From British and Irish
Drama 1890-1950: A Critical History
by Richard
Farr Dietrich -- USF
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& Table of Contents for Entire Book
COMMON
CAUSE: A NATIONAL THEATER
The
modern era is known for its intense and often bloody conflict—world wars, hot
and cold, revolutions and counterrevolutions, civil wars, religious wars, class
struggle, strife of every kind. It’s
unlikely that a more contentious age has ever been known in terms of the number
of casualties. The conflict over
theories of dramatic art that this study has recorded is therefore perfectly in
step with the times, though of course such intellectual warfare seems mild in
context. The debate may seem much ado
about nothing to us now, but it was probably necessary to clarify matters and
raise consciousness. If it is true that
a high drama is central to culture and necessary to its well-being, then
Archer, Shaw, and the other avant-garde critics were right in taking an
antagonistic stance toward the decadent, fallen drama of Victorian
England. Ironically, the sense of having
to do battle in order to get a hearing in the theater ultimately served the
foes as well as the friends of realism.
But this was all to the good in that the outcome of waging critical war
was to foster the best of each kind of New Drama, realistic or
nonrealistic. If the warfare has quieted
down because we’ve discovered that all New Drama has roots in Old Drama and
that all kinds of drama are necessary to a complete account of reality, we
should nevertheless be thankful for the spark that this debate gave to the
creation of a high drama.
A
high drama was indeed the accomplishment of the modern period. In sixty years the drama had been lifted from
its nineteenth-century slough of mediocrity; playwrights, protected by
copyrights from 1891 on,
published their plays as soon as they could, expecting them to be judged as
literature; and ways had been found to make the theater and the drama work to
their mutual benefit, rather than theatricalism
dominating the play. By 1950 such a considerable body of
worthwhile drama had been produced as to make it obvious that “Britain” (a name
replaced midway by the division into Ireland and the United Kingdom) had once
again reached the front rank of those with a nationally significant drama. Shakespeare was no longer overburdened. Yet the problem of supporting such a high
drama grew more acute as expenses rose.
Whatever the differences of opinion in other
areas, most of the leading figures of modern drama and theater agreed on the
need for a subsidized national theater, in both the UK and Ireland. The increasing commercialization of the
theater was driving out those few remaining elements of artistic integrity that
gave the theater whatever cultural stature it possessed. Long runs favored shallow, escapist “hits,”
often musicals, at the expense of the enlarging repertoire of straight
drama. The only solution was the revival
of a repertory system, but no West End theater or
commercial theater in Dublin could afford for long to drop the long run and
gamble on a repertory. An endowed
theater was obviously needed, in both Dublin and London
Calls for an endowed national theater in
England, at first mainly to honor Shakespeare, can be traced back to at least
the mid-nineteenth century, but the 1870s saw the first pleas (led by Tom
Taylor and J. R. Planché) for a theater that would
subsidize a modern repertory as well.1 A young William
Archer took up the cause in 1877; he was further inspired by an 1879 visit to London by France’s subsidized
Comédie Française, and by
the 1890s he became its principal advocate, though Henry Arthur Jones had been
with him from about the mid-eighties. As the years rolled on, more and more
voices were added to the clamor for a national theater, particularly those of
the many amateur and semi-professional theater groups that sprang up in the
nineties and later. In 1904 Archer,
assisted by Granville Barker, wrote a very specific proposal for a national
theater (published in 1907), full
of fascinating details about the exact method of establishing such a theater
and the probable cost of every step; they looked more to private philanthropy
than to Parliament for the means.2
The struggle for a national theater in
Ireland was in some respects well ahead of the English endeavor, thanks to the
efforts of Yeats and Lady Gregory detailed in Chapter 4, and the establishment
of the Abbey Theater in Dublin as de
facto national theater, whatever its setbacks and delays along the way,
must have stood has some sort of reproach to the laggard English.
As for the English cause, though Shaw had
a hand in several of the early theater groups and as a drama critic contributed
to the national-theater agitation, he was not able to lend much prestige to the
cause until the Edwardian age, after which he kept up a fairly constant
promotion, even writing The Dark
Lady of the Sonnets (1910) to
support a Shakespeare memorial theater, eventually presiding at a ceremonial
blessing of a location in South Kensington that ultimately would not be the
site of the theater. He would have been
astonished to see the present National Theatre rise across the Thames near
The
idea of a national theater in England, though sometimes restricted to a
Shakespeare memorial, had been kept alive by many people, only a few of which
can be mentioned here. Lilian Baylis’s
management of the Old Vic between 1914 and 1923, providing a complete repertoire
of Shakespeare’s plays, is sometimes cited as “the seed from which the present
national theatre, as well as the national opera and ballet companies, was to
grow.”3 But Granville Barker’s experiment with
short-run productions at the Royal Court from 1904 to 1907 was an even earlier
seeding, as was the Edwardian efforts of the Stage Society (formed in 1899) and
Archer’s behind-the-scenes partnership with Elizabeth Robins in the New Century
Theatre effort of the nineties. Even
earlier was J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre
(1891-98), modeled after Antoine’s Théatre Libre in
The
Taj Mahal is a temple, of
course, and that leads to the final point of this study, to underline what has been
implied all along. The marvel of this period is that a drama deemed so trivial
and insignificant in the 1880s could rise to a level that would make it worthy
of such an edifice. In an extremely
secular age, drama miraculously returned to, or at least reconnected with, its
distant source in Greek religion as life-worship. The morbidity of the convention- bound
Victorian age, led by a queen who mourned excessively for nearly half a century
the death of her prince consort, was perhaps the most explicit cause of the
need for this religious revival, but it also served well a twentieth century
that was bent on the slaughter of millions.
And in the nuclear age, potentially far more destructive, we have even
more need of it. It was precisely this
return to the religious origin of drama that made it possible for the theater
once again to gain the respect of the sort of people who build temples in order
to center their culture in high-minded aspirations and life-affirming values.
In
The Foundations of a National Drama
(1913), Henry Arthur Jones
had said that “there is no reason in the nature of things why the drama should
not again become something of a religious ceremony.”4 The playwright who took that most seriously
and perhaps thereby struck closer to the heart of drama than any other British
playwright of his time was Shaw, who summed up his years as a drama critic
thus:
Weariness
of the theatre is the prevailing note of
If one knows that Shavian call for actors
to be priests, dramatists to be apostles, and theaters to be temples of the
Ascent of Man, it is difficult to look at that modernistic Taj
Mahal of London’s National Theatre without an eerie
sense that, incredibly, some sort of wild prophecy has been fulfilled. Granted that the Abbey Theatre in Dublin
hasn’t looked much like a Taj Mahal,
in either of its two principal manifestations, but there, characteristically,
this temple to the Ascent of Man has resided more in the spirit of the endeavor
than in the actual building, and who’s to say which has been and will be more
effective.
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