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Title: The Scene is Changed
Author: Dukes, Ashley (1885-1959)
Photographer: Coster, Howard Sydney Musgrave (1885-1959)
Date of first publication: 1942
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Macmillan, 1942
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 18 March 2012
Date last updated: 18 March 2012
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #926

This ebook was produced by
Barbara Watson, Ross Cooling, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






  THE SCENE IS CHANGED




  OTHER PUBLICATIONS BY ASHLEY DUKES
  ----------------------------------


  _Essays_--
      Modern Dramatists
      The Youngest Drama
      The World to Play With
      Drama (_Home University Library_)

  _Verses_--
      The Swallow-Book (_from Toller_)

  _Plays_--
      The Man with a Load of Mischief, _comedy_
      The Dumb Wife of Cheapside, _comedy_
      The Fountain Head, _comedy_
      The Song of Drums, or, Ulenspiegel, _heroic comedy_
      The Players' Dressing-Room, _comedy_
      Such Men Are Dangerous (_from Neumann_)
      Jew Sss (_from Feuchtwanger's novel_)
      Matchmaker's Arms, _or_, The House of Assignation
      From Mom to Midnight (_from Kaiser_)
      The Machine Wreckers (_from Toller_)
      In Theatre Street (_from Lenormand_)
      The Mask of Virtue (_from Sternheim_)
      Mandragola (_from Machiavelli_)




[Illustration: THE AUTHOR]




  THE SCENE IS CHANGED


  BY
  ASHLEY DUKES



  LONDON
  MACMILLAN & CO. LTD
  1942




  COPYRIGHT



  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
  BY R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EDINBURGH




  TO
  EDITH J. R. ISAACS




  CONTENTS


    _THE AUTHOR_                     _Frontispiece_

                                              PAGE

   1. PROSPECT AND RETROSPECT                    1

   2. OLD GERMANY                               12

   3. ZURICH--LONDON                            26

   4. PEACE BEFORE WAR                          38

   5. GERMANY, 1919                             49

   6. LONDON, 1919-21                           59

   7. EUROPE REOPENED                           71

   8. SUCCESS STORY                             84

   9. SCREEN REFLECTIONS                        96

  10. EUROPE AGAIN                             104

  11. FROM THE ORIGINAL                        117

  12. ATHENIAN SPRING                          131

  13. LAST LULL IN ENGLAND                     145

  14. CALIFORNIAN SUMMER                       160

  15. THEATRE OF ONE'S OWN                     174

  16. ROME EXPRESS                             189

  17. POETIC DRAMA                             201

  18. EUROPEAN FAREWELLS                       216

  19. NEW ENGLAND VENTURE                      230

  20. AFTERWARD AND FORWARD                    243

      INDEX                                    249




  1

  PROSPECT AND RETROSPECT


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 Rjane 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 Molire'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
Camlias_, 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 Compigne 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
Wrttemberg; 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.




  2

  OLD GERMANY


Munich in 1907 was a sprawling, tippling, good-natured place, provincial
notwithstanding its pride as capital of a southern kingdom. Although the
student population included many would-be painters, and the great Goyas
and Drers could be seen in the Old Pinakothek, it had not yet given
itself the name or the airs of an "art city". From the standpoint of
architecture it could never have claimed any such distinction. Many
buildings were covered in stucco and decorated in the baroque style, and
some of the palaces had been cheaply provided with painted windows
instead of real ones. Except for a few carved and groined gateways, the
medieval survivals were insignificant: the modern work was uniformly
tasteless. The suburbs with their mock-gothic villas had to be seen to
be believed.

Whatever character the city possessed was due to the meeting of old
winding streets of shops and beerhouses with broad featureless avenues,
the latter stretching out fanwise from the Residences and the English
Garden. Four-seated open horse-cabs plied everywhere, and often they
were loaded to the depth of their springs with stout students in grey
frock-coats and coloured peaked caps, the badges of the various duelling
corps. With these young gentlemen it was a point of honour not to walk,
even from lecture to lecture in the scattered university buildings; and
their journeys from beerhouse to beerhouse were invariably made behind a
trotting horse. As their faces were often scarred in the semblance of a
proposition of Euclid by the combats they had survived, the vehicles
bearing them around the city were known to other students as _pontes
asinorum_.

In winter the wheels of the cabs were taken off and replaced by
sleigh-runners for months at a time; and then the scrape and rattle of
wrought-iron over the cobbles gave way to the tinkle of bells. If in a
thaw the snow of the street surface wore thin, men were employed to
shovel it on to the roadway from the side walk, which was otherwise
seldom cleared. This was one of the tasks of the public serving-men
(_Dienstmnner_) who stood at every corner to await burdens or errands.
In the hotels and _pensions_, other serving-men with brushes strapped to
their feet skated around polishing the floors. These men, and also
waiters and shopkeepers, addressed every superior in the third person.
All menials took off their caps at the approach of an employer or
otherwise saluted him. These survivals of feudalism are worth recalling,
for the old-German picture cannot be complete without them. I doubt if
there were fifty motor-driven vehicles in the whole of Munich at this
time.

The crazy Ludwig, king of Bavaria and patron of Wagner, was already
confined in the villa on the Starnberger See where eventually he met
his death; but the Regent walked often and unattended in the city,
raising his hat when passers-by stood aside to make way for him. The
Court was in formal evidence only at the Opera, and then rarely. The
truly popular monarch, as always in Bavaria, was the peasant from the
highlands, who strode everywhere in the old part of the town with his
feathered cap, short jacket and leather breeches. Gold and silver pieces
were often sewn into his waistcoat. At the October Fair he could be seen
grotesquely bestriding a Lohengrin swan on the roundabouts, or gaping at
the fat woman who served as decoy to a tentful of freaks; and in his
bucolic ranks were a few bearded and more earnest-looking fellows from
Oberammergau, spending the money they had earned by acting in the
Passion Play or betweenwhiles by carving toy chalets and cuckoo-clocks.

Such peasant invasions were seasonal to spring and autumn; and after
Christmas Munich held its own metropolitan carnival, the _Fasching_,
celebrated by masked balls in an old vaudeville theatre and pairs of
lovers slipping through the starlit streets in early morning. In summer,
tourists came to the Wagner Festival in the Prinzregententheater, one of
the first in Europe to adopt the modern seating plan of a single sloping
tier.

For most of the year popular symphony concerts were held in the
beerhouses, where also all political meetings took place. The citizens
liked to tell the tale of a Temperance Society compelled to hold its
meeting in the Hofbruhaus. _Singspiele_, consisting of peasant songs
with vaudeville, were given on platforms in the bigger halls. One Kathe
Kobus ran a more sophisticated cabaret called _Simplizissimus_, where
no public personage, and least of all royalty, could escape ridicule.
Always after these late nights, summer and winter alike, many students
went to the station to catch the early train to Garmisch and climb the
Zugspitze or one of the harder peaks of the Wetterstein range. The life
of the mountains was close to the city.

In our _pension_ everybody wanted to talk English to young Englishmen,
and it was hard to keep to the rule of grammar and exercises by day, and
reading and conversation by night, which should enable anybody to master
a language in a few weeks. I certainly had no more time to spend on the
business, for I have always regarded foreign languages as a kind of
necessary shorthand, in which head waiters and diplomats reach the
highest proficiency but ordinary folk can meet their civilized
requirements if they wish.

The theatre found a place immediately in my system of German education,
for the two legitimate playhouses of Munich were just opening with their
seasonal variety of plays, from German sentimental comedies to Ibsen,
Strindberg, Hauptmann, Shaw and Gorky. One of them, the Residenztheater,
a lovely playhouse which I believe was the first to install a revolving
stage, announced that during the season it would present the whole of
Ibsen's plays from the first to the last at fortnightly intervals. This
promise was fulfilled, and I was duly grateful for having arrived in the
city at such a moment. The other, the Schauspielhaus, was a typical
German provincial theatre run on the repertory plan, with a stock
company and a change of bill every night. The kiosks everywhere carried
the playbills in large Gothic characters, which brought them to
everybody's notice. London and New York should have kiosks: they get in
the way of pedestrian traffic but they are the best form of theatre
announcement.

The Hoftheater or Royal Opera House was flourishing: its tenor at the
time was Knote, the German contemporary of Caruso. He was accustomed to
sing at Munich from September to May for some modest retainer, and then
he took a Covent Garden engagement to make his fortune. This theatre
generally sold out all its seats for the week before noon on Monday, so
that poor students had to get up early and stand in line with the
Dienstmnner from seven in the morning. Their place was generally in the
topmost gallery, where they could hear their girl neighbours gushing
over the entry of the officers below. It was a tradition that officers
should remain standing during a performance, either at the side of the
parquet or the back of the boxes; and in close ranks they made an
effective decoration to a full house.

When the Mozart operas were given for a cycle with famous singers, the
Residenztheater could be sure of the same success; but for most of the
season it offered a repertory rather like that of the Burgtheater in
Vienna, with high comedy and classical drama alternating. Nothing very
revolutionary could be shown on this Court stage, and the appearance of
Ibsen meant that Germany already considered him a classic. His long
personal association with Munich was also remembered. The policy of the
Schauspielhaus was much freer. Hauptmann's _The Weavers_ could be seen
there regularly, with Gorky's _Lower Depths_ (A Night Shelter) and
Tolstoy's _Power of Darkness_ and Maeterlinck's _Monna Vanna_ and
Strindberg's _The Father_, Ibsen's _Ghosts_ and even Shaw's _Mrs.
Warren's Profession_--almost the entire list of controversial plays of
the period. The works that our Stage Society had presented on
experimental Sunday evenings were played here nightly as a matter of
course, before a regular and appreciative public. But the Munich
playgoer, like others, looked abroad for talent rather than at home.
Wedekind, who was then living in the suburb of Schwabing, was never
performed, though many of his fantastic dramas were already written. The
Austrian dramatists, like Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, found it much
easier to get a hearing. The only censorship was that of the police,
which was exercised immediately there was any trouble in the theatre,
such as interruption of a play. I remember such a _Theaterskandal_
arising from the production of Machiavelli's comedy _Mandragola_, which
thirty years later I put on in London without causing one protest.

These Munich theatres may have been subsidized indirectly, but they were
quite commercial in their study of public taste, and they never gave
more performances of a play than the audiences were willing to pay for.
A new work was given three or four times in the week after its
production (usually made on a Saturday evening for the convenience of
the Press). If it proved a box-office draw it was played twice weekly
for several weeks or even months: if not, it was played once a fortnight
for a short time and then was dropped altogether. Some plays went on
year after year in the repertory, and might reach 100 performances.
Production costs were trifling, for old scenery was repainted and the
company were working and earning their living during the rehearsal
period. But if there was no material risk in presenting a play, there
was a risk of reputation. No director wanted to have failures, even in
repertory where they could easily be concealed. Nor did he want to call
upon his season-ticket holders, classes B and C, to fill the house at
cut prices. When classes B and C made their appearance, Class A,
entitled to the new plays, ceased to come at all. Success, in fact, was
as all-important in repertory as in any other kind of theatre, and all
eyes brightened at the word _Riesenerfolg_ (or smash hit).

Munich then had about half a million inhabitants. If one in twenty went
now and then to the opera or the play, and one in fifty went every week,
the three theatres could be sure of good houses. The real proportions
were perhaps higher, for in that age before the competition of the
screen all habits were more settled. The whole middle class could be
relied on to support the stage. From their frequent bowings to each
other as they circulated in disciplined streams around the foyers in the
intervals, it could be seen that the audience were well acquainted. Drab
and dowdy as they were, the drama was part of their culture which in
turn was part of their class-consciousness. Last night's play would be
discussed by small officials in their bureaucratic round, and by
professional men visiting or being visited by patients, and even by
shopkeepers talking with customers. No peoples' theatres had yet been
founded, and probably it never occurred to any workman to go to the
Schauspielhaus or the Residenz. Poor students attended in numbers, but
that was another matter. The legitimate stage was a middle-class
institution, and its very creditable liberty of thought, fostered by
dramatists like Ibsen, was a middle-class liberty not yet translated
into a basic political creed. Priests were often to be seen at the play,
especially at the Sunday afternoon performances when the day's Masses
were over; and the public in general must have been pretty well divided
between the devout and the liberal (for political liberalism always
implied some sort of protestantism or free-thinking). But the one thing
that united them was membership of what is called the _bourgeoisie_.

This is no doubt clearer to me to-day than it could ever have been at
the time, for a young foreigner finds nothing harder to grasp than the
social distinctions (or lack of them) in the country where he happens to
be. To an Englishman the absence of what is technically called a lady
was noticeable in Munich, and I confess sometimes welcome. Such beings
must have existed in Prussia and Saxony, and even in their most
formidable shape; but in Bavaria all women seemed to be women and
amiable at that. A Cambridge scientist who was in Munich with a
vivisection permit, making experiments on mice, told me that German
women had one passion, the cream bun; but this was a falsehood of
specialist observation. They certainly liked cream buns, as Nora in _A
Doll's House_ liked macaroons; but above all they enjoyed being
approached as human beings, neither housewives nor bluestockings. The
girl from the suburbs who came for a day's walk in the mountains
remained almost indistinguishable in her manners, her reserve or
abandonment or charm, from the young professor's wife presiding at a
tea-table.

If these social observations are allowed, a word can be said about the
racial question too. In all that time I was in Germany I cannot
remember any feeling against Jews, either in the theatre where many of
them were working or in ordinary life. There may have been some such
prejudice among the student or official classes, but a looker-on would
never have noticed it. Only in the years after 1919 did mutterings begin
to the effect that the Jews had undermined German culture. And since the
Nazis have attributed "culture-bolshevism" in Germany to the Weimar
Republic, I would add that this "culture-bolshevism", meaning liberalism
in thought and art, flourished before 1914 under Wilhelm II and was then
much commoner than at any time in the 1920's.

My day's work in the university began at seven in the morning by
attendance at an hour's lecture on the physics of the sun, and continued
in the forenoon with some laboratory work on physico-chemical subjects.
But with no examinations to pass, there was no need to take all this too
seriously; and in fact discoveries in the field of radioactivity had
made theories obsolete which had been the foundation of my knowledge as
schoolboy, student and graduate. The movement of knowledge seemed
suddenly to have taken the increasing _tempo_ of the world which was
manifesting itself in the internal combustion engine and the beginnings
of flight. Or was this partly the fancy of a young man turning from
exact knowledge to drama?

I made friends in the university with liberal students, outside the
duelling Corps, who were glad to talk with an Englishman of these
things; and these companions tended to be students of literature rather
than my fellows from the research laboratories. Our conversations often
took the form of one hour's English exchanged for one hour's German. I
had brought a silk hat and tail suit with me from England, and this made
me an embarrassing number of new friends, for every student needed such
an outfit in which to pay his formal call on his professors once a term.
Borrowing was the rule; and sometimes the student returning my clothes
was accompanied by another known to him but not to me, who bowed stiffly
on my threshold and asked if he might have the honour of wearing them
next.

The afternoons were spent in walking or riding, horseback or bicycle,
with such student acquaintances; and on Sundays we joined in scrambles
on the Bavarian peaks, where the rock was friable and treacherous
compared with the basalt of the Lakes or North Wales which I already
knew. We carried coils of rope which were seldom used: at the summit
there was generally a comfortable inn crowded with walkers who had come
up by the path and were toasting the beauties of the view in beer or red
Tiroler wine. On such days one returned too late for the theatre; but
most of my other evenings were spent there, always with a student card
at minimum price. By this time I knew the personalities of all the
players, and even of the prompter who read each part aloud, sometimes
too audibly, from his hooded box in the middle of the footlights. It was
perhaps too much to expect of any company that they should keep the text
of as many as ten plays in their heads at the same time. But to remember
words was easier than to preserve distinctions of character:
type-playing showed itself as the real weakness of the repertory system.
Some of the heavy fathers, elderly spinsters and young lovers soon
appeared rather in the manner of a stage procession, whose individual
members had gone off and were coming on again with old familiar faces.

It was the director's task to give variety and freshness to plays under
these casting conditions. The total repertory required two or three of
these _Regisseure_ beside the general director responsible for all
productions; and there was always an evening director (_Abendregisseur_)
who timed and scrutinized every act and scene, and had powers to call an
extra rehearsal any morning. Directors of separate plays had a free
hand, and some of them showed an individual imagination that went far
beyond the most skilful of stage management. I began to know one
director by his lighting, another by his variation of stage levels; and
to see possibilities in the art of staging plays which our English
theatre, in spite of Craig's writings, had not begun to realize. With
all this in mind, I sought to make back-stage contacts which would help
me to understand the technical aspect of theatre. My first ambition was
to write plays; but I wanted to work myself into theatre life, to attend
rehearsals, and to learn how everything was done. This was far from
easy, for a German theatre playing repertory had no time to spare for a
young English scientist with a dramatic hobby. As for other students,
they laughed at me and advised making love to an actress; adding that
after a week of her I should find a waitress more fun. There was
something in this, for when I met stage folk I found them personally
disappointing. I remember that one of the directors envied me the life
of science, and said that whenever he entered a stage door he felt he

should put on the white overalls of a specialist, because the artist
was a pathological case.

At about this time Shaw's _Candida_ was announced by the Schauspielhaus,
and on going to the first night I found that the director, misreading a
stage direction which describes the poet Marchbanks as having apparently
slept in the heather, had dressed him as a sportsman who only needed a
rifle to be in perfect trim for deer-stalking. Otherwise the play had
been understood well enough. I wrote to Shaw to give an account of this
production, and received by return mail one of those lively postcards
which all who know him, and others too, have accumulated in the course
of years. This message from the _Dichter_ was a sufficient passport to
the authorities of the theatre, I was invited to rehearsals of all
foreign plays, and at the director's suggestion I was emboldened to
write two articles on English and Irish drama for the _Neueste
Nachrichten_, where they duly appeared. So it happened that my first
earnings as a writer were for work in a language not my own. A student
of philosophy had looked over the script for me; and sharing the fifty
marks which arrived at my Munich address by money order, we had a
convivial evening at a wine shop, for as he said philosophically, that
is always better for men of letters than a beerhouse. On the way home I
was obliged to stop and tell him how strongly the _Dichter_ Shaw would
have disapproved our entire proceeding, had he known of it; but he sawed
the air with vague gestures and imaginary further toasts to _die schne
Philosophie_. During the evening we had become sworn brothers in the
student fashion. Physicists and mathematicians now began to ask me why I
was no longer attending their lectures, but writing for the papers
instead. I snatched a fortnight's holiday in Vienna and Budapest, going
third class by night train, to think about this question of science and
art.

At the Burgtheater in Vienna I was able to see German classics played
with gestures in proportion to the immensity of the stage. Those were
the great days of the Burg, when even the ushers, dignified grey-haired
men, wore gold braid on their uniforms and carried cocked hats which got
in the way of their selling of programmes. The vast Imperial box faced
the stage from the middle of the first balcony, and one evening I saw it
occupied by Franz-Joseph. I could now appreciate the life of Vienna, its
cafs where all the business of the city was done, the Prater and the
vineyards of the Wienerwald, the Zentralcaf with its chess-players and
their lookers-on, and the old town within the Ring. This was before the
time of the Theater in der Josefstadt, and I recall nothing on the stage
that was half as exciting as the Breughels and the Danube. Maybe, at
twenty-three, the poise of life was helping to balance the authority of
science and the attraction of art. At Budapest, without understanding a
word, I could follow the performance both of classics and some modern
plays in the style since perfected by Molnar. A strong and colourful
theatricality marked everything on the Hungarian stage, from the State
Theatre to the gipsy cabarets; but in this capital too the drama of
living for me was uppermost.

When I came back to Munich the city seemed more provincial than ever. I
took a dislike, quite unreasonably, to the youths and maidens munching
ham rolls in the long interval at the Schauspielhaus, and the endless
procession of their dull elders circulating in the corridor around the
hat-and-cloak rooms, the compulsory financial pillar of the German
stage. I knew how important an institution this theatre was to the young
life of Germany, as it had been to me; but nothing less than the stage
of Berlin, where plays had long runs and Reinhardt was in command at the
Deutsches Theater, would have contented me. I had to escape from science
and Bavaria together. At the worst, I knew that an English honours
graduation followed by a German post-graduate course could always earn
me a living in a university college at home; and meanwhile the world was
giving me a free chance as writer and theatre man.

An opportunity arose of going to Zurich for a further stay in Europe,
and I accepted it at once. The change of university solved the
scientific problem forthwith, and new surroundings promised greater
freedom of every kind. Perhaps the Alps of Switzerland were higher too;
it was certain that the Zugspitze was dwindling. This was the summer of
1908; and had I known it, I was saying farewell to Old Germany and
everything it meant. Leaning from the window as the train started, I
exchanged the familiar _Du_ with fellow-students, and then blew a kiss
to a Munich girl I had never set eyes on before. When we were safely
moving out, she returned it gaily. An hour or two later we drew up on a
pier by Lake Constance, and embarked on a steamboat which lost the
German shore to view before sighting the Swiss lowlands with their
jagged background. Yes, the Alps were higher; and the next great lake
with the city at its outflow looked very much as the posters of
Continental travel had always pictured it.




  3

  ZURICH--LONDON


If Munich had been both Bavarian-national and provincial, Zurich was
just a city on a lake in a country international at heart for all its
William Tell romanticism. Russians, Poles, Netherlanders, Scandinavians,
Italians, Frenchmen and even a few English were represented in this
cluster, and swarmed on terms of complete understanding with the angular
black-coated German-Swiss. Having common interests in learning or
science, sport on the water or the mountains, the pursuit of health or
the refuge from persecution, we went about our daily task in that
freedom which small European communities in this last century (or shall
we say until the present one) have been able to offer their guests. The
general tolerance was accompanied by a rigid system of police
registration, which was accepted as a needful precaution in a country
where all were welcome.

The social atmosphere was as congenial as the simplicity and
cleanliness--the only dirt in Switzerland is to be found on its
glaciers--but living there, I felt from the first the sense of being
outside Europe looking in at her life, her mind and heart, her strength
and errors and confusions. As one had hitherto looked into a dramatist's
mind through the proscenium of a theatre, observing his particular way
of bringing order out of chaos, so one now looked out physically at the
strange and gigantic spectacle of the Powers. It was the time of the
Edwardian _Entente Cordiale_ linking up with the Franco-Russian
alliance, and of the other grouping that professedly joined Germany with
Italy through Austria-Hungary as relic of the Holy Roman Empire. But the
view one had of it was not political, though all of us knew in those
years that Europe might be pregnant with disaster. The individual
civilizations themselves were seen more clearly from this craggy
international height. Their colours stood out more vividly, with their
vast cultural creations; and the very narrowness of the Swiss horizon,
mental as well as material, brought a consciousness of the fateful
spaces that lay between the Atlantic seaboard and the steppes.

Twice, in those early autumn months in Switzerland, I had taken my
student ticket for a journey to the highest point of the railroad before
the entry into the tunnel, and walked over the passes into Italy,
turning back each time from the first villages above the Lombard plain,
and returning to Zurich. Walking the passes is an old Alpine diversion,
well repaid in the case of the Saint Gothard or Saint Bernard by the
sudden change from mists to sunshine, often in the space of a few yards,
and the prospect of the great country below. It was made doubly exciting
by a scramble up some not too difficult peak at the head of the pass,
from which one might see as far as Milan. After a joyous winding
descent into an upper Italian valley with its vineyards ripening to
harvest, to turn back from the gate of this promised land was more than
tantalizing. Already I carried in my knapsack the books of those who
knew it well--the travels of Arthur Young, the letters of Horace Walpole
and Stendhal, the memoirs of Casanova. And if these should appear in
every sense a promiscuous bag, they yet reflected the moods of a young
Englishman, truant from science, who was learning about Europe and art
from men who had taken coach or horse over the same highway. The
nearness of Italy, lying there in the sun beyond the snowy ranges seen
from the Zurich foothills, made one sure of her in the end; and for the
present she could wait as she had waited for centuries.

France, lying westward and unknown but for one week's visit to Paris
when I was hardly out of school, seemed actually much closer because my
approach to literature had been chiefly through the French. Stendhal
(_De l'Amour_, _Le Rouge et le Noir_, _Vie de Henri Brulard_) was then
my ruling passion, since I had discovered one of his books on a stall in
Vienna; and if he remains a passion after thirty years, it is because
his absorption in life, women, war, theatre and poetry falls into a
sequence personal and familiar. I could imagine him, as he somewhere
describes himself, seated in the 1930's on a bench by an Italian lake
looking back on it all: tracing with his cane in the dust the initials
of the mistresses who had brought him so much grief as well as joy:
recalling proudly that in his writings he had never given one of them
away: declaring the ultimate creed of a man born into the crucible of
the French Revolution and destined to survive into the Victorian age.
He had been among the most eager of Napoleon's soldiers, following him
to the Danube and to Moscow; yet he stood unmoved by the Fall in 1814
because it had ceased to mark the overthrow of human aspiration. If he
had forgotten the plots of a score of his unwritten comedies, he
preserved the spirit of our civilized heritage. Stendhalism is like
Byronism, it has its manifest extravagances. But is there any man of a
century ago who stands closer to our own time?

My reading just then included works of genius of every nationality, in
which the _Penses_ of Pascal, the comedies of Molire, the novels of
Flaubert and even the contemporary histories of Anatole France were
confoundedly mixed up with Tolstoy and Dostoievsky and Turgenev. Still
more oddly, the first part of Goethe's _Faust_ which I knew almost by
heart was accompanied as chorus by the verse of Stefan Georg. Then,
having begun to realize how far dramatic poetry differs from all other,
I was in course of discovering the marvels of the dramatists before and
after Shakespeare. When it came to other poetry, I liked Ronsard and
Donne better than Keats or Shelley. If there was room in any reader's
mind for _The Anatomy of Melancholy_ beside _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_,
I somehow contrived to find it. No wonder there was little place in this
gallery for Thackeray or Dickens; or that George Meredith, a writer who
had been in fashion with every young Englishman of the period, was as
good as forgotten. Bergson brought some discipline of thought into all
this luxuriant confusion, and Sorel's _Rflexions sur la Violence_
suggested new and disturbing political concepts far removed from those
of Wells or the Fabians. By no means lastly, but outstandingly, there
was Nietzsche; and I confess that for a while _Thus Spake Zarathustra_
and _The Birth of Tragedy_, both read in the lyrical German, were like
an Old and New Testament.

Nothing could witness my abandonment of science better than this
miscellaneous yielding to mental avidity, sensibility, defiance,
eroticism and literary conceit. The drama of my own private stage ousted
all actual theatre interest for a while; and it was certainly more
exciting than anything I could hope to see in the town theatre of
Zurich, whose notion of modernity was to play some Russian social drama
by Tolstoy or Gorky four times a week. (The work of Chekhov was still
unknown.) I learnt nothing new about the stage or contemporary drama
during many months spent in the German-Swiss city; but on the strength
of my published articles the university allowed me to give short
extension lectures to evening students on English life and letters. The
subjects ranged from Elizabethan tragedy to the woman suffrage movement;
the language was German but Socratic conversations followed in French
and English; and since I learnt as much as my listeners the hours were
far from wasted. They helped me to gather up and formulate the results
of much seeing, thinking and reading; and this was useful now that the
time drew nearer for a return to England.

By the middle of a second summer I was back in London, wondering why the
place had changed so little when I had changed so much, or thought so.
A. R. Orage's weekly review _The New Age_, which I had read before and
during my time abroad, was still appearing with shrewd notes of the
week, articles by Shaw, Belloc and Chesterton, a weekly book article by
Arnold Bennett under a pseudonym, and commentaries on the arts. After a
short spell in a teaching post I became its dramatic critic, with
freedom to train the batteries of Continental criticism on Somerset
Maugham, three of whose comedies were running at one time, Galsworthy
who had just produced a capital-and-labour play called _Strife_, and
Barrie who had established himself with _What Every Woman Knows_. The
Vedrenne-Barker management was no more, and no regular forward-looking
theatre had yet taken its place. Acting, too, seemed to be undecided.
Ellen Terry survived from the former great generation, and even appeared
in Shaw's _Captain Brassbound's Conversion_. "Mrs. Pat" was to be seen
occasionally, and Marie Tempest and Irene Vanbrugh moulded their art
sensitively to whatever slight changes English comedy might undergo with
the passage of years. But there were no new Irvings or Hares or Wyndhams
that the public could discover; and though nearly every actor of the
Vedrenne-Barker school made a name for himself, it was generally in
character work. Gordon Craig's productions and especially his writings
were much discussed, but Granville Barker remained the only practising
director of distinction. It was as though the stage had halted, sensing
the approaching rivalry of the screen; and in fact at this time (1909)
Charles Chaplin was touring England with Fred Karno's _Mumming Birds_,
which I recall seeing on "the halls", as we called the vaudeville
houses.

To a young European the round of new plays was dull enough. For a while
Rupert Brooke, who wanted to learn about the stage, came with me to the
openings; but the only luck we had together was with _Don_ at the
Haymarket, written by Rudolf Besier who was later to write _The Barretts
of Wimpole Street_. After these excursions we would either go round to
the Gray's Inn rooms of Edward Marsh (then Winston Churchill's
secretary) or rail at the theatre together in the Caf Royal. Brooke
then went abroad; and presently Orage, who was always a good editor,
suggested that instead of gnashing my teeth weekly over plays that his
readers would never go to see, I should write about the Continental
stage and its dramatists. This suited me perfectly, and the series began
with the Scandinavians and went on with Germans, Austrians, Frenchmen,
Russians, Dutchmen and Italians, with Shaw, Barker and Galsworthy as the
three Court Theatre playwrights planted in the midst of them. These
essays were later published in England and America under the title
_Modern Dramatists_, which was far too important for their content, but
conveyed a journalistic idea well enough.

In the same months I wrote a comedy, _Civil War_, which was produced by
the Stage Society at the Aldwych Theatre in the spring of 1910. My
twenty-fifth birthday fell during the rehearsals, and the first
performance took place under the shadow of public mourning for Edward
VII. The plot concerned a land-owning baronet whose son had fallen in
love with a daughter of an old international communist living in a
colony near the baronet's estate. The drama of social and political
oppositions was as simple-minded as this theme would suggest; but at
twenty-five it is one thing to be critical and another to be genuinely
creative. Considering how few first plays are ever performed, this one
was lucky and perhaps pardonable. Thanks to the acting it had a
respectable Press, and one or two repertory theatres revived it in the
next two years, after which it died a natural and far from regrettable
death.

The event of that year 1910 was the Frohman Repertory Season at the Duke
of York's. Charles Frohman, the shrewdest of theatre men, had been
impressed by the success of Shaw and the other dramatists of the Court
Theatre, and decided to give them a real chance under Granville Barker's
direction. The theatre chosen was in good standing with the public, but
it had drawbacks for repertory which no one seemed to realize until
after the opening. These might have been overcome if only one of the
first three or four plays had drawn the town, and carried the rest of
the bill by frequent performance. But neither Galsworthy's _Justice_ nor
Barker's _The Madras House_, still less Shaw's _Misalliance_, could do
this; and Barrie's plays, which were more popular, formed a double bill.
The success problem confronted the repertory management as grimly as any
other, and after a few weeks Pinero's old play _Trelawney of the Wells_
was brought in to save the situation. By the time the venture closed, it
had lost Frohman a small fortune and the newer English dramatists a good
deal of credit. The drama of intellectualism and argument had been
routed, and on the whole deservedly. Shaw remained, as he had been in
the Court Theatre days, the only one of these writers entitled to demand
of the theatre that it should be his own mouthpiece; and this by right
of being a wit and a dramatist born. The rest, with their social
indignation or carping, were misusing the stage and frustrating the
actor and boring the audience.

I remember many things about the year 1911, including my own retirement
to a cottage to write comedies, a move that coincided with a heat wave,
a railroad strike, and an international crisis which threatened to blow
up the world just three years too soon. My cellar-book also links this
year with the framework of later life, for it was an excellent year for
burgundy. In our theatre the interest of the year began early and well,
for on January 30th the Reinhardt Company opened at the London Coliseum.
I was there that day, and would not have been absent for the world from
such an occasion. Having seen the first performance in the afternoon I
saw the second in the evening, and the third next afternoon, and so on
while funds and opportunity lasted. The play, if one could call it such,
was an Arabian Nights entertainment founded upon the story of Noureddin
and the Fair Persian: the title was _Sumurun_, Victor Hollnder wrote
the music and there was no text other than the sequence of action (one
could not call it a libretto) devised by Friedrich Freska. There were
several acting or miming performances in the first rank: one, obviously
supreme, was that of Ernst Matray in the part of the clown. Direction
was evident in every movement in every scene; and this was the work of
Reinhardt, whose theatrical _flair_, to put it at the lowest, had
contrived to make a masterpiece of its kind out of an old
highly-coloured tale and a good company of mimes and some near-Eastern
music. By what strange accident or providence _Sumurun_ reached the
stage of a London family vaudeville theatre, nobody could explain. It
was there for several weeks and months; and one could only rejoice in
it. This wordless play had taken full revenge upon the too-wordy
dramatists of the Frohman season; but most of all upon their assumption
that the stage must be their personal pulpit.

Later in the same year came the inferior but even more successful
production of _The Miracle_, a spectacle devised by Karl Vollmller to
the music of Humperdinck and given at Olympia under Reinhardt's
direction. This was _kolossal_ where the Coliseum show had been merely
superb. Both productions, very likely, had been conceived with the idea
of making as much money as possible out of the English public, so that
it could be spent on further Reinhardt ventures in Berlin. In this they
succeeded, and for years afterwards the Professor (as he had now become)
had complete freedom to develop the work of his companies. To _The
Miracle_ also he owed the castle of Leopoldskron, near Salzburg, built
by a prince-archbishop of the seventeenth century who had banished all
actors from the diocese. We shall come later to the Leopoldskron
evenings which gave brilliance to the Festival in the 1920's.

1911 was also the year of Chekhov's first performance in London, and as
usual the dramatic pioneer was the Stage Society, which gave _The Cherry
Orchard_ in George Calderon's translation. An audience of would-be
intellectuals tittered at intervals all through the play, and had to be
told by some members, including myself, to mend their manners. Next day
our leading critic, William Archer, admitted with his invariable honesty
that he had found the dramatist completely incomprehensible. Shaw,
characteristically, entered the discussion by explaining Chekhov in
purely scientific and social terms; the man, he said, was merely showing
how futile the life of the _bourgeoisie_ could be. He even threatened to
write a Chekhov play himself, and later did so, to his own satisfaction,
in _Heartbreak House_. These perplexities and obscurations were due to
the simple fact that _The Cherry Orchard_ was a work of art. It had
nothing to do with the drama in which Shaw and Archer had been mainly
interested, the social drama of Ibsen and his followers. Chekhov was
employing naturalism as an art form in the theatre, just as Flaubert and
George Moore in successive generations had employed it in their novels.
Those who had understood the post-impressionism (or art naturalism) of
Manet or Renoir or Czanne should have had no difficulty in knowing what
Chekhov was about. In the following year or two _The Seagull_ and _Uncle
Vanya_ were seen, and they made clearer the dramatist's individual line
and the beauty of composition that he had brought into the lifelike
theatre.

Next in 1911 came the Imperial Russian Ballet, which had already
triumphed in Paris. Its first appearance at Covent Garden on June 21st,
the day of the summer solstice, with Nijinsky and Karsavina, was of
course the event of the century so far. Diaghilev was in command, but
this was still his romantic period with _Pavillon d'Armide_, _Spectre de
la Rose_, _Clopatra_ and _Les Sylphides_. I shall inevitably have more
to say about ballet, without pretending to any knowledge of its
technique; but the importance of this coming of the Russians lay in its
great widening of the theatre horizon. Here, in complete harmony, were
direction, scene and costume, music and the work of stage artists who
in years of schooling and longer years of experience had perfected
themselves. Each one of them spent more hours in daily practice than our
players of the legitimate stage spent in acting. It was possible to
speak of the art of the theatre, not only as a unity which Gordon Craig
had sought to make his readers comprehend, but as an accomplished fact.
And here, at the end of a memorable year, is the place to pause again
and look around.




  4

  PEACE BEFORE WAR


In his autobiography _La Vie de Henri Brulard_, having concluded two
long chapters about his life, Stendhal writes "After so many general
observations, I shall now get born". I have much the same feeling in
approaching the year 1912, when actually I reached the age of
twenty-seven. _Aprs tant de considrations gnrales, je vais natre._
Up to now I have seen a little of the stage and the world, enough to
make a prologue to my own comedy or tragedy or whatever it is destined
to be; I can estimate the parts so far played by thought and action in
the shaping of a mind. Now must come the rise of the curtain and the
"act of preparation", as the French call it, in which the drama really
begins. I have started a career; but do I really want the things that
success in a career brings with it, money and reputation, settlement and
responsibility, all the many millstones that our century can hang about
the neck of artists and writers? This may be begging the question: such
burdens are very welcome if one is able to bear them. In this year 1912
I see older writers whom I know personally, men like Arnold Bennett,
struggling with them all the same. I think again of the gaunt
ill-dressed figure of Synge, standing in 1907 on the stage of the Great
Queen Street Theatre on the London first night of _The Playboy_ and
facing the Irish hooligans with the unseeing eyes of a dreamer. It is
true he was then a man about to die of a mortal sickness; but what more
could he have asked of life than to have written this comedy, and lived
among the Aran islanders and the folk of Kerry, and sat staring before
him in some Paris caf while a waiter brought his single unheeded drink?
In a life like that, pauses and silences count for most and bring their
own reward. They count for most in every act of preparation, when the
outward progress of the drama is so slow as to be imperceptible.

One thing I see now which I could never then have foreseen--that is how
lucky we were, we men now in the fifties, to have known what the world
was like before 1914. Seeing what has since befallen and was then in
course of preparing, we need not talk of "that civilization" but simply
"what the world was like". It had many worthwhile things to offer the
grown man or woman; and by grown I mean mature, ready at some age in the
twenties to face outward catastrophe if need be. The unlucky ones are
the men now in the thirties and forties, who were born into one
cataclysm of our social life and now must face another without real
experience of the first. They are the legion of the frustrated, and from
no fault of their own. Beside them, though they are half a generation
our juniors, we can be young and confident. And here let me be forgiven
the egoism of standing, in 1912, waiting to be born. The earliest
recollection of Stendhal's infancy was biting his nurse's cheek when she
asked him too sentimentally for a kiss. Mine is that of casting off
socialism and the Fabians and the _New Age_, always with due gratitude
for past favours, and beginning a new hedonist life on the editorial
staff of _Vanity Fair_, which Frank Harris had made a man's paper
thriving, as always, on its Spy cartoons of notabilities. Also I was
writing dramatic criticisms for the _Star_ and short essays called
"turnovers" for the _Globe_. Royalties came in from translations such as
Sudermann's _Midsummer Fires_ which I did for Miss Horniman's theatre in
Manchester. I was planning a book on Molire's characters, in which one
should get acquainted with Alceste and Climne as people of our
century, instead of thinking of them as figures in the classics. Two or
three unacted plays lying in my own desk did not seem to matter: a time
for them would surely come along.

