Delphi complete works of.., p.662
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 662
However, let that pass. Let me first, before giving you my personal views on the drama, explain very briefly my qualifications for the task. I am what may be described as a finished actor — finished about twenty years ago. And my long and varied experience on the stage, before being finally persuaded to leave it, has served me as a background of practical knowledge as a dramatist or playwright.
I don’t mean to imply that I have ever acted in any of the great Metropolitan centres. I never have. I have never even acted in my home city of Montreal. But I have acted in Verdun, the suburb where the Provincial Asylum is. The inmates were wild over my work. They wanted me to stay. They saw no reason why I shouldn’t.
Nor have I ever acted in Boston. But I have acted just outside of it, in Chelsea, where the police limits end. In fact, generally speaking, wherever the police limits end, I begin.
A lot of my earlier work was done with a touring company, one of a chain of companies acting in that grand old drama Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I am sure you all know it so well that I needn’t describe the plot to you. In any case I couldn’t; I wasn’t part of the plot. My work was in the great climax scene, where the fugitive slave girl, Eliza, her unborn babe in her arms, is fleeing across the Ohio — leaping from one ice floe to another in the swollen flood of the river. That’s where I acted — I was a chunk of ice in the Ohio, the third one from the Kentucky side, working under a blue curtain.
I put my heart into it. I said to myself: ‘If I am to be ice, I’ll be the most dangerous ice in the river. If Eliza puts her foot on me, up she goes!’ Well, I worked away conscientiously night after night until it happened one night the general manager of our chain of companies was down front. And he saw my work and he said: ‘Who is that ice? The third from Kentucky?’ And they told him, and he sent for me and he said: ‘Look, I’ve seen your work. You’re too good for ice. How would you like to be First Bloodhound!’
That was my first big move up. And after that I had a number of parts, not exactly character parts in the different plays, but what you might call ‘Key-parts,’ the ones you see written in the stage directions. I have been A voice is heard without, and A bell rings, and I’ve been a Groan, and an Explosion, and a Fairy, and, of course, Thunder and Lightning ever so many times. And I’ve been in Shakespeare as a Tucket — you know how it says: Enter the Duke of Burgundy with a Tucket — and I’ve been a Link — Enter the Duke of Gloucester with a Link — and a Hobo — Enter Belgium with Hoboes. I am afraid my language is getting technical, but I won’t apologize as I know that the members of your club are themselves technicians.
From those earlier experiences I moved along into what has always been to me a favourite field, the old-fashioned melodrama. The play I was in was one of those typical melodramas of the New England coast, called Cast up by the Sea, or Thrown up by the Waves, or something like that — anyway one of those Foam and Storm plays of the New England seaside that used to be so popular. There was a lighthouse in it, and the lighthouse keeper was a farmer, and his daughter Liz had run away with a young man, a sea captain, and gone to sea, months before; and this night, when the play reaches its height in the third act, there’s a great storm raging, and Liz and her husband, on their ship (He’s captain of it), are going to be wrecked right there beside the lighthouse.
It’s a wild night in the third act. There’s a group of fisherman-farmers all in oilskins down on the shore looking out to sea. One points and says, ‘There’s lightning in yon cloud!’ There wasn’t. It was me. The speech was my cue for the first lightning. After that I gave it to them at three-minute intervals.
At that minute there comes a shout from the clustered fishermen on the Fore Shore.
‘A ship! A ship! There’s a vessel out on the reef. See! Look!’
They run up and down, pointing and shouting. And far out on the waves, lit for a moment by a flash of lightning, the audience sees a dismasted schooner (She’s made of cardboard) out beside the breakers on the reef.
Then in a vivid flash of lightning, a double charge, they get a full view of the ship out on the rocks (It was white cardboard and showed up well) and they recognize it and all begin to shout, ‘It’s the Good Hope.’ You see that was the schooner that Liz ran away in with her husband, the captain of it.
