|
From British
Drama 1890-1950: A Critical History by
R. F. Dietrich |
Link to Title Page
& 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, 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. 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
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. 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
Calls for an endowed national theater, 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
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, 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
immediate 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, we have no less 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 Taj Mahal of London’s National Theatre without an eerie sense
that, incredibly, some sort of wild prophecy has been fulfilled.
Link to Figures &
Illustrations