I moved from a Bloomsbury attic into a top floor in Mortimer Street,
near Oxford Circus; and presently T. E. Hulme, a writer on philosophy
and translator of Bergson, came to share it with me. Our link at first
was that we had been on the staff of _The New Age_ together; but soon we
found much more in common. Hulme made a strong impression on his time,
though his writings actually were to be few (he was killed in 1917 on
the Belgian coast, quite near my own Company headquarters). A book about
him by Michael Roberts (1938) deals with his attitude to the world. Tall
and rather Prussian-looking, with greying fair hair and blue eyes, he
would sit for hours unwinding, as it were, general ideas, with expansive
gestures which began and ended in the region of his chest. He seldom
went to bed before three or got up before noon; but his reading was done
in the morning hours. On all evenings when I was not at the theatre, we
dined in a chop-house behind the Caf Royal with the sculptors Epstein
and Gaudier-Brzeska and a group of English painters including Nevinson
and Robert Bevan; and also sometimes Richard Curle, Conrad's friend and
biographer, and Ramiro de Maeztu, who became Spanish ambassador to the
Argentine. The rest of the evening was spent in the Caf itself,
generally in talking about the world, the inevitability of war,
Marinetti's futurism or Ezra Pound's verse, or the paper that Wyndham
Lewis was bringing out called _Blast_. Once a week these conversations
were carried on more fully in a house in Frith Street, where Middleton
Murry and C. R. V. Nevinson used to join us. We knew of the work of T.
S. Eliot, though he never came himself to these gatherings.

The atmosphere of this group was authoritarian, and no doubt Hulme, had
he lived, would have embraced some form of fascism. The significance of
all our argument lay in its anticipation, by about ten years, of any
political movement embodying its ideas. There was nothing, actually,
about which we were united: the sharpest divisions were on religion as a
motive in art and literature. Hulme himself declared that he was a
member of the Church of England and left it at that. Again I cannot
remember any anti-semitic feeling. Jacob Epstein, who was in the midst
of his "abstract" period as sculptor, does not recall it either. Our
general interest in "abstract" art led us especially to a revaluation of
the images of poetry and a strong reaction against romantic verse. This
movement would certainly have extended to drama, had any members of the
group been able to take the theatre seriously, even the intellectual
theatre. But Shaw, I regret to say, was not even discussed as a thinker.
As a rationalist, he had shown his opposition to the "heroic values"
forming the central nerve of our essential ethic. "The author of _Arms
and the Man_", wrote Hulme, "reminds one of the wasps described by
Fabre, who sting their prey in the central ganglia in order to paralyse
it, in this way acting as though they were expert entomologists, though
in reality they can have no conscious knowledge of what they are doing."

I have to give this short account of intellectual birth-pangs in
1912-13, although my total picture is incomplete because it leaves out
the emotional stresses of the same time. I was living among new people
in a new eager world, which, however, had few points of contact with the
theatre and the writing for and about it which was my living. The
contacts which did exist were personal, and through them I drew closer
to friends on the stage, most of them working for serious theatre
through repertory or some such endeavour in London or the provinces. The
London stage was noteworthy only for the productions of Granville
Barker, but these included Arnold Bennett's _Great Adventure_ at the
Kingsway, Shaw's _Androcles and the Lion_ at the St. James's, and
especially a _Midsummer Night's Dream_ at the Savoy, in which by the aid
of an apron stage peopled with "bronze angels" the play was given
moments of new and extraordinary loveliness. The leaven of creative
direction was already working upon our theatres; and England, which had
seemed to me rather dull and reactionary when I came from abroad, was
again the home and hearth of everything I cared for. Visits to Paris in
these years made me familiar with the boulevardian theatres, their witty
playwrights and smooth players: I took to chess among the professionals
in the Caf de la Rgence, and pursued my Molire studies at the
Franaise. In the Alps I walked more passes.

Late in 1913 the Stage Society asked me to translate two plays by
Anatole France, one of which was the _Comedy of the Man who Married a
Dumb Wife_. This title sounded familiar, and taking down my Rabelais I
found the whole tale in _Pantagruel_, where it is recorded as the
subject of a medieval farce played at Montpellier. Anatole France's only
embroidery of the plot was to make the husband a much-bribed judge; and
probably he did not think it necessary to give the origin, except
implicitly in a dedication to a French society for Rabelaisian research.
The comedy has a perfect _peripety_ or dramatic reversal of action, for
the dumb wife whose tongue is loosened by the surgeon talks too much,
and since she cannot be made dumb again, the only remedy is to make her
husband deaf. In two acts, it is a classical hour's entertainment if the
players can keep up the sublime spirit of mock-solemnity.

The Stage Society production was made at the Haymarket early in 1914,
with the dumb wife played by Maire O'Neill, the original Pegeen Mike of
Synge's _Playboy_. At the dress rehearsal I found Granville Barker at
the back of the circle enjoying the play, and he said at once that he
would like to acquire it for Lillah McCarthy. The two performances went
well, but the derivation from Rabelais passed unnoticed by all the
critics, including the Francophile and learned A. B. Walkley of _The
Times_. Had I known it, this was to be my last direct contact with the
stage for at least six years: it was also eventually to be the means by
which I met and married a wife, herself by no means dumb. The fact that
the comedy was played at the Haymarket completed the chain of
association, for there my _Man with a Load of Mischief_ was to be
produced eleven years later for its first London run. Whatever other
parts are played in the theatre, luck admittedly plays the lead. It is
so important that in Middle Europe the actual wishing of luck is thought
unlucky, and an actor or playwright is wished _Hals-und-Beinbruch_
instead. This means "broken neck and legs to you", and it serves just as
well. It is contracted to _H. und B.B._ in German telegrams to players
wishing them a good first night.

And so we came to the summer of 1914, which perhaps in recollection
seems more charged with fate than it seemed at the time. I went to the
Derby with Hulme, who had never seen a racecourse before and was
fascinated by the mathematical adroitness of the bookmakers in adjusting
the changing odds. We stood on the Hill opposite the grandstand, and it
gave him equal satisfaction to see the King (George this time and not
Edward) flanked by the entire peerage and many members of the House of
Commons, all in the ceremonial attire of Epsom. But he reminded me that
the Shah of Persia on a visit to this country a few years earlier had
declined to see the Derby, saying "It is already known to me that one
horse is swifter than another".

The booths on the Downs were pulled up and the roundabouts cleared
away, and England was never quite the same again--but then England never
is. Hulme was to be wounded within a year and killed within three: I was
to be a soldier nearly five years and go back with an army of occupation
to the Germany where he and I had both studied. Our period of training
brought us together again, with others including Rupert Brooke who had
returned from the expedition to Antwerp. The theatre had stopped at
first and then reopened with spy plays and _revues_, the usual provender
of war. A distinguished exception under Granville Barker was the
Kingsway, which gave Thomas Hardy's epic drama _The Dynasts_. In this
first autumn, too, eight of Shakespeare's plays were performed at the
Old Vic, where Matheson Lang inaugurated the season. Twenty-five of the
plays in the First Folio were to be given in this theatre before the
Armistice. Even Reinhardt in Berlin could not do so well as this. The
Stage Society wisely continued its work, and I made them do _The
Recruiting Officer_ by Farquhar early in 1915. This was the first
Restoration comedy to be revived for many years, and it led to the
performance of plays by Congreve during the war, and afterwards to the
formation of the Phoenix as a producing unit.

And now it is time to write a few words about war as an interlude in
life and a pause on this journey. It is the simpler to do so because
this chapter I am writing has been half a dozen times interrupted by air
raid warnings, and one of them is in progress as I write this sentence
in a room of my own theatre. (As the sentence ends the all-clear is
sounded, and the theatre cat comes to rub himself against my legs and
tell me of his heroism.) These thunderous echoes in 1940 recall very
clearly the sequence from 1914 onwards. I held every rank, except that
of sergeant, from private soldier to major and company commander. From
early in 1916 until the Armistice, I took part as a combatant in every
action of importance on the Western Front from St. Quentin northward. No
injury ever took me further back than an advanced dressing station. As
an officer I was mounted and grew very fond of my horse, a red roan who
behind the lines would go for walks with me like a dog. I still carried
Pascal, Stendhal, Casanova and the rest in my valise. At no time had I
any impulse to write about the experiences of war, nor do I wish to do
so now. The descriptions I have read in the pages of novels appear to me
to have as much value as a clinical account, say, of agonies on a
deathbed; and certainly no more. Since Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ there
has been nothing essentially to be said on this subject. One
illuminating experience of war is long association and comradeship with
men one might never otherwise have known.

But I am glad to have seen the major assaults on the Somme and the first
lumbering entry of tanks into warfare; the turning of the dolphins in
the phosphorescent waters of the North Sea at the mouth of the Yser,
where my gun position _Extrme-Gauche_ lay among the sandhills; the
tower of Ypres Cloth Hall before it was finally overthrown; the blowing
of the great mines at Messines; the streaming of the Cavalry Corps at
dawn through the broken Hindenburg Line, even though they came back the
same evening; and the Very lights that went up in a desolate landscape,
but without the chatter of machine-guns, to serve as fireworks after
dusk on Armistice Day. I am critical of heroic values; but in their
grim precision these remain and I would not have missed them. Nor is
their memory weakened by any repetition of war's alarms. The loss of
friends apart, the one personal event was my marriage in the spring of
1918 when it seemed the thing might last for ever (I mean of course the
war).

In mid-November 1918 my division began the march to the Rhine, a journey
of some 200 miles which I made on foot, my horse being needed for
laggards at the rear of the column. The French villages in the freed
zone were garlanded and festooned to greet us: in the first of our
billets for the night we had to liberate a cow which the farmer had
driven upstairs to save her from being driven off by the retreating
Germans. Cows can get upstairs but not down and the engineers had to
lift her through the window-opening with a crane. In Belgium we would
invite the burgomaster to dine in the mess, toasting the kings Albert
and George in whisky: he would then tell us where to find wild boar of
the Ardennes, which we hunted with service rifles if the conditions
admitted a day's halt. I had a day's pike-fishing in the Meuse.
Presently we crossed the German frontier marked by great stones on a
bleak plateau; and there the divisional general stood under the flag to
take the salute. The Eifel, a high wooded part of the Rhineland through
which we marched for days, has a Catholic population and peasant houses
like those of Bavaria. We passed more and more abandoned German
equipment and cars; and from the opposite direction came, in groups or
singly, ragged bearded men, hardly recognizable as British prisoners now
freed and making their way to Channel ports.

So there was Germany again, strangely revisited after ten years; and in
the clean houses with their wood-burning tiled stoves one spoke with the
sullen but correct local authorities, distributing so many troops to
each farm or cottage and reserving the castle on a rocky eminence as
personal headquarters for the night. Here might be paintings and
woodcarvings, or a library of books finely bound; things that helped to
bring back circulation to the soldier's numbed mind. It became
increasingly important to find good quarters at the journey's end, which
was timed for Christmas Eve; and as we left the foothills for the
alluvial plain of the Rhine, I rode forward to reconnoitre the village
of Flerzheim which had been allotted to two companies. Good quarters
were few, and my choice fell immediately upon a nunnery with
seventeenth-century turrets, which stood in moated seclusion on the
outskirts of the place. The Mother Superior, with the parish priest,
received me on the threshold and was not surprised to hear that officers
and men would be quartered on her. The priest observed that it had been
happening ever since the Thirty Years' War. One wing of the ground
floor, and half the cells in the main corridor of the floor above, had
been evacuated already and the two parts of the building separated by
curtains (also, I fear, by barricades). The Mother Superior kindly
offered me her own cell, as she had withdrawn with the rest. In half an
hour all was settled; and within a week the mess servants were handing
in our rations at the kitchen window and the nuns, growing themselves
rosier each day, were cooking the best meals I had known in my military
career. Life had definitely begun again, and theatre was about to
begin.




  5

  GERMANY, 1919


Of the German disorders that followed the Armistice we saw nothing, for
we were ourselves following the retreating army through the Rhineland at
a disrespectful distance, and the arrival of our troops automatically
preserved order in the occupied zone. But within a few weeks news came
from Berlin of the Spartacus movement, in which Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg tried to arm the workers and seize power for communism. The
Mother Superior was much perturbed about the activities of Red
Rosa--"one of those hot-blooded Polish females" as the parish priest
declared. Rosa must have been very prim compared with their vision of
her. In that winter, while we skated round the nunnery moat or rode
across the plains hunting hares, in the intervals of parades and
educational lectures for the troops, Germany was plainly agonizing in
mind as well as body. This was the background of literature and the
theatre, and one might have expected that the drama of the streets would
drive the drama altogether from the stage; but actually the will to
expression was too strong to be stifled. New writers pressed forward to
seize the stages which had functioned with German thoroughness during
four years of war; the organization was all ready for them, and
understanding audiences and critics were ready too. There was no spirit
of defeated chauvinism such as the Nazis have since pictured and
invoked. The people wanted to hear what New Germany with its saddler
head of the provisional government had to say, and Europe wanted to hear
it too. Whatever political blunders had been or were to be made, the
feeling of that time was one of stubborn hope. _Nie Wieder Krieg_, never
again, was the watchword oftenest heard passing from mouth to mouth; and
we who were still in soldiers' uniforms echoed it as heartily as any
German civilian in his threadbare suit.

As a German-speaking officer I was bound to be assigned some sort of
special duty, and there was even talk of a regular commission with field
rank and years of prospective service on the Rhine. Luckily at this
moment a temporary post came along, and made the authorities forget
about the matter. I was to be appointed commandant of Elsenborn Camp
near Aix-la-Chapelle, a bleak place, 2000 feet up, which had been the
concentration point for the original invasion of Belgium. The divisional
general added that I could sleep in Ludendorff's bed, some disarmed
German officers in charge of stores would join me at meals, the hotel up
there was said to have a good cellar, and one could shoot small deer in
the forests but I must take an armed bodyguard if I went out with the
keepers. I thanked him and went into his staff office, where a bargain
was made that this command should carry with it short leave at my own
reasonable discretion, and a pass by rail or any other form of
transport to Cologne. No motor vehicles could be relied on to reach
Elsenborn in winter, so I set out mounted for this elevated spot,
accompanied by two junior officers and a detachment on limbered wagons.
The camp was only two feet deep in snow when we arrived, but four feet
deep soon afterwards, so that we were cut off for the best part of a
week and then provisioned by pack mule. Otherwise the place was as
described, Ludendorff's bed was comfortable, one of the Germans played
chess, and the host produced Marcobrunners and Jesuitengartens of mature
years and character. I mounted a guard which presented arms impeccably
by day and was dismissed after dinner. The few deer I shot at made off
indignant and unharmed.

At the first melting of the snows (and there are several meltings in the
Rhineland) I took my accumulated leave and made a playgoing visit of ten
days to Aix-la-Chapelle and Cologne in our zone and Coblenz in that of
the French. The city of Charlemagne was disappointing as a theatre town,
and Coblenz had only an uninspired playhouse; but the chief theatre in
Cologne included in its repertory practically every play of merit
written in Germany since 1914. One of them certainly was _Der Bettler_
by Reinhard Sorge, a dramatic poet who fell at Verdun. It was the first
expressionist drama, and perhaps the best because it never left the
plane of poetry. The subject was modern but yet timeless, just one of
those German domestic dramas that in prose can be so boring; the verse
irregular and strong, seldom lyrical, always dramatic. The staging
showed an understanding of the expressionist mind; across the proscenium
hung a fine gauze, that now familiar device for preventing the
diffusion of light on a subdivided scene. Symbolic arrangements of
pieces of furniture and a stove, caf seats on a raised terrace, a high
window and the shrubs of a garden, formed the subdivision. The lighting
moved from one part of this scene to another, leaving all the unlighted
part invisible. In 1919 this was most impressive, and it would be so
to-day. A work of rare interest was being directed and played as it
should be.

And what, pray, is expressionism? the reader may reasonably ask, for it
is some time since this word was current in the theatre. The answer is
simpler than the dramatic critics, who signally failed to understand the
movement, would have the public believe. Expressionism is, or should be,
one form of the poetry of the stage--the writer's form which seeks to
give the essential rather than the detail of drama, and so to help the
actor to give the essential of acting and the director and the scenic
artist to give the essential in presentation. The aim of expressionist
drama is clearly allied to that of imagist verse and impressionist
painting; but the name itself became specially attached to
middle-European dramatic writing in the years between 1917 and, say,
1927. I should say that expressionism perished because few who practised
it were poets themselves, and of the others too few understood how to
contribute to the general poetry of theatre. When the dramatic history
of our century comes to be written this movement may appear much more
important than it appears now, a few years after its decline and virtual
abandonment by dramatists. These nameless characters of the
expressionist imagination, the Mr. and Mrs. Zeros or other numerical
figments, played their part in a fermentation of the creative mind which
was the possible forerunner of a new dramatic poetry. And in its wildest
extravagances the actor and the director found stuff to work upon.

At first I felt a certain shyness in attending these evenings at the
Cologne theatre, which was seldom patronized by foreign officers in
uniform. The middle-class audience which promenaded in the intervals,
slightly paler and more haggard than the Munich audience of old, stared
at me as none but promenading Germans can ever stare. An official of the
management approached and asked me deferentially whether I represented
the _Zensur_ of the British authorities, and when I replied that I was
there for pleasure he begged a thousand official pardons. Editors and
dramatic reviewers put me at my ease, and I met people not only in
Cologne but in Bonn among the university staff. I returned to my camp on
the frontier with experience of half a dozen new and vital plays and a
library of expressionist drama up to date. Signs of spring were
appearing, and we became busy as an overnight halt for horses and mules
brought by road from France to supply the Rhine Army. Hundreds of these
were making their last journey, having been marked for civilian
consumption. With them rode young officers, innocent of war, who ate and
drank, slept and passed on. Beginning to feel like an innkeeper, I
applied for early demobilization, and even for a consular post which I
did not seriously want. Divisional headquarters, as I had hoped, was
sufficiently impressed to recall me to battalion duty so that I should
hand over to a possible successor. I returned by way of Cologne, where
they were now playing _Von Morgens bis Mitternachts_ by Georg Kaiser.
The opportunity of seeing this play was welcome, for it seemed the most
characteristic prose work the expressionists had produced, and so the
best to translate for the English-speaking stage.

At the nunnery, all was changed except the benevolence of the nuns; the
Army of the war was visibly dissolving, and on the horse lines my old
roan and his groom were the only survivors. They were to remain a few
weeks longer, for it was typical of routine that I should now be given
short leave to England. This included a day or two in Cologne each way
(with more playgoing) and a protracted journey by the Boulogne express,
which lived on the reputation that it had once been three days late. The
spell of leave itself was very welcome: one of the contacts I renewed
was with the Stage Society which had just given _The Beaux' Stratagem_
by Farquhar. The consular post came to nothing, but I was offered
interesting work by the successors to Baedeker in the English publishing
world. One of their projects was a handbook to the Western Front,
Belgium and Northern France; and the queer association of history and
art, architecture and war made an appeal to me. I must have been back in
Germany in full spring, for the Rhine valley was all fruit blossom from
Cologne to Coblenz, and Bonn was once more a university town with youth
in its veins. Like schoolboys at the end of term (for that is what it
means to be on the verge of demobilization) another major and I rode to
the Rhine one morning early, stabled our horses and took ferry to the
forbidden and neutral zone of the Siebengebirge, where we walked from
wooded height to height in the deepest solitude I have ever known on
mountains. Next morning early I was awakened by my orderly with my final
Army orders, which were to proceed to the Crystal Palace by way of
Rotterdam.

In thirty-three years of life I had hitherto successfully avoided
visiting the Crystal Palace, which is one of several English equivalents
of Coney Island. Not even the great Saturday evening firework displays
of Messrs. Brock had drawn me there. But as a gateway to civilian
freedom this glassy structure, originally set up in Hyde Park for
Victoria's Great Exhibition, glittered with a fantastic glamour. Just
twenty years later I was to see its original cement foundations, close
to Knightsbridge, laid bare by mechanical diggers and cranes filling
sandbags with earth in readiness for the second German war. But for the
moment my dream was the Crystal Palace and demobilization was my Bank
Holiday. I saw it refulgent before me as we rode for the last time
through the German forests on the way to the station. My groom was to
take back the roan; it was hard to part from this animal who had been
mine for three years and had once been wounded under me but retrieved
from the Base. I celebrated the last night in Cologne by going to the
opera-house instead of a theatre, and afterwards went round to talk with
the English players under Esme Percy who had by this time started a
stage of their own in the city and were performing plays by Shaw and
others. Next morning a mixed crowd of officers and men of all units,
unknown to each other but united by the wish not to be soldiers any
more, sailed down the Rhine towards Holland. We sang a great deal and
drank very little, although the propensity of the English for drinking
aboard river steamboats is well known. When Germany was left behind and
the windmills came into sight on the flat river-banks, we raised a
cheer.

Holland seems to me a country permanently unmemorable, however often it
is visited. This time we were not to be rewarded even by seeing
galleries of great pictures, for the cities themselves were out of
bounds. I recall dimly a railroad journey to the Hook, where the Harwich
boat was alongside; and much more vividly the North Sea passage on a
still moonlit night and the view of the Essex coast at dawn--strangely
unlike the view of Kentish cliffs seen hitherto by soldiers on short
leave. There cannot have been one of us aboard who did not feel the
finality of this experience, the laying down of arms and taking up of a
life that was either unknown or almost forgotten. The boys in their
early twenties were entitled to feel happiest about it, for despite
certain deficiencies of education they could start from the beginning;
we in the thirties had no illusory belief that 1919 would be in the
least like 1914. And so we berthed in Harwich, came to London in the
early morning, and by noon were forming lines at tables in the Crystal
Palace to receive our papers. It was a pleasure, that evening, to get
into civilian clothes.

Now that it is closing, I see that this chapter is itself rather
expressionist, giving as it does the essential and not the detail of a
half-year suspended, as it were, between war and peace. In retrospect
also I see the Germany and her stage of this time midway between Munich
as I had known it and Berlin and Salzburg as they were to be seen a few
years later. At a revolutionary time--for 1919 was so in every country
more or less--the stage was making new and positive gestures of its own.
I had the good fortune to see them in their full significance, because
in Germany the theatre was a genuine reflection of a people's dramatic
will; it was not, as in post-war Soviet Russia or in the total state of
to-day, an instrument of policy. It was still too early for some of the
best dramatic writing that came out of this time of struggle, though
Toller's _Die Wandlung_ and Fritz von Unruh's _Ein Geschlecht_ were
already written, beside Sorge's play which has been described. But the
stage was not waiting for only dramatists; acting and especially
direction were making gestures of their own. The style of the
Burgtheater was now completely outmoded and a byword among the
profession--very much as "ham" acting is a byword to-day. The work of
directors began to be described as _stilisiert_ or _konstruktivist_, and
_schpferische Leitung_ (creative direction) was something more than a
new theatre fashion. It was odd to be returning to a country where such
developments had scarcely been heard of, and manifestly impossible in
the mood of 1919 to enlist any but the most limited English sympathy for
a movement of German origin.

The effect of it all was to give me a strong urge toward constructive
theatre criticism--not dramatic criticism as the London reviewers
understand it, narrating the plot of the play at length and adding a few
words about the acting at the end, but illumination of the stage in its
capacity as a bearer of works of art. Had the _New Age_ still existed in
its old form I would have written for it weekly; but Orage had turned it
into a Social Credit organ, and he himself emigrated first to France
and then to America. The _New Statesman_ gave me space for a few
articles, and Desmond MacCarthy, as always, showed himself sympathetic
to the new idea. Other colleagues in criticism like William Archer
received me kindly and took care that I had work to do. In this first
civilian summer I rose at six every morning and set about the task of
furnishing new material for our stage; the first play was to be Georg
Kaiser's _From Morn to Midnight_, and in my rosy imagination there were
many to follow. Revisiting the hills of my native Somerset, and driving
a gig around its villages on a first properly-arranged honeymoon, I
persevered with this project which was to be realized in due measure.




  6

  LONDON, 1919-21


Here, then, I found myself one of some millions of soldiers turned
civilians--sharing their sense of deliverance and freedom but also of
unrest. I write of these things twenty-one years later, by the warmth of
an open fire which itself has been kindled from the timber of
neighbours' houses destroyed in this month of October 1940. Our physical
faade of common existence is now scarred if not shattered: there is no
room for social complacency any more: and since all of us lead a
soldier's life in some degree, we may contrive to face the outbreak of
peace with more unity and less disillusion than in 1919. Nobody will
make us unfulfilled promises of a land fit for heroes: we shall hope to
work out and make for ourselves the stupendous changes in our world.

But my own memory of 1919-20 is plain enough: it was a time of
impatience, of protest, of action that threatened many abrupt and even
violent issues. Socially, politically, intellectually, masses of
soldiers and civilians wanted to make an end of established things. Some
felt themselves disarmed at the moment when, armed, they could have
imposed their will on Europe and not only on the former enemy who has
since become an enemy again. In my own middle thirties, with the wild
oats of a socialist youth long since sown and almost forgotten, I felt
again the urge of deep discontent that has driven some men to fascism or
communism and has made others opportunists, cynics, adventurers or vain
seekers after religious faiths.

One contact with the social structure of England was to be found in the
theatre, where I had worked in former years. I went to it, not for the
moment as professional critic, but as adventurer and observer. Two
characteristic London plays of that demobilization period come to mind.
Somerset Maugham's _Home and Beauty_ pleased me hugely by its
farcical-satirical pattern, worthy almost of Wilde, and by the bitter
laughter echoing below its surface. A. A. Milne's _Mr. Pim Passes By_
filled me with a hearty unjust rage. Either of them, essentially, might
have been written in the days of Edwardian or Georgian peace; and I came
to them out of the volcanic eruption of Middle Europe after war. Looking
at this sort of drama gave me the sense of detachment, both from current
criticism and creative activity, which has been with me ever since. I
have never wished to express, either as critic or playwright or
producer, anything but a personal taste in drama formed by personal
experiences not lightly to be shared.

How should I try to tell the English public, for instance, that to
understand their own current mood and thought they must look to the
stage abroad and not at home? They discovered this for themselves ten or
fifteen years later, when American drama evidently became the most
vital in the English language. And meantime they prided themselves
justly on the possession of Shaw, who had been a foreigner before the
war and remained a foreigner afterwards. He was even, in his own static
way, more understandable to the English than any other foreigner; for he
had never changed his mind about anything, and had been as inevitably
right or wrong in 1900 or 1910 as in 1920, 1930 or 1940.

In 1919 Shaw was represented only by a revival of _Arms and the Man_,
for _Heartbreak House_ and _Back to Methuselah_ were still unwritten.
The retirement of Granville-Barker as producer-manager meant that one
could look nowhere in particular for standards of direction and acting.
The disappearance of the older type of actor-manager, with his
deplorable choice of plays but careful personal control, added to the
uncertainty of the playgoer. The stage seemed to have few ideas beyond
that of waiting for young writers to come along--a good enough idea in
itself, if the young writers could have bridged the gap formed by war
and secured their own intellectual footing on the hither side of it. But
in practice the bridging of this gap was left to men of middle age and
more--to Shaw and Barrie and Galsworthy, Maugham and Bennett. These men
inevitably wrote about the world as they had previously known it, or as
it had seemed to them all their lives; and they were encouraged by the
English tendency to win a war and lean back as usual.

Still, noteworthy adventures began here and there. One of them was at
the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, a former vaudeville house a few miles
west of London's theatreland. A far-sighted group had rented this old
place cheaply; and here the company of Barry Jackson's Birmingham
Repertory Theatre gave John Drinkwater's _Abraham Lincoln_, a chronicle
play welcomed by a public whose own eyes were fixed on the drama of
Versailles and the treaty-makers. There was much in common between the
problems of President Lincoln and President Wilson. In fact the hour of
this drama could not have been better chosen; and old and young
theatregoers rallied to give it a run of many months. At the Lyric
Theatre itself, the way was prepared for further successes lasting years
under Nigel Playfair's direction. The English stage had by no means
produced a masterpiece in Drinkwater's play, still less had it come into
line with the creative spirit of the rest of Europe; but the gesture was
serious and well-intentioned, and the work gave some foreshadowings of
dramatic poetry that might be written.

The Hammersmith Lyric soon became the regular home of the Sunday evening
play societies, the Stage Society in particular. This pioneer producing
unit had survived the war with credit, thanks partly to its revivals of
Old English classics. In 1919 it sponsored a new Sunday Theatre called
the Phoenix, whose opening play was Webster's tragedy _The Duchess of
Malfi_. Our stage history shows that such enterprises, explorations of
the rich mine of English dramatic literature, are established from time
to time and flourish long enough to acquaint a generation of playgoers
with classic treasures. The productions of the Mermaid Society and
William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society were within the memory of the
founders of the Phoenix, who rightly felt that to see the greatest
tragedies of Marlowe, Jonson or Webster, or the comedies of Congreve and
Farquhar, is an experience to be valued throughout a lifetime. So in
fact it proved to be; and those Sunday evenings with the old masters of
dramatic poetry, presented in a simple convertible set and played by our
best Shakespearean artists, were landmarks of the after-war years.

It was harder to make a way on the English stage for new European drama,
which had been the special function of the Stage Society for twenty
years. Still harder, of course, when the play bore the name of one of
the German or Russian expressionists. I offered Kaiser's _From Morn to
Midnight_ to the Society within six months of the Armistice, and managed
to get it performed within a year; but not until several West End
theatres had been refused for the performance of a German play, and some
members of the cast (though not Edith Evans) had thrown up their parts
for the same reason. In episodic form, the drama follows the adventures
of a bank cashier who falls under the spell of a lady client "rustling
in furs and silk" at his counter, embezzles money in the hope of
possessing her, is indignantly repulsed by her as the virtuous mother of
a grown-up son, and thereafter wanders through the city
pleasure-seeking, casting his cash to the winds in mingled
disillusionment and exaltation, until finally he is brought to a
Salvation Army meeting where all are exalted and all disillusioned with
the things of this world, and shoots himself there. This modern morality
has a throng of nameless characters, vivid flashes of action, and a
twist of heavy satire. The English production was reviewed as a
regrettable breach of taste, although it was admitted that Brember
Wills, and later Claude Rains, gave first-rate performances in the
cashier's part.

And so expressionism made its first and almost its last appearance on
our stage, although some years later the Stage Society presented Elmer
Rice's experiment in the same style, _The Adding Machine_. I learned
much from Kaiser's technique as a playwright in _From Morn to
Midnight_--it is indeed a model of economy and rapidity of movement--and
also made my first contact with the American stage through this play,
which was one of the early and creditable productions of the New York
Theatre Guild. Thus in the summer of 1920 I was in Berlin for a brief
visit, discussing the presentation in English with directors of the
Guild and in German with grave _Regisseure_ who had handled it for their
own stage. But European capitals were still chattering with
machine-guns, and it was no time yet for a general theatre tour. I
returned by way of Paris, where playgoers were interested in such new
dramatists as Charles Vildrac (_Paquebot Tenacity_), Georges Duhamel
(_L'Oeuvre des Athltes_) and Jules Romains (_Doctor Knock_). These
plays, so essentially different from the _drames d'amour_ of French
tradition, were already finding their way into the lists of the London
Stage Society and New York Guild. There was also a new French interest
in direction, which showed that the work of Copeau at the
Vieux-Colombier had borne fruit. The next phase, then beginning, was to
be the establishment of little professional theatres, well off the
Grands Boulevards, under such directors as Gaston Baty, Louis Jouvet,
Georges Dullin and Georges Pitoff; and these directors in turn were to
bring new writers before the public.

With us in London, another producing management in the suburbs was quick
to follow the lead given by Hammersmith with _Abraham Lincoln_. The
Everyman Theatre in Hampstead opened in 1920 with Benavente's comedy
_Bonds of Interest_ (Los Intereses Creados), which had also been a
Theatre Guild production. For the next five years it was inadvisable to
miss a new play at the Everyman, uneven as the direction of the theatre
under Norman Macdermott proved to be. Sutton Vane's _Outward Bound_ and
Noel Coward's _The Vortex_ were done there for the first time; but the
revivals of Shaw and Ibsen and the first English presentations of plays
by O'Neill and Susan Glaspell deserved even more credit. Eventually its
own successful policy of making transfers of plays to the West End
sapped the independence of the Everyman, which had begun life as a
drill-hall and eventually became a highbrow movie-house.

At the other end of our theatre's social scale were the Ballets Russes
which had been reconstructed by Diaghilev with a brilliant troupe, and
had enlisted all the talent of the modernist musicians, painters and
designers. The Ballets Russes were popular in 1920-21 as never before or
since; for although the total audience of Ballet must have grown from
year to year until the present time, the post-war seasons had a special
character of delight and surprise. They were also vigorously productive,
for they saw the creation of _Femmes de Bonne Humeur_, _La Boutique
Fantasque_ and _Le Tricorne_, probably the three ballets since the time
of _Carnaval_ and _Les Sylphides_ which have longest held their appeal.
Lydia Lopokova had returned to the company, Massine was both
choreographer and dancer, and though Karsavina's appearances were few,
they gave their own distinction. The genuinely appreciative audience was
as large at the Empire or the Alhambra as it was in later years at the
more social Covent Garden. The repertory was in its full classical and
romantic bloom when, in 1921, Diaghilev overreached himself and mistook
his English public by presenting _The Sleeping Princess_ at full length.
But in all the presentations leading up to this splendid piece of
pageantry set by Bakst to the steps of Petipa and the music of
Tchaikovsky, the Russian Ballet formed an astonishing contrast with the
London stage of stale drawing-room comedy, wearisome intellectual
argument, tasteless musical revue or drab detective drama. No wonder
that some of us turned from this sort of reality to the vision of
creative direction, and hoped to see drama place its own spoken poetry
at the service of that other wordless poetry of theatre, formed by the
union of many arts.

Edward Gordon Craig in his Italian exile had for years maintained the
concept of theatre as an art like those of music, sculpture, painting or
architecture--an art in itself and not simply an exact reproduction of
something imagined and written down by a dramatist. But it would have
been hard to find common ground between Craig's idea of creative
direction and that of a Reinhardt, a Tairov, a Meierhold or a
Stanislavsky. To try to form a judgment of one's own, it was necessary
to study the work of these other experienced men, or at least of some of
them. One had also to take into account the fact that the theatre was in
a transitional state, changing fast in personnel and in direction and
even in dramatic output under the growing influence of the screen. In a
film, all direction was clearly "creative"; nobody held that an author
should "write" a film and then that a company of players should "act" it
scene by scene. If the theatre should decide to turn its back on
creative direction altogether, and to become a dramatist's platform
only, then many fine talents still attracted to the service of living
drama would go over to the screen because of the wider, though not
necessarily the deeper, scope it offered to their imagination. The
respective resources of stage and screen had to be considered too. The
more the stage confined itself to a simple reproduction of the written
drama of the playwright, the less was its chance of competing
commercially with the broad and varied though often tawdry vision of the
screen director. This divergence of scope and aim between the two arts
might well result in an uncommercial drama withdrawing itself into small
theatres whose artists were resolved to hold the living contact of stage
and spectator; while the movie-houses would grow vaster and vaster and
make more and more inroads upon the imagination of writers and the
talent of players.

We can now see how far both these tendencies have already gone; but if
one were asked to fix the time of their beginning, I would place it
about the year 1920. The contrasts then were between the director's and
the dramatist's theatre. Later, the issue was confused by the equal
avidity with which the screen devoured the available talent of both
stages, from creative directors like Reinhardt to realist playwrights
like the author of _Journey's End_. But in 1920 one could still indulge
dreams of a dramatic theatre as splendid as the dance-theatre of
Russian Ballet; one could imagine great poetry spoken by living players
in a rich and lovely setting. I confess to having had these illusions,
and am not at all ashamed of them. It was no part of my task to foresee
the absorption of all kinds of dramatic art into the framework of a vast
international industry serving hundreds of millions of eyes and ears.
Nor could anyone but a technician have prophesied how soon the movie
would talk, and how soon it would be coloured; or how soon (maybe) it
would become stereoscopic and three-dimensional and indistinguishable
from the pageant of the stage, either through the agency of
radio-television or ordinary projection by the multiple lens. One might
have guessed all these things separately, but scarcely together.
Speculation in any case is barren. It remains possible to suppose that
either through man's weariness of the complicated dramatic machine he
has created, or through its perfection into a truly non-mechanical
vehicle, creative direction as a theatre man understands it may yet come
into its own.

I think it was just when I was occupied with these thoughts about the
theatre, in the summer of 1920, that Nigel Playfair made his famous
revival of _The Beggar's Opera_ at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Here
certainly was creative direction of a kind, for an original pattern and
colour were imposed on John Gay's text and even on Linley's score, much
rewritten. A masterpiece that must have been rich in sinister light and
shadow, and is known to have inspired fury if not alarm in many
playgoers when it was first given in Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1728,
acquired something of the character of a toyshop and the spirit of a
charade in Playfair's production and the gay designs of Lovat Fraser.
They hit a certain taste to perfection, and people who liked to see
theatre slightly guying itself, instead of fiercely satirizing a fashion
as the authors originally meant it to do, passed many blissful if
complacent evenings in their dingy stalls at Hammersmith, almost the
only setting that was truly in accord with the opera. The production
became fabulous and ran for years; and indeed Macheath and the wenches
had far more vitality than any other stage figures of the time, for
their original conception survived the trivial retouchings of the
picture.

The year 1921, the sunlit year of hock and moselle and other noble
wines, saw an endeavour to restore the fortunes of the Court Theatre,
where the Vedrenne-Barker management had flourished fifteen years
earlier. Here was the first presentation of _Heartbreak House_, nearly
if not quite Shaw's best--a judgment that seems every time to be
compelled by the vitality of this man. Actually all plays are his best,
and with Shaw the vintages of 1906 and 1921 are indistinguishable.

At some time during that long dry summer I found occasion to wander
through Northern and Eastern France, and falling in with an American
girl and her Russian musician friend on the platform of Strasbourg
station, to travel on with them to the Bavarian Alps, bathe in the
lakes, hear the Ring in Munich Prinzregententheater where the Wagner
Festival had just been resumed, and return by way of Paris to Brittany
to see one of the _Pardons_. I think it must have been that of
Sainte-Anne-d'Auray, in which white-robed maidens, standing upright in
fishermen's boats, come up the estuary of a river at flood-tide
bringing offerings of flowers to their patroness.

The end of this journey was to be Pointe de l'Arcouest, near Paimpol, a
harbour in which was moored the yacht _Eglantine_ owned by Seignobos,
professor of history at the Sorbonne, one of whose closest friends was
Madame Curie. Through French relatives, an Englishman and his Russian
wife came to know and visit them both. On the deck of the yacht, in
company with painters, writers and students of the Quartier, we sailed
among the turret-like red sandstone islands, some of which vanish
altogether at high tide. The ocean-going barques of this part of
Brittany go out for months together to the cod fisheries of the
Newfoundland Banks, two or three days by liner from New York; and here
sometimes the Atlantic passenger can see them, mounting full sail, on a
misty horizon.




