I
There is an idea abroad, assiduously
fostered as a rule by critics who happen to have written
neither novels nor plays, that it is more difficult
to write a play than a novel. I do not think so.
I have written or collaborated in about twenty novels
and about twenty plays, and I am convinced that it
is easier to write a play than a novel. Personally,
I would sooner write two plays than one novel;
less expenditure of nervous force and mere brains
would be required for two plays than for one novel.
(I emphasise the word “write,” because
if the whole weariness between the first conception
and the first performance of a play is compared with
the whole weariness between the first conception and
the first publication of a novel, then the play has
it. I would sooner get seventy-and-seven novels
produced than one play. But my immediate object
is to compare only writing with writing.) It seems
to me that the sole persons entitled to judge of the
comparative difficulty of writing plays and writing
novels are those authors who have succeeded or failed
equally well in both departments. And in this
limited band I imagine that the differences of opinion
on the point could not be marked. I would like
to note in passing, for the support of my proposition,
that whereas established novelists not infrequently
venture into the theatre with audacity, established
dramatists are very cautious indeed about quitting
the theatre. An established dramatist usually
takes good care to write plays and naught else; he
will not affront the risks of coming out into the
open; and therein his instinct is quite properly that
of self-preservation. Of many established dramatists
all over the world it may be affirmed that if they
were so indiscreet as to publish a novel, the result
would be a great shattering and a great awakening.
II
An enormous amount of vague reverential
nonsense is talked about the technique of the stage,
the assumption being that in difficulty it far surpasses
any other literary technique, and that until it is
acquired a respectable play cannot be written.
One hears also that it can only be acquired behind
the scenes. A famous actor-manager once kindly
gave me the benefit of his experience, and what he
said was that a dramatist who wished to learn his
business must live behind the scenes and
study the works of Dion Boucicault! The truth
is that no technique is so crude and so simple as
the technique of the stage, and that the proper place
to learn it is not behind the scenes but in the pit.
Managers, being the most conservative people on earth,
except compositors, will honestly try to convince
the naïve dramatist that effects can only be obtained
in the precise way in which effects have always been
obtained, and that this and that rule must not be
broken on pain of outraging the public.
And indeed it is natural that managers
should talk thus, seeing the low state of the drama,
because in any art rules and reaction always flourish
when creative energy is sick. The mandarins have
ever said and will ever say that a technique which
does not correspond with their own is no technique,
but simple clumsiness. There are some seven situations
in the customary drama, and a play which does not contain
at least one of those situations in each act will
be condemned as “undramatic,” or “thin,”
or as being “all talk.” It may contain
half a hundred other situations, but for the mandarin
a situation which is not one of the seven is not a
situation. Similarly there are some dozen character
types in the customary drama, and all original that
is, truthful characterisation will be dismissed
as a total absence of characterisation because it
does not reproduce any of these dozen types.
Thus every truly original play is bound to be indicted
for bad technique. The author is bound to be
told that what he has written may be marvellously
clever, but that it is not a play. I remember
the day and it is not long ago when
even so experienced and sincere a critic as William
Archer used to argue that if the “intellectual”
drama did not succeed with the general public, it
was because its technique was not up to the level
of the technique of the commercial drama! Perhaps
he has changed his opinion since then. Heaven
knows that the so-called “intellectual”
drama is amateurish enough, but nearly all literary
art is amateurish, and assuredly no intellectual drama
could hope to compete in clumsiness with some of the
most successful commercial plays of modern times.
I tremble to think what the mandarins and William
Archer would say to the technique of Hamlet,
could it by some miracle be brought forward as a new
piece by a Mr Shakspere. They would probably
recommend Mr Shakspere to consider the ways of Sardou,
Henri Bernstein, and Sir Herbert Tree, and be wise.
Most positively they would assert that Hamlet
was not a play. And their pupils of the daily
press would point out what surely Mr Shakspere
ought to have perceived for himself that
the second, third, or fourth act might be cut wholesale
without the slightest loss to the piece.
In the sense in which mandarins understand
the word technique, there is no technique special
to the stage except that which concerns the moving
of solid human bodies to and fro, and the limitations
of the human senses. The dramatist must not expect
his audience to be able to see or hear two things
at once, nor to be incapable of fatigue. And he
must not expect his interpreters to stroll round or
come on or go off in a satisfactory manner unless
he provides them with satisfactory reasons for strolling
round, coming on, or going off. Lastly, he must
not expect his interpreters to achieve physical impossibilities.
