. The Lord Chamberlain, the last of our autocrats, not merely condemned the play but later committed himself, through the mouth of his Reader, to the omniscience of ‘Ghosts will never be licensed’. But when the war came someone suggested that here, for the many young men we were daily The lock hospital specialized in sexually transmitted diseases.

1

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thrusting into a desperate world, might be a wholesome object lesson upon this subject, which preachers, clerical or lay, so temptation proof as they themselves must seem, find it hardest to tackle convincingly – and the play was acted ‘by command’ to our troops in France! A thousand pities that the English theatre of the eighties was still too feeble of constitution to absorb the new strong wine of the Ibsen drama, for its own sake and for Ibsen’s also. The plays were driven into corners where it was the harder to protect them from the hungry enthusiasms of that intellectual jackalry which hangs – a scurvy pack! – upon the skirts of all new departures. ‘What does the thorough-going Ibsenite care’, asks our Saturday Reviewer when, a little tardily, he gives his attention to A Doll’s House, ‘about works of art whether they be plays, poems, or pictures? He has just one idea, Woman’s Suffrage, Anti-Vivisection, or Social Purity – as the case may be.’ The years revenge themselves upon such gibes. Ibsen and the suffrage, at least, are free of their jackalry for ever; and ‘What on earth was Social Purity?’ asks the bright young savage of today. But there were in fact such Ibsenites, short-haired women (thirty years before the fashion) and long-haired men (some thirty years behind it) who doubtless cared little enough for the plays as plays. The worst was that a mere handful of them, self-consciously intense, could colour and infect a whole audience. One wished them to the devil. Inevitably there sprang up ‘Ibsenite’ actors too, though not many of them, and never the best. And a ridiculous fiction became current – much encouraged by others who had no use for the unwholesome stuff – that Ibsen was easy to act. He is, of course, as easy to act badly as Shakespeare and Aeschylus are, and as the silliest farce is. He was then, for highly professionalized actors, much harder to act well. And perhaps, in their hearts, they knew this. For he asked a humility of approach, and a new schooling in that packed dynamic method of his.

The middle-class view There was just one antidote to Ibsenism, Ibsen himself, and full knowledge of him as the great dramatic poet which above all else he was. But this was not easily imparted; the British public, indeed, has hardly attained it yet. The plays – the important earlier work too, Peer Gynt, Brand and the historical tragedies – were mostly translated and

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published within four or five years. But few people will read plays, and fewer still can read them with much profit. The new ones and those simpler to stage were given sporadic performance. The rest stayed within their book covers, and mostly do so to this day. The ‘recognized’ theatre, with its actor-managers – whose passing we mourn! – would have none of Ibsen. This seems mere stupidity, and largely it was; they did not find much in him except to dislike. But had they thought him a god among dramatists worldly wisdom would have warned them to let him alone. The great Victorian middle-class was then still at the height of its prestige (it has disintegrated since; part is now plutocratic and the other part pretty well ruined) and they and their theatre had only recently become respectable in its eyes. It was their chief paymaster and they could not afford to offend it. Besides, they were middle-class themselves, and respectability was rightly dear to them. Their own social status was improving. If anything seemed solid in the structure of the England of that day – and most things did! – it was this prosperous and contented middle-class; and both interest and inclination brought the theatre to appeal to its tastes and to flatter its prejudices. Why then, one’s own taste apart, should one at the bidding of a small crew of noisy revolutionary intellectuals, insult one’s chief patrons and quarrel with one’s bread-and-butter by producing them?

The critics No, the theatre may be excused. But what of the critics whose business it was to know and welcome the new thing that was the real thing when they saw it. One blushes for them still. For the critic who is patronizingly glad in the Academy ‘to have had an opportunity of seeing a play of Ibsen’s … upon the stage in London, even though the conclusion one draws after having seen it is, that it is not particularly likely one will see it again’. For the in-nominate monitor of The Times, who found A Doll’s House boring – and was within his rights! – but who considers that it suffers from an ‘almost total lack of dramatic action’. For the Scots Observer – the most brilliant review of its time, still remembered and quoted – which was permitted by its Editor to announce, when the first two volumes of the collected plays appeared, that ‘the four volumes promised will be a neat monument beneath which the remains of

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Ibsenism will no doubt be decently interred;’ to decide that Ibsen is not a master of dialogue, nor is it (his) skill in stagecraft that has endeared him to his admirers. It is scarce possible to believe that the author of A Doll’s House and The Wild Duck has spent many years of his life in theatrical management. In the composition of his own dramas he has resolutely declined to profit by an experience of the stage sufficiently long to furnish a dozen ordinary playwrights with technique. Now and then, it is true, he has lapsed into effectiveness…. And as if here were not obliquity enough we are next informed that Ibsen cannot draw character either. Then, for a finish, that soon, when he is no longer dealt with by the critic of morals but the critic of literature, ‘… his later prose plays will pass into the limbo of dead books’. Our much quoted Saturday Reviewer, belatedly noticing A Doll’s House and premising, with suitable superiority, that as to ‘the controversy which has raged round the production’ he does not ‘pretend to have followed it very closely’, goes on nevertheless to discuss the play with comparative intelligence. True, he finds that Torvald towards the end ‘is made to talk in a tone of selfishness which reminds one very much of Mr. Gilbert’s satiric strain. This is amusing enough in its place; but here it fails to effect its object, which is to reconcile the audience to the heartless and immoral conduct of the wife’ – which would seem to show that Ibsen’s main dramatic purpose had still more or less escaped him. Nora’s second act scene with Dr Rank and its pitiful ironies he finds most unpleasant; it leaves him wondering whether ‘we have a licenser of plays at all’. Is it the episode of the silk stockings that so upsets him and Rank’s mischievous little joke about not knowing whether they will fit her or no? Dress Nora in the fashion of 1929 and the point cannot even be made. But 1960 may be shocked by it again, who knows! Lastly he very much wishes that in ‘refurnishing the Doll’s House for England the translator had moved the marriage couch out of the drawing-room’. This must refer to Torvald’s champagne-charged bout of love-making. We can pass by the grosser stupidities, outcries against ‘The Socialistic Nora’ (one would rather have thought that extreme individualism was her failing; but Socialistic was – as Jacobin had been to 1889’s grandfathers, as Bolshevist is to its sons – less a word that meant anything in particular

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than a useful stick for the beating of anyone you might find on the left of you) and against Ibsen himself as a ‘muck-ferreting dog’. It was Ghosts, however, that inspired this last effort in criticism. The plain fact was that the coming of Ibsen struck fear into the hearts of the parents and guardians of the yet invertebrate British drama. There was the easygoing journalist crew who knew – as the actors of the old school did, though neither could confess it – that they were incompetent to deal with him. Once grant there was something in the stuff, clearly it was not the sort of thing you could dispose of in a dashed-off thousand words without danger of making a fool of yourself. There were the critics proper, competent and cultured enough, but resentful of this attempt to cut through the well-baked crust of their minds. They felt, what was more, and they had readers in plenty to agree with them, that on the whole the theatre had better not deal with vexed and vital questions, had better not ‘take itself too seriously’. [1930: From The Eighteen-Eighties, a volume of essays by Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature, edited by Walter de la Mare]

Note This essay, first given as a lecture to the Royal Society of Literature (RSL), shows the Barker prose style at its sharpest and lightest in writing about the playwright he believed gave modern drama its intellectual liberty. Barker starts with the first Ibsen production in England – A Doll’s House in 1889 (‘the circumstances were modest to a degree’) – and proceeds to examine the state of English theatre before the arrival of Ibsen, the merits of the plays themselves, and the far-reaching impact of this arrival (including humorous commentary on the state of the translations and the reaction of the English public). It offers a marvellous sketch of the theatre undergoing shock and change in the period between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Barker, who was RSL president in 1929, contributed to other RSL volumes (‘On Translating Plays’, see pp. 75–84).

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PART THREE

THE FUTURE OF THEATRE

A play is anything that can be made effective upon the stage of a theatre by human agency. And I am not sure that definition is not too narrow.

17 THE THEATRE: THE NEXT PHASE I think there can be no doubt that we are fairly launched upon a striking development of the Theatre. It has been evident for some years in France, in Germany, in Russia, and in Scandinavia; it is becoming evident in England; there are signs of it in America. The evidence with us varies from the movement for a National Theatre to the springing up of bodies of village players here and there over England. The national theatre movement is an assertion under the most appropriate guise of a memorial to Shakespeare that the dignity of our drama should be a recognised part of our national dignity. For some years, by the way, the Irish National Theatre has been an accomplished fact. In Dublin they are asserting their nationality as well through the theatre as by other means. A movement for citizens’ theatres has lately been launched in Glasgow, in Manchester and Liverpool. This, indeed, is mainly a practical demand by the would-be playgoers in these cities for a provision of the current drama whatever it may be, from which theatrical circumstances are more and more cutting them off. Then there is what one must perhaps call the secessionist movement (growing old and almost respectable now), dating from the Independent Theatre, its influence spread by the Stage Society and the various other movements and individualities so fostered. There are playgoers’ societies; sometimes I must own, rather aimless Sunday evening gatherings of people who find cigarette-smoking and a lecture more pleasantly soporific than church. I think though that in the bulk these clubs take their connection with the drama rather more seriously. But the most striking thing in this direction to my mind, is a new

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departure in amateur theatricals. One thinks of an amateur performance (and often only too justly) as the exploiting of vanity under the name of charity. But more and more amateur clubs, especially those manned by young men and women of the student age, are becoming centres for the serious study of drama. I have in mind the Stockport Garrick Society. The frequenter of fashionable West End theatres passing Stockport in the train would scarcely suspect it of being a centre of theatrical progress. Which only shows, among other things that one is apt to look for theatrical progress in the wrong direction. But I find by its last report (I am proud to be an honorary member) that here is a tenyear-old Society, with a dozen papers and debates a season on quite abstruse dramatic problems. It has a dramatic library; it runs elocution classes, and it has to its credit during ten years, the production and performance by its members of nine plays of Shakespeare (including King Lear), two by Sheridan, four by Ibsen, four by Shaw, not to mention a Hauptmann, a Maeterlinck, a Yeats, a Synge, an Arnold Bennett, and a few other trifles; twenty-nine productions in all to their credit – to their very great credit – in ten years. If there were a couple of hundred Stockport Garrick Societies – and why should there not be? – I should feel quite sure of the English dramatic renaissance. For though this sort of influence on the drama and that of the village players (who contribute not a little to the revival of the amenities of country life), may be the slowest in their indirect working, I think they will ultimately be the most far-reaching in their effects, since they are fostering the dramatic spirit in the people themselves; they are creating a perfect audience. Now it is significant that these movements are largely extra-theatrical. They are not fostered by the professional theatre; they spring up often, I am sorry to say, in the face of its prejudice, a prejudice though that tends to pass and will pass I think. But there is evidently a growing feeling that the development of such an art as the theatre cannot be left solely to its professional exponents, strangled as they are apt to be in the net of speculation and competition. We have but lately begun to feel our way in England to a method of establishing and promoting the arts in a democratic state. We see clearly enough that something must be done, that such things belong to good government. For instance: we provide more or less publicly

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endowed colleges for training people in music and in painting. I believe the training is almost always excellent. But in practice how does it work out? We educate a man to appreciate and interpret the beauty of Bach and Mozart and Beethoven. Then he goes out into the world to make his living. How? Unless he is a heaven-sent genius (who would have got on without the training anyhow) he is, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, reduced to teaching in his turn; and at anything higher than the extremest drudgery of that game, the endowed institution (quite rightly) sweats him out of existence, while all of his art he values most rusts from disuse. Or he will play in a theatre orchestra. You know how much attention an audience pays to music in a theatre and the sort of music you consequently get there as a rule. Worse, he will have to join one of the little bands that play for hours and hours a day at smart hotels and restaurants. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please remember the next time you hear these tawdry waltzes and rag-time polkas being ground out to assist your digestion and obliterate the pauses in your chatter that you also are being the means of inflicting upon men who have studied and love great music the insult and the torture – there is no subtler spiritual torture to an artist than to be forced to degrade his art. We teach thousands of people to draw and paint and model and then turn them out – to what? Apparently with the idea that they will paint pretty genre pictures which, while some of them in expensive gilt frames may hang a month or two in the Academy, no one will ever buy. But as to making some organised use of all this ability in art; as to decorating (for instance) our public and semi-public buildings – why, it is as much as we can do to get them washed. I know of a band of young men, who are decorating public buildings in London for the wages of housepainters’ labourers. Subscriptions have to be raised to pay for putting up scaffolding. It is becoming a serious question of conscience whether we have any right to turn out pupil after pupil to this barren, disheartening waste of No Opportunity. Literature. There is still the tradition that good work may be as well done in a garret as elsewhere. And this much, of course, is true: that pens and ink are cheap; a writer can write in a garret; publishing is not over costly; the quantity of books that get out is amazing, and the quality not perhaps on the whole so bad. But this also is generally true, that serious literature is all but barred except to men with money.

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And the theatre. A reason in the past why nothing was done to organise the theatre was that the powers that be were ashamed of its existence. It is amusing to remember the almost desperate efforts of dead-and-gone professors of literature (they are not all dead and gone, by the way) to conceal the fact that our great idol was anything so vulgar as a playwright. I wonder how Shakespeare himself would have taken the curious compliment that his plays were fitter for the study than the stage. Odd praise for a playwright when you come to think of it. The day of that sort of literary professor is over, we hope; just as we hope that the day is at least waning of the theatrical manager, who, ignoring from his other point of view the fact that Shakespeare wrote plays, kindly proceeds before directing one of them to reconstruct it. As we cease to be ashamed of Shakespeare the playwright, we discover equally that it might be to our advantage to see something more of his work as he meant it to be seen. I emphasised just now the fact that the Stockport Garrick Society had performed King Lear. I emphasised it for the reason, among others, that I, who have been connected with the theatre for twenty years, had until a few months ago never seen King Lear – had never had an opportunity of seeing King Lear. I ask you to appreciate the monstrosity of such a confession What would painters and lovers of painting say if the half-dozen best pictures in the National Gallery were kept locked away for fifty weeks out of the fifty-two? It is a part of my trade to read plays and visualise their stage effect as I read them. I had read Lear much and fondly, but I was electrified at things which actual performance threw into relief. I had hardly suspected the wonderful craftsmanship of the scene between blind Gloucester and mad Lear, when the dialogue only reinforces the poignancy of that perfectly devised meeting. I need not suppose that anyone here is much better off than I in his practical knowledge of Shakespeare. Therefore are we not neglecting and wasting our noble inheritance of his plays quite shamefully? We cannot get Shakespeare as we want it by private enterprise. I could bring figures and figures to prove it. But let us take the simplest sort of evidence. We never have; and what signs are there that we ever shall? Nor if we could get it, do I think we should accept it; for Shakespeare is not only a national inheritance but a national responsibility. That phrase is acquiring a real meaning. We are making the state a governing entity in ways undreamed of a

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generation ago. Why should the state assume sufficient responsibility for our various artistic activities to establish a Ministry of Fine Arts, under which existing public and semi-public institutions should gradually be co-ordinated, in much the same relation to it as local authorities now are to the local government board? One thing certain; it would be the immediate duty of such a ministry to build and open a national theatre, if only for the sake of Shakespeare’s plays. And why should not such a theatre be opened free? The suggestion, if not practical, is a perfectly serious one. We have a free National Gallery and a free British Museum Library. A free National Theatre would always be full – if the performances were good enough – and full of people who really wanted to see the plays; for, unlike those other places, a theatre is not a convenient place to flirt in and not a very convenient place to sleep in. It would only cost a few thousands a year to have the classic drama there like a drinking fountain in a public park – free refreshment to any one who was really thirsty for it. I assert that it would be cheap at the price. For I don’t think one sufficiently realises the enormous influence of the drama. It is primarily an emotional influence; and it is principally exercised on that section of the people most open to emotional influence – men and women between the ages of seventeen and thirty. That is the stretch of life when released from the tie of one sort of education, the other sort is in full swing – education in moral ideas, in conduct. This is gained emotionally; through art, through fiction, and, very largely, from the theatre. My practical suggestion for the great cities other than London that have free libraries and museums and picture galleries is that if they will not think thus of a municipal theatre, they should at least put it on a level with the swimming baths, build and equip at the public expense, looking for the running expense to be met by the people who use it. It is becoming obvious that some such plan is the only hope for giving provincial centres the current variety of good drama. With the great increase of travelling the rich people of a big town are more and more apt to do their theatre-going in London. The filling of the cheaper seats only will not support good plays. One pleads from time to time for these public theatres, and worthy citizens reply that there is nothing they would better like to see – if a millionaire or two could be induced to provide them. That doesn’t suit me. In the first place because I dislike cadging public institutions from

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rich men. It is a most unworthy habit we have got into, it seems to me. Tax it out of the rich man’s income by all means; that’s another matter. Of course if there’s no other way of getting such national work done – well, though our pockets are pretty full of this sort of pride already they must hold a little more. But in the second place I want the rich man’s money for something else. I want it to run the theatre which is sometimes called – by the people who don’t like it – the Advanced Theatre, sometimes even the Intellectual Theatre; and that is one of the most abusive epithets that one Englishman can fling at another. One should generally adopt the bad names that enemies bestow, for they so often become titles to fame. But there’s a lonely feeling about the term Advanced Theatre which no provider of public entertainment wishes to cultivate; and, really, Intellectual Theatre gives me a headache. No, if I had to name the movement in drama (better unnamed) that I care most for I should call it the Normal Theatre. That is a just description of the endeavour to produce normal plays about and for normal people, capable of normal success under normal conditions. To take conditions first. If we are to trust the experience of every other country in Europe, this sort of drama can only be run in repertory. To take a parallel from literature, this approaches the conditions under which normally good books are produced and sold. A publisher looks for a moderately numerous public to welcome them, and after for them to depend upon a slow and steady sale. For, roughly, there are two sorts of literature – that one buys to read and throw away, and that which is on one’s book-shelves to be taken down from time to time. A condition of the Normal Drama’s existence is that it can be on the shelf of a theatre, so that, as from time to time a reasonable number of people is likely to want to see it, it can be taken down without overwhelming trouble and expense. Now, managers must make their theatres pay. Failures are ruinously expensive, so that a success must be made to play and pay as long and as well as possible. And a manager nowadays is – to take the literary parallel again – in the position of a publisher who can only afford to produce a book at all if he thinks that about a hundred thousand people are likely to read it, and, moreover, will be forced to withdraw the book from circulation altogether as soon as its readers drop below eight hundred a day. We can imagine what would become of English literature working on terms like that. The wonder to me is that the drama

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gets on so well as it does. If the commercial test were strictly applied, if there were not unselfish enterprise and artistic self-respect in the question too, be assured that it would not. During the last few years I have been interestedly and disinterestedly into the figures of various repertory theatre schemes, complete and incomplete, and I have come to the conclusion that a repertory theatre cannot be made to pay in the commercial sense of the word. The Normal Drama needs endowment. All but its actual existence is endangered by the lack of it. I believe that it will anyhow push on to its ultimate recognition and reward. But, the conditions are difficult; the struggle is unfair. The men who are working at it have in most cases less distressing, if less fascinating, but more remunerative, activities open to them. It will push on, I fear, crippled and incomplete, warped perhaps by too constant failure, unless it can be organised and established in health and safety. What do I mean by the Normal Drama? It is easy enough to distinguish, I think, and difficult enough to define. The Normal Drama is noticeable for its Puritan spirit, for the fact that, good-naturedly, portentously, industriously, or light-heartedly, it somehow makes for righteousness. And by that sign more than any other, I judge that the theatre is to be a power in England. Puritans have fought Art; especially they have fought the theatre. If the result of this battle, as of many others, is that the combatants are to join forces! Puritan art has dominated many chosen English minds; a Puritan Theatre, democratic, direct in its appeal, might be a formidable power. But, of course, the obvious test of the Normal Drama is in its normality, in the fact that it does try to present, not an unprejudiced view of life (that would be too tame for anything), but an undistorted view. No, this is not Satan rebuking sin. I protest that the struggle to capture the theatre, now occupied in the interests, on the one hand, of the young lady who will sacrifice her dinner for the play, and on the other of the gentleman who cannot receive it except at nine o’clock on a basis of seven (hurried) courses with wine – to capture the theatre in the interests of the average man. The average man raised to his highest power, perhaps; but – I protest – the average man and woman. For it is their interest that must be consulted (and the sooner the better, if, as I think, the theatre is marked out as the art of the immediate future, of the next hundred years).

