Читать книгу The Scene is Changed - Ashley Dukes - Страница 4

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This late summer morning in 1940 I am looking from a window that is among the topmost on the only hill of Western London. It was said of some Victorian philosopher that his eminence was due to the flatness of the surrounding country; and so it is with this local height of ours, crowned by a reservoir and a water-tower in whose majestic Italianate shadow I have lived for more than twenty years. The inn on the crest of the hill, "The Windsor Castle", is so named because, until the embankment of the waterworks, the castle twenty miles away in the Thames valley could be seen from its upper floor. The wooded gardens of retiring mansions cover a part of our slopes; and rows of less pretending but well-situated homes are occupied by rows of judges, lawyers, novelists and painters. Two main roads run westward out of London on either side of us, and their users scarcely know that we are here.

Much of London city is included in the prospect from the hill to-day. The true heights of Hampstead and Highgate, with their churches, close the horizon to the north; and eastward the dome of Saint Paul's and the towers of Westminster stand out dimly to mark the curve of the unseen river. The nearer and secular towers of Park Lane look over the foliage of Kensington Gardens. Sloping away in the immediate foreground are low-built houses with slate roofs, marking a group of poor streets; and smoke blows every way from their crazy red tile chimney-pots, witnessing to Heaven that Sunday dinners are still cooked on kitchen ranges. In all this view, so harmoniously broken by trees and spires, scarcely any building but the distant pyramidal Shell-Mex bears the character of our own time. The architectural record spread out is that of a past century, mostly the nineteenth, varied by the few outlines of contemporary effort that men have contrived to make between the wars of the present.

If we should examine it closely, even the solidity of this existing city structure might seem dubious; for in the wide landscape there are surely few houses that are not, like my own, crumbling and peeling from neglect. Repairs are forgotten in such times. Soon we shall know whether or not the physical survival of these roofs and walls and the multitudinous life within them may still be possible in any sense that we have hitherto understood; and meanwhile they stretch away indiscriminately and rather beautifully in the sunlight, like the wrinkles of an ageing face that is content to age and has no impulse to renewal for renewal's sake. Were it not for the immense question-marks of our unfolding drama, much of this London would be renewed already.

The portents of the present are written in the sky, as portents by tradition should be. Looking from north by east to south, I count a hundred barrage balloons tugging gently at their cables as they sway and turn in the breeze; and more of them are merged in the haze over the docks and power stations. Near by a flight of pigeons comes wheeling, with little more direction than the many London butterflies that are abroad over the roof-tops this morning. A brace of wild duck, turning above Kensington Palace to beat back toward the Serpentine, show more will and purpose. So does a solitary crow, flapping high in one persistent line which all the cables will surely not deflect. A zigzag cloud unlike the rest, far above balloons and all, may be the trail of smoke-screen practice by some plane unseen. Soon, again, we shall know whether or not this strange sky is our defence; and meantime its darkly dotted canopy spread over the city gives no effect of sinister warning, but rather of observant benevolence, lest in that domain of the past which forms the substance of human building, some evil action born of the present should strike and tear a gap.

Within a stone's-throw stands a building which cannot be mistaken for anything but a theatre. Its sharp elevation at the stage end which is nearest my home, its bare brick walls facing upon a side street, and its pretentious dome surmounting a stucco frontage, tell the whole architectural tale of a late-Victorian playhouse, the Coronet, built in close imitation of the West End model. To-day, and probably for good, this house is given over to the movies; but a generation ago I saw from its gallery the acting of Réjane and the elder Guitry, the two younger Irvings, the first performance of new plays by Miss Horniman's company, and other theatrical events. Then I was living nearer the middle of the city, but people came to the Coronet from all over London. Its prosperous years were the earliest of this century, when the Edwardian accession revived hopes of social gaiety and glamour. As an outlying playhouse it soon became eclipsed by the Court Theatre in Sloane Square, where in 1904 Granville-Barker brought the plays of Shaw one after another before the public. The Coronet had no such director or dramatist, else maybe it might have been a living theatre to this day. In the last and bankrupt stage of its career, I remember the bailiffs' men standing inside the box-office and raking the money aside as the public put it down on the counter.

Another stone's-throw beyond, with its gilt figure of Mercury hidden by the elevation of the larger building, is the little playhouse which I now direct, thirty to forty years later. It opened under its present name in 1933, with Jupiter Translated by W. J. Turner after Molière's Amphitryon; and for that occasion I had written: "Mercury being the god of commerce, it is strange that so few playhouses are called after him. We have nothing against his mercenary attributes, but we prefer to think of his dexterity and charm, his musical inclination, and his dalliance with the nymphs (whence Daphnis and Pan). Born in the morning, he had invented the lyre before noon, and by nightfall had enticed a herd of fifty away from his duller brother Apollo. May this be an omen of our own powers of lure, for we can find room for three times as many. . . . All this knowing well that the god escorts men through adventures, and protects them in enterprises, and dances whispering prudent counsels in their ear."

