The Theatre

George Jean Nathan

TONGUE-TIED CRITICISM.—Whenever a foreign actress appears on the local stage and plays in her own tongue we are entertained by a considerable facetiousness at the expense of such critics as venture, despite an unfamiliarity with the language, an appraisal of her performances. The latest example was to be had in the case of the Greek actress, Marika Cotopouli. Having suffered the pains of ridicule for their profound analyses of the art of the Moscow Art Theatre several years ago, along with one or two other such alien troupes, the majority of the local critics this time persuaded themselves to play doubly safe, first, in announcing—with just a shade of bravado—that they did not understand the language in which the actress conducted her performances and hence were unable to criticize her histrionic efforts and. secondly, that any critic who, not understanding the language, did so was by way of being something of a mountebank and a fraud.

Although the stand that the embarrassed gentlemen have at length taken may surely in certain instances he not without its points, it strikes me that, in a general direction, it is not only a reflection upon their critical equipment hut richly fruity with nonsense. Take, in specific example, the case of Cotopouli. The plays which she acted were the following: Electra, translated into modern Greek from the German of Hugo von Hofmannsthal; La Tendresse, translated into modern Greek from the French of Henri Bataille; and the I phigenia of Goethe similarly translated. To any critic save one who knows no other language than his own—certainly a sorry limitation for any man whose profession is a criticism of dramatic literature, and one that under the local definition would render all German, Scandinavian and French criticism of Shakespeare, say, worse than negligible— to any such critic the Goethe play should have been familiar since school-days (the text is studied in second-year German at most American colleges); the Hofmannsthal play should he familiar to any elementary reader of Continental dramatic literature or to any casual playgoer in foreign parts; and the Bataille play, even to the monolingual critic, should he familiar from the performance of it here in English—in a translation for the most part pretty faithful—at the Empire Theatre. Certainly under such circumstances it should not he too difficult to follow the Greek actress' performances in the leading roles of these plays, even though Greek he as unintelligible to most of the gentlemen as it assuredly is to me. Ami the same thing holds true when other foreign players perform in plays that are—or at least should be —perfectly cognizable. Only when the play is entirely strange, as in such instances as Chinese, Japanese, Sicilian and like performances, does the critical contention hold some water.

While I do not wish to posture as an unduly sapient fellow—such vainglory is foreign to my highly sensitive nature, a fact well and widely known—it seemed a relatively simple matter to me to take in Cotopouli's acting and to estimate it for what it was worth. What it was worth, if I am any judge at all of acting, was very little. Our Greek visitor impresses me as being not much more than a routine actress, as full of stock tricks as an oil company, and one without the remotest trace of genius. Like a number of her colleagues to the Latin west, she is all technical externals; her emotions never for a moment ring true, hut are manufactured fakes that get no nearer her heart than her epiglottis, her anconeus muscle and her biventer cervicis. She is a study less in histrionism than in physiology. She is, in tragedy, less an actress than an anatomical clinic; less a pantomimist—in such a tranquil role as Marthe Dellieres— than a series of "stills" thrown on a moving picture screen. She is at all times obvious, her emotionalism issuing not out of her lines and situations but, like a calliope lost at the tail end of a circus parade, galloping up to meet them, get in line and join the procession. She acts around a role, circling it like a growling tiger a fire at night, ready always to pounce hut—though heated by the flame— remaining ever confounded outside the ring of light.

However strange the language of a play, there are certain emotions that, when expressed by a competent player, gain an automatic reaction from an audience, for the spectacles of grief and pain, challenge and contrition, joy and despair are of universal understanding and touch chords that are themselves universal. Just as dogs may be made to howl by certain sounds, produced by instruments which they do not recognize and which have no apparent significance, so may human beings be moved by the perhaps internally recondite but superficially intelligible sounds and aspects of human ache and passion. The critics who pretend that they cannot even remotely estimate such an actress as Cotopouli should not pretend on the other hand that they can estimate the players in such an American presentation as the Theatre Guild's Midnight, particularly as—by their own statements—they confessed they could not make out one-third of the time what the mumbling players were talking about.