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This may well be so, for the theatre answers to so many of the conditions and requirements of modern life. The simple fact that it is a sociable art, bringing people together, is one point in its favour; since the domestic history of the English middle classes during the last hundred years consists largely of efforts to break up the English home, in the sense of dragging its inmates of an evening away from the narrowness of their own fireside. Incidentally, let us notice what an effect the shortening of working hours may have on the art and literature market. The theatre a man would choose after eight hours work is often not the theatre he chooses after ten hours work; which, again, is sometimes more like the theatre chosen by a man who has not worked at all. If our workers had a little more leisure and our idlers a little less, our taste in art might level up considerably. But in its very nature the art of the theatre is most apt for the expression of modern life. For it is a complex art, concentrated and strenuous in form. And the art of writing a good play is as the art of living a fruitful life nowadays, pre-eminently the art of selection. Society during the last century has undergone a great change. Our distinctive effort now is to realise just what that change has been and to adapt ourselves to it. Does not such a state of things more than any other seem to call for interpretation by the vivid art of the theatre, and more especially for that objective side of it, comedy. I see the theatre of the average man weighted in favour of a comedy which shall reflect and clarify, honestly and humorously, many aspects of the confused life around him. I think he will have no use – already he begins to have little use – for a theatre which would persuade him at every visit that life consists – not even of the four elements or of eating and drinking, but of lovemaking and its consequences; that its comedy is incomplete without love triumphant; that there is no tragedy but love in ruins. The average woman certainly begins to be bored by the never-changing picture of herself created for no other purpose than to be made love to; when she is past it she may indulge in scandal to develop the plot. Again, can life not be interesting if lived on less than £5000 a year? Is a duke only dramatic when viewed from the angle of a shop-girl? I say that this is the distorted view of life. This is the abnormal drama. The Normal Drama is – comprehensively – all the rest. No, this does not open up an arid, educational prospect. Nothing is more stimulating and amusing than comedy at its most modern normal

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and advanced to those who are quick-minded and healthy-minded enough to be amused by it. No, I do not exclude romance. I personally can no more take to the low-pressure romance which is sentiment than I can drink fizzy lemonade. But romance as Kipling sings of it – when one has lost the 8.50 train, romance bringing up the 9.15 – who would not welcome and be ready to thrive on the oxygen of it? Yes, I do want beauty – all the beauty that we can honestly pay for with truth. If this Normal Drama is to develop healthily among us, several things are necessary. Let me name four. It must be put upon an economic footing. No art – the art of the theatre or any other – can flourish upon speculation and by cut-throat competition. It must be free of censorship and be able to draw on a highly trained body of actors. The fourth thing needful – and it isn’t really, but it would be helpful – is a little more open-mindedness in most of the critics of the Normal Drama. I am puzzled by the general critical attitude towards the Normal Drama. Is it the same in all other arts? Does the critic universally look on himself as the guardian of a sacred tradition that a play or a picture or a piece of music shall be this or that and no other because (apparently) in the near or remoter past some special revelation was accorded us to the effect. It is not so that I view the arts or read the history of their progress. Does the critic admit progress in the arts? If so, does he slyly maintain that a necessary condition of that progress is that he – if he is a musical critic – should only discover that Lohengrin is worth listening to just as Wagner, wearing with his heroic struggle has reached the harmonies of the Rheingold? If this is necessary it still seems to me unfortunate. Artists, I am sure, would be most willing to admit progress in the science of criticism upon any terms, if only they could discover some signs of it. In the drama we are constantly referred to the sayings of a person called Aristotle. But the drama is alive, and about Life there is nothing final to be said. If I am told that this treatise of Aristotle refers not so much to plays themselves as to the immutable laws of human psychology which must always govern dramatic art, then I reply that, except as between Aristotle and his reader, I mistrust it even more. I mistrust all dogma, I mistrust it especially in the hands of uncreative men. Are we emancipating ourselves a little at last from religious superstitions to be caught in superstitions about art. It is unthinkable. A dogma as

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a rule is used by its adherents to save them the trouble of thinking and feeling for themselves. Now, an honest artist re-tests his principles every time he puts them into practice, and a critic should, as far as possible, keep unprejudiced enough to do the same. I protest that in Art nothing but its physical boundaries should be taken for granted. To strike at the living future of an art, most of all in the name of its dead past, is a heinous sin. Surely the sign of life in art has always been the revolt against tradition, the determination to remould the old forms which will no longer perfectly contain or express the new spirit. It is very certain that the theatre of today presents tasks that the theatre of yesterday did not. New tasks cannot always be accomplished in the old ways, and it is an ill service to those who undertake them – this terrorising either in the name of Aristotle or another. No sincere artist is ever wilfully perverse or obscure. He has enough trouble without that to find out the exact method of adequately expressing what he has to say. But find it out he must – find it out for himself; no one else’s method, however admirable, will quite do. He must find it out by failure – buying his experience – possibly never succeeding altogether. But that is the burden of the artist. And helpful criticism, to find out where he has failed and why, must first of all have the sympathy to discover just what it is he is trying to do. That, I suggest, is the burden of the critic: to leave the cocksureness of dogma and its foot-rule measurements and to keep an open mind. The next time you see in the papers that such and such a piece is ‘not a play,’ please book your seats at once before the management is compelled to remove it; first, because you may, open-mindedly, find it very interesting; secondly, because it is more than likely to be a piece of mine. I will ask the next critic who tells me that to explain in return just what a play is and all that it is and to explain it without reference to any authority whatever. A play is anything that can be made effective upon the stage of a theatre by human agency. And I am not sure that definition is not too narrow. But it remains a helpful definition, calculated to attract to the work of the theatre men of originality and force. That is why, incidentally, we must go on breaking new ground, enlarging the boundaries of the drama, fitting it for every sort of expression. When we deserve it a new dramatic genius will arise. He will neither break laws nor obey them. He will make laws and there will happily be no questioning. And he must find the theatre ready for him. Meanwhile, do

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believe that we lesser men are doing our best to prepare the way and doing it of very set purpose. [1910: From The English Review, vol. 5, April–July]

Note This is the published version of a lecture Barker gave in 1910 to the Times Literary Club on the growing movement for a new theatre in countries across the world, specifically in France, Germany, Russia and Scandinavia. He writes, ‘It is becoming evident in England; there are signs of it in America.’ He surveys the scene, and includes amateur groups such as the Stockport Garrick Society, which has a play library and has produced Shakespeare, Sheridan, Ibsen, Shaw, Maeterlinck, Yeats, Synge and Hauptmann. He examines the role of the state in a democracy in promoting the arts and sciences and deals particularly with the importance of education and the need for public or municipal theatres. He argues for repertory theatre free from censorship in order to ‘go on breaking new ground, enlarging the boundaries of the drama, fitting it for every sort of expression’. Breaking free of Aristotle and dogma in the theatre, Barker makes the then revolutionary statement, ‘A play is anything that can be made effective upon the stage of a theatre by human agency. And I am not sure that definition is not too narrow.’ The article also appeared in the United States.

Without the power of expression, all knowledge is ineffective.

18 RECONSTRUCTION IN THE THEATRE Amid much reconstruction, plans for the future of the drama are emerging, and are concerned, not with the theatre of the West-end of London – where the problem is purely financial – but with enterprise which may transcend the professional theatre altogether. They have indeed nothing less in view than to help make fruitful that general impulse to self-expression of which the primitive democratic art of the drama is one of the readiest outlets. In practical terms we are promised a crop of what, in the United States, are called ‘Community Theatres.’ There, in many centres, have been formed bands of semi-amateur players, who equip themselves, nevertheless, very professionally, work constantly and seriously, the product of their work being considerable in quality and quantity too. It is worthwhile, perhaps, to note one or two of their characteristics: (1) Much of the impulse to create them has been generated by the practical study of drama in the big American colleges. (2) They tend, very healthily, to be self-sufficing; to make their own costumes, paint their own scenery, sometimes to write their own plays. (3) Less healthily, they may incline to be ‘precious.’ (4) Making a virtue of necessity, they are apt to hold up the ‘Little’ theatre to admiration for what are, after all, only its rather vexing limitations. Now, if the spread of such a movement here is only a sign that the English people are inclining once again to look upon the drama less as a purchaseable show and more as a pastime, in which they themselves can be active – if, for instance, a time is in sight when a band of players will be organized in a village, or small town, or among a set of young

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men and women, much as a cricket team is organized now, and be looked on no more strangely – the movement is one to be encouraged. Well-wishers of such an enterprise – if they are practically minded – may find the following suggestions useful; indirectly, also, they indicate both the line of advance the theatre will probably be trying to take and the dangers that beset it. Help may most usefully be given: (1) By providing a site or a building (the simplest sort of building will do; in villages appropriate expenditure on a barn may give good results), or by guaranteeing necessary capital expenditure on costumes or scenery. The profit of these theatres will be social, not financial, but it is equally an economy to find for them – as for any other sort of factory – an efficient plant, so that energies may be given untrammeled to the work itself. The ready-made brick should not be provided, but neither should bricks without straw be asked for. (2) By guaranteeing the cost of a nucleus of professional help. A ‘whole-time’ organizer or director is probably necessary if any continuity of effort is to be made; a cadre of professional players constantly employed, round which the more shifting amateur company could be formed, would be an even greater strength. Two or three would make all the difference to the speed and precision with which productions could be prepared, while with five or six it would be possible to cover the whole range of drama. If these professionals were engaged by the year their cost should not be prohibitive; it might well be counted in the current expenses that the takings could be expected to meet. Many young actors and actresses would be glad of a better opportunity for training than any dramatic academy can provide for them, and the professional stage, which sadly lacks well-equipped recruits, would finally benefit. (3) By connecting (when the well-wisher has authority to do so) the work of the theatre with the educational life of the district. To speak of the village theatre only, the use that could be made of a company of players established in some centre of 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants, in touch with all the villages to a radius of five to ten miles, its individuals available – upon occasion to advise upon and coach the school plays; the company itself open to perform, say, one of Shakespeare’s histories or comedies in any school room (the thing is quite practicable), or to take part in festivals and pageants – these uses and others do not need to be insisted on with anyone who is facing the problem of reviving the dignities of English country life.

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If the full achievement of one of these theatres were merely to keep country folk entertained through the winter it would not be negligible. It is in the large share to be taken by the people themselves in the work of the theatre that its chief service to the community lies. We have been apt to think of the drama, in its lower reaches, as mere tomfoolery, in its higher as a Cinderella-sister to literature. But a recognition that the art of acting is, in externals, the art of public manners, and in essentials the art of self-expression, would relate it far more closely to social life. This recognition is innate in the upspringing of these companies of players. But, however natural an upgrowth from the soil drama may be, it needs no less than other such products its refinery of thought, which it should find, surely, in our universities. Here what is needed is something like a Faculty of Personal Expression, which would have within its ken the neglected arts of rhetoric, dialectic oratory, the beauty of the spoken language, and would take into account certain aspects of music and even of dancing. It would see that – the content of their subjects mastered – our lawyers knew how to plead, our parsons to preach, our teachers to lecture, and that our public men, who are of all classes now, did not cut a sorry figure in debate and on the platform. These are not superficial accomplishments, such is the obtuseness to which the neglect of our native powers of expression has brought us. Without the power of expression, all knowledge is ineffective. It may be merely depressing to find an educated individual remain half-articulate; but an inarticulate community should alarm us. For we are committed to democracy. If its expression is to be limited to the retention or dismissal of a few hundred bureaucrats by the periodical making of crosses on ballot-papers, it seems likely that from time to time the people will be revenged on that sham by expressing themselves catastrophically, in strikes, in revolution. We must have subtler methods, a living state of fully articulate human beings from whose very diversity can best be moulded the concord of accepted purpose. A high ideal, and a hard task, for which we should not decry the smallest help. And if this movement for the revival of drama among the people can be made to bear its little share of the burden, does it not deserve support? [1919: From The Times, 20 February, ‘From a Correspondent’]

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Note Subtitled ‘Up from the Soil’, this article outlines Barker’s vision for the future of the theatre, which he sees emerging in what is called community theatre in the United States – groups of players concerned with an enterprise that may transcend the professional theatre. ‘Without the power of expression, all knowledge is ineffective’, he writes, and looks to those groups that want to ‘help make fruitful that general impulse to self-expression of which the primitive democratic art of the drama is one of the readiest outlets’.

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19 SOME CURRENT DIFFICULTIES Why many gallant efforts at reform have failed Let us analyze the artistic conduct of a few efforts to reform the theatre, and discover why, with all their good will, based as they are upon a contradiction, they cannot serve as solutions of a difficulty. As essays in discontent they are admirable, and as evidence of a readiness to do anything rather than keep on grumbling even more admirable. But they had better not lay claim to essential virtues. To begin with, there can be no continuously fruitful combination between the efforts to sustain a play-producing establishment as a sound competitive business enterprise and the desire to make a theatre a home for dramatic art. Financial results may be as good – or as bad – in the one case as the other, and even the artistic results may look, on the surface and for a time, alike. But, aims differing, counsel will always be divided; and, indeed, the outlook, intentions, and the methods employed towards these separate ends should differ absolutely and totally. The efforts to reform the theatre during the last fifteen or twenty years in English-speaking countries can roughly be split into two classes: those that have had enough capital and those that haven’t; ten per cent, perhaps, have been of the first class and ninety of the second. And one besetting danger has been that the capitalist, measuring the probabilities of success by the amount of money provided, and yet in his heart rather doubtful of the whole affair, has been apt to demand immediate results, financial or artistic, preferably both. This demand has, of course, led to an inordinate expenditure of capital energy,

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difficult to sustain. For a theatre worthy of its purpose is a complex living organism – a thing of growth. It will grow, moreover, in seemingly unpredestined ways and at uncertain pace; so many influences does it owe life to. The strain of trying, god-like, to create at a stroke a full-grown thing, the impossibility of avoiding serious mistakes when neither time nor energy can be allowed for their correction, must lead to an exhausted smash. One is then told that the theatre wouldn’t ‘pay,’ or that it wouldn’t ‘work.’ Of course it wouldn’t. Good heavens, a fisherman spends more patience to get one trout; and, what is more, it is the fishing he enjoys!

The cautious capitalist Then there have been the enterprises of the cautious capitalist, who watches his expenditure with care and plays for the safety of each step he takes. These have endured better, but naturally at the cost of a limitation of enterprise, and, as a general consequence, of a low standard of work. For some degree of comprehensiveness is a necessary virtue in a theatre, and you cannot, moreover, retain talent in your service unless you give it good opportunity. Into this category would fall most of the ‘short-run’ theatres, which by misplaced courtesy are dubbed ‘repertory.’ There is something, of course, to be said for the short run, though nothing that is unequivocally in its favour. It enables a theatre to produce a number of plays; and, if the audience could be perfectly mobilized – if, that is to say, any theatre could rely upon the constant and immediate support of a definite number of people for every production – the system would be so provokingly simple and so financially sound that its artistic defects and limitations would be too easily forgiven. But the system’s rigidity is its undoing. On the artistic side this is patent from the beginning. On the business side, why ever expect to achieve such a mechanically perfect thing? And if the business ministered to the art as it should do, instead of art being asked to fit itself to business requirements, the attempt would never be made. But business has the whip hand; and the scheme seems so thrifty, and if you have only so much money and do so want to do something relatively worth doing the temptation is great. We, however, must concern ourselves with the absolute objections to it.

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Practical difficulties for ‘practical’ managements Should such a theatre have a permanent company? The answer being inevitably Yes, several difficulties at once arise. If the size of it is to be suited only to plays of short casts then your choice of productions will be seriously limited. But if you enlarge the company you must keep members of it idle perhaps for weeks at a stretch; and, apart from all other objections, good actors will not stay with you to be kept idle. You may adopt the ‘practical’ compromise of calculating the size of your company by the length of an average cast and trusting to special engagements to fill the gaps that a larger cast would show. But in the first place you will be lucky, indeed, to find good actors waiting on a rank like cabs, ready for long rehearsals and a short run (in any case a most thriftless way of engaging them); and in the second a revival of the particular play would be very difficult, for you could not expect to make the same special engagements over again, and a second posse of strange actors would mean rehearsing anew. In practice the solution of this problem is evaded by the avoidance of plays that involve this difficulty. But a policy which dictates the avoidance of good plays is a pretty poor policy. Then arises the question: how short are the short runs to be, and are they all to be equally short? Much hinges on the answer. The length of a run must be settled beforehand. At least if that is not a rule made to be only very occasionally broken, if the plan is simply to be one of taking off the failures and letting the successes run on, what management will be so consistently strong-minded as ever to limit the tide of success once it is flowing? And a course of short runs would come to mean that the theatre was involuntarily specializing in failure. The outsider may say that a management with a well-mobilized audience should, after a while, be able to guess pretty well the amount of attraction each play could be trusted to exercise. On the contrary, the more experienced a manager the readier he will be to own that he can’t. And it comes in practice to his trying to strike a safe average run which will not expose his failures to too many empty houses, nor cheat his successes of too many full ones. Further, as he must be tenderer towards his failures than towards the robuster success which, cut back in its prime, can be trusted to shoot up as strongly in a timely revival, he will rather set out to precognize a run that’s too short than

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one that’s too long. And so it happens that in this sort of theatre the preference has been mainly for a fortnight’s, even for a week’s, spell of performances. Here we touch an ineradicable weakness. If you are to change your bill so often, your productions must be scrambled and your actors shamefully overworked. The old stock company’s way out of this difficulty was to hand to the actor, a while before the season began, a list of the parts he would play. With most he’d be familiar, for old plays made up about 80 per cent of the programmes in those days. And the usual attention given to a new one can be gathered from the letters and memoirs of many an infuriated author. Today, with matinées to consider, a fortnight yields not more than ten rehearsal days, ludicrously insufficient (with the laugh on the wrong side of the director’s mouth) for any play, old or new, if the time is to be used for anything like collective study. In stock company days it was the necessity of doing the job in about half the time that brought into being the curious technique of acting (misnamed tradition) more suited to dancing the lancers (which, indeed, it much resembled) than to the interpretation of a play.

The way out of the difficulty There is, it is true, one method by which plays – new or old – can be produced under these conditions. The principal performer will be the prompter. The actor’s study of his part will be the getting of a rough idea of the character and deciding what are to be its salient characteristics. The company will walk through the play once or twice, marking in their books where they come on and go off and their whereabouts on the stage at stated times. And that will be all. At the performance they will stand peeping at a door till the prompter from his central box beckons them on. The prompter will read the words sotto voce, they will repeat them loudly after him; he can signal them if need be to their places, pantomime their business; and, relieved of all such responsibilities of memory, they can fling themselves into expressing the spirit of their parts. If plays must be produced under such conditions this is, perhaps, the best plan. It may be in any case the best. It may be that we make altogether too much fuss and take too much trouble over the job. Can we get all that is worth getting out of dramatic art by leaving it at the

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level of a living Punch and Judy? Possibly we can, in which case this essay need not have been written.

Old methods and new drama The short-run theatre is in fact a short-sighted, if heroically meant, attempt to provide for the new drama by the old methods which the new drama itself rendered obsolete; an attempt, therefore, logically foredoomed to failure. And if the logic of the situation cannot convince us, it is open to anyone’s observation that each step the drama takes towards a finer artistic freedom makes the task of the new stock company – for all its goodwill and for all its disguising as repertory – more hopelessly difficult. Does this seem a needlessly virulent attack upon workers in a good cause? A called-for blow on their side, rather; for they cannot bite the hand that feeds them, and it is, of course, the financial feeding that is most often at fault. Of all the stupidities that pervade the theatre financial stupidities are the worst and really the least excusable. In London and New York more money is thrown away in a year in theatrical speculation and extravagance than would suffice to endow half a dozen genuine theatres. That is a truism. A truth, though, that still needs enforcing is that most of this money goes in things quite inessential to plays and their acting: profit rentals, advertisement, licence fees, water rates. Even as an industry it is neither well treated nor self-respecting.

