Bonamy Dobree

“ It would be useless for me to write down a typical drama, for the reader of to-day would not follow it, nor, for that matter, relish it more than he does those quaint old seventeenth-century plays where women dress up as men, and blood so freely flows. ”

“ Sometimes the shadows would assume solid shape and stand up as live beings, seeming to detach themselves from the dome so as not to appear in the least like those extravagant persons who populate the ceilings of many of our own theatres: and among them was one singularly graceful form which seemed to dominate the rest, and whose motions I could not help following, so great was the pleasure they gave me. ”

“ This, besides preventing many from entering into the proper mood, destroyed that singleness in the audience without which the highest suggestible state cannot be reached: for an emotion is infectious only if the units of the crowd are ready to agree together, as I have often noticed on first nights when the friends of an author try to sweep the critics [16] away on a tide of noisy enthusiasm. And further, emotion caught on the wing is always stronger than when it is the result of deliberate thought. ”

“ With the glasses the illusion was complete, and I could hardly believe I was not re-dreaming the scene I had just witnessed, except that the producer could stop the play at will, or even go back to a phrase or gesture to point out the errors of voice or movement of which the actors had been [38] guilty. He could also show how a gesture would be more effective if performed at a greater or less speed; and how admirable this method was I could judge from the looks of pleasure or mortification on the actors’ faces as they saw themselves displayed. ”

“ I made bold to tell him that his notion was not so new as he imagined, and that we too had actors who disbelieved that words had any plausible meaning apart from the emotion the actor could register through them: [34] men (as a rule well set up, or even bulky, since these are always the most passionate) who by a clever alteration in stress, or an abrupt cleavage of a sentence in the middle, could effectively cancel any extraneous idea the words of an author might interpose between the feelings of the player and the minds of the audience. ”

“ Man, being in each case a unique individual, was fitted for work more noble than that of a mere interpreter, or conduit pipe from an author to an audience, and the contrary view had been the grand error of all producers from the time of Shakespeare almost to his own day. ”

“ Words, he said, conveyed nothing to them unless accompanied with appropriate action: and this he ascribed to the fact that an [39] audience was a crowd, and therefore followed the normal law of mass psychology in being much stupider and more primitive than a single person. The actor, therefore, had to deal with the simplest objects or ideas, indicating them by a kind of airy drawing. The connection between them, the grammar or the syntax as it were (so he was kind enough to phrase it for my understanding) was portrayed by the actors’ emotion as expressed in gesture or tone. ”

“ The camera through which one looked was simply a stereoscopic glass directed on a double film screen, and the pads were the telephone receivers through which one heard the voices of the actors, which seemed to come from their mouths. The plays themselves were most dramatic in character, since their object was to endue the spectator with a highly disturbing emotion in a minimum of time. They were therefore very allusive, and I should have found it hard to understand many of them if the gestures and tones of the actors had not been profoundly striking. ”

“ This also had the extra advantage of avoiding that dull monotony—for what is art without an element of surprise?—so often to be seen in our actors, who think they have achieved a final rendering, and attempt day after day to repeat a thing which can never really occur even twice.
I was much satisfied at what I had seen and learnt at the Academy, but was made slightly melancholy by the thought that if ever I should return to my own time, I should find our actors and actresses much below the level of what I had come to expect from their calling. ”

“ The shape of the theatre had been chosen for acoustic reasons, on account [12] of certain properties of the hyperbola, which I had not the mathematics to understand, but which, Fabian said, had been utilised in the third (1914–1918) of the five great wars of European settlement, for finding out by their report, the exact post of hidden guns. It was this which had enabled the fairfusser to make the last cry seem to come from the void; the other speeches had merely been delivered by variously placed loud-speakers, connected in due turn with a wireless gramophone. ”

“ For [56] when we are too much troubled by our affairs we may usefully go to art for escape or refreshment. There were a few booths in the more fashionable parts, for errand boys, journalists, and taxi-drivers, while it was found that those in the dentists’ quarter were much patronised: for in going to have our teeth seen to, if we do not like to be late, yet we shrink from entering the place until the last moment, although the waiting rooms are made homely and cheerful with time-tables, comic papers, and copies of Academy pictures. ”

“ The notion was for the professors to find out facts, for the fairfussers to apply them, and for the students to carry them out: and if it may occur to the reader that the workers in one side paid small heed to the discoveries of the rest, a little consideration will show that this is all to the good; for slavishly to accept the opinions of others can never lead to clarity of thought, and the warden was anxious to maintain in every inmate that active spirit of self-reliance without which no advance can be made in any of the sciences. ”

“ That was why plays with few words were better than plays with many words, as in the latter case the number of gestures became very tiring both to the eyes of the audience and the muscles of the actors. ”

“ The object of a drama, Fabian enlightened me, was to summon up a given state of [4] being, pure or complex; and once the fairfusser knew what the clutch was for, it was his business to produce the right emotion. I began to speak of emotion for its own sake, but Ierne hurriedly checked me, saying that I would shock anyone who might overhear, for there was no biological value in emotion for its own sake. ”

“ This booklet is Chapter Twenty-three of a work already largely in being, but of which very little will be published in the reader’s lifetime; for though the author has none of that false respect for the wishes of the dead and the privacies of contemporaries which still causes so much avoidable inconvenience in social life, that feeling of delicacy towards posterity, now so active an influence as sometimes to shrink from exposing its members even to existence, hinders his speaking fully. ”

“ Its dangers, however, now only beginning to be recognised, were fully taken into account in 2,100, for it was seen that the claims of society were incompatible with an emotion then relegated to the songs of derivative poets. Already we know that the battle between the self and the ideal social self gives rise to the most frightful diseases, but in our day we only try to cure the unhealthy symptom instead of going to the root of the matter and abolishing the cause. ”

“ This constructor was good enough to say that he was quite sure our age had not been so dark as was commonly supposed, but that, at least in our classical plays, which had been in verse, a form which compels a certain manner of speech, he thought the ‘pure’ actor must have met with difficulties hardly to be overcome. ”

“ In going about the streets I had often noticed, especially in the business quarters, what appeared to be shops or booths, not unlike those places one may see abroad, where men sit in rows to have their boots polished. ”

“ I was much puzzled as to his meaning until I learnt that ‘clutch’ was the name given to a drama of the kind about to take place, where everything was under the [3] control of one man, the ‘fairfusser’ as he is called, who designs the movement, the emotional sequences, the voices, and whatever else is needed. ”

“ I think too, that if one is to have puppets at all, they should be either grotesque or fairy-like, and these were neither, resembling instead those early Egyptian or Indian sculptures we have so far out-distanced, or those Byzantine paintings, which, once thought beautiful, would look so oddly on the walls of Burlington House. ”

“ Medical men were themselves allowed to buy as many tickets as they liked, and a large percentage of the audience was always composed of them, because they wished to observe the effects of the cure upon their patients. It was [50] not without difficulty that Fabian was able to get us the needful pass, and it was only after representing to the authorities that any account of their age which omitted so beneficial a device would be very faulty, that I was granted it. ”

“ To test the movements appropriate to various emotions, this professor had invented a machine, which, by reason of the changes in electrical resistance a body undergoes under the action of the passions, recorded the feelings of any person subjected to it. ”