BESIER'S BARRETTS.—As I write this, Miss Katharine Cornell's performance of Rudolf Besier's The Barretts of Wimpole Street has not yet been made visible to us. but the manuscript of the play lies before me and offers itself to a leisurely scrutiny. I find it an unusually interesting one and it is a pleasure to know that the Mile. Cornell has at last concluded to do something worthier of her gifts than the passionate drivel to which she has devoted the major portion of the past five years of her career. In these five years one of the most potentially valuable talents in our theatre has, apparently out of an insatiable money-hunger, been corrupted by and dissipated upon various specimens of boxoffice rubbish, the sort of stuff involving melodramatic adultery in chambers fitted up by Vantine, the shooting and poisoning of knavish lovers, and handkerchief-chewing and cud-swallowing confessions and compunctions, all couched in the species of rhetoric which describes women as towers of ivory and men as beasts in human guise, and which assaults the romantic susceptibilities of the soft-headed with ubiquitous adjectives denoting the prettier colors, allusions to the twilight, the moon and the pathos of distance, and other such tasties on the smorgasbord of dramatic hokum.

The Besier script, it is agreeable for Miss Cornell's sake and our own to note, is a sharp departure from such mongerings of dime heart-throbs and cheap tears. It is an ably, often glowingly written play, its choice of word and phrase deft and cajoling, its drama motivated naturally from within its characters rather than by some mayhap wily stage director. Laid in the household of the Barrett family in the 1840's, it presents the spectacle of the influence of the paternal Barrett upon his family of children, the eldest of whom is the invalid Elizabeth, the beloved of Robert Browning. Cruel, warped, bitter, a hamstrung Puritan biting viciously at his own fetters, fetters that lead him to the very coast of incest, this Barrett looms ever a psychopathic Rutherford in the wings of his children's stage. Fearful, frightened and cowering. they find their hopes, their emotions, their lives constricted and extinguished. His ominous tread on the stairway is enough to freeze their power of speech; his single word a whip to lash their already bloodless hearts. The play lies in the drama of the rebellion of two of them, Elizabeth and, under Elizabeth's inspiration, her sister Henrietta.

There are a number of admirable passages in the play: the scenes between Elizabeth, gradually rewarming to life under love, and Browning; the shrewdly handled scene wherein tlie self-tortured Barrett flagellates himself with his desirable young niece; the corroding scene at the conclusion wherein the father, black with vindictiveness over Elizabeth's desertion of him, seeks to satisfy his morbid sense of vengeance by killing her pet dog, only to learn that it, too, has left his household. The only outstanding defect of the play, indeed, is its heavy striving for comedy relief, generally banal, clumsily contrived and not a little disturbing. Here, Besier's invention falls down and takes refuge in the most commonplace of devices. Whether or not young Octavius Barrett actually stuttered, I do not know, but either way stuttering is at this late day a comedy dodge more suitable to the talking pictures than to reputable drama. The repetitions of address and speech, while serving to emphasize the automaton quality of the beaten brothers and sisters, is similarly pretty obvious, as is the elaborate lisp given to the coquettish niece. Comedy strain is evidenced also in the character of Surtees Cook, beau to Henrietta, and in his alternating pomposity and abashed hesitation. But above these shortcomings the body of the play sings and hammers out its story with a very genuine power. Two of its characters, father and eldest daughter, are drawn with a sure hand; its difficult love passages between poet and poetess—passages that might readily, in a less skilled and tasteful hand, have been mere cheap, borrowed music —are simply, beautifully and effectively managed; and what might have in general been merely another version of The Outsider, with its cripple arbitrarily named Elizabeth Barrett and its doctor dubbed Robert Browning, has under Besier's pen become as provocative a play as has come out of England in several years.

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CRITICAL HEAD-SCRATCHING.—Not long ago, there was produced in a New York theatre a play called Five Star Final. It dealt with the tabloid newspapers and was the work of a man who had himself served as managing editor of such a sheet. It was written out of remorse and contempt, out of infuriation and disgust, out of revenge and loathing and, quite evidently, as the purging of a contaminated soul. It was often cheap and nasty, and always crude, and it seethed with indignation. It frothed and fumed in the determination to leave nothing undone in its propaganda against the sex madness, money lust and vicious hypocrisy of the scandal press. The owners of the latter, the editors, feature writers, photographers, reporters, departmental heads and everyone else around the shop were stripped without mercy, without reticence, to their very gizzards. In all of this, as I have said, there was no trace of literary skill and only the faintest trace of what goes critically by the name of dramaturgic skill. There was no subtlety, no originality of word or phrase or line, no single episode above the quality of one of yesterday's ten-twenty-thirty melodramas. What was more, the staging was at times so laboriously tricky that it distracted the attention from the play itself, and the acting of a number of roles was of a species that would not have been tolerated even in Mr. Fritz Leiber's repertory company. But, somehow and nevertheless, the play had a very real, very convincing and often even powerful effect. It got its audience by the throat and shook it until it listened and, listening, was screwed tensely to its seats. It got every last ounce qut of its intention and it made its point certainly, surely and even eloquently. It not only accomplished what it set out to accomplish, but it accomplished it just about as persuasively as it could conceivably be accomplished. It was, in other words, a bad play that peculiarly denied and confounded its own badness and that shot out its message— yes, God forbid, it bad a message—as plays-with-messages a hundred times better haven't succeeded in doing.

