The World to Play With

A Playwright and a Stage Director Exchange—a Little Banteringly—Their Views on the Theatre

ASHLEY DUKES

PLAYWRIGHT: You know that I value good direction and good acting as much as you do. But I must remind you that the aim of both should really be to translate the author s purpose into theatrical terms.

DIRECTOR: SO it is believed; and that is why original directors and inspired actors are so rare. Directors and actors must be artists, and something more than author's interpreters if they are to give their best to the theatre.

PLAYWRIGHT: I think your comparisons are dangerous; and I mistrust that word "artist" that you use so freely. For my part I am content to be a plain writer for the theatre; but I want to see my intention plainly carried out. I therefore ask the manager to engage a stage director and actors who will suit my purpose. I explain to the director roughly what I wish to convey and he uses his skill to obtain the desired result from the company. That seems to me the right process of theatrical creation. There must be authority in the theatre, just as there must be authority in the state. The right person to exercise authority is clearly the playwright, for he knows what is meant by his play.

DIRECTOR: Forgive me—he knows what is meant by his text, whether printed or typewritten; but that is not the play. PLAYWRIGHT: Then what is it?

DIRECTOR: I should call it the words of the play. The play does not exist until it is performed.

PLAYWRIGHT: That is a half-truth with which I have no patience. The play exists in my mind, and I may consider that a performance misrepresents it.

DIRECTOR: What exists in your mind is not dramatic evidence. It is what you show the public that counts. What the public sees is a joint creation of yourself and other people, whom I must insist on calling artists.

PLAYWRIGHT: Come, there is only one right way of performing a play, and that is the way the author approves.

DIRECTOR: That is quite true of most present-day comedies and all plays of ideas and argument. But they are only a part of drama. Side by side with them appear plays, even modern plays, that can be handled in different ways by different directors. More and more of these plays appear every year; that is what we understand by a dramatic movement. They are not only the product of a playwright's mind, but the creation of the theatre.

PLAYWRIGHT: DO you claim then that the theatre creates its own Shakespeares and Molieres and Goethes?

DIRECTOR: We know that a writer's opportunity is often his inspiration.

PLAYWRIGHT: Very true; but once your dramatist has been called into being, his will must prevail. Shakespeare, for example, was a practical playwright, and there is only one right way of performing his plays, which we may call the Shakespearean way. I grant you that modern directors find several different ways of handling Twelfth Night or A Midsummer Night's Dream; but these were originally conceived as light and decorative entertainments. No director can give his own version of the great tragic masterpieces. They belong to Shakespeare and the actor alone. We know that every great actor's way of playing Hamlet or Lear is Shakespeare's way. The form of presentation is unchangeable. Indeed I will tell you this: in my opinion an actor cannot be directed in his best moments. He towers above the reach of all who seek to help him—above their reach and perhaps above their comprehension. He becomes a supreme enigma to them. -

DIRECTOR: Even to the playwright?

PLAYWRIGHT: Even to the playwright.

DIRECTOR: YOU are the most generous of men. What a pity we have no actor with us!

PLAYWRIGHT: It is not good for him to hear this truth too often. And yet it must be said, and we must say it, for the actor cannot say it for himself. Poor fellow, his task is to learn our words and not to utter his own. He stands dumb before the knowledge of his greatness, and he finds expression only as he grows mysterious and remote.

DIRECTOR: Can we not meet on the ground of our common admiration for the actor? Are we not all aiming at the same mastery of theatrical craft, which reaches its height in theatrical independence? Need we be rivals to each other? Your wittiest line, your finest speech, your most moving scene are yours alone, and no actor or director can rob you of them. The actor's presence and voice and gesture and imaginative attack are his alone, and when he employs them fully he transcends not only himself, but his character as the playwright imagined it to be. We desire a theatre in which such moments of transcendent power shall be fused into one dramatic whole —into an hour of burning experience that makes all of us together spectators of a prodigy. How shall this wonder be achieved? With or without the director as partner in creation? If he is to have any place at all, it must be the place of a partner and not a subordinate. At one stage of creation he must be more than partner; he must be given sole authority.

PLAYWRIGHT: At rehearsal, of course.

