The Future of the Legitimate Theatre

LIEUT-COLONEL GEORGE A. DREW, President, introduced the speaker, and welcomed the members of his Company.

MR. COLBOURNE: After expressing sincere regrets on behalf of Mr. Sherwood, who was unable to he present on account of illness, he remarked that Mr. Sherwood seemed to have solved in his own person all the problems which confronted not only the British Empire but the entire English-speaking world, for in spite of the fact that he was an American of Scottish and Irish ancestry and fought with the Canadian forces in the War and visited England whenever he could, and loved it, yet he seemed to be at supreme peace with himself and incidentally a very successful person (Applause). He is suffering, the speaker continued, from a bout of 'flu, but he is not alone in his suffering, for Mr. Barry Jones and myself, together with those of our company who are here today are also suffering-from an excess of Toronto hospitality gloriously experienced last night even into the early hours of this morning. (Laughter.)

We thank the audience today for their reception of us, and we also thank the press, not only of Toronto but also of Eastern Canada, for we feel that the immediate future of the legitimate theatre is intimately dependent upon the press. In the present instance our only fear was that neither ourselves nor our company nor our play could possibly live up to the royal reception provided for us by the press in advance, and that we should be bringing to Canada at least a couple of Drury Lane Caval cades. (Laughter.)

The subject of my address-The Future of the Legitimate Theatre-is perhaps one of the most difficult on which I could be asked to speak, since it is so easy to talk an infinite amount of claptrap about the theatre and especially about its future. How can any of us know anything worth knowing about the future of the theatre, legitimate or otherwise? If we could, nothing would be simpler than to lay our plans accordingly and rapidly become millionaires.

There are always so many lugubrious Jeremiahs in this business, as in every other, that perhaps it will be as well to try and dispose of some of them first. These will say that THE THEATRE IS GOING TO THE DOGS! Well, I always feel that much the best way to deal with that well-worn statement is to agree heartily and say "Yes, the theatre is going to the dogs", and then to follow up the agreement with the equally truthful statement that it has been going to the dogs steadily for at least 2,000 years, but has never reached them yet. (Laughter.)

I suppose in the old days of the Greek theatre when, say, Oedipus Rex was produced for the first time, there were people sitting in the open-air orchestra stalls who declared that the topic of the play was a disgraceful one to be offered for public consumption and who went straight home and wrote a strong letter to the local papyrus pointing out that the production of such immoral plays was a clear indication that the theatre was going to the dogs. And so on, through all the theatre's ages and stages, it has been going to the dogs. I will indulge in one more instance. When the element of comedy entered into the miracle and mystery plays of mediaeval times (if 1 remember rightly the first comic character to he introduced by the playwright was one of the shepherds who watched their flocks by night; his name was Mak, and he was made not only a comic but a sheepstealer into the bargain)--I feel fairly sure the local padre went to the producer of the play, which was always enacted inside the churches themselves, and said, "Look here, we simply will not have this sort of thing; either you cut out this so-called funny stuff or else you take yourself and your frivolous players outside the sacred precincts of this church." SO, because the element of comedy refused to be smothered, they left the churches and played to excellent business in the market-places just round the corner. Then, no doubt, a burning correspondence was carried on in the Parish Magazine to prove that the theatre was doomed and had already reached the dogs. Well, they were wrong, and 1 think these Jeremiahs will always be wrong.

Now, gentlemen, I want to avoid claptrap and get right down to brass tacks. I therefore submit to you a magnificent slogan for the professional theatre of any age, one coined by Sir Henry Irving, who said, "The theatre that does not pay is dead". 1 thing those words should be emblazoned on the portals of every theatre and be carried in the forefront of the mind of anyone who presumes to be associated with the Theatre in a managerial way. The theatre should pay. I am all against theatres supported by the State, whether by endowment or subsidy. Even the famous Comedie Francaise for some years has been in a moribund condition, and I suspect that the intended English National Theatre will remain a permanent argument instead of a concrete fact, because the English at the back of their minds always seem to muddle through, as the phrase goes, and do the wise thing; and I feel they have refrained for so many years from building a national theatre, in spite of continuous efforts to build one, because they see that it too would shortly become what I only call a moribund mess. In New York they actually built the Century Theatre (which in many of its essentials approximated a national theatre), and I see that it is now satisfactorily pulled down and defunct.

