Straight Talk and Hard Hitting

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 62, 4 June 1927, Page 24 (Supplement)

Straight Talk and Hard Hitting

On Being Able to Say What You Mean IDEAS IN THE THEATRE A PLEA for straight talk and hard hitting in the theatre is put forward by H. P. B. Mais in an English magazine. He tcants to hear the ideas of to-day expounded on the stage of to-day . Thing’s seem to be looking up in the world of the theatre. Just as H. <l. Wells used to contend that the novelist ought to take ail the world for his province, so do I firmly believe that, the playwright ought to use the stage as a platform from which to propagate new ideas. With the exception of Bernard Shaw. most dramatists have been content to hash up again and again the .most effete and antique beliefs, with the result that one critic has complained with considerable justice that as soon as you enter the theatre you are sure to have to listen to arguments that are twenty years behind the times. In Miles Malleson’s new play, “The Fanatics,” we are, more or less for the first time, privileged to hear men and women talk as they actually do talk in 1927. and American managers excitedly ask what the Lord Chamberlain is about to allow such tilings. I am not at the moment concerned with the merits of “The Fanatics” as a play. lam merely chronicling my delight on finding that it is possible to listen to people actually discussing such things as birth-control and trial marriages on the stage. This is a refreshing advance upon the ever-re-curring theme of marital infidelity which, as a plot, has surely now had its day. I am strongly of opinion that Milton was right in his plea expressed in “Aeropagitica” for a complete freedom of the Press. A censor seems to me to have no place in a a state; that contains any but callow Hedgings and dissolute ancients. “He that, can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly tetter, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise,a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathod, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat.” That seems to me to be the essence of the whole matter. Swine will find mud in which to wallow, purge you the land never so thoroughly. Decent human beings will learn to pick their way the more carefully the more mud there is about. Promiscuity in morals is never the farce that revues would have us imagine it to be. Allow it to be shown in all its workings in intellectual comedy or tragedy and those who advocate it in theory will become less likely to try it in practice. We ask in the Litany to he forgiven for sins committed in ignorance, thereby acknowledging that in Divine as in humor, law it is no defence to say that we didn’t know. Now, the whole of modern education is u conspiracy of silence. Each sex is brought up in complete ignorance of the needs of the other and the result is disastrous. It rests with the dramatists and novelists to open the eyes of youth to reality. I cannot see where the harm lies in this. Inhibitions and repressions have only led to malpractices, disordered nerves and neuroticism. Open and free discussion paves the way for interest in other things beyond sex. The clearer the insight we get into the demands made in the relationship of the sexes the sooner we shall be able to settle the most vexed of modern problems and proceed a stage further to settle more important problems. Hitherto we have been hampered by being allowed to say so little that we have never been able to get away from it. With a few more plays of “The Fanatics” kind we shall be free to give rein to our desire to dramatise other interests.

I, for instance, in my novels and in the plays that I turn over in my mind shall be able at last to turn from the conflict of man and woman to the more engrossing conflict between nature and man, the stramge mingling of loveliness and cruelty that meets the eye of the country lover, the nightmare struggle between capital and labour, between aesthete and Philistine, between materialist and mystic. More than anything we want on the stage to make a clean break with the old traditional ideas of what is fit subject for drama and come to live issues between rati on id people.

The tendency of late has been to dwell :oo insistently on the petty vices of the unpleasant and the petty virtues of the unco* guid, and we have been bored beyond measure by an endloss succession of trumpery sexual mishaps in the lives of dwellers in suburbia and Mayfair. What we nowwant.is a vigorous drama on the subject of relativity, not after the manner of Pirandello, but after the manner of Einstein, something as novel and refreshing in theme and treatment as the sculpture of Frank Dobson and the painting of Duncan Grant. We want to make a bold bid to drive out o' the theatre the present-day audiences of illiterate, mentally underted hysterical viragos and physically under-developed effeminate young men. a H d replace them with audiences of vigorous mentality, men and women of mark in the world of science and niedi-

cine, philosophy and psychology. The theatre should become far more eclectic. Far too much pandering to the vulgar has been done on the ground that there are more vulgarians than intelligent people, and that a vulgarian occupies as much space and pays as much money as an intellectual.

The time must come and soon when we shall go to the theatre to be shocked and stimulated into accepting new codes of thought that cut right across our woolliness, and then at last there will be a taboo on the senseless stories of sheiks and scandals, of suicides and strychnine poisoners, of cuckolds and procuresses, of stolen jewels and blackmailing letters. Mr. Malleson has lit a Cranmer-like torch which will not easily be extinguished.

The time has come for straight talk and hard-hitting from the most influential of ail platforms. The stage was once the place for the exposition of a mediaeval faith. It will again become the arena in which the tenets of the new faith will be proclaimed. The dramatists are ready. All that now remains is to rope in the proper audiences and to excommunicate or hang the audiences that bar the way to progress.