virtuosity in the theatre

Irish Jesuit Province

Virtuosity in the TheatreReview by: Gabriel FallonThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 74, No. 877 (Jul., 1946), pp. 303-310Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515534 .

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303

Sitting at the Play

Virtuosity in the Theatre By Gabriel Fall?n

IN an intriguing article on The Writer in the Theatre iji the first (March, 1946) issue of Theatre To-Day, Mr. Frank O'Connor makes an opening reference to the dramas written

by Shelley, Keats, Browning and Tennyson and their utter

unsuitability as works of theatre. "

Browning," he declares, "

who couldn't write a lyric without the very throb of drama in

it, wrote verse drama which is almost comical." In a fair

measure this is true of course ; yet one cannot afford to overlook

the amazing fact of actor-manager Louis Calvert touring The

Blot on the Scutcheon (even to our own Gaiety Theatre) with a

considerable degree of uncomical success.

John Drinkwater in his Victorian Poetry covered much of this

ground, commenting on the waste of energy incurred by Tenny

son, Browning, Swinburne and Arnold in the writing of plays. He referred to it as-one of the tragic futilities both of English

literature and the English theatre. "

It was a time," he tells

us, "

when the actor had achieved complete ascendancy in the

theatre and when what he wanted was not creative poets whose

work he could perform, but hack playwrights who could serve the

purpose of his own histrionic virtuosity."

Like Drinkwater, Mr. O'Connor finds employment for the "

virtu "

root, and he informs us that "

from the point of view

of the virtuoso, musical or theatrical, the creative artist is only a

nuisance. He can get far better show pieces from the theatre

pianist or the village idiot ". I wonder. Making due allow

ance for Mr. O'Connor's pardonable and poetic exaggeration, the

statement seems plausible enough. But is it? Where will our

theatrical virtuoso find his purpose better served than in the plays



304 THE IRISH MONTHLY

of Shakespeare? Consider the soliloquies. Think of the whole wilderness of

44 virtuosity

" which has been thrown behind

Hamlet's "

O what a rogue and peasant slave "

or the fifth

Henry's "

Once more into the breach "

to mention only two

of them. Your Shakespeare is (or rather was) the very abiding place of theatrical virtuosity.

Harley Granville-Barker puts forward the Drinkwater

O'Connor view but in another way. " With the actor in the

ascendant the contemporary drama is generally lifeless," he tells us. And then goes on to say: 4f Remarkable plays are not

written by taking an actor at his own valuation, and by giving him merely what he likes best to do. But neither are they written by men who take other plays for a model, and know noth

ing at first hand about the actor's art at all." Something which rules out the village idiot, I'm afraid. Mr. O'Connor speaks of

that Victorian period in theatre as one in which the partnership of dramatist, audience and actor had been dissolved,

4i and the

actor was in the saddle ". Granville-Barker on the other hand, is not inclined to grant a partnership at all.

4i It would seem,"

he says, "

as if this collaboration were less an alliance than a

rivalry, the history of the theatre could be viewed as a never

determined struggle between drapiatist and actor for pre eminence

" with, of course, all the advantages as disputant or

historian on the writer's side. Except, perhaps, when actors like

Shakespeare or Moliere were in the saddle.

Much of the early history of the Abbey?the exodus-of-the

Fays period, for instance?shows traces of this 4i

never

determined "

struggle. What actors are in the ascendant there

now, a period which Mr. O'Connor has already measured by

literary standards and found wanting? If the ascendancy of the actor-manager kept Tennyson, Browning, Shelley and

Keats from writing actable plays, and if, as Mr. O'Connor con

tends, the ascendancy of the producer is keeping Eliot, Auden



VIRTUOSITY IN THE THEATRE 305

and Spender from writing actable plays, could we possibly create dramatists by liquidating producers?

' Or would we then find

excuses in stage-door-keepers, for instance?or in the moon?

But this?virtuosity?which so offended Mr. Drinkwater and is not pleasing to Mr. O'Connor. Mr. St. John Ervine, no

enemy of writers, confesses in The Theatre in My Time that he has wakeful moments in the night, wakeful moments " in which a fear crosses my mind that the actor-managers were in the right more often than I supposed and that the exploitation of

personality is an important part of what we callfi theatre '." He

complains of the passing of great speech in the theatre. itf

The

naturalists, upset by these bursts of eloquence declared that this,

way of speaking words was mere ranting and they demanded a

method of delivering lines which would be more life-like."

(Incidentally the naturalists to whom Mr. Ervine refers were the

literary conquerors of the actor-managers.) "

Henry the Fifth

was to call his friends to the breach once more as if he were Mr.