The next question we have to ask is, IS the theatre paying? Well, I do not think it is, as a whole. I think the theatre is in a very critical and dangerous state. One reflection of this state is the fact that the greatest individual firm which the world has seen in the theatrical business-the legitimate stage-went bankrupt a few months ago in New York. One of the troubles in London, on the other hand, is, I think, that the theatre is over-theatered. This is not so much because we have built so many new theatres as because we have an innate horror of pulling anything down; with the consequence that at the slightest provocation, at Christmas time, for example, not only are all the regular and new theatres open, but there is a rush to resurrect and re-open all the old ones, with both old and new giving perhaps four extra matinees a week; with the obvious further consequence that there are not enough audiences to go round.

In saying that the theatre does not pay today 1 have in mind particularly the average London theatre, because it especially is behind the times and behind its competitors-by which I mean of course the gargantuan palazzos of the cinema. The ostentatious luxury of these places may he a good thing, a had thing, or an indifferent thing, according to your moral philosophy and views upon the virtues, if any, of comfort and leisure; but the fact remains that this is an age of creature comforts and mass production; of, that is, a flood of low-priced goods of mediocre quality; and the London theatres are still proceeding on the old basis of delivering exclusive and exquisite goods in small quantities to the aristocratic and the few.

I think part of the problem comes down to the need for cheaper seats. Here in Toronto, with its cheap matinees, 1 would call theatre prices okay. If you grant this, let us compare the London prices. I suppose the cost of commodities in general in England is about half of what it is on this side of, the Atlantic, so that the cost of an orchestra stall over there ought to be about half what it is here, but its actual cost in London is, as you know, at least ten shillings and six, which is roughly $2.50, or in other words twice too much, compared to other commodities. If orchestra stalls in London were sold at a fashionable price of five shillings or seven shillings and sixpence there would be a chance of the London theatres filling themselves--a feat not being accomplished this ~on.

Of course London is very conservative-which is a great thing, no doubt, because it is that spirit that has kept the Old Country from all sorts of unpleasant excitements in the past. But equally it keeps us from doing a few fairly pleasant and necessary things in the present. In the theatre. for instance, if we ever have the doubtful fortune to own one in London, one of the first things we would do to improve it and make it possible to make it pay would be to see that our patrons were able to receive a programme of the play and to park their hats and coats, for nothing. (Laughter.) If you suggest this to a Londoner the answer is likely to be, "Oh, be careful; people like to pay for their programmes; if you give them away for nothing they will think it is a rotten show."

Another thing we would take from this side (where we have learnt so much) would be what 1 call Bargain Matinees, such as we had the pleasure of giving yesterday. These are tremendous incentives to attendance, and 1 believe people, especially the ladies, feel they are at a sort of January clearance sale. (Laughter.) Again, when we suggested that this should be tried in London, they said, "Oh, but be very careful; if you charge less for one of your matinees people win think there is something wrong with it and conclude that all the understudies will be taking part."

Welt we have to get over all kinds of little things like this in London before it can be said to have put its theatrical house in, order. today there are dozens of other little prejudices and customs that are making the theatre less and less palatable to the theatre-going public. For instance, we may call this the age of the artificial silk stocking. By this I mean that when a young fellow wants to take his girl out in the evening to an entertainment-let it be a theatre or a cinema or whatever else is going on-and he cannot afford two orchestra stalls, he will hesitate a good deal before risking letting himself down in the eyes of his girl by taking her into a theatre by what in England is literally a back door; which is what he has to do if he takes her into the pit or gallery, the only places where he can get cheap enough seats. But in all rival places of entertainment he can make for the cheapest seat in the house through the main door, and he escorted to it in the best style completely surrounded by powdered flunkeys. (Laughter.)

