Why I Do Not Go To The Theatre

A Personal Experience Exposing Some Inconsistencies to Which the Playgoer Is Prone

ALDOUS HUXLEY

AT THE time when I was paid to go frequently to the theatre, I used often to find myself sitting next to William Archer, who was there professionally, as I was. I was glad when this happened; it was pleasant to have an intelligent neighbour to talk to between the acts. But that was not all. It was not only between the acts that Mr. Archer interested me; it was also during I hem. When he sat next me, I used to spend as much time looking at Mr. Archer as at the actors and actresses on the stage. Whenever one of the characters uttered an amusing line, whenever there was a thrilling situation, I would steal a glance at my neighbour. Mr. Archer's long, grave face was always perfectly impassive. The most brilliant piece of wit, the most absurd and unexpected touch of farce left him without a smile. He could watch scenes of Grand Guignol horror, he could see and hear Desdemona being murdered or Ophelia running mad without so much as moving an eyelid. He sat through every theatrical performance—through all those, at any rate, at which I had an opportunity of watching him—with the perfect and complete impassivity of the English aristocrat in a romantic French novel. I watched him, fascinated.

FOR this man who could sit with unruffled gravity through plays like Monro's At Mrs. Benins and Somerset Maugham's England, Home and Beauty I felt an unbounded admiration. I am myself a great admirer of English aristocrats in French novels and always try, as far as I can, to model my conduct on that of Sir Rodolphe Brown in George Sand's Indiana. But with the best will in the world, I cannot keep a straight face through At Mrs. Beam's, I cannot look on at the last acts of Othello or Lear without feeling and betraying considerable agitation. Mr. Archer —I generalize from my own limited observations— could sit through any comedy or any tragedy without moving a muscle. In the midst of a roaring, a shuddering or weeping audience, he remained immobile in his stall, like a fakir for whom the joys and sorrows of the world have become a matter of absolute indifference.

Mr. Archer was deeply interested in the theatre and had spent a good part of his life thinking and writing about it. But my belief is that the interest was purely intellectual and that he never enjoyed going to the play in the ordinary everyday sense of the word. Can one be said to enjoy comedies when one never laughs, or tragedies when one never weeps? Personally, I rather doubt it. There are two kinds of critics: those who criticize, so to speak, from within, with sympathy; and those who criticize detachedly, from without. Both are valuable. Mr. Archer, I believe, was an extreme case of the second type.

X, on the contrary, was an extreme case of the first type of critic. Not that he was professionally a critic. He was just a first-nighter. X voluntarily performed the corvée which I was driven to undertake by need. I was paid to look at all the new plays; he gave money. So should I, I suppose, if I enjoyed the theatre half so much as he did. He criticized exclusively from within, never for a moment emerging with any part of himself out of the warm cavern of his immediate emotional pleasure—criticized with such an excess of natural sympathy, that every play without exception seemed to him delightful. It might be Abie's Irish Bose, or it might he Hamlet; it might be The Cherry Orchard or Peg o' my Heart—X was always in raptures. ''Too wonderful," lie would say to me between the acts, "Isn't it too wonderful?" And the words, the intonation were the same whether we hail been seeing Duse or the Dolly Sisters, Heartbreak House or the current musical comedy success. "Too wonderful" he would repeat and the tears, I would notice, were not yet dry on his monocle.

As a theatre-goer, my position is somewhere between that of X and that of Mr. Archer. The consistent and chronic impassivity of the one is as impossible to me as arc the consistent and chronic enjoyment and emotional excitement of the other. I can no more not laugh at what seems to me very funny, or not feel distressed by what strikes me as genuinely tragic than I can find all comedies humorous or all dramas without exception tragical. Most plays seem to me extremely bad; but a few evoke in me ecstasies of amusement or distress. That is why, now that I am no longer paid to go to theatres, I visit those places of amusement (which for me are too often places of boredom) so rarely.

