Literatura y crítica

Romance and Realism 1891-1914

LUNES, 31 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

Romance and Realism 1891-1914

Chapter 17 of The Illustrated Oxford History of British Drama, by Simon Trussler: 

The tension between Victorian verities and Edwardian frivolities was already perceptible when, in 1901, the portly Prince of Wales belatedly succeeded to the throne. A world ever more closely resembling our own had been ushered in as much by the arrival of primitive film and popular halfpenny newspapers in the 1890s as by the activities of trades unionists and the suffragettes at home and intimations of revolution abroad in the following decade—which also saw the parliamentary struggle of the last great Liberal government to lay the foundations of a Welfare State. Already the rights and wrongs of the Boer War, bridging the old century and the new, had divided the nation, and soon the First World War (by present-day standards a conflict somewhat short on technology, but profligate of suffering and death) was to cast its long, engulfing shadow.

[Illustration:] the fall from the tower of the title character in The Master Builder, by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906). This illustration (from the Pall Mall Budget) is of the first British production at the Trafalgar Theatre in 1893.Watching Herbert Waring's Solness is his youthful hero-worshipper Hilda Wangel, played by the anglicized American actress Elizabeth Robins (1862-1952), who held the British stage rights to most of Ibsen's plays. Among other of his leading female roles, she played Martha Bernick in Pillars of Society (1889), Mrs. Linde in A Doll's House (1891), the title role in Hedda Gabler (1891), Rebecca West in Rosmersholm (1893), Asta Allmers in Little Eyolf(1896), and Ella Rentheim in John Gabriel Borkman (1896). Controversy over the true merits of the Norwegian dramatist dominated critical discussion during this period. Though his cause was championed both by his first translator William Archer and by the young Bernard Shaw, he was virulently attacked by such conservative writers as the ageing but influential theatre critic of theDaily Telegraph, Clement Scott.

THEATRE AS 'SOCIAL LUXURY'In the face of all this, commercial theatre remained cosily complacent, concerned to insulate the class interests it served. An Italian observer, Mario Borsa, writing in 1908 in The English Stage of Today, summed it up: 'The entire organization of the theatre reflects that special and aristocratic conception of its status which is the point of view of its patrons.' In consequence, although London was 'overrun with theatres', there was, in Borsa's judgement, a pervasive 'intellectual apathy' behind the 'lack of good prose drama'—or, as even that most Anglophilic of immigrants, Henry James, had to concede, the theatre in England was 'a social luxury and not an artistic necessity'.Such contemporary comments should serve to caution us against the selective recall to which some theatre historians have been prone as they earnestly trace the ascendancy of 'the new drama'. This, although it undeniably existed, was in truth written by and for a mere handful of intellectuals—while the West End theatre continued to cater to audiences who were either unconcerned with or actively seeking diversion from political and industrial struggles symptomatic of profound social discontent. Ibsenism may have been as quintessential to Bernard Shaw as socialism: but neither was considered a fit subject in polite conversation.The nation was becoming no less intellectually than it was socially divided. The 'moderns' in the theatre, as in all the arts, were by and large radical in their political as in their artistic beliefs, just as they not only held but were now able to propound a rationalist philosophy which would have been unmentionable (if not unthinkable) a bare thirty years earlier. Yet they still sought to storm the citadels of that 'special and aristocratic' theatre, with little thought of reaching a popular audience through its own forms of art—of which the music hall, as we shall see, was enjoying a proud heyday before its fall—or of touching the habits and tastes of other than the well-to-do.In the West End theatres, the curtain generally rose at eight o'clock, to permit patrons to dine beforehand, and was down in time for 'carriages at eleven' and a late supper. Evening dress was de rigueur except in the residual pit and the gallery, whose lowlier patrons were generally assigned their own entrances in adjoining alleyways—and so discouraged from joining the fashionable foyer throng. Certainly, they were not expected to have much to contribute to the plays themselves: thus, Arthur Pinero claimed that 'a certain order of ideas expressed or questions discussed' was simply beyond the powers 'of the English lower-middle and lower classes' to articulate. And it is ironic that even Bernard Shaw, for all his declared socialism, in practice seemed to concur—his occasional working-class characters being drawn either from the long typology of clever servants, such as Enry Straker in Man and Superman, or conceived as good-natured but indolent buffoons, as when Alfred Doolittle in Pygmalion fulfils the expectations of his charactonym (a convention now rare in the 'realistic' drama).THE ACTOR-MANAGER AS MATINEE IDOLOften, when dramatists strayed from idealizing the respectable classes in their contemporary drawing-rooms, it was to transplant their value system into the realms of romance: and the last great generation of actor-managers increasingly found it expedient to cast themselves in the choicest romantic leads. It was George Alexander who began the trend in 1896 when, in the face of scepticism from his contemporaries, he accepted Edward Rose's adaptation of Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, himself doubling the roles of Rudolf Rassendyl and the King—thereby restoring the fortunes of the St James's Theatre, which he managed from 1891 until his death in 1918.But sometimes actors found themselves trapped within the romantic personae they created. Lewis Waller, for all his personal modesty and classical ambitions, thus came to be increasingly identified with just two parts—those of D'Artagnan in the most successful of numerous adaptations of Dumas's The Three Musketeers (1898), and of Booth Tarkington's eponymous Monsieur Beaucaire (1902). To Waller is usually given the doubtful credit of becoming the first matinee idol—his faithful followers even wearing badges proclaiming that they were 'Keen on Waller' (a slogan which quickly gave way to it unfortunate acronym).Among his fellow matinee idols, none was a better physical embodiment of the 'interesting' romantic type than Johnston Forbes-Robertson. This 'dreamy, poetic-looking creature'—as he was described by Ellen Terry, who had played opposite him as early as 1874 in The Wandering Heir—was already in his forties when, to Irving's absence, he triumphed as Romeo to Mrs Patrick Campbell's Juliet in 1894, and three years later he gave what was generally acclaimed as a definitive Hamlet for the fin-de-siècle generation, causing Irving to forswear acting the part again.

Johnston Forbes-Robertson (1853-1937) in the role of Hamlet—which he first played at the age of forty-four, 1897. Seeing this performance is said to have inspired Shaw to write Caesar and Cleopatra, in which Forbes-Robertson eventually played in 1907. Generally recognized as the inheritor of Irving's mantle, Forbes-Robertson, like Lewis Waller, had a 'fallback' role, in his case that of the Stranger in Jerome's mystical melodramaThe Passing of the Third Floor Back—although, perhaps to the envy of Waller, Forbes-Robertson could count no less on the enduring popularity of his Hamlet According to Hesketh Pearson, biographer of The Last Actor-Managers, Charles Wyndham could similarly rely on reviving David Garrick, Hare on A Pair of Spectacles,Alexander on The Importance of Being Earnest, Tree onTrilby, Martin-Harvey on The Only Way, and Fred Terry on The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Lewis Waller (1860-1915) in The Three Musketeers(1898). Waller was embarrassed by his reputation as supposedly the first of the great 'matinee idols': he much preferred Shakespearean or light comedy roles, but found himself (like several other of the great actor-managers of the period) inescapably identified with the romantic leads his fans preferred. ('Will no one', he is said to have pleaded, 'rid me of these turbulent priestesses?') He was also greatly admired in Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire(1902), playing the even-tempered Frenchman of the title, whose exquisite debonaire wit gallantly puts down ill-bred English rivals.

Forbes-Robertson's last great success was as the enigmatically beneficient Stranger in Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1908), a sort of bourgeoisified Bloomsbury equivalent to the mysterious vagrant in Maxim Gorky's Lower Depths. The self-denial personified by Jerome's Stranger was approved as a vicarious virtue by audiences not much given to its practice: thus, no less popular was the role of the selfless Sidney Carton which John Martin-Harvey had carved for himself at the Lyceum (again while Irving was on tour) in a dramatization of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, retitled The Only Way (1899). Unfortunately the character so overwhelmed Martin-Harvey's reputation that, to borrow Bryan Forbes's apt metaphor, 'his many journeys to the tumbrel led to a guillotining of what might have been a more varied and distinguished career'.Towering above all these, with his usual deceptively indolent air, was Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who managed the Haymarket from 1887, just eight years after his professional debut, until he built the new Her Majesty's Theatre across the road in 1897. Tree produced Shakespeare with a legendary extravagance to which we shall return, while as an actor he preferred larger-than-life characters ranging from Falstaff to Fagin. Even when he found himself bowing to the new taste for romance, he usually managed to tune-in a character to his own temperamental wavelength—as with his Svengali in Paul Potter's adaptation of George du Maurier's Trilby (1895).Tree was also prepared to take occasional risks on less formulaic stuff, with varying degrees of success. When he staged Ibsen's Enemy of the People in 1893 it barely graduated from matinees to evenings, achieving a mere seven performances: but in 1914 it was Tree who gave Shaw his first great commercial success with Pygmalion —in which Mrs. Patrick Campbell playing Eliza, completed an unholy trinity of creatively tensile personalities. However, among the actor-managers it was George Alexander who most consistently preferred new British plays, and who staged at the St. James's Wilde's Lady Winderemere's Fan(1892) and Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893). Both plays raised and, in the end, ducked the issue of the sexual 'double standard'—which brings us to the one serious issue with which West End audiences did (as it were) flirt: the 'woman question'.THE 'WOMAN QUESTION'As pursued in the drama, the debate over the 'woman question' largely reflected a patriarchal concern to give the matter serious attnetion and then to come down solidly in favour of the status quo. Sydney Grundy (a dependable churner-out of overly well-made plays after the manner of the French boulevardist Sardou) thus wrote an eponymous put-down of The New Woman for the Comedy Theatre in 1894, the year in which the phrase enterd popular usage, in clear expectation that his audience would share his own conclusion—that she was really 'as old as Eve, and just as hungry for the fruit she plucked'.Of course, the prevailing sexual hypocrisy touched the theatre no less than the rest of society. In The Case of Rebellious Susan (1894), another of that topical cluster of plays of the early 1890s which deigned to notice the 'woman question', Henry Arthur Jones, while calmly affirming the inevitability of male philandering, set out to show how a wife who tries to pay back her husband in kind comes to grief, repentance, and acceptance of the woman's role—to 'forgive the wretched till they learn constancy'. The manager of the Criterion, Charles Wyndham, refused to allow his leading lady, Mary Moore, to utter the one line which would have confirmed Susan's adultery: but in real life, though very unobtrusively, Wyndham had loong been committing adultery with Mary Moore. Like Wyndham, Tree managed to acquire a knighthood while at the same time breeding children faster with his mistress than his wife, and personifying the ideal of the Edwardian male described by Frank Harris as 'adultery with all home comforts'.Ironically, the profession of actress was meanwhile becoming, if not exactly respectable, at least a good deal more acceptable than it had been—although no less an actress than Ellen Terry had bolstered all the worst Victorian expectations of her caling by strewing an estranged husband, a lover, and ilegitimate children in her wake. (Careless of the respectability vicariously restored by her association with Irving, she took a third husband half her age in her sixtieth year, and was duly made to wait until three years before her death in 1928—thirthy-three years after Irving's knighthood—to be created a Dame.)Successive census returns reveal that whereas in 1851 there had been around half as many actresses as actors, by 1881 women were outnumbering men in the profession, as they have continued to do ever since: precisely, their numbers rose from 891 in 1861 to 3,696 thirty years later. However happily such figures may reflect the improved social standing of the profession as a whole, and a wider acceptance that actresses were not instantly to be identified as whores, it was, none the less, largely the male dramatist's typoloty of womanhood which determined the parts they were permitted to play.When Robertsonian society dramas had begun both to emulate and to educate in polite behaviour, the public tendency to confuse manners displayed on stage and off encouraged the assumption that a socially acceptable role reflected an actresse's 'real' nature. So while the American Adah Isaacs Menken, in achieving a succès de scandale with her notorious breeches role as mazeppa, was behaving as might be expected of a foreigner, English actresses wishing to advance their social standing had followed the lead of Helen Faucit—who had made a 'good' marriage and been able to retire early by specializing in roles which identified her with the Victorian ideal of demure, domesticated womanhood. Even Ellen Terry enjoyed one of her greatest successes, as Imogen in Cymbeline, in part because the role embodied the untainted female virtue deemed desirable by the Victorian patriarchy.

Ellen Terry as Imogen inCymbeline. Playing opposite Irving's Iachimo in the Lyceum production of 1896, she had to embody a Victorian ideal of constancy in the face of doubts and temptations—to become, in Swinburne's words, 'the most adorable woman ever created by God or man'. Terry's genius added some mercurial spirit to the character, but the patriarchal expectations which confined her were as much part of Irving's acting style as of her audience's life style. Shaw warned her of 'an idiotic paragon of virtue produced by Shakespeare's views of what a woman ought to be'