  7

  EUROPE REOPENED


An exciting London event of the next year, 1922, was the Stage Society's
production of Pirandello's _Six Characters in Search of an Author_. This
has proved to be one of the most unpopular works in modern dramatic
history; no doubt for the double reason that it deals with the process
of theatre behind the scenes, and has an interest mainly psychological.
Actually Pirandello inverts drama as completely as Shaw ever inverted
heroism, romance or idealism; and the one thing the inversion of drama
will do is to empty a theatre. But the first appearance of the play was
no less provocative for that. Everybody talked about it; and either one
compared Pirandello with Einstein and said that he had dramatized the
principle of relativity, or one pooh-poohed the whole entertaining
affair and pointed out that when the characters, after wandering on to
the bare stage of a theatre in search of a dramatist for their moving
personal story, had come to the end of their imaginative tether, they
resorted to the trick of "evoking" a real person outside their own drama
in the shape of Madame Pace the dressmaker. A motive of genuine comedy
was the embellishment by tone and gesture of the scenes which were taken
over by a company of "real" actors who had lived them and knew just what
they were like. But this was merely a subtle critique by an Italian of
the conventions of his native stage, where false embellishment has been
the rule and tradition. The European vogue of _Six Characters_ lasted
only a short while, and its end was hastened by the repetitive style of
the other works of Pirandello which came from the Teatro dell' Arte in
Rome.

The play remains a distinguished curiosity of drama. It may have been a
Western European attempt to parallel in a drama of thought the
"constructivism" with which Meierhold and others were experimenting in
Soviet stagecraft. Just then we heard much about this theatrical
movement, and saw many pictures of queer productions in Moscow; but it
was difficult to visit Russia and see for oneself, and by the time the
country was thrown open to "Intourists" there was less to be seen. In
the early 1920's, however, the truly left-minded could accept as an
article of faith (never having seen it) that the Russian stage was the
only one even possibly worthwhile. Actually, out of all this Soviet
architecture of ladders and platforms, out of all the clambering of
actors in and out of windows and their marching up and down stairways,
nothing of value to our current theatre seems to have survived.
Constructivism represented a brief attempt to vary the two-dimensional
character of the stage picture; and most of the talents responsible for
it have since gone over to the screen, where the scope for varying the
picture is greater.

In the same year 1922 the Stage Society gave _The Rumour_ by C. K.
Munro, a writer who promised for a while to link the impulse of English
drama with that of the best in Europe. This was the first of a trilogy
of his plays--the two others were _Progress_ and _The Mountain_--which
handled major post-war issues of statecraft and economics. Munro's plan
was to invent some Ruritanian country where syndicates were struggling
for the control of oil or minerals, workmen and capitalists were staking
out their respective claims, generals and politicians were carrying on
political intrigues, and so forth. The exact resemblance of the
Ruritanian country to all others in Europe was the moral of the dramatic
fable. A prodigious volubility smothered Munro's theatrical effect,
though it gave him an individual line and character. Such plays were
refreshing in our English theatre which could only boast, at the same
period, the witty and rotund perfection of Maugham's _The Circle_ at the
Haymarket. Maugham was kind to his players too; he maintained our
international reputation for high comedy, and he was performed as
smoothly in Berlin or Paris as in London. Around Shaftesbury Avenue
there was still no sign of a stage concerned with anything but realistic
drama. From Shaw and Munro to Maugham and Milne and Galsworthy, every
writer declared his faithful adherence to the lifelike stage, the
dramatist's own platform. As a critic and observer I was turning more
and more against such a convention, but looking further afield than
England for any hope of change.

During the summer I went to Germany. The times were uncertain, for
inflation had started and was proceeding in a series of waves. Every
visiting foreigner at this moment was in effect a millionaire; for
everything from a long taxi drive or a railroad ticket across the
country to a meal at a restaurant, a bottle of good wine or a seat at
the play, cost a matter of ten cents. In Berlin I found it hard to spend
two pounds (say ten dollars) a week; and even this sum allowed for books
and suchlike purchases. In thirty years of travel I have never known
such complete indifference to the monetary cost of things; and I cannot
feel it to be pleasing or satisfying in any way. The sense of robbing a
nation, by some obscure economic process, is ever present.

Berlin theatres are mostly closed in summer, but that year Reinhardt was
presenting at the Grosses Schauspielhaus a play by the young Bavarian,
Ernst Toller, who had been a Minister in the brief Soviet Government at
Munich in 1919, and had since been imprisoned in a fortress. Oddly, the
subject of _Die Maschinenstrmer_ (The Machine-Wreckers) was drawn from
English history. Toller had read Lord Byron's impassioned speech of 1812
in the House of Lords against the Frame-Work Bill, which would have
added the breaking of machine-frames in the textile industry to the list
of capital crimes. In the industrial background of this action stood the
figure of one Ludd, leader of the weavers in the "Luddite" riots against
the introduction of machinery to the factories of the Midlands. This was
a great theme, for the war of man against his machine does not belong to
the nineteenth century or the Industrial Revolution only. Especially it
was a theme for an imprisoned rebel of 1919, who sought to connect the
legacy of European war with the crisis brought about by mechanical
development.

The Grosses Schauspielhaus, a huge oval circus-like building of
remarkable ugliness, was much better suited to the crowd scenes of
Toller's drama than to the intimate passages in which the issue between
workman and employer is defined. The former were played in the arena of
the theatre, amid the spectators; the latter on the raised stage within
a proscenium. As a director Reinhardt was not seen at his best in this
production, for he was uninterested in the social aspect of the play and
bored by his author's sentiment: what he liked best was the sinister
visual building-up of the Engine, the enemy of mankind against which the
masses break themselves, breaking at the same time the body of their
idealist fellow-workman. I looked forward to a simpler presentation in
which the Engine should consist of shadows of wheels and crankshafts,
and the more personal scenes should be given their full value. However
it were done, this play was obviously one for the English stage; and the
immediate problem was how to meet Toller and discuss with him the
translation I was resolved to make. His other play, _Masse-Mensch_
(Masses and Men), which had been given a year earlier by the Volksbhne
in Berlin, was already to appear in English.

The fortress of Niederschnenfeld, where the author was imprisoned,
stood near Augsburg in the plain through which the Upper Danube flows.
And at the Three Moors in Augsburg, one of the half-dozen great inns of
Europe, I should certainly be able to hire a car (at the current rate of
ten cents) for the journey. It was inadvisable to speak of Toller in
this town, for here he had been taken prisoner by Noske's troops after
his followers had spent their ammunition on chickens and the like. So I
set out from Augsburg in the car, and after many miles reached a gloomy
village with a gloomier-looking gaol surrounded by rusty barbed wire.
Gone, evidently, were the days when fortress imprisonment was an
agreeable vacation for political offenders in Germany--when they could
put themselves on parole each morning and go hunting, fishing, whoring
or what-not for the day. This prison of Niederschnenfeld looked a hard
place to get out of and even to get into. I should never have got into
it at all but for the fact that my passport, which I presented at the
gate, still described me by the military rank of major. This is a higher
rank in Germany than in England, and means battalion commander. The
governor of this gaol was only a captain, and he wanted to see what an
English major looked like, so that I was admitted at once.

Only once before had I been inside a gaol, and that was years ago in
London to visit a publisher, who had been incarcerated not for
publishing, but for bigamy. I remember thinking of the comparatively
trivial nature of this offence while I was being led through stone
corridors to the office of the governor, a close-cropped man in grey
uniform who stood up and clicked his heels. He proved to be intelligent
and considerate, as most German army men are, by contrast with the
civilian riff-raff who get into uniform. He told me the conditions of my
interview with the prisoner Toller, namely that no subject must be
mentioned on either side except the production of his play in England,
or kindred professional matters. A warder would be present to see that
these conditions were enforced. No other language but German must be
used. After further clicking of heels and bowing, I was admitted under
escort to a wing of the building where the political prisoners were
walking up and down a broad corridor, from which their cells opened on
either side.

Toller was an eager, nervous man under thirty, whose eyes betrayed the
mental strain of his imprisonment. He led me into his cell, where in a
top corner was built the swallows' nest about which he had written _The
Swallow-Book_. He read me passages of this long poem while the warder,
on a stool by the doorway, sat looking vacantly before him. Outside, the
other prisoners padded up and down. It would be strange indeed if human
beings, thrown together in this extraordinary situation of Toller and
myself, should not feel an instant friendship. If this feeling grew less
in future years in London and elsewhere, it was because Toller's real
creative period ended with his release. I could not be interested in his
politics, which were of the sentimental left-wing rather than the
communist order, or in his _Weltschmerz_. But for a while he wrote
marvellous things, and he touched expressionism with poetry.

We parted after a short hour which had been allowed for the interview,
having agreed about the translation both of the play and the poem (the
latter was brought out by the Oxford University Press a year
afterwards). I took leave of the governor of this gaol and drove, not
back to Augsburg, but to the old town of Ingolstadt on the Danube,
whence I could take the evening train to Munich. Toller had told me that
if only he could be let out of prison, he would spend the first three
days of freedom in running about a forest. At dinner over my bottle of
Steinberger I recall wondering how long freedom for the rest of us
would last, and what it was worth. I got into the train with a German
tennis champion, who was going to play in a tournament at Munich. His
ambition was to play at Wimbledon, and as long as we spoke of tennis he
was a most amiable fellow. Then he asked me what I was doing in Bavaria,
and I told him of my visit that day to the fortress. His eyes hardened
as he said, "But Toller is a Jew". At the time this struck me as
irrelevant and even funny, for Toller had every German characteristic.
But deep in the blue eyes of this tennis-player was foreshadowed the
darkness of Europe. I got out of the train at Munich feeling that the
city was not quite as before; superstition was strangling its
good-nature. I had to walk up the Zugspitze for fresh air; and when I
came down from the mountain huts, three days later, my stock of paper
money had dwindled in value by a half. The farmers of the villages were
fingering million-mark notes and wondering what to do with them, for
their yards were already stacked with agricultural machinery bought from
Krupps, and they had paid off the mortgages on their farms for the price
of an old suit of clothes. Inflation makes the peasant king.

I had just money enough left to visit Breslau for some dramatic
celebrations in honour of Gerhart Hauptmann, who was then celebrating
his sixtieth birthday. A series of his plays was very well done by the
company of the city theatre, reinforced by players from Berlin. This
dramatist had been considered as a possible President of the Republic;
and he had every claim to be called the "representative man" of cultural
Germany. Here in Silesia, among his own people, his peasant plays made
a notable effect; but I liked best _Florian Geyer_, a drama of the
peasants' war in a defeated but hopeful Middle Europe. And so to the
Baltic coast, where I rejoined a wife and a daughter aged eighteen
months who was making sand castles on that tideless and mosquito-ridden
shore. Back in Berlin, we took our tickets to Dover for a couple of
dollars by the sleeping-car night express, and were relieved to get out
of Germany for the time being. At Aachen there was trouble about a new
baby carriage, the export duty on which was so enormous that I presented
it to a grateful (and no doubt prolific) customs official. At Namur I
inadvertently left my hat in a dining-car destined for Paris, with the
result that in Brussels we were within a few francs of destitution.
Nobody will cash a cheque for a man without a hat or the means to buy
one; this is a curious psychological fact to be borne in mind by
tourists. In Dover, to which we pressed forward hastily, hunger overtook
the whole family and we had to send our infant daughter to beg food from
complete strangers on the shingle beach, until I was able to borrow the
fare to London and telegraph funds from there. This poverty-stricken
ending of the journey was the right contrast to a beginning with the
riches of Croesus.

Next spring, that of 1923, _The Machine-Wreckers_ was done by the Stage
Society at the Kingsway Theatre. Nugent Monck of the Maddermarket
Theatre in Norwich, the only Elizabethan playhouse in England, came to
London to direct the play; and very beautifully and simply he did it.
Herbert Marshall, who has since become a screen star, played the chief
part. A. B. Walkley of _The Times_ was moved to praise the drama and
the dramatist. The Old Vic should have put on this play of the Luddites,
which with all its faults had the classical line; but such was not the
policy of the Old Vic in those days. The two performances gave me
complete satisfaction, for I never expected any more, and my other
occupations as editor and reviewer had allowed me to do the six months'
work for nothing.

Good plays of another kind, like St. John Ervine's _Jane Clegg_, had
been produced for brief runs in London and had made as creditable a mark
without achieving much more success. Very bad plays like William
Archer's _The Green Goddess_ had come out in the same year and run month
after month. Many people were astonished that Archer, the pioneer of
Ibsen and the revered chief of English dramatic critics, should have
written so ordinary a melodrama. But he had attended first nights for
years with an umbrella under his arm and a detective story in his pocket
to be read between the acts, while less austere critics were at the
theatre bar. _The Green Goddess_ was the kind of play he really believed
in: it was written not at all with tongue in cheek but with the utmost
and most limpid sincerity. When it was produced at the St. James's, with
George Arliss in some preposterous Indian Rajah part, all Archer's
fellow-critics were presented in the foyer with a copy of the work.

A few weeks after the beginning of the run William Archer asked me to
come and see him, and with great kindness offered to suggest me to one
editor at least, and possibly to more, as his successor in dramatic
reviewing. He added with Scottish caution that he could not be sure how
long the present tenfold increase of his income would last, and it
would be better to move slowly. The time might come when he would be
glad to take up the work again, but meanwhile I was welcome to keep it
going. I thanked him and accepted willingly, assuring him that he would
never need a critic's hard-earned pay again. We parted with a word about
his son Tom, whom I had known before he was killed in action in 1916.
Archer had a liberal mind and was a man of deep integrity. I think every
one was glad to know that he met with such luck in his last years. The
run of his play almost, if not quite, survived him. His large dramatic
library went to the British Drama League which Geoffrey Whitworth had
founded.

I shall soon have to tell a success story of my own, and here is its
background as the year 1923 comes to an end. Archer's legacy of dramatic
criticism, coupled with a money legacy from an uncle which nearly
equalled my normal year's income, gave me a buoyant feeling of
independence. I was close on forty, but until then had never possessed a
hundred pounds except on receiving my Army gratuity on demobilization,
and that went to furnishing a home. Most writers live as precariously as
this; but I mention it here lest my travels in Europe should have given
an impression of ample means. Actually these journeys were always
undertaken with a small sum scraped together by saving; and but for the
small inheritance from my uncle I have never to this day owned a penny
of unearned capital. This made it all the easier, when earned money came
to me in large sums, to subsidize one kind of work by another--for
instance to become a theatre director on the earnings of a dramatist or
a modest impresario for ballet or opera on those of a theatre director;
or even again to help pay for productions out of my earnings as a wine
merchant allowed to sell good claret or burgundy at a theatre bar. All
these things have added to the enjoyment of life, but their material
basis has been the enjoyment of writing and nothing else--unless perhaps
a wife's enjoyment of the queer task (to my mind) of training and
presenting dancers.

Let me come, then, to the beginning of 1924. Flecker's _Hassan_ at His
Majesty's had trailed an autumn glory over the closing months of 1923,
and its success brought new hopes of a drama linking all the arts. This
play was too lavishly staged to make it outstandingly a poetic drama. I
would like to see it done again with an Elizabethan simplicity, and I am
sure Flecker would have understood such a wish, had he lived to see his
work on the stage. We were approaching the few short years between two
wars when carefree hopes of any kind could be indulged. For some reason
I believed in 1924 as in my own star; and early in the New Year I gave
up every sort of other work to begin dramatic writing. Everything, that
is to say, but dramatic reviewing for one weekly paper; for I wanted to
keep every possible contact with the stage, to see every new play, and
to form ideas about casting and direction.

This also was just the time when _Theatre Arts_ changed over from
quarterly to monthly publication. From its issue of February 1924: "We
shall look back upon the realistic drama of present commerce as we now
look back upon Victorian antimacassars and bunches of wax fruit under
glass shades. Realism is not a goal. It was a milestone. . . . Dead
conventions encumber a living theatre. Lifeless gestures of lifelike
banality fail to arrest the eye. Muffled voices of indisputable good
taste fail to enchant the ear. Phantoms eat and drink on the stage, and
our bellies are not filled. Phantoms make love, and our pulse beats no
jot the faster. Phantoms perish and our withers are unwrung." At which
the writer of to-day may say "Well, well" and smile a little; knowing it
all, however, to be true.




  8

  SUCCESS STORY


Years before 1914 I had made the plan of a comedy whose motive should be
the meeting at an inn of four people, master and man, mistress and maid,
and their setting to partners for the night. Put like this, it would be
hard to find a more ordinary theme, or one more apt to invite every sort
of obvious treatment from the purely cynical to the rosily erotic. My
plot allowed for the cross-pairing of lovers in a way that every modern
playgoer would expect; but the choice of partners was to arise from
character rather than type. The comedy was imagined as a "costume play"
from the start, yet it was meant to break away from prevailing theatre
fashions. Producers for instance were talking of Shakespeare in modern
dress; but this was to be modern thought in period setting. Dramatists
were putting contemporary slang into historical drama; but this period
play was not to be historical, and its speech, though without any
gadzooks, was to fit the dress and the setting. The four personages,
destined to play their comedy with a conventional innkeeper and wife for
background, were to be four people like ourselves, born of the social
and political revolutions made in the uneasy intervals between wars, and
well aware of the inheritance.

Granted the setting to partners as an accomplished fact, man to mistress
and master to maid, I wanted to leave to these four the answer to the
question, what should happen to them in the morning. Their pairing-off
could be either brief or lasting; either surrendered at the call of
social necessity, or broken by mutual disgust, or maintained in the face
of the world; but these were things they would have to decide for
themselves, as modern people should. I knew the treatment could be
neither wholly cynical nor wholly sensual, remembering how the comedy
had first come to mind in those far-off years. The part of the Lady in
it was meant to be played by Nora, my friend of the time around 1911,
namesake of Ibsen's heroine and daughter of Charles Charrington and
Janet Achurch, the pioneers of _A Doll's House_. We had talked of the
play from that angle, and I had imagined her stooping beautifully to a
manservant whose hard sincerity in love should awaken response in her
own sophistication. After Nora's death in 1914 about the time of our
joint birthday (she had been five years the younger), the idea of this
unwritten comedy lived on sadly, bereft for a while of significance. But
as a soldier in France I began sketching out scenes for it in Army
notebooks, and by 1919 its outline had acquired almost the pattern of a
workable scenario. Now here already was 1924 and the comedy still
unwritten, though meanwhile I had been working in the theatre for years,
and at thirty-nine had burned the boats of every other sort of
profession behind me. It was high time to begin, as I reflected one
spring morning at the outset of a day's walk over the Chiltern Hills,
every step of which was to be given to thinking out the composition.

A title for a play, as every dramatist knows, is useful from the start
because of its power of suggestion. Climbing over a Chiltern stile with
this thought in mind, and perhaps feeling a noonday thirst, I remembered
marching in 1915 as a soldier past some roadside alehouse called _The
Man with a Load of Mischief_. It may have been either near Cambridge or
on the Berkshire downs; the sign was once not uncommon among English
inns, and on the site of Selfridge's Store in Oxford Street such a house
had been embellished by Hogarth with a painting of a man "loaded with
mischief". Here, anyway, was a title for a comedy; and it gave me the
idea that a manservant (The Man) might be loaded with mischief by his
master (The Nobleman) in being bidden to make love to a mistress (The
Lady) for her discomfiture, while the master himself should make love to
her pert follower (The Maid). In two strides, here was a plot fully
elaborated. All that was needful was to link it up with the past of the
four chief persons, and leave them to work out their future for
themselves. Should the comedy be in verse or prose? Irregular rhyming
verse tempted me greatly, but prose is more difficult and for that
reason won the day. For period, the Regency would surely be best; and if
nobody but myself should see the double irony of the title, the loading
of mischief upon a man for his master's ends, no harm would be done.
Everyone would see the irony of the man already in love with a woman
commanded to make a pretence of wooing her; for that is one of the
classic though rare motives of comedy. Everyone would taste the
bitterness of the manservant next morning, when his noble master yawns
over breakfast and laments the fleeting character of carnal pleasure.
Dialogue began to run through my head, something this way:

    _Nobleman:_ Sympathy, remember. Speak of me--none too kindly,
                for she hates me.

    _Man:_ I will not speak ill of your lordship.

    _Nobleman:_ Have no scruples. Say your worst.

    _Man:_ Servants often speak ill of their masters. I think that
           is not the way to my lady's confidence.

    _Nobleman:_ A nice point. Yes, you have the finer touch.

    _Man:_ I would rather rely on my own merits than your lordship's
           shortcomings.

And so it is that plays contrive to get themselves written, after
maturing sometimes through years of personal experience and emotional
impulse to which a technical understanding of the writer's craft is more
or less unconsciously added. Being built of all these things my comedy
sailed perhaps into deeper waters than I had meant to navigate in the
beginning. Before half an act was finished, the ending was already
determined by the need of making the love of a man and woman the motive
of an action where all else was masquerade. The play became liable to be
called romantic, although the lovers sought nothing but reality in
themselves and one another. It varied from the plane of high comedy to
that of the comedy of feeling; which in turn made it none too easy a
play for the actor and actress confronted by one realist obstacle after
another to be taken in the stride of their emotional perception.

_The Man with a Load of Mischief_ found a publisher at once, and ran
into several impressions as a reading play before it was seriously
considered for the stage. During the summer of 1924 the script had been
shown to three or four London producing managers all of whom said there
was not a penny in it; which opinion I entirely shared. Nigel Playfair,
however, offered to arrange some matinee performances at his theatre in
Hammersmith if he could get the right cast, and Norman Macdermott at the
Everyman was willing to face ruin by giving the play an evening run. I
preferred to hand it to the Stage Society--a step which gave it the
final stamp of highbrow non-commercialism but at the same time offered
the hope of first-rate casting if it should ever be produced. The
Society announced it as the first production of the season 1924-25; and
when I modestly suggested that Fay Compton and Leon Quartermaine should
be asked to play in it they astonished us all by accepting immediately.
Fay Compton was afterwards obliged through other rehearsals to give up
her part; but we went forward with a good cast, luckily small enough to
enable us to afford the scene and costumes designed by Aubrey Hammond,
which gave a distinction hitherto unknown to a Sunday evening play
production. Another motive for this little extravagance was an American
offer received for the play during its rehearsal weeks; the advance
royalties were promptly spent in setting it forth to advantage.

Meantime I had also to rehearse _No Man's Land_, which the St. Martin's
management had commissioned me to translate from _La Terre Inhumaine_ by
Franois de Curel. This was the work of a notable French dramatist who
hitherto had been played only by the Stage Society in England; and the
most I hoped for was that his play should have a run, whilst my comedy
perhaps might score a success of esteem. Actually _No Man's Land_ was a
failure not from its own fault but from casting and other causes. _The
Man with a Load of Mischief_ after its two Stage Society performances,
was acquired by Frederick Harrison for the Haymarket, where it was
presented the following summer, June 1925, and began a first run of
eight months. The theatre was more or less sold out for the rest of the
London season; and thanks to the contract which had been offered me by
the courtly old manager, the last of his line in the West End, I found
myself suddenly with an income of close on a thousand pounds a month,
more than I would normally require in a year. It was all very
surprising, and rather like winning a Derby Sweep by one's own exertions
if that were possible. I tried to live up to the part of successful
playwright, visiting the theatre now and then and giving little
supper-parties; but in fact I made few contacts with the new world in
which I found myself, even though total strangers wrote and asked me to
their homes. On the other hand I fell in the estimation of highbrow
friends, who were accustomed to argue that West End success and
triviality were one and the same, and felt that I must have been writing
down deliberately to the public. I cannot say this troubled me much. Of
that summer when the play was done, I seem best to remember a day spent
in walking to and from Ascot races through Windsor Great Park, and
lunching out among the gipsies and bookies on the far side of the
course. I regarded the men of fashion in grey top-hats and their ladies
in picture-frocks with quite a new interest, knowing that most of them
would go to see my comedy because it was the thing to see, and hoping
that some of them might even like it. The only visible connection of
Ascot with the theatre was the name of Lord Howard de Walden, a patron
who had once enabled Herbert Trench to put on plays by Maeterlinck and
others at the Haymarket. One of his horses, the race-card told me, was
running in the next race; and sure enough there it was, with a jockey in
apricot, cantering to the starting-post. The tip was altogether too good
to miss, and I enriched myself a little more by the victory of a
fantastic outsider. After this, it was sensible to reflect again on luck
in the theatre, and the overwhelming part it plays. Where would my
comedy have been without Fay Compton and Leon Quartermaine and Frank
Cellier, backed by the authority of the Haymarket? A title in the
archives of a Sunday evening play society, at the very best.

The problem of continuing to write for such a medium of expression, as
an independent author submitting his work for the approval of a
producing manager, was sufficiently complicated. As an old dramatic
critic I knew how few playwrights register more than one or two hits,
even though they give their whole lives to the business. I knew also
that what I really needed was to work in the theatre with a group of
artists, actors and directors and craftsmen, and to write for them,
sometimes at my own suggestion, sometimes at theirs, without
surrendering that absolute creative freedom of the study which is the
dramatist's right. There was nothing new about this idea, indeed all
Elizabethan drama had come into being by such means. Creative directors
in our own time had tried, and were still trying, to broaden the basis
of theatre so that the stage should not merely translate the realist
picture in the playwright's mind into realist fact and furniture. But I
questioned very much, and still question, whether it is possible to form
such a creative group under satisfactory conditions in the existing
proscenium theatre and with existing players whose style is already
formed. One would probably need not only dramatic schools and workshops
of a new type, but also playhouses differently constructed and
proportioned, with a new relation between stage and auditorium to embody
the new theatre conception. The more photographic reproduction of a
dramatist's or director's picture could be left to the screen. Failing
any such movement in our theatre of 1925, which was imagined to be
solely the dramatist's mouthpiece and instrument, I could only go on
trying to bring it into effective being; but it was an advantage to back
my opinion with the freedom of a practising playwright, as well as the
experience. As royalties continued to pour in, I began to think of
theatre management and direction.

This modest success, which had not otherwise changed my way of life,
gave me the chance of a first visit to America. Aubrey Hammond and I
sailed in the old _Celtic_ in September 1925, with a vast crowd of
returning tourists of those days. Ostensibly we were going to see the
New York production of my comedy with Ruth Chatterton and Robert
Loraine, but really we meant to learn something more about the world
than we knew already. We were innocent enough of the Atlantic to imagine
that this aged liner, in which as first-class passengers we slept above
each other's heads, represented the normal comfort of ocean travel. As
we arrived at the pier, it was cheering to see the yellow covers of
_Theatre Arts_ waving above the heads of the crowd, and to know that we
were among friends, most of whom we met for the first time. We lived at
the Algonquin and lunched with the dramatic critics, who welcomed us
with the kindness always extended to children escaped from Europe. We
visited Toronto and Atlantic City during the out-of-town tour of the
comedy (I shall always cherish the memory of the Boardwalk and the Heinz
pier), and we behaved neither more nor less unwisely than other
newcomers to Broadway and its life. I cannot say that Broadway and
Shaftesbury Avenue seemed to me essentially different: in both of them I
met numbers of producers, directors and players whose main interest was
the stage, while my own interest was the theatre. Noel Coward was there
with _The Vortex_, which I had liked very well a year earlier in London;
and among the actors was Herbert Marshall, who had played in _The
Machine-Wreckers_ for the Stage Society. As for my own comedy, I had
registered a private vow in mid-Atlantic that any money made by it in
America should be devoted to subverting and otherwise destroying the
theatre as we know it in the West End of London and elsewhere. The
theatre does not forget such vows, and knows how to defend itself. The
comedy failed after a few weeks, though I remained to pay for my seats
at other people's plays and to meet writers for the theatre and critics,
among whom were Sidney Howard, Stark Young and John Mason Brown. The
visit had been a stimulating adventure, and I could have forecast at
that time the arrival of the American dramatists in Britain and their
conquest of our stage in the years between 1935 and 1940. Just before
beginning the homeward journey I was able to accept a cabled offer of
the Home University Library to write their book on _Drama_, which
occupied me on the boat and for months afterwards.

The ambition of a dramatist is generally to go on writing plays, each as
successful as possible, and to draw royalties upon them until eventually
the copyrights become extinguished by the passage of time, both on the
professional and amateur stage. I share this ambition to the full; and
in this year 1941 I am still earning a small income from copyrights
created in the early nineteen-twenties. But the casualties in such a
career are heavy; and when I think of the months spent in writing and
rewriting plays never to be performed or maybe to receive one or two
fugitive presentations only, the perennial hope in the dramatist's mind
seems to be the chief marvel of his profession. Among the full-length
plays I wrote in the years following 1925 were _The Song of Drums_ or
_Ulenspiegel_, which managed to get itself performed in the Royal
Flemish Theatre at Brussels but not in London; _The Fountain-Head_,
which had a short run in a club theatre; _One More River_, given
successively by the Stage Society, Cambridge Festival and Gate; and
_Matchmaker's Arms_ or _House of Assignation_, played in different
versions by Sybil Thorndike and at the Mercury. The first and last of
these were more or less based on picaresque masterpieces in narrative,
the _Lgende_ of Charles de Coster and the _Celestina_ of Fernando de
Rojas respectively. There were also the many adaptations commissioned
for me by producing managers in England and America, nearly twenty of
them in all. Most of them reached the stage and ran for various periods
from a fortnight to a year, whilst others were gradually forgotten by
the men who had commissioned them, and still lie somewhere in the dusty
files of theatre offices. None of this was hack-work in the ordinary
sense, for I declined every play or subject that would not give me
pleasure in the writing; but much of it was work done in the spirit of
the Elizabethan play-craftsman for a kind of theatre almost unknown in
our time. The plays that succeeded owed their success, as I had owed a
great deal of mine with the Haymarket comedy, to outstanding
personalities in the cast; and those that failed were mostly overladen
with scenery or costume or some other element inimical to the effect of
the spoken word. Had I been given a free choice I would have had none of
this dramatic work performed on a proscenium stage, but on a platform
stage resembling that of the Florentine or English Renaissance. And
although these notions may seem queer to the reader familiar with one
type of theatre architecture only, they are based on the experience of a
practical playwright who has always had one foot at least firmly planted
on the commercial stage.

This has been a very personal chapter, for which I make no apologies.
Needless to say, many things happened in our London theatre of 1924-25
beside _The Man with a Load_. To this time belong _Saint Joan_, _Our
Betters_, the rise of Noel Coward, the appearance of the Chauve-Souris,
Stark Young's _The Colonnade_ at the Stage Society, _The Emperor Jones_
and many other lively happenings. The General Strike, that strangest of
social and economic phenomena, was still before us. The world had not
yet embarked upon the orgy of confident speculation that succeeded
Locarno and was so abruptly ended in 1929-30. We had not reached midway
in the passage between our wars, and the swell of optimism was still
evident, even though it might forecast heavy seas. Most of Europe was
quiet too; and to the reflection of this mood in Continental drama I
shall come very soon. The spring of 1926 found me free to come and go in
any country or continent, to write or cease from writing as I pleased,
and indeed to engage in the world spectacle either as player or
spectator. No man of forty-one could have desired a greater liberty than
this, or have been more resolved (I hope) to make use of it.




  9

  SCREEN REFLECTIONS


As a dramatist I came into the theatre just too soon to be concerned
with the movies through the presentation of current plays. In 1925 a
successful play was not necessarily screened, though the author always
liked to sell his picture rights and looked on the sum he received as a
gift from the gods. In the writing of its drama the screen even had a
tendency, until about 1930, to move away from the stage, however many
actors and directors it borrowed from the theatre. Highbrow film critics
were loud in praise of this independent spirit shown by the youthful art
of the picture, and they wrote copious (though now forgotten) articles
and books to show that the screen would never follow the example of the
despised stage by using words, but would rely on its own supreme power
of visual imagery. The more would-be prophetic of these writers added
that the screen would never become coloured or stereoscopic--never any
of the things that it was bound to become from its nature as a
scientific invention capable of reproducing the creations of art. Then,
suddenly, the arrival of the talking picture confounded them as much as
it amazed and delighted a public which had never considered highbrow
theories of screen art. The movement away from the stage was reversed
overnight, and the playwright as well as the actor and director became
useful to the producing corporations.

I confess to having watched this comedy of confusions with ironical
pleasure, for all my friends who had any feeling about the movies were
obstinate addicts of the silent picture, and when the first talkie
appeared they found themselves obliged to predict the ruin of the whole
art and industry. It never seemed to me possible that they could be
right; and the lapse of only a few years has shown the absurdity of
forming such rigid ideas about an expressive medium new in the world's
history. To-day we all see that a good picture can be the better for
good dialogue; which means that words have taken a vital place in the
composition and are themselves one of the images of screen. Maybe
to-morrow we shall see colour and stereoscopy assume a place just as
important; that is unless the whole process of photography on celluloid
and projection by light is meanwhile made obsolete, as it is likely to
be, by radio-television. (The broadcast play "performed" by a reading
party was on the point of being superseded by the televised play when
war conditions interrupted visual radio in all countries.) Whatever the
scientific development may be, the values of direction, acting and the
spoken word will remain; and I put them in that order because it is the
present order of importance in a picture. One of the interesting
possibilities of television is that the author may come first and the
director second or third; but that has not happened yet, and for the
present one should regard the director who controls every detail of
presentation as the real author of a picture.

These are the reflections of a theatre man without any prejudice against
the new art form of the machine age. Let dotards talk of the characters
of the screen as "shadows": they can be much more real than the
personages of many plays. Let sentimentalists revel in the thought that
a stage performance is freshly created each evening before a living
audience capable of spontaneous response: the talking picture now evokes
just the same warmth of laughter or emotion, and its scenes may well be
better acted. When a stage critic wrote of a play of mine that, thank
God, here was something nobody could make into a movie, I was obliged to
him for his amiable intention but not so pleased with the value he put
on film rights that I would gladly have sold. To-day if a critic said as
much he could be sued for damages; but this was before the talking
picture, as aesthetic rival of the stage play, had come into the field.
After a brief period of pictures with noise effects, to which belonged
the screen play of _The Patriot_, the talkie established itself in a
single season; and like most authors I stood looking curiously at the
new dramatic medium and wondering whether to try working in it or not.
The decision depended on age and temperament as well as opportunity.
From 1930 onward I noticed that very few of my seniors among dramatists,
men in or nearing their fifties, were taking the screen seriously enough
to write for it themselves; although eventually Shaw broke all rules as
usual by becoming an octogenarian screen dramatist. Popular playwrights
went to Hollywood because it was made worth their while; Maugham and
Galsworthy let others do the writing for them when their plays were
screened at all. On the other hand, practically all my juniors among
dramatists were as closely bound to the screen as to the stage; and some
of them gave up stage writing altogether. My own policy was to take any
work that offered, whether theatre or film or radio, if it looked
interesting in itself and required a writer's hand. The result was that
in the ten years following a stage success, my earnings from the screen
were perhaps a tenth or a twentieth of those from the theatre; but they
have been just enough to give an impression of the screen world from
within and add to a knowledge of the world at large.

Yes, I have visited the dramatists of Hollywood in their tidy little
offices at the studios, where they clock in and out at fixed hours and
deal in rotation with scripts laid on their desks. I have driven my car
through the gates of the less glamorous English film factories with
their architecture of the corrugated-iron period, and drunk those
endless cups of coffee which accompany waiting on somebody else's time,
and seen the processions, sad in their different ways, of the principals
and the supers; and watched shooting on the floor and cutting in the
cutting-room which should be called an operating theatre. I have taken
part in those solemn but extremely funny conferences at which the story
of a picture is overhauled dramatically and psychologically by an
assembly of script writers, continuity men, technicians, directors and
their assistants, presided over by some hard-boiled head of a producing
corporation with constant reference to his own administrative staff and
a stray capitalist or two from his financial board. I have seen a
picture go from bad to worse in tale and dialogue before a photographer
was ever let loose upon it: I have climbed the crazy structure of sets
that had cost a fortune but were never to be used at all because the
scenes they represented had vanished from the script: I have heard fact
after fact about some fantastic fiction verified from an encyclopaedia:
I have known distinguished stage artists cross-examined about their
capacities and careers by people who had never heard of them, and
classified in order of merit by the salaries they asked. And months
after the job was over, I have attended the preview of a picture which
bore practically no relation to the script from which it arose, and
marvelled at its score of industrious and individually intelligent
authors as they stood in line at the refreshment buffet.

All these things are commonplaces of a studio system which some
playwrights with longer knowledge have had the wit or cruelty to make
into comedies for the stage. They represent the inevitable follies and
errors of an industry that sets out to appeal to millions, and has been
guided since its cradle by the timid mentality of the men who financed
it into being. Fear governs the manufacturers of the screen as much as
hope governs its artists; and when these motives are inverted in the
hope of gain and the fear of failure, the industry reproduces in a
grotesque and magnified shape the anxieties that have always haunted the
imagination of the entertainment world.

The screen itself as a dramatic medium not only outlives ridicule
already, but makes the ridiculer frankly ridiculous. It is in practice
the theatre of youth, and in geographical fact the theatre of
multitudes who will never know any other. Already in the great capitals
it sets a standard that the living stage must equal or excel. Ten years
ago in London or New York one could look through the theatre list and
classify the plays in two groups. The first group, with most of the
current thrillers and comedies and the like, could be as well done by
the screen if it chose, with its new gift of words, to undertake them.
The second group, having some special intellectual or poetic appeal,
seemed to be marked out for the stage alone. But in that short space of
ten years the position of the groups has been entirely changed. The
first is threatened with total extinction by the screen, which not only
presents realistic drama and realistic playing as well as the stage but
a good deal better. The second has to compete with pictures of
distinction and subtlety forecasting a poetry of the screen, as well as
with pictures of comic genius that all the cultivated world runs to see.
Such is the stride that has been taken between 1931 and 1941; and again
I record it as a theatre man who has been able to turn screen spectator
with an open mind.

Three years ago on a winter evening I saw the first performance on any
stage of Thornton Wilder's _Our Town_, played in a Boston theatre before
a half-filled house. It was a sensitive play well acted, which after the
doubtful week of its opening went to New York and became the Broadway
hit of the year. Early this year (1941) the screen picture _Our Town_
came to London, and I liked it better even than the original from which
Wilder had written it. The reason was that the no-scenery stage
convention on which the performance had been based seemed to me
insufficiently related to the deep feeling of the work. I was always
conscious of the theatre radiators standing there at the back of the
stage. When the screen offered a background varied enough in plane and
conception to give all the characters their right setting, I was able
not only to see the drama more clearly but also to listen better to the
words which the author had beautifully conceived and timed (I do not
think of them as being "written") before the director came in with his
technical craft to give them full effect. What had originally been
rather an austere New England tale now seemed to gain an Elizabethan
quality of richness. I saw in the whole presentation a counterpart of
the method of those old Spanish romancers like Fernando de Rojas who,
long before the rise of classical Spanish or Elizabethan drama, sent
their characters talking from house to house and street to street in
snatches of vivid dialogue without narrative, which were never meant to
be spoken from a stage but only visualized as they were read. The screen
now gives opportunity for the making of drama out of such passages of
speech in movements from place to place; and this opens a brave new
world to the understanding dramatist, who need not be a dramatist of the
stage at all but must be a man of simple imagination, like Wilder
himself.

