How the Plots Thicken

Even Grey Science Does Not Alter the Eternal Cycle of the Dramas

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

AGRECIAN stroller once fell into the habit of singing things in praise of Bacchus from his cart—and that, says Isaac Disraeli, was "the beginning of the theatrical representation of the ancients".

Pilgrims, returning from the Holy Land in the Middle Ages, sang canticles of their journeys, weaving into them scenes of which Christ and the Apostles were the devotional themes. And here was the beginning, in turn, of the theatrical representations of the moderns.

Turn it into a generality—and I think it will be as good a generality as any: Drama must begin with wanderers' praises of whatever gods there be. Thereafter, it will settle down to resident membership, and to the smaller affairs of mortals. From the Whitsun Mysteries of Chester, from The Creation,The Deluge and The Last Supper, to such, a mundane Morality as The Condemnation of Feasts, to the Praises of Diet and Sobriety for the Sake of the Human Body, the way is typical. And equally simple the transition from Judas, the great betrayer, to the City Feller who brings ruin down upon the Old Homestead of today. For, in point of fact, all plots begin in God and struggle towards the Everyday.

I CANNOT recite for you—not here, at any rate—the seven standard plots of fiction and drama. It is foolish to rely on any such bondage of invention. You might as well say that all music is slave to eight notes and cannot escape them. The seven plots have been amenable to seventy thousand variations, just as the eight notes of music have been moulded in Beethoven symphonies, liquified in nocturnes of Debussy, crisped and splintered into the glittering facets of Stravinsky. Once upon a time the eight notes were only one, the single roar of the breath of an amazed savage through a conch-shell. Once upon a time the seven plots were only one, a tribal dance on Sctybos, an untrained, impetuous mimicry of the will to live and worship.

It is not the similarity of plots and plots I marvel at. All life is only a plagiarism on the past. On the contrary, I take this similarity for granted, and so those several nights per week which I am hired to give over to attendance at the theatre become, instead, periods of pure wonder that so few plots should make so many utterly different plays. When I consider, for instance, how contrarily Euripides, Shelley and Artzibashev approached the theme of incest, I realize that incest has three totally unrelated meanings. Certainly,three moods.

And the mood is the key which gives every old plot its new resolution. Shakespeare could make a comedy of such a plot as Measure for Measure has. How many farceurs have made beery jigs of it, since? How many playwrights of the best intentions have turned it into maudlin tragedy? Or take, for example, plot number two or three of the standard seven: two ladies in love with the one gentleman. Think over the army of variations on this theme which you yourself have met upon the field of theatre. The muster will take you all the way back to the brink of the Greeks, who never bothered about such low topics as loving ladies at all.

What the plots of today are having a devil's own time with is heroism. This is the age of the sense of the ridiculous. No character can be a hero to his playwright any more. That complicates the hitherto simple rights of melodrama. It mocks and frazzles the handsome old theme of virtue rewarded and villainy punished. No one dares present you with a hero who is not, through three out of the four acts, either a drunkard, a dub or the victim of an inferiority complex. No one dares give you a villain, any longer, whose lascivious and antisocial conduct is not to be justified by the unavoidable condition of his glands. The black and white fictions of life, as melodrama used to see it, are out of date and out of keeping. All is grey science nowadays.

If Oswald had committed social high-jinks and begotten melancholy in some version of Ghosts written long before Ibsen, there would be nobody to censure for it excepting Oswald, ipse. But now it is Oswald's father who bears the brunt of the blame, his mother who is victimized—and the sins of the children are visited upon the third and fourth generation ol ancestors. We have lost faith in even our own faults.

Even the rudimentary old "murder will out" plot has put forth innumerable ramifications. The mystery plays of today are self-conscious splurges in horror, shrieks, deathdealing telepathy, fatal rays, gorillas rampant. Not one self-respecting thrill per act, but fifty a minute, until the din of excitement has become sheer hubbub and sprawl. Sometimes, when they realize this with just a twinge ol conscience, they call it a "farcical mystery play" or a "burlesque melodrama", and think the curse has thereby been averted.

BUT plots are the constants of the drama, no matter how we colour them. Old operas used to have librettos based on the babyswitching plot. They were fearfully serious about it. You knew from the very start of the overture that Manrico would turn out to be the real Duke, and that the Duke would be shown up in the mountain pass scene as just a gypsy boy who had grown up in the wrong environment, owing to a slight mix-up in their cradles at the common age of two or three weeks. But it was nothing to giggle at. Not at Italian opera, anyhow. Until, of course, along came W. S. Gilbert and burlesqued these babyswitching plots for all they were and weren't worth; and along came Oscar Wilde, with his Miss Prism and her mixed-up manuscript and perambulator . . . and everyone had a gorgeous time spoofing and sputtering over the baby-switchers. But travesty never ruined a good plot. You can't keep the switchers down. Two of the most unhumorous dramas of this season have based their plots on ibbety-bibbetybaby-business, precisely the same old cribsnatching which made grand opera dullest and most profitable.

In the long run, of course, those ancient and honourable plots which are the closest to the start of drama are the safest. The Mary Magdalene plot is a gorgeous instance. The sinner repentant, the funereal wages, the final forgiveness—this has lasted up through the ages. It is just as affecting today as it was when the Wooldyers' Guild used to enact it as a Passion piece ol Holy Week in some old English marketplace. But try too tricky a variation on it and see what happens. It may have a furious little vogue—The V nr hast cued Woman had but it will not be food for revivals. Whilst Manon Lescaut, simply because she atones her giddy life in exile and sings and sobs her way to a shallow grave, will go on being popular forever and aye.

A WISE old gentleman whose name some of Aus have run across in the course of four healthy and more or less beneficial years at college—Aristotle, I mean—took great pains to divide tragedy into the simple and the complex. But I imagine that Time has done an even better job at that than Aristotle. For the progression of dramatic plots, especially tragic plots, has been of its own accord from the simple to the complex. Arty malcontents to the contrary notwithstanding, any theatre audience is willing to pack more honest and intensified thinking into half an hour's watching of a play today than our forefathers used to spread over the whole Ring cycle, the Shakespearian repertory and both Iphigcnias combined. The simple plot is no longer for us. We think in half-tones and we feel in semi-quavers. We want our plays to do likewise.

Or perhaps that is not really and deeply what we want. Perhaps, quite oppositely, we are hankering for a return to the old plots set forth :n the old simple way. That would go far to explain the movies. The movies are unashamed about their heroisms, their crime-clues, their double-dyed punishments, their catch-as-catchcan passions. We rail at them for being childish, atavistic, but we attend and applaud them in droves for probably this very same reason. They are the cut-back from complexity. They are the assurance of a life where good is good and bad unalterably bad, where a black moustache and a leer are still irrefutable evidence of villainy, where a woman's honour is still something worth, shooting about, and a sissy still something to be ducked in the lake.

I cannot say. All I do know is that, when I come out of the theatre where a highly involved, undetermined modern drama has chased its causes and reflections all around the crepuscular stage for three wrinkle-browed hours, I feel no such,great satisfaction with myself and my world as I once did when chirruping home from a gallery scat at Bertha the Sezvmg-Machine Girl. It is too terrible to think of the drama as having outgrown its standard plots.

But, cheer up, it never will.