And so when Clement Scott, nearing his dotage in 1898, warned that 'it is nearly impossible for a woman to remain pure who adopts the stage as a profession', the collective outrage of the London managements secured the old man's dismissal from his influential position on the Daily Telegraph. But male playwrights continued to assume that in the serious affairs of their life their sex was, as of right, cast in the decision-making role: thus, in such products of the patriarchy as Jones's later plays The Liars (1897) and Mrs Dane's Defence (1900), young reprobates are saved from the clutches of 'women with a past' in order to fulfil their destinies as the providers and legislators of society.Thoughtful actresses were well aware that the roles they were given to play made them haplessly complicit in the way that their sex was presented on stage. Even the vaguely supportive Pinero deeming it necessary to convert his title-character in The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) from a 'woman agitator' with 'original independent ideas' (as her creator, Mrs Patrick Campbell, described her) into a creature of 'Bible-reading inertia' in the last act.So a growing number of women began to write their own plays—a task few had successfully attempted since the eighteenth century, despite (or perhaps becaue of) the pre-eminence of women in the less public form of the novel. And, with the predominantly male breed of actor-managers unsypathetic (as much on account of the absence of central roles for themselves as from ingrained prejudice), women had also to involve themselves in management—as did Lena Ashwell, when she took over the Kingsway Theatre in 1907. In the following year was formed the Actresses' Franchise League, which offered active—and activist—support to the campaign for women's sufrage. As in the days of Chartism, sympathetic performers would sugar the propagandist pill at meetings and rallies—at first with solo acts, then with specially written plays. One of the best of these, a collaboration between Cicely Hamilton and 'Christopher' St John, female partner to Ellen Terry's daughter Edith Craig, was a swift-moving farce entitled How the Vote Was Won(1909), which fulfilled the anticipatory promise of its title by showing women taking men an¡t their word—and completely overwhelming them with demands for the 'protection' they claimed as their prerogative.A more conventionally prestigious outcome of the League's activities was its members' reluctantly-conceded participation in the glaa celebrations of 1911 for the Coronation of King George V—in which, ironically but imaginatively, they presented a masque by Ben Jonson, The Vision of Delight. And some women prominent in the movement went on to form permanent companies—most notably Inez Bensusan, who mounted a successful women's season at the Coronet in 1913, and Edith Craig, whose Pioneer Players, formed in the following year, managed to survive beyond the First World War.PROBLEM PLAYS—AND POPULAR PLAYSOther women's plays were more orthodox in structure if not in theme, and probably neither Cicely Hamilton, whose Diana of Dobson's was staged by Ashwell at the Kingsway in 1908, or Gilda Sowerby, whoseRutherford and Son enjoyed a full season's run at the Vaudeville in 1912, would have objected to her work being labelled a 'problem play'—though it was with malice aforethought that Grundy had coined the term in the 1890s to describe the collision between the belated English discovery of naturalism and that discussion or ilustration of a specific social 'issue' which so often distinguisehd its dramatic expression.Of the continental 'slice-of-life' realism of Zola—as more immediately of Gerhard Hauptmann's The Weavers or Gorky's The Lower Depths—there was very little trace in the British theatre: indeed, such rare examples as spring to mind were products either of the women's movement or of the more down-to earth provincial theatre (to which we shall shortly turn). And so it was, for example, that D. H. Lawrence's vivid depictions of a coal-mining community in A Collier's Friday Night, The Daughter-in-Law, and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd—all of which were written before 1912—remained unperformed for over fifty years.Predictably, the box sets which entrapped the characters of the 'new drama' more often than not represented domestic or business interiors not dissimilar from those in which their audiences passed their lives—or aspired so to do. So while Bernard Shaw wryly acknowledged that the 'problems' identified in his Widowers' Houses or in Mrs Warren's Profession—respectively slum landlordism and prostitution—qualified them as 'Plays Unpleasant', not one of their scenes is set in a slum or a brothel. Rather than in any closer visual (or for that matter verbal) approximation to the 'real' —or, more precisely, much sense that it should be other than bourgeois in its dramaturgic boundaries—it was largely in a changed perception of character that naturalism in the new drama was now manifesting itself.In melodrama (as indeed in society drama) character had been largely a function of plot—the product of changes rung, often arbitrarily, upon a set of immutable traits. The assumptions behind the received rules which governed this socio-dramatic decorum were either duly fulfilled, or simply inverted—as when aristocrats are turned into villains, or labourers are endowed with nobility of spirit. Naturalism, on the other hand, presented character as it presumed it to be formed in life—as a composite effect of heredity and environment. In this it became, however, a mode not much less deterministic than classical tragedy.This, while it is clearly more 'realistic' that past actions rather than plot mechanics should be seen as the driving force behind present events, man's destiny appears no less inescapable when it is governed by birth and social circumstance than when ruled by an implacable fate. And so a sense of inevitability pervades even the choicest products of the new naturalism—whether twisted towards tragedy as by Ibsen in Ghosts,or towards comedy as by Shaw in Man and Superman. Despite the best intentions of the dramatists, this could not but bolster an audience's feelings that, however imperfect the world might be, there was not much that they personally could do about it.It is not surprising, then, that in the works of such writers as Alfred Sutro, St John Hankin, and the emergent Somerset Maugham, native naturalism should have integrated itself so soon and so seamlessly with the old 'society drama'. And even while the freer-spirited among the new dramatists were trying to broaden its horizons—Granville Barker, for example, through the unresolved dilemma of The Voysey Inheritance(1905), or Galsworthy thorugh the egalitarian concerns of Strife (1909) and Justice (1910)—on the Continent the creative energies of the style were already on the wane.Henrik Ibsen had thus written his last play in 1899, by which time Alfred Jarry had strangled individual psychology almost at birth in the proto-absurdist Ubu Roi. August Strindberg was already moving into his expressionistic phase, and Maurice Maeterlinck was sparking symbolism into fitful dramatic life. The closest counterpart the British theatre could muster was Stephen Phillips—whom William Archer, with what proved to be undue optimism, acclaimed as a new Milton for his high poetic dramas such as Herod (1900) Ulysses (1902), and, most notably, Paolo and Francesca (1902). Both Alexander and Tree briefly took him up, but his work soon floundered into high-sounding incoherence.

Poster for the first production of J. M. Barrie's perennial Christmas show, Peter Pan,at the Duke of York's Theatre, 1904. Barrie (1860-1937) wrote other, more grown-up whimsies, such as Quality Street (1902) and Mary Rose (1920), but these have weathered less well than his gentle social satires, notably The Admirable Crichton(1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), and Dear Brutus (1917), where his chronic sentimentality is redressed by imagination and an insistent, insidious charm.

The theatrically enduring plays of the period often tell us truths in their authors' despite. Thus, Brandon Thomas skilfully energized that most perennial of farces, Charles's Aunt (1892), by blending mild sexual titillation into his even milder satire upon social and mercenary ambitions: while this was sufficient to ensure the play's contemporary success, today we can relish, too, its understated, perhaps sublimated uncertainties about gender role and the ageing process.Other uncertainties, social rather than sexual, lie beneath the mannered surface of James Barries's The Admirable Crichton (1902), whose titular paragon of a butler, his household marooned on a desert island, assumes the master's role only to withdraw into his 'proper place' with the return to normalcy. Even so, Squire Bancroft. as recorded by A. E. W. Mason, was surely not alone in feeling that such a juxtaposition of the drawing room and the servants' hall was 'a very painful subject'. And the even more enduringly successful Peter Pan (1904) is, for all its whimsical pleasures, no less painful in the truths it tells, whether about Barrie's own psyche—or about a patriarchal society which was already gearing up to fight a world war according to the ethics of the preparatory school.The relative popularity of writers we might today consider of greater importance is instructive. Futures collated by the critic Ian Clarke indicate that although plays by Shaw enjoyed 2,568 performances between 1890 and 1919, Jones notched up a total of 3,690, and Pinero no fewer than 4.834—while Galsworthy and Barker managed a mere 290 and 231 respectively. Shaw, who actually overtook his rivals in the final decade, was thus alone among the 'new' dramatists in breaking into the commercial sector, and so making an impact upon an audience beyond the intellectual elite: but it took him well over a decade after his first play reached the stage, and a good deal of conscious self-publicizing—not to mention the staking out of acceptable boundaries—to establish a platform from which to do so.THE SELF-FASHIONING OF BERNARD SHAWAll through the 1890s Shaw had thus remained more influential as a critic than as a dramatist, while meanwhile calculatedly fashioning himself as a socialist enfant terrible (albeit in early middle age) and a prototype of what we would today call a media celebrity. In 1898, when only two of his seven Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant had been performed, he also took the then unusual step of publishing them in a nicely-presented reading edition, apparently as the only way of guaranteeing them a reasonable circulation. For his fortunes as a performed playwright were at first inseparable from the activities of the little play-producing societies which, since the creation of the Independent Theatre by J. T. Grein in 1891, had been attempting to emulate the work of the 'free theatres' of continental Europe—and which played (in borrowed theatres) to audiences which, however critically receptive, were usally very small indeed.For most of its six-year existence the main concern of the Independent Theatre was with the work of little-known foreign dramatists (ibsen of course among them) but it had also launched Shaw's belated dramatic career in 1892 with a production of Widowers' Houses. Its mantle was inherited by the New Century Theatre, formed in 1897 by Elizabeth Robins, a pioneer of the Ibsenite as of the women's movement, and then, more enduringly, indeed, until the very eve of the First World War—by the Stage Society, which gave Shaw renewed exposure with its opening production of You Never Can Tell in 1899. In the following year came the premier of Candida—in which the role of Marchbanks as played by the then rising actor and aspirant playwright Harley Granville Barker.

From the first production of Shaw's Man and Superman, staged in 1905 during the Vedrenne-Barker management of the Court: Ann Whitefield and Jack Tanner, the couple drawn irreisistibly together by the 'life force', were played by Lillah McCarthy (also seen as Viola [below] and her future husband, Granville Barker—here in distinctively Shavian guise. Barker only adopted the more familiar hyphenated form following his second marriage, when, at his new wife's instigation, he abandoned the stage—but produced the valuable series of Prefaces to Shakespeare.

It was when Granville Barker entered into mangerial partnership with J. E. Vedrenne at the Court Theatre from 1904 to 1907 that Shaw's work began to reach a wider public. No fewer than eleven of his plays were produced, firmly establishing his reputation as a 'new' but entertaining comic dramatist, while the Vedrenne-Barker seasons also presented work by Barker himself, Galsworthy, and Hankin—not to mention Euripides, three of whose tragedies (in new translations by Gilbert Murray) were restore to the live theatre after centuries of confinement to the study. Somerset Maugham followed in Shaw's footsteps, though not his politics, making his name with productions first by the Stage Society and then at the Court—whence Lady Frederick transferred to the West End in 1907, to be joined within a year by three more of Maugham's finely-honed yet hollow-centred society dramas.Shaw himself had by now entered heartily into what was to prove his lifelong role as licensed jester to a social system which, as a self-proclaimed communist, he supposedly despised. Since he also believed that the sex drive was controlled by 'creative evolution' (which he theatricalized as the 'life force') any love interest in his comedies tends towards coyness and the encouragement of good breeding—understood as a matter not of armorial bearings but of eugenic engineering. In this as in other matters the Shavian 'tone of voice' is inimitable: but so far from filling his plays with spokespeople for himself, as popular legend asserts, Shaw gives the devil considerably more than his due in the dramatized debates which flesh out his plots serious issues all too frequently being reduced to rhetorical diversions in the process.Shaw's topical satire upon the Irish question, John Bull's Other Island (1904), was thus greatly enjoyed by most of its supposed targets—the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, actually paying a return visit. And although in Major Barbara (1905) Shaw dared to delve so far into the sanitized lower depths of London as a Salvation Army hostel, his delight in dialectical paradox ensures that he ends up apparently in favour of armament production as a species of social service. Only in Heartbreak House, written during the First World War when armament production was no longer a laughing matter, does a raw nerve of honesty seem touched within himself, creating a more contemplative, bittersweet mood which the English later came to insist on regarding at Chekhovian. Thus far, however, few had so much as heard of Anton Chekhov.The little play-producing societies were believed, by virtue of of their club status, to enjoy immunity from the Lord Chamberlain's continuing powers of censorship. It is not simply that Ghosts would not have been produced in the commercial theatre: it could not have been, since the Examiner of Plays in the Lord Chamberlain's Office had made it clear that he would refuse a licence—as he later refused one for Mrs. Warren's Profession in 1902 and for Barker's Waste in 1907. An intensive and widely-supported campaign against the censorship resulted in a parliamentary Committee of Enquity in 1909, which took voluminous evidence from the great, the good, and the opinionated before deciding to leave things more or less as they were—to the relief of the commercial managers, who had no wish to second-guess an audience's tastes, and who valued the protection a licence seemed to afford.THE REPERTORY MOVEMENTIn other respects, attempts to 'organize the theatre', if not quite as irresistible as the late-Victorian critic Matthew Arnold had proposed, met with mixed success. The opening in 1904 of what was to become the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art owed much to the energy and generosity of Beerbohm Tree—incongruously, since he had always claimed that acting could not be taught. RADA was only the first of many such schools of acting, and the improved standards of training which resulted were to affect entry into the profession as profoundly as the formation in 1903 of the Actors' Union—whose efforts to secure better pay and conditions remained largely unrealized until, ironically, it ceased to be a union in name and, as Actors' Equity, became one in practice in 1929.In 1904, William Archer and Granville Barker had published an elaborate Scheme and Estimates for a National Theare which, despite some premature laying of foundation stones, was to take even longer to reach fruition Their advocacy of performances playing in 'true repertoire' on the continentl model went beyond the limited-run system which was then being employed at the Court: but when it was put into practice following the move of Vedrenne and Barker to the Savoy in 1907, its expense led to the dissolution of their partnership. In 1910, Charles Frohman also tried to run a repertory season of ten plays at the Duke of York's: and while it was surely significant that so wily a commercial manager should make the attempt, even more so was its failure, which bore Darwinian witness to the way in which the long-run system, the survival of the threatrically fittest, had reshaped the habits of West End audiences.Outside London, however, a typically British compromise between the limited run and 'true' repertoire, whereby single productions were played (often twice nightly) for a single week, began to be adopted as preferable, locally-based alternative to the touring system. The earliest theatre to be run on such lines was set up in Manchester in 1907 by Miss Annie Horniman, heiress to a tea fortune, and between 1908 and 1913 further 'rep' theatres were established in Glasgow, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Bristol. From 1908 at the Gaiety, Miss Horniman's Manchester company worked with particular success to reflect local attitudes and concerns—which, though arguably just as class-ridden as those of the West End, now seem less exclusively and claustrophobically so.The most notable exponents of the 'Manchester School' of playwriting were Allan Monkhouse, with Reaping the Wind (1908) and Mary Broome (1911); Stanley Houghton, with The Younger Generation (1910) and Hindle Wakes (1912); and Harold Brighouse—a writer of more than neibhourhood naturalism, whose The Northerners (1914) is almost as expressionistic in its exploration of a Luddite theme as is Hobson's Choice (1916) in its more recognizable workaday mould. Unsurprisingly, Hobson—its plot hinging upon a strong woman who stands up for 'her' man—was alone in finding favour in London, where 'provincial' had long been favoured as an appropriate epithet of abuse for Henrik Ibsen.Earlier, in 1904, the munificent Miss Horniman had taken a lease on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where the poet W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn had been sustaining the Irish Literary Theatre since 1890. While Yeats was able to tap into the mythic roots of the Irish consciousness in plays which, further afield, have remained a rather specialist taste, Lady Gregory was more at home with an enecdotal, almost domesticated approach to her resurgent nation's folklore: then, in J. M. Synge, the new Abbey company found a voice of naturalistic genius, as readily expressed through the tragic dimension in Riders to the Sea (1904) as in the peasant comedy of The Playboy of the Western World (1907).Owing to his premature death in 1909, Synge's plays were sadly few in number, and some met with hostility from audiences over-sensitive to supposed affronts to their national dignity—most famously during the 'Playboy riots' which marred both the Dublin and New York premieres, but also on account of the wry anti-clericalism of The Tinker's Wedding, which opened in London in 1909 since it was considered 'too dangerous' for the Abbey. In truth, Synge gave a vital, poetic expression to the Irish national character and new cause for its reviving cultural pride no less than had Shakespeare for his own countrymen three centuries earlier.APPROACHES TO SHAKESPEAREShakespearean productions during this period ranged across an ever-widening stylistic spectrum. After 1897 the showcase for the established (indeed, expected) spectacular approach shifted from the Lyceum to the new Her Majesty's, where Tree follwoed Irving in cutting his texts and rearranging his scenes in the case of decorative convenience. Long waits during all the complicated scene changes were none the less common, though Tree did eliminate two intervals by reducing the conventional five act divisions to the three which were becoming the norm in new plays.

