The American Theatre in England

THE English stage has always been one peculiarly susceptible to foreign influences. Whereas in France the drama has recoiled from every influence which was not classical, and whereas in Germany, greedy as the audiences are of foreign writers, the native dramatists have little connection with the outside world, English dramatists seem to find indispensable for the cultivation of their art the whip and spur of the outsider. We gave recognition to Ibsen, even if at first it was only the bark of abuse, and it is only now when England has absorbed all that was valuable in the Norwegian master that the Comédie Française is deigning to notice officially him and his works. Despite the fact that English playwrights and English dressmakers are probably as good as any in the world, we still persist in going abroad both for our plays and for our dresses. Despite our insularity, we are both curious and lazy. We wonder what the work of these other fellows really is worth, and it saves an infinite amount of trouble if we have ready for our inspection a really complete play — a play that has passed through the test of an actual production and been marked by the approval or disapproval of some particular audience — instead of a cold, formidable, lifeless thing lying stiff within the covers of a manuscript. And so, whatever may be the future of the immigrant and the alien manufactured article, the alien play will probably always find a welcome in London.

Of late years, however, the stream of Continental influences has declined in vigor. The great Ibsen invasion has waxed and waned, and there is little left to remind us of him except Mrs. Patrick Campbell and an occasional performance of some one of his masterpieces in London. Neither France nor Germany has anything to give us. We are not at all interested in Herr Ernst Toller and his propaganda messages, and M. de Curel leaves us respectful but cold. Vienna still sends us waltzes, but no plays. Čapek came and went and left merely a name, for his word ‘Robot’ has now passed into the English language. Sierra and Benavente serve to remind us merely that Spain has a modern drama. Only one modern European dramatist has really interested the English playgoer, and that is Pirandello. His visit has been too recent to judge of the impress he may succeed in making on English stagecraft, but that curiosity in regard to his metaphysical characters on the stage and his strange, uncomfortable analysis of personality has been aroused is undeniable. And curiosity in an Englishman often becomes submission. For all one knows we may all be Pirandellos in a few years’ time, and exchanging a satisfying belief in the permanence of character for a delicious doubt as to whether character really exists at all.

But, Pirandello apart, dramatically speaking we are out of touch with Europe. Are we then thrown back on ourselves and exempt from alien interference? By no means, for the New World has once again been brought in to redress the balance of the Old, and what Europe was to us yesterday America is to us to-day. Indeed, the growing influence of the American play, the American novel, and above all the American short story, raises many very interesting questions. The United States, seen through obstinate British eyes, has only in recent years emerged from the pioneer stage, and has existed for providing us with and buying from us material things, rather than as a reservoir of culture and as a community capable of dumping on us ideas. Recent exhibitions of Australian sculpture and Canadian paintings are reminding us that our own Dominions have souls as well as bodies, and that, having marched with the backwoods and the prairies, they are now engaged in exploring and cultivating their own minds. We have now been reconciled for some years to the impressive truth that Boston has an intelligentsia as well as Edinburgh, and that the desire to earn dollars is not the exclusive passion of the average American. These truths we meekly accept, but the sudden realization of the thought that the New World — Canada, Australia, South Africa, as well as the United States — may some day soon be flooding us with its art as well as with its foodstuffs raises a vision as staggering as that which confronted Balboa on his Darien peak. For centuries Europe has looked upon herself as the teacher of the New World. Has the lesson been taught, and has the stalwart pupil now started, on his return, to repay the benefit, and educate in his turn his former master?

Such speculations are for the future — perhaps, however, the not very distant future. But the influence of the United States on the British theatre is at this present moment a very evident fact. It is a moot point whether more American players and plays come to England or more British plays and players go to the United States, but certainly the growth in the importations from the other side of the Atlantic has been very noticeable in the last ten years. And the influence of America is the more marked because outside London, if we exclude Birmingham, the British theatre can scarcely be said to exist, whereas New York cannot claim to dictate the theatre policy of the United States. It is not unusual to find seven American plays or musical comedies running in London at the same time. Many explanations, apart from the common language, might be given. Indeed, the language bond can be exaggerated. Many American plays, with their rich slang, would be as unfamiliar to the average Englishman as a poem written in Hindustani, and nearly all British dramatists know how often their plays have to be practically rewritten before they are considered acceptable to Broadway.