The good businessman and the theatre But an industry it is, with its practice and ever-growing precedent; and a paying industry, or people would not meddle with it. Bring a scheme, then, for the establishment of a genuine theatre before any average body of businessmen, and by instinct they consider it in the light of the dominating industrial conditions, for all that these may be demonstrably both the fruit and the root of insensate extravagance. And they cover their ignorance by such commercial platitudes as ‘The theatre must be economically managed.’ Excellent. But outline to them the genuine economy of a genuine theatre and they stare. ‘That needs a great deal of capital. The return will be slow, but will it be certain? Why not

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a simpler scheme, a more modest beginning?’ If it were a factory they meant to build they would realize easily enough that money must be spent on equipment, on experience even, not to be returnable in a year or so. And the theatre, a higher organism than the factory, needs more liberal consideration, not less. If the enterprise is to be public-spirited then the good businessman will opine that while, of course, it must not be expected to pay in any commercial sense (cent per cent, or total loss, he will mean by that) it should, to justify its existence, be made to ‘pay its way.’ But that does not take us very much further, for it is its way that is in question. There are, of course, many very uncommercial ways of paying. It would be inconvenient, perhaps, to make a theatre as free to the public as is a picture gallery or a museum. Theatres are not places (even if galleries are) into which people should be encouraged to wander idly. But suppose performances at twopence, fourpence, and sixpence a head, which, though crowded to the doors, would still stand very thinly on the credit side of a balance-sheet – would this justify the existence of a public-spirited enterprise? Or, again, if we put the value of dramatic art before public entertainment, is it better to perform a good play to a half-filled house than a worse play to an overflowing one, and, if so, why not a better play still to a house quite empty? Are plays always – or ever – to be judged by their immediate appeal? And if the theatre is a public-spirited enterprise what claim has a minority audience to consideration? These questions may be academic and may seem foolish. But it is only by answering them and their kin, and by analyzing his own answers, that the good businessman will be brought to a reasoning, if not reasonable, attitude towards an attempt at the founding of a genuine theatre. And if its promoter does not at this stage push controversy hard he must not grumble later if, when his first streak of luck fails him (and most of these schemes have, at least, a short attack of success – a sort of measles), he fails. Though there will follow from this a worse result, at which we may all most legitimately grumble. For from every such failure the whole cause of the theatre suffers. And a promoter may rightly argue, as he fights for conditions or against the misunderstanding of his aims, that far more is involved than his personal success or the prosperity of a single enterprise. The one thing needful to begin with is that everyone concerned should agree upon what it is they are up to. No one will propose to

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give art a free hand and a Fortunatus’1 purse to dip into. Whether they ought to may be a question, though it is a good case to argue that artistic self-sufficiency would, in the long run, do little but harm. And no one, presumably, will suggest that such a theatre’s success should be judged merely by its money-making powers. Crowded houses are exhilarating, but the cause of the crowding must be any management’s concern. What is wanted is a determinant.

The integrated audience This can be found, it would seem, in the audience – that essential part even of the artistic completion of a play. But by no means in the haphazard collection of people that we now describe by the term. If the audience is a completing part of the play’s performance obviously its quality and its constitution matter. As well, almost, cast a play haphazard as suppose that anyone dropping in can, by virtue of paying half a crown or half a sovereign, carry through his passive part of the performance with credit. There is an art of listening. Five minutes’ test will distinguish a good audience from a bad one; and numbers have nothing to do with it. Now instinctively we write our plays and plan our productions with an eye to a perfect audience. Or, let us say that we should; for it’s obvious that to do a thing less finely than you can do it for fear of misunderstanding is a fault in art. Therefore, not the least of the tasks of any theatre is to develop out of the haphazard, cash-yielding crowd a body of opinion that will be sensitive, appreciative, and critical. And when such an audience has been formed it can be regarded as an integral, if a not too rigidly calculable, part of the theatre’s constitution. Certainly a manager must lead his public’s opinion, and not look to be able to follow it. He had better, indeed, force the pace at times; go boldly ahead with but a few to follow him, leaving the laggards to catch up as they can, even at the risk of having to stop and wait, or at the peril of taking a wrong path. It would be possible, of course, so to organize an audience that they could make positive choice of plays and the like; but inadvisable. The business of a government is to govern, and no manager should let himself be robbed of his initiative: it is the touchstone for all his A popular figure from medieval folklore who was given a purse by Fortune that refilled whenever he took money out. 1

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other qualities. Besides, this audience, the constituency of his appeal, need not be thought of under a single aspect. It will show divisions of taste more or less constant, definitely attributable sometimes to the various sections of the community for which it is the theatre’s duty to cater, such as schools, bodies of teachers, and students, or societies interested in drama from one point of view and another. But even as a whole – and, perhaps, better as a whole – such an integrated public can act as a determinant. One supposes, be it noted, a theatre doing such a quantity and variety of work that a confirmed playgoer may find fairly full satisfaction in his attendance there. The theatre, in fact, by its policy must look to form its audience’s taste, but after that need not be ashamed to regard it as a guide. And as a determinant such a public should surely content the good businessman engaged in an enterprise of public spirit. He will not have genius rampant and irresponsible, with nothing less mighty than the universe to appeal to. He will not expect the easiest entertainment of the greatest number to be his theatre’s aim. But upon the basis of an integrated audience he can budget. The budgeting will always be a tiresome business, and for some time must be a very chanceful one as well. It is a great drawback to the English-speaking theatre that, while its art has been to some small degree fostered, hardly any practical knowledge of its proper economy exists – economy here meaning housekeeping, and not more of a tyranny than a good housekeeper needs to exercise. It has always been so much easier to apply the recognized commercial standards and to salt them with altruism; to say, for instance, to the well-meaning manager: ‘Go ahead, and you may lose on your classical swings just what you can make on your popular roundabouts.’ But this is an even more vicious method. Why should a selfrespecting roundabout do more than support itself? Oh, but if it doesn’t the swings are to be starved; and they will grow more than ever exiguously and forbiddingly classical. Then, as a remedy, are we to make the roundabouts more popular still? Such a lazy-minded policy leads one deservedly into muddle and loss, and one returns to the brutal directness of commercialism with relief. Nor can one save trouble by laying down golden rules. They are to be rattled off by the dozen; all excellent, and not one that cannot be dangerously misinterpreted. It is simple, and true enough to be worth

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saying, that a theatre, if it is to do public service, should be given the freedom of the city, released from rent, rates, taxes, the cost of light and police and the necessity of advertising. These things the public should be ready, directly or indirectly, to lose if they are to profit by the theatre. It is worth noting that the smaller the scope of a theatre’s work and the shorter the time the estimates cover, the greater will be every cost in proportion. And it follows that every limitation of necessary equipment is an extravagance, not an economy; and every expenditure upon temporary needs equally an extravagance. If there is money to burn at first, and you accumulate a large store of scenery and clothes; a little later, their effective appeal to your public having been made, you are left with the obligation to go on using them; and this will tell probably at the very moment when that backwash of enthusiasm comes, from which all such enterprises suffer, and when you’ll be needing, above all things, to set free inventiveness and fresh ideas. One lays up this sort of treasure only to wish that moth and rust would corrupt it sooner. But there is one rule which, if not pure gold, has at least been tried in many fires. Always from the beginning pay the market-rate for everything and everybody, and if by good luck you get anything cheaper, write down the difference in pencil on the debit side of your accounts. For the deadly backwash of that first wave of enthusiasm sweeps in among workers as well. If it were only the individual that had to keep himself up to the mark! But the collective courage of a theatre is a very uncontrollable thing, and if, at an unexpected and difficult moment, it may be sapped by a loss of energy, which for some reason is no longer to be given for nothing, but for which there is no proper provision of pay, from that moment, perhaps, disintegration will begin, unobserved. And most likely it will not be observed until too late to check it. Vice versa, sell nothing under the market-rate; or, if you do, see that the buyer suitably acknowledges the bonus, and that somebody pays the full price and knows what they are paying for. No complimentary seats should be allowed unless the cost of each compliment is written plainly somewhere. No privileges to patrons and guarantors and the like. If they want special seats for first performances, let them be paid for, in one way or another, at the right rate. More enterprises have been ruined for the petty convenience of their avowed supporters than all the hard words of their true critics could stimulate to success.

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The pyramid of policy But confront a manager with his theatre and its problems in the concrete; and now he will be wise to build the pyramid of his policy from the bottom up, ideals at the top, the base of expedients tested and tried. He must know first what he wants to do; he should be allowed time and some money for sheer experiment; but, above all, he should ask patience from his supporters and authorities while he assembles his resources stone by stone. He will be wise if he makes neither attempt nor promise to bring the theatre to normal running conditions in less than three years. He should see that every experience is made illustrative. Let the theatre be set its various tasks. He can size up the gross cost of each with some accuracy and, at a guess, the likely return. Prize plays and their like should have special funds set apart for them. A play which is being studied that term in the city’s schools must certainly be performed in the theatre. Very well, put the gross cost on one side. Whether the children see it free or at sixpence a head, and how the account is balanced (balanced it must be), is a matter of convenience. But the incidence must be made clear to everyone concerned. The theatre’s main task is, of course, to stand as drama’s representative with its audience. Now, a library – to which we have compared our repertory of plays – does not buy one book here and there by a recognized author: it has their works on its shelves. The theatre moves more slowly and under obvious disabilities, but the parallel should hold. The whole canon of Shakespeare, for instance, should be brought by degrees into the repertory, certainly of any purely English theatre.

The theatre’s duty towards the drama No rhetorical urging should be needed to enforce upon any publicspirited theatre the all-obvious duty of representing Shakespeare to its audience. But more is implied. The theatre’s attitude towards its great dramatist should be its attitude towards all drama. It should have truck with none that cannot hope to be admitted – however distantly – into this view. The business of any true theatre is, indeed (the simile serves yet once again), to build up a library of living drama. Now the limitations forced upon it with the cost and complexity of its

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machinery, not felt in the library of books, must make it more chary rather than less of being cumbered with experimental stuff. And so it demands a scheme of selection which, however else it may be evolved, can certainly not be dictated by the opportunism of a vague wish to please anybody and everybody. Even the selected audience whose judgment may be respected will only form itself in response to a programme. There is no such thing as public taste. The democratic world of culture is, but for some few strongholds of purpose and hope, lost in the anarchy of pleasure-seeking. Haphazard armies of fashion march hither and thither under irresponsible and unknown leaders. What should the theatre do here? It can only exist as a stronghold; self-respecting, even self-sufficient, single-minded. Seek out, hat in hand, bowing and scraping on its behalf, that personified monster the Public, and what does one get? Halfpence; and, more deservedly, kicks. Coax the monster if you think you can into a reasonable and articulate mood, and ask – not what he wants, for the answer is ‘Find out,’ and many have been the lives wasted at that task – but ask ‘How should this theatre of yours stand for the drama?’ and with the utmost reasonableness he will reply ‘Why ask me?’ But, politely ignoring him, use the theatre according to the drama’s own honour and dignity, and he, unmastered a little, will soon find his use in it, if pleasure and use are to be found. A director can find tasks enough. There is the Shakespeare canon, there is eighteenth-century comedy, there is now not one school, but many, of English-spoken drama. There are the French and Spanish, Italian, German, Scandinavian schools, all worth their place. One could plan out with ease a three years’ programme – leaving spaces for plays still to be written – which should have a consistent purpose. It would not be an especially educational programme, in the sense that plays would be done chronologically, or according to any other inappropriately logical method. Nor yet should it be arranged as an elaborate exhibition of drama; not as anything so soulless. Its purpose should be the articulation of a body of plays and their acting so ordered and balanced as to make of this theatre a living thing. The peculiar property of the dramatic art is that, by virtue of its human constituents, their show among themselves, and our close touch with them, it can stand as a symbol of that larger life of sympathy given and granted, that extension of personal power, the membership one with another,

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which is civilization’s only sure achievement up to now. First has come realization of oneself; then follows – a far and for long, indeed, a feeble cry – realization of one’s neighbour: this art’s contribution to the second effort, being her childlike hints that neighbour and self are very much alike, especially neighbour.

The theatre’s duty towards itself Therefore, as both epitome and mirror of our social life, a theatre’s first task is to realize a self, compacted, as a man’s mind is, of heritage and circumstance. Then, without fail, a spirit will inform it. And so, with full title, it may take its stand as a living unit of that social world of man’s creation – which is, as we begin to know, the grouping of groups and powers as much as of individuals, the complex following on the simple – its full task being just to make friends. The problem of this enlargement of the laws of individual association to a comprehension of groups and powers is admittedly a pressing one in these times. Why are mobs blackguardly? Why do men deteriorate in crowds? Must an assemblage be less moral than the individuals that compose it? Surely the art that offers to elucidate a little these confusions cannot be a negligible one.

Drama and democracy The problem of social life is the problem of the balance of obligations; and for the theatre, an epitome of social life itself, and at its truest a radiating centre of almost personal imaginative life, this is the key problem. The obligations to an audience are undoubted. One would like to see every theatre that takes its task comprehensively a popular theatre, crowded with all sorts and conditions of people: for its public should be comprehensive, too. The drama has always tended to be a democratic art; and an audience class conscious to the point of selfconsciousness is inevitably a bad audience. At its best it is apt to be a feeble audience in its passive politeness, or in its noisy ebullience, according to the custom of its particular class. Old theatrical hands will tell us to take it as a sure sign of success when, at the end of a second or third act, strangers all over the theatre turn and talk to each other like

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old acquaintances. The touch of art has succeeded in making that little assembled world kin. Culture is a bond, knit by the common response to the thousand small voices with which the world of created thought daily calls to us. And therefore the contribution that this art of the theatre in particular can make to the comity of society is a very real one, insisting, as in its nature it does, there and then upon the common response, the mutual understanding. If it is true that the happiness generated in an audience of all sorts and conditions of people, who are at one only for this hour or two in their liking of a play, but who are made one, we may almost say, for that time by the play’s virtue, is fuller and richer than any that will spring in an assembly whose bonds are but a commonly inbred prejudice towards life and the world, then here is indeed a service done to democracy. In the end, no doubt we get the government, the church, the theatre we deserve. We go to the theatre, people say, to be amused, to be taken out of ourselves. No doubt; but into what? There is no world but this to write plays about. We can but inhabit it a little more fully in our imagination. We are too modest, though. It is not out of ourselves the dramatist must needs take us, but rather a little further in. There are no possessions of romance and beauty which are not our own, and the secret of appreciating art is first to believe this, and then, perhaps, to have a little patience. We may turn from a play because the life it paints for us is too familiar and too despised. Can the alchemy of art transmute it to some value for us? To none greater, in the end, no doubt, than our own metal’s worth allows. But in that mysterious process – through the lively symbolism of a play’s acting, the actors’ surrender to the dramatist’s idea, the triple sympathy then set up – we do gain a vicarious experience that may almost stand for personal illumination. And art’s teaching, heaven knows, is not more fallible than life’s. [1922: From The Exemplary Theatre, sixth section]

Note This is the final section of The Exemplary Theatre (see pp. 35–50 for the fifth section, ‘The Production of a Play’). In it, Barker confronts the difficulties that

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face any attempt at serious reform in the theatre; as he writes, ‘In the theatre, the path of compromise is hard.’ He is firm about the social aspect and states, ‘We get at last, no doubt, and not at very long last either, the government, the church, the theatre we deserve.’ Barker looks idealistically to a time when the playhouse will be ‘so intimate a part of the people’s life’ and ‘as much their own as is their church or their club that no one will mark the boundaries of its influence’. The paths to such an ideal, he concludes, are many.

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Here is a theatre for which any dramatist of today … may well sit down to write.

20 AMATEUR INTEREST IN DRAMA There is an art of the theatre and there is a theatrical industry, and it is absurd to expect that the interests of the two can be continuously identical; it is difficult, rather, to see why nowadays they should ever coincide. Consider for a moment the current conditions of the industry as they are dominated by the London market. High rents, high rates, special taxes, high wages, high prices, the pleasure-affording public largely such a shifting one that its attraction demands much expenditure in advertisement and agency fees – what wonder that the man of business, trying to deal fairly with hard-to-come-by capital, protests that he can only afford to traffic in goods which will attract the greatest number of people to a highly purchased enjoyment of them in the shortest possible time? But now there is another theatre towards which the most practical dramatists may advisedly turn their eyes. It is not – it can never be – a financial lucky-bag; no syndicates will exploit it, landlords and ticket agents will regard it with indifference. Today, truly, is its day of small things. But on that account alone it is proverbially not to be despised. Besides, the small things are multitudinous; and they show promise of many and various morrows. Some twenty-five to fifty years ago there began (you may date its beginning according to your particular sympathies) a so-called renascence of the English drama. If the birth was painful, the bringing-up has not been easy, and the problem of putting this new heir of the ages out into the world (so to speak) is yet to be solved. There seems little present chance of a solution upon what are called business-like lines, and even less in any appeal to the state or to private wealth for endowment and subsidy. If a national theatre will cost half a million, a

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national theatre may go hang. If to show school-children Shakespeare is to burden the rates with a few thousands extra a year, he may abide for them in his printed and annotated prison (save for the chance that a teacher or two of talent may be able to rescue him unaided), and the children may abide in their weary wonder at all this blank versifying and conglomeration of queer words being called, of all things in the world, a play. And what cannot be conceded to such a respectable fetish as Shakespeare it will certainly be worse than a waste of time to advocate for any merely contemporary art. Besides (we shall be told) Shakespeare’s plays had no cockering1 at their birth in the shape of subsidies and official patronage, and they flourished in native unconstrained vigour. But where are now the dramatic nurslings of the universities, where even is rare Ben Jonson? The argument is impeachable. But why argue? For it is at least true that, whatever endowment may or may not do, talk keeps no art alive. And it is also a fair question whether the demonstration of a dramatic renascence made during these last twenty-five to fifty years by a few hundred faithful workers, supported with intermittent enthusiasm by a few thousands of the public – subsidised, in a sense, indeed – has not failed. Well, one might admit it, so far as to admit that the great heart of the people has remained untouched, that today one may stop half a dozen men at random in the streets of Newcastle or Huddersfield and question them upon the achievements of the modern English theatre, to find them not only abysmally ignorant but absolutely indifferent about the matter. But there are failures more fruitful than success; and we, the public, may perhaps face the London manager’s balance-sheet of a three years’ consistent trial of the ‘serious’ drama with more equanimity (though naturally he will not!) if we will look elsewhere for the victory in that rather heart-breaking struggle. It is certainly true that under present industrial conditions the best modern drama cannot flourish (apart from a few strokes of luck and by a constant searching for novelty and still more novelty) in any representative variety in the West End of London, and that this inhibition takes reflexive effect throughout the country. There is the failure. The success lies in the upspringing all over England of bodies of people so hungry for a little simple, wholesome dramatic art, that, denied it by the professional providers, they are ready to see to the supply themselves. That they now Pampering.

