Touch and Go | Page 4

you give me for my syllogism? Not a slap in the eye, I hope.
We stick to our guns. The seats are cheap. That has a nasty proletarian look about it. But appearances are deceptive. The proletariat isn't poor. Everybody is poor except Capital and Labour. Between these upper and nether millstones great numbers of decent people are squeezed.
The seats are cheap: in decency's name. Nobody wants to swank, to sit in the front of a box like a geranium on a window-sill--"the cynosure of many eyes." Nobody wants to profiteer. We all feel that it is as humiliating to pay high prices as to charge them. No man consents in his heart to pay high prices unless he feels that what he pays with his right hand he will get back with his left, either out of the pocket of a man who isn't looking, or out of the envy of the poor neighbour who IS looking, but can't afford the figure. The seats are cheap. Why should A People, fabulous and lofty giraffe, want to charge or pay high prices? If it were THE PEOPLE now.--But it isn't. It isn't Plebs, the proletariat. The seats are cheap.
The plays are good. Pah!--this has a canting smell. Any play is good to the man who likes to look at it. And at that rate Chu Chin Chow is extra-super-good. What about your GOOD plays? Whose good? PFUI to your goodness!
That minor premiss is a bad egg: it will hatch no bird. Good plays? You might as well say mimsy bomtittle plays, you'd be saying as much. The plays are--don't say good or you'll be beaten. The plays--the plays of A People's Theatre are--oh heaven, what are they?--not popular nor populous nor plebian nor proletarian nor folk nor parish plays. None of that adjectival spawn.
The only clue-word is People's for all that. A People's---Chaste word, it will bring forth no adjective. The plays of A People's Theatre are People's plays. The plays of A People's Theatre are plays about people.
It doesn't look much, at first sight. After all--people! Yes, People! Not THE PEOPLE, i.e. Plebs, nor yet the Upper Ten. People. Neither Piccoli nor Grandi in our republic. People.
People, ah God! Not mannequins. Not lords nor proletariats nor bishops nor husbands nor co-respondents nor virgins nor adultresses nor uncles nor noses. Not even white rabbits nor presidents. People.
Men who are somebody, not men who are something. Men who HAPPEN to be bishops or co-respondents, women who happen to be chaste, just as they happen to freckle, because it's one of their innumerable odd qualities. Even men who happen, by the way, to have long noses. But not noses on two legs, not burly pairs of gaiters, stuffed and voluble, not white meringues of chastity, not incarnations of co- respondence. Not proletariats, petitioners, president's, noses, bits of fluff. Heavens, what an assortment of bits! And aren't we sick of them!
People, I say. And after all, it's saying something. It's harder to be a human being than to be a president or a bit of fluff. You can be a president, or a bit of fluff, or even a nose, by clockwork. Given a role, a PART, you can play it by clockwork. But you can't have a clockwork human being.
We're dead sick of parts. It's no use your protesting that there is a man behind the nose. We can't see him, and he can't see himself. Nothing but nose. Neither can you make us believe there is a man inside the gaiters. He's never showed his head yet.
It may be, in real life, the gaiters wear the man, as the nose wears Cyrano. It may be Sir Auckland Geddes and Mr. J. H. Thomas are only clippings from the illustrated press. It may be that a miner is a complicated machine for cutting coal and voting on a ballot-paper. It may be that coal-owners are like the petit bleu arrangement, a system of vacuum tubes for whooshing Bradburys about from one to the other.
It may be that everybody delights in bits, in parts, that the public insists on noses, gaiters, white rabbits, bits of fluff, automata and gewgaws. If they do, then let 'em. Chu Chin Chow for ever!
In spite of them all: A People's Theatre. A People's Theatre shows men, and not parts. Not bits, nor bundles of bits. A whole bunch of roles tied into one won't make an individual. Though gaiters perish, we will have men.
Although most miners may be pick-cum-shovel-cum-ballot implements, and no more, still, among miners there must be two or three living individuals. The same among the masters. The majority are suction- tubes for Bradburys. But is this Sodom of Industrialism there are surely ten men, all told. My poor little withered grain of mustard seed, I