At the same time a new call is made upon the seeing and listening power
of the spectator, who will not easily appreciate the Chekhovs of the new
screen any more than playgoers at first appreciated the Chekhov of the
stage. The call is not made upon the spectator's intellect, his capacity
for example to follow the argument of a Shaw who will explain everything
in heaven and earth and human history; but upon his sensibility and
range of vision. And viewed in this way, the new art of the screen looks
uncommonly like the collective art of the theatre, made up of the
collaboration of dramatist and director and designer, which we have long
been seeking to establish in its due place on our stage. There is in
fact no difference between them but the physical medium they employ; and
if theatre art has met with set-backs in this decade, most of them have
been due to the movement of its own creative directors from the stage to
the screen which offers them greater scope and greater rewards together.

When dramatic history comes to be written we may be envied as people
who, in a time of major wars and other world convulsions, made
discoveries of mind and imagination as surely based on scientific
knowledge as the discoveries of Renaissance man were based on voyages
and expanding horizons. The silent picture was one of them, the talking
picture another, and radio-television is assuredly a third. And how
blind would be a playwright and producer of plays, telling of his
journey through theatre in this time, if he could not comprehend such
things. He might well appear to posterity like a Rosencrantz or
Guildenstern complacently content with his own part in _Hamlet_, and
unaware of the significance of the Prince of Denmark on the stage. So
for this good reason, if for no other, I am glad to pause and envisage
the career of the movies, looking backward a little but more especially
forward along their cometary and predictable path.




  10

  EUROPE AGAIN


About Easter 1926, having finished my little book on _Drama_, rewritten
one new play and begun another, I set off for Vienna with the reasonable
excuse that _The Man with a Load of Mischief_ had been accepted by the
Burgtheater and the director wanted to discuss with me the German
version and some details of production. For my part, I wanted to see
what the city looked like after twenty years; and why should a writer,
who can work anywhere, seek an excuse for a journey in Europe at the
most delightful season? In April the first- and second-class coaches of
the international trains are empty, except for an officer here or there,
a pretty woman, or a factory owner who looks just the same whether he be
French, Swiss, German or Austrian. The third class, which is hard
sitting but more fun, is full of migratory priests, peasants, doctors
and small tradesmen. Except for the varied wines of the restaurant car,
frontiers pass almost unnoticed; though one may have to pull a suitcase
off the rack for some pretence of customs inspection, or get out to buy
some new sort of money from a bank official at a station. Why, you may
ask, write of such things in the present when they are so evidently of
the past? The answer is that they are real while the Europe of to-day is
a transient nightmare. Freedom to move about our Continent is a right
and a heritage, like the freedom to move about England and America. To
feel this is to travel and not to be a tourist.

The Alps, seen from the window on this spring journey, overawed me into
feeling that at forty-one my mountain days must be over; which in fact
was far from true. Ten years later I could take a glacier peak in a
day's stride from the valley level, and be none the worse for it. The
capacity for physical endurance, with the pleasure that it brings, is
not to be suppressed by a few years of sedentary habit.

In Vienna, the director of the Burg showed me what I had wished for many
years to see, the organization of a great middle-European playhouse in
mid-season, with a bill of five to seven different plays each week. The
acting company under contract numbered at least thirty, and the stage
workers as many more. Counting all employees in the front of the house,
the weekly pay-roll included not less than 140 people. This was perhaps
not excessive for a theatre seating about 2000 and maintaining the
largest repertory in Europe; but it was impressive that such an
organization should have survived the disappearance of the monarchy and
aristocracy, the inflation and all the other ills of Austria. State
support was one obvious reason, but another was to be found in the
solidity of the institution itself. The young Viennese might call it a
museum of antiquities and modernities, but in fact the Burg, more than
any other playhouse in the world, stood for authority in drama, playing
and direction. To give Shakespeare and Molire, Goethe and Schiller and
Lessing, Scribe and Sardou and Ibsen, under one roof and with the same
company, was something that even the Comdie Franaise had never set out
to do. The vast stage could harbour in its wings all the scenery
required for a week of current plays. The wardrobes, workshops and
paintrooms functioned with traditional efficiency. The public functioned
just as thoroughly at the box office, crowding to the seven o'clock
performance from their cafs and going afterwards to dine and talk at
leisure of the play.

With the Burg was associated the small Akademietheater in the modern
city outside the Ring, and the two houses bore the same relation to each
other as the Kammerspiele to the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. To some
extent this solved the problem of presenting the modern intimate play,
which was liable to be travestied by the grand manner and sweeping
gestures of the Burg stage. I would have liked my comedy to be done at
the Akademie; but the translator was to be Felix Salten, author of
_Bambi_, and his preference for a Burg production was bound eventually
to decide the matter. Meanwhile I was able to see typical productions of
_Minna von Barnhelm_ and other classics at the Burg, and of Molnar,
Wilde and Strindberg on the smaller stage.

In Salten's home, which was full of hunting trophies, I met Max
Reinhardt for the first time. The Professor, a man of great zest and
vitality, was in the midst of his second main productive period during
which he controlled four theatres in Berlin, the Viennese Theater in der
Josefstadt, and the dramatic side of the yearly Salzburg Festival. I
believe the success of this huge enterprise was equally due to the
acumen of his brother Emanuel and the ability of his chosen directors.
With Reinhardt was Helene Thimig, who was afterwards to be his wife, and
came of the gifted acting family whose head was Hugo Thimig. In life
this actress gave an impression of shy and even awkward domesticity, by
contrast with her rich and confident stage presence. Seeing her standing
in the wings with a couple of hot sausages for Reinhardt's lunch, or at
the top of the stairway in the candle-lit castle of Leopoldskron where
she received an array of international guests, one would never have
taken her for the distinguished artist that she was and is. At this time
in Vienna she was appearing in _Kabale und Liebe_ and in Hofmannsthal's
_Christina's Heimreise_. She remains my brightest recollection of the
Theater in der Josefstadt, even brighter than that of the crystal
chandelier, one of the largest in captivity, which illumined the house
from a low level and was raised to the ceiling just before the curtain
rose. Looking at it one realized how notable a part the chandelier had
played in the theatre of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
leader of the Paris _claque_ formerly sat below it to conduct his
orchestra of applause given forth by hand-clappers in the balconies, and
was therefore called _le chevalier du lustre_. Further back in history
this refulgent object was a hang-over, in the best sense, from the
theatre of the Court and ballroom.

Less mannered, but as pleasing a link with the past, was the Theater an
der Wien, the old home of operetta which had echoed in its time so much
light music, and in our day had seen all the premires of Strauss and
Lehar. It was always said that the best place to listen was the topmost
gallery, and accordingly I climbed a wooden spiral staircase to some
fantastic perch, where I heard _Die Zirkusprincessin_ without seeing too
much of its tawdry costumes and setting. One would never have believed
oneself to be at the creative source of musical comedy, that flourishing
international business (if not racket) of the first quarter of this
century. Visits to clever cabarets, some political and all free-spoken,
completed the round of Vienna. My play was now scheduled for the opening
of the Burg season, 1927-28, and in May I left for Paris as delegate to
an international theatre congress. It was a preliminary gathering of the
Socit Universelle du Thtre formed by that true idealist, Firmin
Gmier of the Odon; but associated with it was a meeting of dramatic
and musical critics from various countries.

Gmier believed it possible to form an international theatre society,
under whose auspices festivals should be given in turn, during the
regular season, in the capitals of Europe, America and perhaps Asia. A
permanent bureau was to be established in Paris to carry out this plan,
and to form archives of theatre information and reference, to which
members of the society and students should have access. Theatre men of a
number of countries promised their support, and eventually a beginning
was made a year later with the appearance in the French capital of
Dutch, Flemish and Japanese companies playing in their own language, and
of Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson's English company in _Saint Joan_
and the _Medea_.

Theatre congresses seldom accomplish as much as this, and in the season
they can never be quite representative; but when held in Paris they can
be very pleasant. This was the time when the theatrical left wing, under
such directors as Gaston Baty, Charles Dullin, Louis Jouvet and Georges
Pitoff, was beginning its notable work in little playhouses off the
boulevards. Here was an opportunity of meeting them and their own group
of dramatists, men like Jules Romains, Lenormand, Denys Amiel,
Jean-Jacques Bernard and Simon Gantillon. My friendly acquaintances of
those days led later to translations, and to the making of contacts
between French writers and the Gate, the newly-founded Cambridge
Festival Theatre, and other professional little theatres springing up in
England. Each evening we went to a play in parties, and by day we were
enlivened at the conference table by the interventions of Tristan
Bernard, the far from serious parent of the serious Jean-Jacques--a
bearded, Rabelaisian and almost legendary Parisian figure who came to
help us along. I cannot remember that any of the new plays were so
impressive as Henry Becque's _Les Corbeaux_, a classic of 1882 which was
just then being superbly played at the Comdie Franaise. This was
freely admitted by the dramatists of 1926 themselves. Becque's play,
written just before the more accomplished _La Parisienne_, had been in
the repertory at intervals ever since its first production; and it will
surely remain there for generations more.

Other distractions of a Paris international congress always include an
official morning reception at the Htel de Ville, where the Prefect of
the Seine Department reads the delegates an address, and the invited
guests, Parisians who have acquired the privilege by hereditary or other
means, afterwards storm the buffet to drink sweet champagne. There is
also the official banquet, held in one of the larger restaurants of the
Champs-lyses, where Mlle. Ccile Sorel makes one of her perennial
appearances and a Minister proposes the toast of art, declaring without
fail, though with little justification but political sentiment, that
"L'Art ne connat pas de frontires". There is the afternoon reception
in the grounds of the lyse itself, where, weather permitting, the
official photograph is taken after all features have been artistically
composed. And if any delegate, after a week of this, does not feel that
he would willingly do it all again next year, he is no true traveller
and no student of human nature. I should add that the French Government
makes a yearly grant in aid of such occasions, and its hospitality puts
all others to shame.

Returning home by way of Dover, I found the quay lined with trim Oxford
undergraduates in pullovers ready to berth and unload the steamboat. The
General Strike had already lasted some days, but long before reaching
London one knew that it had been broken by such volunteers, whom nobody
even called blacklegs. It dragged on hopelessly a few days longer--the
workers standing by quietly to watch their jobs being done by the nation
at large--and then collapsed. The affair had been very un-Continental
and a complete disproof of all syndicalist theories; but it was as
epochal in its own way as the Wall Street crash two or three years
later. Our world, already in the grip of mechanical forces, had made a
violent, improbable, frustrated gesture. Nothing could ever be the same
again, for the unexpected was bound to happen socially, politically,
internationally. A logical observer might even have forecast at this
stage the arming of the charlatan dictators and their exploitation of
the universal economic ill for national ends.

The actual momentary crisis passed, and we said complacently that
England was herself again: this complacency was not to be rudely
disturbed until the hour of the Abdication. Theatres reopened as the
other wheels of life resumed their turning; and this was not a bad year
for the London stage, including as it did a series of Chekhov revivals
under the direction of Theodore Komisarjevsky, O'Casey's _The Plough and
the Stars_ which confirmed him the rank of the best Irish writer since
Synge, the positive English success of an American dramatist in Sidney
Howard's _They Knew What They Wanted_, and among the rest _Berkeley
Square_. Sacha Guitry, as guest artist, made a fashionable hit with the
very slight _Mozart_, made and tailored for Yvonne Printemps. The
Ballets Russes had renewed their summer visits to Covent Garden. I was
amusing myself by writing a modern comedy in verse, intended to parody
the plot and characters of the drawing-room dramatists; and this
sufficed to bridge the gap between early and late summer, when it was
time to pay a first visit to the Salzburg Festival. This, in fact, was
to be a year of travel.

To-day there is nothing new to be said of the _Festspiele_ in the town
on the rushing river Salzach, or of its rain and sunshine, laughter and
Mozartian sentiment, social snobs and music-lovers, peasants and
_Wandervgel_ and Fritzi Massary, Max Pallenberg and Moissi,
_Mozartserenaden_ and Caf Bazar. All this formed one of the bright
recurrent episodes of the inter-war years; and if the glamour was a
little unreal, that was excused by its intentional theatricality. I
shall not write of any year in particular, even though 1926 in my
experience was in many ways the best; but the few things I have to say
are to be taken as a friendly critique of Salzburg in general. The
association of music and drama was never wholly satisfying, for the
musical ascendancy was always marked, and Reinhardt seemed content that
it should be so. At one time he had perhaps meant to make new
productions at the Festival, and this would have given it a
world-importance from the theatre standpoint; but with the exception of
the _Everyman_ played in the setting of the baroque cathedral square,
all the plays of the earlier years were revivals transferred from Berlin
or Vienna, either to the small stage of the Stadttheater or the larger
one in the ill-shapen and rather forbidding Festspielhaus. Reinhardt
then became interested architecturally in the possibilities of the old
summer riding-school of the archepiscopal palace. He transformed it into
an open-air playhouse by making its arcaded galleries into a group of
stages; and here some years later I saw the unlucky production of
_Faust_.

Carlo Gozzi's _Turandot_, _Princess of China_ was the dramatic highlight
of 1926 and the following year. In Karl Vollmller's version it was not
quite the play that the Venetian dramatist had intended, but it was a
good reconstruction in the spirit of the old Italian Comedy, with some
clowning on the foreground of the stage. The prevailing humours were of
the Berliner type; for instance Pallenberg's "I am the Chief Eunuch: the
office is hereditary in our family". Technically, the use of hangings in
place of painted sets, and the manifold entries through the auditorium,
showed that Reinhardt had lost none of his skill since the time of
_Sumurun_. And in Goldoni's _Servant of Two Masters_, remade in the
spirit of Viennese popular farce, he could accomplish miracles of
illusion with a couple of screens and the comedians of the Thimig
family. For at least two years in Salzburg we had access to rehearsals;
and I say "we" because my wife had much to do with the privilege. We sat
in the stalls of the Festspielhaus hearing the chuckles with which
Reinhardt expressed his relish and encouraged his comedians; and we
attended the various receptions, at one of which I had the felicity of
seeing the Professor kiss the Archbishop's ring. Nor should one forget
the surprise of seeing Dr. Kommer, so dapper and inevitable a figure at
first nights in London or Paris or New York, in the _Lederhosen_ of the
Alpine countryside.

When that year's Festival was over I remained alone in Austria, and
found my way to a high village of the Salzkammergut, which can be
nameless because it has nothing to do with theatre. Here I was to begin
a new life of summer seasons, on mountains and in valleys, with and
without the car which made the place in later years so accessible both
from England and Italy. The work done in this retreat--and I cannot
think of a holiday without writing--was the happiest of each year. Since
I was lucky enough, that September, to strike a cloudless month, I had
much high walking from hut to hut of the German Alpine Club around 8000
to 9000 feet, and good companionship among the Austrians up there, all
of us singing at dusk, sleeping at nightfall and rising before dawn.
Then, coming back to the valley, I found a cable offering me the
commission to translate Guitry's _Mozart_ into English verses for the
music of Reynaldo Hahn. I accepted because I happened to be out there,
and felt the rhyming task would amuse me in the open, at caf tables
under the red canopies that dotted the green hillside. The version was
finished in a fortnight, and having mailed it to New York (where I fear
its run was brief) I felt rich enough to leave for Venice, which was no
great way off by the railroad through Carinthia. In the Dolomites, the
great cliffs of the Marmolada could be seen in a clear evening sky.

Perhaps it is well that a first visit to Venice should be made by a man
alone. I know all the romantic glamour of the place, the evenings out on
the lagoons, the mornings in cool churches and galleries, the afternoons
(if you must have them) on the Lido, and even the wanderings arm-in-arm
through the narrow alleys of the city by land; but the mind needs no
distraction when you reach the station after midnight on a journey from
the north, and embark on your very first gondola, baggage and all, to
proceed down the Grand Canal to the water-front. Then the crystal-harsh
cry of the gondolier as he turns the corner of some alley is at its
clearest: then the stars are at their loveliest even though the
mosquitoes are at their most voracious. I had not long arrived in
Venice, and indeed was only walking at noon next day under the arches of
the Piazza near Florian's, when I met the linen-clad chairman of the
Stage Society and his lady, who rented every year a Venetian palace, and
with it a pair of the most admirable gondoliers I could ever hope to
see, clad in steely silk which matched the sheen of their burnished
prow, the product of hours of work begun at dawn each morning. My
friends introduced me forthwith to a luncheon of _scampi_, the Dublin
Bay prawns or New Orleans prawns or what you will of the Adriatic. When
they placed their equipage at my disposal, complete with silken canopy
and gondoliers, to be paddled from church to church and gallery to
gallery, I would not have envied Casanova himself. My first voyage,
however, was to the Piombi, that dark prison whence the great Venetian
adventurer made his escape; I felt that the numerous Madonnas, and even
the Colleoni statue, could wait upon this pious pilgrimage. After dark
there was music in the palace of my host and hostess, until the hour
when I was ferried to my hotel by those two fierce Mussolini-haters, my
gondoliers; and thus it was that September, still cloudless, declined
into October beckoning me home.

As sequel to this journey, which by now had become rather fantastic in
its pleasurable nature, I could think of nothing better to do than to
travel westward by Monte Carlo, where at the tables in the warmth of a
Mediterranean midnight I met an old friend, a horseman of Allenby's
campaigns, wandering from room to room with a handful of counters. We
mutually confessed that gaming bored us, and agreed to play chess. In
the early hours, therefore, we resorted to the caf over the way from
the Casino and demanded a board and men. The waiter consulted his chief,
who consulted the manager, who in turn consulted one of those
resplendent beings in cocked hats who represent the law in Monaco. It
was finally decided that we were either sane or harmless, so that the
board and men were fetched from somewhere. The game, played _al fresco_
until three in the morning, attracted much attention. The reason was
that on the only previous occasion when chess was played there, a Pole
who had borne his losses at roulette with apparent resignation had drawn
a revolver and shot himself on losing a chess game to a compatriot. We
said, justly, that Englishmen are not Poles. Next day we walked together
over the hills above Monte Carlo, and through La Turbie, where the
mothers threaten their troublesome sons that if they are naughty they
will not be _croupiers_ when they grow up. Then, having eaten ripe figs
from the trees of this Roman place of execution, we descended and took
train for Marseilles, Paris and London.

Considering critically the mood of fifteen years ago, I now find in it
undeniable traces of what the left wing would call "bourgeois escapism".
Yes, Austria was the escapist country for many years between the wars,
and Venice has always been the escapist city and the Mediterranean the
escapist sea. But I have never liked any of them for that reason only,
or mainly; and now that the mood is past and only the tale remains, let
us grant that they have their own place in the theatrical picture of the
time.




  11

  FROM THE ORIGINAL


The producing managers of Shaftesbury Avenue and Broadway, aware of the
risks of following their own judgment where not more than one play in
ten may be a hit, have always cast an eye around the horizon for the
appearance of a foreign success in Paris, Berlin, Prague or
Budapest--but Budapest especially. The magic of that city's name is such
that one of our dramatists has been known to attribute a play of his own
to a fictitious Hungarian author, and then by posing as its adaptor to
get it produced for a run; and afterwards even to sell the rights to a
Middle Europe innocent of the affair but eager to buy an Anglo-Saxon
hit. For it is not only in London or New York that the perennial quest
for somebody else's work goes on. A German or Austrian _Verlag_, which
takes control of a dramatist and arranges his multiple productions at a
commission of 50 per cent, brings out its seasonal list of
English-American plays, commended in a style which makes all our poor
geese appear swans, as the geese of the Molnars and Vajdas appear when
they too are trussed and exposed in the international play market.

But in this matter the theatre lives up to its traditions as well as its
commercial instincts. Many Elizabethan masterpieces are free adaptations
written by various or successive hands; and Molire did not scruple to
borrow from the Italian Comedy or anything else that was handy; and
original plots in Restoration drama are conspicuously few; and actually
all historical and most classical drama is a variant of some original
theme, so that the playgoer who has seen, say, _Hamlet_, and _Mourning
Becomes Electra_ and read a play or two by Sophocles, may well wonder
whether there exists more than one fabulous and supreme tragic subject,
that of guilty parents and their children on whom the burden descends--a
myth which seems to form the source of manifold streams in man's
imagination. It is certain that the dramatist's own impulse has more to
do with "adaptation" than the interest of a producing manager, however
strong it may be, to exploit a current success. For the dramatist is
locked in an age-long struggle to preserve the fabric erected by
dramatic thought; and the renewal of this structure, which has become a
common possession, is more important than what is called, lightly, the
individual writer's "originality". This is a longer way of saying that
it is the treatment and not the subject that counts; but perhaps it is
well to stress the adapter's place in theatre history. When a modern
French playwright names his comedy _Amphitryon 38_ he is gracefully
acknowledging the existence of 37 previous versions of the same tale,
some better than his and some worse, but all with the same beginning and
end. The number might be trebled if account were taken of all the
derivatives of the _Menechmi_ of Plautus and its adaption the _Comedy
of Errors_, with their own confusion of twin masters and twin servants.
By such lively repetition the theatre contrives to subsist on its
limited available number of dramatic plots, which have been narrated by
some ingenious Frenchman and estimated at under forty. All of us are
engaged more or less in "adapting" them, as for instance the theme of
the woman with a past, not the most elevated of themes, is adapted
successively in Dumas' _Dame aux Camlias_, Sudermann's _Magda_ and
Pinero's _Second Mrs. Tanqueray_. When the Attic dramatists thought of
her as the woman borne down by guilt, they made better use of the
material.

I was thinking of such matters early in 1927, by which time I had
cheerfully relinquished any belief that a dramatist's other plays will
reach the stage because one of them has had a long run. It depends on
the kind of plays they are and how far they repeat a successful formula.
Neither my Flemish legend of Ulenspiegel nor my verse parody of
drawing-room drama were likely to make a hit, though the latter play,
called _One More River_, was given by the Stage Society with a star cast
of comedians and was afterwards played by the Cambridge Festival and the
Gate. There was no sign of the foundation of a London management such as
I would have liked to write for, in the capacity of what the Germans
would call a _Hausdichter_, over a term of years. But Matheson Lang, our
most successful road actor at that time, a very creditable Othello, a
pioneer of the Old Vic, and an outstanding talent in character parts,
asked me to adapt for him _Der Patriot_ by Alfred Neumann, a Berlin hit
of the year before. The play was about the conspiracy of Count Pahlen
against the crazy Paul I of Russia, and it had much in common with a
play by Merejkovsky in which Charles Laughton had made one of his early
London appearances. Neumann's drama was both stronger and less subtle
than the Russian work, though it was equally a free adaptation of
history.

_Der Patriot_ did not enrapture me, for it had the wordiness of a
novelist's play and was designed for the heaviest type of German acting.
Lang, however, possessed a sense of comedy among his gifts, and it was
certain that Pahlen would suit him better than anything he had played
for years, if only vigorous cuts could be made in the script and a less
banal title could be found for the English version. He agreed about all
this, and said he had an idea that a title must be found somewhere in
Shakespeare, maybe in _Julius Caesar_; so that the responsibility was
equally divided between us when I sent him a postcard next day with the
words _Such Men Are Dangerous_. This seemed to put a different
complexion on the play, and in a month the version was finished. Robert
Farquharson was to play the explosive and gibbering Czar, and Aubrey
Hammond designed the costumes together with settings which gave an
effect of pageantry by the simplest means. Gilbert Miller bought the
play for America, where he planned to do it in my version but under the
name of _The Patriot_, which was to be the screen title also. Leslie
Faber, Madge Titherage, Lyn Harding and John Gielgud (then a very young
actor) were to go over and play in the New York production, which was to
be designed by Norman Bel Geddes. This was a spectacular failure only a
few weeks before our own success in Edinburgh, which was to be repeated
in London. I am, however, looking forward a little, for the year of this
play was 1928 when it had some 300 English performances.

1927 was a poor year in our London theatre, for the reason that neither
dramatists nor directors were doing anything distinctive; and the
American drama had scarcely begun to arrive. But it was about this time
that the Cambridge Festival Theatre came into being, thanks to Terence
Gray and his lighting expert and co-director C. Harold Ridge. For years
this was to be a very provocative stage, handling both classics and
modern plays in a fresh way. The acting and directive talents that
sprang from it were as notable as those from the more conventional
provincial theatres, the Liverpool Playhouse under William Armstrong and
the Birmingham Repertory under Sir Barry Jackson. The idea of linking up
the theatre with wine and food at an adjoining restaurant made an appeal
to the University, and even more to the visitor from London. Terence
Gray meant his own process of adaptation applied to drama to be as
positive as the Elizabethan process of the dramatist. He was himself a
disinterested patron and friend of theatre art; and I would rather not
dwell on the more perverse of his productions, made on an uncurtained
stage with an architectural setting. These latter conditions were in
themselves good, and if the playing and the sense of the dramatic word
had been as well conceived and controlled, the Cambridge Festival might
have become a new Globe Theatre on Camside. When its director retired
from the enterprise and became a wine-grower at Tain l'Hermitage, where
revived some of the growths that had appealed to former generations of
English burgundy-drinkers, he left a gap which was not entirely filled
by the artists, like Norman Marshall and Margaret Rawlings, who had
worked with him.

There was also the Gate Theatre, which had been started by Peter Godfrey
in an upstairs hall near Covent Garden market and was later transferred
to better premises under the arches of Charing Cross Station, where,
however, the opening hour of performances depended on the closing of a
skittle alley next door. This new little theatre, for subscribers only,
was opened with _Maya_ by Simon Gantillon, which had run a long time in
the Studio des Champs-lyses in Gaston Baty's production, and caused
some commotion when it was done in New York. In a country with a
censorship like ours, the temptation of a private theatre is to produce
plays because they would certainly be censored if submitted, and not
because of their own positive merits. Also the Gate had begun with a
left-wing tendency, and between the communists and the searchers after
forbidden sex plays, it collected a highly specialized audience.
Nevertheless _Victoria Regina_, _Parnell_ and _Oscar Wilde_ came from
this theatre to the regular stage, either in London or New York or both;
and many good foreign plays were performed as well. The Gate began even
to supplant the Stage Society, which had introduced the best foreign
plays since the century began, and continued to do so with a diminished
membership. After some years the direction of Peter Godfrey had given
place to that of Norman Marshall. The rule was to play every evening,
including Sundays but without matinees, for three or four weeks at a
time; and this allowed for better rehearsal than could be given at
Cambridge or at most of the repertory theatres. Birmingham Repertory,
however, made its productions once a fortnight and Liverpool Playhouse
once a month.

Salzburg that year was at the height of its social glamour, of which the
visitor was perhaps too constantly reminded. Beside the music-lovers and
the fashionable international crowd, there was a gathering of critics
from many countries to discuss, without undue exertion, the furtherance
of their professional interests. I had been asked to represent the
London Critics' Circle, and accepted, although criticism was no longer
my work in the theatre, because it was a pleasant way of meeting old
colleagues and new writers from many capitals. Being mostly accompanied
by our wives or other ladies, we went to the opera or the play in
congenial groups, attended a glittering midnight reception at
Reinhardt's castle, admired the groups of artificial fountains at
Hellbrunn which are called in German _Wasserknste_ and in French
_thtres d'eau_, and even made a collective mountain ascent by a steep
cable railway which was more agreeable to go up than to come down. I
made myself unpopular at the steepest point, when many critical hands
were clutching nervously at seats, by mentioning the sorrow which would
be felt by the dramatists of Europe if by mischance we should come down
too quickly. But each evening in the theatre it was good to see men who
had made it a professional rule never to applaud throw etiquette to the
winds and remain in the stalls insisting on one more curtain-call for
the artists. The operas were _Don Juan_ and _Fidelio_; the plays
_Sommernachtstraum_ in the Festspielhaus and _Kabale und Liebe_ in the
town theatre. The Mozart was not very satisfying, but one was glad of
the rare opportunity of hearing and seeing Beethoven's work in all its
gloomy grandeur. Again, Reinhardt's conception of poetic happenings in
"a wood near Athens" showed little feeling for the real wood which is
near Stratford-on-Avon; and even the Berliner critics concurred with the
French and ourselves that his _Midsummer Night's Dream_ should not be
confused with Shakespeare's comedy of the same name. Schiller's play, on
the other hand, retained all the delightful quality of its production in
Vienna the year before. No one seeing this presentation could contend
that Reinhardt is insensitive to his author's text. He transfigured the
old work and almost persuaded us it was a masterpiece. Still, however,
the original dramatic productions that Salzburg should have made were
missing.

The critic-delegates had been presented by a hospitable Government with
passes for several weeks over the Austrian railways, and this led to our
dispersal before the Festival itself was over. For my own part I had to
attend the final rehearsals and first night of my comedy at the
Burgtheater in Vienna. Many things had happened there since my last
visit. The Courts of Justice had been burned out in the riots of July,
which came perilously near breaking an established convention (in the
minds of Austrian hotel-keepers at any rate) that there should be no
political or other disturbances during the months of the tourist season.
Life was unchanged at the Burg, where the company, fresh from summer
festivals or lakeside holidays, were making the usual September
complaint of having to rehearse five plays at once. This is one of the
few drawbacks of the repertory system: the opening of each new season
puts a heavy strain on the players. I noted that rehearsals began at 8
A.M. and went on until noon, when the single meal of the day was taken.
The afternoon was for rest and word-study; then by 6 all were back in
the theatre in readiness to play from 7 to 10. By 10.30 they could
possibly get away to a restaurant for half an hour, but here social life
began and ended. The only matinee was of course on Sunday.

_Das Wirtshaus zum Pechvogel_ (or Mischief Inn) had become the name of
my comedy, and it was a lively experience to be adapted myself in this
time of adaptations. If Salten's English was limited, he could write
German and that was the main thing; his cuts and additions to the text
pleased me equally. Leon Quartermaine's part was played by Paul
Hartmann, who was already one of the leading actors of the
German-speaking stage and had been prominent each year at Salzburg. Fay
Compton's was taken by Ilse von Wohlgemuth, tall and stately and as
delightful as her name. The period suited the Viennese temperament, and
since the personages were nameless the English character of the comedy
was nameless too: the whole affair readily became European. I saw the
costumes made or adapted from the vast wardrobe of the Burg, and the
scene made and painted; and watched the smooth mechanism of the final
rehearsals, with telephone installations placed all over the house under
shaded lights for the convenience of the _Regisseur_ and his assistant
the _Abendregisseur_ who was already taking over full responsibility
from him. I had never seen theatre efficiency like this, and the four
morning hours of a Burg rehearsal would cover as much work as a long
day on any stage of London or New York, not to say Paris.

At the dress rehearsal, which began at 10 A.M. to the minute on the day
before the production, the house was practically filled; there must have
been 1500 people present. The comedy was received almost in silence, and
I thought it had fallen down completely; but it seemed this army of
regular attendants at a Burg rehearsal was hereditary, and had been well
trained in generations not to interfere either by laughter or applause
with the final touches of the director or the judgment of the critics.
The first night went well enough, the public was animated, and an
imposing official in court dress with knee-breeches summoned me from my
box to make a bow. The old tradition of formally announcing the author's
name at the end of a performance, although it stood everywhere in print,
was still observed in this theatre. Next morning I hastened to buy all
the papers just as one does after a first night in London or New York.
There was the story of the play, sure enough--the part of the notice
that always interests the dramatist least because he knows it
already--and here was a writer saying that the work was _kurz und tief_,
which indeed I would have hoped to be true. A day or two later, having
said my farewells, I left for London by the roundabout way of Prague,
Carlsbad, Dresden and Berlin. Alas, I have never since been in Vienna,
where the salutation _Kss' die Hand, Gndigste_ is no empty form of
words. Outside the theatre itself, one of my contacts was with Dr. Josef
Gregor, the learned director of the State Library and editor of
_Monumenta Scenica_, which he was then preparing to bring out. We were
to meet again some years later in Rome.

Prague, like Vienna, was just opening its season, and I was able to see
productions both in the German and Czech theatres. Since the world
success of the plays by the Capeks from this city, there had been a
constant interchange of work between the Bohemian, German and Austrian
stages: the hit of the moment was Frantisek Langer's _Periferie_, which
I had seen at Reinhardt's theatre in Vienna. Josef Capek made very
striking designs for this play, which was afterwards seen in many
countries. Under the Republic, Prague was always famed for its theatre
settings. I stayed in the city long enough to know it for the most
Eastern of middle-European capitals and to be sorry to pass on. But I
had writing to do this early autumn, and a mind to fast as well, both of
which can be pleasantly united with the drinking of waters from hot
springs. This led me to Carlsbad, the only town in Europe where one's
hotel is just a lodging and not even breakfast need be taken there.
Those who breakfast at all in Carlsbad do so at sunny little cafs on
the promenades, after rising at dawn to hasten, glass in hand, to their
prescribed spring to sip their water slowly while they listen to the
band. By 8 A.M. this serious part of the day's work is over; but for an
hour or two earlier the main colonnade, with its water-drinkers grouped
by nationality, race, profession or social standing, makes a very
curious spectacle which the looker-on, glass in hand himself, may well
take to be theatrical.

The Sprudel, which leaps from six to twelve feet high in jets renewed
each second, within another colonnade adorned by a statue of Hygeia, is
certainly theatrical, and some visitors utter cries of admiration when
they first behold it, while others sit entranced and regard it by the
hour. It is said to have ceased to flow for three days at the time of
the earthquake of Lisbon, and otherwise through the centuries has never
failed. The more legitimate theatre in Carlsbad flourishes too, and I
saw good guest performances by Moissi and Pallenberg. Many houses in the
streets along the river side are inscribed with the names of poets and
painters whose lodgings they have been.

The most visited physician of this place made his name by prescribing no
diet at all, but a variety and sequence of water-drinking to meet each
case. I followed his direction for close upon a fortnight, when having
lost about a pound daily and written the greater part of a play, I was
shocked to find myself stopping at delicatessen shops in the street and
gazing earnestly upon the hams and sausages. The physician, again
consulted, declared my cure to be complete and sent me away, a
well-irrigated and possibly a better man, to break the fast with milk
and autumn fruits. So by way of Dresden, where I paused a few hours to
see the Sistine Madonna and the modern gallery, I reached Berlin in late
October, where the autumn plays were well under way.

Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater was giving a new version of _Troilus and
Cressida_ by Hans Rothe, written in a style much more direct and
colloquial than the classical (or Gothic) Shakespearean translations of
Schlegel and Tieck. Text, acting and scene were all modernized in the
liveliest production of this play that I have seen. Of course there is
nothing sacrosanct about Schlegel except to the Nazi mind, which became
increasingly disquieted about Rothe's activities as translator and
eventually threw him out of Germany for his pains. There is no reason
why new translations of Shakespeare should not be made in Germany every
fifty or a hundred years. The awkward corollary is that the actual
language of Shakespeare, receding more and more from the current idiom
of the English-speaking peoples, may in time become as archaic as the
language of Chaucer, and so leave his own countrymen lacking essential
contact with him. But dramatic posterity will have to solve that problem
for itself, and discover how to give stage life to the classical text.

In the adjoining Kammerspiele I saw Wedekind's _Die Bchse der Pandora_,
perhaps one of the last satisfying productions of this dramatist before
his work was prohibited altogether. It was also an object-lesson in the
uses of chamber-theatre seating two or three hundred people, the
selective audience for the play of intimate, psychological interest. For
such varied productions as these two, Reinhardt could find always the
right directors among his lieutenants.

The advance guard of the Berlin audience, however, had by this time been
drawn away from Reinhardt by Erwin Piscator, the director of the Theater
am Nollendorferplatz, who had the reputation of being communist and
super-Soviet in his theatrical style. He was doing _Hoppla, wir leben!_
by Toller, an affair of divided stages, platforms and ladders, film
effects and all the battery of constructivist drama. This had a vogue of
sorts and the direction was certainly creative, but the gap between
drama and treatment was altogether too wide. In a suburb I visited
Toller, who was none too happy about his play and indeed had never quite
taken his dramatic bearings since his release from imprisonment.
Piscator of course had real gifts, which developed as he shed his
pseudo-Russian mannerisms and party attachments; but he was another
artist who had not long to live and work in Germany, and the price on
his head was eventually considerable. But for the catastrophe of 1939,
he would have made for Gilbert Miller, with a text by Alfred Neumann, a
dramatic version of _War and Peace_ for which I was to work as adapter.

Coming home by the Hook as autumn turned to early winter, I met a German
woman explorer of African forests and student of primitive mankind, who
was on her way to England to fit out her coming expedition. We talked
with the zest which two people can only feel if they have just met for
the first time and have a subject of absorbing interest between them.
This was solitude and the forest, for I doubt if she had ever given two
thoughts to a play. In London she came to visit in our home. Her name is
forgotten and I have never heard of her again, but hope she lives.




  12

  ATHENIAN SPRING


Early in 1928, while Princes Street and the Castle still lay snowbound
under winter sunshine, _Such Men Are Dangerous_ opened in Edinburgh; and
this was the beginning of a capacity tour of the play. The London
premire was not to be until the autumn, but a provincial success was
assured from the first rehearsal. This was one of the advantages of
working with Matheson Lang; but others lay in the thoroughness of his
producing method and the sensibility with which a text was handled. Cuts
and additions were discussed each evening, tried and agreed; then from
their word-perfect stage onward the company held to every line. All
details of the mounting were handled with equal pains, so that there was
no question of "try-out" but only of finished presentation. In all these
respects the tour of an English actor-producer compared very well with
the hectic "out-of-town" fortnight or month which I had known in America
before a Broadway opening.

Meanwhile I had been asked to do another play for Lang, this time an
adaptation of Lion Feuchtwanger's _Jew Sss_. At first I urged that a
Jew ought to undertake this work, for to my mind the climax of the tale
lay in the conversion of Josef Sss Oppenheimer, after his life of showy
splendour at the Court of Wrttemberg and the tragedy of his daughter's
death in seeking to escape a royal seducer, to the Israelite mystical
faith whose unceasing advocate and apostle had been the Rabbi Gabriel.
It was this withdrawal of the chief character from the Gentile world to
the citadel of Judaism that seemed to lift the novel above the
commonplace of highly-coloured historical narrative; for the hanging of
Sss sky-high in a cage was one of the minor sensations of the
eighteenth century, and there is no record of his apotheosis through
repentance or any other religious gesture. I felt that in making a play
of the subject, no one but a Jew might be able to convey the mingled
humility and pride, abnegation and ecstasy, cringing and magnificence,
in which the hero of Feuchtwanger's romance approaches this elevated
end. Lang, however, was determined that I should do the work for him;
and I reflected that he was not even a Jew himself but a cousin of the
Archbishop of Canterbury with a Scots accent which became more
noticeable when he made his nightly curtain speeches in the cities north
of the Border. (He was also much liked by his company and it was good to
work with him again.) As for myself, Sir William Rothenstein had once
mentioned finding my name in an old German-Jewish encyclopaedia he
possessed, but all my other hopes of establishing a non-Aryan ancestry
had been disappointed. The subject-matter of _Jew Sss_ itself was rich
enough to tempt any playwright.