Sidney Webb exhorting members of the Fabian Society to

propagate the principles of the Minority Report of the Reform

of the Poor Law ". (And this is exactly how most of our

present-day young Henrys do perform the trick.) "

Gradually the old-style of acting disappeared," laments Mr. Ervine,

i and

was succeeded by the new style, in which actors and actressses

behaved on the stage as if they were in their own homes. Acting, indeed, seemed as if it might disappear altogether and be

replaced by behaving ". Exactly; all the virtuosity had gone out of it.

We were told, of course, that this new type of acting called

for greater intelligence on the actor's part. Irving could never

play ShawT, and all that. And so we fii^d a modern critic, James

Agate, searching for something which the theatre had lost when

it lost the actor-manager. He looks around for an actor who can

act in any sense of the word, even though there be nothing but




vanity in his head, and he declares that he will get out of the fellow's pose and voice and gesture a Hamlet who will bear some

resemblance to the original. "

You, on the other hand, shall be at liberty to produce your intellectual darling, steeped in Piran

dello to the very lips, and set him mooning upon the stage ; and the best he will achieve will be to resemble a well-laid fire to which the house-maid has forgotten to apply the match." (It should be noted that Agate is looking for an actor to play Hamlet and not in Eliot, Auden or Spender. No doubt he would be content to leave the works of those producer-inhibited dramatists to the

multitude of "

well-laid fires ".) Thanks to the writers who downed Irving and the actor

managers, acting has become so unlike acting that when we come

upon it by some rare chance to-day we call it over-acting. And

certainly if we find it in anything but Shakespeare or melodrama we are justified in calling it so. For outside of these spheres,

acting, as Irving and the actor-managers knew it, is to-day as

incongruous as a giant in a pigmy's overcoat. The "

realists "

on

the writers side of the theatre have seen to that. Virtuosity in

acting had served the theatre well ; the Greeks had a use for it ; so had the Elizabethans ; you will find it even in our own fathers'

early time. Then it ceased to be required ; it was no longer necessary ; the new dramatist had no place for it ; it acquired a

relative badness ; in his stated opinion it was just bad acting ; and

that's all there was to it. The players of the Moscow Art Theatre

obligingly supplied the new style in acting ; and thereafter be came known as?the Whisperers. These were the forerunners

of the "

naturalistic "

actors of to-day.

Naturally, whenever the theatre of to-day stages a play calling

for " virtuosity

" in acting, the result is often tragic, though, of

course, in a non-theatrical sense. Shakespeare, for instance, is "

produced "

and "

experimented with "

to cover up the

deficiency. Hamlet in a lounge suit is a sober example. Recently




in a Dublin Theatre we were subjected to a fancy-fair version of

The Merchant of Venice, misleadingly dressed in 18th-century costume, tricked out with musical kick-shaws, and complete with programme note (a sop to the pseudo-intelligentsia) handed across the footlights

" in the manner of "

Commedia dell

Arte. Yet, what's to be done? How many of our present-day

actors possess the virtuosity necessary for the speaking of that

unrhymed iambic line which Shakespeare used so pliantly to help the actor in his interpretation. How can one expect the very

competent speakers of Mr. Shaw, for instance, to answer the call

of a form of verse, free, pliant, and subtle which the late Professor

Quiller Couch described as " the multitudinous rhythm of life,

broken yet harmonious, continuous, various, out of itself unfold

ing, in a moment responding to sudden thoughts, interruptions,

gusts of passion, changings of mind, ardours, repentings, dejec

tions, interchange of eyes, quick embraces of the young, slow

death-beds of the old ". In other words, a form of verse calling

for virtuosity or nothing. No wonder Desmond McCarthy recently found it necessary to

make an appeal for virtuosity in the playing of Shakespeare's

buffoons, declaring that it was the business of the actor " to

transmit to the audience his own virtuoso's relish " in the playing

of such figures as Bottom, Dogberry, Osric, etc. But what are

actors without virtuosity to do? Pursuing his point Mr.

McCarthy told us that sometimes, it is true, Shakespeare's

great poetry should be dropped, as it were, by accident, but at

others "

it should be pronounced with a glorious ostentation of

which, say, Yeats in conversation was alone capable among con

temporary poets ". This reference to Yeats is of more than

usual interest, particularly in view of the fact that the virtuosity which his

" glorious ostentation" represented has long been

foreign to the acting content of the theatre he founded.

Yeats dedicated his play The King's Threshold to " the beauti




ful speaking of Frank Fay." Yet many years after this dedi cation he had occasion to write

For actors lacking music

Do most excite my spleen

They say it is more human To shuffle, grunt and groan Not knowing what unearthly stuff Rounds a mighty scene.