Lillah McCarthy as Viola in Granville Barker's production of Twelfth Night at the Savoy (1912). Norman Wilkinson's formal and stylized permanent set contrasted with the lavish embellishments (and real grass) employed by Tree. While best remembered for her roles in Barker's productions (which included many of Shaw's female leads), Lillah McCarthy (1875-1960) also went into management on her own account, at the Little Theatre in 1912 and at the Kingsway in 1919—a year after the divorce from Barker which was effectively to bring both their careers in the live theatre to an end.

Tree's elaborate and top-heavy style was to attract ridicule soon enough_ but if he took both his naturalism and his symbolism a touch too literally, the aim was often similar to that of his revered near-contemporary, Stanislavsky, in his legendary productions of Chekhov for the Moscow Arts Theatre during the same period—even down to the twittering of attendant birds, arguably no les superflous in Konstantin Stanislavsky's The Cherry Orchard  than in Tree's Much Ado About Nothing. Again, Tree's live rabbits on stage for A Midsummer Night's Dream and his terraces of real grass in Twelfth Night have passed into theatrical folklore as examples of misconceived straining after verisimilitude: yet they suggest an instinct not that different from Stanislavsky's when he commended the filling of hollow oars with water for realistic splashing along Venetian canals in Othello.

The forum scene from the production of Julius Caesar  (1911) by Herbert Beerbohm Tree, showing his characteristic concern for  the scenic and actorly detail of the stage picture. Here, Tree, playing Antony, is standing with his back to the rostrum. While taking risks on productions of Ibsen and Shaw, Tree (1853-1917) was also ruthless in establishing his own stage presence, whether as Svengali in Trilby (1895), Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I (1896)—or (against a no-less-determined Mrs. Patrick Campbell) in Shaw's Pygmalion (1914). Tree managed the Haymarket from 1887, then personally oversaw the building of Her Majesty's, which became his base from 1897 to 1915.

From 1905 Tree invited fellow Shakespareans to participate in annual festivals to commemorate the bardic birthday: and so diretors—as we can now unreservedly begin to call those who saw it as their function to give artistic cohesion to a production—as different as F. R. Benson and and Wiliam Poel both found themselves working at His Majesty's (as the theatre had duly become). Benson had for some thirty years been touring Shakespeare round the provinces with one of the last stock companies worthy of the name—and from 1886 had also been responsible for mounting the annual festivals at the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (opened in 1879), where bardolatry was just beginning its acceleration from the light fantatic to the light industrial.As a director, Benson's approach seems to have varied between the highly athletic, jogging Henry V along at a welcome pace, and the sonorously funereal, stretching out his Hamlet to six hours excluding an interval for dinner. William Poel was more consistent in seeking to recover the 'swiftness and ease' which he believed to have characterized Elizabethan acting, in the wider interests of replicating the manner in which he believed the plays had first been staged. No less pioneering than his Hamlet of 1881, based on the First Quarto in a seminal conjunction of scholarly and theatrical disciplines, was his restoration to the living repertoire of the works of Shakespeare's contemporaries. His revival for the Independent Theatre of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi in 1892 coincided, moreover, with the popularization of the 'minor' Elizabethans and Jacobeans through Havelock Ellis's launching of the influential, bravely unexpurgated, Mermaid Series of 'The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists'.A year later, again for Grein, Poel staged Measure for Measure in a would-be facsimile of the original Fortune. Then, in 1895. he formed his own Elizabethan Stage Society, which for the next ten years mounted what Poel proclaimed to be 'authentic' Elizabethan productions—with Johnson's plays, among others, happily featuring alongside Shakespeare's. Although subsequent scholarship has cast doubt on some of his beliefs—and he himself often vitiated the intimacy he sought by pitching his Elizabethan platform behind a host proscenium arch—Poel's was a leading influence in the clearing away of centuries of accumulated clutter, both physical and metaphysical, from Shakespearean production.Rhetorically Poel revealed, in Lillah McCarthy's words, that it was possible 'to keep the exquisite rhythm and cadence of the verse even whilst the drama was hurtling along its swift tempestuous course' Lillah McCarthy is herself best remembered as the creator of the earliest of Shaw's female leads—in which she was directed by Granville Barker, who became not only her husband but her collaborator on a series of Shakespearean productions mounted at the Savoy Theatre between 1912 and 1914. In these the lessons of Poel's work were assimilated, but its niceties adapted to the conditions of contemporary staging and the expectations of a contemporary audience.Barker thus built an apron stage out over the front stalls of his theatre, and replaced its footlights with a batten mounted across the front of the dress circle. His eclectic approach even extended to incorporating some of the revolutionary design ideas then being propunded by Ellen Terry's son, Gordon Craig—a curious, lonely figure, whose monumental columns and sweeping swathes of teps had little to do with Elizabethan staging, but did begin to meet the need for single settings conducive to a play's atmosphere and properly uninterrupted pace.Spending his long life largely in self-imposed exile, Craig enjoyed more influence as a theorist than a practitioner, his view of actors as super-marionettes tending to attract frustrated directors but to deter the profession at large. Yet he remained devoted to the memory of Irving—not only as a surrogate father, but for the kind of mesmeric power with which as an actor he had, in The Bells, transcended melodrama. However, as a theatrical force melodrama had virtually died along with its last traditional exponent, William Terriss—struck down in 1897 at the stage door of the thatre with whose very name it had become synonymous, the Adelphi.DEVELOPMENTS IN MUSIC HALLWhile the increasingly diverse nature of the music-hall bill now made it 'variety' indeed, many of the stars of the pre-war years remained true to the proletarian traition of the older 'halls'—not least Marie Lloyd, prohibited from appearing before royalty as much on account of her risky double meanings on stage as her unconventional private life. The period saw many other such legendary acts at peak form and peak popularity—varieties of comic experience ranging from the 'character' acts of George Robey and Harry Tate to the 'eccentric' Dan Leno and Little Tich, from the 'grotesque' comedy of Nellie Wallace o the 'coster' comedy of Albert Chevalier and Gus Ellen, from the stylized Scots of Harry Lauder to the stylish males of Vesta Tilley—glimpsed in characteristic military mode on the songs-sheet cover [below].Honourably, most such bill-topping acts showed solidarity with their humbler brothers and sisters in the music-hall strike which followed the formation of the 'Variety Artists' Federation in 1906, and which secured a slight improvement in conditions. Then, in 1912, a long-standing dispute over the inclusion of 'dramatic' material was resolved with the legalization of sketches up to thirty minutes in length. However, an earlier advance was by then proving double-edged—the music-hall managers having at first welcomed the arrival in the 1890s of the first short moving pictures, which they hired for 'ciné-variety' bills on the grounds of novelty and relative cheapness. But within a decade feature-length movies had arrived along with purpose-built cinemas to exhibit them, and film had become a dangerous competitor—not only for audiences, but also for performers. Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel, both graduates of Fred Karno's slapstick company, were just two of those who deserted the halls as also their native land for the lure of boom-town Hollywood.A leading music-hall singer of a slightly earlier period, 'the Great Macdermott', otherwise G. H. Farrell, had achieved a hit at the time of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 with 'We don't want to fight, but by Jingo! if we do', a patriotic ditty which added the word 'jingoism' to the language—and continued, 'We've got the ships, we've got the men and got the money, too.' By the time that the jingoism which fuelled the First World War had been purged, nearly a million men from Britain alone lay dead, some in the still-disciplined ranks of the war cemeteries, some scattered disorderly and dismembered across the poppy fields of Flanders—one million of the ten milion who died in a war which left wounded twice as many more, to devastate a generation and sow only the seeds of renewed conflict.

[Note: the illustration in Trussler's book is from The Bold Militiaman, another song sheet] Vesta Tilley (1864-1952), most famous of music-hall male impersonators, pictured on a song-sheet cover in typically jingoistic mood. Even before the First Wrold War, Tilley's strutting soldierly personae were no less popular and only a little less plentiful than her gallery of would-be dandies and elegant young men about town. Unambiguously female in her personal life, on stage Tilley created gamine males who combined the centuries-old appeal of 'breeches parts' for the men in her audience with an unthreatening image of an asexual Adonis for her many female admirers. During the First World War, Vesta Tilley made forceful appeals for recruitment in numbers such as 'The Army of To-day's Alright' and 'Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier'. Her act, in the words of Elaine Aston, thus 'moved away from satirical comment on social behaviour towards prescribing or instruvting people on how to behave'—men, in whort, being urged to volunteer for the trenches., and women to permit them the sexual licence their heroism merited. She made her farewell appearance at the London Coliseum in 1920.

FROM BURLESQUE TO REVUE Burlesque had been kept artificially alive through the dedication of John Hollingshead and the genius of his leading players, Fred Leslie and Nellie Warren: but its dual attractions of sexual display and gentle satire now began to find distinct outlets in the rapidly developing forms of musical comedy and revue. 'Musical variety farce', as Hollingshead's partner and successor at the Gaiety, George Edwardes, dubbed it, was at first quite decorous, hinting at rather than disclosing the femininity of the Gaiety Girl—a species that bred generically from the show so-titled in 1893 to spawn the Shop Girls and other girls decoratively packaged for decades to come. Of course, impresarios soon saw the potential for exploiting the fleshlier reaches of the 'chorus girl', who thus found herself supplanting the 'legit' actress as a lady-in-waiting for the 'stage door Johnny'—in whose company she entered many a smart restaurant, just occasionally the peerage, and the reach-me-down demonology of the censorious. The more intimate style of revue began hesitantly to find itslf in Under the Clock at the Court in 1893, and was fully formed by 1899 when Potpourri opened at the little Coronet in Notting Hill. Its genealogy having been interrupted along with Henry Fielding's theatrical career, this now blended topical skits, songs, and parodies of fashionable plays into political satire rather less barbed than Fielding's—although one title appearing to claim direct descent from his Historical Register for 1736 did open at the Crystal Palace just two days before Potpourri: called, intriguingly, A Dream of Whitaker's Almanack, it appears, alas, to have sunk without a trace. Revues on a more lavish scale became increasingly popular after the turn of the century. At the Empire in Leicester Square the shows ranged from Venus 1906, which vaguely celebrated womanhood, to By George! in 1911, which even more vaguely celebrated the new King. And at the Coliseum in St Martin's Lane, purpose-built as a variety theatre in 1904, Oswald Stoll celebrated his own large debt to the French style—a debt which later extended to his titles, as Stoll nudged customers into the refurbished Middlesex Music Hall with C'est Bon!  and Cachez Ça! and C'est chic! In 1912 Everybody's Doing It at the Empire duly acknowledged the arrival of ragtime, fresh from the USA. in the same year Albert de Courville set out to become the Londoner's Ziegfeld with the first full-scale spectacle after the American manner, Hullo, Rag-time! at the Hippodrome—while at the Alhambra André Charlot arrived from Paris to present Kill That Fly! Then, in 1914, C. B. Cochran began his management of the new and intimately proportioned Ambassadors, and two years later also took on the adjoining St Martin's (where his opening Houp la! exploited the more relaxed wartime attitude towards female flesh on display). By this time Charlot had moved to the Vaudeville, along with such coming names as Binnie Hele, Beatrice Lillie, and Gertrude Lawrence. Thanks to longer holidays and cheap railway excursions, the seaside resorts had entered upon their boom years with the new century, and troupes of pierrots from many a beach and pier-head drew from and fed into revue, and music hall besides—Pelissier's Follies most successfully venturing inland to appear in variety, as also by royal command at Sandringham. King Edward's tastes had lowered a little the class barriers that once separated music-hall audiences from their 'betters', and the inauguration in 1912 under his successor of an annual Royal Variety Performance (aptly enough at the Palace Theatre) accelerated this legitimation. But Marie Lloyd, more on account of her doubtul morals than her double meanings, was not invited. [Illustrations]: The presumed naughtiness of all things French was exploited by Oswald Stoll with a sequence of French-titled revues at the Middlesex. On the left, the spelling-out in the cause of modesty of one such offering, Cachez-Ça (1913), is an oblique refernce to the banning of a poster for the earlier C'est Chic—on account of its excess of pink flesh. As the illustration on the right attests, American influence was no less strong: here, the chorus dances down the 'joy plank' used in Hullo, Rag-time! at the Hippodrome (1912).

The Speculative Theatre 1871-1891

When the Foeman Bares His Steel

Una escena de The Pirates of Penzance, de Gilbert y Sullivan (1879), sobre eso de enviar soldados a la guerra a cubrirse de gloria.... Toda una sátira mordaz del discurso patriótico y militarista de la época victoriana—y una coreografía genial en esta adaptación cinematográfica:

Be Copy Now

From THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT

DOMINGO, 30 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

From The City of Dreadful Night

In The Cambridge History of English Literature: 

(... )  all that is most authentic and arresting in the poetry of James Thomson is absolutely “without hope, and without God in the world.” It is the poetry of sheer, overmastering, inexorable despair—a passionate, and almost fierce, declaration of faith in pessimism as the only true philosophy of life. Here we have one who unequivocally affirms
           

that every struggle brings defeat
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success;
That all the oracles are dumb or cheat
Because they have no secret to express;
That none can pierce the vast black veil uncertain
Because there is no light behind the curtain;
That all is vanity and nothingness.

—oOo—

  This little life is all we must endure,
  The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,                  
    We fall asleep and never wake again;
  Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
  Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
    In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.

  We finish thus; and all our wretched race                 
  Shall finish with its cycle, and give place
    To other beings with their own time-doom:
  Infinite aeons ere our kind began;
  Infinite aeons after the last man
    Has joined the mammoth in earth's tomb and womb.          