Well, suppose the theatre does put its house in order and brings itself up to date in the matter of comfortable seats and cheap prices and all else, upon what does its future depend? It depends, I think, upon four main things.

One, of course, is the author, the playwright. Where are the playwrights to succeed the older generation-the Galsworthys and the Barries and the Shaws and the Somerset Maughams? Well, there is always one answer: some of them lie in Flanders' fields and some in other fields, farther-flung. What are those immortal lines?

It downs in Asia; tombstones show,
And Shropshire names are rad;
And-the Nile spills its overflow
Beside the Severn's dead.

Out of the million English slain there would surely have been a playwright or two. As to those of the Lost Generation who did not perish and who are writing plays today, I think they will find themselves falling, as playwrights, into one of four categories. There are the realists, intent on depicting the disillusionment of the times. Contrarily, there are those who want to get away from the grim uncertainties and troubling questions of the present generation, escapists, who will seek refuge in comedy and farce and romance as far removed as possible from the disillusionment of the realists. Thirdly, there will always be the propagandists, like our old friend G. B. S. And fourthly, there will be that best of all playwrights, the playwright who writes to please himself.

We have two splendid examples today of this kind of playwright, one on each side of the Atlantic-Noel Coward and our friend upstairs, whose play Re-union in Vienna is one of the very few big successes now running in New York. Certainly Noel Coward writes to please himself; otherwise he would not have written Post Mortem, a play that stands only the slightest chance of immediate production, especially since the public has not been taught to expect that kind of play from Noel Coward.

Robert Sherwood I know writes to please himself, because it was only yesterday that I heard-if I may trespass on the play now appearing in Toronto-how he came to write The Queen's Husband. He wrote it in much the same way that A. A. Milne wrote his play, Wurzel-Flummery. When Milne was serving in the War he was very late on parade one day--not a unique occurence, for he admits to being a very unsoldierly soldier-and as he ran on to the barrack square buttoning up his tunic, he suddenly thought of the words Wurzel-Flummery. During parade they bored their way into his brain until finally, to get rid of them, he wrote a play round them. In the same way, apparently, the thought of a line came to Robert Sherwood, The line was, "Yes, that is the worst of these revolutionists; they are always such rotten shots!' That line was the genesis of The Queen's Husband, and in the completed manuscript was due to end the second Act and to be spoken by King Eric VIII. as he stepped out on to the balcony. Well, to show the curious way these things happen, that line was one of the first to be cut out at rehearsal. (Laughter.)

Then of course, secondly, we have to have actors. Now, here is an interesting point, and 1 submit the question to you, Where today can we look for the successors of those players whose names have been household words for years past, players such as that great actress who, to the grief of us all, passed away but a few days ago-Mrs. Fiske? Where are their successors?

For today there is a cause at work which utterly prevents the training, and largely the tradition, on which those great artists were brought up.

I suppose most of the best British actors of today, like my friend at this table, Mr. Barry Jones (Applause) are Old Bensonians. Now, it was the invariable routine and pleasure of the Benson Company to put you in your place; that is, you were given a spear and told to walk on for a couple of years; and very glad you were to do it, round the provinces, across the Atlantic, in South Africa, in Australia, everywhere-walking on, understudying, holding spears, watching and waiting, absorbing tradition and discipline.