Then someone shouts: ‘She’s struck the reef. She’s breaking. They’re lowering the boat. Look! Look! There’s a woman in the boat!’
They all have to keep terribly excited and run up and down and get in the road of the wind, as I made it — there wasn’t enough for everybody unless they kept moving.
Then they shout: ‘Fetch Hiram Haycroft! There’s only him can pilot the lifeboat to the reef!’
Then someone else says: ‘He’s at the light! He can’t leave the light!’ And a lot of them yell, ‘He must leave the light!’
And at that minute Haycroft’s wife, Liz’s mother, lets a shriek out of her: ‘It’s Liz! It’s Liz!’ And the crowd yell, ‘Now he must come,’ and rush in a mass for the door leading up to the lighthouse. And just as they do it, you see the boat and Liz vanishing in white foam from a calcium light on the reef. . . .
Then came a sudden change of scene — all done in three minutes, from the shore to Lighthouse Tower. It was what used to be called a ‘transformation scene.’ It involved an eclipse of darkness punctured by little gas jets, and a terrible thumping and bumping with an undertone of curses. You could hear a voice in the darkness say quite distinctly, ‘Get that blank blank drop over there,’ and you could see black figures running round in the transformation. Then there came an awful crash and a vision of a back curtain sliding down amongst the dark men. The lights flicked up again and all the audience broke into applause at the final wonder of it.
Look! It’s the lighthouse tower with the big lights burning and the storm howling outside. How bright and clear it is here inside the tower, with its great windows looking out over the storm, sixty feet above the sea.
He stands beside the lights, trimming the lamps, calm and steady at his task. The storm is all about him, but inside the lighthouse tower all is bright and still. Hiram peers a moment from the lighthouse window. He opens the little door and steps out on the iron platform high above the sea. The wind roars about him and the crest of the driven water leaps to his very feet. I threw it. He comes in, closing the door quietly and firmly behind him and turns again to his light.
‘God help all poor souls at sea to-night,’ he says. That was my cue to throw a bucketful right at him.
And then with a rush and clatter of feet they burst in upon him, the group of fishermen, Martha his wife, crowding into the lighthouse tower and standing on the stairs.
‘Quick, Hiram, you must come! There’s been a wreck. Look, there’s a boat going on the reef. The men are ready in the lifeboat. You must steer her through. It’s life or death. There’s not a moment to lose.’
Hiram looks for a moment at the excited crowd and then turns quietly to his task.
‘My place is here,’ he says.
There is a moment’s hush. Martha rushes to him and clutches him by the coat.
‘Hiram, they haven’t told you. The schooner that was wrecked to-night is the Good Hope.’
Hiram staggers back against the wall.
‘And the boat that’s drifting on the reef, it’s Liz, it’s our daughter.’
Hiram stands grasping the rail along the wall. He speaks panting with agitation, but firm:
‘Martha — I’m sworn to tend the light. If the light fails, God knows what it means to the ships at sea. If my child is lost, it is God’s will — but — my place is here.’
And he turns back to the light.
That was the signal for a double flash of lightning, two cylinders of thunder, and a bucket right at him.
That’s the kind of climax we used to love to have in the old Melodrama — everything apparently hopelessly lost and then sudden salvation.
Martha, the farmer’s wife, points to a great coil of rope which her quick intelligence has perceived hanging on the wall of the tower. As a matter of fact it was so big and so obvious that even the people in the gallery seats had noticed it right away.
‘The rope!’ she says. ‘The rope!’
Hiram turns.
‘You’re right,’ he says. ‘There’s that one chance.’ With a fisherman’s quickness of hand he ties a bowline knot at the end of the rope. Then he throws open the door and slips out on to the iron platform in the great roar of wind and sea — that needed two of us, one for the wind, one for the sea.
The audience see the long rope go hissing out into the night air, and when Hiram hauls it up again what do you think is on the end of it? — Liz!