  We bow down to the universal laws,
  Which never had for man a special clause
    Of cruelty or kindness, love or hate:
  If toads and vultures are obscene to sight,
  If tigers burn with beauty and with might,               
    Is it by favour or by wrath of Fate?

  All substance lives and struggles evermore
  Through countless shapes continually at war,
    By countless interactions interknit:
  If one is born a certain day on earth,                   
  All times and forces tended to that birth,
    Not all the world could change or hinder it.

  I find no hint throughout the Universe
  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
    I find alone Necessity Supreme;                  
  With infinite Mystery, abysmal, dark,
  Unlighted ever by the faintest spark
    For us the flitting shadows of a dream.

The City of Dreadful Night

Harold Pinter

SÁBADO, 29 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

Harold Pinter

Pinter, Harold. The Room. 1957. In Pinter, The Room and The Dumb Waiter. 
_____. The Birthday Party. Drama. 1958. 
_____. The Caretaker. Drama. 1959.
_____. The Dumb Waiter. Drama. First performed 1960.
_____. A Slight Ache. Drama. In Pinter, A Slight Ache. A Night Out. London: Methuen, 1961.
_____. The Hothouse. Drama. In Pinter, Plays One. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. A Night Out.  Drama. In Pinter, A Slight Ache. A Night Out. London: Methuen, 1961.
_____. The Black and White. In Pinter, Plays One. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Examination. London: Methuen, 1963.
_____. The Dwarfs. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Lover. Drama. 1963. In Pinter, The Collection and The Lover. (Methuen's Modern Plays).
_____. Tea Party. TV drama. 1965.
_____. The Collection. Drama. In Pinter, The Collection and The Lover. (Methuen's Modern Plays).
_____. Night School. Drama.  In Pinter,  Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. The Homecoming. Drama. 1965. (Methuen's Modern Plays). London: Methuen.
_____. The Basement. TV drama. 1967.
_____. Landscape. Drama. First broadcast BBC, 25 April 1968. 1st staged by the RSC, Aldsych Theatre, London , 2 July 1969. Dir. Peter Hall.
_____. The Go-Between. Screenplay, based on L. P. Hartley's novel. 1969.
_____. Silence. 1969. In Pinter, Plays: Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. 189-209.
_____. Old Times. Drama. London: Methuen, 1971.
_____. No Man's Land. TV drama. 1975.
_____. Betrayal. TV drama. 1978.
_____. Poems and Prose 1949-1977. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978.
_____. The Proust Screenplay. (= A la Recherche du Temps Perdu). Screenplay, based on Marcel Proust's novel. 1978.
_____. Mountain Language. New York: Grove Press / Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
_____. One for the Road. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. Victoria Station. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. Party Time. Drama.
_____. Request Stop. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Last to Go. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Special Offer. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Trouble in the Works. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Two. London: Faber and Faber.
_____. Family Voices. London: Next Editions / Faber, 1981.
_____. The French Lieutenant's Woman. Screenplay based on John Fowles' novel. 1982.
_____. A Kind of Alaska. Drama. 1982.
_____. Night. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. That's Your Trouble. Drama. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. That's All. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Applicant. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Interview. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Dialogue for Three. In Pinter, Plays Three. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
_____. Collected Poems and Prose. London: Methuen, 1986.
_____. Monologue. In Pinter, Plays Four. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.
_____. The Heat of the Day. Screenplay.
_____. The Comfort of Strangers and Other Screenplays (Reunion, Victory, Turtle Diary).
_____. The Trial. Screenplay.
_____. Moonlight. Drama. 1993.
_____. Ashes to Ashes. Drama. 1996.
_____. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-1998.
_____. "Art, Truth, and Politics." Nobel Lecture, Dec. 2005. Nobelprize.org
    http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
    2005-12-09
_____. "Arte, verdad y política. Trans. José Ángel García Landa and Beatriz Penas Ibáñez. In Fírgoa: Universidade pública 9 Dec. 2005.
http://firgoa.usc.es/drupal/node/24005
    2005-12-09

From the Oxford Companion to English Literature: 
 

Harold Pinter (1930-[2008]), poet and playwright, born in East London, the son of a Jewish tailor, and educated at Hackney Downs Grammar School. He began to publish poetry in periodicals before he was 20, then became a professional actor, working mainly in repertory. His first play, The Room, was performed in Bristol in 1957, followed in 1958 by a London production of The Birthday Party, in which Stanley, an out-of-work pianist in a seaside boarding house, is mysteriously threatened and taken over by two intruders, an Irishman and a Jew, who present him with a Kafkaesque indictment of unexplained crimes. Pinter's distinctive voice was soon reconized, and many critical and commercial successes followed, including The Caretaker (1960), The Lover (1963), The Homecoming (1965), Old Times(1971), and No Man's Land (1975). Betrayal (1978; film, 1982) is an ironic tragedy which ends in beginning and traces with a reversed chronology the development of a love affair between a man and his best friend's wife. Later plays include A Kind of Alaska (1982), based on a work by O. Sacks, One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), Party Time (1991), and Ashes to Ashes (1996, a short drama of the Holocaust). Pinter's gift for portraying, by means of dialogue which realistically produces the nuances of colloquial speech, the difficulties of communication and the many layers of meaning in language, paue, and silence, have created a style labelled by the popular imagination as 'Pinteresque'., and his themes —nameless menace, erotic fantasy obsession and jealousy, family hatreds, and mental disturbance—are equally recognizable. Pinter has also written extensively for radio and television, directed plays, and written several screenplays, which include versions of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between (1969), A la recherche du temps perdu (1978) and J. Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1982). Poems and Prose, 1947-1977 was published in 1978. See The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (1996) by Michael Billington.


The Caretaker, a play by H. Pinter, performed and published in 1960.

One of Pinter's characteristically enigmatic ddramas, it is built on the interaction of three characters, the tramp Davies and the brothers Aston and Mick. Aston has rescued Davies from a brawl and brought him back to a junk-filled room, in which he offers Davies a bed and, eventually, an ill-defined post as caretaker. The characters reveal themselves in inconsequential dialogue and obsessional monologue. Davies is worried about his papers, the blacks, gas leaks, and getting to Sidcup; Aston reveals that he has suffered headaches ever since undergoing electric shock treatment for his 'complaint'; Mick, the youngest, is alternately bully, cajoler, and materialist visionary, with dreams of transforming the room into a fashionable penthouse. In the end both brothers turn on Davies and evict him. The dialogue is at once naturalistic and surreal; the litany of London place names (Finsbury Park, Shepherd's Bush, Putney) and of decorator's jargon (charcoal-grey worktops, teak veneeer) serves to highlight the no man's-land in which the characters in fact meet.




The Homecoming, a play by H. Pinter, performed and published 1965. 

A black Freudian family drama, the play presents the return to his north London home and ostentatiously womanless family of Teddy, an academic, and his wife of six years, Ruth, once a photographic model. The patriarch, Mac, a butcher, is alternately violent and cringing in manner, and the other two sons, Lenny and Joey, in a very short time make sexual overtures to Ruth, who calmly accepts them; by the end of the play, Teddy has decided to leave her with the family, who intend to establish her as a professional prostitute. The tone is dark, erotic, and threatening; the shocking and the banal are sharply juxtaposed throughout. Ruth's acceptance of her role as mother, mistress, and possibly breadwinner for her new family, and her rejection of her husband, are intricately connected with the enigmatic figure of the long-dead mother. Jessie, who is both reviled and idolized by her survivors.

Pinter brinda por los "Viejos tiempos"

British Drama 1800-1950

SÁBADO, 29 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

British drama 1800-1950

1800-1900:

Hay que ver el capítulo correspondiente de la Cambridge History of English and American Literature, en red en Bartleby.com, en el volumen XIII, sobre teatro del siglo XIX:

VIII.

Nineteenth-Century Drama

By HAROLD CHILD, sometime Scholar of Brasenose College, Oxford  The drama a popular amusement in the nineteenth century Richard Lalor Sheil Charles Robert Maturin H. H. Milman Sheridan Knowles; R. H. Horne J. Westland Marston Melodrama Black-ey’d Susan Dion Boucicault Tom Taylor W. G. Wills Douglas Jerrold John Poole; Box and Cox; J. R. Planché; Shirley Brooks; H. J. Byron T. W. Robertson W. S. Gilbert BIBLIOGRAPHY

1890-1950:

Hay muchos materiales sobre el periodo 1890-1950, y sobre todo sobre la obra de Bernard Shaw, que lo domina, en el sitio web de Richard F. Dietrich, Richard F. Ozymandias: The Complete Works of R. F. Dietrich
    http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/
    
Sobre todo está allí la edición revisada de British Drama, 1890 to 1950: A Critical History(Boston: Twayne, 1989, titulada ahora British and Irish Drama 1890 to 1950: A Critical History.   http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~dietrich/britishdrama.htm

o en http://www.rfd2.net/britishdrama.htm

    2012 

    I.       Introduction: A Renaissance of the Drama              
    II.      “Our Theatres in the Nineties”: Haunted by Ghosts                  
    III.     1900-1930: The Triumph of the New Drama                
    IV.     Irish Drama: Soul Music from John Bull’s Other Island         
    V.    1930-1950: Waiting for Beckett                           
    VI.        Common Cause: A National Theater           

The speculative theatre 1871-91

Arthur Wing Pinero

SÁBADO, 29 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

Arthur Wing Pinero

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature: 
 

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero  (1855-1934). He left school at 10 to work in his father's solicitor's practice, but, stage-struck from youth, became an actor, and was noticed by H. Irving who later produced some of his plays. His first one-act play, Two Hundred a Year, performed in 1877, heralded a successful and prolific career. The first of his farces, The Magistrate (perf. 1885), involves a series of ludicrous confusions between Mr Posket, the magistrate, and his family; it brought Pinero both fame and wealth. Later farces, such as The School-Mistress(1887), did nearly as well, as did his sentimental comedy Sweet Lavender (1888). His first serious play, on what was to be the recurrent theme of double standards for men and women, was The Profligate (1889); it was praised by Archer, and noted not only for its frankness but also for its absence of the standard devices of soliloquy and aside. Lady Bountiful (1891) was the first of the 'social' plays in which Pinero was deemed to display his understanding of women. The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), returning to the theme of double standards, was a lasting success. The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) again dealt with a woman's dubious past. Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), a sentimental comedy nostalgically recalling his own passion for the theatre he had haunted as a boy, also had great success. He continued to write, but, although knighted in 1909, lived through many years of dwindling reputation and disillusion, eclipsed by the reising popularity of the new theatre of Ibsen and G. B. Shaw. 
 

The Second Mrs Tanqueray, a play by Sir A. Pinero, first performed 1893. 

Tanqueray, knowing of Paula's past reputation, still determines to marry her, in the belief that his love and the generosity of his friends will prove strong enough to counter prejudice and hypocrisy. Ellean, his young convent-bred daughter from a previous marriage, comes to live with him and Paula; soon Tanqueray begins to realize that Ellean, his friends, and his own suspicions are proving too powerful an opposition to his once-loving marriage. whan Paula realizes that she has lost his love, she kills herself. Because of the daring theme Pinero had great difficulty in having the play accepted for production, but once produced it was an immediate and abiding success. 

The Speculative Theatre 1871-91

The Speculative Theatre 1871-91

VIERNES, 28 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

The Speculative Theatre 1871-91

Ch. 16 of The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, by Simon Trussler:

However clear-sighted may have been Karl Marx's diagnosis of the ill-effects of nineteenth-century laissez faire capitalism, his prognosis, especially if misread as a programme for continuing action, was deeply flawed. He acknowledged the skill of the English ruling classes in deflecting revolutionary tendencies through timely concessions: but he recognized less well their capacity to assimilate or, where necessary, to cauterize the traditional culture of the proletariat—the breeding ground of effective subversion.

At the lowly level of recreation, the process of assimilation had been accelerating since mid-century. many of the sports which, though played for generations according to vague but locally recognized oral codes, had been banned as disruptive in their 'unofficial' forms now began to be 'officially' resuscitated—replete with printed rulebooks, top-hatted regulating bodies, and all the class ramifications of 'amateur' and 'professional' status. However, those popular customs which threatened profits as well as peace of mind had, necessarily, to be put down rather than merely contained. And so it was, for example, that the diverse ways in which midwinter had traditionally been celebrated were now tidied up and at first confined to Christmas Day itself: the addition of Boxing Day (following the act of 1871 which established Bank Holidays) was thus made to appear a benevolent concession rather than a grudging acknowledgement of a far ampler ancient right.

Not only were the twelve days reduced to two, but a once-communal feast was turned inward upon the family and the domestic hearth—even the raucous street music of the waits being suppressed in favour of the 'rediscovery' of carols, so much more reverent and demure. And all those charitable ladies who, on Christmas Day, massaged their consciences by doling out to those incarcerated in prisons and workhouses their one decent meal of the year had now, in the cause of temperance, to concede that their healths be drunk in water instead of good ale—while the annual treat was, of course, preferably to be confined to the 'deserving' rather than the recalcitrant poor.

Despite all these tendencies, Epiphany long kept its hold on the popular imagination, although its traditional inversions had become largely symbolic—practical jokes, typically, rendered down to cardboard as the subjects of Twelfth Night cards (which long predated Christmas cards as we know them). Stubbornly, however, seasonal topsy-turvydom did survive—not least in traditions of cross-dressing, an indecorous ebullience which disturbed not only the smug religiosity of the makers of the Victorian Christmas but the discreet hypocrisies of their sexual habits.

And so it was that the subversive transvestism of old became a sanctioned form of sublimation, made manifest in the rituals of pantomime—which, although often a Christmas offering in the past, was now becoming exclusively so. In the process, most lingering associations with the old commedia masks were purged, as Harlequin and Columbine gave way to a transsexually titillating principal boy and principal girl, backed up by a chorus line inf fleshings. The Clown was cut down to the likes of Buttons, and Pantaloon unsexed to become the Dame—a male in drag, usually a music-hall favorite drafted in to boost the box-office, as pop stars and television personalities are today.

Drury Lane, notably under the management of Augustus Harris from 1879 to 1896 restored its drifting fortunes by specializing, for ever-lengthening Christmas seasons, in pantomimes of the most spectacular kind—filling out its year with sensation dramas similarly dependent upon extravagant effects, for which the theatre's technical resources as well as its sheer size made it well suited. Such effects ranged from the sinking of the Birkenhead in Cheer, Boys, Cheer (1895) to August Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath in The Great Ruby (1898) and a full-scale horse-race in The Whip (1909).