Feuchtwanger had originally written his own version of the tale as a
drama, which was published in the years of the first War but was either
unperformed or unsuccessful. He then decided to make a novel of it, and
rather strangely this took the shape of a book almost devoid of
dialogue, for which was substituted a subtle analysis of situation. The
novel met with no more popularity in Germany than the play, but it
became a best-seller both in America (where I think it was called
_Power_) and in England where it owed much to the critical praise of
Arnold Bennett. The lack of dialogue suited me well enough, for my task
as adapter was to read the book two or three times, put it aside for
good, make a list of the characters who seemed to me dramatically
indispensable, forget about the rest and set about writing a play on the
same theme with the same general sequence of action. The movement, scene
by scene, up to the death of the Duke was inevitable; but I would myself
have wished to prolong the drama beyond this actual accomplishment of
the Jew's revenge, and to follow the tale as far as the condemned cell,
the executioner and the cage, and the Rabbi who brings his own dark
absolution to Sss. This was not to be, and more than one of my
suggested closing scenes disappeared in the final version. The adapter's
way is sometimes hard; but so is the playwright's way altogether. We
should not forget that Ibsen wrote a "happy" ending to _A Doll's House_,
in which Nora's affection for Helmer triumphs over her resolve to leave
him and brings her back after the banging of the door; and this was
printed for years in translations of the play and left to the choice of
the playhouses of Europe.

_Jew Sss_ in English eventually turned out well enough to please not
only Lang and the public but also Feuchtwanger, who had my version
translated into German under his own supervision and performed in a
number of German theatres about 1930-31. Meanwhile his own original play
was done into Yiddish and produced in New York in the autumn of 1929
after our London success had drawn attention to the theme. This,
however, is again looking forward a year or two. I mention here the
various ramifications of the Sss story because they illustrate
possibilities in collaborative dramatic creation. Our way of going
successively to work upon the legendary tale was quite Elizabethan; and
if we did not achieve a great drama, that was perhaps the fault of the
current stage as well as our own.

This theme required leisure and reflection for the writing. I could have
found both in London, since I was no longer obliged to follow the round
of plays unless they were, like _Back to Methuselah_ at the Court, of
some outstanding significance. Here, set in Shaw's intellectual
platinum, both harder than gold and chillier in effect, were some of the
glittering talents of the years to come--Cedric Hardwicke, Edith Evans,
Gwen Ffrangon-Davies and Laurence Olivier for example. I cannot
remember much else of dramatic importance at this time; for with the
first sign of spring I took a sixpence and tossed it to decide whether I
should go to write in Spain or in Greece, the two countries I most
desired to visit. The coin came down for Greece; and if I have since
regretted never having set foot in Spain (for some inopportune
rehearsals prevented me from attending the Lope de Vega celebrations in
Seville a few years later), one should never question a step so decided.
Otherwise, why toss a sixpence?

The journey to Greece, lasting many weeks, was the only one of its kind
that I have made alone; and however lovely a companionship in travel can
be, there are times when one needs no man or woman, day or night. In a
writer's life strangers can suffice, if he has time for them and
patience with them and enough thoughts to occupy his own mind. He need
never talk to them, but only sit as in a Marseilles caf to watch the
Arabs, sailors, merchants and the rest go by. Personal silence and
solitude are good in themselves; and where can they not be enjoyed? I
would never wish to travel with a man or woman capable of being bored
when alone or restless in silent company. After all, the ever-visible
spectacle is a drama and not a senseless confusion of movement, fact and
object. To lean on a bridge and watch the loading of a barge, as much as
to sit awaiting the rise of a curtain, can form the mirror and pattern
of the mind.

On the way south I stayed a while in Paris to see what the _Cartel_ of
little theatres was doing; and found it, as always in the inter-War
years, the main thing of dramatic consequence. The French were far ahead
of us in two respects: they had talented directors in control of a group
of small stages, and they had playwrights who understood where the
director could help them and in what degree their own independent
inspiration could serve the theatre. A great part of this co-operation
and understanding was a legacy from the time of Copeau and the
Vieux-Colombier. It was true that Copeau himself had retired into the
provinces to form artists and devise plays in his own way; and he would
not entirely have approved the eventual careers of Gaston Baty and
Louis Jouvet, for whom the little theatre was in some sense an
apprenticeship, and who eventually were caught up in the activities of
the major stages and the screen studios. But there was this to be said,
that when artists of the Jouvet quality came on to the boulevards and
brought dramatists of the Giraudoux quality with them, they preserved
all the integrity of their own work and communicated it to their authors
as well. The little professional theatre has been the cradle of all
distinguished writing, direction, acting and stagecraft in the France we
have known; and beside it the pontifical triviality of a Sacha Guitry
seems very dull and unimportant. At that time in the little theatres I
remember best _Volpone_, a typical example of group dramatic authorship,
freely adapted by Stefan Zweig into German from Ben Jonson's original,
and then freely adapted back again into French. There was also the
perennial _Dr. Knock_ of Jules Romains, which Granville-Barker had
translated into English. Expressionism had gained a footing at the
Studio des Champs-lyses; and one of Lenormand's series of
psychological dramas, bearing so profoundly the character of our time,
was to be seen.

The next step of the journey took me into Provence at the peak of the
bull-fighting season; but I have a clearer memory of the river Sorgues
at Vaucluse, which issues full-grown from a hillside to flow past the
villa where Petrarch wrote his poems to Laura. Should one come to this
unique and limpid source at a later season, as I came with a
fellow-pilgrim in September of another year, the rocky basin under the
cliff is half emptied and the stream itself idles through banners of
heavy weeds; but in March the aged Provenal earth brims over freely.
So, too, the fantastic structure of the Pont du Gard, built to carry
water across water by its Roman arches, is at its loftiest when the full
torrent runs through the cleft below. And in spring also the uncrowded
coaches of the P.L.M. convey lovers from one of these sights to the
other and to the Roman arenas of Nmes and Arles, or to those ghostly
hilltop relics of Les Baux, cat-haunted, which give them pause to count
their nights and know they are not eternal.

From here to Nice (its Carnival just ended) was another step, and thence
to Genoa a third; for this port was to be the starting-point of my
Grecian journey proper. Having a mind to see as much as possible by the
way, I secured passage on a big Italian liner, the _Conte Grande_ I
believe, which was making her maiden crossing to New York but touching
at Naples where I could disembark. The city was hung with flags to
celebrate her sailing next day at noon. I spent the evening in a visit
to Edward Gordon Craig, who was then living on one of the hills of the
Genoese suburbs, in a villa with a garden approached by a narrow
stone-paved footway. The handbell at the gate made distant music in the
porch of the house, and gave warning to a couple of formidable dogs
which may have been kept to deal with creditors. When these defenders
had been called off by one of the youngsters of the family, there sure
enough was Craig himself coming benignly down the path to welcome a
visitor. We entered a room so full of books that they covered the walls
and overflowed on to middle shelves. Parchment, calf and morocco had,
however, no effect of mustiness as in our northern climate; or maybe
they had borrowed something of their owner's freshness of spirit, far
removed from the scholarly. This is no place to record more than a
glimpse of Craig, who has been mistrusted by his countrymen as only a
man can be who writes as well as he draws, and talks as well as either,
and prefers living in France or Italy; who has never concealed his
revolutionary aims in theatre design and practice, and has acquired a
European name like those of Appia or Stanislavsky; and in fact who
proposes to be well remembered when many of his English theatre
contemporaries are forgotten.

Over dinner we talked of _The Mask_, which he had managed to bring out
for years; and of other theatre projects of the past and future. He had
lately produced Ibsen's _The Pretenders_ at the State Theatre in
Copenhagen; but his last London production had been _The Vikings_ as far
back as 1903. Coming down with me to the gate at midnight, he had many
recommendations of theatre interest for Naples, Sicily and Greece; but
he had difficulty in recalling names. Apart from written or printed
drama, I think Craig must have forgotten more about theatre than the
rest of us ever knew.

Next day our brand-new liner, her paint scarcely dry, cast off from the
pier to an accompaniment of salvos from shore batteries and warships,
sirens from every vessel in port, speeches from notabilities, national
anthems from a band and huzzas from the Genoese multitude. Soon we were
out in the bay, receding from a city which loomed like a vast theatre
intent (as in fact it was) upon our performance. This was decidedly a
spectacle for the solitary and undistracted looker-on; as was also the
flow of Chianti, Barbera and Asti Spumante which celebrated the
sailing. The boat had anchored in the bay of Naples by the time we got
up in the morning; and the excitement was renewed as one went on deck to
take in the panorama at a glance, assuring oneself by a second look at
Vesuvius that it was really true. I was one of a handful of passengers
getting off, accompanied by a stowaway who had been found overnight; and
when our tender left for the shore it was given a lively ovation. There
was no customs officer on the quay to declare that my baggage had come
from Genoa and pass it through the dock gates; and every messenger who
went to look for him came back to ask for five lire. The liner weighed
anchor and made off to New York before he came.

The San Carlo in Naples is a paragon among theatres, as I was able to
see for myself that evening. The Museo Nazionale is a paragon among
museums, and its _piccoli bronzi_ and wall-paintings from Pompeii are
very circumspectly shown. An English guidebook to the city observes of
this special collection that "ladies should seek advice before entering
the rooms". My advice to them is to brazen it out. The Blue Grotto may
be a paragon among blue grottos, but we could not enter it because the
sea was rough and the boat-owner was not insured against broken heads.
No scene-painter has conceived any paragon of scene-painting so
discreetly gaudy as Capri. To wait ten days in Naples for a boat to
Athens was a week too long, so that I faced the worst in Italian travel
by making a night journey to Brindisi overland. The early morning hours
were spent in looking out upon a Calabrian landscape that seemed to be
fissured, sulphurous and in every way repellent.

In Brindisi I made haste to get aboard a Greek steamer, regardless of
the agent's hint that sheep might be among her passengers. So constantly
were sheep among them that there was no hour of the day, certainly not
the luncheon or dinner hour at the captain's table, when a lamb or ewe
might not come to rub against one's chair. Variety was added to numbers,
for when we put sheep ashore at Valona or Santi Quaranta we took others
aboard for Corfu or Patras. But this voyage was enlivened by the happy
chance that we anchored in Corfu harbour an hour before the beginning of
the yearly procession of Saint Spiridion, an Orthodox monk and patron of
the island, whose embalmed remains are carried under a canopy by bearded
priests, while music is made by civic and religious performers alike. To
these were added, as at Genoa, the ships' sirens; and such a cacophony
alone would make the feast memorable. But Corfu was dressed that day for
the parade of rich vestments and the drift of incense through narrow
streets. The saint has always been not only invoked but beloved by his
people, whom he has preserved from many threatened calamities and
avenged for others. As they withdrew into the church bearing his name,
the clergy surrounded their patron's relic as our peers and officers of
state surround a King after his coronation.

As spectators of this scene, we were unwillingly recalled to a boat that
meanwhile had gathered more sheep than ever to her hospitable decks. The
captain said that most of them would be turned loose on uninhabited
islands with fresh springs, and there left to graze unattended until
autumn. This use of pasturage explained the carrying of sheep to
Greece, where nothing but mutton has been bred and grown for centuries.
Amid the flocks a German professor lay in a deck-chair reading his
Peloponnesian War; and as we passed an island he pointed out to me the
scanty covering of grass broken by cliff or crag. In these lands of the
ancients, he said, our earth stands naked or next to naked in the wash
of the sea, as she has stood in all recorded time; so much the pitiless
sun and wind have worn her covering away. Then he went back to Greek
strategy, in which the physical nature of the country was all-important;
but I began to see the other Greece, builder of monuments and cities, in
perspective as possessor of a natural background. Nothing has arisen by
way of art that is not related directly to the arid scene. Temple and
theatre, arch and column and pediment belong to the hills of bare earth,
where grass and olive-grove and cypress are no more than lichen on a
roof or a wall. We came soon to the Corinth Canal, cut in a deep
straight groove through this earth to make the shortest way from Athens
to the West. I think we passed Mount Parnassus before the Acropolis came
into view in the middle distance, some miles inland and above the
harbour of the Piraeus.

Those entitled to be called travellers jog willingly on horseback along
the valleys and over the passes of Greece, visiting antiquities or
simply seeking adventure in unfamiliar places. I have done enough of
this travelling to declare myself a tourist instead. There are places
like the Hieron of Epidaurus with its great theatre, a matter of twenty
miles from the sea, to which a man can ride horseback (as I did) with
pleasure. Marathon may be another, and there are some who think that
Delphi, Thebes and Olympia require a nag and a courier; but I would
sooner take rail or steamer from Athens, and even then not overdo such
excursions. The Hellenic Club enjoys its jaunt by motor-coach down the
Sacred Way to Eleusis, and its tactful lecture on the Eleusinian rites
by a classically-minded clergyman perched on a broken column. But Athens
remains actually most satisfying because the antiquarian interest never
succeeds in overlaying the aesthetic. Monuments are seen continually
with fresh pleasure, even though the housewives of the city hang their
linen from pillar to pillar of a temple. The monuments of the Acropolis,
preserved from such treatment by a small admission charge, have no
character whatever of museum pieces. They have an equal grandeur at
whatever hour they are visited, whether noon or dusk or midnight. The
same is true of the Dionysian theatre at the foot of the Acropolis and
the Odeion or Greco-Roman theatre higher up the road; and these ruins
have far more importance in the history of the stage than is implied by
their architectural classification, often so meaningless, as "early" or
"late". Everything about them has an interest for our theatre of to-day,
from their remarkable acoustics to their foreshadowing of scenic
equipment and the focus of the spectator's vision upon a plastic picture
at a given distance. These two theatres viewed together, and especially
considered in relation to the truly perfect arena at Epidaurus, show how
the great orchestral space in its original entirety was invaded by the
seats of privileged members of the audience, and how this began the
backward thrust of the platform of dramatic action which has gradually
given us the proscenium theatre of to-day. There is no other art whose
monuments trace and forecast its growth so clearly. We have only to
think of the changes in the writing of drama, in stagecraft and in
acting which must accompany such drastic changes in the theatre's
physical shape, to see why Athens remains the first theatre city and the
source from which dramatic inspiration flows.

Nor is the background of modern Athens, so uncongenial to the
antiquarian mind, at all disturbing to the observer who finds a living
interest in the monuments. I enjoyed my Shaw translated into Greek at
one playhouse, and my Sophocles modernized at another; a Chaplin film
with Greek captions and a French cabaret with Greek accents; an Easter
procession of Athenian maidens carrying lighted candles through the
windy streets and getting well waxed-up on their way; the roulette men
turning their perpetual wheels at street-corners and trying to beguile
the passer-by by paying out huge winnings to confederates; the sudden
concourse of talkative coffee-drinkers in the main square and their
equally sudden dispersal; the kilted Greek highlanders making gallant
advances to ladies on the boulevard, and bouncing from one rebuff to
another until they met with a willing partner; the Athens races where
dubious thoroughbreds from the stables of warned-off English trainers
galloped round a circus-like track in a cloud of dust; a flight over the
islands in a Greek naval seaplane with a pilot to whom I had a letter of
introduction from London; and indeed everything about Greece except a
sneezing-germ which is said to be carried on the wind from Egypt every
spring. I liked the wine and even the mutton when once I had taken the
advice of the reverend lecturer on Eleusinian mysteries, and bought
myself in the market a rope of garlic with which to supplement (one
cannot say neutralize) the diet. This purchase eventually had the happy
result of securing me a cabin to myself on a well-filled boat sailing
for Marseilles. I cherished my supply of the savoury root during a
voyage which took us to Syracuse and Messina, past the brimstone-laden
Stromboli and through the straits between Sardinia and Corsica. In the
customs shed of the French port I laid out one or two Tanagra figures as
my only objects to declare; but the _douaniers_ ignored them and brought
to light my garlic, which they confiscated under the heading of imported
vegetable produce and doubtless ate themselves. Athenian spring had
turned to English summer before I was back in London, all scripts for
the present completed, and plans laid for a season or two of theatre
ahead. When, again, shall we ever see so far?




  13

  LAST LULL IN ENGLAND


Midway between the wars Europe had her forebodings born of inward
unrest, but England was to snatch a year or two more of quietude and
even optimism. Only after the Wall Street crash of 1929, whose dust
swept around the world like the volcanic cloud projected by the Pacific
waves from the crater of Krakatoa, did we peer obscurely into the future
and see the political storm gathering behind an economic depression--how
inevitably gathering, historians will say. The months or years before a
catastrophe are in themselves dramatic as one looks back upon them. In
my own mind I call this time of 1928-29 the last lull in England, for in
many ways it was like the time of 1913-14.

Of the summer after my Grecian journey I chiefly recall Alpine days,
varied by a visit to Salzburg where Reinhardt, who was contemplating
work in the movies for the first time in his career, had made a
screen-like theatre production of Schiller's _Die Ruber_. This was
partly a counterblast to the Berlin productions of Piscator, which had
established the new director and made the Herr Professor look
old-fashioned in the eyes of seekers after sheer dramatic novelty; but
it betrayed also a certain weariness of the simpler things in theatre,
such as the direct appeal of poetry. Reinhardt was unlucky in the moment
of his approach to the screen, for the great change-over to the talkie
was just being made and he would have directed silent pictures (just as
he directed wordless plays) best of all. 1928 was also the year of his
New York season, in which he presented several of his Salzburg plays and
brought Moissi, Hartmann and the Thimig family before the American
public. Outwardly Schloss Leopoldskron and the Festival were just as
before, and the trolley-cars brought their loads of young Bavarian
tourists from a peaceful Berchtesgaden a few miles away.

One of the September plays in London was _Such Men Are Dangerous_, which
began a run lasting some months. Matheson Lang had chosen well in
casting Robert Farquharson for the Czar in opposition to his own Pahlen;
this actor brought an Italianate delicacy to the playing of what might
have been the most bogus of character parts, too often definable as
parts without character. Another leading player arose from this
production in Donald Wolfit, who played the sentry Stepan. The play
itself was no masterpiece, but it had a strength that was brought out to
the full by the simplicity of Aubrey Hammond's background, and Lang made
the crafty conspirator a man of wit and even a lover as well. Reginald
Denham, who directed, has since become a screen director and playwright.
_The Fountain-Head_, which I had finished rather suitably at Carlsbad,
came on a little later for a limited season; its only subsequent
appearance outside repertory was at the Maddermarket in Norwich.

I had myself taken advantage of the carefree years and a flow of
royalties to buy the freehold of a stone-built hall near my home in
Kensington and still nearer to Notting Hill Gate, which had been
formerly the toll-bar entry to London by the road from Oxford. The
building to which this hall belonged was a nonconformist church of the
1850's facing a short drive with double gateways, through which the
carriage-folk of the period had proceeded in state to their austere
devotions. Both structures were of Cornish granite in the plainest
modern-Gothic style. The hall was long since disused for religious
purposes, and had been in fact everything from a military billet to a
polling-station. It could have seated perhaps 400 people in its main
space, floored in oak and heavily raftered; but my first proceeding was
to wall it off into two sections. I had an immediate use for one of
these as the school of the Marie Rambert dancers, afterwards to become
the Ballet Rambert. The other remained for a while the studio of a
sculptor in wood who used entire tree-trunks as the medium of his
carvings. This latter section, opening upon the quiet and almost rural
Ladbroke-road, was to become the theatre of the Ballet Club and
afterwards the Mercury. The acquisition gave me the first idea of making
theatre productions myself, and this is perhaps a reason for mentioning
it here. To tie oneself to a property on such a scale was an action that
needed to be boldly followed up and justified in the event. It may have
been so justified, but at the cost of years of thought and labour and
many kinds of embarrassment--in fact of most troubles except the
surrender of personal independence and control. But had I the choice to
make, I would do it all again.

The outstanding play of 1928-29 in our regular theatre was _Journey's
End_, one of a growing list of commercial successes presented in the
first place by the Stage Society as works of art. R. C. Sherriff's play
imposed its own positive style on the director and all the cast, so that
its transfer to the West End followed with ease. As a soldier's document
of war, convincing in every line, it went very shortly all over Europe
and the world. I saw it in French and German, as well done as in
English, and at one time there were nearly twenty companies playing it
somewhere every night. Maurice Browne, the director who controlled the
big organization needed to deal with the rights, was himself a little
theatre man of long American experience who now became a commercial
producer more from necessity than choice. Others also among the
producing managers of this period were enterprising enough, and had more
ideas in their heads than the playwrights they were trying to discover.
We had to wait a year for another outstanding work by a newer dramatist
in Sean O'Casey's _The Silver Tassie_.

Rehearsals of _Jew Sss_ began in London in July 1929 and were continued
in Blackpool where the play was to be first produced. This town is a
resort made theatrical by its choice as a brief summer paradise of the
Lancashire workers, who have required from it the Tower and the
ballroom, the dancing crowds swaying in hypnosis and the diapasons of
the giant organ, the oyster parlours and the exhibitions of freaks, the
suicidal switchbacks and all the joys of a waterfront in perpetual
carnival. Riding horseback on the sands with Peggy Ashcroft, who was
taking her first important part in Naemi, I was entitled to wonder if so
much theatre in life made the town best for our purpose of drama; but we
were crowded as soon as we opened. Without following the play's tour of
the Northern cities, I went off to Malvern where Sir Barry Jackson
promised Shaw's _The Apple Cart_ for the opening of a dramatic festival.
This was to be an English summer in earnest.

Like Reinhardt at Leopoldskron, Barry Jackson had his own country home
near by; and he brought to Malvern the nucleus of a company and an
administrative staff from his repertory theatre in Birmingham. As the
original producer of _Back to Methuselah_ he had a special association
with the work of Shaw, who repaid him with amiable perfidy by giving the
actual first production of _The Apple Cart_ to a theatre in Warsaw. But
the first English performance was important enough to bring to Malvern a
trainload of dramatic critics and to cram its decorous hotels with
visitors, among whom elderly spinsters propping their Shaw against the
coffee-pot at the breakfast-table were conspicuous. The youth of
Salzburg was decidedly lacking; but then Malvern, comfortably spread on
the slopes of rounded hills above the garden of Worcestershire, has none
but an educational connection with the young. Nor was it ever visited,
until Festival days, for any object of interest but the admirable
stained glass of the Priory. Below this church the pump room and
assembly hall, with the bandstand and gardens laid out for miniature
golf and croquet, completed, with a typical provincial theatre and a
movie house, the entertainment value of the resort. Above, the twin
beacon hills clad in bracken and scarred by quarries were accessible to
an agile walker (say Shaw nearing eighty) in less than an hour.

The dramatist, in this and succeeding years, became something like the
patron saint of Malvern; and striding around in his Norfolk jacket and
knickerbockers of the Ibsen period, he might have been an emblem of the
ascendancy of drama over direction on the Festival stage. _The Apple
Cart_ itself was characteristic, intellectually, of the time midway
between the wars. Avoiding obvious complacency, it was yet not in the
least disturbing, but consisted only of a stream of lively talk about a
world as it never had been and never would be. The last lull in England
might have lasted for ever under the persuasive intonation of Cedric
Hardwicke's King Magnus. Later Reinhardt gave the play in Berlin under
the title _Der Kaiser von Amerika_, cutting it by a third of its length
to great advantage and to its author's indignation. The London
production was an immense autumn success, thanks to all the discussion
of the play since summer; and so it was that Malvern, unlike Salzburg,
became a stage for the first performance of drama. Barry Jackson had met
a need of the vacation time which was not entirely satisfied by the
Stratford Festival, then under the direction of Bridges Adams and later
of Iden Payne. Stratford had always been a lovely place to visit in
April for the Birthday and the first few nights of the repertory, and it
remained an inviting goal by road from London for its afternoon
performances; but Malvern, if you accepted the limitations of an English
festival, could be more entertaining. Though Shakespeare and the
Birthplace live on, I shall remember the landlord of my Malvern inn
scratching his head over Shaw, raising a tankard to the old gentleman's
health, and declaring he will go to his play another night "to see if
it's all leg-pullin' or no".

And so to Birmingham by Henley-in-Arden for the last provincial
performances of _Jew Sss_, and to London with the play; where after
concluding our dress rehearsal, we came from the stage door past a long
all-night queue waiting to get pit seats for the opening twenty-four
hours later. This was no absolute guarantee of success; but when people
lined up at the breakfast hour after the first night to get seats for
the second, we knew that we had scored a hit. A few days later, visiting
Lang's dressing-room, I found him perturbed by the reaction of the
audience. If he did not know, he said, that no seat was to be had for
love or money weeks ahead, he would suppose the play to be the biggest
flop in his experience. Curtain-calls--why, there were no curtain-calls
worth mentioning for such a success; the people just got up and went
home. Lang was in a theatrical difficulty because his very real acting
gifts would not serve him in the part of Sss without a searching
self-surrender. Character-playing was of no use; this Jew had to be
lived and his mind and heart made known. Lang, I think, felt all this;
and had he been able, after the scene of his revenge upon the Duke, to
stand alone with the spectator and listener and speak to them directly
of the drama as it concerned his own nature--had the play in fact
followed its original plan--I think he would have made a completer study
of his hero.

Such theatrical difficulties arise most commonly in mid-rehearsal, when
an author can often help to resolve them. In so far as they are
difficulties of timing and movement, he can quickly place himself in the
position of the player, face the imaginary audience, and add the line or
make the cut that may be required. Rather more difficult are
transpositions of text to follow sequences of thought or feeling that a
player, though not always able to express himself in exact terms, knows
to be needful to the sincerity of his performance. Emotionally he does
not want to "cheat a bit", as the director will often tell him to do in
stage movement; his own inner integrity requires him to find every line
convincing. The author, here, can nearly always help him by slight
reconstructions of text conformable to acting logic, which is not always
the logic of writing. The greater theatrical difficulties are those
arising deep in a player's mind from an incompatibility between his
intention and his dramatist's imagination; and with these one does one's
best if the play is to go on at all. I suppose the texts of Elizabethan
drama as they come down to us, with all the stage-managers' corrections
that scholars call variorum readings, reflect these difficulties, their
partial solution at the time of rehearsal or performance, and their
abandonment in the main to posterity.

An outstanding performance in _Jew Sss_ was that of Peggy Ashcroft, who
reflected the simple integrity of the part she played; and a wise and
subtle portrait was the Weissensee of Felix Aylmer. The play had been
running a few weeks at capacity when the Wall Street market broke, and
with it the bond of finance and entertainment the world over. This was
perhaps regarded as an incident by English observers; but actually
theatre receipts were never again to reflect the daily trend of stock
prices. Plays like ours continued their London run almost undisturbed,
but American rights were immediately affected. At the end of this year
1929, aware that something serious had happened to the economy of the
world, I reckoned myself lucky to be the richer by the writing of plays,
and bought a couple of houses next to my hall with the notion that they
might one day prove useful. By the spring of 1930 the idea of contriving
a theatre within my existing walls had definitely taken shape; and from
now onward months were spent in planning and measuring, designing a
stage and proscenium and fore-stage, lighting and furnishing and
decorating and all the rest of the business. There is time enough in a
writer's life for such things, if he chooses to busy himself with them;
and in fact the putting of words on paper, which is more a pleasure than
a toil, blends well enough with the relaxation of handling practical
affairs. Many times I have thought I would rather be a farmer, a
carpenter or a fisherman than a theatre-owner; but I have never wished
to lay down a pen for long, or to abandon the writer's way of talking to
fellow-creatures willing to listen. Least of all would I have wished to
give up writing plays because I had made a stage on which to perform
them.

My theatre, however, was first of all intended for performances of that
semi-public kind which our law benevolently allowed. One had only to
form a members' club like the Gate or the Arts in order to play freely,
on weekdays or Sundays, without reference to any public authority. A
company was available in the dancers of the Ballet Rambert, whose
repertory already included modern classics like _Sylphides_ and
_Carnaval_ and new compositions by Frederick Ashton which everybody
wished to see because he was the hope of English choreography. We had
our own rooms for the making of costumes from designs, and our own
workshop where every stick of scenery could be made and painted. At
first there were only 500 subscribers, but this number was soon doubled
or trebled, so that the yearly subscriptions alone could be relied on to
pay for three new productions. After one or two experimental seasons in
the early part of 1931 the Ballet Club settled down to Sunday
performances; and for nearly ten years these were a distinctive part of
the theatre life of London. I shall say very little more of Ballet,
which (perhaps because it is wordless) is more written about than any
other form of theatre art. But this enterprise was of course entirely
dependent on the artistic direction and integrity of Marie Rambert, who
undertook complete responsibility back-stage as I undertook it in front.
There were no guarantors and no committee; we lived within our own joint
incomes and had nothing to limit our personal authority and
independence. I was even able to indulge a collector's taste for prints
and paintings. But especially I learned from these first steps in
management how to run a regular theatre of my own, which should be
equally independent in direction.

About this time I went back to theatrical criticism in _Theatre Arts_,
as distinct from the dramatic reviewing that could be found in most of
our papers. The dramatists of the time were few, the theatrical
possibilities were many. It was a time when the stage, with adequate
confidence in itself and support from capital, could have made a bold
gesture of independence and rallied its own public without reference to
the screen. But none except Diaghilev had made such a gesture; and his
direction of the Ballets Russes, more fashionable than ever socially,
had become fashionable in the pursuit of painters and musicians in
vogue. He died during the summer of 1929 on the Lido, and the Ballets
Russes came to an end for the time being.

Early in 1930, being in Liverpool to give the Shute theatre lectures in
the University, I crossed over to visit Ireland for the first time.
(Many Englishmen who know all Europe have never got so far.) I find a
record that our boat "missed the mouth of the Liffey and anchored for
some hours in a fog off the Irish shore, exchanging groans with unseen
steamers in a like predicament, until towards noon a gleam of late
winter sun showed the way between a pair of lighthouses into the river
channel". Naturally I thought this must happen every morning to the
Liverpool packet, but Dubliners disabused me. There were lots of them
along the quay, busied in supporting walls; and there were side-cars
(called by the English jaunting-cars) with fast-trotting horses, and an
excellent variety of saloons and barber shops. In a street near the main
bridge was the Abbey Theatre, facing which I was able to stand alone,
like many visitors before me and after, to venerate the shabby little
building in which _The Playboy of the Western World_ had first been
performed. I guessed that in this hospitable city I might scarcely be
alone again, but should approach the Abbey with some Irish friend
telling me that Synge never made good in Dublin; and then I should be
reduced to saying to myself that I would give all the plays ever
produced at the Abbey for a single act of _The Playboy_, the third for
choice. So it all proved to be; and let me never argue with Irishmen
about their one dramatist of genius, but only say how good it is to
enter a theatre where a painting of a poet, the portrait of Yeats, hangs
above the box-office.

By the kindness of Lennox Robinson I lived during this visit at Dalkey,
a few miles south of Dublin on a misty bay under misty hills. The
journey was made by a primitive railroad; and actually all the
conditions of Dublin life reminded one that this was a city with the
airs of a European capital, but the graces of a provincial town of the
nineteenth century. I have returned to Dublin since then, and would
willingly return oftener; but although the horse-drawn side-cars have
vanished, the provincial grace remains in my mind as the virtue of the
city. My theatre experiences were a good production of O'Casey's _The
Shadow of a Gunman_ at the Abbey, and Goethe's _Faust_ at the Gate,
which since 1930 or thereabouts has been a serious rival of the other
playhouse. The claim of the Abbey to be the only existing National
Theatre in the English-speaking world has been substantiated, since
about the same time, by the small but useful subsidy paid to it by the
Eire Government.

1931 began with the opening of the new Sadler's Wells Theatre in
Islington, the associate and counterpart of the Old Vic on the other
side of the Thames. The work of John Gielgud, and his Hamlet especially,
had raised the prestige of the people's theatre, as the Old Vic could
claim to be; and in the years of optimism Sadler's Wells was planned and
the building begun on the site of an older playhouse, remembered alike
for Grimaldi the clown and Samuel Phelps the Shakespearean actor. The
name was derived from a spring first owned by the monks of Clerkenwell
(the clergy's well) and then paved over and rediscovered as a spa in the
seventeenth century, when a Mr. Sadler built around it all manner of
booths for fairs and circuses, outlasting his day until they were
replaced by a music-garden and opera house and then a theatre proper.
Prosperous London suburbs grew up in the fields near by; and my
grandfather kept a school for the sons of gentlemen only (no tradesmen's
sons admitted) in a large house with a fishpond just beyond "the Wells",
as the place was always called. The idea of the new venture was that
opera and Shakespeare should alternate at the two theatres; but very
soon the Wells became the home of opera and ballet, while the Old Vic
continued with drama, now ranging from the Elizabethans to Chekhov.
Lilian Baylis remained in control of both houses; and at the back of the
pit in Sadler's Wells she would have a trap in the floor lifted to show
a visitor the spring of clear water still flowing.

In the same year the Malvern Festival, which had followed up _The Apple
Cart_ with a first production of _The Barretts of Wimpole Street_, gave
a sequence of drama from Shakespeare's predecessors to James Bridie, our
contemporary Scots dramatist. Notable also was the first London visit of
the Compagnie des Quinze under Michel Saint-Denis, who gave us Andr
Obey's _No_ and _Le Viol de Lucrce_. This company proved how simple
the equipment of the theatrical theatre (as distinct from the lifelike
theatre) could be. A tent-like variant of the ordinary backcloth and a
few constructional pieces and properties could give an illusion of
scenic grandeur to the poet's play. In fact the scene and costumes had
mostly been made by the company themselves, and everything could be
loaded on a single small van. The plays could be given with equal effect
either in a barn or a large London theatre. The work of Copeau at the
Vieux-Colombier and in his country farmhouse was bearing fruit, and new
ways of expression were opening to the dramatist as well as the actor
and director. All the plays of the Compagnie were works of
collaboration.

During the summer I was asked to make the English version of a German
play which itself owed much to Lytton Strachey's _Elizabeth and Essex_.
The author was Ferdinand Bruckner, who had hitherto been known as Tagger
in the Berlin theatre; but if there was a mystery about his name there
was none at all about the German success of the play. On a divided stage
Elizabeth and Philip of Spain were the protagonists of their countries,
each praying for victory; this was the real drama of _Elizabeth of
England_ and the rest was the amorous history of Essex and the Queen.
Charles Ricketts designed splendid costumes and a simple unit set for
the limited stage space of the Cambridge Theatre. The Elizabeth of
Phyllis Neilson-Terry was a triumph of voice and authority over
physique. Heinz Hilpert, Reinhardt's successor at the Deutsches Theater,
came from Berlin to direct; he spoke no English to help him with the
players or the text, but succeeded in repeating his original groupings
and effects, although at rehearsal I never saw him seated further back
than the fifth row of the theatre. This was the only play to enjoy a run
of several months at the Cambridge: at the Haymarket it could certainly
have lasted a year. More modestly, the Westminster Theatre under Anmer
Hall began this same autumn an enterprise that was to continue for many
years and give us a long series of good plays, the first of which was
Bridie's _The Anatomist_. All this year I made improvements to the
little theatre of the Ballet Club, so that it should be ready for a
public opening in due course. And lest at forty-six I should feel
inhibited from doing something everybody else could do, I bought a car
for the first time and learned to drive it. Then came an invitation,
which I accepted at once, to spend the summer of 1932 in San Francisco
and talk about theatre as visiting professor in the University of
California at Berkeley.




  14

  CALIFORNIAN SUMMER


To see ahead a prospect of travel that must carry him ten thousand
miles, and change his way of life for half a year, and take him more
than half out of his profession, is enough to unsettle any man. A writer
especially is subject to what the Germans call _Reisefieber_, meaning
not so much the unrest of travel itself as the restless thought of it
before and after. Actually there is no sort of man who needs unsettling
more; and a writer who knows himself should be aware of it. All this was
in my mind at the outset of 1932, when with a play still running from
the previous autumn I could survey the progress of my own theatre
construction each morning and the plays of fellow-dramatists most
evenings of the week, and wonder to what sort of dramatic scene I should
eventually return. The panorama unfolded by the outside world was
sinister enough. We had suffered a chain of economic collapses on our
minor European scale: in the immediate present was some greater American
disturbance, vaguely understood on our side: the future darkened as it
grew increasingly political.

The plays to be seen in London might well have been portents too. This
was the time of Noel Coward's _Cavalcade_, which, in presenting a swift
dramatic procession of the years in our own century, reflected also the
mood of an England now compelled to read in the huge question-mark of
the present a challenge to the validity of all her deeds and hopes. The
play was so successful that for years afterwards the stockholders of
Drury Lane, the theatre where it was given, used to attend their annual
meeting and heckle an apologetic chairman with cries of "Why can't we
have another _Cavalcade_?" This is the simple question that the
commercial stage is always asking itself, and it is simply answered as a
rule by sequences of comedies or musicals, revues or thrillers, all as
like as peas. But there was only one time for _Cavalcade_, and that was
the season of 1931-32. It was the season also of _Grand Hotel_, an
outsize in kaleidoscopic talkies with which for the moment the stage
answered the challenge of the screen; and of the return of the Compagnie
de Quinze with _La Mauvaise Conduite_, their comedy in masks after
Plautus; of Clifford Bax's _The Rose without a Thorn_, which made the
fortune of a new dramatic venture; of Bridie's _Tobias and the Angel_;
and especially of Reinhardt's production of _Helen_ and his revival of
_The Miracle_. There were many hopes that the artists leaving the stage
of Middle Europe would bring their talent to our own. In this year, too,
the Memorial Theatre in Stratford was opened; and never was April on the
Avon so bright. The Festival Theatre in Cambridge gained little
publicity but much credit by a series of original productions, and
formed a rallying-stage for the theatre theatrical.

I sailed away from it all by a ten-day boat to New York, there to spend
less than a week before sailing again, this time bound for San Francisco
by the Canal. The stock market, in early May of 1932, was at its lowest
ever; people even said that the whole structure of banking and insurance
might fall in ruins. Days of sunshine working towards a heat wave
accompanied these forebodings; and forgetting the latitude of New York,
I was perplexed by the brevity of my shadow on the sidewalk of
Fifty-seventh Street. _Mourning Becomes Electra_ had finished its first
and notable run, but I was taken once to the theatre to enjoy _Of Thee I
Sing_, which as much as _Cavalcade_ belonged to that year. I found work
to occupy me on the coming voyage of nearly a month; for Joseph Verner
Reed, who had made several productions in previous seasons with Kenneth
Macgowan as director, was now planning to present _Bifur_ by Simon
Gantillon after its outstanding Paris success. He asked me to make the
version for him, and I agreed because this strange and sensitive work
was the nearest to a poet's play that had come from the professional
little theatres of the new France. _Bifur_ meant "road fork", perhaps
the worst possible English title for a play. I wanted to call it
_Tangent_, to express the abrupt spatial divergence of a spirit seeking
reincarnation which was the actual theme. The American production
eventually was destined to fall through; but I presented the play in
London a year later without a title and with a nameless cast, in the
Mercury whose name also had not yet been found. Meantime it was good to
have an occupation for my deck chair other than that of reading, which
to me is an intensive task for no more than one or two hours of each
day. Writing, on the other hand, is a form of composition involving
walks up and down a room or a street or the deck of a ship, a good deal
of talking to oneself by way of shaping words into sentences, and now
and again a swift resort to writing-pad or typewriter in order to get
the words on paper in the least space of time. Writing with a subject
ready to hand, which is what it means to adapt a work one likes from
another language, is perhaps the ideal occupation and pastime for a
theatre man going to sea.