Her husband drowned? Oh, no, he got him on the next throw and some of their valises but not all of them. And the play ended in a flood of happy reconciliations, with the storm all gone (I shut it right off after the second valise) and sunrise — the dawn of a new life — just appearing in the west, where the sun had set earlier in the act.
So that was the good old Melodrama of forty years ago, when some of us were forty years younger than we are now. We still look back to it with affection. Let me try to contrast it with the High Brow Drama of to-day. Forty years ago the theatre was carried on by straight hand-to-hand acting. The actors were well-armed, determined people and they fought the play through. Of course, they took their lives in their hands; they were liable to be drowned, shot, or blown up anywhere in Act II, III, or IV. It always seemed a miracle that they were still alive in Act V, with the dead body of the villain smoking on the floor, the missing will found, and the heroine clasped in the hero’s arms, which went once and a half around her.
This used to be called Melodrama and it was played, at its best, at ten-twenty-thirty cents. Any lift in the price put a false polish on it and spoiled it.
They say that the old Melodrama is still there if you know where to find it. But for most of us, whether we like it or not, its place is being taken by the new High Brow Drama. These two dramas, the High Brow and the Melo, are wide apart. The new High Brow is not exactly played in the theatres. At least it is ‘given’ in Little Theatres, Repertory Theatres, Community Theatres, College Auditoriums, and places like that.
The old Melodrama needed nothing but lots of sawdust, chewing tobacco, and bright open gas lights. It didn’t even need fire escapes. If the audience got burned, that was too bad, but there were lots more.
The new High Brow is played among soft lights, huge ferns, heavy curtains, dim corridors, and attendants with dark lanterns.
The old Melo was played for money, just straight-out money. It had no artistic purpose whatsoever; any of the actors was ready for murder or suicide or infanticide — ready, in fact, for anything, for money.
But the new High Brow Drama is not put on for money. It is done in connection with town-planning, park-making, slum-killing, children’s welfare, and maternity hospitals. The people who play it don’t care about money; the people who write it are too artistic to think of money.
That’s why the prices are what they are — not the old ten-twenty-thirty (infants in arms free), but seats at one-dollar-fifty, two-dollars and two-fifty. In fact you had better pay two-fifty and be done with it. You see you have to go; either your daughter is acting in it, or your friend’s sister wrote it, or your son-in-law staged it. All the town is caught in the same net. So there you are in your two-fifty seat in your local Community Repertory Theatre, waiting for it to begin. Don’t hurry it. It will start in an hour or so. The old Melo began on time; because the actors had their supper at the hotel at six o’clock and had nowhere else to go. But the new Repertory Community takes a lot of starting.
But even when it does start, somehow there seems something wrong with it, at least for those of us who remember the old Melo of forty years ago. It all seems too — how shall I call it? — too quiet. There’s not enough action to it. The people in it do too much talk — just talk all the time, they never get down to business.
For instance, take the first act. There’s the heroine on the stage with a man. You can’t exactly make out who he is because there’s no decent gas light and you can’t see to read the programme. But it doesn’t matter. All he does and all she does is just talk. In the old play, if the fair heroine was left alone with a man, he was supposed to start something — either tie her by the feet and throw her out the window, or else soak her with chloroform. This got the play off to a good start. But in the new Community-Repertory-Art-for-Art’s-Sake the heroine is perfectly safe. The fellow isn’t man enough to lay a hand on her.
So presently the man goes out and the heroine is left alone. Here again notice the difference. In the Melodrama if the heroine had been left alone in that room she would have started skipping round, looking in every drawer and corner to find a missing will or a document to prove that her mother had been really married. But instead of that she just stays in the room alone, analysing herself. She is, so it seems, trying to realize herself; in fact, she distinctly says that she is trying to reconstruct her life. This leaves the audience very vague as to how she is doing it and what it is that she wants to do.
Now another character comes in. As he enters, for a moment the audience think that something is going to happen. But nothing does. The new man seems to have the same talk-mania as the one who went out. He, too, is working out some ‘problem.’ All the characters in a new Community Park and Playgrounds Theatre play are full of ‘problems’ up to the neck.