[Illustr.] Augustus Harris (1852-96)  under whose management from 1879 Drury Lane interspersed its regular diet of spectacular dramas with an annual 'Christmas' pantomime which might run past Easter. Although condemned by traditionalists for his recruitment of music-hall performers in panto, Harris retained many of its older features, including the Clown and the harlequinade—which duly featured in Babes in the Wood. Dan Leno, whom Harris introduced to the West End in this production, remained teamed with Herbert Campbell in pantomimes at the Lane until both died in 1904. This cartoon was one of the long sequence published in Vanity Fair by 'Ape' and (as in this case) 'Spy', otherwise Sir Leslie Ward.

(Illustr.): Impressions of characters from  Babes in the Wood, Augustus Harris's Drury Lane pantomime of 1888. These were drawn for the  Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic—the journalistic conjunction reminding us of the strong links between the stage and the turf at this time. Dan Leno is shown here in the 'dame' role of the wicked aunt, with Harriet Vernon (she of the redoubtable thighs) as the 'principal boy', Robin Hood. The two babes ('of forty or thereabouts', as the Sporting and Dramatic reminds us) are older music-hall stars, Herbert Campbell and Harry Nicholls.

A NEW BOOM IN THEATRE BUILDING

That the ruling classes were now showing some readiness to alleviate the harshest excesses of the industrial revolution had to do in part with enlightened self-interest, in part with a calculated a ppeal to class allegiances. Thus, because factory owners tended to be free-trading Liberals, and imperialist Conservative government might embark upon industrial reforms without offence to its supporters in the rural shires—while in the process wooing those newly enfranchised by the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, which gave the vote to virtually all male householders. No less important, the Ballot Act of 1872 kept secret from employers and landlords alike the way in which a man cast that vote: and although no woman was yet able to cast hers, the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 marked a first step towards greater economic independence.

Although the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was passed by Gladstone's first Liberal administration, it was thus his successor Disraeli—the first to deplore 'two nations' living in mutual ignorance—who as leader of the Conservative government of 1874 enacted a programme of reforms which one of the first two Labour MPs then elected declared to have 'done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals in fifty'. Factory legislation significantly loosened the shackles of long hours and insufferable conditions, while trades unions were freed from criminal penalties for strike action and peaceful picketing. Under a Public Health Act, sewage systems were built which have only recently begun to show their age. An Enclosures Act not only brought the private absorption of common land virtually to an end, but increased the provision of public recreation grounds and allotments And local authorities were encouraged to build 'artisans' dwellings'—thus creating the very system of council houses that more recent Conservative governments have been anxious to dismantle.

Although conditions for ordinary working people thus began slowly to improve, the 1870s saw also the start of a severe trade depression which, with only two brief intermissions, persisted almost until the end of the century. But since some of the causative factors—tariff barriers abroad, the end of the railway boom at home—left investors with spare capital, the theatre, as an alternative focus for speculation, ironically benefited, and it was during this period that an 'entertainment industry' effectively emerged.

However, the tale of the two London theatres known as 'the rickety twins' suggests that this development could have its pitfalls. On a site between the churches of St Clement Dane and St Mary le Strand were thus constructed in 1868 and 1870 the back-to-back playhouses best remembered as the Globe and the Opera Comique. Slum clearance in the area to make way for the Aldwych and Kingsway development was already being actively planned, and the speculative builder Sefton Parry therefore erected both theatres of the flimsiest materials in expectation of their imminent demolition—and his own hefty compensation. They were considered serious fire hazards, although in the event both manged just to outlive the century.

Two sturdier products of the new boom in theatre building also opened in 1870—the charming Vaudeville in the Strand, and the first Royal Court, whose situation in Sloane Square testified to the ever-westward drift of fashionable London. On Regent (soon to be Piccadilly) Circus, the subterranean location of the Criterion Theatre, built in 1874 beneath the restaurant of the same name, bore witness to the spiralling land values in the heart of the West End. Even further west, if never quite so fashionable, Hammersmith saw its Lyric Opera House go up in 1888. And in 1881 had opened both the Comedy, in Panton Street between the Haymarket and Leicester Square, and the first Savoy, midway along the Strand. The Playhouse, which followed a year later, was anecdotally another of Sefton Parry's gambles, owing its obscure situation off the Embankment to an anticipated extension of the Charing Cross railway, from which he hoped in vain to profit.

In 1884 the Prince of Wales's opened in Covent Street, off Piccadilly Circus—and then, in 1887, were completed the slum clearances which now drove Charing Cross Road north towards Oxford Street from Trafalgar Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue south-west from Holborn down to Piccadilly. The very heart of theatreland now underwent a rapid transplant, fed by these wide, well-lit, and accessible arteries. In 1888 the first Shaftesbury Theatre went up near Cambridge Circus, where the two roads crossed, to be closely followed by the Lyric, just a little further west: and then, in 1891, arose the great sprawl of the Palace, at first as the Royal English Opera, to dominate the Circus itself. The Garrick had already staked a first claim for the theatre along Charing Cross Road in 1889, and three years later arose the almost abutting Trafalgar, now known as the Duke of York's, with its frontage on St Martin's Lane.

THE VINTAGE VICTORIAN THEATRE

The Empire music hall, Newcastle, pictured in 1891, and probably much as it had been for the previous half century. Note the cane chairs for the orchestra, the plush seats in the 'front stalls' —and the hard benches in the slips. Flock wallpaper and pictures lend a homely touch to the auditorium, which contrasts with the fantasy world conjured up on the stage

 

Our illustration shows some typical features of the vintage Victorian theatre: its fully-formed and ornately gilded picture-frame stage, from which any residual trace of apron and stage doors has been eliminated; its rich but highly (and sometimes confusingly) eclectic embellishments; its pit foreshortened or (as here) abandoned before encroaching stalls; and upper tiers ever-extending towards the stage, as new techniques of cantilevering removed the necessity for so many supporting pillars. Other less immediately obvious characteristics were dictated by considerations of safety: these included, besides improved ventilation, a new tendency for the pit to be sunk below ground so that the dress circle was at entrance level, and a requirement that the theatre should be isolated from surrounding buildings by passageways. 

Since rooms could no longer be built above the auditorium, the fly-tower now became a dominant external feature, while new scenographic techniques were encouraging the internal improvement and development of the flying space. However, overriding commercial considerations meant that, in comparison with continental practice, front-of-house facilities in the new theatres were meagre, with box-office, cloak-room, and refreshment areas often so cramped as not even to be adequately functional. As, in many such theatres, they remain.

But the most enduringly important innovation in theatre construction to occur during this period lay, of course, in the use of electric lighting. Richard D'Oyly Carte led the way in 1881, his new Savoy not only the first theatre but the first public building of any kind in London to be so lit; and later in the 1880s two disastrous fires within two years at the Theatre Royal, Exeter, accelerated a nationwide conversion from gas which was virtually complete by the end of the century. But D'Oyly Carte continued to illuminate the auditorium as well as the stage during performances, and this hungover habit at first limited the artistic potential of electricity—at a time when Henry Irving was insisting not only on the lowering of the house lights at the Lyceum, but on the retention where possible of gas, which he believed to permit subtler control over his effects.

Irving was, indeed, entirely modern in deploying light not merely for illumination but for dramatic emphasis, a diffusion and variation allowed more readily by the banks of individual gas taps and valves than by the initially more limited controls over the new source. Famously, Irving relished, too, the resources of limelight—not merely for its mellow brilliance in tracking his own actions like a modern follow-spot but for the varying impressions of moonlight and directional or waning sunlight it facilitated.


 

IRVING AND THE LYCEUM YEARS

In view of his approach to lighting, it is ironic that in other respects the period's leading actor-manager, Henry Irving, was a rather old-fashioned player with a preference for an old-fashioned repertoire. Indeed, in 1877 there even appeared a small, anonymous pamphlet entitled The Fashionable Tragedian—a 'criticism with ten illustrations' which set out to prove that, for all his then burgeoning influence, Irving was, in truth, 'a very bad actor'. 

Unlike much of the critical sniping to which he was subjected, this squib in brown paper wrappers merits attention because its authors, William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, were to become respectively the leading critic and theatre historian of their generation. And both clearly sensed, as early in their own careers as in Irving's, that the grip this charismatic performer was already exerting would encourage (as it also exemplified) a spirit of conservatism which for some time yet would insulate the British theatre from the new drama of Europe. For while Irving was not a 'very bad actor', he did, as Shaw perceived and complained, choose to contour his greatness within a corset of very constraining trim.

Having served an old-style extended apprenticeship in the provinces, Irving spent five inconspicuous years in London before being noticed in 1871, at the age of 32, in the role of Digby Grant in James Albery's Two Roses— a role which, ironically, was also to be among the most modern he ever attempted. Albery, whose dilutions of what Archer described as the 'flippant and feebly sentimental small talk' of the 'Robertsonian school of playwriting' kept the new Vaudeville full for 294 performances, was briefly hailed as the natural successor of Tom Robertson—who, already in ill-health, died the following year. However, Robertson proved to have no natural successor—although hes widely imitated knack of making dialogue trip with seeming ease from well-mannered tongues made this an era when affluent amateurs encouraged themselves to believe that acting was an accomplishment easily acquired.

Thus arose a new breed of superior supernumeraries—'extra ladies and gentlemen' who duly got their billing, but seldom in other than walk-on roles. And among the fond (though in this case not so foolish) parents who encouraged their offspring in their histrionic ambitions was one Hezekiah Bateman, who, also in 1871, had gone so far as to take the lease of the old Lyceum Theatre—which was still finding it hard to live up to the pretensions of its portico—as a showcase for the talents of his four daughters.

Bateman duly recruited Irving to the company: but neither the opening play by his own wifre nor the stage adaptation of Dickens's Pickwick Papers which followed caught the imagination of audiences. And so it was very much as a final fling that Bateman agreed to let Irving take the lead in an adaptation from the French by Leopold Lewis of a melodrama entitled The Bells, in which Irving was to take the role of the haunted burgomaster Mathias. The opening night of 25 November 1871 not only rescued Bateman's fortunes but, in the words of Clement Scott—a critic as traditional in his tastes as Archer was innovatory—lifted Irving 'at one bound above his contemporaries'.

That same night, Irving, returning home, is said to have stepped down from his cab and out of his marriage when his socially ambitious wife asked irritably if he was going to go on making a fool of himself all his life. His subsequent career was dedicated to showing that making a fool of oneself might be no bar to social advancement: and in 1895, at the second time of asking, he duly accepted a knighthood—the first such honour for services to the theatre, which could from then on regard itself as officially respectable and respectably official. A knighthood for Squire Bancroft followed in 1897, and for Charles Wyndham, aptly an Edwardian creation, in 1902.

Meanwhile, in September 1872, began Irving's long association with the hack dramatist W. G. Wills, whose reincarnation of the martyr king in the actor's won image for the historical romance Charles I led to his appointment as house dramatist to the Lyceum at £300 a year. Wills's talent, like Lewis's, was mediocre, but in every sense adaptive—and subervient to Irving's requireemnts, as in his mangling of Goethe's Faust in 1885, to the interests of the actor's Mephistopheles. 

Henry Irving's Mephistopheles in W. G. Wills's version of Goethe's Faust (Lyceum, 1885). Against massive costs of over £15,000, the production (five years in the planning) took in nearly £70,000 in its first year and £57,000 in its second. By then Irving had added the grotesque splendours of a scene in the Witches' Kitchen to the climactic Walpurgisnacht revels on the Brocken Mountain, in which (according to Clement Scott) a 'shrieking, gibbering crowd' of witches, goblins, and apes from hell made a terrifying contrast with 'shadowy greys and greens' suggestive of Gustave Doré. 

Even the poet Tennyson, then entering his dotage, permitted Irving to shape the part of Philip of Spain in Queen Mary (1876) as a vehicle for his talents, and while the laureate lay dying, Irving went to work on Becket (1893), reconstructing the role of the archbishop and a good else besides.

Irving's first Shakespearean production at the Lyceum, judiciously chosen, was his Hamlet of 1874. He played the title role 'like a scholar and a gentleman', wrote Clement Scott: Irving was 'not acting' but 'talking to himself . . . thinking aloud'. During the run of 200 nights, then unprecedented for a Shakespeare revival, Bateman died, and his widow, after briefly toying with the reins of management, amicably resigned them to Irving in 1878. Irving continued to extend his Shakespearean range, a mannered Othello (1876) and a curiously unromanticRomeo and Juliet (1882) easily outweighed by triumphs as Richard III in 1877, as Shylock in 1879, as Wolsey in Henry VIII in 1892, and as Iachimo in Cymbeline in 1896.

Despite scenic embellishments of a kind which had driven others into bankruptcy, incidental music often specially composed for an orchestra of thirty, and ambitiously choreographed crowd scenes, Irving managed to make more money from Shakespeare and to play him for lengthier runs, than had ever proved possible before. He took no less trouble over lesser plays: his biographer Alan Hughes has thus calculated that the formidable number of 639 people were employed to work on Robespierre, including 355 performers and musician, 236 technicians (the lighting crew alone numbering 38), and 48 administrative staff. 
That was in 1899: later in the same year Irving gave up his management of the Lyceum, which he had recently turned into a limited company. He died six years later, during what he had already declared to be his farewell tour.

A rare photograph of Irving in performance—in Sardou's Robespierre, on tour to New York in 1900 (cameras were banned at the Lyceum, where the production had opened the previous year). Irving as Robespierre is here addressing the hall of the revolutionary Convention in the last act of the play. The picture is, of course, posed, but begins to suggest Irving's concern for the careful orchestration of his crowd scenes.

As an actor, Irving seems to have exerted a force of will which not only infused his role but took command of his audience. An unusual mixture of the protean and the idiosyncratic, he was physically adept at shrinking, extending, and otherwise dissembling his spidery limbs into a new character, while deploying mannerisms of speech and gait which made him, unmistakably and with deliberation, Irving. An eccentric showman who wooed his audiences rather as Disraeli wooed his Queen, he sustained the dying tradition of a permanent acting company, but not in the spirit of interdependence on which Richard Burbage or even David Garrick had built; rather, Irving was the undisputed first among unequals.

