THE THEATRE
WHEN I wrote in these pages some months ago that there was no reason to expect any great acting before the season ended, I had no intention of saying, as some indignant critics have assumed, that there could not and would not be great acting. The offending words were so qualified as to indicate that in the present state of the theatre great acting was not likely to be demanded by either the producers or their audiences. To that I stand committed, and am grateful to Broadway for bearing me out.
On the whole this may be a good thing for the stage. The second-rate practitioners of an art are the sure heralds of its decay; let them flourish in all their arrogance, let them be called great, and their successors are already round the corner. I am the more convinced that something new and revolutionary is coming into the theatre by another circumstance. Ten years ago a critic might have written that there was no reason to expect any great plays, because neither the producer nor the audience demanded them. He would have been amply justified; for a few flashes of genius might have come, but the long run would have shown that the conventional play is declining rapidly. Already the theatre is beginning to live by other things.
It was Gorki's Night Lodging which gave the clue to this, and gave it with a most moving power and beauty. I may say at once that this was the most impressive production of the season; it lacked the living beauty of Mr. Jones' investiture for Richard III, but it was much better acted than that play; it lacked the poetic beauty of the Medea, but it had a finer sense of rhythm and pace in the production. A slightly sanctimonious air was thrown about the wandering peasant who, by all of Gorki's implications, ought to have been of the most simple; but this was virtually the only surrender (an unconscious one) to the prevalent conceptions of character-acting. The rest of the play, amazingly décousu, had the irregular terrifying beat of life; for all its apparent dispersal of interest, it possessed an almost intolerable concentration of emotion;
