The Poet in the Theatre. II

Irish Jesuit Province

The Poet in the Theatre. IIReview by: Gabriel FallonThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 66, No. 781 (Jul., 1938), pp. 490-497Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514370 .

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490

Sitting at the Play.

The Poet in the Theatre-II. BY GABRIFL FALLON.

ET the poets say what they will. In the theatre the specifie appeal is-DRAMA. A play is the result of collabora tion between the author, the actors, and the audience.

Authors write to be spoken, actors move and speak to be seen

and heard, and audiences watch and listen to be entertained.

Ignore Aristotelian definitions if you choose, break every rule you have a mind to, consider if you will that crooked roads are

the roads of genius-your success will be the greater for all

that, should you happen to succeed-but see to it that you never

forget you are in the theatre. Poets, they say, are apt to be a

trifle absent-minded. Audiences, on the other hand, seldom forget.

Among the many tributes which have been paid to Mr. George Bernard Shaw it is difficult to find that which should be the most obvious tribute of all-the tribute of completely overshadowing the theatre of his time. Shaw's effect upon the theatre of his time has been tremendous. " Devastating, " is Mr. Somerset

Maugham's word for it. And as a single instance, he points to Mr. Granville Barker saying : " There, but for the bane of Shaw, goes a great British dramatist." Mr. Barker is only one of many.

Having cleared away much of the debris which littered the stage of his youth, Shaw pledged himself with a fiery earnestness and gangantuan enthusiasm to give us a better and a brighter

theatre. Unfortunately his earnestness and enthusiasm happened



THE POET IN THE THEATRE-II. 491

to be that of the preacher and not that of the playwright. We and our theatre have suffered for it. Anything would be better

than pre-Shaw, our elders said. So give us Shaw. And Shaw gave himself-generously, magnificently. He gave himself to our elders, he gave himself to us; and who knows, our children's children in the theatre may not have escaped the influence of this

giving. Shaw's observation of life was perceptive. It was not profound.

His overmastering anxiety to uncover what he believed to be

false drove him into the dangerous snare of pointing his moral at all costs. In his honest and earnest desire to expose falsity, he

falsified. Instead of unfolding human character in action (the task of a playwright) he was led (by his preacher's temperament) into creating an amazing institution of his own, a house of

fantastic puppets, dangling on dexterously manipulated strings, each of them joyously proclaiming the doctrines of George Bernard Shaw. And we allowed him to do this thing simply because he did it so wholeheartedly, so enthusiastically and so entertainingly.

But the stage is not a pulpit. A sermon is not a play. Didactic art is bad art. The bad play may have a moral but the good play is a moral. " Screaming for an obscene purity, shouting for an inhuman peace, hacking up human life into small

sins with a chopper, sneering at men, women and children out of respect to humanity "-these are not themes fit for the

theatre, nor can they be counted among the honourable occupa tions of a playwright, no matter how well-intentioned that play

wright may be, nor how entertainingly he may scream or shout or hack or sneer.

Under this first great handicap-the influence of a playhouse which had been made into a den of preaching puppets-lie mosc of the clever young poets who are attempting to vault upon the



492 THE IRISH MONTHLY

stage to-day. Isms and ologies, fevers of their time, obsess them. These they insist in preaching, in theatre and out of theatre. Lecturing in Dublin last year on The Poet Returns to the Stage, Mr. Ashley Dukes, himself playwright and poet, bemoaned the fact that most of the young poets of to-day were " ideologists "

and (this seemed to pain him more) " to the left ". But the point about poets in the theatre is, that to the left or to the right, " ideology " in the sense in which that heavily laboured word is used to-day can find no abiding place in the theatre though it speaks with the tongues of poets. Outside the theatre is another place. But even there it seems " ideology " may find no refuge:

I never bade you go To Moscow or to Rome, Renounce that drudgery, Call the Muses home.

It would be a mistake to think that Communism as a faith for

poets could stand in the way of poets becoming playwrights. Or that an " ideologist " would be incapable of writing a good play.

All of the great playwrights were " ideologists ": all of themu knew and understood the communal nature of the theatre and appreciated that instant communication with the multitude which the craft of the playwright afforded. They allowed nothing to stand in the way of that communication. They ruthlessly scalpelled themselves to fit the theatre, pruning to grow, suppressing to express. Yet this was no mere " paring to the bone ". It was " panng to the theatre ", which is a vastly different operation.

The Ascent of F.6, The Dance of Death, The Dog Beneath

the Skin, and Trial of a Judge are all plays by young poets which reveal in a marked fashion the presence of a disastrous didac




ticism. In all there is poetry. In all there is evidence of a great enthusiasm for the theatre coupled with an appalling lack of knowledge of the theatre's essentials. I think it was Mr. Ivor Brown who said that The Ascent of F.6 had the suggestion of undergraduate charade about it, and left one with the feeling that some bright young Communists were doing it impromptu.

That may sound unkind, but to anyone who knows and appre

ciates the theatre no less than he loves poetry, it is very true.

About all these plays there is a strange unexpected obscurity. Strange because obscurity is anathema in the theatre, unexpected because (remembering Mr. MacNeice) one had hoped for a more explosive sense of communication from his fellows:

It's farewell to the drawing-room's citilised cry, The professor's sensible whereto and why, The frock-coated diplomat's social aplomb, Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb."

