De Gemeenschap. Jaargang 1

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The new spirit in the English theatre.

Copyright by the author.

I am asked to write on the new spirit in the English theatre. If the request had come immediately after the cessation of the war, I should have written with more confidence than now. At that time I was editing a magazine which was ostensibly devoted to that very ‘new spirit’ in which I heartily believed. I will not say that I have been altogether disappointed, but the grounds of my optimism have shifted.

The commercial theatre in London seems to have come to stay, and commerce will have the ‘new spirit’ only in the smallest homeopathic doses. I look now to other props to sustain my determined optimism, and I find them in the most fruitful soil of all - Youth. All over England there are springing up groups of people, for the most part young, who are determined to provide an outlet for the expression and appreciation of the drama. So far, perhaps, little headway has been made; but if one compares the efficiency of the performances, the number of groups, and the nature of the plays produced, with the efforts of the ‘amateur dramatic societies’ which existed before the war, one is amazed and encouraged by the progress.

Let me give a brief synopsis of the activities of some of these new groups.

There are the ‘settlements’ frequently recruited from the working-classes. In Canning Town, one of the poorest districts in London, there is the Mansfield House Settlement where excellent performances of plays by Shakespeare, Shaw, and others are given by the working men and women and students who attend the classes. In the West-central district of London we find another working-class institution known as the Mary Ward Settlement, where not only well-worn plays but comparatively new ones - ‘The Lady of Belmont’ by St. John Ervine, the Irish playwright, for example - are performed by a company consisting exclusively of working people.

In Bath there is a settlement known as Citizen House, where every year a number of plays are given by children drawn from the worst slums of the town. This is in many respects one of the most interesting of the settlements, for here not only do they make all their own scenery and costumes, but the plays performed are written by instructors of the settlement and the children are encouraged to make suggestions, which are frequently adopted. It is an education to see tiny children - from five years upward-accepting the responsibility of their rôles and their duties behind the scenes and acquitting themselves with conscious art.

There are many other settlements which I have not space to allude to.

Another organisation which gives one grounds for hope is the Village Drama Society, which is scattered all over the English country-side and encourages the village people to perform plays at different times of the year. The society has about a hundred branches; has published a number of suitable plays, specially written for villagers; has open competitions for local playwrights; has a number of costumes, etc., which can be hired by those village societies which are unable to provide their own, and in a hundred and one ways endeavours to foster the love of drama among people who rarely go within the walls of a town.

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Then a number of factories have quite flourishing dramatic societies, of which that at Bournville (Messrs. Cadbury's cocoa works) is one of the most go-ahead. I was recently lecturing to an audience brought together by this group and was surprised to find how keenly interested they were in what is happening in the theatres of Russia, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, and other European countries. They perform two or three plays every season and every fortnight give readings, partly in costume, of some of the most interesting plays of our time.

Many of the professional and semi-professional theatres outside London are also much more enlightened and venturesome than the commercial theatres in London. The Birmingham Repertory theatre, fully professional, has given the first performances of many plays which afterwards found a place in the London repertory. G. Bernard Shaw's ‘Back to Methuselah’, Georg Kaiser's ‘Gas’, Rutland Boughton's ‘The Immortal Hour’ (a music-drams based on the poetic play of Fiona Macleod) and many other interesting plays which found no producer in London received courageous and competent attention in Birmingham. In Liverpool there is a good repertory theatre, where, however, little new work is tried. In Sheffield, the repertory theatre - a comparatively new one - is showing signs of more initiative and giving not merely new plays but plays which have some pretentions to being modern in spirit. A semi-amateur venture in York, calling itself The York Little Theatre, is also launching out into modernist productions; while in Weston-super-Mare and elsewhere other repertory theatres, more or less on modern lines, are endeavouring to make a stand for good drama. London is so much more the centre of England than Amsterdam is of Holland or Berlin of Germany that this devolution of the theatre is both remarkable and significant.

In London we have a plethora of revue and musical comedy, a few interesting plays by established authors like Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy and Somerset Maughan, revivals of eighteenth century musical comedies, like ‘The Duenna’ by Sheridan and ‘The Beggar's Opera’ by John Gay; but very few new plays by young, progressive writers who are breaking away from old and out-worn traditions. No! It is from the smaller enthusiastic younger organisations like those which I have mentioned that I look for the real expression of the spirit of our times.

As a playwright and an enthusiast for the theatre, I profoundly believe in the free expression of the dramatic spirit in man. Always, in season and out of season, I advocate the doing of things as well as the seeing of things done. I should like to see groups of players in every school, in every factory, in every rural village. The function of all art is to exalt and intensify: life should seem the richer for having been experienced through the quicker imagination of an artist. Of no art is this truer than of the art of the drama. I believe that Saint Francis had the wisdom to appreciate the value of acting the mysteries of the Christian faith, and he got the Brethren of his Order to give dramatic expression to the chief incidents connected with the life of Christ: for the nonce they became the awestruck shepherds and adoring Magi, the doubting and the believing disciples. In this way, thought Saint Francis, their faith would gain in actuality. One of the most impressive performances I have every witnessed was not given by professional

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actors at all but by the Monks of Caldey Abbey, off the coast of Wales, where the art of modern staging was employed to great advantage, but the monks acted in their own habits with such reverence and conviction that the divine tragedy was made actual to all who were privileged to be present.

Hermon Ould.