The dramatist who sends a pretty woman off in street
attire and seeks to bring her on again in thirty seconds
fully dressed for a court ball may fail in stage technique,
but he has not proved that stage technique is tremendously
difficult; he has proved something quite else.
III
One reason why a play is easier to
write than a novel is that a play is shorter than
a novel. On the average, one may say that it takes
six plays to make the matter of a novel. Other
things being equal, a short work of art presents fewer
difficulties than a longer one. The contrary
is held true by the majority, but then the majority,
having never attempted to produce a long work of art,
are unqualified to offer an opinion. It is said
that the most difficult form of poetry is the sonnet.
But the most difficult form of poetry is the epic.
The proof that the sonnet is the most difficult form
is alleged to be in the fewness of perfect sonnets.
There are, however, far more perfect sonnets than
perfect epics. A perfect sonnet may be a heavenly
accident. But such accidents can never happen
to writers of epics. Some years ago we had an
enormous palaver about the “art of the short
story,” which numerous persons who had omitted
to write novels pronounced to be more difficult than
the novel. But the fact remains that there are
scores of perfect short stories, whereas it is doubtful
whether anybody but Turgenev ever did write a perfect
novel. A short form is easier to manipulate than
a long form, because its construction is less complicated,
because the balance of its proportions can be more
easily corrected by means of a rapid survey, because
it is lawful and even necessary in it to leave undone
many things which are very hard to do, and because
the emotional strain is less prolonged. The most
difficult thing in all art is to maintain the imaginative
tension unslackened throughout a considerable period.
Then, not only does a play contain
less matter than a novel it is further
simplified by the fact that it contains fewer kinds
of matter, and less subtle kinds of matter. There
are numerous delicate and difficult affairs of craft
that the dramatist need not think about at all.
If he attempts to go beyond a certain very mild degree
of subtlety, he is merely wasting his time. What
passes for subtle on the stage would have a very obvious
air in a novel, as some dramatists have unhappily
discovered. Thus whole continents of danger may
be shunned by the dramatist, and instead of being
scorned for his cowardice he will be very rightly
applauded for his artistic discretion. Fortunate
predicament! Again, he need not indeed,
he must not save in a primitive and hinting
manner, concern himself with “atmosphere.”
He may roughly suggest one, but if he begins on the
feat of “creating” an atmosphere (as it
is called), the last suburban train will have departed
before he has reached the crisis of the play.
The last suburban train is the best friend of the
dramatist, though the fellow seldom has the sense
to see it. Further, he is saved all descriptive
work. See a novelist harassing himself into his
grave over the description of a landscape, a room,
a gesture while the dramatist grins.
The dramatist may have to imagine a landscape, a room,
or a gesture; but he has not got to write it and
it is the writing which hastens death. If a dramatist
and a novelist set out to portray a clever woman,
they are almost equally matched, because each has
to make the creature say things and do things.
But if they set out to portray a charming woman, the
dramatist can recline in an easy chair and smoke while
the novelist is ruining temper, digestion and eyesight,
and spreading terror in his household by his moodiness
and unapproachability. The electric light burns
in the novelist’s study at three a.m., the
novelist is still endeavouring to convey by means
of words the extraordinary fascination that his heroine
could exercise over mankind by the mere act of walking
into a room; and he never has really succeeded and
never will. The dramatist writes curtly, “Enter
Millicent.” All are anxious to do the dramatist’s
job for him. Is the play being read at home the
reader eagerly and with brilliant success puts his
imagination to work and completes a charming Millicent
after his own secret desires. (Whereas he would coldly
decline to add one touch to Millicent were she the
heroine of a novel.) Is the play being performed on
the stage an experienced, conscientious,
and perhaps lovely actress will strive her hardest
to prove that the dramatist was right about Millicent’s
astounding fascination. And if she fails, nobody
will blame the dramatist; the dramatist will receive
naught but sympathy.
And there is still another region
of superlative difficulty which is narrowly circumscribed
for the spoilt dramatist: I mean the whole business
of persuading the public that the improbable is probable.
Every work of art is and must be crammed with improbabilities
and artifice; and the greater portion of the artifice
is employed in just this trickery of persuasion.