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know what they want, where to find it and how to bring it to full being – these are the true fruits, so far, of our English dramatic renascence. We have no national theatre, and the best of our modern plays – each having had, be it said, one hard, if not long, run for its life – lie, most of the time, dusty on bookshelves. But there is hardly a town or a district of villages in England today that does not hold some collection of young men and women who, with their workaday world behind them, set out, now and then, to adventure together into the wider mimic life, for the deeper sympathetic experience that they can find in this simple art of acting. Amateur dramatic societies, it is true, have existed for years by the hundred, with their seasonal exhibitions, in which ‘local talent,’ for the ostensible benefit of local charities, matched itself against London originals in the latest procurable London success. But these new associations have different aims and are of a different temper. They have as a rule much contempt for the commercial theatre, more indeed than befits their ignorance of its difficulties and its dormant virtues. They read the modern ‘bookshelf’ drama and discuss it, rightly enough, with very critical tongues. But their chief anxiety is to stand clean upon their own theatrical feet. The surest of them may disdain to derive their drama from anything but their own expressive selves; they will both write their plays and act them, paint their scenery and make the costumes, be their own audience too if necessary. Here, though – for all the theoretic merit – is but a small circle to revolve in. Others are content to turn their eyes outward for plays at least. But they will often look, if they are wise, for plays that are not modelled to the complexities and the sophistication of the professional stage. These – only the very best, of course! – might be good enough for them, but when playing becomes the question, too much of a good thing besides. It is true, also, that even the most radical writer, having reasonably enough an eye upon the conditions of his work’s first employment, does tend to a set and limited scope of form and content – to one, moreover, that may be both positively and negatively unsuitable to groups of amateurs. For material resources they cannot command; but, on the other hand, they are free from professional obligations as to subject, length, balance of cast, and half a dozen other minor things. But here is a theatre for which any dramatist of today, with his eye upon the immediate tomorrow, may well sit down to write. In collective importance, in the persistent or recurrent interest it may show in his work, it can already rival for him the more exacting and capricious

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professional stage. And it promises to develop in these two directions, among others: one, of variety of interest, for another, in positive tastes. To have an audience that liked everything would be the enterprising manager’s ideal. To cater for a public that tolerates anything, as long as it is mildly entertained, is debilitating to a degree. This, though, is one of the curses laid on the London theatre. The integrated audience (such as it was) has now broken up, with the upbreaking of many things more. And the manager, trying to divine the public taste – searching the entrails of many plays for the purpose – can but come to the despairing conclusion that, as there is no such comprehensible thing as a public, neither has it any definable taste. Wherefore, if he have none of his own, he revolves through chaos to prompt retirement on a run of luck, or bankruptcy. But these smaller, closer-knit units of so-called amateur interest in drama can form concrete opinions, can also, to some intelligible extent, express them. They are the right soil, then, for experiment. A failure to please is not a catastrophe. Moreover, the selective process by which some band of enthusiasts has just separated itself upon this matter from its neighbours (later to recruit from them) will continue in the discovery of its own particular capacities for adventure. And drama opens a wide field. [1922: From the Preface to Little Plays of St Francis by Laurence Housman]

Note With a new title, this is an extract from Barker’s Preface to a collection of plays by Laurence Housman, a friend of Barker’s and a collaborator with him on the play Prunella (1904). Barker takes the opportunity to explore the distinction between the art and the industry of the theatre, writing that not ‘even the most enterprising London manager’ would be expected to pounce upon this sequence of plays setting forth the life of St Francis. There is, however, another theatre towards which a dramatist may turn his eyes, and Barker identifies this in the renascence of English drama in the world of the non-professional theatre. He pays especial attention to the forming of a new audience as an integral part of the process. He believes Housman has written a drama for such a theatre and for such an audience.

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21 SPEAKING TO THE YOUNG You may, it strikes me, find something incongruous in a discussion of art at a time when this most destructive of wars is still raging. You cannot, believe me, find it more incongruous than I do. But artists and men of letters must resign themselves under such conditions either to going ahead with their own work and admitting its momentary uselessness or to finding other sorts of work altogether – which they will probably do worse than the next man. The personal aspect of the matter is, of course, not important, except to the one person. But to be of no present use and to have to remember that the past is of no real interest – for all their polite protests – to younger people who have never known it, is to find oneself driven forward upon the future, even though one’s juniors may then reasonably retort: ‘But as you will never know that, what concern is it of yours?’ I pray their forbearance. It is possible, too, that our experience – which is the name we give to the record of our mistakes – may be of some indirect use to them, as a shadowy bridge between our past and their future. We elders look, according to our natures and moods, sometimes a little wistfully, sometimes, for their sakes, a little ruefully, towards that future.

A moral exercise Art is not mere entertainment, although it can be most entertaining. It is a moral exercise, although it need never be depressingly solemn. It should leaven the daily life of a community. It frees men’s imagination, and controls it. If it is of good quality itself it sets a standard of quality,

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even in the simplest things. ‘Quality’ is its watchword. There will be the difference between a nature it influences and one to which it means nothing that is the difference between crude iron and tempered steel. Doubtless our purveyors of theatrical fare are ever assiduously seeking the ‘new idea’ – which to profit by need be neither so new nor very much of an idea – and variety at any cost. But when this is found it usually proves to be only superficial, shop-window variety, behind which the old monotony persists. The actors are still called on to sound – to a slightly different tune perhaps – the same few, well-worn notes, out of the wide gamut of expression that they could command: the comic, which ‘gets a laugh’, the erotic, the pathetic, which, dwelt on, earns an occasional sniff. If these are all to which the ear and the taste of an audience are attuned the rest may as well be left dumb. Why should an actor – and how can he! – cultivate to the fullest an art that he is only called on to exercise so crudely and scrappily? Let him follow where popularity leads and learn only what applause can teach him. He will be ‘successful’, that being his aim; but with half his capacities coarsened by over-use, and the rest atrophied for lack of any. Science even now offers us, for the turning of a switch, the voice of a singer, the sound of an orchestra – and whether it is the voice of the dead or the living, whether the music is being made now while we listen or was recorded years ago, who is to tell? Every movie we see and hear, however new, is still a record of the past; whether it was taken a month or ten years back will soon make little difference. And there is the television, where that man may sit at home before his own silver screen and switch on the picture of his choice; not merely the latest thing, but, if he is in the mood, that which once charmed him. And except for the relief simply of going out and getting away from home – an important factor, however, this! – here is one likely prospect for the great entertainment industry. Its products will be brought to our doors with the milk and the groceries. And if the traditional, old-fashioned drama comes to selling itself yet more extensively for a well-paid petty share in this, it can look, of course, to a similar prospect. And why should it not? Why (it will then be asked) put up these cumbrous and costly buildings and mobilize actors in them night after night to parrot a play through, when science enables us, after taking all the pains needed to prepare the best performances possible – a single one sufficing – to record it and preserve it? Until now, the finest performances of the greatest plays

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have been condemned to share the human mortality of the actors that animate them. The marvellous movie has shown us, surely, a better way. Let us then have done with the theatre as we have known it and set to work accumulating libraries, visual and auditory, of records of the drama. The art of Titian, of Verrocchio, of Beethoven is thus preserved to us, and already the great musicians of today are more widely known by records than in person. It sounds the right sort of thing for a scientific age. What would be wrong with it? I want to absolve myself from any suspicion of prejudice against the movie. I have never been concerned in making one; but I am a confirmed movie-goer, and have been so from the days of its restful silence (but for the buzzing of the projector and the anomalous clatter of the piano), those tentative days when movie-makers took plays for their models very much as the earliest railway builders made trains of horse-carriages fastened on trucks. Since then they have found their own formulas, and the technical advance has been amazing. The movie can, of course, do things that the theatre can never compass, and it is seen at its best, possibly, in doing them. The best movie-makers, I should suppose, think and plan chiefly in terms of pictures from the beginning. What is there, if anything, that the old-fashioned theatre can do and the movie cannot? And here, you may say, I am bound to be prejudiced. I learned to enjoy the theatre before the movie was born. The millions who now learn to enjoy the movie before ever they sec a play acted – if they ever do – may equally be disappointed by the cramping conventions of the theatre. There is no absolute standard in such matters, and I do not attempt to dictate one. I can but note the effect made on me and do my best to explain it. I find that what I look for and like best in the movie is technical achievement. Striking photography will do much to atone for the banality of the scenes photographed. But pleasure in spectacle is quickly gratified; and it is less readily renewable, one seldom wants to see a movie twice. The movie-maker seems to be for ever trying to reconcile his public’s craze for novelty with the financial safety of the accustomed thing. And a craze for novelty will be the curse of any art. Now spectacle plays a small part in the theatre, for more than a modicum of it can only depreciate the actor’s share in a play. It is in the actor and his acting that the pulse of the drama beats. If the movie, then, is to make the drama its own, it must do as well by the actor as the theatre has done.

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So far, of course, it has not; and to deny this is merely to show oneself insensible to what the actor – given opportunity – can do. To make him part of a picture, however cunningly our attention is focused on that part, is to give him only the fraction of an opportunity. And ‘registered’ speech, assimilated to the picture, must surely be under like limitations. Machinery may capture the moment at its best both in sight and sound; but in doing this it stereotypes it, and robs the actor of his natural power over the audience. It comes to this, I think. Accomplishments and externals of all sorts can be reproduced; but the human factor in the theatre involves something more. Upon what does the power of the actor over his audience rest? For a very short while upon his looks, nor to a great extent upon how skilfully he does what he has to do. For longer, perhaps, on the magnetism of his speech. But ultimately it seems to rest upon something that he is. Other qualities may attract an audience, but it is by this that he will hold them. Can the movie find means then – as it must if it is to seize the theatre heritage – by which he can exercise this power to the full at second hand? That is the question.

A drama of enduring worth The prestige of the art of the theatre ultimately rests upon it being some sort of guardian of a drama of enduring worth. Such a theatre would save plays of quality from oblivion; its company of actors and directors would put their continuing vitality to the proof. It could enlarge the scope of the drama’s general appeal, triply limited as this now is, by the sort of play acted, in the way it commonly is acted, in the narrow section of the public appealed to. During the four hundred years and more of the modern drama’s existence many plays of many sorts have been written. Most of them, no doubt, were – as most plays apparently ever are – imitations of imitations of what was not worth imitating to begin with, never had much more life in them than was given them by their first actors, and certainly would not respond to any attempt to revive them. Then there are the plays, still full enough of vitality, but only written to be of topical interest (though sometimes your author writes better than he knows). Are these worth reviving? Are they capable of real revival? Can we, with the best will in the world, come to appreciate the wit-combats of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost? Luckily, we say, the speech

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about the king’s evil in Macbeth is easily omitted. Do we genuinely enjoy Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules? How much do we not inevitably miss of the satire of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People? But a very small change turns ‘topical’ into ‘historical’ interest, and that can be a positive addition to a play’s value nowadays. Never, I suppose, has a sense of the past been more widely cultivated and under so many guises as in the last few decades. Various aspects of history, political, social, economic; biographies by the hundred; diaries; correspondence; facts fictionalized and frank fiction; centenaries celebrated weekly – have we ever shown such interest in our ancestors before? It is easily explicable. We stand at a fateful juncture in the world’s history, and we are at this very moment pledging ourselves – we democratic nations in particular – to be more prudent shepherds of its future than we have proved of its past. No better reason is needed for our interest in that past, and in other than the doings of its kings and ministers; since it will not be in their hands only but as much and more in ours, strengthening them, that the fortunes of the future, we believe, will lie. Its nature allowed for, there is no better witness to the life and temper of the past than drama of the time. It varies in directness and worth. Bartholomew Fair, Love for Love, An Enemy of the People, are pictures of such sections of life as the theatre can easily accommodate. They are seen, of course, through the eyes and coloured by the humours of Jonson and Congreve and Ibsen; but these were not unreliable interpreters, and contemporary audiences seem to have recognized some likeness to life. Shakespeare’s histories and Roman plays provide, naturally, no positive evidence of how the Wars of the Roses were actually fought or Antony betrayed and self-betrayed; nor could the theatre in any case accommodate more than mere symbols of such events. But they tell us what Shakespeare, and the public he swayed, thought and felt about these things, about kingship and empire and the passions they nourish. And this is perhaps almost as well worth the knowing. Students of history, no doubt, gain something indirectly by simply reading the plays. But unless they are students of drama, too, this will be of uncertain benefit; and even when they are, of no more – to use a worn comparison – than is a music student’s reading of a score, when he might be hearing it performed. Nor in any case is an art something

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to be cultivated for the sole benefit of its students. The language of music and drama, and of painting and sculpture, should be a part of the cultural currency of the educated world. The drama’s incomparable vividness – its pictures painted in the human medium of the actors – lends to the past the actuality of the present. Further, it sets us asking: when does the past begin? By the clock, it is beginning as you read these words. But of what does the past consist? Essentially, by less mechanical measurement, of the things we have done with; while what is still alive for us and within us is therefore not to be reckoned in that sort of past at all. There is a famous line in Jonson’s tribute to the dead Shakespeare – ‘He was not for an age but for all time’ – which we commonly read as conventional hyperbole (to which, incidentally, Jonson was not very prone). But it can be given a more significant meaning; and, certainly, three centuries and a half of time by the clock have told little on his value to us. Shakespeare did not write such plays as Bartholomew Fair. He preferred to set his scene in times or places where his imagination could range more freely. Yet he would give its figures familiar traits so as to ‘bring them home’ to us, and thus create that combination of the actual and the highly imagined in which lay his unique strength. Hamlet’s Elsinore was, in particular, no far cry from the London of its staging. Bottom the Athenian weaver and Dogberry the constable of Messina might be met at the next street corner; Oswald, the sycophant upstart from about the Court of King James, is posted back intact into the England of King Lear; and Cleopatra wears a stomacher and plays billiards. These incongruities passed unremarked, since (apart from his audience’s carelessness about such matters) the life of the characters lay, not in those circumstantial things but in the ideas and emotions informing it, which, whether or no it proves valid for ‘all time’, is certainly so – and has already proved so – for more than one place and age. It is astonishing how little out of touch with Shakespeare and his age we are. Upon certain questions, certainly, the Elizabethans felt as we no longer do, about kingship and its privileges, for instance; nor are we haunted, as they were, by the memory of a thirty-year civil war. If we are to appreciate the histories we must take with us to the theatre a little historical sense – but a very little will serve. We do not think about witches quite as Macbeth did, nor about ghosts as did Hamlet. But his feelings about his mother and uncle would be ours, and his inward doubts and misgivings make a pattern for many a

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man’s today. Nor does it take modern costume to make the politics of Coriolanus modern enough. What are the qualities in Shakespeare’s plays that do most to keep them alive today? He was no faultless artist nor great philosopher, nor, by direct means, a moral teacher; and devout attempts to fasten these titles on him fail. But he was a most remarkable observer; his mind, like a sensitive plate, faithfully registering every impression it received. And he was a poet – which meant among other things that his eyes saw what commoner eyes could not see, beauties they missed; and saw, beneath the surface, into men’s more occult thoughts and motives. He lived and wrote at a time, too, when there was unusually much of this sort to be divined. For it was one of England’s most revolutionary and formative ages, when the full effect of the belated impact of the Renaissance was first felt there, and men, in a freshly kindled awareness, were trying to come to a freer understanding of the world and themselves. Since then we may seem to have changed in so much. We have – in the clothes we wear and the way we live. The external world has changed. Air travel and radio now have their part in its organizing. England is no longer a mere little island but the hub of a great commonwealth, and the vast terra incognita somewhere to the west of those ‘still vext Bermoothes’1 has become ‘these United States’. We have changed in the things we do: but how little yet have those things changed us in what we are, in our ways of thinking, our moral standards, the religions we profess, our weekday creeds besides. And these are the things with which – comically coloured, tragically intensified – Shakespeare’s genius dealt. We are much the same men. Caius Marcius and Menenius and the Tribunes are in politics still; and Hotspur (if without his blank verse) and Fluellen and Pistol are to be found on every battlefield. Yet change may be upon us, more of a change than lies in dress and travel and talk. A clever invention or so will not effect it, but men’s views of the world and of themselves do change.2 Mediaeval man – to call him so; say the man of the Crusades – gave way in time to Renaissance man. It is to his kingdom that we ourselves have belonged; and this may now in turn be giving way to another, built upon six or seven generations of an everencroaching industrial, mechanical, scientific civilization, culminating in Ariel’s reference in The Tempest to Bermuda. Barker adds a footnote that he wrote this before the ‘disclosure’ of the atomic bomb.

1 2

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two world wars. What the spiritual product of this will be – what type of man will emerge from its marvellous confusions – we do not yet know. Despite history’s warnings he may be for complete revolution, and may relegate very much more than Shakespeare and his code to the things of the past that he has definitely done with. And in times of catastrophe changes come rapidly; so not a few of us now living may live to see the beginnings, at any rate, of such a change.

Enduring art The drama has more of the attributes of life itself than has any other art; and, like life, it passes. Yet even now there is this aspect: its unique credit as a co-operative art, still being built up over the years by the accumulation of a body of plays which have in them an enduring worth and vitality. But for these and the standard they set, the actor’s art would still be abiding at about the level of the Commedia dell’ Arte. It finds its higher ranges only in such plays as these. For a parallel, consider what the credit of a musician would be if he contented himself and thought to content his audience with nothing but the music that is written today mostly to be forgotten tomorrow. There are those of us who cling to our heritage (that being all we have), believing in the continuity of man’s long progress, no matter the stumbling, up from the beast, in today’s debt, therefore, to yesterday, and in the value to the present of that still living past. Art of all sorts has a dominant share in keeping that past alive, in making it a part of the present. Think. A tune is played centuries ago, a sequence of notes breathed into the air, no more than that; or a poet writes a verse. Melody and verse are still alive today, and men are moved by them. Drama is generously privileged in this. And if it can vivify the past – which is not past – for dwellers in the present, it can equally preserve the present for the future. The good play of today will have its vital value for a tomorrow, not too far in the future, also. With this, then, we clinch the claims of a true theatre to a worthy place in the world. It can, as no other art can, help to keep us vividly conscious of the continuity of our civilization. And without this continuity, without, what is more, the consciousness of it, is it too much to say that no civilization can survive? The theatre also serves its purpose the better, when it can be made to serve it at all, even because all parties concerned must collaborate in the work. The dramatist does his share once and for

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all. The actor’s contribution is continually renewable, and should, to his audience, seem ever to be freshly made. This presents him with a problem in the practice of his art – he only shares it, however, with all interpreters: how to combine mastery of his material with apparent spontaneity in the use of it. The problem may be insoluble in its entirety. It would occur in such a theatre as I envisage, for it belongs to the finer aspects of the art. The part to be played by a critical audience is a passive but important one. Its obligations are simple: to go to the theatre otherwise disposed, now and then, than for mere digestive entertainment and no more; to learn to like things which are good of their sort, whatever the sort, and to submit to no others. Some small amount of learning is involved; but the essentials of it can be slipped almost unnoticed into the regular course of our education, if appreciation of the arts in general is admitted once more to be a part of this. From which standpoint it is that I have been trying to discuss the use of the drama, a use depending from first to last upon our treatment of it as a normal, sane, and ordinary activity, into which may sometimes be breathed extraordinary life and beauty and spiritual power. A theatre is not a theatre building, but an organization by which the art of the drama can be cultivated – should enshrine these two aspects of it, of the plays to be performed, of the art of their presentation; and its value will lie in the reconciling of the two. Material equipment must be adequate, if only for economy’s sake; but primarily it will be an association of men and women co-operating in the practice of an art. The aim here would be to develop in the theatre and its company that best sort of comradeship, which belongs to the good regiment, the good government, the good school or university, in which individual pride becomes pride in the whole, by which the value of the whole comes mysteriously to exceed that of the sum of the parts. And whenever this semi-miracle is achieved the effect will perhaps be more notable in a body of artists working happily together than in any other collection of fallible human beings. [1945: From the final section of The Use of the Drama, based on three Spencer Trask Lectures delivered at Princeton University in 1944]

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Note Originally entitled ‘A Theatre That Might Be’, this essay is taken from the last of three lectures Barker gave in the United States in 1944. He and Helen had escaped occupied France and made their way to the United States, where he worked briefly for the British government and continued to write as well as lecture. Against the backdrop of a destructive conflict – the second he had witnessed in his lifetime – Barker argues for the worth of both the educational role of drama and its influence, along with the arts in general, on the type of society in which we live. He focuses on the latter, and deals with patronage, censorship and the shortcomings of the commercial theatre. He argues that ‘drama has more of the attributes of life itself than has any other art’, and returns to themes that have engrossed him throughout his life: what is theatre; the role of the actor, of the dramatist and of the audience; and the vital importance of quality. At the end of the war, he returned to France by way of Britain and died in Paris in 1946.

EDITORS’ POSTSCRIPT: A QUESTION OF REPUTATION Seventeen of the twenty-one pieces in this book were written after 1918, the year Harley Granville Barker divorced his first wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy, and married Helen Gates Huntington, an American heiress, poet and novelist. Much has worked to cloud Barker’s accomplishments and to question his commitments during his time with Helen, and this perhaps has contributed to these extraordinary writings being lost for decades in forgotten publications. It also has worked to obscure the totality of Barker’s true significance as a theatre artist. In this postscript, we explore the latter half of Barker’s working life, both the legends it engendered and the truth as best we can now determine.

