Let it be for ever understood that State theatres and State performances never have had, never will have, any real connexion with original dramatic art.  That is one reason why I am against a national theatre, whose influence on the drama is bound to be sinister.  To count the performance of “Money” as an insult to living artists is to lose sight of a main factor in the case.  The State and living art must be mutually opposed, for the reason that the State must, and quite rightly does, represent the average of opinion.  For an original artist to expect aid from the State is silly; it is also wrong.  In expressing a particular regard for the feelings of musical comedy, and in announcing beforehand his intention of being present at the first night of the new Gaiety masterpiece, the King was properly fulfilling his duties as a monarch towards dramatic art.  Art is not the whole of life, and to adore musical comedy is not a crime.  The best thing original artists can do is to keep their perspective undistorted.

A PLAY OF TCHEHKOFF’S

[8 June ’11]

At last, thanks to the Stage Society, we have had a good representative play of Anton Tchehkoff on the London stage.  Needless to say, Tchehkoff was done in the provinces long ago.  “The Cherry Orchard,” I have been told, is Tchehkoff’s dramatic masterpiece, and I can well believe it.  But it is a dangerous thing to present foreign masterpieces to a West End audience, and the directors of the Stage Society discovered, or rediscovered, this fact on Sunday night last.  The reception of “The Cherry Orchard” was something like what the reception of Ibsen’s plays used to be twenty years ago.  It was scarcely even a mixed reception.  There could be no mistake about the failure of the play to please the vast majority of the members of the Society.  At the end of the second act signs of disapproval were very manifest indeed, and the exodus from the theatre began.  A competent authority informed me that at the end of the third act half the audience had departed; but in the narrative fever of the moment the competent authority may have slightly exaggerated.  Certain it is that multitudes preferred Aldwych and the restaurant concerts, or even their own homes, to Tchehkoff’s play.  And as the evening was the Sabbath you may judge the extreme degree of their detestation of the play.

* * * * *

A director of the Stage Society said to me on the Monday:  “If our people won’t stand it, it has no chance, because we have the pick here.”  I didn’t contradict him, but I by no means agreed that he had the pick there.  The managing committee of the Society is a very enlightened body; but the mass of the members is just as stupid as any other mass.  Its virtue is that it pays subscriptions, thus enabling the committee to make experiments and to place before the forty or fifty persons in London who really can judge a play the sort of play which is worthy of curiosity.