The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays by Gordon Bottomley et al. (i read a book TXT) 📗

Mr. William Archer, who wrote, "No English-speaking man of more unquestionable genius has been lost to the world in this world-frenzy." These true and honest dramas represent the English Repertory theatres at their best in this brief form, and give promise of the great and permanently interesting "human comedy" which Chapin might have completed had his life not been sacrificed. In spite of the simplicity and lightness of the little play here given, there is more shrewd philosophy in old David Pirnie, and more real humanity in his family, than is to be found portrayed in many pretentious social dramas and difficult psychological novels. It is admirable on the stage, as was shown by the Provincetown Players last winter. In the memorial performance for Harold Chapin in London, the author's little son appeared in the part of wee Alexander.

"Butterbiggens," Mrs. Alice Chapin, the dramatist's mother, replied to an inquiry as to "what Butterbiggens is or are," "is, are, and always will be a suburb of Glasgow."

There is little difficulty with the modified Scots dialect in this play if one remembers that ae generally takes the place of such sounds as e in tea, o in so, a in have, and so on, and that a' means all. A wean is a small bairn, yinst is once, ava is at all, and thrang is "thick" or intimate.

Distempered means calcimined, or painted in water-dissolved color on the plaster.

Lady Gregory: SPREADING THE NEWS

In her notes on the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which she was most influential in building up, Lady Augusta Gregory says that it was the desire of the players and writers who worked there to establish an Irish drama which should have a "firm base in reality and an apex of beauty." This phrase, which admirably expresses the best in the play-making going on to-day, finds most adequate illustration in the work of Synge, of Yeats, and of Lady Gregory herself. The basis in reality of such jolly and robust comedies as her Seven Irish Plays and New Irish Comedies is clearly discernible. They are in the tradition of the best early English comedy, from the miracle plays onward; of Hans Sachs's Shrovetide Plays, and of Molière's dramatizations of medieaval fabliaux, as in The Physician in Spite of Himself. Lady Gregory describes in her notes on Spreading the News how the play grew out of an idea of picturing tragic consequences from idle rumor and defamation of character. It is certainly not to be regretted that she allowed "laughter to have its way with the little play," and gave Bartley Fallon a share of glory from the woeful day to illuminate dull, older years.

The inhabitants of this same village of Cloon appear as old friends in other of Lady Gregory's plays, with, as usual, nothing to do but mind one another's business. In The Jackdaw another absurd rumor is fanned into full blaze by greed; upon Hyacinth Halvey works the potent and embarrassing influence of too good a reputation. Still other plays attain a notable height of beauty—notably The Rising of the Moon and The Traveling Man. The Gaol Gate tells a story similar to that of Campbell of Kilmhor, with genuinely tragic effect. She has written, besides, two volumes of Irish folk-history, Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which Mr. Yeats calls masterpieces of prose which one "can weigh with Malory and feel no discontent at the tally."[1] A writer who has produced such range and beauty of works, from very human, characteristic comedy and farce to fine, poignant tragedy, besides writing excellent stories and contributing largely to an important experimental theatre, is secure of her share of fame.

The "Removable Magistrate" is apparently one appointed by British officialdom; this one, having just come from the Bay of Bengal, is going to fit upon the natives of Cloon methods which may have worked in a rather different district.

The song "with a skin on it," which Bartley sings, is given in
Lady Gregory's Seven Short Plays (Putnam, 1909).

[Footnote 1: Appendix to The Poetical Works of William B.
Yeats, volume II, (Macmillan, 1912).]

Winthrop Parkhurst: THE BEGGAR AND THE KING

The Beggar and the King looks at first like a pleasant absurdity; it is in reality valuable as a short history of the ostrich method of dealing with realities. The beggar, of course, continues to cry aloud after his tongue, and even his head, have been removed, because there are so many millions of him. Again and again, in the course of history, he has gathered desperate courage to defy authority that is blind and evil. Always at last, as in the French and the Russian revolutions and in the more recent European revolts, he succeeds in wresting the power from those in autocratic authority. And yet, just as of old, not only kings, but all others who attempt dictatorship and the playing of providence, try the simple tactics of the ostrich; they close the window, or their eyes and ears, as a sufficient answer to rebellion. Appreciating the futility of these methods, we have no difficulty in continuing the drama ourselves beyond the fall of the curtain.

Mr. Winthrop Parkhurst, by birth a New Yorker, according to a family tradition is a descendant on his mother's side of John Huss, the Bohemian reformer and martyr, and on his father's of the executioner of Charles I of England. His writings include Maracca, a Biblical one-act play, and several short satirical sketches.

George Middleton: TIDES

Mr. George Middleton generally pictures in his dramas problems which are not easy to solve. And he does not try to give ready-made solutions. He merely shows us how various people have tried to work these problems; and his dramas are like real life because the attempts at solutions fail as often as they succeed. Certain of the problems Mr. Middleton presents are such as high-school students meet and can well consider; several of these plays appear in the lists following. Tides is about a man who has supported an unpopular theory. Nothing is said about whether his ideal is right or wrong, but it is clear that he has held to it in perfect sincerity of belief and has been quite unmoved by the bitterest persecution. But when he is offered honor and flattering respect, though he does not really change his belief and adherence, he compromises and partially surrenders his ideal. The fable is similar to that of Ibsen's The League of Youth, but the telling here is straighter and clearer. William White's self-deception is made evident to him and to us by his honest and courageous wife, who tells him frankly of it. "Haven't you sometimes noticed that is what bitterness to another means: a failure within oneself?" she comments wisely. An effective contrast is furnished by the son, who has altogether and honestly abandoned his father's theories in the face of new realities as he sees them.

