Why I Laugh at My Own Plays

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 490, 20 October 1928, Page 21

Why I Laugh at My Own Plays

Edgar Wallace Explains

HE peculiar behaviour of authors on their first nights has always been a source of great interest to me, writes Edgar Wallace, novelist and

playwright, whose new drama, “The Squeaker,” was recently presented in London.

I have never quite understood why authors should be so extraordinarily nervous ou a first night, unless they know their play hasn’t quite “come out” as they intended. But the play that reads well doesn’t always act well. An author who has sent what he believes to be his masterpiece into production veryolten turns up at one of the final rehearsals and leaves the theatre a shocked and depressed man. There are one or two authors who send their long-suffering xvomenkind to a play and wait at home for an encouraging telephone message before they appear in the theatre. With one exception, and that was in the very early days of my apprenticeship, I have always known whether a play was wrong before the curtain went up ou the first performance, and I confess that - when a play is wrong I never go to the theatre. A first-night audience is a very difficult one. In the first place, it does not expect a success; the only doubt it has in its mind is how bad the play will be. This is not because it is not magnanimous, but because it is sophisticated. It has very few illusions about the theatre; it knows that the real good play is a rarity, and the most it can hope is that the piece it is about to see isn’t too bad. A first-night audience is not in a discreditable sense antagonistic; its psychology is that of the judge who desires to hear both sides, but is predisposed from his experience to believe that the man in the dock is guilty. If a play pleases me, I make no attempt to conceal my pleasure. It is not because I have an enlarged ego or any very great conceit of myself, but because once it is in the hands of actors and actresses, it ceases to be mine and is presented to me as a novelty—something that may have been written by a man with whom I have a great deal in common, and whose sense of humour agrees with mine.

Years ago, when I was writing for revues, I had a sketch in which Maisie Gay made her first big success. Whenever I felt depressed I used to go. on the stage into the prompter’s corner and watch the playlet through, and I never failed to laugh at the right