Private imagery, untranslatable symbols and a seemingly relentless indifference to traditional forms of verse, hamper all these young poets in the theatre. Instant communication is out of the question. The elusive strange adjective, the startling originality of phrase, impeding the understanding and tripping the imagination like a protruding barb, the ever-present danger of bathos lurking in the use of the idiom of our own times, alienate not the audience only but the actor as well. Starkness, actuality, newspaper realism, the milling of mobs, interspersed with calm pools of pure poetry, will never compensate any but the most hard-wearing of the intelligentsia. And even when the resigna tion of the indignant actor has been overborne by the substitu tion of the bright Communist undergraduate, the difficulty of the third A will remain. The honest audiences of Hamlet and

Macbeth, aye, and even of Man and Superman, will surely flee



494 THE IRISH MONTHLLY

these excesses of Messrs. Auden, Isherwood and Spender for the more congenial surroundings of the nearby Hollywood or hostelry.

For instance, despite its undoubted poetry, not many audiences would be prepared to accept this. Mrs. A, a typical suburbanite, is speaking of a dead mountaineer and of his escape from:

Ever charming, he will miss The insulting paralysis, Ruined intellects' confusion, Ulcer's patient persecution, Sciatica's intolerance And the cancer's slow advance. Never hear, among the dead, The rival's brilliant paper read,

Colleague's deprecating cough And the praises falling off.

Would it precipitate a theatre riot, one wonders, if a gentleman in the front pit, having listened in amazement to the last four lines, were to rise and exclaim:

That's charning, Aude-n, I should say, But certainly not Missus A.!!

Yet rioting in such a cause might do much to bring these young men to a sense of theatre.

In Mr. Spender's Trial of a Judge there is a death scene which though in parts poetic, presents difficulties for both speaker and hearer, and runs to the verge of rant:

As the helmeted airman regards Through the glazed focus of height The bistre silent city abandoned like a leaf



THE POET IN THE THEATRE-il. 495

With veins in microscopic detai beneath him, So from my towered pause of death, 0 sweet carrier of life, my rivited eye looks Thirty years forward when your child is grown.

Imagine if the children of this hour

Grew free of the tree-like shadow of their parents Falling across them with the fate of envy And with roots of greed to clutch their hearts.

And again, one wonders what lessons did Mr. Spender ever seek to learn from poets who were playwrights in the theatre and could move (and can still move profoundly) whole multitudes of hearers with such simple things as this:

My mother had a maid call'd Barbara: She was in love; and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. She had a song of " willow ";

An old thing 'twas, but it express'd her fortune And she died singing it : that song to-night will not

go from my mind. Or this:

Thou'lt come no more, Never, never, never, never, never! Pray you, undo this button: thank you, sir.

Or-but why ply instance after instance? We would laugh to scorn the man who thought to succeed by foregoing apprenticeship to a craft, or who hoped to practise what he had neglected to study. And Master-Craftsman Shakespeare is still to be found in the theatre to-day. But most of our young poets simply shrug shoulders at him, turning towards the darkness of their little ways away from the illumination of his great knowledge of the theatre.

The Herne's Egg, described as " a stage play " (so that there can be no doubt of the author's intention of delivering his goods



496 THE IRISH MONTHLY

in the theatre) is a baffling piece of work. Mr. Austin Clarke says of it: " This is a very odd play." Others might prefer

to say of it simply " It is very odd ", and leave it at that. Mr.

Yeats has wvritten well for the theatre in his time and has inspired others to write better. But one is tempted to doubt that he ever expected actors, either having or lacking music, to perform this play for him, or that he imagines that any but the most adoring of Dublin's three hundred would sit it out. According to Mr. Clarke, " A nodding acquaintance with the poet's private

mythology is all that is necessary in order to follow this play of

transmigration. But to understand it would be too great a demand." It is hardly necessary to add anything to Mr. Clarke's words. But a quotation from the work may prove illuminating and help to give a wholly unintended meaning to the phrase " actors lacking music ":

He will come when you are dead,

Push you down a step or two Into cat or rat or bat, Into dog or wyolf or goose. Everybody in his new shape I can see. But Congal there stands in a cloud Because his fate is not yet settled.

Mr. Clarke's comment is that the verse " lacks the old magic and presents a problem to the actor ". Mr. Clarke speaks sym

pathetically and as a poet. But the fact is that any thought of the theatre in reference to this work simply robs one of reason able comment. One cannot help feeling that this work of Mr.

Yeats calls for as preface his remark that " The Abbey Theatre will fail to do its full work because there is no accepted authority to explain why the more difficult pleasure is the nobler pleasure." This Herne's Egg is a difficult pleasure surely.




Ignorance of the theatre's fundamentals is the greatest barrier that stands facing the poets. Their seeming refusal to study the theatre is all the more difficult to understand in view of the poets

who have made of it their monument. Yet there is a clean wind of hope in the enthusiasm of the younger men. There is a possibility that their middle years may witness the dawn of a great enlightenment, the birth of an essential humility. Poets they may be, but playwrights they have yet to become. The traditional theatre will stand so long as the older poets stand.

And they are likely to stand a little longer. Shaw's moment and his movement lay between the dreary ineptitude of the Victorian stage and the coming of the omnipresent cinema. Entertainment is for sale in so many places to-day that there are actually people who expect to find it in the theatre. Sometimes, as Mr. Maugham reflects, plays succeed in the " commercial "

theatre simply because they have the appeal of dramatic enter tainment. They may not have much more to recommend them.

But the works of Lope de Vega, Shakespeare and MoliZere had everything and more than the theatre required. These authors knew the theatre. The poet must know the theatre if the theatre is to know the poet.



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The Poet in the Theatre. II