The Barker legend No history of British theatre could be complete without the acknowledgement of Barker’s importance as playwright, director, producer, actor, essayist and theatre visionary in the first decades of the twentieth century. However, his reputation has also been a tarnished one. Ever since Barker’s death in 1946 (and for a considerable time before), the consistent and generally accepted view of his career has been that it fell into two distinct periods: the time before the First World War, when he famously worked as actor, director, producer and playwright in England’s professional theatre; and the time after,

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when he abandoned the professional theatre and devoted himself to writing. This abandonment, it has often been said, created a deep resentment of Barker within British theatrical ranks, for having betrayed his profession and betrayed the cause to create a new serious, even essential, theatre – a cause he had been so much a part of, almost synonymous with. The explanation for this supposed abandonment has been laid squarely at the feet of Barker’s second wife. Portrayed as but a rich, third-rate poet, second-rate novelist, dilettante American, Helen Huntington seduced Harley, it is claimed, and turned him into a reclusive snobbish country gentleman. Her visceral hatred of the theatre and all theatre people (so went the gossip) forced him to withdraw from lifelong friends and colleagues. Barker thus became separated from his true nature, his true talent, even his true politics. To add an exclamation mark to all this horror, she even made her new husband add a hyphen to their name to assuage her own crass aristocratic ambitions. And so, says the myth, Helen – perhaps unconsciously but always selfishly – all but single-handedly destroyed the great hope of the British theatre. This is the Barker legend that began in the 1920s. Here is St John Ervine writing in The Observer in 1923: ‘Mr. Harley Granville-Barker does not require any introduction … what he requires is reprobation for his abandonment of the theatre.’1 And here in 1955 is C. B. Purdom in the first Barker biography: ‘His [Barker’s] true place of work was as producer and dramatist, and he deserted it.’2 Writing the foreword to Purdom’s biography, Lewis Casson, an early friend and apostle of Barker’s, piled in: ‘He [Barker] gave up the struggle, threw off the dust of battle, and became a mere professor. To us it was almost a desertion.’3 In his entry on Barker in the Dictionary of National Biography, Casson added that it was Helen Huntington who was to blame for Barker’s ‘almost complete severance’ from the theatre. And so the Barker legend found its way into common currency.4

St. John Ervine, The Observer, 30 September 1923. C. B. Purdom, Harley Granville Barker (London: Rockliff Publishing, 1955), p. 285. 3 Ibid., p. vii. 4 Lewis Casson, ‘Barker, Harley Granville’, Dictionary of National Biography 1941-1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 318–21. 1 2

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By 1975, when Barker and his plays had all but been forgotten, the Royal Shakespeare Company revived his early work The Marrying of Ann Leete; at the same time, however, David Jones, the director, helped seal the legend: After World War I, [Barker] ceased directing, no new play of his was ever produced, and he had divorced his wife to marry an American lady, some years older than himself, rich and an authoress of dubious talent. Severing all theatre connections, he withdrew into a world of butlers and country mansions. His name acquired a hyphen. His intellectual drive was diverted into committee work and critical studies. … When he died in Paris in 1946, he had done no work in the theatre for 30 years.5 In 2015, Richard Eyre, a former artistic director of the National Theatre for whom Barker was a hero, added this in the NT’s programme for its revival of Barker’s Waste: ‘By the time he [Barker] was 40 he had retired … acquired a hyphen in his surname, moved … to Devon to play the part of a country squire.’6 Even those few defenders of Barker’s second life with Helen accepted the legend’s main plank, that he had withdrawn from the theatre. Margery Morgan, for example, in her 1961 study of Barker’s plays A Drama of Political Man, endorses the view that ‘the undisputed leader of the new theatre in England’7 retired after the First World War. Eric Salmon in his 1983 book Granville Barker: A Secret Life does not dispute that Barker abandoned the theatre, but concludes he did so when he began ‘to despair of a theatre which seems incapable of providing him with the right kind of audience or the right kind of actors or the right kind of organization’.8 In a similar vein, Dennis Kennedy in From a speech David Jones gave to the cast (in private hands), which was later used as the basis for his article ‘The Neglected Giant’, The Observer, 13 January 1985, published at the time of the RSC revival of Waste. 6 Richard Eyre, National Theatre programme, Waste, 2015. Eyre also wrote of Barker’s withdrawal from the theatre in his 1993 foreword to Barker’s Prefaces to Shakespeare and in his entry on Barker in the 2004 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 7 Margery M. Morgan, A Drama of Political Man (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1961), p. 18. 8 Eric Salmon, Granville Barker: A Secret Life (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 295. Barker was all too aware of the theatre’s shortcomings, but he did not despair. For example, when he told William Archer that there was no English company that could act his latest 5

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Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre says: ‘He left the theatre because its conditions were antagonistic to his genius, and he became less and less willing to compromise his ideals.’9

What ifs But what if Barker never did retire or quit the theatre? Or, rather, that this was never his intention or wish? And nor was it Helen’s? What if his second marriage was a boon to his theatrical work? What if Helen was not an untalented novelist but a significant writer in her own right and wrote in a style reminiscent of Barker’s own? What if the famous addition of a hyphen carried no aristocratic ambitions whatsoever? What if the Barker legend of abandoning the theatre was the conscious creation of a frustrated rival who was desperately afraid that Barker’s plays and his humanistic aesthetic would be the basis for the future British theatre and not this rival’s own broader, more discursive plays? What if this rival was Barker’s friend, one-time confidant, early mentor and collaborator, George Bernard Shaw?

Harley and Helen Barker met Helen Huntington in New York City, probably in December 1914 or early 1915, when he was directing a season of plays there. After securing a difficult divorce from Lillah McCarthy, Harley and Helen married in London in July 1918. Helen’s mother was the sister of Collis P. Huntington, who over the course of his long life became one of America’s most powerful and richest railway tycoons. For many years, Collis kept a mistress, Arabella, with whom he had a son, Archer Milton. Supported by Collis, Arabella play The Secret Life, the following year he relaunched a campaign to establish a National Theatre. Ten years on, after co-directing a revival of The Voysey Inheritance, Barker judged the theatre had not changed in forty years, but believed that was why ‘real repertory and a permanent company are the only solution’ (Purdom, Harley Granville Barker, p. 243). 9 Dennis Kennedy, Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 205. Other sympathetic commentators, such as Mary Luckhurst (Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre) and Cary Mazer (Great Shakespeareans, vol. 15), take a similar line.

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became well known as a Washington D.C. hostess and power broker. When Collis’ wife died, Collis quickly married Arabella and legally adopted his own son, Archer. Helen, as the niece, grew up a witness to the machinations of ruthless power, political and commercial as well as personal.10 Helen married young and had a daughter. The marriage was short lived, and the Huntington family soon organized a marriage between Helen and Archer, her first cousin, who now the legal son of Collis and was himself a very wealthy man. Archer Milton Huntington was interested in culture, especially Spanish culture. He was also, probably, gay. The weight of circumstantial evidence seems to point us towards this conclusion.11 When Helen and Harley first met, she and Archer had been married twenty years and had no children; her daughter, raised by the father, was now grown up, married, and had a child. So Helen was a grandmother, and the author of four novels and three collections of verse. She had travelled widely, most often in Spain with Archer, but also throughout Europe; she was fluent in Spanish, French, probably Italian and maybe German. When they divorced, Archer surprised her with a large settlement, possibly as a grateful gift for Helen’s twenty years of being an understanding wife to a gay husband. This made her very rich. As Helen’s mother wrote, there was ‘no living creature whom he respects, and more than respects, like Helen’.12 Archer certainly did not behave like a typical aggrieved and cuckolded husband. It has become accepted wisdom that Helen Huntington hated, perhaps was even jealous of, the theatre, and so she did all she could to keep Harley close to her bosom and away from his old theatre friends. Shaw especially claimed to feel her force. In perhaps an unguarded When Collis died, Arabella would marry Collis’ nephew, Henry, to whom Collis had given a large portion of his estate, after first forcing Henry to divorce his wife. 11 For example, in the only known letter from Helen’s mother to Harley, she discusses Archer: 10

I must not fail to speak of that strange man [Archer] Milton. He is a perpetual wonder and I am sure that there’s no living creature whom he respects, and more than respects, like Helen … I can think of nothing which would please me more than to have him find a big, tactful, beautiful mate for him, someone to make him forget all others. Eric Salmon (ed.), Granville Barker and His Correspondents (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985), p. 305. 12 Ibid., p. 305.

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moment of a very old man, Shaw, in answering a series of questions posed by a Princeton University student in 1947, wrote: ‘Yes, I have met her [Helen]. … She … was determined to detach him from me. She succeeded.’13 There is no evidence, however, that Helen Huntington hated the theatre; the facts point in the opposite direction.

Helen and the theatre Soon after their marriage, the Barkers began co-translating Spanish plays; she knew the language and culture, he the theatre. In their first four years together, they translated four plays; one, they co-directed14 in the West End. They went on to co-translate another nine Spanish plays, many of which were produced in the West End and on Broadway, and a number were turned into television productions in the 1930s and 1940s. Helen encouraged Harley in his professional work. This is clear from letters they wrote each other before their wedding, and in the few they wrote after (they were rarely apart during the marriage). They often went to the theatre together, in London, Stratford, New York, Salzburg and Paris, and she often wrote about theatre in her novels; in Come, Julia (1931), she wrote at length of the pleasures of seeing a play in a provincial English theatre. The couple maintained a social life with numerous friends from the theatre: William Archer, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy and Laurence Housman, to name a few. The one old friend who was cut out of their lives was Shaw. There is just one letter that is quoted as proof of Helen’s animosity towards the stage. Florence Hardy, Thomas Hardy’s second wife (and almost forty years his junior), was exchanging letters with a young actress her elderly husband was attracted to, regarding an amateur performance at their home, which Barker was attending. Mrs Hardy politely points out: ‘Mr Granville-Barker will not, I think, do much in the way of coaching as he has now no connection with the stage as his wife 12 November 1947, H. Wright Johnson Collection on Harley Granville-Barker (TC029), Manuscripts Division, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 14 Both are credited, though it is not clear how much Helen contributed. 13

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objects.’15 Florence Hardy, attempting only to discourage a perceived rival and save her husband from an embarrassing infatuation, had used Barker’s wife as an extra excuse – hardly proof of Helen’s abiding dislike of the theatre.

The most productive time of Barker’s writing life Another key strand of the Barker legend is that after marrying Helen he withdrew from the theatre into a lazy life of luxury. Yet the immediate effect of the marriage was the opposite. As a young man he had pawned his clothes and economized on food to make ends meet, and he later bankrupted himself trying to run a repertory theatre. By the time of the marriage, he was deeply in debt (mostly to Shaw). Though his life with Helen brought him newfound comforts, it allowed him to pay off his debt, and, more importantly, it brought him the freedom to focus on his writing, his long-expressed desire and ambition. Indeed, the first six years of Helen and Harley’s marriage, 1918–24, were the most productive time in his writing life during which Barker wrote the bulk of the book you have in your hands. Besides the translations with Helen, he revised his play The Madras House, wrote or drafted two full-length original plays, and wrote a long short story, two translations of French plays, a groundbreaking book, The Exemplary Theatre (sections from two chapters of which are included in this book), the first five brilliant Prefaces to Shakespeare, and numerous essays, including ‘The Heritage of the Actor’, perhaps one of the most important statements on the art of theatre that we possess (included in full in this book). During these six years, Barker remained extremely busy on other theatrical fronts: he directed or co-directed two West End productions, oversaw other productions (un-credited), extended his lecturing programme, including a major lecture tour across America and as Liverpool University’s Shute Lecturer (one of the first such appointments for a theatre professional), and he became the first chair of the British Drama League, the nationwide association of community and amateur theatres at the 19 October 1922, Michael Millgate (ed.), The Letters of Emma and Florence Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 189. 15

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forefront of campaigning for a National Theatre. He also maintained his interest in politics and stayed a political being for the rest of his life.16 Then, from 1924 until his death, Barker stopped producing original work. He wrote no more new plays,17 he never again wrote an original short story, and his essays and Shakespeare Prefaces, however perceptive, now all followed patterns and approaches he had already set. Barker, nevertheless, remained highly productive. As well as four books on the theatre (all based on lectures), and more essays and Prefaces, he rewrote old plays and the book he initially co-authored with William Archer on a National Theatre. There were further translations with Helen, and he translated another play from French. He advised and helped out on several productions, though he directed only one more, a revival of The Madras House in 1925, but he corresponded in great detail with actors and directors on productions in which they were involved, most notably with Harcourt Williams when he was running the Old Vic and John Gielgud on his Shakespeare work. Barker also accepted positions as head of the Shakespeare Association, the Royal Society for Literature, the English Association and the British Institute in Paris, where the Barkers had gone to live in the 1930s. But never again would he produce an original piece of work. What changed after 1924? And what happened that opened Barker up to the accusation of his abandoning the theatre?

After 1924 On 19 May 1923, Barker wrote his friend William Archer that he had the mumps and on 29 May: ‘I’m officially out of quarantine tomorrow week and I’ve been up and about these five days, within the garden limits.’18 A month or so later, the Barkers headed for the Pyrenees where they stayed until September. This seems a first, as no previous reference exists of the Barkers having visited the Pyrenees.

Helen, like Harley, was a supporter of the suffrage movement. His last play, His Majesty, had been drafted by then, though would not be published until 1928. Neither The Secret Life nor His Majesty, the two new full-length plays he wrote after marrying Helen, would be produced in his lifetime. 18 Salmon, Granville Barker and His Correspondents, p. 85. 16 17

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After returning from the Pyrenees in 1923, he wrote, ‘Neither my health nor my aptitude is what it was.’19 And by November 1924: ‘I am now on my 10th doctor (counting them all). And they’re still talking.’20 Thomas Hardy wrote Barker that December, responding to a Barker letter:21 ‘I am so glad to get a letter from you, as it implies that you are “still running”, and I had been anxious lest you should have got laid up.’ He invited the Barkers to a seaside resort near his home ‘so as to pick yourself up if the doctors have pulled you down, which I expect they have.’22 Barker wrote back: ‘And we’re well – at least I shall be when the doctors have done with me.’23 The Barkers, inveterate travellers, continued their regular trips; they moved between Devon (where they had bought a house), London, Paris (usually in December/January) and other continental locations, until in January 1929, they visited Tucson, Arizona. In 1929, Tucson was known for just one industry; it was the centre for tuberculosis treatment in America. Between 1880 and 1945, the local paper declares: ‘If you had tuberculosis, the prescription was Arizona. … Tucson, in particular was “the destination” for tuberculosis. … Between 1920 and 1930 there were more than 30 sanatoriums holding permits in Tucson … [including] the Desert Sanatorium. ... The resort-style sanatorium served elite clientele with tuberculosis.’24 In February 1943, while the Barkers were living in New York during the war, they again visited Tucson, Arizona. From Tucson, Helen wrote her cousin Caroline in Pasadena, California, declining an invitation to visit: ‘On account of war-time difficulties … also the duty of going on with the cure here as long as possible, makes us feel that we ought

Ibid., p. 500. Purdom, Harley Granville Barker, p. 228. 21 Now lost. 22 3 December 1924, Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 291. 23 Salmon, Granville Barker and His Correspondents, p. 380. That year, Barker had translated Jules Romains’s recent Paris hit, Doctor Knock, a satire of the medical profession. 24 The Arizona Daily Star, 21 June 2012. According to a 1932 prospectus, the Desert Sanatorium, 2,600 feet above sea level, specialized in treating chronic pulmonary diseases, including bronchitis, asthma and emphysema, and also hypertension. 19 20

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not to yield to the temptation.’25 A postcard Helen sent to Caroline at this time showed where they were staying. On the front is a photo of a building, with the caption: ‘Clinic, The Desert Sanatorium, Tucson, Ariz.’ Helen wrote on the back of this postcard: ‘We are leaving tomorrow – with our trained nurse – for NY.’ Without Barker’s medical records, we cannot be sure that he was consumptive, and if he was, when the disease was first diagnosed and what the prognosis was. However, as his sister Grace as well as his father26 both died of consumption, Harley would have had first-hand experience of the ravages of tuberculosis and been exposed to it at very close quarters. Whatever the truth, he clearly thought he had the disease or something similar. Many of the places the Barkers visited, such as Algiers, St Moritz and the Pyrenees, had climates that were considered particularly beneficial for consumptives or people with associated problems. Helen, who often used details from her life in her writings, wrote in her last novel, Traitor Angel, a lengthy description of a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Pyrenees. The novel’s main character, Sophie, has taken her consumptive husband to the Pyrenees to recuperate: She had gone for the summer with Edgar to an isolated place in the Pyrenees. … He was taken to a sanatorium near Cambo and installed there with such speed that one scene faded to another for him as it does in the unreality of moving pictures. Sophie went to a small, near-by hotel. Nothing definite was to be got out of the head doctor, or even the more talkative of the nurses. … The bare, scrubbed and disinfected sanatorium – its light streaming through immense uncurtained windows; its silences, and faint odours; its nurses, all in white, soft-footed; even its poor gallant show of little pleasures, made up a world where Sophie was an outsider. … The invalids themselves, laid out in the depths of their enclosed porches, saw only rolling forests and the spurs of the Pyrenees.27

Held at Huntington Library, San Marino, California. If one can trust Harley’s first biographer. 27 Helen Granville-Barker, Traitor Angel (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1935), pp. 181–3. 25 26

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Consumption in the 1920s It is hard for us to fully grasp the fear associated with tuberculosis in Europe and America in the 1920s. There would be no cure until the early 1940s, with the advent of antibiotics. Consumption was a disease spread by coughs and sneezes, and therefore often in crowds. Consumptives were obliged to avoid crowded places, like theatres. Booklets were written instructing consumptives on how to cough; women’s hemlines were raised to avoid stirring up potentially tubercular grains of dust and dirt. Such a disease would strike not only the body, but also the mind, as the consumptive’s selfimage would become that of a social pariah and both self-confidence and sense of self-worth would drain away.28 D. H. Lawrence, a consumptive, was once asked to leave his hotel in Switzerland: ‘Next morning they were all asked to leave: the coughing that had echoed through the small hours had persuaded the owner to tell them that it was against hotel policy to have consumptive guests. It was also frowned upon by the newly-established Bureau de Tourisme.’29 Whether Barker suffered from consumption or not, or bouts of it, or from associated illnesses and their psychological effects, his behaviour suggests he thought he needed specialist treatment. He had a history of poor health, and was even near death in 1908 when he fell ill with typhoid fever on tour in Dublin. Despite being a confirmed walker, his constitution remained vulnerable, as can be seen from his correspondence throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In these later years, he was put on a special diet, had problems with his kidneys and suffered from eczema, to the extent that he sometimes had to wear protective gloves, and in the 1940s he had the condition treated in hospital. Recollections from actors rehearsing with Barker during the last twenty years of his life – of his wearing overcoat and gloves during rehearsals, his short working hours, and his being picked up promptly by chauffeur and Helen – have been used to corroborate an image of Towards the end of his life, Barker described his eczema (a potential side effect of consumption, as was his occasional depression) as ‘the shameful thing’ (Salmon, Granville Barker: A Secret Life, p. 292). 29 Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), pp. 291–2. 28

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aloofness and being pampered by his wife. More likely, these details are consequences of his health and the caring protection offered by Helen.30 After his death, Helen continued to guard Harley’s private life with great resolve.31 Responding to an enquiring letter in 1946, she replied, ‘You write that you would like a complete sketch of Mr. GranvilleBaker’s life. Knowing, as I do, how much he disliked any publicity that had to do with what was outside of his public career, I regret that, even if it were possible, I could not furnish you with this.’32 To make her point even clearer, she had her lawyer write as well: ‘Mrs. GranvilleBarker has forwarded to us your letters. … We need only add that you should exercise great discretion in publishing conjectures of a personal nature which might be regarded as very undesirable by Mrs. GranvilleBarker.’33 Barker may not, therefore, have abandoned the theatre, at least in the sense that this was his intention, desire or ambition. Instead, having changed direction after the First World War and focused upon his writing, he might have found himself facing an illness or illnesses that were debilitating if not crippling, physically and psychologically, and lived his final twenty or so years struggling to remain active.34 What part might Helen have played? What if, instead of thwarting Barker’s theatrical career, she worked to support her husband, encouraging him in the work he was still able to do? What if, instead of the evil witch of legend, she formed the foundation upon which Barker accomplished whatever his body would permit? If so, then Helen Granville-Barker has been deeply wronged, and Harley deeply misunderstood. If this is indeed a possible even probable narrative, then the question arises: Why would such a legend emerge and how could it have been sustained over so many years?

