In The Benefit of the Doubt, by Sir Arthur Pinero, we have a crisply dramatic opening of the very best type.  A few words from a contemporary criticism may serve to indicate the effect it produced on a first-night audience—­

We are in the thick of the action at once, or at least in the thick of the interest, so that the exposition, instead of being, so to speak, a mere platform from which the train is presently to start, becomes an inseparable part of the movement.  The sense of dramatic irony is strongly and yet delicately suggested.  We foresee a “peripety,” apparent prosperity suddenly crumbling into disaster, within the act itself; and, when it comes, it awakens our sympathy and redoubles our interest.

Almost the same words might be applied to the opening of The Climbers, by the late Clyde Fitch, one of the many individual scenes which make one deeply regret that Mr. Fitch did not live to do full justice to his remarkable talent.

One of the ablest of recent openings is that of Mr. Galsworthy’s Silver Box.  The curtain rises upon a solid, dull, upper-middle-class dining-room, empty and silent, the electric lights burning, the tray with whiskey, siphon and cigarette-box marking the midnight hour.  Then we have the stumbling, fumbling entrance of Jack Barthwick, beatifically drunk, his maudlin babble, and his ill-omened hospitality to the haggard loafer who follows at his heels.  Another example of a high-pitched opening scene may be found in Mr. Perceval Landon’s The House Opposite.  Here we have a midnight parting between a married woman and her lover, in the middle of which the man, glancing at the lighted window of the house opposite, sees a figure moving in such a way as to suggest that a crime is being perpetrated.  As a matter of fact, an old man is murdered, and his housekeeper is accused of the crime.  The hero, if so he can be called, knows that it was a man, not a woman, who was in the victim’s room that night; and the problem is:  how can he give his evidence without betraying a woman’s secret by admitting his presence in her house at midnight?  I neither praise nor blame this class of story; I merely cite the play as one in which we plunge straight into the crisis, without any introductory period of tranquillity.

The interest of Mr. Landon’s play lay almost wholly in the story.  There was just enough character in it to keep the story going, so to speak.  The author might, on the other hand, have concentrated our attention on character, and made his play a soul-tragedy; but in that case it would doubtless have been necessary to take us some way backward in the heroine’s antecedents and the history of her marriage.  In other words, if the play had gone deeper into human nature, the preliminaries of the crisis would have had to be traced in some detail, possibly in a first act, introductory to the actual opening, but more probably, and better, in an exposition following the crisply touched einleitende Akkord.  This brings us to the question how an exposition may best be managed.