Under the circumstances, criticism may be pardoned a little misgiving and a little nose-scratching. Well may it go into a conference with itself and ask itself, "What's the big idea?" Here was a play that violated almost every apparently sound prejudice of criticism, that got no nearer to reputable dramatic writing than dozens upon dozens of similar artistically worthless exhibits, that—by any decent standard of criticism—was profoundly and even irritatingly bad, and that yet achieved almost everything a very good play is critically supposed to achieve. It moved an intelligent audience emotionally; it stirred an intelligent audience's thought on its subject matter; it left duly lingering in the consciousness its convincing thematic after-image; it was consistently interesting and even engrossing. Let us, in our critical perplexity, accordingly try to figure the damned thing out.

Let us say, by way of a beginning, that the play had the effect it did have because an audience instinctively recognized it to be made out of truth and honesty. Here we find ourselves confronted with the established fact that plays equally truthful and equally honest have failed not only to get a like effect but, for that matter, any effect at all. I refer you, for example, to such exhibits produced in recent seasons as Spread Eagle, Elmer Gantry, Coin Home, Exceeding Small, Hotbed or These Days. Or let us say that the play, despite its lack of quality, got its effect because it dealt with a subject close to an audience's immediate interest, so recognizable and alive that it held that audience's attention regardless of the manner of its telling. Here we bump up against the contradictory evidence that such plays as several of those named above dealt similarly with subjects almost equally immediate, equally recognizable and equally alive and yet failed of effect. But perhaps Five Star Final had a theme of broader interest. Here one may ask in all fairness if the tabloids are a subject of broader interest than, shall we say?, the question of justice as it is dispensed in America, and ask coincidentally why it was that Gods of the Lightning did not get half the same effect?

Five Star Final is sensational, as that word is commonly used in a theatrical sense; had that, perchance, anything to do with its effect? I doubt it, particularly as it is an effect upon an intelligent audience of which we are speaking. If mere sensationalism is good for an effect, why did not the even more sensational Room 349, the then timely Rothstein murder muckraking, turn the trick? Or could it have been, perhaps, the rapid, tricky, newfangled staging that chained the audience's attention? The same kind of staging, even more greatly elaborated, did not suceed in doing anything of the kind in Johannes Kreisler.

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The play is a violent propaganda play, and such propaganda plays are generally held by criticism to alienate an intelligent audience's interest. In the last three seasons not a single propaganda play produced in the New York theatre has succeeded in doing anything but boring its audience. Even Roar, China!, for all its fine presentation and the protection of the Theatre Guild's advance subscription audiences, got practically nowhere. Without the ready-made and guaranteed audience, it would surely have gone into the discard very promptly. Plays like Five Slur Final, according to the reviewers, "impair their attacks by their open prejudice." But do they? For that matter, do any plays? How has equally open prejudice impaired, from an audience point of view, the attacks of Euripides or Strindberg? Or of Uncle Torus Cabin? Or of such American box-office nonesuches as Charles Klein's The Third Degree and such British birds of a feather as An Englishman's Home?

Mr. Weitzenkorn's play was written in the white heat of indignation. Was it, perchance, that some of the heat found itself reflected in the audience? Possibly. But the records go to show that plays written in this manner pretty generally leave their audiences completely cold. I cite, in brief example, the local failure of every play dealing with the late war written in that mood, together with such plays, boiling with indignation, as several of those presented by the group known as the New Playwrights. Mr. Weitzenkorn's play combined with its sensationalism a sufficient dose of sentimentality to pleasure the more susceptible members of an audience. Did that, mayhap, account for its effect? Certainly not its effect upon the less susceptible portion of the same audience. There was just as large a dose of sentimentality in the sensational Welded of O'Neill and the play, though infinitely superior on all counts, affected neither the susceptible nor the unsusceptible. Mr. Weitzenkorn's leading characters were drawn photographically and very recognizably from certain persons well known to the audience and hence doubly suggestive and interesting to the audience. So were the characters in Revelry, the expose of the Harding administration, and Revelry evoked only yawns.

It is all very confusing.

P.S. In Philip Goes Forth, by George Kelly, I can discover nothing hut third-rate drama.

P.S. As to Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Philip Barry, my report is the same.