Plays Must Please Women to be a Success

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 44, 14 May 1927, Page 21 (Supplement)

Plays Must Please Women to be a Success

They Want Happy Endings, Clothes and Jewels

If women stopped going to the theatre, there would be no more theatres, and one of the biggest industries would cease, writes Alan Dale, the American critic, in a New York journal. Most plays are written to please women. Any playwright who has tried to do otherwise, has gloriously failed. Mere men w*ould keep no theatre open. Theatregoing is a pastime essentially for women. Let the aspiring playwright ever remember that. Otherwise, his efforts will end in disaster. Men go to the theatre because women take them there. If it were not for the women men would stay at home, and play poker or bridge, and the earnest speculators would be minus their juicy plums.

Women do not object to the moral decadence of a heroine. They have no objection to seeing the poor, silly thing going to his rooms at midnight, there to be caught by hubby. Not a bit. They like it. They revel in it. If the heroine deliberately goes wrong, they merely murmur, “girls will be girls,” and let it go at that. She might do worse than go wrong. She might go right! But let the aforesaid heroine be the subject of masculine jokes! WHY PLAYS FAIL Let her be laughed at by the entire cast as well as the audience—especially when the audience might say “how true!”—and the play will fail. It may be an extremely wellconstructed drama, filled to the brim with bright and fascinating lines, but it will fail. It will fail silently without one word of explanation, and it will remain in oblivion. That is the worst thing that can happen to any play.

It is hard to submit to this sort of thing, and sometimes playwrights rebel and write plays dealing with drab subjects, without much “love story”— and they aim at appealing to men. These plays are very thoughtful and artistic. You might believe that they would appeal to “advanced” women. Alas! the term “advanced’ 'is out of date.

It is an early Victorian term. Today all women are “advanced,” and the more advanced they are, the more anxious they seem to be to send the plays that deride them into the discard. Woman is responsible for the "happy endings” of eleven plays out of twelve. She is tremendously keen on the lived-happy-ever-after climax. There are plays that actually demand a rigidly “unhappy” ending. The heroine should live up to her beliefs, and refuse marriage. She should deny any man the right to live with her apologetically. No. The play must end with wedding bells, and woman exacts them, in gorgeous, clanging, chiming music. WOMEN—ALL WOMEN

Unless women be mingled with these topics, and mingled conspicuously they are out of question. There have been political plays, but unless the governor of the State is in the toils of some woman, or owes his position to some woman, or is saved by some woman from political disaster, that sort of play cannot succeed. Same with finance. There must be a woman for whose sake the villain saves the hero from being crushed in Wall Street.

Women often go to the theatre to ! see clothes. You may say that they ! could walk along certain thoroughfares and see ’em copiously displayed !in shop windows. But it is clothes in action that “intrigue” them. The heroine has just admitted that she is no better than she should be. and she falls at his feet, and confesses her I guilt. I Women love to see the gorgeous ! evening gown she selects as fitting j for her confession, and the “jools” she sports, and the wrap she will wear when she goes out into the night. Women adore “society” plays in which women wear diamonds whilst they are eating their morning egg (that is considered very bung-tung on the stage), and always go to bed in a tiara. , , Astute managers realise this, and the squalid play is rarely popular, except in the cult theatres —and they do not count in my argument at all. The inevitable conclusion is that the theatre is essentially feminine; and that anvthing contrary will —as they say in the classics—get it in the neck, where they deserve to get it. Plays built deliberately for masculine comprehension are absurd, and 111 say, uninteresting And if I have most consistently and persistently used the word “woman” in the foregoing, pleai*' let me remark that I meant to say ’lady.” I refer to the lady at her I and her darndesL