DRAMA from 1879 to 1888, produced Mr A. W. Pinero’s first play of any consequence, The Money-Spinner (1881), and afterwards The Squire (1882) and The Hobby Horse (1887). Mr and Mrs Bancroft, who, after entirely rebuilding the Haymarket Theatre, managed it from 1880 till their retirement in 1885, produced in 1883 Mr Pinero’s Lords and Commons ; and Messrs Clayton and Cecil produced at the Court Theatre between 1885 and 1887 his three brilliant farces The Magistrate, The Schoolmistress, and Dandy Dick, which, with the sentimental comedy, Sweet Lavender, produced at Terry’s Theatre in 1888, assured his position as an original and fertile dramatic humorist of no small literary power. It is to be noted, however, that Mr Pinero was almost the only original playwright represented under the Bancroft, Hare-Kendal, and Clayton - Cecil managements, which relied for the rest upon adaptations ,and revivals. Adaptations of French vaudevilles were the .staple productions of Mr Charles Wyndham’s management .at the Criterion from its beginning in 1876 until 1893, when he first produced an original play of any importance. When Mr Beerbohm Tree went into management at the Haymarket in 1887, he still relied largely on plays of foreign origin. Mr George Alexander’s first managerial ventures (Avenue Theatre, 1890) were two adaptations from the French. Until well on in the ’eighties, indeed, adaptation from the French was held the normal occupation of the British playwright, and original composition a mere episode. Robertson, Byron, Albery, Gilbert, Tom Taylor, Charles Reade, Herman Merivale, G. W. Godfrey, all produced numerous adaptations; Mr Sydney Grundy was for twenty years occupied almost exclusively in this class of work; Mr Pinero himself has adapted more than one French play. To this day the managers have not quite unlearnt the habit of regarding Paris as the natural fountainhead of English drama. The ’eighties, then, may on the whole be regarded as showing a very gradual decline in the predominance of France on the English stage, and an equally slow revival of originality, so far as comedy and drama were concerned, manifesting itself mainly in the plays of Mr Pinero. The reaction against French influence, however, was no less apparent in the domain of melodrama and operetta than in that of comedy and drama. Until well on in the ’seventies, D’Ennery and his disciples, adapted and imitated by Boucicault and others, ruled the melodramatic stage. The reaction asserted itself in two quarters—in the East End at the Grecian Theatre, and in the West End at the Princess’s. In The World, produced at Drury Lane in 1880, Paul Meritt (d. 1895) and Henry Pettitt (d. 1893) brought to the West End the “Grecian” type of popular drama; and at Drury Lane it has survived in the elaborately spectacular form imparted to it by Sir Augustus Harris, who managed that theatre from 1879 till his death in 1896. The production of Mr G. R. Sims’s Lights o’ London at the Princess’s in 1881, under Mr Wilson Barrett’s management, also marked a new departure; and the two streams of melodrama flowed together in a long series of popular plays at the Adelphi Theatre, from about 1882 to almost the end of the century. The “Adelphi” as opposed to the “ Drury Lane ” type of drama has recently died out in the West End, apparently because a host of suburban theatres drew away its audiences. Of all these English melodramas, only one, The Silver King, by Mr H. A. Jones (Princess’s, 1882) could for a moment compare in invention or technical skill with the French dramas they supplanted. The fact remains, however, that oven on this lowest level of dramatic art the current of the time set decisively towards home-made pictures of English hfe, however crude and puerile. For twenty-five years, from 1865 to 1890, the English
517 stage was overrun with French operettas of the school of Offenbach. Hastily adapted by slovenly hacks, their librettos (often witty in the original) became incredible farragos of metreless doggrel and punning ineptitude. The great majority of them are now so utterly forgotten that one scarcely realizes, until one looks into the records, how in their heyday they swarmed on every hand. The reaction began in 1875 with the performance at the Royalty Theatre of Trial by Jury, by Mr W. S. Gilbert and Mr (afterwards Sir) Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900). This was the prelude to that brilliant series of witty and melodious extravaganzas which began with The Sorcerer at the Opera Comique Theatre in 1877, but has been mainly associated with the Savoy Theatre, opened by Mr D’Oyly Carte {d. 1901) in 1881. Little by little the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (of which the most famous, perhaps, were H.M.S. Pinafore, 1878, Patience, 1881, and The Mikado, 1885) undermined the popularity of the French opera-bouffes, and at the same time that of the indigenous “ burlesques ” which, graceful enough in the hands of their inventor J. R. Planche (1796-1880), had become mere incoherent jumbles of buffoonery, devoid alike of dramatic ingenuity and of literary form. When, early in the ’nineties, the collaboration between Mr Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan became intermittent, and the vogue of the Savoy somewhat declined, a new class of extravaganza arose, under the designation of “musical comedy ” or “ musical farce.” It first took form in a piece called Ln Town, by Messrs “Adrian Ross” and Osmond Carr (Prince of Wales’s Theatre, 1892), and rapidly became very popular. In these plays the scene and costumes are almost always modern, though sometimes exotic, and the prose dialogue, setting forth an attenuated and entirely negligible plot, is frequently interrupted by musical numbers. The lyrics are often very clever pieces of rhyming, totally different from the inane doggrel of the old opera-bouffes and burlesques. In other respects there is little to be said for the literary or intellectual quality of “musical farce”; but being an entirely English (or Anglo-American) product, it falls into line with the other indications we have noted of the general decline—one might almost say extinction—of French influence on the English stage. To what causes are we to trace this gradual disuse of adaptation % In the domain of modern comedy and drama, to two causes acting simultaneously : the decline in France of the method of Scribe, which produced “well-made,” exportable plays, more or less suited to any climate and environment; and the rise in England of a generation of playwrights more original, thoughtful, and able than their predecessors. It is not at all to be taken for granted that the falling off in the supply of exportable plays meant a decline in the absolute merit of French drama. That point is discussed in the section French Drama below. The historian of the future may very possibly regard the movement in France, no less than the movement in England, as a step in advance, and may even see in the two movements co-ordinate manifestations of one tendency. Be this as it may, the fact is certain that as the playwrights of the Second Empire gradually died off and were succeeded by the authors of the “ new comedy,” plays which would bear transplantation became ever fewer and farther between. It is worthy of note that (a few mere buffooneries apart) most of the adaptations produced since 1890 have been from comedies and novels of a very much older date—works of Labiche and of Dumas pere wad fils. Attempts to acclimatize the poetical drama of the present generation—Pour la Couronne, Le Chemineau, Cyrano de Bergerac—have all been more or less unsuccessful.