The _Santa Ana_, I think, was the name of our little liner which left a
remote Brooklyn pier among the fruit warehouses and turned southward.
Her cargo included quantities of coiled barbed-wire, enough to furnish a
new trench war on the Western Front, but in fact consigned to American
detachments in Nicaragua. Her passengers had to stand aside and make
room as they passed on the lower of her two decks; and clearly there was
little they would not know about each other by the end of a month. The
boat took about a week of ever-warmer nights with changing stars to
bring us from the Atlantic seaboard past the great and small islands of
the Indies and across the Caribbean to her first port of call, which was
Cristobal on the Isthmus of Panama. We were then in the years of
Prohibition, and this garish and ramshackle town just outside the Canal
Zone made the most of its liberties, flaunting in particular a saloon
where the Glory-Hallelujah Cocktail was said (no doubt libellously) to
have been named with approval by Aimee Semple Macpherson, the
evangelist. The Canal passage lifted us by immense locks to the
high-lying lake which is their reservoir; and here it was odd to pass
liners, freighters and warships navigating a sheet of water whose trim
islets made it look like an ornamental pond in tropical public gardens.
The sun in the heavens fantastically reminded us that we were moving
eastward through the canal, in fact back towards New York, and not
westward as we should have supposed. Alongside our boat in the Cut
puffed an absurd train that had picked up laggards from Cristobal,
mostly those recovering from the night before. Everybody scanned the
banks for alligators. Towards nightfall, as the locks dropped us a step
at a time, it was exciting to see the Pacific below, and the lights of
Panama City.

In this port we took aboard a circus, which added much to the theatrical
pleasure of the voyage. A roundabout and swings with booths and a cage
of lions were "discovered", as dramatists used to say, at dawn next
morning on the after deck, embarrassingly near the canvas swimming-pool
of the little liner; and with them the personnel of the circus who were
steerage passengers, all of them in fact except the proprietor and his
lady trapeze artists who were first class. The blandishments of the
captain's table were unavailing to persuade the trapeze beauties to do
their act from mast to mast as we steamed through the Pacific waters;
nor would the lion-tamer consent to enter the cage of his charges, to
whom ocean travel was distasteful. We parted from the circus at Corinto,
where the Spanish-Indian lightermen alongside, after unloading barbed
wire from our crane for hours together, were more than surprised by the
appearance of lions descending on them from mid-air. Almost as pleasing
was the view of the roundabout wafted from the deck with its boats and
swans and ponies turning in the breeze, and finally planted on a barge
and rowed ashore.

In Nicaragua and San Salvador there was no chance of going inland; but
from a harbour in Guatemala it was possible to ride by train up-country
through coffee plantations and glance at the pyramidal monuments of
Central America. Again at Mazatlan, ravaged by earthquake, there was
just time to see a dignified church filled with kneeling women in
Mexican headgear, a market overflowing with swollen many-coloured
vegetables, and a hotel with a tame python, before obeying the purser's
orders to re-embark. If this be the life led by pleasure-cruising
passengers, I will have none of it. One scrambles aboard at dusk to sail
at dawn, after a night of creaking machinery and the scurry of footsteps
overhead; and the lost hours are never retrieved, but accumulate in an
accusing void of time.

And so to San Francisco, to pass on a June evening through as yet
unspanned Golden Gates into the ultimate harbour of a sailor's quest.
Some one beside me on deck had spoken of 1849, and I thought of the
handbills broadcast in the streets of Paris to entice all who could pay
their passage to the new Eldorado of the Californian goldfield, their
treacherous voyage round Cape Horn, their welcome by earthquake and
tidal wave in this same Californian port, and their ships that dragged
anchor and were cast ashore as wrecks because the crews themselves,
infected by gold fever, had abandoned them and gone up-country to burrow
in the earth. Here was the city itself towering on steep sandhills above
the quays, and across the bay Oakland, and between them a procession of
ferry-boats. On these I was to travel daily, living with friends and
kinsfolk in the quarter above Chinatown in San Francisco, descending by
cable car daily to the pier, and on the other shore mounting by
trolley-car from the industrial waterfront to the serene if arid campus
of the University at Berkeley. Life for close on two months proved as
agreeable as all these anticipations could forecast. With the help of
increasing acquaintances and an Italian bootlegger I was soon
acclimatized to San Francisco, though I cannot understand to this day
why a city with so mild and equable an air lives so little in the open.
At Berkeley I talked to my dramatic classes with all the freedom that an
invincible shyness would allow, sometimes resorting to chalk and
blackboard rather than face directly the level glance of so many earnest
students, including among them two nuns who sat habitually in front.
When they were absent one morning I was torn between relief and the fear
that I had shocked them; but I was told, perhaps on imperfect authority,
that it was the nuns' day at the swimming-pool. Next day, sure enough,
they were back again. I lunched daily with the teaching staff of varied
faculties, and through some of them renewed old contacts with the
laboratory. Nearly every professor or lecturer I met quoted a Frenchman
as saying that America was the only country known to history that had
passed directly from barbarism to decadence without an intervening
period of civilization; but as I knew he didn't mean it and was only
adopting a self-torturing intellectual pose, I indulged a hearty
non-committal laugh every time as if I had never heard the wisecrack
before.

Actually there was good reason to value these two months in an American
university for the light they threw on the universal scene. As a
scientist by training, and only through avid and various study any sort
of scholar, I could enjoy walking on the sunny campus with the thought
of all in life and learning that it had to offer. Here a library filled
with the treasures of Europe, there a splendidly equipped technical
college, and again an institute or a clubhouse or a research laboratory,
would repay a visit of hours in company with some specialist in his
profession. The wealth of endowment they represented was in itself
hugely impressive; for if industry gives so much to thought, there must
surely be a return in planning and service. But I wanted to know also
who were the students and what was their background; how they came
about, rather than how much they knew; why it was that university women,
who with us in Europe increase in such numbers the legion of the
frustrated, seem to find their American place in a profession or in
marriage with such confidence and ease; what these college boys and
girls mean collectively to the rest of the world in which they live; and
whether in fact this Western civilization has made progress toward
solving the problem of the separation between culture and chaotic life.
In this year 1932 we were all thinking ahead, if we had any ideas at all
about the planet on which we lived. The shadows of ignorance in high
places were falling across the scene, soon to grow into darkness like
that of racial nationalism. Would the college boys and girls be educated
and resolved enough to combat this ignorance, or would they be drawn
into the inert mass of their fellows and accept the patriot philosophy
readiest to hand? No, these are not speculations after the event. I
remember well the discussion of them with what we should call dons in
an English university--grave lean fellows stretched in armchairs looking
out on the Californian groves and lawns, and listening, in the silences
of the conversation, to the tinkling of the campus stream. Friendships
made here and renewed in Europe are things that count.

To look more closely at the scene, drama as understood by an American
faculty means theatre and has the status of, say, architecture--including
as it does not only the text of the written play but every kind of
stagecraft. This breadth of understanding is good in itself, but it does
not make for much sympathy between the informed public and the
professional stage: they live in two different worlds, and vast physical
distances increase the rarity of contact between them. I generally found
that university people knew all about the movies, in which they took a
cynical but lively interest, and next to nothing about current theatre.
This was true of whole cities as well.

In San Francisco at that time the only sign of English-speaking theatre
was an occasional visit of a road company, and one of these gave me the
chance of seeing Katherine Cornell in _The Barretts of Wimpole Street_.
It was remarkable that the leading Chinese theatre, a modern building on
a main street, equipped even with the laundry which tradition requires,
should be so little visited by Californians or indeed by any white
visitors. In several evenings spent there, I think I never saw any other
American or European in the audience; but the Chinese are courteous folk
and no one ever looked at me twice on that account. I cannot say they
looked much at the stage either, for they were busied, also
traditionally, in holding family tea-parties and reading newspapers and
recalling their children from games of hide-and-seek in the theatre
gangways. The dramas performed were period classics accompanied by an
orchestra seated on the stage. One dressing-room at least was fully
visible through a doorway, and here sat the leading actor looking into
his mirror at the audience in front and finishing his make-up as he
awaited his entry. On receiving his cue he rose, threw off a
dressing-gown, stalked on to the stage, and began to act forthwith. The
properties were conventional in the Chinese taste, a couple of chairs
serving for the banks of a river and so forth; but a Western elaboration
of scenic background was noticeable here and there. When one of the
painted flats toppled it was supported by members of the company, still
acting their parts, until property men came on to put it up again. The
appearance of a beauty chorus in diaphanous skirts made the young
Chinese males of the audience lay aside their evening papers and
baseball forecasts to pay attention. At midnight this entertainment,
which had begun about seven o'clock, was always briskly proceeding. I
was never able to follow the plot of the play, and the acting was rarely
distinguished; but the pattern of the stage in relation to the audience
had an enduring charm. I gathered from San Francisco citizens that the
plays of the Chinese theatre were regarded as the proceedings of so many
children; which in fact they may have been. Only very tiresome folk will
praise Orientalism for its own Oriental sake, or the Chinese stage for
its _chinoiserie_.

After one or two excursions down the peninsula, where friends owning
vineyards produced the table vintages of California, my stay ended with
a visit to the national park of the Yosemite Valley. Our party drove
into it on a moonless night, when only the irregular black-out of stars
marked the edge of the cliffs above. Walking before breakfast next
morning I met a bear, and afterwards moved circumspectly around the
valley slopes. The mountaintops should have been inviting to a European
but somehow were not; they looked to me like stony skulls to which trees
and vegetation adhered with the tenacity of ancient hair. But I saw the
giant Sequoia pines, the oldest living things because some of them are
rooted in the centuries before Caesar; and a melancholy Indian
Reservation; and the firefall made by thrusting embers at sundown over a
cliff where Indians formerly had kindled their beacon. And with the
journey through ruined gold-diggers' villages and the Bret Harte country
on the way back to the coast, here was another Californian landscape
revealed.

If an Englishman ever needed excuse for a tourist and disinterested
visit to Hollywood, he could find it that year in the Olympic Games. The
streets were beflagged for them, and even the Hollywood Roosevelt where
I stayed seemed to be interested in something beside the stars. I was
able to see one British victory at the Games, I think in the
quarter-mile, and to jump on my seat and cheer. The studios of Hollywood
and their writers and directors, the stages and their players were
almost photographically as one had imagined them to be. I cannot
remember one surprise in this place, from the Bowl and the
super-suburban Beverly Hills to the rich manifold beauty of the women
lured by hope from all countries of the world, and the austere
expressionless uniformity of their eyes. A sisterhood of the enclosed
ambitious, their nun-like glance told every passer-by that they lived
for art alone.

So again by way of a burning Arizona and sweltering Chicago to New York,
and thence to Darien in Connecticut, where by day the eye could range
over a landscape like that of Kent or Dorset, but the August night, so
still in our English counties, was enriched by the symphony of the New
England insect world. They sing so much in these parts, a naturalist
tried to tell me, because they are more bent on reproduction than
insects elsewhere; but he admitted never having personally known an
English cricket. It is just that the nights are warmer. On one of them I
was taken to visit Lawrence Langner's playhouse at Westport, one of the
first professional out-of-town theatres for the summer season; and from
this visit came the project of a tour of _The Man with a Load of
Mischief_ with Jane Cowl, realized during the following autumn. I sailed
for Europe on the same ten-day boat that had brought me four months
earlier to America.

From the time of this Californian summer and the homeward voyage there
began for me a life of other journeys than those of theatre, closely
bound though they often were; of meetings and partings in which liner,
airfield, station, and again harbour, quay and plane or car alongside
were to draw suddenly year by year to some place or scene a focus of
utterly personal interest, joyous or bitter, that is not to be shared by
more than two people though it is understood by all who have been locked
in a close relation of mind and body, and know such a bond to be as
incommunicable in inward nature as it must be secret in outward
necessity.

London was no sooner reached by way of Brittany than the opportunity
offered to go southward again before the autumn. The author of _Bifur_,
living on a houseboat in Provence, wanted to talk to me about the
version of his play. Provence in late September, even October, is warmer
than Northern Europe in midsummer. Early autumn was warm in Paris also,
where theatres were opening and I was able to see a new play or two.
Then, caring very little and with good reason to what place I should go
next, I boarded the Nord-Express on a grey evening and awoke in the
chill of Berlin at the coffee-hour next day. The Adlon was housing its
tenants of former times, the French Embassy, whose own premises were
being redecorated; and in the room next to mine an indiscreet attach
was telephoning the Quai d'Orsay about _les Boches_ as though walls and
exchanges had no ears. The atmosphere of the city was at once depressed
and hectic: characteristic of the political fever were the crimson
headlines of the papers and the groups forming and muttering at street
corners. No violence was visibly being done, but I had a more sinister
impression than in Leipzig during the inflation of earlier years, when
the chatter of machine-guns could be heard almost hourly from some
quarter. In the theatre Gerhart Hauptmann's seventieth birthday (I had
been present for the sixtieth in Breslau) was well and truly celebrated
by the production of one of his Silesian peasant tragedies with that
distinguished artist Paula Wessely. Otherwise nothing of note was to be
seen. One or two rash satirists were trying to exploit the political
situation for stage purposes; other dull forerunners of the Nazi
playwrights were turning to a style which Polonius might have called
the "historico-patriotic". I had journeyed far enough this year without
exploring such barren fields as well. It was time to go home, and the
plane brought me to Croydon in three hours, to slide out of sunlight
through high banks of fog into our familiar autumn ground-mist fed by
the smoke of cheerful suburban chimneys.




  15

  THEATRE OF ONE'S OWN


I shall hold to the title of this chapter, though it has more to do with
the European stage than with my activities as producer from 1933 onward.
In perspective, the European and not the personal scene is the one that
counts. It took me two years of theatre production, always made to
please myself and not "the public", before I found a real success; and
this I shall come to later under the heading of poetic drama. Meantime I
presented a number of plays for limited runs between October and June in
each theatre season, while Sunday performances of ballet on the same
stage continued without intermission as they were to continue in all for
nine years. The vacation months were spent somewhere in Europe, mostly
in living but also in writing and studying and visiting festivals or
other occasional performances of drama. And since no man could ignore
the trend of the world in those years, the record of them is neither
theatrical nor personal to the exclusion of a general view. This is
actually what I mean by perspective. The European picture of that time
was no longer one of isolated artistic effort, but of a culture
contending with external forces and seeking, not always successfully to
the spectator's eye, to justify its own survival. This had been the grey
picture of Berlin as I came to it after my Californian and Provenal
summer of 1932. If such were theatre, one asked oneself why it should
survive at all; and no doubt every capital of the world gave in some
degree the same effect of conflict and frustration. For myself, I was
glad to have other things than writing to occupy me during weeks and
months together; for this was not a time when a dramatist could sit down
each morning calmly and confidently at his desk to create his own
picture. Or, if he still found it possible to do so, it was often at the
cost of detachment from reality as well as art.

I came back to the London theatre season of 1932-33, which was to give
us several fashionable stage movies like _Dinner at Eight_, but also
plays of character such as _The Green Bay Tree_, _The Late Christopher
Bean_ and _Richard of Bordeaux_. If the season was noticeably less
Continental than in former years, Paul Robeson and Flora Robson in
O'Neill's _All God's Chillun_ made the English playgoer more than ever
interested in American drama. I was in Paris in the spring to see Jean
Giraudoux's _Intermezzo_, and to find Louis Jouvet in his dressing-room
clad in a suit of shining black oilcloth, prophesying commercial success
for his dramatist with a certain sadness because he knew it would carry
him and his own company of artists out of the little professional
theatre to which they belonged, and on to the Boulevards which had other
standards of taste. All his forecasts for Giraudoux were more than
fulfilled, and this writer took his place in the next few years as
dramatic interpreter of the modern French spirit. His gay
reconstructions of themes from antiquity were gifts to the player and
director because of their sureness of theatrical appeal; and the
playgoer liked them because with all their bawdy wit they remained fine
in perception, intellectual but never controversial. Giraudoux was no
Shaw, but he sustained the Voltairean tradition. It will be sad if we
have to go on speaking of him in the past.

Later in 1933, and appropriately brought to London at the time of a
world economic conference that was to achieve nothing, came the Ballet
Jooss with a satire on world conferences called _The Green Table_, which
had carried off the prize at an international festival of dance in
Paris. The name of Ballet was forced upon the Jooss company from lack of
an equivalent for _Tanzbhne_ (dance-stage or dance-theatre) in the
French or English language. Kurt Jooss, its director, wanted to express
thoughts and to create pictures of life in the round through the medium
of dance alone. He admitted a debt to ballet technique, but his real
impulse came from expressionism in dance, painting, music and perhaps
literature. This was not the sort of enterprise to draw away the
fashionable public from the Ballets Russes who had reformed their
company and returned to London; but the company had its own vigour and
integrity, and over a period of years it has educated the theatre in a
knowledge of what dance unaided can do.

My next experience of this year was attending the opening performance in
Salzburg of _Faust_, given in the arcaded courtyard next to the Festival
Playhouse. This had been a riding-school of the prince-archbishops of
the city; and Reinhardt had long wanted to make dramatic use of it for
open-air performances, using a multiple stage formed by the arcades
which were mostly hewn out of the living rock. Accordingly the whole
rear wall of the courtyard became an architectural unit of platforms,
open chambers and galleries on which Goethe's tragedy (Part One) was to
be given. In case of bad weather the open-air performance, like the
production of _Everyman_ which was still regularly made in the cathedral
square, was transferable to the building next door; but the rehearsals
were conducted day after day in August sunshine, and they were
complicated enough in themselves without envisaging alternative
movements and sequences that would be needful for a regular stage
production. Showers on the day of the premire aroused misgivings, but
it was too late to do more than hope for the best. During a bright
evening interval the spectators from all over the world, suitably
attired for a great occasion, filed into their places carrying leather
cushions as protection against slightly damp seats. Some also carried
umbrellas, which were rather frowned upon. The rich variety of the scene
became evident after the first passages between Faust and the
Mephistopheles played by Max Pallenberg. The lighting passed from stage
to stage; crowds appeared and faded from view like the solitary figures
in cells or at casements. We had just come to the opening scene of
Gretchen (Paula Wessely) when the first umbrellas went up, to go down
again amid cries of disapproval and a lessening of the shower. They went
up again in numbers as a steady rainfall set in, then people began to
leave. The rest of us were uncertainly trying to keep our attention on
the play when a thunderclap and a real Salzburg cloudburst washed us
out. Rivers ran down the tiers of seats to form pools in front, near the
main exit, to which white-waistcoated cavaliers waded with ladies limp
in their arms. My record of it ended "and let us hope that before next
year the German frontier will be reopened and the spirit of Salzburg
will be unclouded by dark politics: that preoccupation does more to damp
the Festival than any thunder shower". But our Austria, as home and
playground, was in her last unhappy years.

Just over the mountains and on the sunny side of them, in Venice a
fortnight later, one could sit in the courtyard of the Doge's Palace
towards midnight to see _Othello_ played under the stars by an Italian
touring company of no great acting merit, but directed by an artist sure
of his climate and showman enough to make use of his setting. The notion
of seeing the Moor in Venice was in itself alluring; for one had too
often looked in a production of the play for an authentic Venetian
bridge or a flight of waterside steps. Actually the bridge was almost
the only piece of theatrical scenery that it was necessary to build for
this presentation in the courtyard, whose own splendid flight of steps
and galleries were made to break the levels of the stage and serve for
crowd movements. The weathered statuary looked down as decoration, and
Iago could come into the audience to speak his soliloquies, leaning over
a well-head illumined from within. One of the open squares of Venice
could be suggested by a space on to which the players swarmed to whisper
in little knots, suddenly quitting it again to run through lanes or into
gateways for such a movement as the warning given to Brabantio. The
scene of the Council grew from a procession of banners and insignia,
which when drawn aside revealed the Doge, enthroned among the senators.
One Pietro Sciaroff, who contrived all this, seemed to have learned from
Reinhardt some of his aptitude in the play of crowd gesture or the
sudden flash of steel. And in the early morning hours, when the
performance ended but the city was still awake and the Piazzo San Marco
with its tables not yet deserted, one could feel that _Othello_, however
good its Moor or Desdemona, would never live with such intensity again.

If I remember, one of the objectives of this Italian journey was an
exhibition of modern art and craftsmanship at Milan, which the
Government were so eager to see visited that they would almost fetch the
tourist by force from another country, paying most of his fares and
giving him a bonus on his hotel bills. All he had to do to enjoy these
benefits was to go to Milan; and there sure enough were flags of the
nations and exhibition buildings and neat little functional villas
poured out in concrete, covered with dazzling white plaster and
furnished with all the modern appliances for living, dining and
begetting a family to grow up and colonize Africa. Alas, the
Government's beneficence was wasted, for it did not know that the real
objectives of a visit might be the Cathedral and Leonardo's Cena. After
seeing them, it was pleasanter to quit the hot city of Milan and to
leave the country by way of Genoa and the coast, to sit awhile in the
cafs of Marseilles and be nourished on _bouillabaisse_ in the places
overlooking the inner harbour. Here I learned from the English papers of
the imminence of a revival of my Haymarket comedy at the Westminster;
and I had also to think of my own autumn opening and its rehearsals. So,
with a few hours' halt to dine in a town where you, dear reader, may
never have alighted, though you have sleepily looked out to see its name
on a signal-box or heard the milk-cans that are rolled melodiously down
its platform in the early morning hours, the journey had to be continued
to Paris where the season had not yet begun.

The first impression of London that autumn was of more open-air theatre;
for if Faust had resorted to the baroque courtyards of Salzburg and
Othello had invaded Venice, here was Bottom strutting it and falling
into slumbers of enchantment on the lawns of Regent's Park. Was that
summer of 1933 so rich in sunshine or other magic that it brought out
all of them together? My cellar-book tells me the year was good for most
wines; in fact one of the best of the few remaining vintage years.
Sydney Carroll, who presented _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ in the open,
was to enjoy sunny seasons again, and to give much pleasure to old and
young, as the saying goes, by his Park performances. On really warm
evenings he could rely on a full house, and in all weathers on a
congregation of moths and some scattered birds seeking to roost
undisturbed by floodlights and amplifiers. As time went on and R.A.F.
planes began their night operations overhead, open-air theatre was less
placid; but otherwise no one could deny the delight of being stretched
in a deck-chair and listening to Shakespeare and especially inhabiting
for a while the wood near Athens. In the logic of art I certainly prefer
theatre to be theatre, with a designed scene instead of trees and bushes
in the background, and this condition had been very largely fulfilled
at Salzburg or Venice where works of art formed the decoration; but
there is a mood with which the open air of garden or parkland accords
very well, given the right performance.

The revival of my comedy lasted only a few weeks, and _Jupiter
Translated_, which W. J. Turner had made into English verses from
Molire's _Amphitryon_, had a very modest run at the Mercury. _A
Sleeping Clergyman_ by Bridie, which I had seen in Malvern during a
fleeting visit that summer before Salzburg, settled down as one of the
season's successes. The Old Vic, thanks to the self-sacrificing presence
of Charles Laughton and other famous artists in the company, was doing
better than at any time of late, and both _Twelfth Night_ and _The
Cherry Orchard_ filled it to overflowing. I found time in November to
fly to Berlin, attend a round of theatres for myself, and try to form
some sort of judgment of drama and direction under the first phase of
Nazi rule. For the scene of arrival, my own account at the time may
serve best: "here suddenly was Berlin glittering below, fully lighted in
the dusk, a pattern of _Kino_ signs and advertisements concentrating in
the glare of the Kurfrstendamm. Tilted at the angle of our flight, the
city seemed at one moment to fill a part of the sky and not the
earth--its churches, chimneys, factories luminous and foreshortened, a
fantastic panorama of a metropolis. Like a floodlit stage in this
theatre of optical sensation, the airport loomed and spread to receive
us . . . and ten minutes later here were the Brandenburg Gate and Unter
den Linden, hung with flimsy streamers proclaiming sentiments of honour,
duty and the like, which seemed to be connected, like most appeals of
their kind even in the less enlightened democratic countries, with a
forthcoming election."

On the first evening I ran across a movie house in the Friedrichstrasse
where _Cavalcade_ was being shown, and was astonished to find it
described as a "sound-film with 10,000 soldiers, 4 troops of cavalry, 50
cannon, 8000 weapons, 3 Zeppelins, 1000 horses, 200 motor cars". So
Hollywood had not done its work upon Noel Coward's peaceable script in
vain; it had satisfied the longing of Germans (or at least the official
longing) to see all these instruments of destruction. Not far off was a
public war museum made out of a store, where for a few pfennigs one
could walk through papier-mch trenches and peer out of machine-gun
posts at rusty barbed wire. This was in queer contrast to the calm of
the streets, from which beggars and prostitutes had alike vanished, and
the calm of the press which still came out under a dozen different names
where one would have sufficed; not to speak of the calm of the theatre
with more than half the houses closed at what would normally be the
busiest time of year. Somebody explained to me that the stage had not
yet been organized, meaning that no successors had been appointed to
replace Reinhardt, Piscator, Barnovsky and the rest. A more malicious
wit told me the stage had been liquidated but had not yet solidified;
which is the kind of thing Berliners say to each other in cafs all day
long and are afraid to say openly, so that they get the form of
government they deserve.

It was easy to understand that nearly every dramatist of standing must
be suspect; for if not a Jew he was almost certainly a "culture-bolshevist"
or merely a writer successful under the Republic and in possession of
ill-gotten royalties. The whole of theatre life had to start again from
the beginning, and I was privileged in this autumn to see it get off the
mark. One of my experiences was _Krach um Iolanthe_, a racy country
farce about a sow (Iolanthe) seized from a farmer for debt, put in a
police station for safety, and liberated by one of the suitors for the
hand of the farmer's daughter. The author of this stuff performed at the
classical Lessing Theater was not exactly a Synge, but he was a good
master-carpenter of sixty, and his father had been a master-carpenter
before him; and many worse men have written or put together plays. The
live sheep, goats, pigs and poultry let loose upon the stage were
borrowed from various establishments and from the Zoo near by. Then I
went to a former railway station made into a popular theatre, the Plaza,
which was giving an aged operetta but was interesting in itself, because
it manifested, with an auditorium holding 3000, the strength of the
movement toward mass entertainment. The older people's theatre
corresponding to our Old Vic, the Volksbhne, had forgotten its
political past and was giving Schiller's _Maria Stuart_ under Heinz
Hilpert's direction with the minor men's parts, courtiers and the like,
played by actors who had been stage footmen with Reinhardt. Overplaying
and ranting were conspicuous. But in a State-subsidized theatre like the
Schauspielhaus the old traditions were maintained, and one could see
good acting and direction at the service of the new "blood and earth"
drama.

Playgoing in the smaller theatres around Berlin's West End was more
speculative, and one could easily stumble on some nave piece of
dramatic journalism where a Jew, the villain of course, was beaten up
before vanishing from the scene. This would be played before an audience
largely made up of "Strength through Joy" members at reduced prices; and
the masochistic artist concerned was able to get home early with his
bruises, for the public would never wait longer than a couple of acts to
see retribution overtake him. There were no demonstrations in the house,
and one heard very little applause. Everything was taken for granted
with appalling calm; these people knew that no more than one opinion
would be expressed by stage, press or platform. And in the homeward
plane sailing over Hanover to Holland and the North Sea, I could only
think how manifold is what we call a lifetime to-day. The Germany where
I had studied was already as remote as if it had existed in another
century; and so were now the Germanies of the Armistice and the
Republic. But a Berlin friend who had met me cautiously in the back
rooms of cafs or confectioner's shops, because he was already being
watched, said that we should see several more phases, each worse than
the present, before we had done. This would stretch out the number of
lifetimes within a lifetime still further; and I shivered as the height
of the plane approaching the sea made it needful to reach for a second
greatcoat.

Soon 1934 was here, and with it a revival of theatre quite notable
considering the progress of the screen. It was a players' revival, for
new dramatists were fewer than ever. Artists of the standing of Bergner,
the Lunts, Yvonne Printemps, Edith Evans and Cedric Hardwicke, Charles
Laughton and John Gielgud and Gertrude Lawrence made it clear by choice
of work that they sought stage engagements first of all, and would
struggle at personal loss to retain them, and considered the movies as a
secondary art. With some of them this was a last gesture, for soon after
making it they turned to the screen for good. But it was bravely made
all the same, and it brought multitudes of people to see the plays which
were vehicles for such talents. The dramatists, however, from
Shakespeare to Shaw and Sherwood, could not prevent the movement from
being short-lived. Some sentiment apart, nothing actually united the
famous player to the stage except the writer's inspiration continually
renewed and continually interpreted afresh by direction. In a little
while we were back in a period of stage fashions like that of reviving
Congreve and Wycherley on their bawdy merits. I was out of the theatre
fashion in staging Becque's _Parisienne_, which was now due to celebrate
the fiftieth year of its performance by the Comdie Franaise, and out
of the social fashion with Kataev's Soviet comedy _Squaring the Circle_.
But we had a success with a summer season of the Ballet Rambert, which
made it needless for me to stay in London; and another event loomed
ahead in the first night of _Vintage Wine_, a farce which I was alleged
to have written jointly with Seymour Hicks (he is a great comedian and
likes to make this kind of joke). I decided to send my cable of good
wishes to the Hicks company from Berlin: it would have been too late
coming from Oberammergau, which was my real destination. And so, making
the flight on the day when the farce was due, I found myself back again
at the Adlon for the second time in six months, and watching an imposing
march of sailors through the Brandenburg Gate to the Jutland memorial.

Between the approach of midsummer and a delightful production at the
Staatstheater, Berlin seemed a pleasanter place than usual. The play was
a baroque _Comedy of Errors_ very freely adapted by Hans Rothe, another
joker with his public since he put it all down to Shakespeare. In
refashioning the play from the original and not from the classical
German version, Rothe had made it a comedy of character in which the
Dromios and their masters, and especially Adriana and Luciana, might
have stepped from any witty and subtle drama of to-day into the maze of
Ephesian intrigue. Their reactions to it were logical and intelligent,
and this was the mainspring of the comic effect. The explanations came
at the end and not at the beginning as with Shakespeare; and an
ingenious direction and staging diminished the physical field of action
as the play went on, so that the frontage of the house of Antipholus
came nearer and nearer down the sloping stage, scene after scene, until
it became a simple drop-curtain. From pure enchantment with this work I
took the adaptation in hand again, and we made two London productions of
it in the following years. It is now called _They Wander in a Maze_, and
gin-and-Ephesian and gin-and-Syracusan are both served at the Porcupine,
to which house (you will remember) Antipholus of Ephesus resorts to dine
with "mine hostess" when he finds his own home barred against him.
Meantime America had rediscovered the Comedy of Errors theme in the
_Boys from Syracuse_ as a musical and screen play; but the Rothe version
is nearer the entertainment that Plautus and Shakespeare set out to
offer.

I had never seen the Passion Play of Oberammergau, which was specially
given in 1934 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of its foundation.
Legend says that plague was averted from the village by a vow to perform
the drama of Christ's life and death every ten years; and the sequence
would have been 1930 and 1940 in the ordinary course. It could be
guessed that the 1934 series of performances would be the last in the
lifetime of many of us; and here was a reason for taking the opportunity
now. The stage is in the open air, and the background of its
architectural setting is formed by the mountainside; but the spectators
are covered by the span of an unsightly modern auditorium, which in this
year was flying the swastika flag, in defiance, it was believed, of the
players' wishes. I had not realized that the Play itself would be so
much dominated by the Passion Chorus of singers. They intone a text
devoid of poetic merit either in German or translation; but many
spectators follow the drift of the chant from a printed copy in their
own language, and so the ritual character of the performance is much
heightened. The chorus leader was Anton Lang, world-known as a former
Christus, and his gift of presence was inspiring. Alois Lang, the
Christus, had great presence also, but it was of a kind too elemental to
give significance to scenes which were not full of strong action, such
as the driving-out of the money-changers or the trial before Pilate. As
they have always done by tradition, the peasants of the village raised
the Play on the shoulders of their own simplicity and made every crowd
scene memorable. To see this drama lasting seven hours one spent two
nights in lodging with a peasant or woodcarver and supping at his
table, then sleeping perhaps above a manger or workshop. Such nights of
quiet are a part of the experience of Oberammergau, like the train
journey back to Munich on the third day at dawn, when the roe-deer of
these highlands are feeding out in the open, presently to steal one
after another into a thicket or the fringe of a wood.




  16

  ROME EXPRESS


Here was high summer of 1934 and with it the opening of Glyndebourne
Opera House, the wing of a country mansion in a fold of the Sussex
Downs. In building it John Christie made one of the gestures of the
remaining peaceful years. And I see no reason to change the view
expressed of it then: "This opera house is an accretion to a history of
civilization that to-morrow may try to sweep away, yet it belongs to an
aristocracy of taste that must endure through wars and revolutions.
Mozart will be played in this house long after the material conditions
of the Glyndebourne Festival have been changed beyond knowledge." This
can be considered as sure as the blooming of the same flowers in the
gardens of Glyndebourne and the survival of the same wooded prospect
from the terrace; and what was a rich man's plaything will not in the
end be his Folly. The singers of Salzburg, many of them refugees from
their own stages, were brought over in numbers, so that from now onward
the English lover of Mozart had little reason to seek his festivals
abroad.

It may have been some minor and humble echo of Glyndebourne that made me
prepare a new autumn entertainment in _Vauxhall Gardens_, a blend of
intimate opera and ballet as they might have been performed (between
fireworks and balloon ascents) in the old pleasure gardens across the
Thames. But I was called away from its rehearsal to go to Rome for the
Convegno Volta, a congress held every two years and endowed by the
inventor of the voltaic cell "for the consideration of some branch of
science or art". This year it was the turn of theatre to be considered,
and theatre men from all countries were to be brought to Rome by the
Italian Government for the purpose. Whether they came from near or far
in Europe, Italy took charge of them from the moment when they stepped
aboard the Rome Express. W. B. Yeats had come from Ireland with Mrs.
Yeats, who asked me whether one of the leather cases in my baggage
really contained a top-hat: she had her wifely social misgivings about
the poet's broad-brim soft felt, under which his grey mane flowed so
magnificently. He was himself rather concerned as a Senator for the
prestige of Ireland, where hats are as important as anywhere else and
even more varied; but Mrs. Yeats settled the question by declaring that
"Willie never really looks his best in a top-hat", and he was persuaded
to agree.

America was represented only by correspondents in Paris and Rome; and to
talk about the present and future stage without having the viewpoint of
American artists was a handicap admitted by most of us. In Paris we were
joined by dramatists like Jules Romains and Denys Amiel and by a group
of Netherlanders and Scandinavians. Genoa brought aboard more theatre
folk from the north and east, so that a lively company arrived at the
Roman station to be greeted by Italians as various as Pirandello,
Marinetti the Futurist, and Silvio d'Amico, a man and artist friendlier
even than his name if that were possible. We who were writers knew only
too well that other theatre workers were much less free than ourselves
to run about Europe in October, which is the busiest month of the
international stage. The number of active directors especially was
limited; but Copeau sent an envoy, and Tairov represented the Soviet
cultural organization as well as his own Kamerny Theatre in Moscow, and
Walter Gropius of the Bauhaus in Dessau, who has since become professor
of architecture in Harvard, stood much less officially but with as great
distinction for the Germany he was about to leave.

This gathering was significant in 1934, when the stage could be calmly
reviewed by its own people after thirty years of the screen and seven
years of sound-film. To-day, after another seven years, it seems more
significant than even at that time; for although meanwhile the theatre
has made no great gesture, the issues that concern it have become
clearer. To take only one of them, there is the main question of policy:
whether the stage should withdraw from all rivalry with the screen by
doing nothing on its own boards that the screen can do as well, or
collaborate freely with the screen as it is doing to-day even at the
cost of becoming quite subordinate, or begin building playhouses on a
new and different plan designed for the special effect (possibly the
mass-effect) of living performance. The first course would soon mean the
retirement of the theatre to the back street where it would seek the
patronage of a small but cultivated public; and this was favoured even
in 1934 by some dramatists. The second can be defended for reasons of
expediency, but means nothing to theatre art. The third, naturally
tempting to architects with new ideas, and still more to political men,
would open up extraordinary vistas ranging from the rebirth of ritual
drama (including political drama as it is understood in totalitarian
countries) to the growth of a new spectacular drama with resources in
machinery, lighting and sound effect that have never yet been brought
into play. I think the choice between them was the major issue faced by
the Convegno Volta at its Roman gathering, even though some older
delegates from Maeterlinck to Craig would not admit the part the screen
had played in forcing it upon us. The producing managers of Broadway and
Shaftesbury Avenue, who were not represented and indeed would not have
known what any theatre congress was about, were the only theatre men who
could be imagined as supinely awaiting events. Observers in Rome could
follow a sharp conflict, like that of a political struggle, between the
need of the individual dramatist to express himself in his own way and
the impulse of the theatre to master the machines and use all its
dynamic power.

Actually this theatre problem could not have been faced more aptly than
in Rome, whose architectural vistas no longer offer a view of "ruins"
but speak to the present in its own direct language. On every hand in
this Roman background which itself is theatre, the eye could follow the
uprising in centuries of new structural forms based upon new powers,
perhaps of new machines, always of new discovery and recreation, until
now the bare stones are themselves discovered with a fresh significance.
And this was not necessarily the Rome of fascism that we viewed, but the
Rome of modern thought. Gerhart Hauptmann in sending his greetings to
the Convegno had rightly reminded us that our problem to-day resembled
that of the antique world in being always dynamic and not static. More
had happened to human culture, as he said, during the time between the
assembly of the first players of drama on a Greek hillside and the
building of the Coliseum, than during the time between Nero's Rome and
Mussolini's. Neither new forms nor new machines were arising for the
first time to challenge drama, which itself can be no stable fact but
must be a process of creation. These thoughts were bound to be in mind
as we moved through Old Rome on daily well-organized excursions, or
wandered at our own will through the Coliseum or drove in the Appian Way
by moonlight; but especially as we met for each morning session in the
well-named Sala dei Perspettivi, the hall in the Palazzo della Farnesina
on the Tiber bank. The symbol of perspective summed up all that theatre
had accomplished and now desired.