Only, the public of the dramatist needs far less persuading
than the public of the novelist. The novelist
announces that Millicent accepted the hand of the
wrong man, and in spite of all the novelist’s
corroborative and exegetical detail the insulted reader
declines to credit the statement and condemns the incident
as unconvincing. The dramatist decides that Millicent
must accept the hand of the wrong man, and there she
is on the stage in flesh and blood, veritably doing
it! Not easy for even the critical beholder to
maintain that Millicent could not and did not do such
a silly thing when he has actually with his eyes seen
her in the very act! The dramatist, as usual,
having done less, is more richly rewarded by results.
Of course it will be argued, as it
has always been argued, by those who have not written
novels, that it is precisely the “doing less” the
leaving out that constitutes the unique
and fearful difficulty of dramatic art. “The
skill to leave out” lo! the master
faculty of the dramatist! But, in the first place,
I do not believe that, having regard to the relative
scope of the play and of the novel, the necessity for
leaving out is more acute in the one than in the other.
The adjective “photographic” is as absurd
applied to the novel as to the play. And, in
the second place, other factors being equal, it is
less exhausting, and it requires less skill, to refrain
from doing than to do. To know when to refrain
from doing may be hard, but positively to do is even
harder. Sometimes, listening to partisans of
the drama, I have been moved to suggest that, if the
art of omission is so wondrously difficult, a dramatist
who practised the habit of omitting to write anything
whatever ought to be hailed as the supreme craftsman.
IV
The more closely one examines the
subject, the more clear and certain becomes the fact
that there is only one fundamental artistic difference
between the novel and the play, and that difference
(to which I shall come later) is not the difference
which would be generally named as distinguishing the
play from the novel. The apparent differences
are superficial, and are due chiefly to considerations
of convenience.
Whether in a play or in a novel the
creative artist has to tell a story using
the word story in a very wide sense. Just as a
novel is divided into chapters, and for a similar
reason, a play is divided into acts. But neither
chapters nor acts are necessary. Some of Balzac’s
chief novels have no chapter-divisions, and it has
been proved that a theatre audience can and will listen
for two hours to “talk,” and even recitative
singing, on the stage, without a pause. Indeed,
audiences, under the compulsion of an artist strong
and imperious enough, could, I am sure, be trained
to marvellous feats of prolonged receptivity.
However, chapters and acts are usual, and they involve
the same constructional processes on the part of the
artist. The entire play or novel must tell a
complete story that is, arouse a curiosity
and reasonably satisfy it, raise a main question and
then settle it. And each act or other chief division
must tell a definite portion of the story, satisfy
part of the curiosity, settle part of the question.
And each scene or other minor division must do the
same according to its scale. Everything basic
that applies to the technique of the novel applies
equally to the technique of the play.
In particular, I would urge that a
play, any more than a novel, need not be dramatic,
employing the term as it is usually employed.
In so far as it suspends the listener’s interest,
every tale, however told, may be said to be dramatic.
In this sense The Golden Bowl is dramatic; so
are Dominique and Persuasion. A
play need not be more dramatic than that. Very
emphatically a play need not be dramatic in the stage
sense. It need never induce interest to the degree
of excitement. It need have nothing that resembles
what would be recognisable in the theatre as a situation.
It may amble on and it will still be a play,
and it may succeed in pleasing either the fastidious
hundreds or the unfastidious hundreds of thousands,
according to the talent of the author. Without
doubt mandarins will continue for about a century yet
to excommunicate certain plays from the category of
plays. But nobody will be any the worse.
And dramatists will go on proving that whatever else
divides a play from a book, “dramatic quality”
does not. Some arch-Mandarin may launch at me
one of those mandarinic epigrammatic questions which
are supposed to overthrow the adversary at one dart.
“Do you seriously mean to argue, sir, that drama
need not be dramatic?” I do, if the word dramatic
is to be used in the mandarinic signification.
I mean to state that some of the finest plays of the
modern age differ from a psychological novel in nothing
but the superficial form of telling. Example,
Henri Becque’s La Parisienne, than which
there is no better. If I am asked to give my
own definition of the adjective “dramatic,”
I would say that that story is dramatic which is told
in dialogue imagined to be spoken by actors and actresses
on the stage, and that any narrower definition is
bound to exclude some genuine plays universally accepted
as such even by mandarins. For be it
noted that the mandarin is never consistent.
My definition brings me to the sole
technical difference between a play and a novel in
the play the story is told by means of a dialogue.