See, for example, Marius Goring’s memory of Barker directing, The Voysey Inheritance in 1934, in Irving Wardle’s The Theatres of George Devine, p. 40, or Stephen Murray’s account of Barker directing Waste in 1936 (Salmon, Granville Barker: A Secret Life, pp. 283–4). 31 He died in Paris of artereo-sclerosis after three months of pneumonia. 32 H. Wright Johnson Collection, op. cit. 33 Ibid. 34 In a letter to John Gielgud in 1937, Barker wrote, ‘I have to put it all in books now, and as quick as I can before my time is up’ (Salmon, Granville Barker: A Secret Life, p. 416). 30

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Barker’s reputation before 1924 It is difficult to overstate Barker’s importance to British theatre in the first decades of the twentieth century. The historic seasons he ran at the Royal Court and Savoy theatres with business manager J. E. Vedrenne, his experimentation at the Duke of York’s and St James’s theatres, and his three innovative Shakespeare productions in 1912 and 1914 made Barker in many eyes the most original and creative director of his day and the playwright who best pointed the theatre’s way forward at the head of a momentous reform movement. A man of the theatre, he was its visionary. His decision after the war to concentrate on his writing had already been signalled during the war years, which brought an abrupt end to his efforts to form a permanent repertory theatre. His body of four outstanding plays – The Marrying of Ann Leete, The Voysey Inheritance, Waste and The Madras House – suggested the decision was a sensible one. As early as 1913, Rebecca West had likened Barker’s talents in The Marrying of Anne Leete to those of Chekhov in The Cherry Orchard, and (ironically, given the complaint at the heart of the Barker legend) had bemoaned the fact that he was directing plays instead of writing more of them.35 That same year, P. P. Howe, in praising the suggestive power of Barker’s plays, called him ‘the first definite experimentalist in the modern English theatre’.36 Also in 1913, John Palmer, in his Future of The Theatre, imagined looking back on the English drama from the distance of 1950 and wrote: Let us recall the career of a playwright, still young. … Mr. Granville Barker, as an author of plays, is an excellent peg for our discourse upon the future direction of English drama. Mr. Barker began his author’s career with a play which for his age was, without hyperbole, amazing. The Marrying of Ann Leete was not a masterpiece, but it must have seemed to Mr. Barker’s contemporaries of the late ’nineties the promise of masterpieces to come.37

Rebecca West, ‘Androcles and the Lion’, The New Freewoman, 15 September 1913. P. P. Howe, ‘The Plays of Granville Barker’, Fortnightly Review, 1913, p. 476. 37 John Palmer, The Future of the Theatre (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913), p. 175. 35 36

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Palmer dedicated his book to Barker. Archibald Henderson the following year proclaimed: ‘The crown of the Stage Society’s achievement [the society that presented The Marrying of Anne Leete] was the presentation of Mr. H. Granville Barker to the world of dramatic art in England. … A few people nowadays are beginning eagerly to claim him as the one true dramatist – and English withal – of the movement.’38 In 1917, Dixon Scott wrote: ‘Enviably famous as an actor; far and away our best producer [director]; the only manager [producer]. … And yet … I am convinced. … The genuine Barker is the writing one.’39 Capping this, in a series of seminal lectures at King’s College in 1922, perhaps the most influential critic of his day, William Archer, made the case: ‘The author of The Voysey Inheritance and Waste stands, in my eyes, second to none of his contemporaries.’40 And later: ‘I do not hesitate to say that I consider these plays [and The Madras House] the biggest things our modern movement has produced.’41 It is fascinating how often during this period the plays of Barker and Shaw are compared. Rebecca West found the ‘unconventionality’ and ‘reverence towards life’ in Barker’s plays marked him off from Shaw.42 P. P. Howe went further: ‘The dreadful danger of the play of ideas [Shaw’s theatre] is that the ideas may exist for their own sake instead of for the play’s sake.’43 Dixon Scott cautioned not to confuse Barker’s ambition with that of Shaw’s: ‘It is amazing, it is heartrending, it fills one with despair for common eyesight, to watch the wholesale way Mr. Barker has been bracketed with Mr. Shaw. … He [Barker] has to write sentences – but he refuses to pronounce them; which is exactly what Shaw can’t help doing. Mr. Shaw’s stage-directions are commands; Mr. Barker’s indications.’44

Archibald Henderson, European Dramatists (Cincinnati: Stewart & Kidd Co., 1913), p. 373. 39 Dixon Scott, Men of Letters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917), p. 135. 40 William Archer, Old Drama and the New: An Essay in Re-Valuation (London: Heinemann, 1923), p. 129. 41 Ibid., p. 358. 42 Rebecca West, ‘The Gospel According to Granville-Barker’, The Freewoman, 7 March 1912. 43 Howe, Fortnightly Review, p. 199. 44 Scott, Men of Letters, p. 147. 38

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There were, however, others who saw Barker as little more than an apprentice of Shaw’s, and it is the detractors who are the more frequently remembered; Shaw, the Nobel Prize winner, is seen as the giant of early twentieth-century British theatre, a colossus unchallenged. But between 1910 and 1923, Shaw’s reputation was at its nadir; the Nobel would not come until 1926.45 Shaw’s opposition to the First World War had damaged his reputation with his home audience, and, until the success of St. Joan in 1924, his career was generally perceived as in decline, if not over. To many, it was Barker who represented the theatre’s future; Shaw was the past.

The Barker/Shaw relationship The Barker/Shaw relationship began in 1900 when, having been persuaded reluctantly to see Barker in a Stage Society production, Shaw cast him as Marchbanks in Candida for a performance at the Strand.46 Over the next decade or so they became very close and their work profoundly influenced each other’s. Barker played, and in several cases created, leading roles in a number of Shaw plays, and co-directed and directed them as well. The most notable collaboration came during the 1904–7 seasons at the Court. It was a triumphant alliance for both men, helping the much older Shaw, who acted the role of mentor and father figure to the younger Barker,47 establish an international reputation as Britain’s leading playwright. There were acknowledged differences of approach and taste from the outset. As early as 1902, during rehearsals of Mrs Warren’s Profession in which Barker created the role of Frank, Shaw urged him ‘to soar, not gravitate. You seem to be bitterly reproaching me all through for the flippancy of my dialogue.’48 At the end of the Court seasons, Shaw urged Shaw was awarded the 1925 prize in November 1926. The play was by Gerhart Hauptmann and was called The Coming of Peace. In 1900, Marchbanks was known as Marjoribanks. Shaw had changed it to Marchbanks by 1904 when Barker reprised the role at the Court. 47 A rumour circulated at the time that Shaw might be Barker’s father. It was plausible and persisted after Barker’s death, and Shaw certainly treated Barker like a favoured son. There has also been speculation on the homoerotic nature of the relationship (see, for example, Sally Peters, Bernard Shaw – the Ascent of the Superman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996)). 48 Purdom, Harley Granville Barker, p. 15. Shaw later characterized the difference between the two as that between Verdi (himself) and Debussy (Barker). 45 46

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Barker to abandon ‘Barkerising’ his plays and to concentrate on his own playwriting instead. When this turned out to be what Barker wanted, Shaw became alarmed. The success of Barker’s revelatory Shakespeare productions and his growing reputation as a playwright when Shaw’s career appeared to have stalled only added to the alarm, and through the war years Shaw began complaining that Barker had deserted the theatre when all Barker had deserted were the plays of George Bernard Shaw.49 Then in 1918, Barker’s marriage to Helen Huntington seemed to cause the decisive shift in the Barker/Shaw relationship. Shaw was not told when the marriage took place and he was not invited to the Barkers’ new home. The two men grew apart. Though Barker was at the time in Shaw’s debt, both figuratively and literally (and Shaw in his letters was never shy of reminding Barker of both), once married to the very wealthy Helen, Barker severed his financial bond with Shaw and paid off his debts, presumably with Helen’s money. Any material pull Shaw may have felt he had over Barker was now eliminated. He believed he had lost Barker to Helen, and the two men, apparently at least in Shaw’s eyes, were now rivals. In 1922, William Archer, a close friend for many years of both men, came out of theatre-criticism-retirement to deliver in his King’s College lectures what appeared to be a coup de grace to Shaw’s career, using Barker’s plays as the weapon: Perhaps the most difficult task that criticism can attempt is a valuation of Mr. Bernard Shaw as a dramatist. Some people simplify the task by denying that he is a dramatist at all, and considering him purely as a merchant of ideas. … His characters never seem, for any length of time, to lead a free and natural life, but are constantly reminding us of the ventriloquist and wire-puller behind the scenes.50 The last new Shaw play Barker directed was Androcles and the Lion, 1913, which he revived, as well as The Doctor’s Dilemma, in the United States in 1915. During the war, in 1916, Barker wrote a play called Farewell to the Theatre, which was later used to support the contention of his desertion/retirement from the profession. Even though one of the two characters, an actress, is contemplating retirement from the stage, the play primarily deals with an attempt to rekindle a love after many years, a theme Barker would return to with The Secret Life. 50 Archer, Old Drama and the New: An Essay in Re-Valuation, pp. 341–2. Archer, in the last essay published in his lifetime, again turned his sights not just on Shaw’s plays, but upon Shaw’s entire career and future reputation: ‘The paradox of his [Shaw’s] career is, it seems 49

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Shaw, with very little new work produced for the previous decade, and none particularly successful, may well have felt vulnerable and the need to fight back. Attack was often his first line of defence, and he was doubtless piqued and exasperated, if not saddened, by his distance from Barker; he had lost control of him to Helen. Hitting back at his critics would gain him little, if anything. What about a subtle, somewhat camouflaged, assault upon his friend, one-time colleague, and now competitor, directed through a surrogate so no fingerprints would be left?

The creation of the Barker legend In 1922, Barker published The Exemplary Theatre and a year later ‘The Heritage of the Actor’.51 In these two works, Barker produced a manifesto for a new theatre of being rather than doing, an aesthetic completely at odds with Shaw’s. At the same time, he published his play The Secret Life, a working expression of his theories and his first full-length play for fourteen years. The beginnings of the public legend of Barker’s retreat from theatre at the hands of Helen can be traced to this time and to the correspondence between Shaw and his close friend and future biographer St John Ervine. ‘We shall have to keep on insulting him [Barker] for his sterility,’ Shaw wrote Ervine, ‘or he will be dead before he gets another play on to the stage.’52 Ervine took his cue to attack; in his column in The Observer, which appeared soon after Archer’s King’s College lectures, Ervine used a review of The Secret Life to compare unfavourably Barker’s determination to focus on writing plays with Shaw’s pursuit of wider interests: Mr. Shaw has not confined his energies to writing plays, although he has written one more than Shakespeare wrote, but has engaged in enterprises of all sorts. … Twice a year I go to Mr. Granville-Barker and try to bully him into resuming the job he did so finely, and twice a year he tells me that he will never resume it.53 to me, the extraordinary disproportion between his fame and his influence. It is hard to think of anyone who has made so great noise and so little mark’ (‘The Psychology of G.B.S.’, The Bookman, December 1924, pp. 139–41). 51 Initially intended as a preface to his play The Secret Life. 52 10 July 1923, Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), p. 477. 53 Ervine, The Observer. Archer’s lectures were published in Old Drama and the New.

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Ervine goes on to suggest a moral failing on Barker’s part, perhaps even a moral cowardice, for spending his time only writing his own plays. ‘It is the business of the just man to hammer hell out of the wicked one, and I hope to heaven I shall never live in a world where the just man gives up his job.’54 In other words, Ervine attacked Barker for ‘giving up’. But what had Barker actually given up by 1923? He was in the midst of a prodigious amount of work; he had his fingers in numerous professional and amateur theatrical pies, he was still occasionally directing (though not on the scale of the pre-war years), he was translating plays and he was writing – Prefaces to Shakespeare, essays, a short story, The Exemplary Theatre and new plays. All he had given up was his acting, which he had done before the war (and which nobody seemed to mind very much, except perhaps Shaw) and being seen primarily as a director and theatre manager noted for his attempts to run repertory seasons. Barker attempted to deflect the attack with a letter to Ervine. He explained his long-held and well-known desire to focus on his playwriting. He mentioned certain health considerations as well. His letter had a convivial tone, even a generous one, perhaps because he had already guessed that Ervine was only a surrogate. It was also marked ‘Private’.55 When the Barkers returned to Britain in early 1924 from several months in Algiers, something bizarre happened after they attended a performance of St. Joan, which had become a sensation and had revitalized Shaw’s career. Harley sent his old friend his congratulations, and so opened a door. Shaw roared right through it. Shaw wrote to Barker, proclaiming that Helen was ruining Harley’s life, as writer and man of the theatre; she was destroying his soul – even, he suggested, his manhood.56 He laid all blame at Helen’s feet. Then, he added as if to clinch his argument, that he, Shaw, was not Ervine, The Observer. Shaw was also facing another anxiety. His new play, St. Joan, was very un-Shavian, and Shaw, given the state of his career, may well have had deep concerns about its reception. Though no known correspondence exists in which Shaw made a plea to Barker to direct St. Joan, in Shaw’s mind, Barker would have been the ideal director. If he made such a plea, it was rejected. Later, Shaw told Barker that the play was only a dare to him to produce something better or be forever silent (Dan H. Laurence (ed.), Bernard Shaw Collected Letters, vol. 3: 1911–25 (New York: Viking, 1985), p. 880). 56 The letter is lost; its contents are deduced from another letter. 54 55

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alone in having this opinion, and that many of Harley’s closest friends thought the same but were afraid to tell him to his face. Shaw named at least two such friends: Mr and Mrs Thomas Hardy. Barker, incensed, must have shown the letter to Helen. Helen, equally incensed, drove straight to the Hardys’ home, it seems, and confronted Florence Hardy. Mrs Hardy denied any such thoughts and became furious with Shaw. Shaw learned of Florence’s rage, and wrote her trying to tap down the fire: ‘I didn’t say you said anything in the sense of verbatim quotation.’57 He went on to justify his actions as but his sincere concern for Harley, and then escalated his attack on Helen, calling the Barkers’ marriage ‘dead’ and Harley’s state of mind that of a ‘lost soul’. From this point on, Barker and Shaw’s friendship was over. Any slim chance of reconciliation was dashed the following year when Barker gave a lecture in London at which Shaw attacked Barker’s retirement from the theatre as inexcusable. Shaw left the lecture in great physical pain and later claimed Helen had bewitched him, a ridiculous calumny that was repeated in print and stoked the Barker legend that Shaw had now created. Barker saw Shaw at least one more time. In 1931, Lillah McCarthy was about to publish a memoir and asked Shaw to write a Preface. He obliged. Among other things, it dealt with Barker’s divorce, and the publisher sent the Preface to Barker, who showed up on Shaw’s doorstep, demanding the Preface be withdrawn. It was, and, as far as we know, Barker and Shaw never met again. For the next decades, as was to be expected of Shaw, his rumour mill never ceased, and continued after his death.58 He had biographers report his regret at his separation from Barker while feeding the Barker myth that it was Helen who had robbed him and the theatre of its genius son. One future biographer, however, reported otherwise. A week after Shaw died, no less a figure in the Barker legend than St John Ervine confirmed that Shaw was ‘entirely to blame’ for the loss of friendship with Barker.59 Laurence, Bernard Shaw Collected Letters, pp. 879–80. He had form, especially in the way he handled his obsessive relationships, for example with the actresses Florence Farr, Janet Achurch and Stella Campbell. After Barker, Shaw moved on to T. E. Lawrence, and rumours arose that he, too, was Shaw’s son. 59 St John Ervine, ‘Bernard Shaw’, The Spectator, 10 November 1950, p. 6. His biography of Shaw appeared in 1956. 57 58

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Regardless of the facts, however, the Barker legend was retold and expanded upon countless times and took on a life of its own.60 This was a very seductive narrative after all, as it stroked three deeply ingrained British prejudices: against the nouveau riche, against pushy women and against Americans. Alongside ‘examples’ of Helen’s ‘witchery’, gossip spread when Lillah McCarthy’s new husband was knighted that Helen was uncontrollably jealous. There were ‘those Spanish’ play translations that Helen ‘made’ Harley do against his will. Helen became a prude who disliked anything to do with sex. And of course there was the often-repeated ‘fact’ about the Granville-Barkers’ new hyphen, revealing another British prejudice: against social climbers.

The hyphen Just before they were married, Helen and Harley created a monogram of interlinked ‘H’s. They signed their letters to each other in this way. This monogram would be reproduced on nearly every book either of them would write for the rest of their lives. They were in love, perhaps for each of them, for the first time. Their monogram of interlinked ‘H’s was an expression of this love. As soon at Harley and Helen married in 1918, they began to collaborate on the Spanish translations of plays by Gregorio Martinez Sierra. By at least 1920, with the first production of one of these translations, the question must have arisen: How should they credit themselves? Helen, the author of a number of books under her married name, Helen Huntington, would have wanted to acknowledge her new married name. The credit would have read: ‘By Helen Barker and Harley Granville Barker’.61 How much more elegant would it be to have the same name, just as their Hs were interlocked in their monogram? But to make ‘Granville Barker’ Helen’s last name required an added hyphen.62 The fact that Barker did not have any new work produced after he married Helen allowed the idea of him quitting the theatre to take hold, and his extraordinary directorial achievements before he married her enabled that view to dominate. 61 Barker called himself Granville (first name) Barker (second name) until he married Lillah McCarthy when he added Harley as a first name. 62 ‘Helen and Harley Barker’ would only have confused, as ‘Granville Barker’ was a famous name, and, in the world of theatre, one with cachet. 60

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At first, the adoption of the hyphen was used inconsistently, which also suggests a pragmatic rather than a premeditated origin, and for Harley a hyphenated last name would not have seemed strange or foreign; his mother’s maiden name was hyphenated,63 as were numerous members of his extended family on the Italian side. For Helen, ‘Granville-Barker’ would remain mostly a pen name; in her letters to her cousin, Caroline, for instance, she gives her sender’s name as ‘Helen Barker’.64

Shaw and Helen Along with others, including J. M. Barrie, Shaw was an intermediary in Barker’s protracted divorce from McCarthy. From his letters to McCarthy at this time, Shaw does not appear to have been a completely neutral intercessor. He writes of having committed some major indiscretion that will upset Helen, should she find out. And, as Barker writes to Helen just before the wedding (which Barker kept a secret from Shaw), trying to explain his old friend to his fiancé, it is clear already that there is tension between Shaw and Helen. In words that read like a warning, he writes: ‘A strange figure [Shaw]. … Refusing to be a combination of weakness and strength, which nobody would mind, insisting on being thought all strength, which nobody believes. … I view him objectively – split him into watertight compartments, as he has split himself. For part, I’ve admiration – and affection, too. For the other part: well, I just open my eyes and shut them – and things not to be forgotten keep them open clearer than before.’65 Shaw’s behaviour towards Helen confirmed Barker’s worst fears. By 1924, as Shaw’s attacks on Helen were gathering pace, Shaw wrote to William Archer and confessed that Helen must loathe him for the role he played in the divorce. However, he then excused himself as but a caring and concerned friend of Harley’s, and invoked an ‘imaginary Barker Relief Expedition’ suggesting that he was not alone and that there were crowds of Harley’s friends afraid for Barker’s survival and desperate to Bozzi-Granville. On their gravestone at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, he is ‘Harley Granville-Barker’ and she ‘Helen Huntington Gates.’ 65 Salmon, Granville Barker and His Correspondents, p. 340. 63 64