To the British manager the great advantage of the American play is that it has been acted, and that it can be seen under the conditions necessary to its life — namely, before an audience who, good but practical souls, have paid for their seats and have had their powers of discrimination whetted accordingly. The average Briton, I fearfully suggest, is lazy, and the supreme example of that happy and not unattractive indolence is the British theatrical manager. To read a play is not only a weariness to the flesh but also a grim adventure into the unknown — an attempt to reconstruct, from a pale ghost, the flesh and blood, the charm and movement, of reality. Will it act? And — even more agonizing thought — will it pay? How much easier is it to accept a play which has actually emerged from the chrysalis script stage into the full life of the theatre; has made a New York gallery roar and Chicago stalls melt. There is, of course, a gamble all the time — the risk (how often proved) that what pleases one side of the Atlantic may not please the other. But our lazy friend will face the risk rather than the trouble of visualizing a drama from the manuscript. Moreover he argues, probably rightly enough, that American and British audiences have much in common, more so than those of any other nations. A French play, to pass the British censor, has almost to be rewritten, and a German play is either too heavy or so frankly indecent that its production is out of the question. There remains New York, — the great try-out place for the English stage, — and so our lazy friend takes a ticket for the States and returns with a portmanteau packed with scripts and contracts.

There is another reason why the American play finds favor in this country — namely, its superior technique. That blessed word can be given a mysterious significance which it scarcely deserves. Technique simply means that the dramatist has mastered his business; that he can give to the movements of his characters that verisimilitude to life which is the test of the successful play; and that, having aroused the interest of the audience, he can hold it to the fall of the curtain. Now the Americans pay more attention to technique than we do. From the country school up to Professor Baker of Yale, eager people are at work teaching the theory and practice of stage technique. The result is that in all these ‘crook’ and mystery plays where the actual movements of the personages on the stage, their entrances and exits, are so much more important than the motives which inspire those movements, the American dramatist and producer excel. The Bat and The Cat and the Canary may not be high types of theatrical art, but within their limits they are exceedingly clever and efficient. The success of the film in America, with its concentration on what Mr. Vachel Lindsay calls ‘speed and splendor,’is another instance of the skill of the American in appealing to the eye rather than to the ear, to the simple rather than to the complex, to the things which touch our emotions and do not agitate our minds. The result is that in that type of play America either has a monopoly or is simply copied (now being copied very strenuously and successfully) by British imitators.

If the influence of the American theatre in England were confined to such plays, we should be dealing merely with commercial and not with literary considerations. But the interesting feature of modern American theatrical enterprise in London is that it has traveled far from the ‘crook’ and ‘vamp’ thriller and that it is as daring and speculative in the realm of the mind as it is ‘slick’ in the mechanics of stage production. The literary influence of theatrical America in London is primarily the work of one man. Eugene O’Neill is the one American dramatist who enjoys a great reputation in England. Not only the critics and the highbrows, but a considerable portion of the theatregoing public, have seen and read his plays and rejoiced in that skill of his in probing what Mr. Ashley Dukes calls ‘the motive of illusion — the study of that infinite capacity of self-deception which has been the despair of the moralist, the joy of the cynic, and the stumblingblock of the reformer.’