It is a difference less important than it seems, and
not invariably even a sure point of distinction between
the two kinds of narrative. For a novel may consist
exclusively of dialogue. And plays may contain
other matter than dialogue. The classic chorus
is not dialogue. But nowadays we should consider
the device of the chorus to be clumsy, as, nowadays,
it indeed would be. We have grown very ingenious
and clever at the trickery of making characters talk
to the audience and explain themselves and their past
history while seemingly innocent of any such intention.
And here, I admit, the dramatist has to face a difficulty
special to himself, which the novelist can avoid.
I believe it to be the sole difficulty which is peculiar
to the drama, and that it is not acute is proved by
the ease with which third-rate dramatists have generally
vanquished it. Mandarins are wont to assert that
the dramatist is also handicapped by the necessity
for rigid economy in the use of material. This
is not so. Rigid economy in the use of material
is equally advisable in every form of art. If
it is a necessity, it is a necessity which all artists
flout from time to time, and occasionally with gorgeous
results, and the successful dramatist has hitherto
not been less guilty of flouting it than the novelist
or any other artist.
V
And now, having shown that some alleged
differences between the play and the novel are illusory,
and that a certain technical difference, though possibly
real, is superficial and slight, I come to the fundamental
difference between them a difference which
the laity does not suspect, which is seldom insisted
upon and never sufficiently, but which nobody who
is well versed in the making of both plays and novels
can fail to feel profoundly. The emotional strain
of writing a play is not merely less prolonged than
that of writing a novel, it is less severe even while
it lasts, lower in degree and of a less purely creative
character. And herein is the chief of all the
reasons why a play is easier to write than a novel.
The drama does not belong exclusively to literature,
because its effect depends on something more than the
composition of words. The dramatist is the sole
author of a play, but he is not the sole creator of
it. Without him nothing can be done, but, on the
other hand, he cannot do everything himself.
He begins the work of creation, which is finished
either by creative interpreters on the stage, or by
the creative imagination of the reader in the study.
It is as if he carried an immense weight to the landing
at the turn of a flight of stairs, and that thence
upward the lifting had to be done by other people.
Consider the affair as a pyramidal structure, and the
dramatist is the base but he is not the
apex. A play is a collaboration of creative faculties.
The egotism of the dramatist resents this uncomfortable
fact, but the fact exists. And further, the creative
faculties are not only those of the author, the stage-director
("producer”) and the actors the audience
itself is unconsciously part of the collaboration.
Hence a dramatist who attempts to
do the whole work of creation before the acting begins
is an inartistic usurper of the functions of others,
and will fail of proper accomplishment at the end.
The dramatist must deliberately, in performing his
share of the work, leave scope for a multitude of
alien faculties whose operations he can neither precisely
foresee nor completely control. The point is not
that in the writing of a play there are various sorts
of matters as we have already seen –which
the dramatist must ignore; the point is that even in
the region proper to him he must not push the creative
act to its final limit. He must ever remember
those who are to come after him. For instance,
though he must visualise a scene as he writes it, he
should not visualise it completely, as a novelist
should. The novelist may perceive vividly the
faces of his personages, but if the playwright insists
on seeing faces, either he will see the faces of real
actors and hamper himself by moulding the scene to
suit such real actors, or he will perceive imaginary
faces, and the ultimate interpretation will perforce
falsify his work and nullify his intentions. This
aspect of the subject might well be much amplified,
but only for a public of practising dramatists.
VI
When the play is “finished,”
the processes of collaboration have yet to begin.
The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the
most desolating part of his toil awaits him.
I do not refer to the business of arranging with a
theatrical manager for the production of the play.
For, though that generally partakes of the nature of
tragedy, it also partakes of the nature of amusing
burlesque, owing to the fact that theatrical managers
are no doubt inevitably theatrical.
Nevertheless, even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming
the slightest interest in anything more vital to the
stage than the box-office, is himself in some degree
a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist
that a play is not a play till it is performed.
The manager reads the play, and, to the dramatist’s
astonishment, reads quite a different play from that
which the dramatist imagines he wrote. In particular
the manager reads a play which can scarcely hope to
succeed indeed, a play against whose chances
of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.
It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees
failure in a manuscript, and very seldom success.
The manager’s profoundest instinct self-preservation
again! is to refuse a play; if he accepts,
it is against the grain, against his judgment and
out of a mad spirit of adventure. Some of the
most glittering successes have been rehearsed in an
atmosphere of settled despair. The dramatist naturally
feels an immense contempt for the opinions artistic
and otherwise of the manager, and he is therein justified.