Only his leading lady, Ellen Terry—whose hiring was one of the first acts of his independent management—was permitted to complement rather than challenge his supremacy, and even she had to confine herself to roles which would reflect Irving's brilliance. As Beatrice and Benedick, Portia and Shylock, or Imogen and Iachimo the pair could thus work on an equal footing, but she was unable to play, for example, Rosalind in As You Like It, because there was no role of equivalent stature for the 'partner' who was also the boss. Terry's Imogen, which was much to the taste of virtuous Victorians:

As a manager, Irving well understood his respectable Lyceum audiences and was always responsive to their predictably limited tasts: but within these limits his productions were rigorously rehearsed by disciplined companies, and their polish scrupulously maintained during long runs which would otherwise have fallen apart. And to be found among the names of his company were such harbingers of the theatrical future as George Alexander, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and John Martin-Harvey.


PROSPERITY IN THE WEST END

Irving not only brought commercial and (by his own and his audience's standards) artistic success to the old Lyceum: he also did much to create a climate in which other West End managements might prosper—though all, confessedly, were assisted by favourable economic conditions. Thus, the increase in middle-class incomes consequent upon falling prices and stable salaries after 1873 allowed them not only to shunt many patrons of the pit to a more fitting place—well out of sight in the upper gallery—but also to risk increases in seat prices, thereby boosting profit margins. 

And so, despite Tom Robertson's death in 1871, the Bancrofts continued to prosper at the Old Prince of Wales's, prettifying safe classics from Shakespeare to Sheridan with what Bancroft called 'elaborate illustration'. In 1880, following the retirement of the veteran Buckstone, they moved to the Haymarket, which he had left largely unrefurbished: they proceeded to refurbish it thoroughly, gilding the picture-frame of their proscenium arch, cunningly concealing the footlights and orchestra, and, to howls of impotent protest, pioneering the total abolition of the pit. Meanwhile, their protégé John Hare, in partnership with Madge Robertson and her husband W. H. Kendal, was winning the public's initially uncertain favour for the new Court Theatre, the same team later moving successively and successfully to the St James's and the Garrick.

In 1875 Charles Wyndham began his long association with the underground Criterion, where at first he specialized in vasectomized adaptations of French farces, before becoming his own matinee idol in middle age. Augustus Harris was soon to begin his long reign over pantomime at Drury Lane, and Richard D'Oyly Carte to take Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas to triumph from the Opera Comique to the SAvoy—whence George Edwardes crossed the road to help John Hollingshead keep 'the sacred lamp of burlesque' burning at the Gaiety. J. L. Toole, taking on the little Charing Cross Theatre in King William Street in 1879, reflected the prevailing managerial self-confidence by renaming it after himself—an American fashion which found few other followers.

The promenade of the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1902. A youthful Winston Churchill was among those opposed to the attempts led by Mrs Ormiston Chant to close down the promenade in 1894 (on the grounds that it was a haunt of 'ladies of the town'). Later, the theatre housed revue, and, after the First World War, musicals were performed there, until it was demolished in 1927 to make way for a cinema.

 

MUSIC HALL AS BIG BUSINESS

When, as the spectacular centrepiece to A Life of Pleasure (1893), the promenade at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square was recreated on the stage of Drury Lane, a back-handed compliment was being paid to the famous music hall. As the notoriety of the Empire promenade confirms —it was allegedly a favoured haunt of prostitutes—music hall continued to offend the bourgeoisie, though its appeal (like that of horse-racing) united the more raffish elements of the aristocracy with the generality of the working class. This was in spite of the endeavours of those would-be respectable music-hall managers who banned alcohol from the auditorium—an auditorium in which the old, convivial clusters of tables and chairs were giving way before regular rows of fixed seating, and where performers once welcomed with the raised glass of the chairman were now identified by numbers slotted into the invasive and alienating proscenium arch. 

Such palatial West End establishments as the Empire, the nearby Alhambra in Leicester Square, and later the surviving Palace on Cambridge Circus were, of course, aiming to attract customers of a different class from those who attended the humbler halls down in the East End, and there were many gradations of neighbourhood hall in between. But after 1888 all had to obtain a Certificate of Suitability by meeting minimum legal standards of safety and sanitation: and the cost of the necessary reconstruction work often required a major injection of capital. Companies were therefore floated to build new halls as well as to rebuild old—often to the designs of 'legit' theatre architects, such as the prolific Frank Matcham. 

Some managements also began to accrete first a local chain of halls, and then a larger circuit—the beginnings of the music-hall empires of the likes of Oswald Stoll and Edward Moss. At the same time, a divide began to open up between the top-billing stars who were able to command huge salaries to work the new circuits—Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd being probably the most familiar to emerge during this period—and their lowlier brethren, whose dispensable services were open to exploitation. A long struggle for better conditions began with the formation of the Variety Artists' Association in 1885, well before 'legitimate' players had successfully formed thamselves into a union—a right at last acknowledged by the social reforms of the 1870s.

[Illustration:] Opening bill ofr the New Cross Empire in 1899. Designed by the prolific Frank Matcham, this typical suburban hall had a capacity of around 2,000. Note the 'credentials of the organizers' whose capital investments are listed along with their 'present market value'.

NEW WRITING—AND A NEW STYLE OF OPERETTA
Managements in the [1870s] required new writing to provide vehicles for the acting talent at their command and to satisfy the expectations of their paying public. Indeed, by the 180s the problem of the English drama was not particularly the absence of a 'literary' output of intellectual substance—none such had existed for over a century—but rather the presence of a deeply bourgeois audience which, scornful of the hearty affirmations of melodrama, had come to prefer the enervated emotional shorthand of the 'society' style. Writers now seen as harbingers of a 'new dram' could and did get their work staged in the West End—just so long as their innovations titillated but did not seriously disturb their audiences.
The production of original work was encouraged by the international copyright agreements which now began to stem the flood of foreign imports and adaptations. The five years of protection from unauthorized translation given to foreign writers in 1852 was extended in 1875 to cover adapted pieces, and in 1887 the Berne Convention strengthened copyright arrangements between most European countries—the most important non-signatory, the United States, following with its own legislation in 1891. Some doubts remained until 1911 as to how far prior publication of a play might endanger performing rights, and this led to numerous one-off 'copyright performances': but the new arrangements did help to encourage reading editions, alongside the ubiquitous acting texts of Lacy and French—whose technical jargon and abbreviations proved forbidding to the uninitiated.
As commissions to adapt foreign plays began to dry up, some writers unwisely made bids for posterity by attempting those five-act historical tragedies in blank-verse for which posterity was presumed to have an unquenchable thirst. As Irving wryly observed in 1880, many of the unknown authors who submitted such works to him by the score 'proudly claimed that they made a point of never going near a theatre'. Even such a piece as Joan of Arc (1871) by the thoroughly professional veteran Tom Taylor, has not only failed to impress posterity ever since but owed such notoriety as it enjoyed in its own day to the realism with which the saintly maid was burnt at the stake.
Among the few writers who achieved both an immediate and more enduring fame, W. S. Gilbert occupies a special place. His 'fairy' comedies for the Kendals at the Haymarket in the early 1870s were, improbably, satiric burlesques in blank-verse in which Gilbert made audiences laugh at their own hypocrisies by transplanting them to fairyland. Despite a prolific early career (in 1872, for example, no fewer than five of his plays were running in London theatres) at first he won more respect than acclaim. His satirical edge was a touch too sharp for comfort, needing not so much to be blunted as to be melodically honed to the music of Arthur Sullivan.
Although John Hollingshead first teamed the pair in the over-erudite Thespis at the Adelphi in 1871, it was only when Richard D'Oyly Carte, in search of a native equivalent to the French opera bouffe, persuaded Gilbert to adapt his Trial by Jury for a musical setting at the Royalty in 1875 that the long, symbiotic association began, finding a first permanent theatre at the Opera Comique from 1877 to 1881. Then the team transferred along with their latest production,  Patience, to the new Savoy Theatre, a slight but salubrious step westwards along the Strand. G. K Chesterton described the characteristic tone of what have ever since been known as the 'Savoy operas' as capturing that 'half-unreal detachment in which some Victorians came at last to smile at all opinions including their own'.

The Savoy Theatre, during the opening production, Patience, in 1881. So closely were Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas associated with Richard D'Oyly Carte's new theatre that they are often known collectively as the 'Savoy operas'. The theatre was the first to incorporate electric lighting, and in its decorations and colouring it was more subdued than earlier Victorian houses. It was to the Savoy that J. E. Vedrenne and Granville Barker moved in 1907 from the Court, staging the first London production of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Between 1912 and 1914 Barker staged here his innovatory productions of Shakespeare, further described on p. 271. The theatre was reconstructed in art deco style in 1929, but severely damaged by fire in 1990.

 

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A scene from HMS Pinafore, by Gilbert and Sullivan:




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THE LEADING WRITERS

Arthur Wing Pinero, whose later 'problem plays' contributed to the theatrical debate over the 'woman question' (to which we shall turn in the next chapter), made an earlier and arguably more deservedly enduring reputation as the writer of a string of successful farces, largely for the Court Theatre. From The Magistrate in 1885 through The Schoolmistress and Dandy Dickto The Amazons in 1893, he rang proficient changes on that distinctively British pattern whereby would-be adultery and its exposure are secondary to the dread of embarrassment and social gaffes—a dramatic emphasis also happily inoffensive to the Lord Chamberlain.

Unlike many other farceurs, Pinero gave the impression of being almost fond of characters who were only a degree or so offset from reality. George Rowell compares the types with those of the Aldwych farces of the 1920s—among them a 'pure and persecuted husband', a 'knowing man of the world' with his 'vacuous companion' , and a 'formidable matron'. These were played respectively by Arthur Cecil, John Clayton, Fred Kerr, and Mrs John Wood—a team whose regular 'lines', well-developed sense of ensemble, and consummate timing must have endowed Pinero's writing with the same ring of confidencethat Robertson Hare, Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, and Mary Brough were later to give Ben Travers.

[Illustration:] Arthur Cecil as Posket, The Magistrate in Pinero's farce of that name. Seen at the Court in 1885, this was one of the sequence of plays at that theatre with which Arthur W. Pinero (1855-1934) consolidated his early reputation as a farceur. After flirting with a seduction theme in The Profligate(1890), he turned, most famously in The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), to social dramas and 'problem plays': but these have generally worn less well than either the farces or such later comedies as  Trelawny of the 'Wells'(1898) and The Gay Lord Quex (1899). He wrote inextinguishably on, but was out of touch with the style and values of the post-Victorian world.

Among those considered leading writers at the time, Henry Arthur Jones cuts the least appealing figure today. The equivocal stance of his 'problem plays'—and their no less equivocal solutions—must, like Pinero's, await later discussion: meanwhile, in his early work his success depended upon combining an old-fashioned melodramatic instinct—well-matched to the temperament of the actor-manager Wilson Barrett at the Princess's—with a solid storytelling technique and a good ear for dialogue. However, such structural skills were too often blighted by a pervasive and invasive social snobbery—perhaps inspired by contempt for his own petty-bourgeois origins—as early exemplified in Saints and Sinners(1884).

Jones went on to specialize variously in dramas of thwarted or distorted passion, such asJudah (1890), and old-fashioned intrigue comedies of which The Triumph of the Philistines(1895) is a typical and The Liars (1897) a rare superior example. Unfortunately his satire was not only heavy-handed, but betrayed an almost clinical detestation of the common people—also evident in his distaste for 'The Theatre of the Mob', as Jones dubbed it in one of his numerous polemics for a higher drama. Elsewhere, a shrill anti-clericalism sits oddly with an awed reverence for high society—any intended criticism of which is effectively muted by his insistence that those of lowly origins, inhabiting 'the dark places of the earth', are beneathe the notice of art. Later, he was to prophesy that 'the epitaph on . . . all this realistic business will be—it does not matter what happens in kitchen-middens'. 

Oscar wilde was outraging and amusing fashionable London by strutting his aesthetic stuff as early as 1881, when Gilbert parodied such greenery-yallery decadence (as it was viewed by the properly grey majority) in Patience. Although, with nice incongruity, Wilde was a cousin of W. G. Wills, it was only with Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and A Woman of No Importance(1893) that he found his own, very different kind of theatrical voice: for within the ostensibly well-made structures of these plays social norms are obliquely questioned by means of that calculated confusion of satire, cynicism, and delight in paradox, which was already shaping the Wildean inverted epigram.

Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which pushd this technique to its comic limits, is a farce rooted in the native stock of situation and mistaken identity rather than in threatened adultery—though here sublime aristocratic insouciance substitutes for the precarious poise which Pinero's middle-class characters strive to maintain. The play is, indeed, in part a parodic reaction to the Robertsonian style of understatement, still dwindling into the drawin-room miniaturism of the likes of James Albery; but where those authors believed that their neatly-turned phrases aspired to some ultimate truth, Wilde delighted in ultimate paradox, avowedly aiming at an 'art divorced from life'.

[Illustration:] George Alexander as Jack Worthing, in mourning for his pretended brother Ernest, in the first production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James's in 1895. In an interview published one month before the opening in February, and four months before the libel action which changed the course of his life, Wilde declared of the play: 'It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy . . . that we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied frivolity'.

Wilde was the first in a line of homosexual dramatists whose legally prescribed distance from social and sexual norms lends ironic weight to their latter-day comedies of manners. InEarnest, his own delight in outraging the proprieties gave us an inimitable slice of art divorced from life—but, as life divorced him so cruelly from art, it was also to enmesh him in the scandal and imprisonment which (compounded, it is now believed, by the debilitating progress of syphilis) led to his premature death.

The would-be successful social critic had to find a more protective persona, and it was through his genius in creating just such a persona that Bernard Shaw secured his dominance over the drama of the ensuing decades. Shaw was, of course, a novelist and critic well before he found success in the theatre—and by the time he pitched himself into the critical front-line in the ealry 1890s two of his contemporaries, Clement Scott and William Archer, had already staked out positions as heads of the opposing forces in a new battle of 'ancients' versus 'moderns'.

ANCIENTS VERSUS MODERNS

Scott, the theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, who also edited the leading general-interest theatre journal of the day, The Theatre, headed the traditionalists, while Archer had sounded his optimistic clarion call for the new in English Dramatists of To-day as early as 1882. Writers such as Robert Lowe and Percy Fitzgerald were at the same time introducing some scholarly discipline into the writing of theatre history and biography, which in the past had been largely impressionistic when not unashamedly anecdotal. Lowe also produced his massiveBibliographical Account of English Theatrical Literature, the first serious attempt to review everything published about the theatre—as valuably distinguished from treatments of the drama as if it were a branch of literature.