It is interesting to recall that Frank Fay, before his untimely death, was looked upon by many of his younger colleagues as an

actor who suffered from too much virtuosity. In his preface to

A Full Moon in March, Yeats wrote "

I came to the conclusion that prose dialogue is as unpopular among my studious friends

as dialogue in verse among actors and playgoers." The theatre had changed : that was all. But it was the writer

and not the actor who had changed it. , The theory that Eliot, Auden and Spender write as they write because the existence of

the producer in the theatre compels them to do so has no bearing with common sense. Indeed, it suggests an examination of the

earlier theory that Tennyson, Swinburne, Browning and the rest

wrote as they wrote because (to use Mr. O'Connor's phrase) 44 the actor was in the saddle ". When the change came, the

audience accepted it, the audience having no initial power of choice in the theatre. Yet, as early as 1902, Val?ry Bruissov

wrote : 4i

Naturalism has degraded the stage?it has banished

everything that is truly of the theatre ". And Georg Fuchs

writing in Die Revolution des Theatres, published in 1909, reads like a paraphrase of Yeats

44 The more often one goes to the

modern theatre the stronger the feeling assails one : It won't

be very long before there is not a single actor who can speak German dramatic verse properly on the stage. The task of an

actor in modern plays is to smoke, spit, cough, blow his nose,




snuffle, belch, and to mouth revolting or commonplace gibberish. Such action destroys the creative art of the actor which is essential for the genuine drama. A sharp division must be made, at least, between dramatic art in the real sense, and literary,

novelistic, lyrical and dialogised psychology ". In contributing to this necessary work of sharp division, how

right Mr. O'Connor is when he says that the mistake which so

many poets make is the mistake of writing "

poetic plays as

though poetry was an end in itself and not merely the greatest instrument of the theatre. Poetry is not external to the theatre ; it isn't something one applies like rouge, and for first-rate

dramatic poetry one has to turn not to the professional poets but to the realists like Ibsen and Synge ". Now here's where the trouble of division really begins. For there are many, like

myself, who would refuse to accept the label of iC

realist "

for

Synge or for the Ibsen of Peter Gynt (from whom Mr. O'Connor

quotes). Dr ink water, on the same point, goes a little nearer to

the heart of the problem when he says that the dramas of the Victorian poets were for the most part little more than elaborated

lyrics thrown into an inert dramatic form. " That is to say,

lacking the theatre, and the formative influence of the theatre, the objective quality which is the first essential of drama never came into full play at all ".

In the theatre (the real theatre) there is a need for virtuosity in the writer no less than in the actor. If the poets have it they call it poetry and there's an end to it. The "poetic

" play

wrights of to-day are studiously avoiding it, and who can blame

Ihem since they were taught to believe that was a vice and not a

virtue in theatre. But call it what you will?Ci virtuosity ", "

poetic-realism ", "

objectivity "

it is a quality which the natur

alists in the theatre killed both in author and in actor. Represen tation or didactically critical aspects of life have taken the place of great theatre. Nowadays people are uncomfortable at being




taken by surprise in the auditorium. As George Saintsbury put it, they want to be told to

" prepare to receive cavalry ". The

warning is hardly necessary for we have neither the horses nor

the riders fit to carry out the evolution.

In an interesting conclusion to his article Mr. O'Connor breaks

a lance with Mr. Shaw in the cause of St. Joan, though he does so ever so chivalrously declaring that

" in criticising another

man's play there is always the danger that one is really trying to write one's own ". But he very pointedly declares that

" at the

same time it seems to me that the crux of St. Joan's tragedy is

the question of whether her voices were real or not?real to her,

that is". "

I want to know," declares Mr. O'Connor "

what

that cry of 'Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!' meant ". (So, indeed, do I.

So would anyone who senses what the complete function of the

dramatist ought to be.) "

Was it the mystic's love-cry on the bosom of God, or was it the

' Eloi, eloi, lama Sabachtani

' of

the cross? Either way, it has a tragic beauty. But once again Shaw ignores the question entirely. It is as though he were

desperately casting about for something in the burning of a girl which has no tragic beauty ". Well, Mr. Shaw (his idea of Galtonic visualisers apart) was merely being faithful to his texts of theatre in ignoring that question. I, for one, know my Shaw

well enough not to be surprised by his side-stepping. And Mr.

O'Connor's explanation does not completely satisfy me. "

The

fact is," he says, "

Shaw has been plunged straight into a subject which cannot be treated in prose, which could only have been written by an Ibsen, and has proved to us, if it ever needed proof, that while a storyteller may be no poet, a dramatist must always

be one ". I prefer to put it in another and a simpler way?a

dramatist must always be a dramatist and being so, may be

entitled to be called a poet. Nevertheless there is a grave danger that writers like Mr. Shaw may call him

" a writer of monstrous

fustian "?or more briefly, still?a virtuoso.



virtuosity in the theatre

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