What is Realistic?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 369, 19 July 1946, Page 14

What is Realistic?

‘TOM ROBERTSON was merely a name to me, before I heard the pro. gramme dealing with "The Realistic Stage" in the English Theatre from 4YA. Although his plays don’t seem to be known nowadays, Robertson was evidently the first playwright to shuffle off the coil of high-falutin’ melodramatic dialogue of the unhand-me-sir type, in favour of plain everyday speech such as ordinary people commonly. use. This, combined with the fact that he invented realistic stage scenery (real door-handles, forsooth!) made him a pioneer to whom the modern stage owes a great deal of its naturalness. As the speaker said, however, there are two schools of thought on the subject. Realism carried too far has strange results. On the one hand, the players do their stuff in a spectacular setting which has the audience gaping and allows it to ignore the words; there is very little difference between the real floods and fires of melodrama and the urge which made Wagner request, in the first act of the Rhinegold, "the upper part of the scene filled with moving water which restlessly streams from L. to R." On the other hand, realistic dialogue carried to extremes results in the one-syllable conversations of Noel Coward. And there must. be, among play-goers, not a few who would be quite content to have their plays acted against Isadore Duncan’s plain blue curtains, provided they could, at the same time, listen to the un-realistic blank verse of Shakespeare, or some such pre-Robert-sonian dramatist.