Even the theory of acting, which had not much concerned either the profession or its critics of late, began to be debated with some liveliness. As long ago as the 1770s the French encyclopedist and playwright Denis Diderot had written in defence of objectivity as opposed to emotional identification in acting: now, Walter Pollock's translation of Diderot's work as The Paradox of Acting (1883) became central to a dispute which found Diderot's fellow-countryman and disciple, Constant Coquelin (who had published his own study of intellectually controlled acting technique in 1880), ranged against no less an authority than Henry Irving. The isues—and the opinions offered by these and numerous other actors—were summarized and aanlyzed in Archer's aptly titled Masks or Faces? in 1888.

Thanks to ever-speedier means of transport, this international exchange of ideas was increasingly complemented by the cross-fertilization of theatrical activity. Irving and Wyndham took full companies to America where earlier they would have taken only themselves, while Sarah Bernhardt with the company of the Comédie Française visited London from Paris. From the USA came Edwin Booth to play Othello (to an Iago whicvh far betted fitted Irving's temperament than his earlier Moor), from Italy the great tragedian Tomasso Salvini, and from Germany the company of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen—often regarded as the first director in the modern sense, whose meticulous concerns with ensemble playing certainly influencedIrving's treatment of his Lyceum crowd scenes.

Then in 1891 a visit from André Antoine's Théâtre Libre from Paris inspired the creation of a similar experimental art theatre in London, the Independent Theatre, by the critic J. T. Grein. This provided a living platform on which the 'moderns' might focus their attack against the 'ancients' through their promotion of the already ageing Norwegian dramatist Henryk Ibsen—among whose champions were both Shaw, whose Quintessence of Ibsenism also appeared in 1891, and Archer, whose first complete edition of his works in translation was then in preparation.

However, for most British audiences ibsen remained merely an obscure dramatist from an obscure vcountry whom such intellectuals had made it their business to promote well above the heads of their good selves—and who might therefore consider himself lucky to have had his Doll's House redeemed by the use of its happy ending in Henry Arthur Jones's version of 1884, coyly retitled Breaking a Butterfly. Janet Achurch acted in Archer's more faithful translation in 1889, and this was duly pronounced 'ibscene' by Scott—who two years later was scandalized beyond such punning put-downs into his legendary scream of outrage against the first English performance of Ibsen's Ghosts. Staged as the opening production of the Independent Theatre at the Royalty, on 13 March 1891, this was at once condemned by Scott as 'an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly'—and anything phoney about the war between 'ancients' and 'moderns' was clearly over.

[Illustration: ] Wilde's 'studied frivolity' as ironic liberation: Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer, dancing the tarantella in the middle act of Ibsen's  A Doll's House. This pen and ink drawing was made when the play was staged for thirty performances at the Avenue Theatre in 1892—one of no fewer than five London revivals during the 1890s.

 

Romance and Realism 1871-1914

Too True to Be Good: Cartografía narrativa

lunes, 24 de diciembre de 2012

 Too True to Be Good: Cartografía narrativa

Too True to Be Good: A Political Extravaganza. By George Bernard Shaw. Online at Project Gutenberg Australia
    http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300591h.html
 
La cartografía narrativa consiste en la ubicación de un fenómeno narrativo (un texto narrativo en este caso) en el marco de una narratividad general, o de la realidad como gran narración o sistema de narraciones. La realidad es otras cosas, por supuesto, además de una gran narrración o un sistema de narraciones; se trata de un aspecto relevante de la realidad al que estamos prestando atención, o resaltando con nuestra atención.

El estudio del anclaje narrativo, un aspecto concreto de la cartografía narrativa, consistirá en examinar cómo se sitúa una narración a sí misma en relación a otros fenómenos narrativos que dan cuenta del mundo como secuencia temporal organizada e interpretable—que sitúan a esa narración en el marco el mundo como gran relato. Para ver qué tipo de anclaje narrativo se da en una narración, habrá que determinar qué tipo de conceptualización del mundo en tanto que gran relato se está invocando o presuponiendo. La historicidad es una manera específica (moderna, pongamos) de anclaje narrativo.

La cartografía narrativa en sentido amplio también atiende a otras cuestiones, a saber, la cuestión de los géneros narrativos. Dado el mundo como gran historia, hay muchas maneras posibles de hablar de ella, muchos géneros de discurso al respecto. Y un texto narrativo también puede caracterizarse a sí mismo como una manera determinada de presentar el mundo, o puede ubicarse de modo más o menos consciente o explícito en el mapa de los géneros posibles, o aludir a otros géneros que presenten una perspectiva determinada sobre la realidad (en el aspecto que se está tratando) o sobre el propio texto, entrando así en un dialogismo intertextual (del cual nos interesa aquí la dimensión narrativa, historicista o temporal).

La obra de Bernard Shaw Too True to Be Good (1931) se ubica explícitamente en un momento dado de la evolución de la humanidad, más en concreto en el debate entre socialismo y capitalismo en el siglo XX. Shaw, un socialista de costumbres austeras, ve gran parte de los males de la humanidad como consecuencia de la desigualdad de riquezas, y propone en toda una serie de obras la abolición de la propiedad privada. Por tanto, Too True to Be Good se ubicará no sólo en el contexto histórico de una determinada fase del desarrollo del capitalismo, y de la reacción comunista, sino también en el contexto de la obra socialista de Shaw.

Hay que decir que Shaw, con su estilo de vida personal, era muy consciente de que la vida de los ricos no es una condición para la felicidad; que la sobreabundancia de propiedades y bienes puede incluso ser un obstáculo para ella (y aquí es a donde apunta esta obra en concreto). La visión de los ricos como el ideal de vida puede cegar a los pobres sobre la naturaleza de la felicidad, y eso es un problema mayor incluso que el de la propia existencia de desigualdades en los bienes.  La pesadilla insensata que es la vida del rico la describe la Paciente en el acto III "I was devoured by parasites: by tourist agencies, steamboat companies, railways, motor car people, hotel keepers, dressmakers, servants, all trying to get my money by selling me things I dont really want; shoving me all over the globe to look at what they call new skies, though they know as well as I do that it is only the same old sky everywhere; and disabling me by doing all the things for me that I ought to do for myself to keep myself in health. They preyed on me to keep themselves alive: they pretended they were making me happy when it was only by drinking and drugging--cocktails and cocaine--that I could endure my life."

Son éstos ricos modernos, como queda claro por su tren de vida. El tipo de ricos de quienes se ocupa la obra también la sitúa históricamente.

Otra dimensión de la cartografía narrativa irá dirigida a la obra (texto, fenómeno, etc.) como fenómeno parcial ubicado en el ámbito global de la producción de un autor—a la relación entre el fenómeno narrativo concreto (TToo True to Be Good en este caso) y otro fenómeno histórico-temporal narrativizado: la vida de un autor, su sentido y su lugar en ella.

Todos estos fenómenos son perspectivizados por el papel del analista y su situación histórica. Por ejemplo (y haciendo abstracción de la cuestión principal aquí, nuestro interés por la cartografía y anclaje narrativos)—podemos valorar las ideas socialistas de Shaw, vistas a principios del siglo XXI, sobre el trasfondo histórico de la experiencia socialista y comunista del siglo XX, y de ello se seguirían como poco importantes matizaciones a su postura. Podríamos argüír, por ejemplo, cómo Shaw subestima el papel de la iniciativa privada como creadora de riqueza y civilización, o cómo subestima a Stalin, en esta obra de 1931, como opresor de vidas, cuerpos y mentes.

Shaw, dramaturgo de ideas, abre sus obras con grandes prefacios teórico-filosóficos. Y éstos son de interés para nuestro proyecto aquí porque atienden a diversas dimensiones de la cartografía narrativa. En este caso presenta una panorámica de los sistemas de gobierno social, basados en última instancia en una interpretación de la naturaleza y de las motivaciones humanas—los impulsos egoístas y parasitarios, frente a los altruistas y socialistas, o, tal y como lo pone Shaw, el Imperio frente a la Iglesia. También aludirá a su propia intervención en el debate político en forma de drama, teniendo en cuenta a su público y su trayectoria pasada todo ello de modo explícito. A lo cual hay que sumar el dialogismo implícito que el análisis extraiga ya sea del prólogo, ya de la obra en sí.

Por supuesto que la perspectiva de Shaw (o "la perspectiva de Shaw tal como la interpreta el analista") no coincidirá con la perspectiva del analista, y ello añade dimensiones perspectivísticas y narrativas propias. Por ejemplo, la admiración hacia Stalin o que mencionábamos, y también hacia el fascismo (" Stalin and Mussolini are the most responsible statesmen in Europe because they have no hold on their places except their efficiency"...) —claramente, Shaw no sólo ignora hechos relevantes que han sido puestos de manifiesto por la historia subsiguiente, sino que su análisis se basa en una interpretación errónea de la naturaleza humana, de las motivaciones de la acción humana, y de la dinámica social. Ignora o es incapaz de ver la dinámica de opresión y conformismo, de control y de vigilancia mutua, que se da en la sociedad al margen de la adquisición de bienes materiales. Por eso no ve a Stalin como un grotesco y monstruoso acumulador de poder, aunque lo vea como un nuevo Papa, sino como un honesto funcionario dedicado a su trabajo en la máxima austeridad; por eso es totalmente ciego al distinto tipo de parasitismo social y de opresión que ejercen los comisarios políticos, para Shaw una especie de monjes laicos. Shaw cree que puede haber un gobierno objetivamente científico de los asuntos humanos al margen de los intereses de lucro personal. Eso sería too good to be true: no parece la naturaleza humana responder a esa creencia, pues el lucro no sólo se expresa en objetos caros o cuentas millonarias; la naturaleza humana se lucra a expensas de los demás con poder, opresión, atención e influencia.

La obra se abre con un acto en el que un monstruo o microbio gigante dialoga con un médico sobre la paciente que está en la cama. El médico arguye que no hay un microbio conocido que cause el sarampión. Y en efecto no lo había dn 1931. Según la Wikipedia, "Measles (also known as Rubeola, morbilli, or English measles), is an infection of the respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of the genus Morbillivirus" ... " In 1954, the virus causing the disease was isolated from an 11-year old boy from the United States, David Edmonston, and adapted and propagated on chick embryo tissue culture. To date, 21 strains of the measles virus have been identified. While at Merck, Maurice Hilleman developed the first successful vaccine. Licensed vaccines to prevent the disease became available in 1963."

El médico reonoce que no tiene tratamiento para el sarampión, y que sin embargo lo simula por el efecto placebo: "Faith is humbug. But it works."

—quizá de allí pasamos a la explicación del título de la obra. Las ideas religiosas son too good to be true, pero quizá en cambio el análisis científico y escéptico de la realidad sea too true to be good, es incapaz de generar el ilusionismo, el efecto placebo necesario para un funcionamiento adecuado de las motivaciones humanas y por tanto de la sociedad.

Otra manera de situar la obra en la historia es mediante los detalles de la ambientación y la realidad representada (incluyendo, por ejemplo, el mobiliario e interiores que se empleen en la representación, pero también detalles como la caja fuerte de seguridad, el teléfono o el timbre eléctrico mencionados en el primer acto). Hay que tener en cuenta el posible desfase entre el momento en que se escribió la obra y el momento que escenifica, algo que puede hacerse más o menos explícito con señales deliberadas de historicidad; y también las posibles distorsiones o desfases temporales introducidos por la adaptación o recepción posterior de la obra—por ejemplo reubicaciones en una época anterior o posterior, que pueden a su vez causar incongruencias o tensiones con diferentes aspectos de la obra, su lenguaje o sus representaciones de la realidad. Así, un montaje actual de la obra podría mantener su ambientación en los años 30, o actualizarla en algunos aspectos —etc.

Shaw alude a su propia reputación como autor de teatro "de ideas," con obras basadas en debates más que en intriga, con las palabras del monstruo o microbio al final del acto I: "The play is now virtually over; but the characters will discuss it at great length for two acts more".

Un aspecto importante de la cartografía narrativa de la obra es su ubicación en el panorama comunicativo—en concreto, en este caso, en la historia del teatro británico o del teatro moderno. En este sentido vemos a Shaw como un socialista de salón, es decir, un autor fundamentalmente integrado (no digamos ya en su círculo social, su vida personal, etc.) en los círculos sociales e intelectuales más influyentes de su tiempo. Trabaja "para la humanidad", pero dirigiéndose a un público muy concreto que es el suyo, y con un género muy específico que ha de ser recibido por ese público. Por ejemplo, los personajes de Shaw son siempre caballeros, aristócratas, con una conciencia de clase extraordinariamente desarrollada, a la británica—y ése es el trasfondo sobre el cual sus obras se constryen y sobre el que actúan. Shaw no inaugura nuevos protocolos comunicativos, sino que sus obras vienen marcadas como fundamentalmente convencionales, sean las que sean las ideas que en ellas se ventilan. No es sorprendente que muchas de ellas acaben con protocolos de conciliación social menos radicales de lo que son las proclamadas ideas del autor—matrimonios en la clase alta, pactos entre capitalistas y progresistas, herencias para los intelectuales, desengaños de los idealistas, etc. El argumento, y no ya tanto el argumento como la galería de personajes, desactiva por anticipado el socialismo del autor, reubicándolo no en la acción política sino en un debate de ideas (en línea, en realidad con las tesis "Fabianas" antirrevolucionarias). La benevolencia con que se presenta a las clases altas y a sus humores y caprichos contrasta curiosamente con la supuesta virulencia política del mensaje de Shaw; en esto, como en tantas otras cosas, la obra es característica de su época como fenómeno histórico.

Una obra se construye por alusión a géneros anteriores o a referencias culturales que le proporcionan un tono, una estrucutra, una serie de convencione. Por ejemplo, Heartbreak House de Shaw se presenta explícitamente como una pieza "al estilo ruso" —de Chejov, pongamos—sobre temas británicos. En Man and Superman alude a Nietzsche y al darwinismo. En este caso, el acto segundo nos remite a pastiches imperiales humorísticos, quizá en la tradición de Gilbert y Sullivan, o, en la caracterización de la "paciente" del primer acto en su disfraz indígena, a indígenas explícitamente teatrales, de los que sólo se encuentran en el "ballet ruso".