Eugene O'Neill: ILE

Eugene O'Neill, American seaman, laborer, newspaperman, and dramatist, has been associated for several years with the Provincetown Players. This group, including Mrs. Glaspell and other playwrights of importance, gather in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the summer, and in winter present significant foreign and native plays in a converted stable on Macdougall Street in New York, where may be seen the ring to which Pegasus was once tethered! In 1919 Mr. O'Neill received the Pulitzer Prize for the most important American play of the year.

Mr. O'Neill has had experience of the sea, like the great Englishmen, Mr. Masefield and Mr. Joseph Conrad. He knows the interminable whaling voyages, as described in Melville's Moby Dick and the first chapter of Typee—best of all in Bullen's Cruise of the Cachalot. Out of this experience of hard life and harder men he has written many poignant and terrible dramas—perhaps the greatest this story of the skipper's wife who insisted on making the voyage with her husband and is worn to the edge of insanity by months of ice-bound solitude. The motive of Captain Keeney is like that which caused Skipper Ireson to leave his fellow townsmen to sink in Chaleur Bay. Against his iron determination his wife's piteous pleading and evident suffering are more potent than the mutinying hands; whether she can avail to turn him home "with a measly four hundred barrel of ile" is the problem of the play.

J.A. Ferguson: CAMPBELL OF KILMHOR

This tragic story of the war and hatred in Scotland belongs in the series of attempts made by Charles Edward Stuart and his father to regain the throne lost by James II in 1688. "The Young Pretender's" vigorous campaign in 1745, carried far into England, might easily have succeeded but for the quarrels and disaffection of the Highland chiefs who supported him. His failure was completed at the bloody battle of Culloden, or Drumossie Moor, in 1746, celebrated in Scottish story and song of lamentation. Scott's hero Waverley went into the highland country shortly after these uprisings, and David Balfour, in Kidnapped, had numerous adventures in crossing it with Allan Breck Stewart, who was in the service of his kinsmen, the exiled Stuarts. The hatred of Campbells and Stuarts, of Lowlander and Highlander, Loyalist and Jacobite, is intense throughout the record of those days.

The young Scot and his stanch and proudly tearless mother are, of course, the heroic characters in the play. We have a hint that Charles Edward Stuart himself is with the band whom the young man protects so loyally. It may seem strange that the drama is named, not for him, but for the crafty and pitiless executioner of the king's justice. But he is after all the most interesting character in the piece, with his Biblical references in broad Lowland Scots (we may suppose that the Stewarts speak Gaelic among themselves), his superstition, his remorseless cruelty. We should like to see how he takes the discovery that, perhaps for the first time, he has been baffled in his career of unscrupulous and bloody deeds!

This play represents the most successful work of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1914. The author has written no others which have been published, though he is credited with a good story or two. It may be hoped that he will write other dramas as excellent as this one. He has put into very brief and effective form here the spirit and idea of a most intense period of merciless conflict.

A kebbuck is a cheese; keek means peek; toom, empty; a besom, a broom; and soop, sweep.

John Galsworthy: THE SUN

According to Professor Lewisohn and other critics Mr. Galsworthy is without question the foremost English dramatist to-day. Without arguing or attempting to offer solutions, he gives the most searching presentation of problems which we have to face and somehow settle. In Strife, after a furious contest and bitter hardships, the strike is settled by a compromise which the leaders of both sides count as failure. Things are much as they were at the start; the difficulty is no nearer solution. In Justice, "society stamps out a human life not without its fair possibilities—for eighty-one pounds," because obviously clear and guilty infraction of law cannot go unavenged. Justice is not condemned by the facts shown in this play, nor is its working extolled. In The Mob, the patrioteering element destroys a man who proclaims the injustice of a small and greedy war of conquest. In The Pigeon, brilliant debate is held, but no conclusion reached, as to what we should do with derelict and wasted lives, with men who do not fit into the scheme of success and society.

In his sketches and stories Mr. Galsworthy presents these same problems, and again without attempted conclusions. The Freelands particularly is a most dramatic novel of conditions and results similar to those in some of the dramas mentioned above. Many of his sketches and essays also—for example, "My Distant Relative" in The Inn of Tranquillity and "Comfort" in A Commentary—are of biting and almost cynical irony in viewing proposed and present solutions of problems; but none suggest panaceas. They merely make us think soberly of the size of our problems and their immense complexity, move us to go out to look for more information and to examine carefully our most solid institutions as well as suggested alterations in them.

A large part of Mr. Galsworthy's time and thought, both during the war and since, has been given to the problem of some measure of justice to soldiers, and particularly to wounded and broken soldiers. In A Sheaf and Another Sheaf appear various papers presenting sharply the conditions of suffering and neglect that actually exist. The Sun is a brief sketch of after-war days,—this time of a wounded man who has gained an advantage over one who escaped injury,—and of joy in deliverance from the hell of war—a joy so profound and luminous that the released soldier cannot let a sharp mischance and disappointment mar his happiness. The whole piece is in the key of