The Black Cat | Page 3

with less of the traditional theatrical-academic element. The
"well-made play" has itself undergone evolution since the days when it
was an aphorism that not what is said but what is done on the stage is

the essential thing. This of course is at once true and false, like every
other truism. Without action there can be no play; and a play may be
made fairly intelligible without a single spoken word, just as a scene
from history or fiction may be quite recognisably depicted in a few
symbolic lines, dots, and dashes, though no single human figure be
decently drawn.
We must not, however, forget that action itself is language. What is
called the action of a play is simply a story told by the movements of
the players. But when we see a man stabbed, or a woman kissed, our
curiosity is excited. We want to know something more about the people
whose actions we see. This, indeed, may be roughly told by gesture and
facial expression, which are themselves language; but, finally, to
understand more than the barest outline of the story, we are forced to
demand words. And the more we are interested in human nature the
more we want to understand the thoughts, emotions, motives,
characters, of the personages in action before us. Hence by gradual
steps have come our latest attempts at studies of complex characters, in
their struggle to solve the problems of life; or what are objected to as
"problem plays." Well, why object? Every play, from _Charley's Aunt_
to Hamlet, is a problem play. It is merely a matter of degree. Every play
deals with the struggle of men and women to solve some problem of
life, great or small: to outwit evil fortune. It may be merely to persuade
a couple of pretty girls to stay to luncheon in your college rooms, when
their chaperon has not turned up. It may be something more important.
The more interest the public and the dramatist take in human
nature--that is to say, the better developed they are as regards dramatic
sympathy--the more, rich, vivid, and subtle will be the play of character
and passion, in the drama demanded and produced. In a word, the less
wooden-pated and wooden-hearted they become, the less mechanical
and commonplace will their drama be.
We are slowly emerging from the puppet-show conception of drama.
Our dramatists are beginning to do more than refurbish the old puppets,
and move them about the stage according to the rules of the
"well-made" play. They are not content, like their predecessors, to

leave their characters quite at the mercy of the actor who, in "creating"
them, gave them whatever small resemblance to humanity they may
have possessed. And as the play gains in vitality, the playwright begins
to feel the absolute necessity for writing decent dialogue--not mere
stage dialect that may be scamped and ranted ad libitum by the "star" to
suit his own taste, or want of it, but real dialogue, which, while ideally
reflecting the colloquial language of the day, taxes the intelligence and
feeling of the actor to deliver properly.
This means real progress; for the dialogue is the very life of the play. It
alone can bring out the essential import of the situation, the relation of
character to character, at any given moment. An action, an incident,
may have a thousand different shades of meaning or motive. Language,
tone, and gesture give it its precise value. Plot and situations are at best
but the skeleton; character and emotion are the flesh and blood. The
treatment is everything.
We still want more of life, of the vital movements of our own time,
upon the stage; and we shall get it by degrees. Sentimental melodrama,
with its male puppet, who is hero or villain, its female puppet, who is
angel or devil, may still continue to flourish among us; for it still
satisfies the natural craving for romance, ideality, which the drama is
bound to supply. But these things belong to a decaying phase of
romance; and our so-called realism is but the first wave of a new
romantic movement, on the stage as elsewhere. For when the old ideals
become decrepit, we must go back to nature to get the stuff wherewith
to make new ones.
As our dramatists advance with the times, people begin to go to the
theatre to see plays, and not merely an actor in a part. The "well-made
play," which was a piece of mechanical contrivance into which the
puppets were ingeniously fitted, may some day develop into a work of
art--a thing born rather than made--growing up like a flower in the
imagination of the dramatist.
When that day comes, the actor, who used to "create" the part, will
have to be content to