Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

house in Alberta, or deal with the simple folk of Mr. Leacock's Sunshine Sketches-(would that he had not abandoned this field!) and possess the essentials of real drama. The amateur dramatist might well learn a lesson from Elizabeth Baker's play Chains-the first of the modern English realistic school. This study revolves on the decision of a London city clerk to emigrate to Australia, and the frustration, by his wife's family, of his desire. Nothing else is introduced into the whole three acts, and yet the movement of the piece is uninterrupted and the interest of the audience is sustained throughout. It is an intensely dramatic play.

There is a danger which the Canadian dramatist must avoid the peril of the didactic. Synge touches it in one of his prefaces: "The drama is made serious,' he says 'in the French sense of the word-not by the degree in which it is taken up with problems that are serious in themselves, but by the degree in which it gives the nourishment not very easy to define, on which our imaginations live.' In this passage there lies a useful warning. With the growth of popular interest in the drama there is a tendency to use the play as a medium of propaganda. We are familiar with the morally elevating play that our fathers thought safe. The old melodramas, The Social Glass, Ruined by Drink, or Ten Nights in a Bar-room, are, of course, now robbed by circumstances of their original value. But there are plays in plenty which commit the same sins against art-plays to teach children the value of soap and freshair; plays to teach farmers the importance of consolidated schools and the evils of scrub bulls; and there are plays to aid home missions, or to stop cigarette smoking, to stimulate patriotism, and to do a number of things, in the interests of health or morals, for which the drama was not intended. Perhaps from our double foundation of Puritanism-drawn from Scotland and New England and a strength in most respectswe have derived a certain weakness for preaching. But the drama may be elevating without a trace of 'uplift.' A play must not point a moral and the plays which really give us the 'uplift'-in the original sense of this degraded word—are the plays which 'nourish the imagination.' The Beggar's Opera, as its prologue says, contains not an honourable man nor an honest woman, yet with its sheer beauty of colour and music,

and the clean wit of its satire its influence is incomparably finer than the most moral Sunday School pageant, in which a set of allegorical abstractions, called 'social service' and 'foreign missions' or what you will, ultimately overcome another set of allegorical abstractions labelled perhaps the 'drink traffic' or 'heathen religion.'

Synge has said—and the student of the drama need never apologize for quoting him—'on the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy.' This sentence should be painted on the door of every Canadian playhouse. If he believes in reality the Canadian playwright will avoid the faintest suspicion of false sentiment; he will think dispassionately. If a drama is to develop dealing with Canadian life we must view our own civilization with a critical eye. Its faults, its virtues, its peculiarities must be understood and interpreted as Stanley Houghton interpreted those of middle-class Manchester. This argues a detachment of mind and a critical faculty that are slow to grow in a new country. The very fact that the word criticism here generally carries an unfavourable connotation, shows how little it is understood. Our playwrights and our artists generally must acquire this faculty if they are to understand the people about whom they write; it is humiliating that we had to leave the first real interpretation of French Canada to a European. And our audiences, too, must acquire intellectual detachment if they are to appreciate a critical treatment of our national failings. The Playboy of the Western World caused riots in Dublin until the Irish public learned to tolerate a realistic treatment of their eccentricities. What would happen to a dramatist who produced a play in Toronto dealing, however sympathetically, with the failings of the Orangeman?

Synge asks us to put into our plays joy as well as reality. Here is a more difficult matter. There is joy in the Irish plays because they faithfully reflect the Irish character. For the same reason Manchester gives us a photographic sordidness, and from the New York schools of playwrights we are apt to receive a wealth of smart cynicism. We Canadians are not a joyous folk-we are rather serious, or sometimes even solemn without being serious at all. Whether gaiety will be characteristic of our new drama no one can say, but

it is certainly one of the functions of our theatre to teach us how to laugh-how to laugh unthinkingly and irresponsibly, and to be less professional or academic, or businesslike, in our moments of relaxation.

