LOVE ON THE STAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 December 1941, Page 5

LOVE ON THE STAGE

COMEDIES AND TRAGEDIES. “The stage,” said Bacon, “is more beholding to love than the life of man.” And well every dramatic critic knows it! writes Mr James Agate. All of us, it can be said, run to the two great love plays of Shakespeare, “Romeo and Juliet” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” “like boys unto a mus.” What about the modern fashions in love-plays? “As to the stage,” says Bapon again, “love is ever a matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies.” But even in the comedies Shakespeare is continually looking for some other interest to keep sweetness from cloying. All plays about men and women must in a sense start from the se\-attraction between them, since you cannot make a play out of . a common passion for eating, drinking and taking exercise. Yet, if we take even the most casual look through English comedy from Ben Jonson to Mr Shaw, we see at once how resolute have been the efforts of each and every dramatist to get away from the purely romantic aspects of the passion. “As if man,” says Bacon in high scorn, “made for the contemplation of heaven and all noble objects should do nothing but kneel before a little idol.” Every comedy that I can think of that is worthy of the name is a comedy at the expense either of the kneeler or the idol —how this kneeler was a fool, and what led to his folly, and what will be the consequence of it: how this idol was not fit to be knelt to, or realised that it was not she but Mother Nature to whom the genuflexion was made; how in the end she told the genuflector to get up and dust his trousers and stop making a fool of himself.