BUT if most plays are bad, it may be objected, many actors are very good. A fine piece of histrionic art ought to make up for a wretched piece of dramatic art. Perhaps it ought. But in my case, unfortunately, it does not. I am too thoroughly the literary man and the critic to be able to leave my critical faculties and my love of letters in the cloak room along with my coat and hat. Good acting in a play which strikes me as bad disturbs and exasperates as much as it pleases me. For I feel all the time that it is an attempt—an unfair, an unjustifiable attempt—to warp my better judgment about the play, to make me believe, by arts that have nothing to do with literature, that what I know to he a bad piece of literary work is really good. I resent being moved by a fine performance of what my literary judgment tells me is a shoddy, insignificant and unsubstantial play. The attitude, I know, is absurd. Fine performances are not so numerous in any activity of life—from tight-rope walking to solving mathematical problems— that one can afford to neglect one or to deny one's self the pleasure of admiration. And yet there the fact remains; I do resent such fine performances and cannot help doing so. A kind of intellectual asceticism prevents me from enjoying the merits of good acting in a bad play. The ethical Puritan cannot enjoy a beauty which he feels to be immoral. The æsthetic Puritan cannot enjoy a beauty which he feels is in any way artistically wrong. I have done my best to free myself from æsthetic Puritanism, but without success. I can never wholeheartedly appreciate good acting in a had play. Half the pleasure that I might derive from the theatre is thus denied me. More fortunate in this respect than I, most theatregoers art able to appreciate good or even indifferent acting in spite of had plays. Indeed, I suspect that most of them are so much enchanted by the acting that they do not notice the badness of the plays that, spellbound by the personality of the players, they even believe that had plays are good ones. Illusion is the parent of almost all happiness; I envy these people their blessed capacity of being taken in. Remembering X's tear-damp monocle, I sigh and wish that I too could find every play too wonderful.

AS a novelist, I am constantly struck, when I go to the theatre, by tin* great gulf dividing self-respecting modern fiction from the average modern drama. All modern fiction having the least pretensions to being good tends in the direction of more and more complete analysis, of deeper and deeper exploration of the reality lying behind common words and conventional ideas. Consider, for example, the notion of love, the Maple theme of practically every novel and every play. Modern novelists from Proust to D. H. Lawrence, from James Joyce to Julien Benda, have subjected the passion in all its aspects to the most searching analysis. The aspects that lie behind words have been revealed, the different kinds of love have been classified and the mechanism of their birth and development carefully described.

How different is the spectacle which greets us in the theatre! There is scarcely a sign here of the novelists' analysis. The popular conventions are accepted at their face value without any attempt being made to discover the psychological realities which lie behind them. There are only two kinds of love on the stage—the pure and the impure. No hint is ever dropped that in reality sacred and profane love are inextricably mixed together; it is never so much as whispered that there may be a great many varieties of both kinds. And then love is regarded, on the stage, as a sort of concrete object, which you have or you don't have, which you keep with care or carelessly mislay. Husbands and wives lose one another's loves as they might lose one another's umbrellas, and then find them again. Nothing could he less like the truth than this conception of love as a thing that can be lost and found, kept in cold storage and taken out, years later, undecayed. On the stage, moreover, love is always (in mathematical terms) a function of the loved object, dependent exclusively on the blond curls and the virtue of the heroine, the black shingle and the alluring impurity of the villainess. No allowance is ever made for the lover's state of mind and body. If there is one thing that the novelists' exploration of reality has made abundantly clear, it is that love is, to a great extent, the product of the lover's imagination and desire and that it has comparatively little to do with the qualities of the beloved. The lover, it is true, loves one particular person; but that is to a great extent a mere accident. He would have loved somebody else just as much if circumstances had happened to be different. And in any case, he loves not the real person, but a largely imaginary figure invented by himself and substituted for the genuine object. Every lover begins by dressing up the woman who happens to have attracted him in the ideal fancy dress which pleases him most, lie then proceeds to love the fancy dress. It is only after a period of intimacy more or less prolonged that he begins to discover that the fancy dress was put there by himself and that the beloved's real habiliments are quite different. He may like the real clothes, or he may not. It is largely a matter of luck. If he does, and if the beloved on her side happens to like his real clothes, then the union will have a good chance of being happy. If not, then the union will probably be wretched. How little of this is ever let out on the stage! There, loves are won and lost and won again like fortunes on the Stock Exchange; they are real and solid entities, independent of the imagination; they are always instantly recognizable as being either pure or impure; and the pure are always pure in precisely the same way in all human beings, the impure are homogeneously impure; there are no disquieting varieties or sub-species. Such absurd and conventional notions of love are to be found in plays having pretentions to be good, plays which in other respects are often genuinely meritorious. They are notions which survive only in the lowest magazine-serial fiction. Accustomed to the novelists' serious preoccupation with reality, I find it very hard to swallow the servants'-hall conventions in terms of which even quite respectable dramatists continue to write. Other people seem to be gifted with minds that are divided up into water-tight compartments. By their own fire-side they enjoy Dostoiëvsky and Proust; in the theatre they derive an equal enjoyment from Pinero and Bernstein. I find myself too consistent to be able to do this. I dislike magazine serials by my own fire-side and I dislike them just as much when they are offered to me in the theatre. That is why, since I am no longer paid to do so, I so seldom go to the play.

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