Our Drama Not Decadent

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 323, 7 April 1928, Page 20

Our Drama Not Decadent

Sir Joint Martin Harvey Answers the Critics

BAD PLAYS EXAGGERATED This winter the flames of discussion concerning the state of British drama have flared up again, licking round two or three West End presentations. Again we hear the cry, never long hushed, that our stage is profane, immoral, and useless (writes Sir John Martin Harvey in an English exchange). That generalisation is as wrong now as when I first heard it while I was acting with Irving. But now. as then, there is superficially some ground for it. Of recent years there have been staged a number of plays which xx^ll

deserve the name of decadent. There has been something of a cult for dramas which do not conform to ordinary requirements of taste and breeding. Cleverly advertised as “courageous,” “witty,” “sincere,” or “reflecting real life,” they were too

often composed of feeble plots cloaked by an objectionable mask of gutter talk and despicable emotions. But, for all this, our drama is by no means in a decline. If in certain plays a laboured substitute for wit is made by a degrading bracketing of fine and beautiful words and ideas with others that are unpleasant, there are still others plays where the authors rise from the hurt ideals and broken illusions which are the backwash of the war, and strive to build in words an edifice of lasting work. There are still dramatists such as Bernard Shaw- and John Galsworthy who, while handling characters which fill the ordinary playgoer with disgust and contempt, can avoid making easy, shoddy plays with them, but instead attack with sincerity and force the follies and hypocrisies of the age. Ephemeral Notoriety To-morrow, when the cheap and nasty plays and their authors, actors, managers, and producers are forgotten, such epics as “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and “Strife” will live on. One of the chief difficulties of cleansing our stage from the occasional blots upon it lies in the fact that such dramas attract so much attention. A madman destroying the Mona Lisa would be heard of by the world, but would soon be forgotten. The sight of a child snatched from under the wheels of a vehicle in the same street would be long remembered. The madman’s name would die, but the painter’s would live for ever. The evil that decadent plays do is not so much to the theatre as to art in general. By deliberately debasing ideas which the world has been taught are fine, and elevating those that are unpleasant, they tend to destroy our sense of values. Idealism or Cash? The reason they are created is largely that it is much easier to smash than to build, and their authors come more easily by a dozen cheap cynicisms than one noble thought. Also, despite the fact that the class of play I am criticising is always said to be written from idealism, it is really put together with the strictly commercial idea of personal gain. There, in The hands of all theatregoers, lies the remedy. They have only to cease supporting the production of these vapid, valueless plays, and transport their patronage to those written less conspicuously and for the glory and love of the art. A complete revolution will take place

when those persons who waste so much breath stigmatising the whole of our drama as retrograde spend a little of that breath asking for tickets for those plays which are clean and wholesome, and contain speeches whose beauty remains unforgotten and become an j?ispiration. The Theatre Irresistible Perhaps it is because sufficient support is not given to the good of the stage that the undesirable productions are put on in a rash and regrettable effort to recuperate financially. And to all who object to the stage on antiquated grounds as being an evil influence upon our national life, I commend Matthew Arnold’s wise saying: “The theatre is irresistible—organise the theatre!” For that it has tremendous powers of good no one who has even a nodding acquaintance with the greater of our dramatists from Shakespeare onward can deny. Nothing is too good for an audience—no sentiment too noble, no idea too enterprising or too fine.

So long as these things are remembered, so long as high ideals are woven into plays for us by fine emotion and beauty of language, there need be no fear that our British drama will ever, as a whole, merit the description “decadent.”