But Mr. O’Neill, though the most prominent, is only one of a number of American dramatists who are winning notice in England, because it is felt that they are breaking fresh ground and are even daring enough to seek a new mode of expression. They are exploring the theatre as the pioneers explored the West. The distinguished authoress of The Verge has been hailed by some London critics as a genius, by others as a lunatic, but always with that respect or indignation which greets the efforts of those who are attempting something new. There is Mr. Richman, who in Ambush gave us Ibsen up to date—an attempt to solve a problem, which Sudermann and Pinero really shirked, by giving the brutal facts and sending us away depressed by the circumstances but exalted by the honesty of the play. There is Mr. Elmer Rice, who in The Adding Machine has made a new venture in expressionism and has sought to convey by a curious mixture of soliloquy and dialogue the subjective as well as the objective side of his characters. Or, to take one more instance, there is Mr. Stark Young, whose dramatic criticisms are well known on this side of the Atlantic and who had produced this year by the London Stage Society his play, The Colonnade. His drama, to our minds, was extraordinarily interesting, because we found him trying to give to his background the force of an actual character of the play, making that soft Southern environment almost as active and human as the characters who lived in it. The intellectual activity of many American playwrights, their daring, their curiosity’, have made them a force in the modern theatre which cannot be ignored.

Now the American dramatist, who has higher ambitions than the mere ‘crook’ or ‘vamp’ play, enjoys, compared with his British confrère, two advantages. In the first place, the American theatre is not afraid of emotion. On the English stage, however, ever since it became respectable, ever since‘our best families’ could look upon the stage as a not altogether ignominious and unprofitable profession for their sons and daughters, emotion has been considered ‘not quite the thing.’ The whole array of the highbrows, with their critics leading the van, is invariably out against it. An audience may laugh, but unless it be seated in the Lyceum or some other ancient haunt of melodrama it must not weep. Its mind may be edified, shocked, tickled, and above all puzzled, but on no account must its heart be touched. It seems to me the negation of the theatre altogether to sterilize those emotions which it is surely primarily designed to arouse. The American theatrical public, more impatient of the dictation of ‘superior’ people, has in that respect saved its theatre from the aridity and barrenness of a snobbish pose, and the American dramatist is thereby given a field which his British colleague can enter only with diffidence and indeed with actual fear. The emotional appeal behind most of Mr. O’Neill’s plays, and behind, say, Ambush, is enormous— positively Elizabethan. ‘Back to the Land!’ is the cry of our politicians, and ‘Back to the Emotions!’ ought to be the cry of our theatrical pundits.

A second advantage possessed by the American dramatist is that he is able so often to discover a fresh, unsophisticated milieu for his plays. In these tiny islands the restricted dramatist finds himself with no new country to conquer. The Irish playwrights have pegged the last claim from Cork to Antrim, and the Scottish Barrie has squeezed the last teardrop out of the kailyard. As for England, we know Wessex as well as we know Mayfair, and Lancashire is as familiar as the street round the corner. But the United States is so rich in strange types, in sheltered communities, in instincts, prejudices, beliefs, and institutions quite unfamiliar to its theatregoers who live in great cities, that the dramatist can always break fresh ground. A play like Sun-Up, for instance, which is now running in London, owes its success primarily to the fact that the dramatist is able to present before our eyes a community so secluded that, though an integral part of the United States, its members had not the slightest idea if and why their country had gone to war. Mr. O’Neill too owes much of his vogue to the skill with which he can portray to us the unfamiliar fascinating life of primitive New England and of the sea. The American dramatist can so often plough virgin soil; here in sophisticated England it is so hard to raise a good crop from these wearied and familiar acres.

Now, in the wake of the American plays which are coming to London, American players are also becoming familiar to our London audiences. To contrast American with English plays is a comparatively easy task; to contrast American with English players is a much harder one. It is extraordinarily difficult to analyze acting. For one thing, it is an exceedingly technical business; for another, in the long run one always comes up against the elusiveness of a personality which escapes dissection. Most dramatic critics — even men of such ability as the late Jules Lemaître, for example — practically give up criticisms of acting as hopeless, and concentrate almost entirely on the play.

