Trial Play and Theatre Workshop

Irish Jesuit Province

Trial Play and Theatre WorkshopReview by: Gabriel FallonThe Irish Monthly, Vol. 66, No. 775 (Jan., 1938), pp. 55-59Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20514266 .

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55

Sitting at the Play.

Trial Play And Theatre Workshop

By GABRIEIL FALLON.

LME:R RICE is something more than a modem play wright. For in a theatre in which the titleh" playwright is easily and unrighteously earned, Elmer Rice is a man

who knows something about the job of playwriting. Very likely he knows it as a job, as something to be done. Very likely, too, he feels that to do a job really well one needs to possess a crafts man's knowledge for the doing of it. Surely that is how Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe viewed their work. That is, of

course, if -ever they thought of " viewing " it. One is tempted to think that art and expression and all that precious stuff and nonsense never robbed these sturdy " theatricals " of one hour's honest sleep nor did the pride of any of these things stiffen another inch into their Sunday ruffs. If ever Shakespeare had the

time or the inclination to consider himself, he considered himself, no doubt, a worker in the theatre. Probably he was far too

busy considering the theatre to find the time (had he the inclina

tion) to consider himself. The stage since Shakespeare's time has played many parts.

Indeed, reputations have been sought and found upon it for things masquerading under the name of play-making which have had but little relation to the craft. The right way of making things in the theatre has given place to the making of things

which do not belong to the theatre at all. Art theatres abound. Audiences have ceased being consumers and have become



56 THE IRISH MONTHLY

connoisseurs instead. And if in Shakespeare's day the artist's peculiarity lay only in knowing how the particular work could be done, nowadays the artist's peculiarity seems to consist in knowing how to do anything but the particular work. The theatre has fallen from the grace of its own first principles. It

must return to a knowledge of itself. When a particular Art theatre proclaims that its interest will lie in producing " plays that are literature" it mea:ns better than well, so to speak, but

when its audiences find that this good intention has led it into the wilderness of producing literary (and other) effusions which are not plays, it would do well to consider the advisability of

shedding the " art " and the " literature " and concentrating on a study of the " theatre " and the play.

Elmer Rice knows much about play-making. However one may disagree with the material content of his work one cannot help feeling that his sole preoccupation is with making a play out of it. No doubt he knew that the great G. B. S. has laid down in his Dramatic Essays and Opinions that the author who stages a trial scene is doing an easy, lazy (and therefore) an un desirable thing. Nevertheless that knowledge did not deter himn from writing Jludgment Day and turning the material of a trial into a three-act play. Shaw himself, by the way, neglected this advice of his drama-critic days and used a trial scene in at least three of his plays.

Although Judgment Day was billed by the Dublin Gate Theatre Productions as Dictatorship v. Democracy, I cannot say if this phrase is the playwright's own sub-title for his work. I

hardly think it is. As a play Judgment Day is well made; entertaining and dramatic. As a representation of the struggle between Dictatorship and Democracy it is-well quite another affair. For its Dictatorship is a swaggering, scheming, brutal, perjured, torturing Goliath while its Democracy is a suffering,



TRIAL PLAY AND THEiATRE WORKSHOP 57

tortured, but-not-so-honest David, scheming to kill, and killing. That this may not have been the general impression received from the play I am quite prepared to believe, for there was that in the

writing and the production of it which tended<to obscure the fact that this particular Democracy was less honest than it protested, less innocent than it proclaimed itself to be. It was a Democracy

which felt it must protect itself from being sinned against, by sinning. The murders of this Dictatorship were horrible heinous crimes crying, not to Heaven, but to Democracy, for vengeance.

Naturally, of course, Democracy heard these cries and answered with murders which were neither so horrible nor so heinous, being, as we were made to see, just glorious blows for liberty.

The total effect of this play and its production was to wring from its many audiences a sweeping thoughtless admiration for something which was not so very admirable. This it did by rousing a righteous detestation for something which was unrighteous and detestable. Being a well-made play, it did its work with thoroughness a-nd with a will. It left its audiences with no choice, with no thought or idea of a middle way, nothing between this brutal Goliath and this sly scheming David. Perhaps it did even more than that in leaving them with no room for another thought or idea. A season of such plays would probably ptecipitate a revolution. Who knows? Then again, who cares? And again, maybe we ought to have a revolution? Of course the only antidote to this sort of thing is another play. But it will have to be at least as equally well made.

The power of a well-made play is a power to be reckoned with. After its own fashion it will answer to a good or evil intent. Sometimes one almost despairs of this fact becoming known to our theatre lovers. But there is another side to this story.

A few evenings ago I was privileged to visit the theatre work



58 THE IRISH MONTHLY

shop of a recently formed drama guild. In a high old Georgian room a group of young enthusiasts had built a simple plain proscenium front. Behind it they had well and truly laid a solid stage, and on that stage they had erected one of the most effec tive settings I have seen in amateur (or indeed professional) work. rThe occasion was the production-the experimental production

-of a play by one of our coming dramatists, a young man whose first professionally produced play is now on an American tour. This other was not perhaps as well-made as his first, but the pro duction of it will no doubt enable him to perfect the flaws in its craftsmanship. Here the content of the play was such that had the hand of the author been surer, one would have no hesitation

whatever in describing it as a play touching greatness. And yet the people of this play were simple folk, true democrats, meeting the great problems of their democracy in that high kingly fashion which is their heritage. Technically faulty, it was, nevertheless, by nature of its philosophic content, deeply-very deeply-moving. Welded with a greater deftness it could claim its place in the ranks of great tragedy.

For the enthusiasm and hard work and common theatre sense of this Drama Guild I have nothing but admiration and a great cheer. They have playwrights, actors (excellent actors) and audiences (who pay for admission, by the way), a stage and an auditorium. In short, they have a whole theatre to command. But they require something more, I'd venture. They require a theatre study group, a body of earnest young people who, realising the power of a people's entertainment, are prepared to study the whole problem of theatre and of our own Anglo-Irish and Irish theatres in particular. This, I think, would crown the excellent work they have so earnestly taken in hands.

* * c

News from America has confirmed the rumour that the Abbey



TRIAL PLAY AND THEATRE WORKSHOP 59

Players there have turned defeat into a victory by their produc tion of Lennox Robinson's The Far-Off Hills. Elizabeth Jordan,

writing in America, says -

" There was no question that the delightful Abbey Theatre Players came a cropper with their first offering this season, Katie Roche. There is no question that with their most recent play, Lennox Robinson's The Far-Off Iills, they have set all the success bells ringing.

" This -fact is as surprising as it is gratifying. The Far-Off

Hills has been offered us before. We have taken it with cheerful gurgles of appreciation. But we have never shown for it the vast enthusiasm we are expressing now. Why? Possibly our taste has improved. Possibly the production and acting of the play have brought out beauties we failed to see before. Certainly those beauties are there, together with the art and charm and zest of Irish players up on their toes to do the best work of their lives and live down a debacle. So a dramatic season which sorely needed another success has it.

" The play is a slight thing. It is the story of a girl who thinks she wishes to be a nun, and who changes her mind about it. Before she changes it, however, Miss Eileen Crowe and her associate players have given New Yorkers an evening full of such gaiety, humour and charm that none will forget the experience. "

After reading that I feel I must see this play of Lennox Robinson's. Few drama critics can sit at all the theatre all the time.



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Trial Play and Theatre Workshop