Just once in this scene there is a piece of tense thrilling action. The man actually lights a cigarette with a match and smokes it. All the audience hope to heaven he’ll set himself on fire. But he gets away with it. Once again as he goes on talking, talking, talking, another piece of action comes in. The man rings a bell and a butler comes in with cocktails. That’s a dirty one on the audience. They don’t get any.
But the butler is supposed to be one of the great hits of the play. He just comes in and says, ‘Cocktails, sir?’ and goes out again. But he goes out so perfectly, and is so completely gone when he goes, that it is felt to be a fine piece of acting. If the audience of to-day had ever seen a train-wreck in Act III of the old Melo, or ‘road agents’ hold up a stage-coach in the Rocky Mountains in Act IV, they’d know what acting really can reach to.
You see the point of the old play was that things not only happened, but they kept on happening more and more. Finally they reached a terrific climax. The hero, for example, had been shot dead by the train wreckers, who had ridden off with the loot, and the heroine had been tied down across the railway track for the next train to run over her. In fact things looked pretty gloomy. Even a trained audience began to feel uneasy about the situation. Especially so, when they heard the clang of an engine bell and realized that a train was approaching over a long cardboard trestle bridge two miles away, with a twist in it.
The engine comes in sight. You can see the engineer and the fireman leaning out of the cab, but they don’t see the heroine. Then just at that moment the hero — he’s not dead, but he’s fixed up the slings and bandages to show how near dead he must have been — makes a flying leap from the rocks of the embankment into the cab of the locomotive. He grabs the throttle and tears it out by the roots. The speed slackens. The hero dashes forward on to the cowcatcher, leans away ahead with a knife in his hand, severs the heroine’s bonds, and swings her into safety.
The whole theatre rocks with enthusiasm. After that, the killing of the bandits in a mountain cave with nitrogen bombs is simplicity itself. In the cave, after the explosion, are found all the necessary marriage certificates, birth certificates, lost wills and other missing documents. The play only needs a mountain marriage with a comic clergyman to cork it up tight and end it.
Now I don’t see why we couldn’t keep some of these features of the good old ten-twenty-thirty by incorporating them in the modern Little Theatre Play. I admit that we need the Little Community Repertory Maternity Theatre. After all Art is Art, and if we never get on to it, where shall we be? And anyway, town planning is a good thing, and if you don’t support a Maternity Hospital what sort of man are you?
But just as a suggestion, why shouldn’t the characters of the up-to-date talk play do all their analysing and talking as part of the real action in a real play? For example, let the heroine get tied down across the rails and then let her start to analyse herself; then let her try to think things out, to ascertain just how to fit in with her new environment.
While she is at it, let the train come along. Of course I admit that in the High Brow play it mustn’t come fast; they’ve a lot of talking to get through first. We mustn’t break what is called the continuity of it, or, if we do, the artistic harmony all goes to smithereens. So here is the engineer sitting in the cab with the fireman quietly talking about differential freight rates and the difference between cost of service and operating charges. Once perhaps we might let the engineer say, ‘I sometimes ask myself, Wilfrid, what I would do if I ran over a woman.’ That will give the audience a real thrill — as close to it as we dare let them come. After that the engineer will heave a deep sigh and start a game of chess with the fireman.
Now at this juncture without danger of being too crude, or too inartistic, I think we can let the hero quietly enter the cab and sit down on the steam pipes. Let him begin to talk with the engineer about predestination, and whether individual will power is dependent on mass impulse — or not. Now the engineer may say: ‘Speaking of prestidigitation, I have a queer presentiment that I am about to run over a woman. I think I’ll go and look.’
While he is gone the fireman starts a talk, about fire. The engineer comes back and sits down and says gloomily that there is a woman on the track, but that the speed of the train is slackening so fast that it is losing half its remaining velocity with each half minute. They are half as near to the woman as they were half a minute ago, but he reckons that that’s about as near as you can ever say you got to a woman.