But what happens today? You engage a beautiful girl with obvious talent at the outset of her career, and hope to train her in the best traditions of the stage. On the third day of her engagement, for which she is drawing the proper salary of two to three pounds a week-proper, that is, for a beginner-she comes to you and says, "I had a telephone call from a film company this morning; I went out to see them and I was offered a hundred pounds a week to make a film for them. May I accept?" Well, if you say No, you make her discontented for the rest of her engagement with you. If you say Yes, she is caught by the films and will remain caught for as long as they pay her a sufficiently tempting salary. One cannot blame her; indeed Barry Jones and I are peculiarly sympathetic towards people in her boat, for both he and I found it utterly impossible to refuse the sums of money held out to us to persuade us to film by day while we were acting by night. It is not a question of sympathy,, however, so much as how is it possible under such conditions to establish a training ground or a tradition or a discipline for the stage, or even to persuade young artists that the stage is a profession, and a wholetime and arduous one at that. Too often today the stage is regarded as an incident that intervenes after a long day at the studio and before the small hours at a party.

Miss Grace Lane, our queen in The Queen's Husband, told me the other day that in Dame Madge Kendall's Company once you were in your stage clothes you were not allowed to sit down. A little mat was provided in the wings duly labeled with the name of the character you were playing, and on that two by three mat you stood until you made your entrance. By comparison with this sort of thing discipline is simply nonexistent in the film studio, for all its early hours. There, the magnitude of a star can easily be judged by observing how late he or she dare arrive on the set; the later, the more important. (Laughter.)

Thirdly, there is the audience. This is such a subtle and important factor that it merits an address to itself, and 1 shall say nothing now except to point to the obvious fact that the presence of an audience at all implies the presence in its pockets of sufficient purchasing power to buy its seats. There were few things more tragic in England this winter than the nightmare dilemma in which the population was placed by being told, on the one hand, to save in order to Balance the Budget, and on the other, to spend in order to set the wheels of industry going round again. (Laughter.)

And fourthly, there is the press. Relations between the theatre and the press become more important daily; this is simply because the urgency of advertising grows daily, a statement true not only of the theatre but of every commodity. In England, unfortunately, the press as a whole is not interested in the theatre as a whole. Consequently advertising rates are high, and individual theatres are able to pay for only snippets of space. The further result of this is that the amount of free space accorded to news and gossip of the theatre is proportionately small. On the other hand, the press is intensely interested in the cinema, some of the press magnates either owning or controlling some of the cinema palazzos. In addition to this personal business interest, the press becomes automatically interested in any industry which buys not daily columns but daily pages of advertising space, and it is absurd to suggest that the cinema, with its power in the press and its low prices, is not making colossal captures among the audiences of the theatre.

These wholesale and continuous captures by the cinema would matter little if there was an inexhaustible reserve of people with money who were bent on being entertained and who would fill up the theatre's gaps. But there aren't and a shilling spent in a cinema means four times out of five five shillings lost to the theatre. I met someone lately who had examined the weekly sheet of one of the largest London cinemas. The takings were £8,000, a colossal sum for any legitimate theatre. But for the cinema it was apparently a bad week because the balance shown was--£30! Well, that just shows how much the cinema can and apparently must spend in advertising to bring the public in, and gives an idea of its weekly overhead costs. What interests me, however, is the literally concrete fact of about twenty such cinemas in London, equally gargantuan and magnificent. Now, if we do a little mathematical sum with these twenty alone, quite apart from the hundreds of smaller London cinemas, we find a sum of well over half a million dollars flowing week by week into the cinema. My contention is that enough of this very considerable sum enough to make all the differenee between reasonable prosperity and acute anxiety, would have flowed into the theatre if the cinema had not been next door underselling it. For I do not think that most people have either the desire or the time or money for both. But this is by the way.