I hugely enjoyed the other Rome too: the Rome where English ladies
"winter" at a certain age, if they have the means to winter anywhere but
at Bournemouth; the Rome where incredible old gentlemen with white
side-whiskers go driving ass-carts through the gardens of the Pincio and
saluting acquaintances on every hand; where pleasant luncheon parties
are given at the British Embassy, or evening receptions at which
debutantes, nieces of the ladies who are wintering, flirt with Italian
officers in the Embassy garden under the walls which are the old walls
of the city; where people have time for cafs and newspapers and looking
at the passers-by; where cats wear ribbons and children trundle coloured
hoops and tenors sing and beggars are not ashamed of beggary. Maybe
nothing will be like this again, all may indeed have been changed in
these seven years; but I am glad to have seen what may be called the
Rome of tourist romance. Into this city I sallied forth each morning
from my hotel, summoning from the cab-rank irrespective of precedence a
driver with a white horse; upon which the cry of _cavallo bianco_ was
echoed up the line of cabmen as if mine were the most reasonable
predilection in the world; and the proud Giuseppe, who told me his name
at our first meeting (also the name of his horse Benito), pulled his cab
out of the rank and trotted up to the hotel door eager to see if I were
wearing my top-hat assumed for ceremonial visits to the Capitol and the
like. If so, he insisted on taking me for an extended drive through all
quarters of the city, where on passing another cab he would point to me
with his whip and say that I not only wore this hat but insisted on a
white horse every morning. He would have driven me out to the vineyards
of the Campagna, to which he himself belonged and where many of his kind
were bestriding their asses and carrying home their wine-skins at this
season; but there it was, oats were limited, the authorities frowned on
horse-cabs altogether, and I should have to take a car.

Rolling along in the sunshine behind Giuseppe and Benito I remembered
Arnold Bennett, novelist and dramatist, and his tale that in going to
Rome for the first time, he ventured into the Coliseum by moonlight
feeling it was the proper thing to do, and met among the shadows a short
man with a pointed beard whom he had little trouble in identifying as
Hall Caine, author of _The Eternal City_. The chieftain of best-sellers
greeted him with the embarrassing query, "A fellow-Briton, I believe?"
and on his admitting the offence, enquired very civilly his errand in
Rome and his profession. Bennett had to plead guilty to writing various
tales of the Five Towns in the English Black Country of which his host
had at least heard, for after a meditative silence he said, "Wonderful,
is it not, that here we should meet, two authors known throughout the
world, among these monuments, in this eternal city". The last phrase,
said Bennett, seemed almost involuntarily to escape him: perhaps it was
a gesture from a major to a minor best-seller. I hope this tale is not
too malicious to be retold, for it seems to me as entertaining as that
of one of the richest bookmakers of the English Turf, who had always
spent his holidays at Monte Carlo until a friend asked him, "Sam, why do
you always come to Monte? Why don't you try some other spot like Rome?"
After this Sam was absent from the tables for a while; but when he
returned and was asked, "Well, Sam, how did you like Rome?" he answered,
"You can have Rome!"

After such piecemeal glances at the Roman scene, it would be an
affectation to ignore the tremendous panorama of Vatican City as it
reveals itself to a man walking through the gateway nearest the Tiber
and following a narrow street to St. Peter's. I was already overawed by
a procession of young Irish candidates for the priesthood, looking
otherwise just as one frequently sees them on English racecourses, who
marched in what seemed to be an ecstatic column of fours along the
roadway beside me, when the full view opened out and there stood the
Cathedral with the quadruple colonnades and the great flight of steps,
the pigeons and the postcard-sellers and the Swiss Guards; and although
myself nothing but a pagan insect crawling unawares upon the scene, I
was seized as though by superhuman power and compelled to go forward,
upward, through ever-greater porticos and over ever-vaster pavements and
around infinite transepts, choirs and cloisters, into the sunlight again
to say to myself, breathless after the breath of incense, that it was
all just as I had imagined it to be, only more enormous. It has been
said that the difference between the English and French translations of
the Bible is that "Behold leviathan" in one language is rendered as
"Voici l'hippopotame" in the other. This is probably a malicious
invention; but however leviathan is named he is magnificently seen on
the Tiber bank within his walls. After the ceremonies of noon I was not
long in discovering the excellence of food and wine in Vatican City,
which spreads a whole amphitheatre of houses of refreshment around the
sublime stage of its principal square. And always afterwards, when
delegates to the Convegno complained of the dearth of restaurants in
Rome, I was able to ask, "But have you tried Vatican City?"

And now it is time to return to the Convegno Volta, for over coffee and
brandy, looking still at the prodigy of St. Peter's, I realize that I
have played truant for the whole morning from a discussion of "the
theatre in the moral life of the nations". This is no great matter, for
Marinetti, who has also contrived to lunch well, opens the proceedings
in the afternoon with a violent polemic addressed to all decadent
peoples whoever they may be (we suspect the French, who are showing
signs of nerves). Yeats has gone quietly to sleep, and Craig is dozing
with the half-closed lids of a lion who may at any time awaken. Nobody
wants to discuss the question of dramatic censorship, least of all the
Russian delegate whose eyes merely twinkle when it is raised. It is
simpler to speak of the assistance given by the State to the theatre in
various countries, in fact with the sole exceptions of Britain and
America. Ireland awakens to say that the Abbey Theatre in Dublin is
subventioned and yet preserves that aristocracy of thought and tradition
of letters which must for ever be opposed to conceptions of
mass-theatre. Gropius again propounds the scheme of his _Totaltheater_,
which is not entirely architectural but embodies the idea of everybody's
theatre and auditorium and stage, where every form of presentation can
be made. Josef Gregor, the practical scholar of the dramatic collection
in the Viennese National Library, ranges over the theatrical arena from
the theatre of Epidaurus to the projects of Norman Bel Geddes and Oskar
Strnad. Copeau thinks that man as seen by Molire, always reasonable,
always open to conviction, determined the nature of theatre's place in
life. We must make ourselves as little children, but very intelligent
little children, before the human spectacle which is the spectacle of
the stage.

That afternoon was memorable in any case because suddenly into the
debate fell a bombshell; a Jugo-Slav monarch had been assassinated in
Marseilles and nobody yet knew which Power had been the instigator. The
delegates of the bereaved country received general condolences and we
adjourned for the day: it was fortunate that our next engagement was to
be a visit to the Villa d'Este and another of the dead country houses
near Tivoli, with their excavated theatres. Then was to follow the gala
performance rather dreaded by all who know such occasions, as much for
the stuffed character of the audience as the waxwork exhibition on the
stage. But there it was, we had been talking of theatre for some days
and now we had to see what modern Rome could do. The event exceeded the
forebodings of Tairov and myself, for we sat together in Anglo-Soviet
harmony and compared notes of our expectations and the actual fact. The
Duce made his appearance in a box, after the entry had been well
prepared by the cries of generals from other boxes. The pitiable
presentation on the stage consisted of D'Annunzio's _La Figlia di
Iorio_, directed by Pirandello and played by Marta Abba and a cast of
Roman talents. The main trouble was that the entire performance could
have been given in the year 1900. Much more modest and at the same time
more delightful was the only other play being given in Rome, which was a
modern vehicle designed for that admirable comedian Petrolini. From this
state of things in the month of October we could readily understand that
Rome itself is not a theatre city.

And here is an opportunity to glance at what has happened to drama,
direction, scene and architecture in the seven years since the Convegno
met. The group of Continental dramatists led by the French, who spoke of
forming a defensive square around the theatre of imagination and
guarding it with the devotion of their lives, have seen their own stages
yearly grow smaller and their audiences dwindle away, until a stroke of
violence destroyed freedom of mind and theatre together. Only in Britain
and America, in these years, have the smaller theatres known how to
defend themselves and to produce, here and there, fragments of a new
dramatic poetry including the interpretation of modern life in verse.
Direction has followed the same course as drama, if only for the reason
that these were years unsuited to large-scale adventure. There has been
the same sharp division between the English-speaking countries and the
rest: many stage directors everywhere have gone over to the screen, but
those holding to the stage have been far from losing credit. Nobody now
disputes that direction can be creative, and in many forms of drama must
be so. Scene and architecture have been undeveloped except in the
immense open-air arenas created by some countries for mass-performance,
where ancient or medieval arenas were not available; and these may be
the forerunners of covered playhouses on the same gigantic scale, where
microphones will bring every word to the listener. The project put
forward by Gropius for uniting in a single structure the three main
forms of dramatic architecture--the arena, the semicircular theatre with
proscenium, and the proscenium theatre with curtain--and making a part
of the forestage and auditorium revolve in order to get the right form
of theatre for the drama in hand, remains a project. But we may hear
more of this imaginative scheme for rebuilding the simplicity of theatre
on the foundation of the machine.

Perhaps the only wasted day of our labours in Rome--and I have recorded
pious use of part of it--was that devoted to our influence upon "the
moral life of the nations", which now seems more chimerical than any
theatre ambition. Year by year since that time one has been able, like a
man stricken and putting affairs in order, to reckon what could be done
in the little space left in which to do it. My own love of Italy,
already going far beyond the mountains of the North and Venice and the
Lombard cities, had been quickened by the Roman Campagna; and I knew the
truth, that this country has everything in nature and in art to complete
the life of a man. So on the way homeward by way of Pisa I could still
pass that tempting branch to Florence and look forward to summer in
Tuscany before it grew too late; and this promise was to be fulfilled. I
see Siena and the Palio yet before me in another chapter of this
European tale. But first let me come to poetic drama, the development of
our stage at home concerning me most nearly.




  17

  POETIC DRAMA


The event of the season 1934-35 was the run of _Hamlet_ with John
Gielgud in the West End. The actor had already played the part at the
Old Vic. Many playgoers felt that he had joined the traditional line of
Hamlets; for this is how people have grown used to thinking about the
play. They like to see a new Prince of Denmark, otherwise a Moody Dane,
once or twice in a generation so that they can compare him with Irving
or Forbes-Robertson, Moissi or John Barrymore. They assume that the play
itself stands still and bears little relation to our own life, full of
quotations though it may be; but they cheer the actor as he surges
forward in his career, an established figure because he has played his
Hamlet with success. And in doing such homage to the greatest of plays
through the actor of the greatest of parts, they go far to justify the
bitter saying that but for Shakespeare Britain might have a poetic
drama.

The corollary is that what poetic drama we have had, in times within
memory, has been much too Shakespearean. Few, perhaps, will now recall
the imposing iambic dramas of Stephen Phillips, which used to fill His
Majesty's and allow Beerbohm Tree, as he then was, to appear as Herod,
Nero or what-not. (There was an embarrassing occasion when Tree showed
them to Berlin.) Rudolf Besier began his career with a verse drama, _The
Virgin Goddess_. Hardy's _The Dynasts_, brought piecemeal into the
theatre by the devoted and superhuman effort of Granville-Barker, was
outstanding in the First Great War. Most of the Irish poets preferred
prose when they were writing for the stage, but Sean O'Casey as a prose
writer made his own original experiments in dramatic verse. Gordon
Bottomley and Laurence Binyon were among the established poets who had
plays performed. John Drinkwater used dramatic verse as well as prose.
Flecker's _Hassan_ has been recorded as the high-light of all this
Edwardian and Georgian drama seeking the form of poetry. Now in 1934
came what might be called the primitives of a new school in W. H.
Auden's _The Dance of Death_ given by the Group Theatre, and T. S.
Eliot's _The Rock_. Their breakaway from established forms reminded us
that the five-footed iambic, Marlowe's line, had been the bane of most
of their predecessors. But we had few critics bold enough to tell the
dramatists to cast it off and listen to the rhythms of speech to-day,
then to make new stresses and metres for themselves. The longer the
inhibitive influence of the Elizabethans persisted, as it still
persists, the more the time was ripe for change. In the perspective of
the years since 1934, we can see how the awareness of these things has
spread among writers for the stage in Britain and America alike.

The _Hamlet_ with John Gielgud came opportunely, for it differed from
others of our generation in understanding of drama rather than in
quality of playing. I wrote after seeing the performance: "His most
satisfying gesture is a withdrawal into that princely solitude which is
a thing of universal though rare experience. Speaking always to himself
as Hamlet must, whether in soliloquy or otherwise, the actor conveys the
conversation of mind with mind so that the most familiar line comes with
an element of surprise, freshly-wrought although inevitable. Why, we ask
ourselves, should not the man of to-day speak so to himself and to
others--in verse and prose, these images of theatre speech that are a
hundred times more natural than the words of common use? Why should
to-day's man, agonizing in drama, employ an utterance other than this we
call poetic? Why indeed should poetry on the stage be an archaism at
all? What has it to do with old times, Danish or Celtic, Italian or
Greek? Should it not be the necessary language of our own dynamic
world?" I see from the words "agonizing" and "dynamic" that I was still
echoing the thought of our congress in Rome; but otherwise the
impression holds good. Gielgud's Hamlet, to me, meant modern verse-drama
and the verse-drama of modern life. And I would add that the actor
triumphed largely through his humour, which is as essential an element
in the mind of the tragedian as gloom is said to be in the spirit of the
clown.

Soon afterwards, in the early months of 1935, I was discussing with W.
B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and E. Martin Browne who had directed _The Rock_,
a project for a Mercury season of plays by poets. The simplicity of
presentation was to be such that no backer would be needed: I would
take the responsibility myself as always on my own little stage. The
Group Theatre might be willing to join, in course of time, by lending us
its own plays and playwrights, Louis Macneice as well as W. H. Auden and
his collaborator Christopher Isherwood. Meantime Eliot had written an
unnamed play about Becket, to be given in the summer in the
chapter-house of Canterbury by the Friends of the Cathedral, who were
raising a permanent fund for the preservation of the fabric and invited
writers and other artists to contribute in medieval fashion with their
gifts. We felt that this would not preclude a production of Eliot's play
as part of our project, perhaps in alternation with a play by Yeats; but
it was the sensible course to let Canterbury, for whom the play had been
written, perform it first, and then to consider it as the opening work
for an autumn season at the Mercury. I recall very well a description of
the yet unfinished play: the drama of the life and death of Becket was
in verse, but the four knights who murdered him, all perfect Nazis, were
to step out on to the forestage and hold a public meeting with the
audience, explaining the various secular or totalitarian grounds that
had made their action necessary. Here, again, humour had come to the aid
of a modern poet treating the most classical of English tragic themes.

So in June of 1935 I was at Canterbury for the production of _Murder in
the Cathedral_, as the play was called at the suggestion of a shrewd
woman who knew how to express its contemporary spirit in a title. No
theatre folk were visible around the city, no producing managers from
the West End had come to see a work by the foremost poet of his
generation. The movement of the time was lost upon them; and in fact the
resistant power of the theatre is such that they would not even believe
in its eventual success when this came about. One eminent critic avoided
seeing it at all because he was sure it would bore him.

The chapter-house of Canterbury is a long narrow Gothic hall opening
from the cloister, and it would be hard to find a building less suited,
at a glance, to dramatic performance. About 700 people seated on rush
chairs were crammed on either side of a narrow middle gangway. The stage
was a platform with slight but appropriate scenic decoration. As they
played their tragedy, the actors were separated only by a wall and a few
paces from the spot where Becket was murdered in 1170; the four knights
battering at the door were again repeating history within a short
distance; and when Becket's body at the end was carried out by his
priests through the audience, they issued into the cloister where monks
had passed with the burden of their martyr archbishop. Such associations
were quietly taken for granted by Martin Browne as director, and by
Robert Speaight, who played Becket as a good actor (he had been one of
the Old Vic Hamlets) both intellectually and spiritually attuned to
Eliot's mind. The chorus of Women of Canterbury defined the nature of
the play from the beginning, for they were neither realistically "the
poor" whom they declared themselves to be, nor archaically the chorus of
Greek drama exciting the spectator to pity and terror by their
commentary on the action. They were a group of young women trained by
Elsie Fogerty in choral speaking and employed by the director so that
the dramatist should speak directly to his listener. No practising
playwright could forbear to admire Eliot's swift and sure treatment of
the four tempters of Becket and the four knights, or the economy with
which the poet everywhere said in three lines what would occupy a prose
dramatist for a whole scene. I felt that this was, as _The Times_
afterwards declared it to be, "the one great play by a contemporary
dramatist to be seen in England".

After summer months in Austria and Italy, I drove down one autumn Sunday
morning with Martin Browne to Canterbury to fetch the costumes and
scenery of _Murder in the Cathedral_, all of which fitted comfortably
into the back of our car. This was part of the economy of our own
production costs, which were not to be more than fifty pounds and in
fact were much less. The play was presented at the Mercury in November
and began a run of 225 nights. For many weeks and even months it was
hard to get a seat. The audiences were oddly and almost equally divided
between churchpeople and the Chelsea-Bloomsbury public; and at the
theatre bar one saw priests in cassocks and rationalists in tweeds, each
with a glass of wine in hand, discussing Eliot's work. All this was just
as unexpected as my former success as dramatist, and for that reason was
as happy. There was the further prospect of working for a long time with
a group of people toward a definite end, in a theatre whose receipts
were large enough to meet all present needs and even to build up a small
reserve for the future. The company were in complete accord with Martin
Browne and myself, and the run was sustained by their integrity as much
as anything. On many nights I was able to see the play myself, standing
at the back among many standing strangers; and that alone made it worth
while to own a poet's theatre and keep it open.

At some time in the near future we had hoped to transfer _Murder in the
Cathedral_ to America with the English company, playing it from coast to
coast without too much consideration of Broadway; but this plan
miscarried because a New York production by WPA (Federal Theatre
Project) had been authorized just before our success in London with the
play. I made an American visit early in 1936 without being able to
influence this decision. The WPA production was already well advanced,
it could not be stopped except by a legal pressure we were unwilling to
use against such an enterprise, and it eventually succeeded on its own
merits. In New York I was able to see _Winterset_, which proved how
international the movement toward poetic drama, in English at any rate,
was becoming. Eliot's play meantime continued in London throughout the
mourning for King George and into the following summer. The run at the
Mercury was resumed in September, and soon afterwards J. P. Mitchelhill,
genuinely moved by the play as he saw it, offered to transfer the
production to his Duchess Theatre in the West End. There it ran four
months longer, surviving even the time of the Abdication when certain
passages about the Archbishop and the throne gained an embarrassing
topicality that even the author had not foreseen. It was, I think, the
only contemporary play to close its run at capacity. The idea that it
would ever cease running seemed to be new to the public, and the theatre
was besieged for the final week. The next phase was a tour of the
English and Scottish cities, during which large and small theatres
alike were crowded. This was concluded by a season at the Old Vic, where
the play should eventually become one of the classics of the repertory.
The last time I met Lilian Baylis was on the closing night in July 1937,
when we sat together in a box and looked from the stage to a house where
no seat was vacant. And that is the theatre history of _Murder in the
Cathedral_ in Britain, though there was a further tour in the autumn of
1937 and a revival at the Mercury in 1940. Eliot's deep originality of
conception was bound to influence new writers for the stage, and before
the beginning of the War this influence had already extended into
Europe. The free countries were making ready to perform the play when
the blow fell. In Middle Europe the ban had fallen automatically upon
its production.

The next Mercury play by a poet was Archibald Macleish's _Panic_, a
dramatic reconstruction in verse of the financial crash of 1933. Coming
from New York, where it had been given a few months earlier, this was
almost an inevitable choice; for the Mercury wanted at the same time to
stress the unity of English and American dramatic poetry and to present
a play of modern life whose rhythm of verse speech should be effective
in the theatre. Eliot was already at work on his own modern play in
verse, which took shape in _The Family Reunion_. The challenge to
existing theatre values had to be made. I think our production of
_Panic_ was a good one; but the play failed because it was unequal and
brief, the main woman character in it did not matter essentially to the
action, and the crowd characters mattered so much that one was always
expecting them to take a decisive part in the drama. Many spirited
passages in trochaic verses (which are iambics with the stress on the
first syllable of each foot instead of the second) supported Macleish's
contention that this form echoes modern speech; but they never carried
the listener away as dramatic poetry should carry him. We had done a
good experimental play and that was all.

Humbert Wolfe's _Reverie of Policeman_ was just as indecisive because
its author was a confirmed and even incurable romantic who mixed lyric
sentiment and rhyming wit in a way distasteful to the moderns among his
listeners, while the more old-fashioned, with whom he might have
succeeded, were not yet ready to accept a London policeman and the Bust
of Darwin as speaking characters in a verse-play, even a bitter comedy
in verse. The piece was worth doing at the Mercury for just these
reasons, both educative and exasperating: the possibilities of the
romantic school had to be examined, and Wolfe had in him the makings of
a dramatist. He certainly invented something new when, instead of
calling the failure of his play "a flop", he wrote to me regretting "the
tragic abstention of the public". This was truly the grand romantic
manner.

Success returned to the Mercury with _The Ascent of F.6_, by W. H. Auden
and Christopher Isherwood, which came to our stage by the collaboration
of the Group Theatre and its director Rupert Doone. At that time we were
still trying to find means by which a poet's play could run for more
than a short sequence of performances; and here was one that ran its
hundred nights. Since then the world has moved so fast that the style of
this verse-and-prose tragedy of a Himalayan expedition seems outmoded
already. But there is a long run of centuries for the main theme of
_F.6_ (as everybody called it), which is essentially the same as that of
_Hamlet_: the problem of a man of thought or inward action contemplating
the outward meaningless action of the world: of a man of integrity made
the plaything of calculation and interest: of a man of sensibility
facing every tough issue with an irony or a smile. Radio speakers and a
listening suburban pair made a double chorus to the tragedy, so that the
authors were able to indulge their satire and their expressionism at the
same time. From this rather uncertain background the group of Himalayan
climbers stood out as remarkable dramatic portraits, though they mostly
resembled boys one had met at school and never expected to meet again.
The Demon reputed to inhabit the top of the mountain charted F.6 on the
map, and the hero's mother who haunted him in other and
psycho-analytical ways, were uncompleted decorations of the tale. But
the writers of verse-plays, long after the present convulsion of the
world, will be able to look back on _F.6_ as a forerunner of their
achievement.

And here I can add a few reasons for the success and failure of the
poets in the theatre during these years. The verse-form is so
magnificent a medium for the stage, so rich in opportunity for the actor
and director as well as the dramatist, that there is no need to justify
its use; and the choice of a subject from modern life only heightens the
dramatic surprise of poetic treatment. But there is every need for the
writer using so new a form to study the theatre and to know what he is
doing when he puts words on paper. Very likely the proscenium playhouse
with its curtain and its peep-show pictorial effect is not the
playhouse of which he is thinking as he sits in his study; he may want
something like the Elizabethan theatre with its apron stage, or he may
reach out in imagination to a rebuilding of the arena of the Greeks in
modern architecture. Failing these--and architectural revolutions are
not made overnight--he may turn his thoughts to the screen, where he
will find many directors who understand his problem and some who even
look hopefully forward to the use of verse in pictures. My own aim would
be to win the poet for the stage and to keep him working there; for the
stage can give his imagination the fullest play and his words the
deepest understanding. How, then, can we bring the poet into contact
with a group of artists who will realize his characters and at the same
time quicken his creative faculty as it is always quickened by the
actual and the practical?

We were luckily able to cast _Murder in the Cathedral_ from existing
stage talent, apart from the chorus who had to be drawn from a trained
reserve of verse-speakers in the nature of a choir. But this was the
exception, and poets who write for the stage must accept the rule. The
rule is that the producing manager and director sit down together a
month before the date of presentation to find out who is available, and
to make one compromise after another in the name of necessity. Our own
_Ascent of F.6_ (1937) and the Westminster production of Eliot's _The
Family Reunion_ (1938) had to be cast from a momentarily free group of
present and future screen stars, Old Vic and other character actors, and
minor players who had served the new theatre movement faithfully enough
to be rewarded with a part. Such casting brings disillusionment to
dramatists, who know too little at best about the workshop of the stage.
They can learn more by giving time and pains to rehearsal, including the
rehearsal of plays other than their own. The main problem of casting
remains, and it is to be solved only by the group production of poets'
plays in a repertory large enough to give every talent a chance. It is
time enough to think of a West End or Broadway production for a poet's
play when it has taken shape in the little professional theatre and won
its own specialized audience.

With all this in mind, I had meant to go on producing plays by poets at
the Mercury and to build up a repertory which could be cast from a small
regular company. _Murder in the Cathedral_ had been done very
successfully in the first instance with a curtained background and a few
scenic structures and properties that one stage worker could handle; and
all other plays were to be given with the same simplicity. But even so,
our resources were too limited for the frequent changes of bill that
repertory production requires, and our seats were so few that the
company could only earn a decent living when the theatre was full each
night. We had unwillingly to admit the need of producing plays for a
run--which meant considering whether they would be likely to run or not.
It was about this time that the New York unit controlled by Orson Welles
and John Houseman paid us the compliment of borrowing our name; and with
much the same ideas as our own, they had on a larger scale much the same
history of production and occasional outstanding success. For several
seasons Mercury productions were those that mattered on Broadway and
round about. They were sometimes made without scenery, like the famous
_Julius Caesar_ in modern dress; and we heard about them and envied our
namesakes their stage if not their ramshackle playhouse, the old Comedy
in New York.

The Mercury in London needed to be two or three times larger. It did
well to be out of the hectic West End marketplace, but a modern building
was becoming essential. Ballet, as well as the poetic drama, was
beginning to outgrow the style imposed by too intimate presentation. I
had long felt that stage dancing, which evolved from the Court ballroom
entertainment, had come to be presented as a picture in the proscenium
frame not so much by its own will as by the convention of the theatre of
opera and comedy. Left to itself, it might far more reasonably have
chosen the arena of the Greek drama or the modern circus. Rightly or
wrongly, I saw ballet emerging with enhanced effect from the proscenium
and coming out upon a platform to compose a truly three-dimensional
picture; and many lovers of dancing supported me in this view. As for
the poet's play, it had never properly belonged to the proscenium
theatre at all, and the apron of the Elizabethan playhouse had been the
very heart of its action. So it was rather more than the indulgence of a
daydream that led me to draw plans of the desired playhouse for both of
them, a building unlike any in London or indeed in Western Europe,
though bearing some modest resemblance to the theatre that Gropius had
in mind. The main principle was the union of proscenium stage with
arena. A single tier of seating rose fanwise in Greek fashion above and
around the large apron of the forestage, beneath which was space for a
full orchestra if it should be needed. On either side of the
proscenium, which could be used either with or without a curtain--and
Martin Browne and I were against any curtain for our kind of drama--were
doorways which formed possible entries or exits for the players. Above
the proscenium and forestage was a canopy, within which a great part of
the lighting was disposed. The stage was to stretch from wall to wall
and have a width at least twice that of the proscenium arch. The total
superficial area was to be that of a West End theatre seating, say, 1000
people, but the actual capacity was to be not more than 500, possibly
less. The economic difference was to be made up by a large excavated
space below the stage and auditorium, affording studios for schools of
dance and drama. We were to provide also for the playgoer's food and
wine. A possible use of the building for Mozartian opera, as well as for
concert music, had been considered in the plan. The estimate was for a
building cost of twenty-five thousand pounds, or, say, a hundred
thousand dollars. It could have been done for that, and well done.

As luck would have it, the very site came into the market in the summer
of 1936, when Eliot's play had established itself successfully
throughout a season. It consisted of a derelict row of shops with a
street of former cottages and stables, the whole forming a square of
about 100 feet each side, and lying within a few steps of the Mercury in
the same street, close to the main traffic crossing of Western London.
An existing byway practicable for transport led to what could be the
stage door. The owner could pull down everything and put up what he
pleased.

I ought of course to have run about London to look for somebody to buy
this property for me, and then to have persuaded him or her to build the
theatre afterwards. That is how most theatres have got themselves built.
But my experience in this world of drama is individual, and the theatre
I wanted to build was individual too. With the friendly aid of my bank,
I walked in and bought the site myself for a modest sum. The demolition
soon began, numerous rats came to a sudden end, and a big open space
appeared where the stables and cottages had been. In the following
winter, which was the last chance had we known it, I very nearly (but
not quite) succeeded in forming the group of well-wishers prepared to
build the new Mercury, for which the older building near by was to be
the experimental producing stage. The difficulties in which this
enterprise afterwards landed me have nothing to do with a chapter on
poetic drama. But the plot of ground remains; and when I look at it
to-day, encumbered by three varied types of air-raid shelter and one row
of ancient buildings still mistakenly spared by the bombardment, I see
the general outline of the stage and auditorium as they were planned and
may eventually be built, even if I do not build them myself. This
ruinous and weed-grown patch of London soil is the visible monument (I
will not say graveyard) of hopes aroused by dramatic poets in the late
1930's.




  18

  EUROPEAN FAREWELLS


During these years which were chiefly given to the staging of poetic
drama, my contacts with the West End remained as before. I went to most
of the new plays, knew most of the actors and directors, and sometimes
agreed to write or adapt a play which might eventually be produced. I
felt no urge to submit any work of my own, for in practice the days of
the free-lance dramatist were past. Our London theatre had as
presentable a list as any in Europe, and the young American dramatists
had put our own writers on their mettle; but the organization of the
stage had changed since the time when Galsworthy and Maugham had been
the ruling playwrights. There had been the period of Noel Coward; and
now the best work was being written by men like J. B. Priestley or Emlyn
Williams, who as producing managers or actor-producers could always
choose their own opportunity. Their kind of theatre was not the one I
cared for most, but they brought into our drama of the immediate pre-war
years a searching and sincere quality that had been absent from the work
of the generation just before them. Even though late in the day, with
calamity overhanging all our minds, these newest writers were seeking
the form of the morality play rather than the plain realistic drama or
domestic comedy. In theatre direction they showed understanding too. It
was the Westminster Theatre under Priestley's control that stood out
especially as a producing stage from 1936 onward. For the more
fashionable kind of West End theatre, _Theatre Royal_ or _Tovarich_ made
not unworthy successors to _Grand Hotel_.

In the summer of 1935 I came once again into this life of the West End
with a play that for awhile was very successful. _The Mask of Virtue_
was a free English rendering of Sternheim's _Die Marquise von Arcis_,
which in turn was a dramatic version of a tale by Diderot. Sydney
Carroll, who presented this comedy, thought at first of calling it
_Virtuous Visor_ ("And with a virtuous visor hide deep vice"), which I
would have preferred. The plot was entirely in the spirit of _Les
Liaisons Dangereuses_, cynical and free-spoken; but what had interested
the German dramatist and now interested me was the task of bringing out
the eighteenth-century blend, or adulteration, of scandalous intrigue
with high-flown sentiment. The only thing to do was to make the
sentiment a comedy in itself, so that any character who pretended to
feel it sincerely should be the more preposterous the more he felt
himself to be sincere; and this was entertainment for a sophisticated
audience, balancing always on a fine razor-edge of irony and masquerade.
It was the very stuff for experienced comedians like Jeanne de Casalis
and Frank Cellier, and they made the most of it; but the play was
completely stolen by Vivien Leigh, a young actress whom nobody had seen
before. In the part of a girl, far from innocent, whose marriage to a
vain philosophizing Marquis consummates the revenge of his former
mistress, she managed by her own wit to remain within the frame of the
comedy and to present some sort of formal picture of beauty, inward
innocence and demure sophistication in place of the ordinary romantic
reality of the _ingnue_. This was quite a feat in a girl who was then
(if I may say it now) about as immature as any young actress could be.
Next morning Sternheim and I watched the line of people at the theatre
box-office with satisfaction, and then went off to drink together with a
mock-disgust worthy of the comedy. Here we were, two good Europeans in
our fifties who knew our playwriting job and had done it well enough;
there were Casalis and Cellier quite admirably realizing our intention;
and now came a slip of an actress with a virginal mask to run away with
the critics, the public and all. Having watched her at rehearsal, we
knew what she had done and what she hadn't, much better than the dazzled
reviewers and the gossip-writers who babbled of her sudden leap into
fame for days and weeks. "First entry of a film star" was one of
Sternheim's sarcasms as he went off to Brussels; I have not seen or
heard of him since.

Because of the rehearsals of this comedy I had cancelled an engagement,
long since agreed with the Spanish Embassy in London, to attend the
celebration of Lope de Vega's tercentenary in Seville. Even the project
of doing a play by Lope at the Mercury had fallen through. It was little
compensation, that summer, to see the _Faust_ in Salzburg which had been
washed out by weather on its production two years before. It now looked
ingenious and rather empty. The end of the great Reinhardt theatre
period had come, and it was hastened by the growing cleavage between
Germany and Austria and the consequent unreality of all theatrical
proceedings in Salzburg. Music became in effect the sole interest of the
Festival, which lasted a season or two more. I was myself occupied with
a play which Henri Lenormand had called _Crpuscule du Thtre_, leaving
the spectator to guess whether the twilight was that of sunset or dawn.
Although not a poetic drama it was a play about poetry in the theatre
and the fate that can overtake it at the hands of commercial production
and even "creative direction". It appealed to me as the subject for a
Mercury comedy, and Lenormand was good enough to let me remould it in
this sense. Eventually I produced it under the title _In Theatre
Street_, and the French author came over to give it his approval. This
summer was a time when I could write at leisure in the Austrian Alps and
at Trieste and Fiume, before driving by Bergamo and Turin over the
Mont-Cenis to Chambry and then by Bourg and the Church of Brou, through
the vineyards of Burgundy, to Fontainebleau and Paris. But in Italy
there had been decided mutterings, with experimental black-outs in ports
and inland cities; and in London it was said that our ships and theirs
were watching each other in the Mediterranean. Lenormand and I had
agreed that his twilight was not of the stage alone.

In the autumn of 1935, about the time of our opening of the theatre for
poets at the Mercury, came a London invasion of German and Austrian
artists who were hoping to follow in the train of the successful
Elisabeth Bergner. But the playgoing public of London is much less
cosmopolitan than the city as a whole--it is in fact rather
conservatively English--and the Continental style of acting with its
full register of expression, vocal and emotional, was not easily to be
harmonized with our own. A few men like Oskar Homolka, an old member of
Reinhardt's company, mastered the inflexions of our language pretty
well. Various leading ladies from Berlin and Vienna were unable to
understand why they had failed to make themselves equally understood.
But the main trouble, both for these artists and the producing managers
and directors who accompanied them as refugees, was the poverty of the
plays and parts they were able to offer. They could only have succeeded
if they had brought great drama with them and had shown themselves
indifferent to ordinary success. Our playgoers crowded instead to the
Old Vic to see young William Devlin in _Peer Gynt_, to the New Theatre
to a _Romeo and Juliet_ in which John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier
exchanged the parts of Mercutio and Romeo, or to the adventurous private
stages of the Gate and the Group. For the last of these Auden and
Isherwood had written _The Dog Beneath the Skin_, a political-musical
comedy with some poetry. As important as any of this drama of the time
was H. G. Wells's screen picture _Things to Come_, casting its long
significant shadow. Some of us also saw a portent in the first (and
almost certainly the last) London International Surrealist Exhibition,
where the real and the bogus in painting were fashionably mixed. Near
the end of the season came _The Seagull_ directed by Komisarjevsky; and
Chekhov, who had once been the dramatist of the few, now drew the town.

We had done a good season's work in my little theatre; and in that July
of 1936, having acquired the site for a new Mercury, I set out by car
with two English friends as passengers to drive across Belgium and
Germany to the mountains of the Salzkammergut. The Rhineland looked much
as usual as we followed the river for fifty miles, but there was a
choric mass-drama of some political significance in Heidelberg, which
was decorated so thickly with swastika flags that the old jutting
house-fronts were nearly hidden. We inspected photographs of an immense
concrete arena and a stage with hundreds of performers, and read the
accounts of the affair which were distributed in every language to the
tourist, and slept and passed on. It was more definitely unpleasing to
see the west front of the cathedral of Ulm, a building always open to
reproach as _kolossal_ but none the less magnificent, nearly obliterated
by more flaggery. In Munich, not far beyond the Rathaus, a new motor
road branched away across the plain toward the jagged line of mountains
which had seemed so far-off in student days and now towered visibly with
every minute's progress. I remember the last German village of
Mittenwald, crammed with summer visitors who were still pent-up within
their own frontier and eyed the British car enviously: there was sudden
stillness and solitude as we passed the customs post and entered
Austria. By nightfall we gained the valley which by now had become my
summer home; and a day or two later I saw my guests off the premises in
the manner of a host, escorting them nearly to the top of the high pass,
much encumbered that year by snow and ice, from which they could look
down on their own goal of Carinthia.

After my round of mountains and music came the real southward journey by
the pass from Salzburg into Italy; to Padua, Ferrara and Ravenna; to
Verona where Verdi's _Otello_ was sung in the Areni by star-and-searchlight
to twenty thousand listeners including ice-cream sellers; to Mantua
among the mosquito-ridden marshes; and back by the Trentino and Merano
to the Brenner, Innsbruck and Kitzbhel, from which place I had to make
an excursion to Schloss Mittersill to discuss a play with Gilbert
Miller. Here was one of the phenomena of those years in which Austria
was an international playground. A medieval castle with a courtyard and
rounded corner-turrets had been modernized by two counts, furnished with
works of art from all over Europe, and opened as a club hotel with the
rights of shooting, fishing, flying or what-not around the countryside.
I drove there to breakfast on the terrace with Miller, who was trying to
telephone Paris or New York, a way of his which caused much agitation in
the village post-office. International ladies, most of them ravishing in
_Dirndl_ dresses with the Schiaparelli cut, were peeping from the
casements as they finished their morning make-up. In the courtyard an
international gentleman in feathered cap, Tyrolean jacket and _Lederhosen_,
a gun slung negligently from his shoulder, was being photographed
standing with one foot on a chamois which had just become his prey. And
in 1936, maybe, nobody doubted that Austria and this life would last as
long as the castle's foundations in the living rock, on a height which
was a natural viewpoint for eternal Alps.

But two people entering Germany again by Kufstein, traversing the
crowded mountain villages, dining in the Ratskeller of sullen Munich and
going on by the Three Moors of Augsburg to the ill-named Freudenstadt in
the Black Forest, to reach the Rhine at the bridge of Kehl, could see
things quite otherwise. Nothing stood firm but the rock itself, all was
crumbling, much was already dust. That was a time when one could breathe
the more freely for being on the soil of France, standing in the shadow
of Strasbourg Cathedral, or seeing the storks in the fields of Alsace,
or sleeping in Nancy to look out in the morning on the gilt wrought-iron
gates and railings of the Place Stanislas. From Bar-le-Duc to Rheims the
switchback Roman road, one of the noblest surely in Europe, ran
steadfast through history; and wayfarers turning aside from it in the
heat of a late summer afternoon to rest on a bank among the thickets
needed no words to feel how old it was in time and action, older than
the cathedral of Rheims or the stone oxen that the masons had carried up
the steps to the height of Laon, a little further on the inevitable
westward way. At the end, after Soissons and Compigne, lay the very
heart of freedom among the forests, rivers and poplars of Ile-de-France.

