Читать книгу The Selected Works of Arnold Bennett: Essays, Personal Development Books & Articles - Arnold Bennett - Страница 87

It is of course impossible for me, in a book of this scope and these dimensions, to deal adequately with such a complex subject as the art, craft, and business of writing for the stage. I shall pretend to do no more than offer a brief sketch of the conditions of the modern theatre, together with a few hints for the aspiring dramatist. The artistic level of the English stage is at present low. It is much higher than it was twenty years ago, but scarcely so high as it was five or six years ago. There are certainly a few talented playwrights; but there is no living acted playwright whose talent, had it been a talent for fiction, would have raised him beyond the second or third rank as a novelist. Our best plays, as works of art, are strikingly inferior to our best novels. A large section of the educated public ignores the modern English theatre as being unworthy of attention. A really fine serious modern play, dealing honestly with modem life as the best novels deal honestly with modem life, has not the slightest chance of being presented unless it happens to contain a magnificent part for an eminent player, a part such as Magda in Suderman’s Heimath, played by Mrs. Patrick Campbell. And it may be said that no play of which the mise-en-scene is not luxurious and the characters not rich or titled, can get itself produced for a run under any circumstances. The playgoing public does not like artistic and truthful plays; or at any rate the modem dramatist with sufficient creative energy in him to force the public to like artistic and truthful plays has not yet come to the front The most successful modem plays are a mixture of sweet sentimentality and ingenuous farce. The most artistic of successful plays during the last ten years have nearly all been farces. And every successful play of serious pretensions has made glaring concessions of sentimentality to the public taste.

No one in particular is to blame for this state of affairs. The standard of taste rises and falls inexplicably. The nation as a whole must blame the whole nation. The playwrights do the best they can; the managers do the best they can; and the public would be unspeakably foolish to go and see that which it did not enjoy. One of the most successful and enlightened managers in London told me once, in a burst of unwonted confidence, that throughout his management he had only produced one play which gave real satisfaction to himself. In response to my query he named a piece (not a modern one) which was decidedly a work of art. That there is a genuine desire among the best managers to produce good plays I am convinced. But the manager’s first desideratum is, and ought to be, a remunerative box-office. The people who inveigh against the English stage, and suggest measures for its reform, are misguided. Nothing will reform the stage but a general upward movement of dramatic taste. When the theatrical public begins to approach the artistic level of the musical public and of the fiction-reading public, then also the theatre will begin to be reformed.

But the theatre can never offer the same untrammelled opportunities to the creative artist as the novel. Its machinery is too vast, intricate, and subject to breakdown. The dramatist who means to gain the general ear is compelled to adapt himself to so many various conditions that he cannot hope, even under the best circumstances, to attain a free expression of his mind. He is bound to consider the salaries and idiosyncrasies of actors and actresses, the hours of dinner and of suburban trains, the specialities of theatres, the limitations of stages, the etiquette of greenrooms. These and similar founts of anxiety and trouble are eternal.