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prize him from his wife’s clutches at ‘Nethermost Hell’ (Shaw’s name for the Barkers’ Devon home, Netherton Hall).66 For the rest of Barker’s life, Shaw never stopped blaming Helen and he repeated this attack in pieces he wrote about Barker shortly after Harley’s death.67 These views surface again in a series of revealing letters Shaw wrote in response to queries from a Princeton University student. ‘I met Mrs. Granville Barker several times,’ he wrote, ‘and had not the smallest dislike to her nor prejudice against her. … But she disapproved of me, believed I was a notorious Socialist and the author of one play (Mrs. Warren’s Profession), banned in England and prosecuted in the U.S.A. for horrifying indecency … to say nothing of my championship of the monster pornographer Ibsen. I had led Barker up the garden path, and it was her mission to rescue him and make a Southern American gentleman of him. The world of Karl Marx and Ibsen was beyond her.’ ‘She made G-B translate Spanish plays, though he dared not write plays of his own. She let him produce The Madras House in London. … These are the facts. … In his translations from the Spanish he no doubt used his wife as a dictionary, and picked up enough of the language for their purpose. Clever as she is, she could not have written his dialogue. His translations are unimportant.’ ‘As Harley would have been made a peer by Ramsay MacDonald if he had not renounced his Fabianism and Helen would have acquired a title, she must have realized that she had made a mistake detaching him from his political as well as his Shavian moorings.’68 14 December 1924, Laurence, Bernard Shaw Collected Letters, pp. 894–5. Shaw says in this letter, ‘If I had produced nothing in the last twelve years except The Exemplary Theatre and The Secret Life I should regard myself as a damned soul.’ After Barker’s death, Shaw described his old friend’s original plays as ‘treasures to be preserved’ (‘Granville-Barker: Some Particulars’, Drama, winter, 1946). 67 Letter to the Times Literary Supplement, 7 September 1946, and ‘Granville-Barker: Some Particulars’. 68 This is a reworking of a letter Shaw wrote (17 February 1931) to his lover Molly Tompkins. In the same Princeton collection there is a letter from Laurence Tompkins, Molly’s exhusband. He had been asked about a letter from Shaw to his ex-wife written some years before: ‘I remember that. … Shaw warned us not to speak of him [Shaw] before Mrs. Barker, her hatred of him being so intense that the mere mention of his name would throw her into a fit and unloose a tirade of abuse. We had however, already spent an evening with the Barkers innocently talking of Shaw – with no perceptible ill affect on Mrs. B.’ 66

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There is no written record of what Helen thought about Shaw, or how she felt he had treated her. There may, however, be a hint in her novel, Come, Julia, published in 1931, when such feelings would have been quite raw.69 This novel centres around life on a Devon estate much like the Barkers’ own. The main character, Julia, picks up a recently published book and muses about its author: ‘What one can’t understand is his immense, his world-wide reputation. The most successful man of letters in England, they say. He ought to be satisfied. … But I expect he’s haunted some days by a vision of posterity – cold, featureless, unapproachable posterity – that can’t be bribed, flattered, manoeuvred into a corner, asked to dinner, or threatened with the more genial forms of blackmail. Now and then [he] must turn quite sick imagining what posterity will say of him.’70 This character never appears or is mentioned again in the novel.71

Conclusion For many years following Barker’s death, his plays were rarely produced, and the writings included in this anthology were largely forgotten. The first biography, published almost ten years after his death in 1955, aroused little curiosity and sanctified the legend of the lost leader who had abandoned his post.72 He remained known as a director from a bygone age and as the author of the influential Shakespeare Prefaces. His reputation as a playwright began to be repaired in the 1970s, and three plays, The Voysey Inheritance, The Madras House and Waste, have since come to be regarded as classics of the Edwardian theatre. Academic interest has also increased, yet, despite some rebalancing of the account, the overriding notion that he gave up the theatre remains, and this has led to a continued underestimation of his importance. Even Helen often used details from her life in her novels. Settings often reflect where she lived or was living or had recently visited, and characters often relate to specific people; in Eastern Red (1918, p. 40), there is a description of a 38-year-old man for whom Harley seems to be the model. 70 Helen Granville-Barker, Come, Julia (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1931), p. 124. 71 In the novel Eastern Red, published in 1918 and written before Helen would have met Shaw, there is a neutral reference to a benefit performance of Shaw’s Great Catherine (p. 16). 72 William Bridges-Adams, another disciple of Barker’s, gave a radio talk on him in 1953 called ‘The Lost Leader’, echoing the title of a once-popular poem by Robert Browning. 69

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the National Theatre in London has no commemoration to the man who contributed as much, if not more, than anyone to its creation.73 Barker wrote about a theatre’s bricks and mortar, its ambitions, how to fund it and to fill it, and he wrote about what kind of human society a theatre should reflect. The essay, ‘The Heritage of the Actor’, stakes out his territory with effusive clarity and passion, defining theatre not as a room full of Shavian debaters but as a place to find human beings, people, in all their complexity and contradictions.74 In this book, we have set out to provide a representative example of Barker’s writings on the theatre, most of which have wrongly, in our opinion, been viewed through this narrative of a man in retreat, a narrative that has cast a shadow across his entire reputation. We believe his work in all its facets – acting, directing, producing and writing in various forms, from essays and short stories to plays – should be seen as integral to a continuous whole that was not static but continuously unfolding. Perhaps we are suggesting that Harley Granville Barker was a deeply heroic figure. Heroic because of what he wrote, and because of how he lived. When able to afford the time to write, he wrote like a demon and with a calling, until in his prime his energy was sapped, it seems by illness, maybe by that awful disease, consumption. We are certainly suggesting a legacy needs reclaiming. The time of the Barker–Shaw collaboration was a crucible for the modern British drama. It reflected a deep and profound reaction against a tired and regressive commercial theatre when numerous aesthetic ideas competed against each other for the future of British drama and where theatre came to be seen, by some, as a potent expression of society itself. Barker put this best himself: ‘What livelier microcosm of human society … can there be than an acted play.’75

A bust of Barker was stolen from the National Theatre foyer and not replaced. A different bust of Barker is held in the NT Archive. His role in the development of the NT building is included in a semi-permanent exhibition installed in the theatre in 2016. 74 In the essays reprinted here, Barker uses this word ‘verisimilitude’, preferring it to ‘naturalism’ or ‘realism’. The ambition of his aesthetic was not to recreate nature or reconstruct the real. It was not an argument, but a truth. 75 The Exemplary Theatre (London: Chatto & WIndus, 1922), p. 46. 73

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The basic human questions of how we live, both as individuals and as a society, are bound up in these perhaps seemingly arcane aesthetic discussions of the role of theatre and drama. A long-ago personal rivalry of course matters not in and of itself, but rather as it has affected both the general view of theatre at a time when many were fighting to redefine its future, and the particular view of one great champion of one great vision. Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers, 2017

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Unless otherwise stated, dates are of publication, and titles were published by Sidgwick & Jackson, London.

Plays The Weather-Hen, with Berte Thomas (unpubl.; 1897). A Miracle (unpubl.; 1900). Agnes Colander (unpubl.; 1900–1). Prunella, or Love in a Dutch Garden, with Laurence Housman (London: A.H. Bullen, 1906). The Marrying of Ann Leete (1909). The Voysey Inheritance (1909). Waste (1909). The Madras House (1911). The Village Carpenter (unfinished; begun 1910, after writing The Madras House, and continued as The Wicked Man, 1914). The Morris Dance (unpubl. adaptation of The Wrong Box by R. L. Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, 1913). The Dynasts (unpubl. adaptation of Thomas Hardy epic drama, 1914). Rococo (1917). Vote By Ballot (1917). Farewell to the Theatre (1917). Harlequinade, with Dion Calthrop (1917). The Secret Life (1923). His Majesty (1928).

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In translation Anatol by Arthur Schnitzler (1911). Deburau by Sacha Guitry (London: Heinemann, 1921). Doctor Knock by Jules Romains (London: Ernest Benn, 1925). Six Gentlemen in a Row by Jules Romains (1927).

In translation with Helen Granville-Barker Plays by Gregorio and Maria Martinez Sierra The Kingdom of God } The Two Shepherds } in The Plays of Sierra, vol. 2. Wife to a Famous Man } (London: Chatto & Windus, 1923). The Romantic Young Lady } Take Two from One (1931). Plays by Serafin and Joaquin Alvarez Quintero The Women Have Their Way } A Hundred Years Old } in Four Plays (1927) Fortunato } The Lady from Alfaqueque } Love Passes By Don Abel Wrote a Tragedy Peace and Quiet Dona Clarines

} } in Four Comedies (1932) } }

Short stories ‘Georgiana’ (English Review, February and March 1909). ‘The Bigamist’ (unpubl. in Barker’s lifetime; Madison, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004). Souls on Fifth (a novella; Boston: Little, Brown, 1917). ‘Out of these Convertities; or, Richard Goes to Prison’ (unpubl. in Barker’s lifetime; Madison, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2004).

On theatre A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates, with William Archer (London: Duckworth, 1907). The Exemplary Theatre (London: Chatto & Windus, 1922). ‘The Heritage of the Actor’ (Quarterly Review, vol. 240, no. 476, July 1923).

Principal writings of Harley Granville Barker

255

A National Theatre (1930). On Dramatic Method (based on lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge; 1931). The Study of Drama (based on lecture at Cambridge; publ. University Press, 1934). On Poetry in Drama (based on lecture at Oxford, 1937). The Use of the Drama (based on lectures at Princeton; publ. University Press, 1945).

On Shakespeare Introduction to acting editions (London, Heinemann): Twelfth Night (1912), The Winter’s Tale (1912), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914). Prefaces to seven vols of The Players’ Shakespeare (London: Ernest Benn, 1923–7). ‘From Henry V to Hamlet’ (Proceedings of the British Academy, 1924–5, vol. 11). Prefaces to Shakespeare: First Series (1927); Second Series (1930); Third Series (1937); Fourth Series (1945); Fifth Series (1947). ‘Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art’ (A Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Barker and G. B. Harrison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).

Published correspondence Granville Barker and His Correspondents: A Selection of Letters by Him and to Him, edited and notated by Eric Salmon (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985).

Miscellaneous Barker’s writing took many forms: in addition to the above, he wrote letters to newspapers and other publications; book reviews; introductions (mostly to plays but also to a novel and an artist’s memoir); essays on subjects other than theatre (for example, on pelmanism, a memory training system, which was very popular in the early part of the century); and a book on the work of the Red Cross in France during the First World War. A List of Writings compiled by Frederick May and Margery M. Morgan can be found at the end of C. B. Purdom’s biography Harley Granville Barker: Man of the Theatre, Dramatist and Scholar (London: Rockliff, 1955). The list is not complete but it is the fullest available in print.

INDEX

Abington, Francis  59 acting, the nature of  xi, 4–5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19–20, 23, 31, 32, 35, 36–7, 38, 39, 40, 41–2, 45–50, 53–71, 72, 75, 90, 91–4, 99, 100–1, 106–8, 110, 138, 165, 173, 191, 198, 207, 213, 218, 219–20, 222, 225, 226, 229 actor-manager  141, 171 actor preparation  7, 15, 36, 40, 41, 43, 46, 88, see also rehearsal actor training  7, 15, 23–32, 37, 38, 140, 141, 190 advanced theatre  182 Aeschylus  98, 102, 108, 114, 115, 116, 146, 170 Agamemnon (Aeschylus)  44, 88, 102, 114 Agnes Colander (Barker)  111, 253 Alladine and Palomides (Maeterlinck)  147 All’s Well that Ends Well (Shakespeare)  30 Alvarez Quintero, Serafin and Joaquin  84 Amateur Dramatic Year Book, The  95 amateur theatre  30, 87–94, 95, 99, 177–8, 187, 189–90, 211–14, 233 American theatre, see United States Anatol (Schnitzler)  142, 254 Androcles and the Lion (Shaw)  242 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare)  110, 168, 221, 222 apron stage  59, 62

Archer, William  9, 32, 82, 84, 163, 167, 229, 233, 240, 247; A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates (with Barker) 9 Aristotle  xi, 57, 61, 68, 97, 185, 186, 187 art  x, xi, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 25, 37, 39, 43, 46, 49, 50, 57, 58, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 87, 88, 89, 95, 97, 99, 101, 109, 110, 111, 113, 114, 121, 122, 123, 127, 131, 145, 149, 154, 158–9, 160, 161, 163, 170, 178–9, 181, 183–6, 195, 199, 201, 202, 205, 206–7, 211–12, 214, 217–20, 222, 224, 225, 226 art for art’s sake  121 ‘At the Moscow Art Theatre’ (Barker)  151–4 audience  xi, 8, 16, 19, 29, 31, 37, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57–8, 59, 63–4, 67, 75, 76, 84, 88, 99, 100, 102, 117–18, 140, 153, 197, 200, 201–2, 204, 206–7, 213, 214, 218, 220, 224, 225, 226, 229 Bach, J.S.  179 Back to Methuselah (Shaw)  109 ballet  43, 58, 157 Barker, Albert (father)  236 Barker, Grace (sister)  236 Barker, Harley Granville: acting roles 9; death 226, 227, 237; Devon 235, 248; divorce 20,

Index

227, 230, 245, 247; early stage experience 32; education 32; First World War 227, 228, 229, 238; hyphen 228, 229–30, 246–7; illness 131, 234–7, 244; marriage 20, 33, 51, 227, 230, 232, 242, 246, 247; near death 10, 237; New York 10, 33, 230, 232, 235; Paris 131, 226, 229, 232, 234, 247; Second World War 226; theatre reform 9, 228, 250; travel 235; Tucson, Arizona 235; United States, 10, 20, 33, 95, 187, 226, 242; work in Intelligence 20; as writer xii WRITINGS: Agnes Colander (play)  111, 253; The Amateur Dramatic Year Book 95; ‘At the Moscow Art Theatre’ (article) 151–4; ‘The Citizens’ Theatre Ideal’ (lecture) 10; ‘The Coming of Ibsen’ (published lecture) 167–73; A Companion in Shakespeare Studies (co-edited with G. B. Harrison) 131, 255; The Drama (UK) 19; The Drama (US) 32; The Eighteen-Eighties 167–73; The English Review 187; Essays by Divers Hands 84; Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray 84; The Exemplary Theatre (book) x, 20, 32, 51, 154, 208, 233, 243, 248; Farewell to the Theatre (play) 33, 242, 253; The Fortnightly Review 142; ‘Georgiana’ (short story) 10, 254; ‘The Heritage of the Actor’ (essay) 53–71, 72, 119, 233, 243, 250, 254; ‘Hints on Rehearsing a Play’ (article) 95; His Majesty (play) 72, 111, 234, 253; ‘Ibsen’s Centenary’ (article) 163–5; Introduction to Tolstoy’s Plays 111; The Madras House (play) 10, 111, 233, 239, 240, 248, 249; The Manchester

257

Guardian 154; The Marrying of Ann Leete (play) 10, 228, 239; A National Theatre (book) 111, 255; A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates (book co-authored with Archer) 9, 254; The New Quarterly 9; ‘Notes on Rehearsing a Play’ (article) 13–19; The Observer 165; On Dramatic Method (published lectures) 97–110, 113–18, 255; On Poetry in Drama (published lectures) 131, 255; ‘On Translating Greek Tragedy’ (essay) 84; ‘On Translating Plays’ (essay) 75–84; Players’ Shakespeare (Prefaces) 72, 255; Prefaces to Shakespeare 72, 111, 229, 233, 244, 249, 255; Preface to Housman plays 211– 14; ‘The Promise of an American Theatre’ (lecture) 33; Prunella (play written with Laurence Housman) 214, 253; Quality (published address) 121–30; Quarterly Review 71; ‘Reconstruction in the Theatre’ (article) 189–91; The Red Cross in France (book) 20, 255; ‘Repertory Theatres’ (article) 3–9; Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre (privately circulated book co-authored with William Archer) 9, 32; ‘The School of “The Only Possible Theatre” ’ (article) 23–33; The Secret Life (play) 20, 51, 72, 111, 229, 242, 243, 253; The Seven Arts Chronicle 154; The Study of Drama (published lectures) 131, 255; ‘The Theatre Exhibition in Berlin’ (article) 142; ‘The Theatre in Berlin’ (article) 142; ‘The Theatre: The Next Phase’ (published lecture) 177–87; ‘A Theatre That Might Be’ (published lecture in The Use of the Drama) 226; The Times 142,

258

191; ‘Two German Theatres’ (published lecture) 135–42; The Use of the Drama (published lectures) 225, 255; The Voysey Inheritance (play) 10, 111, 131, 230, 239, 240, 249; Waste (play) 10, 111, 131, 229, 239, 240, 249, 253 Barker, Mary (mother)  247 Barrie, J. M.  232, 247 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson)  221, 222 Beethoven, Ludwig van  114, 179, 219; Mass in D 114; Ninth Symphony 159 Behrend, Max  142 Bells, The (Lewis)  55, 107 Bennett, Arnold  178 Blue Bird, The (Maeterlinck)  149, 152 Bothwell (Swinburne)  108 Botticelli, Sandro  147 Bradley, A. C.  110 Brand (Ibsen)  171 Bridges-Adams, William  249 Brieux, Eugène  118 British Drama League  51, 95, 233 British Institute, Paris  131, 234 Brook, Peter  x; The Empty Space x Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky)  151 Browning, Robert  249 Burne-Jones, Edward  146 Cambridge University  111, 131, 255 Candida (Shaw)  94, 241 Casson, Lewis  228 casting  14–5, 90 Cause of it All, The (Tolstoy)  158 censorship  10, 122, 157, 169–70, 185, 187, 226 Chatrian, Alexandre  55 Chekhov, Anton  72, 83, 108, 118, 119, 151, 152, 153, 154, 239; The Cherry Orchard xi, 83, 118,

INDEX

152, 153, 154, 239; The Seagull 118; The Three Sisters 118, 152–3, 154; Uncle Vanya 118 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov)  xi, 83, 118, 152, 153, 154, 239 cinema  56–7, 58, 218, 219 citizens’ theatre  10, 177, 181, 187, see also repertory theatre ‘Citizens’ Theatre Ideal, The’ (Barker)  10 Clark Lectures, Trinity College, Cambridge  111, 119 collaboration in theatre  14, 17, 18, 29, 36, 41, 42, 43, 45, 66, 75, 90, 91, 106, 108, 224, 225 Come, Julia (Helen GranvilleBarker)  232, 249 ‘Coming of Ibsen, The’ (Barker)  167–73 Coming of Peace, The (Hauptmann)  241 Commedia dell’ Arte  54, 100, 224 commercial theatre  13–14, 19, 35–7, 58, 135, 171, 182–3, 195–6, 199, 202, 211, 213, 226, 250, see also long run community theatre  95, 189–91, 192 Companion in Shakespeare Studies, A (Barker and Harrison)  131, 255 Congreve, William  221; Love for Love 221; The Way of the World 88 consumption  236–8, 250 Contaminated Family, The (Tolstoy)  157 cooperation in theatre, see collaboration Coquelin  55, 107 Coriolanus (Shakespeare)  223 costume  27, 88, 91, 94, 105–6, 137, 139, 141, 189, 190, 203, 213 Court Theatre, see Royal Court

Index

Coventry Mystery Plays  99 Craig, Gordon  19, 72 critic and criticism  7, 14, 27, 28, 29, 37, 56, 68, 79, 80, 97, 99, 100, 110, 122, 124, 126, 164, 171–3, 185–6 Cromwell, Oliver  160 Cymbeline (Shakespeare)  48, 70 Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand)  37 Dalcroze School, Dresden  143 dance  3, 27, 38, 58, 99, 100, 191 David Copperfield (Dickens)  127 Death of Tintagiles, The (Maeterlinck)  148–9 Deburau (Guitry)  51, 84, 254 democracy  121, 128–30, 131, 187, 189, 191, 206–7, 221 designer  14, 26, 65, 66, 137 Deutsches Theater  135–9, 140, 142, 151 Dickens, Charles  70, 82, 126; David Copperfield 127; Nicholas Nickleby 57 Dictionary of National Biography  228; 2004 edition 229 director, the role of  5, 6, 7, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 26, 28, 35, 38, 42, 43, 45, 51, 54, 55, 60, 80, 90, 91–4, 137, 140, 141, 198, 205, 220 Doctor Knock (Romains)  81–2, 84, 235, 254 Doctor’s Dilemma, The (Shaw)  242 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen)  64, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171–3 Drama, The (UK)  19 Drama, The (US)  32 Drama League of America  33, 95 Drama of Political Man, A (Morgan)  229 dramatist, the role of  4–5, 14, 26, 39, 40–1, 50, 54, 55–6, 60, 61–71, 72, 75, 91, 97–9, 101,