The manager’s vocation is not to write plays,
nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the
rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the
vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to
be pitiably delusive. The manager’s true
and only vocation is to refrain from producing plays.
Despite all this, however, the manager has already
collaborated in the play. The dramatist sees it
differently now. All sorts of new considerations
have been presented to him. Not a word has been
altered; but it is noticeably another play. Which
is merely to say that the creative work on it which
still remains to be done has been more accurately
envisaged. This strange experience could not
happen to a novel, because when a novel is written
it is finished.
And when the director of rehearsals,
or producer, has been chosen, and this priceless and
mysterious person has his first serious confabulation
with the author, then at once the play begins to assume
new shapes contours undreamt of by the
author till that startling moment. And even if
the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals,
similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the
author as a producer is a different fellow from the
author as author. The producer is up against
realities. He, first, renders the play concrete,
gradually condenses its filmy vapours into a solid
element.... He suggests the casting. “What
do you think of X. for the old man?” asks the
producer. The author is staggered. Is it
conceivable that so renowned a producer can have so
misread and misunderstood the play? X. would be
preposterous as the old man. But the producer
goes on talking. And suddenly the author sees
possibilities in X. But at the same time he sees a
different play from what he wrote. And quite
probably he sees a more glorious play. Quite
probably he had not suspected how great a dramatist
he is.... Before the first rehearsal is called,
the play, still without a word altered, has gone through
astounding creative transmutations; the author
recognises in it some likeness to his beloved child,
but it is the likeness of a first cousin.
At the first rehearsal, and for many
rehearsals, to an extent perhaps increasing, perhaps
decreasing, the dramatist is forced into an apologetic
and self-conscious mood; and his mien is something
between that of a criminal who has committed a horrid
offence and that of a father over the crude body of
a new-born child. Now in truth he deeply realises
that the play is a collaboration. In extreme cases
he may be brought to see that he himself is one of
the less important factors in the collaboration.
The first preoccupation of the interpreters is not
with his play at all, but quite rightly with
their own careers; if they were not honestly convinced
that their own careers were the chief genuine excuse
for the existence of the theatre and the play they
would not act very well. But, more than that,
they do not regard his play as a sufficient vehicle
for the furtherance of their careers. At the most
favourable, what they secretly think is that if they
are permitted to exercise their talents on his play
there is a chance that they may be able to turn it
into a sufficient vehicle for the furtherance of their
careers. The attitude of every actor towards his
part is: “My part is not much of a part
as it stands, but if my individuality is allowed to
get into free contact with it, I may make something
brilliant out of it.” Which attitude is
a proper attitude, and an attitude in my opinion justified
by the facts of the case. The actor’s phrase
is that he creates a part, and he is right.
He completes the labour of creation begun by the author
and continued by the producer, and if reasonable liberty
is not accorded to him if either the author
or the producer attempts to do too much of the creative
work the result cannot be satisfactory.
As the rehearsals proceed the play
changes from day to day. However autocratic the
producer, however obstinate the dramatist, the play
will vary at each rehearsal like a large cloud in
a gentle wind. It is never the same play for
two days together. Nor is this surprising, seeing
that every day and night a dozen, or it may be two
dozen, human beings endowed with the creative gift
are creatively working on it. Every dramatist
who is candid with himself I do not suggest
that he should be candid to the theatrical world well
knows that though his play is often worsened by his
collaborators it is also often improved, and
improved in the most mysterious and dazzling manner without
a word being altered. Producer and actors do
not merely suggest possibilities, they execute them.
And the author is confronted by artistic phenomena
for which lawfully he may not claim credit. On
the other hand, he may be confronted by inartistic
phenomena in respect to which lawfully he is blameless,
but which he cannot prevent; a rehearsal is like a
battle, certain persons are theoretically
in control, but in fact the thing principally fights
itself. And thus the creation goes on until the
dress-rehearsal, when it seems to have come to a stop.
And the dramatist lying awake in the night reflects,
stoically, fatalistically: “Well, that
is the play that they have made of my play!”
And he may be pleased or he may be disgusted.
But if he attends the first performance he cannot
fail to notice, after the first few minutes of it,
that he was quite mistaken, and that what the actors
are performing is still another play. The audience
is collaborating.