Inquiry into the metaphysical causes of artistic movements is, as a rule, both fascinating and fruitless. It is idle to speculate as to when a native drama in Canada will develop. The Americans, with many years advantage of us, have still to produce a school of playwrights with more than a local or transitory significance, and plenty of theories there are to explain the absence or to forecast the advent of an American drama. The writer of a recent work points out that great drama has always arisen while states are passing through an Imperialistic phase, and quotes such examples as Periclean Greece, Elizabethan England, and France under the Louis. He then points out that, since the American people are now in a state of reaction and industrial Imperialism, the new drama may be expected at any moment. We may agree with the premise, but the conclusion is less convincing. Some one else observes that the drama is preeminently a thing of action; that Canadians are men of action-practical people-and that the drama should be their natural artistic medium. But unfortunately we are too much given to action. The drama or any other art needs reflection and observation, and these require more time than is available in a community that still is apt to confuse mere activity with accomplishment, and to regard being busy as an end in itself. More leisure is surely one condition of any considerable artistic effort in Canada-either more leisure is needed, or, at least, the proper use of what we have, and that is another way of saying more education, for well-employed leisure is the final test of an educated people.

But art must wait for education: it is the duty of art to educate, to create its own public. The Canadian drama must use what audience is available and build upon that. The question of the audience should present no difficulty. The education of the playgoer is being carried on now by countless groups of amateurs. Already the demand for the play exceeds the supply; and no competent amateur players in Canada need fear a half-filled house. But I should like, even at the risk of making a rather bold conjecture, to suggest that the free

theatre may find its audience reinforced from an unexpected source the cinema. The popular instinct for a show, inherent in most people, is now being greatly stimulated in this country, and for the time being is being satisfied largely by the moving picture; possibly 150,000 Canadians visit the picture theatre each day. But the power of the cinema itself cannot be permanent unless it should develop a form of art definitely suited to this vehicle of expression, perhaps a type of pantomime adapted to the limitations of a medium where there can be no speaking-one cannot say. But there seems little hope of such an advance. The artistic genius of Los Angeles has been devoted not to scenarios, but to the camera, and the content of the 'movies' shows but little improvement, although occasionally a really great artist like Charlie Chaplin may be thrown up from amongst the sensational mediocrities that dominate the screen. When, however, the last mechanical sensation has begun to pall and the most expensive spectacle commences to look cheap, the audience will be left to the filmed novel or play, distorted for the purpose of the screen-which in the vernacular is 'canned art'-or it must be contented with instructive films which are not art at all. Is it too much to expect that as the spell of the cinema fades its good-will may so to speak pass to the theatres, if theatres there be to receive it? After all, the power of the drama lies in the contact of the human actor with the human crowd across the foot-lights. For this the screen at its best is a pale substitute. Here lies the opportunity of the Canadian free theatre, and the Canadian playwright to turn competition into reinforcement. There are difficulties, plenty of them. There is the question of finance, and here the cinema has a great advantage. But the public is after all prepared to pay for what it wants, and the real task is how, without the sacrifice of art, to satisfy its wants. So the problem is one for the artist rather than for the business manager. He has before him a dangerous course. On the one hand lies the stark rock of pedantry; on the other, the shoals of cheap popularity and sentimentalism. But of these two perils the former is the greater. If a 'movie-bred' audience clamours for its 'sob-stuff', let the playwright remember that Euripides was not afraid of the emotions; if the gallery sigh for the slap

stick' let him not forget that Shakespeare gloried in buffoonery. The playwright need not fear to evoke either tears or laughter so long as he is an honest artist.

If advice can be given to Canadian authors it will be found in Yeats' simple message to the Irish authors issued by the Abbey Theatre: 'A play to be suitable for performance at the Abbey,' he says, 'should contain some criticism of life, founded on the experience or personal observation of the writer, or some vision of life, of Irish life by preference, important for its beauty or for some excellence of style; and this intellectual quality is not more necessary to tragedy than to the gayest comedy.' Such counsel has a universal application. If it be followed I have faith enough in the Canadian artist to believe that he can give us plays that men and women will want to see, and will be the better for seeing. The theatres for these plays are in the making; an audience awaits them; the stuff from which the plays are to be made lies close at hand. Whether our drama will lean towards poetic beauty or realistic truth, or satire that cannot be foretold. But if our dramatists are both good Canadians and good artists their plays will have in them the essence of Canada, and will embody the spirit of the country, whatever that may be, and Canada will be the richer for them.

VINCENT MASSEY.

« AnkstesnisTęsti »