DIRECTOR: Not only at rehearsal, but throughout the preparation of a play. The author's mind is fixed upon the text, the director's mind imagines its performance. They form two different pictures of the work, but the director's picture is the play proper. This - picture must be the starting-point of casting, of rehearsal, of design, of all the processes that prepare a play for the stage.

PLAYWRIGHT: And why should any man claim to see so much more in a work than the man who created it can see for himself?

DIRECTOR : It is not a question of what the director sees in the play, but of what he sees in the theatre. His theatrical vision is the thing that counts. I believe that our theatre to-day needs good directors even more than it needs good authors. And I venture to think that if once the directors are forthcoming, the authors will soon appear.

PLAYWRIGHT: That is putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. And while your director's theatre is waiting for its masterpieces, pray what will it produce? Will it evolve something out of nothing?

DIRECTOR: The theatre has been doing that since history began. One fine Spring day on a Greek hillside it produced itself out of a festival chorus and dance. Then, having first created theatre, it went on to create drama. Having created drama, it gave the dramatists the forms in which they should express themselves. Is not that the sequence of dramatic history?

PLAYWRIGHT: More or less.

DIRECTOR: It produced the Roman spectacles and pantomimes from a popular love of pageantry. It produced the mystery plays from the popular consciousness of the Middle Ages and the morality plays from the awakening of individual judgment. It produced the Italian Comedy from the buffooneries that had survived in Southern lands since the fall of Rome. It produced a thousand masques and interludes, ballets and impromptus, without seeking the assistance of the playwright at all. It made a stage of every fair, of every festival, of every ceremonial, nay of every battle. The world's pageantry, as well as the world's delight and entertainment, is due to this spontaneous inventiveness of the theatre. It created a tragedy from a song, a comedy from a smile, a farce from a guffaw, a form from a performance. And when the curtain now rises on a three-act play in a three-walled stage apartment, where three or four characters quietly converse in the language of daily experience, let us remember how small is their part, and ours, in the pageant of theatrical achievement. We who call ourselves directors are the most old-fashioned of craftsmen. We seek amongst other things to restore the theatrical spirit to the theatre—to renew the kinship of our puppet-show with the countless puppet-shows that have gone before it.

PLAYWRIGHT: Let me ask you, then, what is to be the standing of the playwright in this new theatre of yours? Is he to be an independent artist, to borrow one of your own words, or simply a hack writer whose work is grist to the director's mill? I warn you that playwrights are like other citizens of a modern state; they have won their liberties in the course of centuries, and they will not surrender them lightly.

DIRECTOR: The dramatic poet has nothing to fear; he will secure his rightful position in any theatre, of any age. You yourself maintain that his work is inviolable. As for the other ranks of playwrights, they will contribute to our theatre of the future as freely— and no doubt as profitably—as they do to-day. There is a great deal of hack writing in the theatre as we know it. For that matter there was a great deal of hack writing in the Elizabethan theatre.

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PLAYWRIGHT: But the Elizabethan theatre was an author's theatre, not a director's playground.

DIRECTOR: Still it inspired its writers by pursuing what we should now call a definite artistic policy. Show me the modern author who looks upon the theatre as his workshop, and I will show you a good dramatist.

PLAYWRIGHT: You speak with a good deal of authority. Perhaps I had better ask you—what is to be the standing of the director in your new theatre?

DIRECTOR: The director will be what he has always been—the unseen player in the theatrical performance. He will exercise absolute control in the playhouse. He will begin by choosing his own play, which is generally considered to be the theatrical manager's business.

PLAYWRIGHT: I see that I must now be careful to treat you with respect.

DIRECTOR: Next he will choose the cast, which means the entire cast from the leading lady to the butler; and his decision will be final.

PLAYWRIGHT: That is certainly a complete revolution in theatrical practice.

DIRECTOR: He will be responsible for the entire mounting of the play, whether or no a designer be employed.

PLAYWRIGHT: Very good; then everyone will be kept in his place.

DIRECTOR: That is why we want you to write for the theatre and not to argue. Now I am afraid you will throw me out, unless I go quietly.

PLAYWRICHT: Remember my lamp is always lighted at this hour.

DIRECTOR: Keep it burning. I feel that my play is as good as yours.

PLAYWRIGHT: Yours?

DIRECTOR: Well, ours.