To contrast American with English acting is, then, somewhat of a hazardous venture, for there is so much in common between the two schools that it is difficult to recognize the differences. But one difference, to begin with, is surely to be found in the tyranny — or, if you prefer it, the domination — which the star exercises in America. Over and over again I have seen a tendency, in plays where American stars have a controlling interest, to subordinate everything, even such things as clothes, to the glorification of the principal character. This tendency is the more noticeable, for there can be no denying the powers and the fascination exercised by those glories of the American stage firmament. Every star has a personality, but an American star, carrying the intense individualism of his race to a white-heat radiance, has almost a blinding effect. Who, for example, can forget the scholarly precision of John Barrymore getting the exact shade of meaning out of every adjective in the Hamlet, soliloquies, or the keen intelligence with which Miss Doris Keane treats the sugary sentimentalities of Romance, or the way in which Miss Pauline Lord manipulates her hands, or the catch in the voice of Tom Douglas, or the exuberant kittenishness of Miss Peggy O’Neill, or the statuesque repose of Miss Lucille La Verne?

There they are, confident in the possession of at least one superior gift, and impatient of any absorption of that gift in any ensemble, however admirable. The chances are that the film, with its passion for stars, has heightened that tendency, with the result that not only is the part of the star heightened, but the star’s particular gift is also fortified, leaving a durable but also disturbing impression on the memory. In England, on the other hand, the star is taking a smaller and smaller part in the average play, due to the absorption of the average dramatist in the theme rather than in the commercial possibilities of his play, and to the policy of managers in seeking to get a good company together rather than to subsidize expensive personalities.

A second difference between the two schools — and this second point in a way may contradict the first — is the keenness of the American school on teamwork. I cannot illustrate this difference better than by drawing attention to the care with which an American production maintains the picture in each successive rise of the curtain at the termination of an act. There they all stand in the exact position demanded by the development of the play, artists determined to think rather of their art than of the applause of the audience. An English company, however, breaks up at once on the fall of the curtain; and when the curtain rises again, in response to the cheers, there they all are, bowing, scraping, laughing, nodding to one another or to the gallery. ‘The show is over,’ say those careless souls; ‘now we can be ourselves.’ The American is much more conscientious, more concerned with the picture, than his British colleague. Indeed, it is conscientiousness which is the most marked quality in all these American shows. There is no ‘muddling through,’ no amateurishness. A task has to be performed, and no one is at liberty until the audience has left and the lights are out.

A third point is that the average English actor speaks better than the average American. I had noted this point many years ago, but had always attributed my preference for English elocution to the unfamiliarity of my ear with the American accent. But I am told by American friends that they have noticed the same point. On the other hand, there is no mistaking the superiority of the American gesture. An American player can use his hands and his limbs in a way unknown to the average Briton. At the production of Mr. Somerset Maugham’s Rain in London there were some American actors in the cast, and I was amazed at the grace of their movements compared with the clumsiness of the average English player. Probably the explanation lies in the concentration of English schools of acting on elocution rather than on movement. Often at rehearsals in London I have seen old actors who had learned their job in the provinces literally manipulating the legs of some ingénue, in the manner of some surgeon fixing a dislocated bone. ‘Now, dearie, don’t stand like that — like this, please,’ and so on. The girl, able to articulate clearly, had no control over her limbs. But, whatever the reason, there is no denying the superiority of the American in this respect.

I might mention some other differences, though in regard to them I do not care to be dogmatic. I think there is more poetry in English acting than in American. Barrymore’s Hamlet was the scholar rather than the poet, and I have never seen any American player capable of the whimsical offhand grace of a Fay Compton or a Gerald Du Maurier. And I consider the average character actor in England is better than the average American, and there I believe Broadway is inclined to be with me.

However, I think I have said enough to show that the American stage is now a direct, potent, and beneficial influence in London. Technically it has always been good, intellectually it is making its voice heard more and more, and many of its artists are now entitled to call themselves London favorites. And London does not take everybody to its bosom.