The press, on the rare occasions when it wants to help a play, sometimes oversteps the mark and kills the play with kindness. There was the case of the actor-manager who was on fairly intimate terms with one of the great newspaper magnates. What happened was this. The wife of the magnate went to the play and finding the theatre only half full she told her husband and persuaded him to see the play for himself. The magnate went and after the first act went backstage and told the actormanager not to worry. He said, "It's a good play, and I will see that the public comes to it". Accordingly, on reaching his office he issued a sort of Napoleonic order that until further notice every organ under his control should carry an article, every morning, every evening, on the merits of the play. Unfortunately, the great man had more important things to think about and quite forgot to countermand the order after it had had its desired effect, and himself dying shortly afterwards, the articles went on appearing until their surfeit killed the play, for the public began to think that a play needing such boosting must he a very poor one. (Laughter.)

Let us suppose, however, that all goes well; that the theatre puts its house in order in a material way, and attracts and trains and keeps the best playwrights and artists, that audiences have the desire and find the purchasing power to attend, and the press is interested in the theatre to the point of kindness without overdoing it, what, if anything, has the theatre of the future to fear? Well, I think it has to fear the perfection of its present competitors: talkies; television; radio; and it has to fear and keep an eye open for further mechanicalities at present undreamed of, and to remember that mechanism brought to bear on the arts spells mass production of the arts, and the consequent ability to deliver the commodity called Entertainment at a progressively lower cost. Let the theatre fear and face these things honestly, because the more it fears them the greater its inducement will he to put its house in order and deliver its goods.

I think the permanent outlook is good, This opinion is not just blind faith with the wish father to the thought, but is based on a simple fact. Indeed, this fact is so simple that as yet it has no recognized name. I submit to you a tentative name and call it Spiritual Electricity. Now this, as we on the stage know, is a very real thing. It is the thing that makes plays and breaks plays, is the cause of stage fright and first nightitis, and enables an audience to cheer or boo or cry or laugh as cone man. The subtle current of it welds an audience into a unit. Now, I do not believe that this spiritual electricity can flow between two substances unless both of them are made of flesh and blood. (Applause.) It cannot flow therefore between two substances where one is composed of an inanimate area of canvas on which are projected in vary rapid succession the shadows of negative photographs. Neither can it flow between the tubes and batteries of an inanimate radio set and the listener-in. Indeed, the radio, although it has mighty advantages in convenience, cheapness and geographical scope, suffers two disadvantages compared with the cinema and three compared with the theatre; not only does no spiritual electricity flow, and not only does one see nothing, but one is rather lonely, for man is a gregarious animal by nature, and, especially whenn he wants to he entertained, seeks and enjoys the company of his fellows. As with the cinema and radio so with the rest of the theatre's mechanical competitors, present and future, until by a process of elimination we find that the theatre survives in the world of entertainment as the only form in which that all-important spiritual electricity can function and flow naturally and as a permanent and integral part of its being.

Lastly, I like to think of the theatre as a place in which men and women of differing opinions and different ways of living can meet and find a common touch. There the Conservative can sit side by side with the Liberal,' the Roman Catholic side by side with the Protestant (Hear, hear), the poor man-well, if not side by side, yet in the same building with the rich man (Laughter), and together dip into the common bowl of spiritual refreshment, and be at peace.

I see that my time, unfortunately for me, is up. I hope I have been able in some measure to eschew uttering the claptrap of the theatre, and I hope you have not minded coming down to earth with me. The subject of the theatre is a difficult one for me since it is the subject of our own anxious daily cares. One has to be careful to avoid treating it as dirty linen and washing it in public. I hope therefore that in the last half hour I have not in any material way torn any holes for you in the veil of that illusion that is the life-blood of the theatre.

Before I sit down I am once again going to express to you the great thanks of my mute colleague, Barry Jones, whom I hope one day to persuade to make a speech, and of the members of our Company and of myself, for the honour of your invitation to us to be with you today; and if I may end on the same practical note that I have tried to sound all through, we especially thank you for helping our theatrical efforts-they are your theatrical efforts too--in Toronto and Canada generally, TO PAY! I thank you. (Loud applause.)

THE PRESIDENT conveyed the hearty thanks of the Club to the speaker for his interesting address.