If now the summer and winter seasons of this tale seem to succeed each
other with a swiftness of day and night, it is because my own work in
the London of these years has already been outlined. Eliot's play was
running again in the autumn of 1936 and more plays by poets were to
follow. The Mercury was the smallest of the independent professional
stages standing apart from the West End. But theirs was the living
spirit of our theatre, even though the older stage with much publicity
could exhibit work like _The Boy David_ by Barrie, played by Bergner,
directed by Komisarjevsky and rejected by the public within a month. The
Old Vic at its reopening could find nothing better on which to flourish
than the bawdy wit of _The Country Wife_, but in mid-season it made
amends with a full-length _Hamlet_ directed by Tyrone Guthrie with
Laurence Olivier as the Prince. Half a dozen producers led by Cochran
were preparing for the coming year with their "Coronation revue"; but
the parade of theatre at the time of the ceremony remained puny and
colourless. The exceptional play was _Victoria Regina_, written by
Laurence Housman for the little theatre stage, first produced at the
Gate, and carried later into Shaftesbury Avenue on a wave of sentiment
assisted by Edward's monarchical gesture in releasing it from the
Censor's ban. The summer brought a bus strike which shortened the run of
most plays, our own _F.6_ and _In Theatre Street_ among them. When our
third company with _Murder in the Cathedral_ dispersed after their
season at the Vic, not to reunite until just before their visit to
America, I was myself ready for Europe again. One needed no special
premonition to know that any journey now undertaken might be the last in
a decade or a lifetime.

From the Atlantic seaboard to the Tyrol is no great number of hundreds
of miles, less perhaps than are covered in a two-day span of desert or
prairie by an American driving from coast to coast in his own country.
But when the way lies by the heaths and orchards of Normandy and
cornfields of Maine, the vineyards of Orlanais and Nivernais and Cte
d'Or, the winding rivers of Franche-Comt and the hills and plains of
Alsace, leading through Swiss valleys to the Alps of Liechtenstein and
Vorarlberg, the panorama unfolded is the richest in Western Europe.
Parts of this way I knew already, mostly those to the eastward
traversing lakeside, pass and forest; but in that July of 1937 all the
road lay stretched in one significant and final picture. Final, because
not death but life could make such passage through the heart of old
Roman and Gaulish Europe impossible again; and the life that held such
power might itself be death in life, as it has proved to be. Such
thoughts brought with them the long silences in which this journey
largely passed, with eyes calmly and gravely scanning the tree-grown
line of the road, the shape of a belfry or the contour of a hill, the
movement of an ox-cart or the animation of a city, as eyes look on
things familiar that are about to vanish into memory.

Nor was it any great distance from our Austrian valley over the
Grossglockner road into Italy as in former years. It may be possible to
rise in the Salzkammergut at dawn and sup in Padua; but it is better to
sleep one night at least in the shadow of the Dolomites, which are
decorative towers more than mountains, and then to descend leisurely
into the Venetian plain through the smaller towns and cities with their
inland waterways making the effect of Venice in miniature. From Padua,
this year, the way was through Rovigo to Bologna, and thence over the
chain of hills between the Emilia and Tuscany, as far as Fiesole and
Florence. This latter road ran for sixty miles from hilltop to hilltop
through villages clustered about each summit, looking down into blue
valleys; and here on the cool heights in late afternoon were walking gay
and grave Florentines on summer vacation with their children, amid the
vines clambering on ancient walls. Certainly there was no need of any
words at dusk that evening: there is no approach to any place like this
approach to Florence from the hills, and I was to see the city for the
first time. It must have been about Fiesole, near the Roman theatre,
that a funeral procession with horses in black plumes drawing the hearse
and the mourners, and lighted by lanterns hanging from shafts and
carriage-roofs, came up the hill to the traditional burial in a high
place after dark. This may have broken the spell of silence, I do not
remember; but in a few moments I was driving along the Arno bank and
over the Ponte Vecchio itself, ignorant that such traffic is forbidden
and the policeman preventing it goes off duty after dark.

The true theatre of Florence is the Piazza della Signoria, and one need
imagine no other, least of all in the hot-weather season. Here in front
of the Old Palace were all the assemblies and popular tumults and
festivals and most of the executions of the city; and together they
comprise a drama beyond that of any covered playhouse. But this is no
place to write of Florence, though it may be noted how Pistoia and Prato
are brought by the road facilities of our time into the Florentine orbit
and even on to the actual Florentine stage, where they properly belong
because of their place in the Republic. They are now suburbs, as they
should be, of this great capital of art; and they bring their churches
and Della Robbia friezes into the complete dramatic picture. More
distant is Siena; and in mid-August, on the Monday after the Feast of
the Assumption, is the Palio.

Siena is reached from Florence by road in two or three hours, if you do
not break your neck on the way by trying to ascend one of the hilltops
crowned by fortresses, monasteries or just Tuscan villages, which rise
temptingly on every hand. The city itself is high-lying, windy and cool:
Baedeker will require from you at least a week in which to inspect its
churches and monuments. On the day of the great horse-race it is
besieged by people streaming on foot across the countryside, jogging in
carts along every byway, riding in coaches or cars or trains. The narrow
main street and the flights of steps that serve as side streets are so
congested that it is hardly possible to walk: this anticipates the final
crowding of a mass of humanity into the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele in
early afternoon to see the race.

This Tuscan city is divided into seventeen wards, which have been rivals
through centuries. Hence the Palio delle Contrade ("Banner of the
Wards"), a horse-race which puts the winning ward at the head of affairs
for a year. This seems as good a means of civic election as any other:
certainly it has the fullest support of the citizens. The course is
three times round the vast main square, on a cobbled roadway covered
with sand for the occasion; and the mass of the Sienese, reinforced by
country folk from all over Tuscany, crowd themselves into the middle of
the square behind wooden barriers, while privileged or paying spectators
look on from windows, balconies and platforms. Each horse and jockey
represents a ward, but only ten compete each time, seven being chosen by
turn and three by drawing lots. A larger number would increase the many
dangers of the race, which is ridden bareback with the jockeys
flourishing their whips and using them also as weapons. A horse running
wide at a bend can throw his rider against a porch or into the
spectators. The race is started by firing a mortar behind the runners,
who then bolt rather than gallop round the course. While they are
running the great bell of the city hall, which is visibly swinging out
and ringing above the heads of the crowd, is as good as silenced by the
shouting; otherwise it can be heard for ten miles. Generally not more
than three or four runners succeed in finishing. Each has previously
been sprinkled with holy water from the chapel of its ward, and the
whole festival is linked with the Virgin, who is patroness of the city:
her figure is painted on the banner which is the prize.

Before the race comes a full afternoon's parade of companies from the
wards, wearing their liveries and seated on decorated carts drawn by
white bulls or oxen. In front of them go heralds of fantastic skill, who
toss their banners high into the air so that they unfurl above and furl
themselves again as they are caught. This strutting and splendid
pageantry checks the procession here and there, and leads to individual
rivalries of throwing and catching amid a frenzy. After their circuit of
the square the companies take position on tiers of platforms, with
banners now waving slowly and continuously, to await the decision of the
race. It was not surprising to find Marinetti in Siena that day,
declaring that he would never miss a Palio and had flown from Rome to
see it. One thing he said which I find to be true: the spectacle is
medieval in aspect, living in spirit. Even should religion fail the
Sienese, it would survive as pagan drama.

And so back to the warmth of a Florentine midnight and the stillness of
the Lungarno. Summer theatre was ended for the present and perhaps for
good. The farewell to Florence was echoed at Pisa and Genoa, at Avignon
and the Pont du Gard and Vaucluse, and even at Marseilles: if they are
ever seen again they will be strangely different. Driving northward at
last to home and winter theatre, I paused only for a solitary glimpse of
the Roman stage at Orange by sunset; then rising at dawn reached Paris
in one day and Calais by noon the next. An innkeeper at Moulins said the
devil must be behind me; and in the light of these years I think he was
right.




  19

  NEW ENGLAND VENTURE


During the summer of 1937 the National Theatre Committee of which I was
a member had bought a London site. This step I had supported from a
feeling that a part of the large sum we had in hand, subscribed over
many years, should be so invested, leaving the remainder in securities
until the full amount for the erection of the theatre should be
available. At the time this seemed to be a common-sense proceeding, and
I see no reason to think we were wrong; although it is now unlikely that
the National Theatre of Great Britain will be built on the Kensington
site that we acquired. In 1941 an increasing part of London consists of
sites, and we shall find a larger and better space on which to build our
memorial to Shakespeare and home of dramatic art. But in 1937 the
gesture of the Trustees' purchase aroused hot controversy. Everybody
wrote to his or her newspaper (which Taine once declared to be the
English form of confessional) to say what they thought about the
National Theatre project in general. The dramatic critic of _The Times_
wrote to say in effect that such a theatre was now unnecessary: the Old
Vic and West End between them could make all the large-scale productions
that anybody wished to see, and newer dramatists could get their work
performed on experimental stages like those of the Gate and the Mercury.
A National Theatre (he argued) could only exist by producing classics or
by giving the stamp of academic recognition to modern work when the
virtue of originality had gone out of it. If I may answer him here, this
is the strongest case against anything national, whether a theatre or
opera or art gallery, and it deserves to be stated. I should never
expect the National Theatre to lead the way in any respect but its
general standard of production; but such a standard is worth
establishing and never was more desirable than now. Less subtle
opponents of the scheme merely wanted the funds as an endowment for the
Vic or Sadler's Wells, a purpose debarred by the Trust. Plenty of
die-hard resistance appeared in the ranks of the theatre profession as
the fear spread that something would at last be done. How far away, now,
is the time of such prejudices and blind oppositions! Some form of
National Theatre emerges as a national need: the private theatre can no
longer cope with its larger tasks. The question is only how, and not
why, it shall come into being; and that may well be determined by a
Ministry of Arts.

Meantime John Gielgud, representing the best on our traditional stage,
had opened with _Richard II_ his season's repertory, which was to
include _The School for Scandal_, _The Three Sisters_ and the _Merchant
of Venice_. This would have sufficed a National Theatre for a week of
good performances, and the Chekhov production made by Michel
Saint-Denis was in fact worthy of any stage in the world. The same
season was to bring us from America O'Neill's _Mourning Becomes Electra_
and Sherwood's _Idiot's Delight_, and from Prague Capek's _Power and
Glory_, beside _Time and the Conways_ and _Robert's Wife_ from our own
dramatists; so that there was no lack of drama in this last year before
world-politics began inevitably to dominate the scene.

At the Mercury, my way was now defined by force of circumstances. The
sole means of getting a theatre built on my own new site was to follow
up the success of _Murder in the Cathedral_, which thus far had never
failed us and in fact had everywhere exceeded expectations. We now
looked hopefully to America, though not particularly to New York, where
the success of the WPA had made that of another presentation doubtful.
Owing to Harvard associations, Boston could be regarded as Eliot's home
town, though he had been born further west in Saint Louis. An English
company bringing the work of an American-born poet to New England would
be pursuing a bold imaginative trail. Our plan therefore was to open at
Boston early in 1938, to make an extended tour of Philadelphia and
Washington and all the cities we could bring within our orbit, and
perhaps to venture a limited season in New York before sailing homeward
for the summer; then having made contacts with producing groups
like-minded to ourselves, to send out other companies, both English and
American, from coast to coast. And if one single tour, however
successful, could not quite build us our new theatre for English and
American poets, perseverance could achieve everything.

How nearly our plan succeeded and how far it miscarried will be worth
recording here: it is one of those failure stories that all can
understand. Our fate was decided on a single snowy day in Massachusetts;
but this is rather looking forward, for the first problem of the Mercury
was to decide the scope and framework of the tour. As a director, I
believe in the little theatre, and would always seek out the dramatic
audience that lies beyond Shaftesbury Avenue or Broadway. As a
playwright, I am used to big theatres and their producing managers who
think of thousands of dollars weekly where I think of hundreds. With our
successful play by a poet, should we tour America on little theatre
lines, going from town to town before sponsored audiences in colleges
and institutes, or should we boldly enter the round of big cities that
Broadway uses for its try-outs and road successes? The first of these
plans we should have to improvise entirely for ourselves, at every
disadvantage in distance and organization; but for the second we had
already the willing offer of co-operation from Gilbert Miller, whose New
York offices could book the tour and give us all their organizing
service. Our company would have accepted either way, but as theatre folk
they had their own ambitions. As I was to take the major risk, I made
the decision: we would join Miller and undertake the big-city tour.
While the company were still playing in English towns before sailing, I
slipped away on the _Ile-de-France_ to New York. During a few days
there, the weather became news, as usual in January when zero has once
been reached; and as I stepped from the overnight train to Boston it was
"plenty below", as a coloured porter told me. The newslines put it at
twenty below, which is cold enough.

None but a Londoner perhaps can relish the city of Boston to the full;
and then only when he had lived in other cities of Europe and measured
their history. Not that the place is beautiful at a first glance. The
water-front section is as grim as that of any port can be, some of the
main streets look like the dullest of Manchester, and a good part of
Back Bay consists of avenues of smug residences in the manner of
Kensington. One can understand why some Americans say glibly that Boston
is dead and doesn't know it. But the slope of the Common has the sweep
and surge of no other green space that I have seen in a city; and the
colonial spires and frontages, the Old State House and the gilt-domed
capitol of Massachusetts, match the vista of the near-by Cambridge with
Harvard stretching along the shores of the Charles River. The skaters in
the Gardens move in what might well be the luminous winter-piece of a
Dutch master: the shop-fronts of the Italian quarter exhibit delectable
and multitudinous wedding-cakes with sugar effigies of bride and
bridegroom: the clubs around the old town are full of shrewd, hardy,
kindly gentlemen of fifty upward who, but for their welcome to the
stranger, are more like clubmen than any actor could make them: on
Beacon Hill prim housemaids in caps come out to polish the brass
door-knockers of lace-curtained houses which, when one visits them for
dinner, prove to contain great spoils of travel in the tapestries and
paintings of Europe: down in dockland Irish voices hurl mighty Irish
oaths which are hushed as his reverence goes by: among the inner suburbs
a temple of Science rises, imposing and somewhat frigid, to enshrine the
memory of Mary Eddy: down crooked Washington Street flows the stream of
a modern humanity like any other in America or the world.

I had days in which to view all this, before the Cunarder on which my
company had sailed direct from Liverpool was due to berth. Meantime the
frost had turned to thaw and flood, a horizontal rain blew in from the
Atlantic, and the ship which had been signalled for dawn drew alongside
at sunset instead. We were all just in time to see the first performance
of _Our Town_ on any stage: it happened opposite the theatre in which we
were to open a week later. Part of the night was well spent in talking
with Thornton Wilder in a coffee-house. Next day one of our cast, Chris
Casson, developed an appendix which had to come out: his mother Sybil
Thorndike was luckily in New York with a play and could visit him. We
opened with our own play quite moderately, for Boston was not going to
take anything on trust; but the house reacted well and the reviews were
good. Two or three indecisive evenings followed, with the receipts
dropping and not much booking going on. It seemed that the play had
definitely failed, by all reasonable standards; and how could we hold
out for a second week in Boston followed by a fortnight in Philadelphia
(an uncertain theatre town) and weeks in Washington and Pittsburgh? We
were a company far from home, risking limited capital, in the hope of
making money for a poet's theatre in London: not even our return fares
were guaranteed. At this juncture Gilbert Miller telephoned from New
York, sincerely concerned for our position. Without offering advice he
asked me what were our prospects. I tried to be cheerful, but he was
pessimistic after considering the returns of several nights. It seemed
that Boston might be a trap for theatre optimists; and I was bound to
think of _Our Town_, a fine sensitive work, which had played to empty
houses for a week and closed with a loss of thousands. Perhaps New York
was better for us; for that city at least knew our play and had rallied
to it once already. In a few hours the decision was taken: we would play
our two weeks in Boston, cancel Philadelphia and Washington and the rest
of the tour, and open in New York within a fortnight. The alternative
for the company might well be sailing home again from Boston without
seeing Broadway or Fifth Avenue at all.

It was snowing hard as I went back to the theatre in late afternoon,
knowing the step now taken to be irrevocable. A few people seemed to be
standing outside on the sidewalk, and others were casually joining them:
it took me time to discover that this was the tail-end of a line
extending into the lobby and across to the box-office. I asked the
manager what all these people were doing, for there must have been fifty
of them; he said they were waiting to buy tickets for our play. For no
reason a box-office line had suddenly formed around lunch-time, and it
had been there ever since. More business had been done in three hours
than in the previous week. Maybe it was the weather: no, it couldn't be
the weather which was shocking. Then they might have been reading the
reviews; or maybe those Harvard boys who had enquired about the play
were through with their examinations. Such mysteries always envelop
theatre bookings: we were happily surprised when the receipts jumped by
a thousand dollars that night, and the first week ended with full
houses. The second week began in the same way; and nobody but myself had
any misgivings about the turn events had taken. The company argued that
if they were doing so well in Boston, they would do well in any big
city. The tour might have been successful, but there was time enough for
that: now and not the summer was the right season for Broadway. Such is
the effect on the actor of a full house: he feels (reasonably) that
everybody wants to see him everywhere. I left for New York to await the
company, and there learned that Philadelphia had shown an eager interest
in our visit and a good part of the Diplomatic Corps was to have
attended our first night in Washington. All this was too late.

We opened in New York before a dull house and had mixed notices. Here
_Murder in the Cathedral_ was no longer news, but an echo of something
that had been urgent and thrilling news. The houses fell gently away for
several weeks, assisted by a political depression spreading from Europe
(for this was the spring of the Eden resignation, the early stage of
appeasement and the invasion of Austria). It was not so good to be an
Englishman in America at that time. We began piling up debts, and then
the play came off, although the audiences filled up at the end. A tour
was now impossible, for nobody wanted a Broadway failure. We made the
usual efforts to raise fresh capital and carry on: to get ourselves
transported to Canada: to arrange a university tour at short notice. Our
scenery, with which we ought never to have encumbered ourselves--the
Mercury in New York was playing to capacity with none at all--was carted
away for destruction so that it should incur neither import duties nor
return freight charges. The Miller offices handsomely produced ocean
fares, and by twos and threes we made our way disconsolately back to
Europe. The Atlantic had never been so smooth or England so green as
that spring. It was clear, looking back, that we had missed our mark of
success by just three hours on that February day in Boston. Fate did not
intend me to start building that new theatre for the poets; which had it
been begun, would probably by now have been knocked down again.

But the work of the Mercury was crippled for months, while we limited
production to pay off debts on this side. I remember the rich enjoyment
of seeing _The Three Sisters_, and about the same time a passing note on
_Idiot's Delight_: "Let us hope it will not have to be recorded that
several plays like this were to be seen a year or two before the Second
Great War". Odets's _Golden Boy_ came along in the summer to confirm the
hold of young American drama on the London playgoer. Shaw's _Geneva_ was
produced at Malvern, and so the dramatist in his eighties made the
yearly gesture of proving himself right and all the world wrong. Gilbert
Miller, back in London, had formed the plan of a dramatic version of
_War and Peace_, which was to be written in German jointly by Alfred
Neumann and Erwin Piscator and directed by Piscator himself with all the
resources (though they were in fact simple) of stage mechanization. The
use of platforms and stage boxes for characters making their commentary
on the play, of moving backgrounds for the personages within it, and of
puppet soldiers amid artificial mists on the field of Borodino, were
among them. I was to make the English version; and so in July of 1938 I
was met by Miller on the airfield of Zurich and driven out to Rapperswil
on the lake where the writing of the play was going on. Everything in
the script was perfectly feasible, and the main characters stood out
from the action with a stark Tolstoyan reality: the main problems were
those of a director rather than an author or translator, for the play at
best could only be a "Journey through _War and Peace_", unless it were
to be performed in a cycle lasting a week. Maybe this play will yet be
performed; but its prospects were already fading when I visited Piscator
in Paris in early September. This was an excursion from the forest of
Compigne, where the Spahis riding to water their horses each morning
made the sound of a thousand gentle waterfalls on the cobbles of the
Place du Palais--a last happy recollection of France. No Austria that
year, for Munich loomed instead.

The London autumn season opened with Bridie's _Tobias and the Angel_ in
Regent's Park and Charles Morgan's _The Flashing Stream_ in the West
End. The stage was hard-hit for a fortnight by the European crisis, but
recovered briskly and for a while reflected the complacent view of
Munich and the future. Writers were few and drama uncertain. The
high-light of the season proved to be John Gielgud's revival of _The
Importance of Being Earnest_, which was to continue, well recast, into
the season after.

The fortunes of the Mercury were soon restored by another revival, that
of _The Playboy of the Western World_ which I had long wanted to make.
Maire O'Neill, who had created Pegeen Mike and played the part for
twenty years, became the Widow Quin; and Cyril Cusack from the Abbey in
Dublin brought a rich classic quality to Christy Mahon. With them were
old members of the Irish Players company, Brefni O'Rorke and Harry
Hutchinson. We were crowded for months, and this was another play to run
forward into the first war season, when streets were darkened and
theatres hard to find, but nights were quiet. At the Mercury and later
at the Duchess _The Playboy_ must have come before an entire new
generation of listeners and spectators, and it was good to see how well
it bore the character of an established masterpiece. Synge's world of
imagination had never been actual, as actuality is understood by writers
for the lifelike stage, including most playwrights who have written for
the Abbey Theatre. Now that a generation had passed since the play's
appearance in 1907, and the echoes of all mistaken controversy about it
had died away, its other reality as work of art became plainer than
ever. The death of Yeats, in the first month of our revival, recalled
how much _The Playboy_ had owed to him and how closely it was linked
with all poetic drama.

And now there is little more to say about my journey through theatre,
before thinking of to-morrow which is present to the mind of all who
travel. The last original production of the Mercury, about Christmas of
1939, was the _Mandragola_ of Machiavelli, licensed for English
performance after 400 years. I had come across it in an odd way, through
visiting a Kensington auction sale to buy wine and picking up instead a
parchment-bound Italian copy of the _Works_ in the first edition of
1550, where the two Florentine comedies are bound up with all the
Machiavellian essays and poems. About the same time a young Florentine
director came to me from Rome, introduced by Silvio d'Amico, to study
our English little theatre work before forming his own company in Italy.
Together we went through the classical comedy scene by scene, and from
our joint notes I began a paraphrase of it with some development of the
women characters whom Machiavelli had treated in the Roman manner,
leaving them closely walled in a tower of action around which the men
run and make merry. All this was in the summer of 1939, when my
Florentine friend had to leave overnight with a regretful handshake. The
_Mandragola_ that emerged was no antiquarian piece, but definitely a
comedy of modern thought in costume; and as such I was able to offer it
to a cast including John Laurie, who played the celebrated part of
Nicia, and Sarah Churchill as his young wife Lucrezia. We scored fifty
performances in the coldest midwinter England has known; and the
Machiavellian comedy joins the line of plays we have created and hold
for the future.

Meantime every past experience of failure or success comes into
perspective as an event before the time of silent stages, vanished
players, scattered onlookers and scars or rubble-heaps that mark the
frontage of theatre to-day. These actually have put the full-stop to my
tale, which has been concerned in the main with forms of creative effort
possible only in a capital city. But a brave and considerable remnant of
drama has now taken to the road, where it is played not in theatres only
but in halls and barns, inns and workshops, churches and factories.
Maybe now I shall join in that adventure too, for the gap between past
and future is not to be bridged by clinging to any single hearth, even
this beloved London which I leave unwillingly for a single night. Memory
and association are things too precious in themselves, too significant a
part of a man's life, to become habitual only. In a sense, the more one
breaks with them the richer they grow.




  20

  AFTERWARD AND FORWARD


Looking from my window on this late spring morning in 1941 I see how
little has been changed, physically, in the months that have passed.
They have been among the darkest known to mankind; yet visibly within
this limited view they have left no more trace than here a roofless
house, there a row of blackened empty doorways or an array of sightless
casements, and, more distant, a spire truncated to the form of obelisk.
London's foliage, until now held back by the coldness of the season,
bursts forth in a rich untarnished green. The outline of the city holds
good, if the fabric it defines is something of a shell. A haze of old
smoke and new hangs over the horizon. In the streets are fewer
passers-by.

Behind this curtain of our city that has become an actual battleground,
beyond the duel of narrow Straits or the struggle of the Middle Sea,
drama is moving even more grimly in men's minds than it moves bodily in
the masses who grope for bread or light or lodging. Individual men and
women, utterly isolated and often without word or knowledge of those
nearest to them, cut off from their fellow-strangers by mistrust and
from every reasonable orientation by tyranny, are looking out from the
stage on which their tragedy is played and asking themselves if any
spectator any longer lives to see and understand it, or if all the world
together must be plunged into the action.

Such isolation is a doom of the time that has come upon us, and we need
not relate it too closely to military conquest or political circumstance
or the ending of travel. It is linked with all of them together. More
people stand alone than ever before, that is the simple European fact.
Disintegration of the community, inhibition of movement, withdrawal of
the individual into himself are three direct consequences of the
assumption by the State of increased powers. Over tracts of thousands of
miles solitary men and women, facing elementary problems, are the sole
survivors (though they exist in multitude) of what yesterday was called
civilization. So far we have already moved toward the condition of life
that Wells described in _Things to Come_. By a supreme effort, Western
man will prevent a disaster in which he himself could become a solitary
cave-dweller among ruins, harnessing ox or ass to his former car and
going out to scratch for roots in untilled fields. He will save himself
and the world; but his task for a generation will be to restore the
place of the individual in social life and yet to sustain the fabric of
the community. Though it may be a commonplace of current thought, I try
to put this down because it is a deep concern of the dramatist. The
world of which he must write has already changed basically and not in
any superficial consequence of "one more war". And I am pausing here
finally to think of the relation of drama to the future, the period of
time that has always interested me most.

To a writer action and thought, dream and perception are all one, or
should be so. Some man's eyes must see, or try to search out, the drama
that is played within the proscenium of outward fact. A new figure
stands on the stage, the protagonist and hero of to-day's action, the
figure of solitary man on whom the blow of an evil fate has fallen. The
calamity was foreign to his own life and came against his will:
certainly he never brought it on himself by any frenzy of nationalism or
greed. None the less he feels a spiritual responsibility for its
happening at all, for its ever having been allowed to happen; and such a
consciousness relates him, as a citizen of any country, to the figures
of Greek tragedy who carried their burden of guilt from one generation
to the next. This consciousness, again, ensures final expiation and the
making of all things clear, even without the agency of a Messenger
coming in haste, like one of the bearded Attic goatherds toward the
close of the drama, to interpret the riddle of the plot. With or without
the god from the machine, with or without a personal faith in anything
but age-long justice, this solitary man stands in his own right,
resolved to wrest from the struggle a meaning and a solution.

Yes, we shall ask the dramatist to mark this man and bring him on to the
physical stage of the theatre and let him speak for himself; which does
not imply starting again the old kind of dramatic argument about
politics or economics which used to be mistaken for dramatic conflict
because it was wittily conducted on the stage. Let this man speak from
his own solitude of what has befallen him. His is the figure we salute
while freedom remains to us, and would salute in servitude if we were
brought to such a pass.

When he speaks in the theatre, this man whom we might call simply
Agonistes will use words of poetry as well as prose, and he will be
exciting and entertaining as well as moving. He will certainly talk to
himself in the form of soliloquy without asking whether or not a
realistic probability requires it; and he may have other voices to speak
for him in the shape of the Chorus, which is not merely a ritual
survival in the theatre but a living instrument used effectively by
dramatic poets of our time. Chorus speaks directly to the listener and
spectator, where characters in the ordinary play speak to him indirectly
through their dialogue with each other. Chorus is the highest means of
declaration and commentary. There will be Chorus in comedy as well as
tragedy, which need not be proportionately the dominant form of the
theatre, although its restoration in full sweep and power is certain.

Many dramatic developments of this kind could have been forecast years
ago, and some of them had already come about; but now we are entering a
world of general renewal in which the renewal of theatre will play a
definite part, and that must hasten them greatly. Assent, rather than
dissent, will govern the creative mind. This is to look forward boldly,
but not blindly. The matters on which men agree count for more than
those on which they differ. Where no standards are, there is no tragedy
and no comedy and no theatre at all. Solitary man, issuing victorious
from an ideological struggle in which one combatant would deny him
individual right and the other has not yet determined how widely or how
soon it shall be granted, will erect the standards for himself. And in
the theatre Auden had already spoken for him in _The Ascent of F.6_ as
long ago as 1937:

  O you, who are the history and the creator
  Of all those forms in which we are condemned to suffer;
  To whom the intelligent and necessary is also the just;
  Show me my path, show all of us, that each upon
  This mortal star may feel himself the danger
  That under his hand is softly palpitating.
  Quieten that hand, interpret fully the commands
  Of the four centres and the four conflicting winds,
  Those torn between the charities O reconcile,
  And to the human vision lead of one great meaning,
  Linking the living with the dead, within the shadow
  Of which uplifting, loving and constraining power
  All other reasons do rejoice and operate.

This is said by a character in a modern play; and when drama is once so
imagined it creates a theatre for itself. So it is needless for me to
prolong this narrative by saying just how I foresee the future of the
physical playhouse, its architecture and stage, and the players and
directors who will work in it. I think the changes in respect of all of
them will be fundamental. The first is likely to be a rebirth of
simplicity based upon poverty, which may seem at first to narrow the
horizon of the theatre but in effect will widen it fully by throwing the
dramatist first of all, and after him the actors and director, back upon
the resource of imagination.

I have tried in this book to do two things I have never done before: to
look backward and to write about myself. Both have been simpler than I
anticipated; and perhaps for the reason that both have been concerned
with the truth of art as I see it, and not with the much more
miscellaneous and perplexing "truth" about life. The record has been
integral, but it does not pretend to generality in the personal or any
other sense. Looking backward is a thing I have enjoyed because the
scene of movement has so often taken the shape of theatre; yet I do not
want to see this play of outer life again. I have seen it once and
profited by the entertainment and that is enough. What is to come
absorbs me far more, for the act of preparation and the development of
the drama are over, and I find nothing forbidding in the word
catastrophe, which means only solution and clarification, whether
through a Messenger or otherwise. Actually I would wish nothing better
for myself than now, in this opening of the new drama which follows the
conclusion of the old, to take the character of solitary man and join
him as comrade in his anonymous, unbroken and not unfriendly ranks.




  INDEX


  Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 155-6, 240

  Achurch, Janet, 6, 85

  Amico, Silvio d', 191, 241

  Amiel, Denys, 109, 190

  Archer, William, 35-6, 80-81

  Armstrong, William, 121

  Ashcroft, Peggy, 149, 154

  Athens, 141-4

  Auden, W. H., 202, 209-10, 220, 247


  Ballet Club, 154, 159

  Ballet Jooss, 176

  Baty, Gaston, 64, 109, 122, 136

  Baylis, Lilian, 157, 208

  Becque, Henry, 109, 185

  Benavente, Jacinto, 65

  Bennett, Arnold, 42, 194-5

  Berkeley, Calif., 166-8

  Berlin, theatres, 172-3, 175, 181-4, 185-6

  Bernard, J. J., and Tristan, 109

  Besier, Rudolf, 32, 202

  Boston, Mass., 234-5

  Bridie, James, 157

  Brooke, Rupert, 31-2, 45

  Brown, John Mason, 92

  Browne, E. Martin, 203-8

  Browne, Maurice, 148

  Bruckner, Ferdinand, 158

  Burgtheater, Vienna, 24, 104-6, 124-6


  Caine, Hall, 195

  Cambridge Festival Theatre, 109, 119, 121, 161

  Canterbury Festival, 204-5

  Capek, Josef, 127

  Carlsbad, 127-8

  Carroll, Sydney, 180, 217

  Censorship of Plays, 9

  Charrington, Charles, 85

  Charrington, Nora, 85

  Chekhov, Anton, 35-6, 220, 231

  Chinese Theatre, San Francisco, 168-9

  Cologne, theatres, 51-5

  Compagnie des Quinze, 157-8, 161

  Copeau, Jacques, 64, 135, 158, 197

  Corfu, 140

  Court Theatre, 7-8

  Coward, Noel, 65, 92, 161

  Craig, Edward Gordon, 66, 137-138, 197

  Crystal Palace, 55

  Curel, Franois de, 88

  Curie, Mme., 70

  Curie, Richard, 41


  Denham, Reginald, 146

  Diaghilev, Serge, 66, 155

  Drinkwater, John, 62

  Dublin, 155-6

  Duhamel, Georges, 64

  Dullin, Georges, 64, 109


  Eliot, T. S., 41, 202-5, 211

  _Elizabeth of England_, 158-9

  Elsenborn Camp, 50-51

  Epidaurus, Theatre of, 142

  Epstein, Jacob, 41

  Ervine, St. John, 8, 80

  Everyman Theatre, 65, 88

  Expressionism, 51-2


  Fabian Society, 8

  Farquharson, Robert, 120, 146

  Feuchtwanger, Lion, 131-4

  Flecker, James Elroy, 82

  Florence, 225-7

  Fogerty, Elsie, 205

  France, Anatole, 43

  Frohman Repertory, 33


  Gantillon, Simon, 109, 122, 162

  Gate Theatre Studio, 119, 122

  Gaudier-Brzeska, 41

  Gmier, Firmin, 108

  Gielgud, John, 120, 202-3, 231, 239

  Giraudoux, Jean, 175-6

  Glyndebourne, 189

  Godfrey, Peter, 122

  Granville-Barker, H., 7, 42, 202

  Gray, Terence, 121-2

  Gregor, Josef, 126, 197

  Gropius, Walter, 191

  Guitry, Lucien, 3

  Guitry, Sacha, 111


  Hall, Anmer, 159

  Hammond, Aubrey, 88, 91

  Harrison, Frederick, 89

  Hauptmann, Gerhart, 78-9, 172

  Hellbrunn, 123

  Hicks, Seymour, 185

  Hilpert, Heinz, 158, 183

  Hollywood, Calif., 170-71

  Howard, Sidney, 92, 111

  Hulme, T. E., 40-42, 45


  Isherwood, Christopher, 204, 209, 220


  Jackson, Sir Barry, 121, 149

  _Jew Sss_, 131-4, 148, 151-3

  Jouvet, Louis, 64, 109, 136, 175


  Kaiser, Georg, 54, 58, 63

  Karsavina, Tamara, 36

  Kataev, Valentin, 185

  Komisarjevsky, Theodore, 111, 120

  Kommer, Dr. Hugo, 113

  Kropotkin, Prince, 8


  Lang, Matheson, 45, 119-20, 131-132, 151-2

  Langer, Frantisek, 127

  Laughton, Charles, 120, 181

  Leigh, Vivien, 217-18

  Lenormand, H. R., 109, 136, 219

  Lyric, Hammersmith, 61-2, 68


  Macdermott, Norman, 65, 88

  Macleish, Archibald, 208-9

  _Man with a Load of Mischief, The_, 86-95, 125-6, 171, 180

  Maddermarket, Norwich, 79, 147

  Malvern Festival, 149-50, 157

  _Mandragola_, 17, 240-41

  Marinetti, 191, 197, 228

  Marsh, Sir Edward, 32

  Marshall, Norman, 122

  Maugham, W. S., 31, 60, 73

  Mercury Theatre, 4-5, 181, 185, 203-4, 206-15, 218-19, 223-4, 239-41

  Miller, Gilbert, 120, 235, 238-9

  Mitchelhill, J. P., 207

  Mittersill, Schloss, 222

  Moissi, Alexander, 111, 128

  Monck, Nugent, 79

  Monte Carlo, 115-6

  Morgan, Charles, 239

  Munich, 12-25, 69, 78

  Munro, C. K., 72-3

  _Murder in the Cathedral_, 204-8, 232-7


  Naples, 139

  National Theatre, 230-31

  Neumann, Alfred, 118-20, 238

  Nevinson, C. R. W., 41

  _New Age, The_, 30, 40

  New York, 91-2, 162, 207, 237

  Nijinsky, Vaslav, 36


  Oberammergau, 187-8

  Obey, Andr, 157

  O'Casey, Sean, 111, 148, 156, 202

  Old Vic, 45, 80, 181, 208, 220

  Olympic Games, 170

  O'Neill, Eugene, 65, 175


  Pallenberg, Max, 111, 128, 177

  Panama Canal, 163-4

  Percy, Esme, 55

  Petrolini, 198

  Phoenix, the, 62-3

  Pirandello, Luigi, 71, 191, 198

  Piscator, Erwin, 129-30, 145, 238-239

  Pitoff, Georges, 64, 109

  _Playboy of the Western World_, 39, 239-40

  Playfair, Sir Nigel, 68, 88

  Poetic Drama, 201-15

  Prague, 127

  Priestley, J. B., 216-17

  Printemps, Yvonne, 111


  Rambert, Marie, _the author's wife_, 5, 147, 154

  Reinhardt, Max, 34-5, 75, 106-7, 112-13, 145, 161, 177

  Rjane, Mme., 3

  Rice, Elmer, 64

  Ricketts, Charles, 158

  Robinson, Lennox, 156

  Romains, Jules, 64, 119, 136, 190

  Rome, Convegno Volta, 190-200

  Rothe, Hans, 128, 186

  Russian Ballet, 36-7, 65-6


  Sadler's Wells, 156-7

  Saint-Denis, Michel, 157, 231-2

  Salten, Felix, 106

  Salzburg Festival, 111-13, 123-4, 145, 176-8, 218-19

  San Francisco, 165-70

  Seignobos, Professor, 70

  Shaw, G. B., 7, 10, 23-4, 35-6, 61, 68, 134, 149

  Sherriff, R. C., 148

  Siena, the _Palio_, 226-8

  Sorge, Reinhard, 51-2

  Speaight, Robert, 205

  Stage Society, 32, 43, 72-3, 79, 88-9, 119, 122

  Stendhal, 28-9, 38

  Sternheim, Carl, 217-18

  Stratford Festival, 150, 161

  _Such Men are Dangerous_, 120-21, 131

  _Sumurun_, 34-5

  Synge, J. M., 39, 155-6, 239-40


  Tairov, A., 191, 198

  _Theatre Arts_, 82-3, 154

  Thimig Family, the, 107, 113

  Toller, Ernst, 57, 73-8, 129-30


  Vatican City, 195-6

  Vaucluse, 136-7, 229

  Venice, 114-15, 178-9

  Vieux-Colombier, 64

  Vildrac, Charles, 64


  Walkley, A. B., 44, 79-80

  War of 1914-18, 45-7

  Wedekind, Frank, 17, 129

  Welles, Orson, 212

  Wells, H. G., 10, 220, 244

  Whitworth, Geoffrey, 81

  Wilder, Thornton, 101, 235

  Williams, Emlyn, 216

  Wolfe, Humbert, 209


  Yeats, W. B., 190, 197, 203, 240

  Yosemite Valley, 170

  Young, Stark, 92, 94


  Zurich, 25-30


  THE END


  _Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited,
  _Edinburgh_.


  =Transcriber's Notes:=
  - hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in the
    original (other than as listed below)
  Page 64, L, Oeuvre des Athltes ==> L'Oeuvre des Athltes
  Page 72, company of" real" ==> company of "real"
  Page 101, stage of Thornton's Wilder's ==> stage of Thornton Wilder's
  Page 103, the physical mediun ==> the physical medium
  Page 194, sunshine behind Giusep pe ==> sunshine behind Giuseppe
  Page 220, its long significent shadow ==> its long significant shadow




[End of The Scene is Changed, by Ashley Dukes]