Maybe the most prudent counsel in 1933 would have been to abandon the project, for seven bad years at least were before us; but at the end of them the doors are still open. As surely as the old theatre, the new one is here. And this association of place and time in one section of a city gives me the plan on which to write about many years in the life of the theatre, in almost all capacities but that of actor, which I have never attempted. These years have been spent first as playgoer and observer of the stage of Europe, then as critic here in London both before and after soldiering in France; as observer and traveller again, and by a twist of fortune I have never myself quite understood, as successful playwright and even best-seller; again as writer about the stage and its art, and exponent of the modern theatre idea as a European understands it; and latterly (for I decline to say finally) as interpreter of artistic theory in practice by the staging of certain kinds of plays, chiefly poetic, on a platform and under a roof of my own.

I know well how limited the interest of such a career must be; indeed I feel it too personal to be considered a career at all. But perhaps for this very reason, the link of life and work with the actual prospect as seen from my window may be allowed to count for something. To me this London is not only a city but a hearth. And since a window without a house has no significance, let me add that in this house, having married an artist in her own profession, I have had daily pleasure in her mind and companionship, and wit and heart; and here together we have bred and reared children, two daughters to be precise; and from here I have gone forth year after year to see many countries, from California to Greece, and to do many things that no Englishman may be able freely to do again in our time, or any American either; and now here in this home, without indulgence of nostalgic longings for anything that has been or may remotely be again, I take the stand of reality and look on the past with the eyes of the present. This has been the time in which a man should live.

Away, then, from the present habitation of Campden or Notting Hill, whose "great grey water tower" was celebrated by Chesterton, and back to the early 1900's and gallery playgoing. I came to it fresh and eager from a university life whose dramatic experiences had been few but important—the seeing of Sarah Bernhardt on tour in La Dame aux Camélias, Irving in The Bells and The Lyons Mail and an execrable work called Dante (though this was probably at Drury Lane): Mrs. Patrick Campbell in The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, then the last word in fashionable sophistication: John Hare in A Pair of Spectacles, equally the criterion of comedy: Mrs. Kendal in Still Waters Run Deep and The Elder Miss Blossom, the founts of sympathetic tears: and such actor-managers as Charles Wyndham and George Alexander in current successes. All of these excited me, without affording a satisfaction remotely comparable with that of seeing Janet Achurch in A Doll's House or an anonymous touring company in The Devil's Disciple, not to speak of Duse in some piece of which I understood not a word. The strong impact of Ibsen and Shaw was due partly to intellectual curiosity, but also to prejudices left over from a puritan upbringing, which inclined me definitely to dramatists with a moral to their fable.

Further, I was a graduate in science although an aspirant to the humanities; and after brief patronage of such writers as Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones, I turned abruptly to the dramatists of the Court Theatre. Shaw was of course at their head: the others were St. John Hankin, John Galsworthy, Granville-Barker in the days before the hyphenation of his name, and John Masefield and Laurence Housman among men of letters associated with the stage for the first time. Their new works were mostly presented at afternoon performances on Tuesdays and Fridays, and ran on those days for a few weeks at a time, leaving some play by Shaw (I recall John Bull's Other Island and Man and Superman especially) to fill the evening bill. A play successful in the afternoons would be promoted to the evening from time to time.

The acting standard was high, but the staging rather commonplace in its naturalism. Barker's direction was sensitive, shrewd, faithful. We were scarcely aware, even by report, of the richer development of theatre art which was even then proceeding under Reinhardt's direction at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. The work of Stanislavsky in Moscow and the name of Chekhov were equally unknown. But one or two of the plays of Maeterlinck had been translated into English and performed: the gaudy talent of D'Annunzio had been introduced by the visits of Duse and other actresses: the Stage Society had given Hauptmann's Hannele: and so it was just possible to realize that, in Europe as a whole, drama was not confined to the lifelike style of presentation which had come in with the eighteen-nineties, and the proscenium need not necessarily stand for a "fourth wall". But on the stage of the Court lifelikeness was the rule, if the brilliance of a Shaw could ever be considered lifelike; and the plays capable of any other treatment were rare.