259

105–10, 113, 115, 165, 173, 184, 207, 213, 214, 225, 226 dramatist as director  5 dramaturg  137 Drury Lane Theatre  59 Ducis, Jean-Francois  79 Duke of York’s Theatre  10, 20, 239 Dumas, Alexandre  76–7, 78, 79 Dumont, Louise  141 Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus  135–6, 139–42 Eastern Red (Helen GranvilleBarker)  249 education  24, 26, 32, 51, 123, 124, 125, 126, 181, 187, 190–1, 204, 212, 222, 225 Eighteen-Eighties, The  167–73 El Greco  159 Eliot, George  168; The Mill on the Floss 168 Elizabethan theatre  8, 57, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 119, 222, see also Shakespeare Empty Space, The (Brook)  xii endowment  135, 142, 183, 211, 212, see also patronage Enemy of the People, An (Ibsen)  167, 221 English Association  130, 234 English Review, The  187, 254 ensemble  19, 36, 142, see also collaboration Erckmann, Emile  55 Ervine, St John  228, 234–4, 245 Essays by Divers Hands  84 Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray  84 Euripides  30, 84, 146; Hecuba 30; Hippolytus 30 Exemplary Theatre, The (Barker)  xii, 20, 32, 51, 154, 208, 233, 243, 248 Eyre, Richard  229

260

Fabian Society  9, 248 Farewell to the Theatre (Barker)  33, 242, 253 Farren, William  59 First Distiller, The (Tolstoy)  157 form  30, 42, 43, 44, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 91, 92, 99, 100, 103, 104, 108, 109, 110, 111, 113–19, 122, 128, 145, 169, 184, 186 Fortnightly Review, The  142 Fortune Theatre  103 France  20, 68, 69, 76–81, 116, 167, 170, 177, 187, 205, 226 French theatre, see France Frohman, Charles  10 Fruits of Enlightenment (Tolstoy)  90, 158 Future of the Theatre (Palmer)  239 Galsworthy, John  10; Strife 10 Garrick, David  59, 62 ‘Georgiana’ (Barker)  10, 254 German Theatre, London  142 German theatre, see Germany Germany  20, 135–42, 167, 168, 177, 187, 205 Ghosts (Ibsen)  114, 122, 164, 167, 169–70, 173 Gielgud, John  234, 238 Gilbert, W. S.  172 Gillette, William  67 Giotto  60, 147 Glasgow  10, 139, 177 Globe Theatre  59, 60, 99, 102, 103, 104, 105 Goldoni, Carlo  152; La Locandiera 152 Gosse, Edmund  163 Granville-Barker, Helen, see Helen Huntington Granville Barker and His Correspondents (Salmon)  231, 234, 247

INDEX

Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre (Kennedy)  230 Granville Barker: A Secret Life (Salmon)  229, 238 Greek drama  47, 54, 80, 99, 101, 102–3, 104, 115–16, 119, see also Aeschylus; Euripides Guitry, Sacha  51, 67, 84, 254; Deburau 51, 84, 254 Hamlet (Shakespeare)  18, 30, 32, 46, 47, 62, 65, 76–9, 91, 104, 106, 109, 110, 151, 222, 223 Hardy, Florence  232, 245 Hardy, Thomas  69–70, 232, 235, 245 Harley Granville Barker (Purdom)  228, 241 Harrison, G. B.  131, 255; A Companion to Shakespeare Studies  255 Harvard University  26, 33 Hauptmann, Gerhart  84, 118, 178, 187, 241; The Coming of Peace 241 Hecuba (Euripides)  30 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen)  60, 82, 105, 165 Heijermans, Herman  84 Henderson, Archibald  240 Henry V (Shakespeare)  223 ‘Heritage of the Actor, The’ (Barker)  53–71, 72, 119, 233, 243, 250, 254 ‘Hints on Rehearsing a Play’ (Barker)  95 Hippolytus (Euripides)  30 His Majesty (Barker)  72, 111, 234, 253 Housman, Laurence  214, 232; Prunella (with Barker) 214 Howe, P. P.  239, 240 Huntington, Arabella  230–1

Index

Huntington, Archer Milton  230 Huntington, Caroline  235, 247 Huntington, Collis P.  230 Huntington (Granville-Barker), Helen  20, 33, 51, 72, 84, 131, 226, 227, 228–32, 233, 234–5; Come, Julia (novel) 232, 249; Eastern Red (novel) 249; Traitor Angel (novel) 236 Ibsen, Henrik  xi, 60, 61, 65, 82–3, 84, 98, 108, 114, 115–18, 119, 122, 141, 163–5, 167–73, 178, 187, 221, 248; Brand 171; A Doll’s House 64, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171–3; An Enemy of the People 167, 221; Ghosts 114, 122, 164, 167, 169–70, 173; Hedda Gabler 60, 82, 105, 165; John Gabriel Borkman 105; The League of Youth 165; Little Eyolf 94; The Master Builder 165; Peer Gynt 37, 83, 88, 171; Rosmersholm 99, 116, 118, 167; The Wild Duck 105, 164, 165, 167, 172 ‘Ibsen’s Centenary’ (Barker)  163–5 illusion, see illusionary theatre illusionary theatre  5, 60, 63–5, 67, 68, 70–1, 72, 98, 101, 105, 118 Independent Theatre  177 intellectual theatre  182 Interior (Maeterlinck)  94, 148 Irish National Theatre  177 Irving, Henry  55, 107 Italy  205 John Gabriel Borkman (Ibsen)  105 Jones, David  228–9; ‘The Neglected Giant’  229 Jonson, Ben  97, 108, 212, 221, 222; Bartholomew Fair 221, 222

261

Kean, Edmund  59, 64 Kennedy, Dennis  229; Granville Barker and the Dream of Theatre 230 King, Thomas  59 King Lear (Shakespeare)  37, 88, 110, 114, 178, 180, 222 King’s College, London  240, 242, 243 Kingsway Theatre  20, 167 Kipling, Rudyard  185 Knipper, Olga (Madame Chekhov)  153 La Locandiera (Goldoni)  152 Last Judgment (Michelangelo)  114 Lawrence, D. H.  130, 237 League of Youth, The (Ibsen)  165 Le Malade Imaginaire (Molière)  88, 152 Lenin, Vladimir  160 Les Précieuses Ridicules (Molière)  221 Lewes, George Henry  168 lighting  48, 58, 60, 63, 65, 66, 68, 105 Light Shines in Darkness, The (Tolstoy)  158 Lindermann, Gustav  141 literature  14, 80, 99–101, 121, 122, 123–7, 129, 145, 172, 179, 181, 182, 184, 191 Little Eyolf (Ibsen)  94 Little Theatre  20 Live Corpse, The (Tolstoy)  158 Liverpool  139, 177 Liverpool University  233 Lohengrin (Wagner)  185 long run  5, 10, 46, 137, see also commercial theatre Lord Chamberlain  169–70, 172 Love for Love (Congreve)  221 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare)  221

262

Luther, Martin  164 Macbeth (Shakespeare)  59, 65, 152, 221, 222 McCarthy, Lillah  142, 143, 227, 230, 245, 246, 247 MacDonald, Ramsay  248 Madras House, The (Barker)  10, 111, 233, 239, 240, 248, 249 Maeterlinck, Maurice  xi, 51, 84, 94, 140, 145–9, 152, 178, 187; Alladine and Palomides 147; The Blue Bird 149, 152; The Death of Tintagiles 148–9; Interior 94, 148; The Treasure of the Humble 149 Major Barbara (Shaw)  37 Manchester  10, 139, 177 Manchester Guardian, The  154 Mare, Walter de la  173 marionette  4, 65, 106, 146 Marrying of Ann Leete, The (Barker)  10, 228, 239 Martinez Sierra, Gregorio and Maria  51, 72, 84, 246; The Romantic Young Lady 51 Masaccio  147 Mass in D (Beethoven)  114 Master Builder, The (Ibsen)  165 mediaeval theatre  57, 99, 103 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare)  79–80 Meurice, Paul  76–7, 78, 79 Michelangelo  114; Last Judgment 114 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare)  43, 110, 222 Mill on the Floss, The (Eliot)  168 Milton, John  160 Molière  67, 108, 152, 221; Le Malade Imaginaire 88, 152; Les Précieuses Ridicules 221 Montanés, Juan Martinez  159 Morgan, Margery  229; A Drama of Political Man 229

INDEX

Morris, William  125 Moscow Art Theatre  xi, 14, 51, 87, 151–4 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus  179 Mrs Warren’s Profession (Shaw)  241, 248 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare)  222 municipal theatre, see citizens’ theatre; repertory theatre Murray, Gilbert  84, 122 music  4, 14, 15, 27, 41, 43, 50, 53, 58, 61, 67, 68, 75, 92, 99, 103, 106, 113, 152, 178, 179, 185, 191, 218, 219, 222, 224 national theatre  x, 9, 51, 111, 135, 136, 177, 181, 211–13 National Theatre, A (Barker)  111, 255 National Theatre, London  x, 229, 250 National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates, A (Archer and Barker)  9, 254 ‘Neglected Giant, The’ (Jones)  229 new drama  8–9, 63, 65, 119, 163–5, 167–73, 177–87, 199, 211–12, 228 new plays  5, 8, 99, 198, 213 New Quarterly, The  9 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens)  57 Nihilist, The (Tolstoy)  157 Ninth Symphony (Beethoven)  159 normal theatre  182–5 ‘Notes on Rehearsing a Play’ (Barker)  13–19 Novelty Theatre  167 Observer, The  164, 165, 172, 228, 229, 243, 244 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)  37, 54, 143 Old Vic  234

263

Index

On Dramatic Method (Barker)  97–110, 113–18, 255 On Poetry in Drama (Barker)  131, 255 ‘On Translating Greek Tragedy’ (Barker)  84 ‘On Translating Plays’ (Barker)  75–84 opera  58, 100, 152, 158 Osbourne, Lloyd  3, 253 Othello (Shakespeare)  106, 110 Oxford University  131, 255

Prefaces to Shakespeare (Barker)  72, 111, 229, 233, 244, 249, 255 Princeton University  225, 232, 248, 255 ‘Promise of an American Theatre, The’ (Barker)  33 Prunella (Barker and Housman)  214, 253 Purdom, C. B.  228; Harley Granville Barker 228, 241

painting  4, 43, 60, 61, 92, 113, 116, 147, 178, 179, 180, 181, 185, 222 Palmer, John  59, 239, 240; Future of the Theatre 239 patronage  171, 203, 212, 226, see endowment Peer Gynt (Ibsen)  37, 83, 88, 171 performance  5, 7, 13, 18, 19, 29–30, 31, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 56, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 75, 87–92, 94, 100, 106, 109–10, 152, 178, 180, 186, 187, 218, 225 picture stage  59, 63–4, 105, see also illusionary theatre play, nature of a  xi, 14, 16, 19, 38–9, 40–1, 42, 43–4, 45–6, 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 61–2, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75, 81, 89, 97–8, 101–2, 104, 106–7, 110, 113–18, 119, 122, 145, 185–6, 187, 200, 212, 213, 220, 250 Players’ Shakespeare (Barker Prefaces)  72, 255 playgoers, see audience playgoers’ societies  177 playwright, see dramatist poetry  43, 57, 59, 69, 70, 71, 122, 124, 145, 148, 224 Power of Darkness, The (Tolstoy)  157, 158

Quality (Barker)  121–30 Quarterly Review  71, 254 Racine, Jean  76, 108, 114 realism  64, 76, 81, 116, 117, 118, 250 ‘Reconstruction in the Theatre’ (Barker)  189–91 Red Cross in France, The (Barker)  20, 255 rehearsal  13, 15, 16; 18, 19, 28, 29, 31, 36, 37, 38, 41–2, 43, 46, 51, 54, 60–1, 87, 88, 90, 91–4, 95, 137–8, 140, 141, 197, 198, see also actor preparation Reinhardt, Max  xi, 20, 142–3, 151 repertory system  5–6, 7–8, 9–10, 18, 20, 136–9, 182–3, 187, 196, 199, 204–5, 229, 239 ‘Repertory Theatres’ (Barker)  3–9 repertory theatres: Berlin  135–9, 140, 142–3; Dublin 9, 177; Düsseldorf 135–6, 139–42, 143; Glasgow 9; Manchester 9; Moscow xi, 14, 51, 87, 151–4; New York 10 Rheingold, Das (Wagner)  185 Richard III (Shakespeare)  65 Romains, Jules  81, 84, 235, 254; Doctor Knock 81–2, 84, 235, 254; Six Gentlemen in a Row 84, 254 Roman theatre  221

264

Romantic Young Lady, The (Martinez Sierra)  51 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)  64 Rosmersholm (Ibsen)  99, 116, 118, 167 Royal Court Theatre  9, 20, 239 Royal Shakespeare Company  228 Royal Society of Literature  84, 111, 173 Royalty Theatre  169 Ruskin, John  125 Russia  20, 68, 83, 151, 154, 158, 159–60, 177, 187 Russian theatre, see Russia St. James’ Theatre  20, 239 St Joan (Shaw)  241, 244 Salmon, Eric  229; Granville Barker and His Correspondents 231, 234, 247; Granville Barker: A Secret Life 229, 238 Saltzmann, Alexander von  143 Sargent, John Singer  60 Savoy Theatre  9, 10, 20, 239 Scandinavia  167, 168, 177, 187, 205 Scandinavian theatre, see Scandinavia scenery  5, 35, 48, 60, 65, 66, 88, 91, 137, 139, 141, 189, 190, 203, 213 Scheme and Estimates for a National Theatre, see National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates, A Schnitzler, Arthur  84, 142, 254; Anatol 142, 254 scholarship  111, 127–8 School for Scandal, The (Sheridan)  44–5, 59 ‘School of “The Only Possible Theatre”, The’ (Barker)  23–33 Scott, Dixon  240 Scott, Walter  127 sculpture  43, 116, 222 Seagull, The (Chekhov)  118

INDEX

secessionist movement  177 Secret Life, The (Barker)  20, 51, 72, 111, 229, 242, 243, 248, 253 Seneca  103, 104 Seven Arts Chronicle, The  154 Shakespeare, William  x, 8, 9, 20, 30, 32, 48, 59, 60, 65, 69–70, 76–80, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 111, 114, 130, 131, 147, 151, 168, 170, 177, 178, 180, 187, 190, 204–5, 212, 221–4, 234, 239, 243, 249; All’s Well that Ends Well 30; Antony and Cleopatra 110, 168, 221, 222; Coriolanus 223; Cymbeline 48, 70; Hamlet 18, 30, 32, 46, 47, 62, 65, 76–9, 91, 104, 106, 109, 110, 151, 222, 223; Henry V 223; King Lear 37, 88, 110, 114, 178, 180, 222; Love’s Labour’s Lost 221; Macbeth 59, 65, 152, 221, 222; The Merchant of Venice 79–80; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 43, 110, 222; Much Ado About Nothing 222; Othello 106, 110; Richard III 65; Romeo and Juliet 64; Troilus and Cressida 30; Twelfth Night 30 Shakespeare Association  111, 234 Shaw, Bernard  9, 72, 94, 101, 108, 109, 178, 187, 230, 231, 232, 240–5, 247–8, 250; Androcles and the Lion 242; Back to Methuselah 109; Candida 94, 241; The Doctor’s Dilemma 242; Major Barbara 37; Mrs Warren’s Profession 241, 248; St Joan 241, 244 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley  178, 187; The School for Scandal 44–5, 59 short run  196–9, see also repertory system Shute Lecturer, Liverpool  233 Siddons, Sarah  59

Index

Siegfried (Wagner)  158 Six Gentlemen in a Row (Romains)  84, 254 Spain  205, 231, 246, 248 Spanish theatre, see Spain Spencer Trask Lectures, Princeton University  225 spontaneity, see vitality stage business  27, 38, 46, 89, 94, 153 Stage Society  9, 177, 240, 241 Stanislavsky, Konstantin  14, 17, 20, 51, 83, 87, 151, 152, 153, 154 Stevenson, Robert Louis  33 stock company  34, 198, 199 Stockport Garrick Society  178, 180, 187 Stratford upon Avon  111 Strife (Galsworthy)  10 Strindberg, August  108 Study of Drama, The (Barker)  131, 255 Swinburne, Algernon  108, 109; Bothwell 108 symbolism  65, 147, 207 Synge, J. M.  178, 187 teamwork in theatre, see collaboration television  218 text  14, 37, 55, 75, 100–2, 106, 128, 145, 180, 221 theatre, nature and role of  x–xi, 19, 24, 37, 50, 51, 56–7, 58–9, 63–4, 66, 67, 68, 69, 75–6, 83–4, 88, 95, 97–110, 111, 135, 146, 152, 154, 157, 165, 167–73, 180, 181–6, 189–91, 196–207, 212–14, 218–22, 224–5, 226, 229, 250–1 theatre as industry  199–200, 211–12, 214

265

‘Theatre Exhibition in Berlin, The’ (Barker)  142 ‘Theatre in Berlin, The’ (Barker)  142 theatre manager  5, 8, 35–6, 79, 88, 152, 171, 180, 182, 197, 201–2, 204, 212 theatre of being  xi, 68, 72, 117, 118, 119, 149, 243 theatre reform  9, 26, 37, 84, 165, 195–208 ‘Theatre That Might Be, A’ (Barker)  226, see also Use of the Drama, The ‘Theatre: The Next Phase, The’ (Barker)  177–87 Three Sisters, The (Chekhov)  118, 152–3, 154 Times, The  142, 168, 171, 191 Times Literary Club  187 Tinney, Frank  79 Titian  219 Tolstoy, Leo  xi, 90, 157–60, 161; The Cause of it All 158; The Contaminated Family 157; The First Distiller 157; Fruits of Enlightenment 90, 158; The Light Shines in Darkness 158; The Live Corpse 158; The Nihilist 157; The Power of Darkness 157, 158; War and Peace 158; What is Art? 158, 161 Traitor Angel (Helen GranvilleBarker)  236 Treasure of the Humble, The (Maeterlinck)  149 Trinity College, Cambridge  111, 255 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare)  30 Trollope, Anthony  127 tuberculosis, see consumption Twelfth Night (Shakespeare)  30 ‘Two German Theatres’ (Barker)  135–42

266

Uncle Vanya (Chekhov)  118 United States  10, 20, 26, 33, 67, 95, 168, 177, 187, 189, 192, 223, 226, 242 unity of vision, purpose and effect  15, 16, 19, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 50, 141, 152 Use of the Drama, The (Barker)  225, 255 Vedrenne, J. E.  9, 239 verisimilitude  64, 65, 66, 68, 72, 250 Verrocchio, Andrea del  219 vitality, importance of and need for  4, 5, 6, 14, 17, 18, 19, 23, 32, 37, 38, 43, 46, 47, 49–50, 51, 67, 75, 89, 90, 109, 115, 138, 158, 205–6, 220, 222, 224 Voysey Inheritance, The (Barker)  10, 111, 131, 230, 239, 240, 249

INDEX

Wagner, Richard  158, 185; Das Rheingold 185; Lohengrin 185; Siegfried 158 War and Peace (Tolstoy)  158 Waste (Barker)  10, 111, 131, 229, 239, 240, 249, 253 Way of the World, The (Congreve)  88 West, Rebecca  239, 240 What is Art? (Tolstoy)  158, 161 Wheeler, Charles  84, 142 Wild Duck, The (Ibsen)  105, 164, 165, 167, 172 Williams, Harcourt  234 Wollstonecraft, Mary  168 Yale University  26 Yates, Edmund  167 Yeats, W. B.  130, 178, 187 Zurbaran, Francisco de  159