Underworld Drama Goes From New York

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 862, 4 January 1930, Page 20

Underworld Drama Goes From New York

TYRANNY OF MELODRAMA ATTENTION TO CHARACTER After three years the tyranny of the strident melodrama, which is the tyranny of “Broadway,” appears to have weakened, writes Brooks Atkinson in a New York exchange. Not one of the current plays in New York is “stewed in corruption” or mucking about in the underworld, and for this relief we can all give thanks. Although the enormous success of “Broadway” stimulated the stagecraft of producing, it also cannonised ignobility on the stage, reduced dialogue to jargon and flattened character into a galvanic type. When the bootleggers, the ward-heelers, the footpads and the strumpets elbowed their way in, every one else drifted out. After two or three seasons in the company of the melodraraatist’s raucous gang you are fortunate if you are still sensitive enough to recognise the subtlety of the human being. Character is returning to the stage. Here and there you may recognise figures who are not daubs of garish colour, but human beings in whom the colour comes and goes evanescently, and who have some standing in their own right in the drama. “The dramatist who depends his characters to his plot, instead of his plot to, his characters, ought to be depend€id,” John Galsworthy once remarked with unusual homicidal finality. Such extreme measures would remove half the current playwrights from the enigmatic face of this globe. But “Many Waters” subordinates everything to character, and “Journey’s End” tries character magnificently by the fires of warfare. In “Berkeley Square,” “Cross Roads,” “The Channel Road” and “Strictly Dishonourable” character has value, apart from action. It is a civilised trait. When an artist in any medium begins to give his mind to character, he may be permitted to kick off his swaddling clothes.