Should the Theatre Teach?

Irish Jesuit Province

Should the Theatre Teach?Review by: Gabriel FallonThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 75, No. 891 (Sep., 1947), pp. 403-407Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20515703 .

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403

Sitting at the Play

Should the Theatre Teach ? By Gabriel Fall?n

A

CORRESPONDENT (who, for reasons best known to him

self, prefers to remain anony

mous) has sent me a challenge in the

shape of a news item from New York.

This news item informs us that the

Rev. Urban Nagle, O.P., founder

and director of the Blackfriars Guild, when speaking before the Catholic

Interracial Council of ^Sew York in

May of this year, stressed the need

for an experimental theatre to per

form the teaching function which the

commercial theatre is neglecting. The

correspondent (who underlines the

word "

teaching ") succinctly adds: "

So much for your 4

expert '

opinion !"

Now I propose to front this chal

lenge?for it bears on a matter of

considerable importance?not with

any "

expert "

opinion of my own but

with opinions which come from a

source that is both American and

Dominican. If that doesn't satisfy my

challenger, then nothing can.

In America there is an institution

which the New York Herald Tr me

has described as being "

by far the

most enterprising of the experimental

theatres to-day ",and which the maga

zine Time has called " the most news

worthy and perhaps the most notable

of college drama schools ". George

Jean Nathan, that much feared critic, lias given it as his opinion that this

institution is " one of the most inven

tive and progressive amateur theatre

groups in the nation"; while the

Boston Post asserts that " no other

college in the country can match it or

ever has matched it, not even Harvard

or Yale under Professor Baker ".

Praise, indeed !

The institution in question is the

theatre attached to the Catholic Uni

versity in Washington? It was estab

lished in 1937 by the fev. Gilbert

V. Hartke, O.P. ; its assets?" an in

credible enthusiasm and a singular

trust in the Providence of God ". Now when this theatre was being

thought about and talked about there were those who believed they could add another asset?that asset being

what they called "

the Catholic

play ". They reasoned as follows.

Many of the Church's enemies are

using the drama as a means of propa

ganda. Why can't we launch a



404 THE IRISH MONTHLY

counter-attack, use the drama as a

means of disseminating information

about Catholic doctrine and philo

sophy?make the theatre teach ?

I shall now quote from Leo Brady's informative article in The Sign (Dec,

1946). " Father Hartke and his as

sociates felt that there were certain

discrepancies in this approach to the

theatre. First of all, what is a ' Catholic play

' ? One written by a

Catholic ? One dealing with a point of Catholic belief? And would a ' Catholic drama

' rule out Sophocles,

a pagan Greek, for instance ? (His Electra was presented on the campus

last year.) Would it rule out Moli?re, who died under an ecclesiastical

cloud ? Or Christopher Marlowe, who

professed atheism and yet wrote the most successful of all morality plays in his Doctor Faustus ? (Moli?re's

The Miser and Faustus were early

University excursions into the drama

of the past.) That was one objection that occurred."

But there was another and (to my

mind) a more fundamental objection.

It was that this concept of "

Catholic

theatre" was predicated upon the sup

position that drama is concerned

mainly with a 4< thesis ". The young C.U. Theatre thrashed this out as

follows : 6 6 Even a brief glance at the

history of the theatre revealed that

the best theatre?that of the Greeks in the fifth century b.c., the Eliza

bethans, 17th-century Spain, 17th

century France?had always been con

cerned primarily with telling a story in fast-moving theatrical terms for the

purpose of entertaining a group of

persons?not teaching them. True,

this entertainment was often on a high

intellectual and emotional level?and more often than not it dealt with the

eternal problems of existence and sal

vation?but it was always constructed

as entertainment."

They dismissed the drama of "

ideas " on the grounds that (like

magazine digests and the factory sys

tem) it is "a modern development which arose when confusion replaced

certainty in the mind of man and he was no longer free to do his work or

practise his art in Christian serenity". It was theatre used as a means to an

end and to the C.U. Theatre founders

that "seemed incongruous". Against

it they opposed theatre as an end in

itself " as much as anything in this

life can be an end in itself ". This,

they felt, had authoritative approval. So they decided to practise the art of the theatre for theatrical ends, hold

ing that it was worthy work "

and one that might, in its own small

measure, contribute to the glory of

God ".

The C.U. Theatre policy is three

fold. It revives the great plays of the

past ; it encourages the writing of new

plays ; it experiments with fresh ap

proaches to staging. A selection made from the Theatre's repertoire affords



SHOULD THE THEATRE iEACtit 405

some idea of the catholicity of tastes

which this policy engenders. The

Electra (Sophocles), Knight of the

Burning Pestle (Beaumont and

Fletcher), Much Ado About Nothing

(Shakespeare), Ascent of F-6 (Auden and Isherwood), The Miser (Moli?re), Dr. Faustus (Marlowe), Murder in

the Cathedral (Eliot), My Heart's in

the Highlands (Saroyan), Tidings

Brought to Mary (Claudel), Athaliah

(Racine). Guest artistes have in

cluded Florence Reed, Sara Allgood, Robert Speaight, Alan Carney, Julie

Hay don and Frederic Tozera. The

organisation was only

a few seasons

old when New York and Hollywood scouts began to make it a point to be

present at every premi?re. Four of its

original plays went into New York

production. A number of C.U. actors

have found Broadway engagements.