I had a special link with the Court Theatre and its audience through membership of the Fabian Society, the meeting-ground of socialist intellectuals who then included Shaw and Wells, and among the younger people St. John Ervine. In the Fabian circle it was generally agreed that the theatre was taking or should take the place of the church in social enlightenment; and no other serious function was assigned to it. Shaw had propounded such a dramatic gospel in his prefaces, and the rank-and-file of middle-class revolutionaries, indifferent to art though devoted to craft movements, never for a moment disputed his word. I was afforded a malicious sidelight on all this bourgeois socialism by evening visits to the Highgate home of Prince Kropotkin, author of The Conquest of Bread, who spoke freely and with personal knowledge of such men as Marx, Engels and Lassalle. Kropotkin had the scorn of a communist aristocrat for the entire middle class, whether socialist or otherwise; but in particular for bank clerks, who, he declared, could never belong to the proletariat because they wore top-hats. This may have been due either to his failing sight or to faulty observation throughout a lifetime: actually bank clerks had given up wearing top-hats and taken to bowlers (in America, derbies) some years earlier. But the mind of the great old man was a fine corrective to the homespun mentality of the Fabians.

The Court Theatre audience was the resistant force against which a dramatist like Chekhov had to make headway before he could be understood and eventually accepted in England. For there is no conservatism quite like that of the intellectual left wing; and the "drama of ideas", once it had crystallized in the argumentation of Shaw, tended to become the standard form in the forward-looking theatre. What naturalism had meant in the "free theatres" of Europe in the 1890's, intellectualism began to mean to the Court Theatre group and their followers. No other writer had Shaw's entertainment value, which was the true foundation of the movement. Both Galsworthy and Barker were accepted on their own respectable merits, although they were actually less original in relation to their time than Wilde had been, ten or fifteen years earlier. But then Wilde could never have become a Court Theatre playwright. He was interested in making plays works of art, though only once did he fully succeed in the task; and he had no social gospel. Some revival of interest in Wilde was, however, provoked by his Salome, which fell under the Lord Chamberlain's ban as a stage play because of its Biblical subject, but was successfully made the libretto of an opera by Richard Strauss.

Altogether, the Censorship question was one of the issues of the day. A Royal Commission was demanded to examine it, largely because of the attacks of Shaw, William Archer and others on the power given to a "Court official" to deprive a playwright of his livelihood at will. Certain works by Ibsen and Maeterlinck had been banned, and this brought all good Europeans into the ranks of the attackers. By an inverted reasoning, the public began to think that every censored play must be a masterpiece; and on this assumption a number of dull pieces were inflicted on the members of Sunday evening societies, whose audience by a legal fiction were permitted to see them.

Such was the background of a young man's dramatic interest in his very early twenties, say in the years from 1905 to 1907. And if that should now appear to have been an age of enviable tranquillity, I can only recall it as an age of unremitting conflict. This was no doubt the effect of intellectual growing-pains; for looking back I can form a picture of genuine period character and even leisurely charm—the ladies just beginning to find it old-fashioned to ride bicycles in the Park; their long dresses, both afternoon and evening, that "did up" with hooks and eyes at the back; the dust on the country roads and the mud in the London streets; Shaw's first motor-car with the great man himself at the wheel and Mrs. Shaw in a becoming motor-veil at his side; the races at Epsom and Ascot with King Edward in his grey top-hat smoking a cigar; H. G. Wells in evening tails with black waistcoat and tie saying a few words to me at a Fabian conversazione where dancing was described as "the ethical movement". After a year or two of this London life, I resigned my post as university lecturer in science to take a private tutorial post with prospects of travel. My own education was to be continued in a post-graduate course at Munich; and it was this latter prospect that decided the step.

No journey across Europe can ever compare with the first. Still looking eastward from my window as evening falls, I realize how familiar the life of those now forbidden countries has grown to me in the course of time. It seems yesterday (though it last happened more than two years ago) that one drove to the Channel port and crossed over with the car, and passed in a few hours from the Flemish ploughing horses to the yoked oxen about Compiègne or Laon; then left the chalky downs of Champagne for the lovely square of Nancy and the mountains of the Vosges and the Rhine, and climbed over the Black Forest into the rolling plains of Württemberg; and saw the Alps rise in the distance beyond the cathedral of Ulm and the Marienkirche of Munich; and so by forest and pass gained the ultimate goal of Florence or Siena. There was even a day when I rehearsed all morning at the theatre, and lunched at the Garrick Club, and dined the same evening at Thomas Mann's villa on a Swiss lake, thanks to a plane that crossed France in two hours. And yet this first long journey, in 1907, remains the clearest in my mind. It began by Dover and Ostend, and was broken at Brussels and Cologne, and again at Coblenz to which we took the Rhine steamboat. The month was September, when tourists were coming home to England in the opposite direction; and on the evening of the third day from London we drew into the main station of the Bavarian city, there to live for a year. To a young European, it seemed a coming-of-age.