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Page VI.
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W HRESIDE THEATKL
Bs Joor Brown
WHE regular playwright is now a
tures wealth and power and so tragi¬
rarity. There are few, if any,
cally fails to distribute the former
to whom one can look with
or control the latter. Mr. St. John
certainty for one or two pieces
Ervine's People of Our Class (Allen
a vear, as one could look in the
and Unwin, 3s. 6d.) is a study of
days when Barrie and Sutro, Pinero
cramped lives in an English seaside
and Jones, Galsworthy and Shaw, and
town where the young insurgent will
Somerset Maugham were in full
to live and to make headway finds
practice. Que reason for this is the
itself confronted by stiff barricades of
age, inertia, and snobbishness. Here,
lack of established actor-managers or of
too, is a play which urgently concerns
u management with a policy; even the
this world of our own experience.
most successful author may find himself
This, no doubt, explains why no
compelled to hawk a play round in
manager has 80 fal Stugen
search of finance forits production.
This is tiresome and depressing. The
dramatist will almost certainly be able
to earn large sums of money as à pur¬
veyor of dialogue for the films. That
task will probably bore him, but it is
less boring (and far more profitable)
than writing plavs without any
Another
assurance of production.
discouragement is the waywardness of
public taste. An established dramatist.
of the last generation was almost
certain of a three months’ run on his
name and that of his actor-manager
unless his play was a hopeless mess.
Now there is no such certainty, and the
costs of “nursing“' a piece are so high
that plays even by the leading authors
are very frequently withdrawn at once.
In the face of this disconragement and
of the temptation to take their labours
elsewhere, our dramatists are only
intermittently vocal, and this last year
has been an especially poor one for
British authorship in the playhouse.
Consider the evidence. Mr. Gollancz
usually has an attractive volume of the
Fear’s drama, but his Fümous Plays
of 1936 (7s. 6d.), while still attractive,
contains only one native piece out of
six. This is the libretto of a musical
skit on the mid-Victorians,“ The Two
Bouquets,“ by Eleanor and Herbert
Farjeon, gay enough but scarcely im¬
pressive as the sole British con¬
other pieces are
The
tribution.
Schnitzler’s“ Professor Bernhardi.?
good drama of debate on the anti¬
Semitie problem,"Parnell, by Mrs.
Schaufller, an American authoress, a
Chentrieallgattractive studgof Parnell's
deeline and fall whose historical
accuracy has been challenged,“ Boy
Meets Girl.
another American
burlesque of life and work in Holly¬
wood, lively but not so brilliant or ruth¬
less in its satire as “ Ouce in a Life¬