Critica la obra la hipocresía social que cultiva las mentiras y ficciones por su propia conveniencia. Dice Aubrey, el gentilhombre metido a ladrón:

"Make any statement that is so true that it has been staring us in the face all our lives, and the whole world will rise up and passionately contradict you. If you dont withdraw and apologize, it will be the worse for you. But just tell a thundering silly lie that everyone knows is a lie, and a murmur of pleased assent will hum up from every quarter of the globe."
 

La verdad no tiene valor social en sí: muchas cosas son too true to be good. Quizá esté reflexionando Bernard Shaw sobre cómo muchos de sus mensajes revolucionarios son aceptados por su público únicamente porque el vehículo de los mismos es la ficción, la mentira consensuada.

Otra verdad inconventiente dice la "Paciente" Miss Mopply; que los tres estafadores no son sino "inefficient fertilizers. We do nothing but convert good food into bad manure. We are walking factories of bad manure: thats what we are"—pero Aubrey le reprocha que "ther are certain disgusting truths that no lady would throw in the teeth of her fellow creatures--"

Una alusión a H. G. Wells y al creciente pesimismo de estos Fabianos al final de su vida:

(el Sargento, en el acto III): "What must we do to be saved?" There it is: not a story in a book as it used to be, but God's truth in the real actual world. And all the comfort they get is "Flee from the wrath to come." But where are they to flee to? There they are, meeting at Geneva or hobnobbing at Chequers over the weekend, asking one another, like the man in the book, "Whither must we flee?" And nobody can tell them. The man in the book says "Do you see yonder shining light?" Well, today the place is blazing with shining lights: shining lights in parliament, in the papers, in the churches, and in the books that they call Outlines--Outlines of History and Science and what not--and in spite of all their ballyhoo here we are waiting in the City of Destruction like so many sheep for the wrath to come."

El Anciano, padre de Aubrey, hace su aparición para lamentarse de la educación dada a su hijo, que lo ha convertido en sacerdote y en estafador. El Anciano era un escéptico, un librepensador, un defensor de la Verdad, principios que intentó inculcar a su hijo—y ahora ve que la Verdad quizá haga libre a la gente, pero no la hace mejor. Y así ve cómo el universo en el que creía, el universo del racionalista escéptico, se desmorona:

THE ELDER. Yes, sir: the universe of Isaac Newton, which has been an impregnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years, has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before the criticism of Einstein. Newton's universe was the stronghold of rational Determinism: the stars in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws; and when we turned from surveying their vastness to study the infinite littleness of the atoms, there too we found the electrons in their orbits obeying the same universal laws. Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because it must: the commandments were erased from the tables of the law; and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians. Here was my faith: here I found my dogma of infallibility: I, who scorned alike the Catholic with his vain dream of responsible Free Will, and the Protestant with his pretence of private judgment. And now--now--what is left of it? The orbit of the electron obeys no law: it chooses one path and rejects another: it is as capricious as the planet Mercury, who wanders from his road to warm his hands at the sun. All is caprice: the calculable world has become incalculable: Purpose and Design, the pretexts for all the vilest superstitions, have risen from the dead to cast down the mighty from their seats and put paper crowns on presumptuous fools. Formerly, when differences with my wife, or business worries, tried me too hard, I sought consolation and reassurance in our natural history museums, where I could forget all common cares in wondering at the diversity of forms and colors in the birds and fishes and animals, all produced without the agency of any designer by the operation of Natural Selection. Today I dare not enter an aquarium, because I can see nothing in those grotesque monsters of the deep but the caricatures of some freakish demon artist: some Zeus-Mephistopheles with paintbox and plasticine, trying to surpass himself in the production of fantastic and laughable creatures to people a Noah's ark for his baby. I have to rush from the building lest I go mad, crying, like the man in your book, "What must I do to be saved?" Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma. As I stand here I am falling into that abyss, down, down, down. We are all falling into it; and our dizzy brains can utter nothing but madness. My wife has died cursing me. I do not know how to live without her: we were unhappy together for forty years. My son, whom I brought up to be an incorruptible Godfearing atheist, has become a thief and a scoundrel; and I can say nothing to him but "Go, boy: perish in your villainy; for neither your father nor anyone else can now give you a good reason for being a man of honor."
 
(...)

Determinism is gone, shattered, buried with a thousand dead religions, evaporated with the clouds of a million forgotten winters. The science I pinned my faith to is bankrupt: its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests, its cruelties more horrible than all the atrocities of the Inquisition. Its spread of enlightenment has been a spread of cancer: its counsels that were to have established the millennium have led straight to European suicide. And I--I who believed in it as no religious fanatic has ever believed in his superstition! For its sake I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and behold the supreme tragedy of the atheist who has lost his faith--his faith in atheism, for which more martyrs have perished than for all the creeds put together. Here I stand, dumb before my scoundrel of a son; for that is what you are, boy, a common scoundrel and nothing else.

Aubrey a su vez, tranquilo en su cinismo actual, le reprocha al anciano su propia inmoralidad, que tolera la guerra y los bombardeos si son actos "patrióticos", y contribuyó a hacerlo inmoral a él mismo. La experiencia del desengaño del patriotismo y del heroísmo guerrero también es característicamente moderna, históricamente situada. Como dice el Sargento en el acto III, "We were not killing the right people in 1915. We werent even killing the wrong people. It was innocent men killing one another." En sus notas al final de la obra (1932) el autor recalca la manera en que fue la experiencia de la Primera Guerra Mundial para toda una generación la que hizo caer las viejas "verdades" y abrió los ojos a una crisis espiritual e ideológica generalizada.

En el happy end el coronel Tallboys es ascendido por error, aunque observa "la justicia es justicia aunque se haga por error"; su hijo que evitó el servicio militar se ha hecho durante la guerra "so enormously rich that I cannot afford to keep up his acquaintance"; la estafadora Sweetie se casa con el recto Sargento, convencido de que caracteres distintos garantizan la armonía del matrimonio. Y la Sra Mopply, madre de la paciente, se libera del mundo de mentiras en que ha vivido toda su vida, fingiendo ficciones convenientes, y de su papel de madre sacrificada y sufridora:

MRS MOPPLY. (...) What do you know about myself? my real self? They told me lies; and I had to pretend to be somebody quite different.

TALLBOYS. Who told you lies, madam? It was not with my authority.

MRS MOPPLY. I wasnt thinking of you. My mother told me lies. My nurse told me lies. My governess told me lies. Everybody told me lies. The world is not a bit like what they said it was. I wasnt a bit like what they said I ought to be. I thought I had to pretend. And I neednt have pretended at all.

—y si el escepticismo del Anciano se ha visto alterado, ella por su part declara que "I will never believe anything again as long as I live."

—y se reconcilia con su hija, que la aborrecía en su vida de señoras ricas, habiéndose liberado ahora ambas del peso de sus identidades respectivas.

El servicial  cabo Meek les proporciona a todos pasaportes para Beocia, un sueño utópico situado en una dimensión distinta de la URSS: "The Union of Federated Sensible Societies, sir. The U.F.S.S. Everybody wants to go there now, sir." Pero sólo hay visado para Tallboys, por su afición a las acuaelas; los demás habrán de volver a Inglaterra.

Aubrey, abandonado por su amante, se dedicará a predicador, que era su vocación; un predicador sin credo ahora. Y erigiénsose en portavoz del autor, ha de despedir a todos con uno de los característicos sermones de Shaw, y decir las verdades aunque sean inconvenientes:

AUBREY [rising] If I may be allowed to improve the occasion for a moment--

General consternation. All who are seated rise in alarm, except the patient, who jumps up and claps her hands in mischievous encouragement to the orator.

MRS MOPPLY    }    [together]    {    You hold your tongue, young man.
SWEETIE    }        {    Oh Lord! we're in for it now.
THE ELDER    }        {    Shame and silence would better become you, sir.
THE PATIENT    }        {    Go on, Pops. It's the only thing you do well.
AUBREY [continuing]--it is clear to me that though we seem to be dispersing quietly to do very ordinary things: Sweetie and the Sergeant to get married [the Sergeant hastily steals down from his grotto, beckoning to Sweetie to follow him. They both escape along the beach] the colonel to his wife, his watercolors, and his K.C.B. [the colonel hurries away noiselessly in the opposite direction] Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek to his job of repatriating the expedition [Meek takes to flight up the path through the gap] Mops, like Saint Teresa, to found an unladylike sisterhood with her mother as cook-housekeeper [Mrs Mopply hastily follows the sergeant, dragging with her the patient, who is listening to Aubrey with signs of becoming rapt in his discourse] yet they are all, like my father here, falling, falling, falling endlessly and hopelessly through a void in which they can find no footing.[The Elder vanishes into the recesses of St Pauls, leaving his son to preach in solitude]. There is something fantastic about them, something unreal and perverse, something profoundly unsatisfactory. They are too absurd to be believed in: yet they are not fictions: the newspapers are full of them: what storyteller, however reckless a liar, would dare to invent figures so improbable as men and women with their minds stripped naked? Naked bodies no longer shock us: our sunbathers, grinning at us from every illustrated summer number of our magazines, are nuder than shorn lambs. But the horror of the naked mind is still more than we can bear. Throw off the last rag of your bathing costume; and I shall not blench nor expect you to blush. You may even throw away the outer garments of your souls: the manners, the morals, the decencies. Swear; use dirty words; drink cocktails; kiss and caress and cuddle until girls who are like roses at eighteen are like battered demireps at twenty-two: in all these ways the bright young things of the victory have scandalized their dull old prewar elders and left nobody but their bright young selves a penny the worse. But how are we to bear this dreadful new nakedness: the nakedness of the souls who until now have always disguised themselves from one another in beautiful impossible idealisms to enable them to bear one another's company. The iron lighting of war has burnt great rents in these angelic veils, just as it has smashed great holes in our cathedral roofs and torn great gashes in our hillsides. Our souls go in rags now; and the young are spying through the holes and getting glimpses of the reality that was hidden. And they are not horrified: they exult in having found us out: they expose their own souls; and when we their elders desperately try to patch our torn clothes with scraps of the old material, the young lay violent hands on us and tear from us even the rags that were left to us. But when they have stripped themselves and us utterly naked, will they be able to bear the spectacle? You have seen me try to strip my soul before my father; but when these two young women stripped themselves more boldly than I--when the old woman had the mask struck from her soul and revelled in it instead of dying of it--I shrank from the revelation as from a wind bringing from the unknown regions of the future a breath which may be a breath of life, but of a life too keen for me to bear, and therefore for me a blast of death. I stand midway between youth and age like a man who has missed his train: too late for the last and too early for the next. What am I to do? What am I? A soldier who has lost his nerve, a thief who at his first great theft has found honesty the best policy and restored his booty to its owner. Nature never intended me for soldiering or thieving: I am by nature and destiny a preacher. I am the new Ecclesiastes. But I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands. The war has been a fiery forcing house in which we have grown with a rush like flowers in a late spring following a terrible winter. And with what result? This: that we have outgrown our religion, outgrown our political system, outgrown our own strength of mind and character. The fatal word NOT has been miraculously inserted into all our creeds: in the desecrated temples where we knelt murmuring "I believe" we stand with stiff knees and stiffer necks shouting "Up, all! the erect posture is the mark of the man: let lesser creatures kneel and crawl: we will not kneel and we do not believe." But what next? Is NO enough? For a boy, yes: for a man, never. Are we any the less obsessed with a belief when we are denying it than when we were affirming it? No: I must have affirmations to preach. Without them the young will not listen to me; for even the young grow tired of denials. The negativemonger falls before the soldiers, the men of action, the fighters, strong in the old uncompromising affirmations which give them status, duties, certainty of consequences; so that the pugnacious spirit of man in them can reach out and strike deathblows with steadfastly closed minds. Their way is straight and sure; but it is the way of death; and the preacher must preach the way of life. Oh, if I could only find it! [A white sea fog swirls up from the beach to his feet, rising and thickening round him]. I am ignorant: I have lost my nerve and am intimidated: all I know is that I must find the way of life, for myself and all of us, or we shall surely perish. And meanwhile my gift has possession of me: I must preach and preach and preach no matter how late the hour and how short the day, no matter whether I have nothing to say--

The fog has enveloped him; the gap with its grottoes is lost to sight; the ponderous stones are wisps of shifting white cloud; there is left only fog: impenetrable fog; but the incorrigible preacher will not be denied his peroration, which, could we only hear it distinctly, would probably run--

--or whether in some pentecostal flame of revelation the Spirit will descend on me and inspire me with a message the sound whereof shall go out unto all lands and realize for us at last the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory for ever and ever. Amen.

 

The audience disperses (or the reader puts down the book) impressed in the English manner with the Pentecostal flame and the echo from the Lord's Prayer. But fine words butter no parsnips. A few of the choicer spirits will know that the Pentecostal flame is always alight at the service of those strong enough to bear its terrible intensity. They will not forget that it is accompanied by a rushing mighty wind, and that any rascal who happens to be also a windbag can get a prodigious volume of talk out of it without ever going near enough to be shrivelled up. The author, though himself a professional talk maker, does not believe that the world can be saved by talk alone. He has given the rascal the last word; but his own favorite is the woman of action, who begins by knocking the wind out of the rascal, and ends with a cheerful conviction that the lost dogs always find their own way home. So they will, perhaps, if the women go out and look for them.

————

Vemos que la obra se evalúa a sí misma en el discurso final del personaje, convertido en trasunto del Autor como Profeta, y se expone a sí misma como una revelación, "too true to be good", del interior de las mentes y de las actitudes de las personas, arrojadas a una crisis de sus verdades convencionales tras el shock de la Primera Guerra Mundial, y el temor a la Segunda que se ve venir. El anclaje narrativo de la obra en la historia es por tanto excepcionalmente consciente y deliberado, cosa no extraña tratándose de una obra de vejez de un autor célebre por su visión crítica del mundo en que vivía.

El autor continúa en propia voz en las notas sobre la obra escritas para el festival de Malvern (1932), sosteniendo que a pesar de las palabras del Viejo escéptico no ha abandonado ninguna de sus posiciones críticas escépticas y socialistas, y que para los males sociales y espirituales del momento, "extremely practical and precise remedies, including a complete political reconstitution, a credible and scientific religion, and a satisfactory economic scheme, are discoverable by anyone under thirty (the older ones are past praying for)". También justifica la extraña estructura de su obra en atención a una necesidad de manatener la atención del público:

"When people have laughed for an hour, they want to be serio-comically entertained for the next hour; and when that is over they are so tired of not being wholly serious that they can bear nothing but a torrent of sermons.

My play is arranged accordingly."

George Bernard Shaw