The influence of the Catholic

University Theatre of Washington on the professional theatre of America

is beginning to tell.

So much for an organisation

(American and Dominican) which

does not believe that the theatre

should teach in the sense in which I

believe my correspondent thinks it

should teach. Now those of us who, like the C.U. Theatre, oppose the

teaching attitude, do so, in the first

place, because we feel that it is wrong to use the theatre as a means to an

end ; we feel that the art of the

theatre should be practised for thea

trical ends. We know what hap

pened the German Theatre under

National Socialism and we can see

what is happening to the theatre of

the Soviets.

While the desire to teach may help to supply a legitimate source of in

spiration for the dramatist, that de

sire must be obliterated as soon as the

dramatist puts his hand to the drama

turgic task. Art must take prece

dence to propaganda. The most out

standing instances of the reverse of

this is to be found in the work of

Shaw.

Hermon Ould, writing in The Art

of the Play, draws an important dis

tinction on this point between the

work of Shaw and Ibsen. "

Bernard

Shaw, the perfect Ibsenite when it is a matter of ideas, but a poor disciple, when it comes to dramatic technique,

is the propaganda dramatist par ex^

cellence. Lacking Ibsen's architec

tural sense and his superb economy,

and having V.oS concern with posterity than with his own castigable genera

tion, Shaw has nearly always put pro

paganda first and art^ second. . . . His

irrepressible vitality, his superabun dant wit, his impish audacity, and his

fertility in invention have blinded some of us to his comparatively poor

technique and faulty sense of form."

Shakespeare's passionate interest in

human beings, an interest which

carries him to supremacy as a dra

matist, leading to the creation of



406 THE IRISH MONTHLY

characters who appear to move by the

laws of their own being, did not pre clude him from

" teaching

" in the

theatre. As Professor Raleigh puts it : "

In watching his plays we share

in the emotions that are roused in

him by certain events; we are made

to respond to the strange imaginative

appeal of certain others ; we know,

more clearly than if we heard it

uttered, the verdict that lie passes on

certain characters and certain kinds

of conduct." More clearly than if we

had heard it uttered. Here now is

the kernel of our problem. Here is

Shakespeare teaching, and teaching

7/joni effectively than a generation of

" teaching

" dramatists.

As John Drinkwater reminds us,

every one of Shakespeare's plays, from the dark and terrible pity of

Lear to the gracious revelry of

Twelfth Night, is charged with moral

judgment, but "

it is a judgment that

is strictly complimentary to the action

of the characters within the play, as

organically a concern of the poet's

creative function in the play as the characters and actions themselves."

Henry Arthur Jones, distinguished British playwright and early contem

porary of Shaw, held that the dra

matist ought to teach " as nature

teaches?implicitly, silently, with un

obvious, far-removed results ". And

that, more or less, is how Shakes

peare teaches.

In his recently published Looking

at a Play, W. Bridges-Adams (for fifteen years Director of the Shakes

peare Memorial Theatre, Stratford

upon-Avon) sums up the argument as

follows : " The upshot seems to be

that the theatre may and should, for

its own magic purpose, draw on any

thing and everything in contemporary life and thought, but that it is play ing the fool or worse when it sells its

magic for the purpose of propa

ganda." Judgment should follow the art of the playwright. It should

never, as with the propagandist, pre

cede or become embroiled with it.

The dramatist particularly is an

artist who (to borrow some phrases

from Father Arthur Little's The

Nature of Art) "

has fallen in love with man as a spectacle ". He is an

exponent of the ?? '

g&zing ' power of

the soul, not of the reason, which is a

burrowing and exploratory and essen

tially scientific operation". His task

may be summed up as u

a contempla

tion of man by the intellect but in the

imagination ".

Professor Ronald Peacock, in The

Poet in the Theatre, sums up the

effect of the "

teaching "

dramatist on the British drama.

" Under the

impact of subject-matter that had a

pronounced contemporary interest, a

controversial value, and a social ap

plication, writing and production in

the English theatre burst into a great efflorescence ; and yet the movement

failed to produce great dramatic



SHOULD THE THEATRE TEACH? 407

literaturq. That is the remarkable

fact and the critical problem." The movement failed to produce great dramatic literature. Surely the reason

is to be found in the fact that the

theatre was being used as a means to

an end instead of being used as an end

in itself.

What, then, does my anonymous

correspondent (and Rev. Urban

Nagle, O.P.) require of the theatre ?

That it should teach, concern itself with a message, be used as a means to

an end, strangle the possibility of

great dramatic literature ? If totali tarian propagandists see fit to use the

theatre as an end does it follow that we should do so, too ? Why should we panic in this fashion ? The theatre can teach, does teach, teaches

superbly when used for theatrical

ends, used as Shakespeare used it,

used as the Catholic University Theatre of Washington seems deter

mined to use it. Perhaps this may not satisfy my anonymous correspon

dent. For myself, I can only protest

that what is good enough for the

Catholic University Theatre of Wash

ington (not to mention Shakespeare) is good enough for me.

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Should the Theatre Teach?