Player (theatre)

“ All further attempt to describe the progress of this play, and its effect upon the minds of the spectators, we feel to be a mere impertinence. It seems indeed to ourselves, as in imagination we after eye it, a play within a play—where all is like romance. The audience, that theatre, the players, that "foremost man of all the world" speaking his own words; all is like the fabric of some vision seen before,—a shadowy recollection of some brilliant hour set apart from the dull stream of life, and that too, during a glorious epoch. ”

“ How, during the performance of the Passion Play, they act and sing and stand about upon the uncovered stage without taking the slightest notice of the downpour of water that is soaking their robes and running from their streaming hair, to make great pools upon the boards; and how the audience, in the cheaper, unroofed portion of the theatre, sit with equal stoicism, watching them, no one ever dreaming even of putting up an umbrella—or, if he does dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude awakening from the sticks of those behind. ”

“ The long laugh that sometimes keeps the business of the stage waiting is only a sign of the exchange of parts that in the theatre every night takes place. The audience are the players. Their audience on the stage are bound to watch them, to understand them, to anticipate them, and to divine them. But once known and their character established in relation to a particular play, the audience—what is called the audience—need give no further trouble. They themselves cannot alter; they are fixed and compelled by the tremendous force of averages. ”

“ As they act they make up their play. The theater becomes the spot that seems a good place—either spiritually, physically, or by force of tradition—in which to give the play. In time comes a division of labor. One of the actors begins to specialize on the play. This actor studies how he can develop the form of the play to make better use of the theater; and then, with some leader among the actors, he begins to speculate on how to change the theater in order to give more scope to the playwright and to the player who interprets him. ”

“ A young ball-player looks on his first spring training trip as a stage-struck young woman regards the theatre. ”

“ A "one-play" company offers the worst possible chance to the beginner. The more plays there are, the more you learn from observation, as well as from personal effort, to make the parts you play seem as unlike one another as possible. A day like this admits of no drives, no calls, no "teas"; you see, then, a theatrical life is not one long picnic.
If there is one among my readers to whom the dim and dingy half-light of the theatre is dearer than the God-given radiance of the sunlight ”

“ ON SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other day—I know not by what chance it was preserved so long—tempts me to call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very touching in these old remembrances. They make us think how we once used to read a Play Bill—not, as now peradventure, singling out a favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest ”

“ But I have it in my power to make it vastly more interesting than any theatre has ever been."
"You have a play?" the manager inquired; amending this, after another glance, to "You know of a play?"
"Play? No. I'm not troubling about plays," said the caller. "Plays—what are plays? No, I'm bringing you a live idea."
"But I don't wish to make any change in the style of my performances," said the manager. "If you're thinking of a new kind of entertainment for me—super-cinema, or that 'real revue' which authors are always threatening me with—I don't want it. ”

“ In exterior scenes where, for example, trees or clumps of shrubbery answer in a measure to the old "wings," the old terminology may not be quite meaningless; but it is far better eschewed. It is a good general rule to avoid, so far as possible, expressions which show that the author has a stage scene, and not an episode of real life, before his eyes. Men of the theatre are the last to be impressed by theatrical jargon; and when the play comes to be printed, the general reader is merely bewildered and annoyed by technicalities, which tend, moreover, to disturb his illusion. ”

“ A play is a representation, by actors, on a stage, before an audience, of a struggle between individual human wills, motivated by emotion rather than by intellect, and expressed in terms of objective action. ”

“ The painter may paint, the sculptor model, the lyric poet sing, simply to please himself, [5] but the drama has no meaning except in relation to an audience. It is a portrayal of life by means of a mechanism so devised as to bring it home to a considerable number of people assembled in a given place. "The public," it has been well said, "constitutes the theatre." The moment a playwright confines his work within the two or three hours' limit prescribed by Western custom for a theatrical performance, he is currying favour with an audience. ”

“ There are two points of routine on which I am compelled to speak in no uncertain voice--two practices which I hold to be almost equally condemnable. In the first place, no playwright who understands the evolution of the modern theatre can nowadays use in his stage-directions the abhorrent jargon of the early nineteenth century. ”

“ However, if the multitude should begin to shout "Out with the fool!" the danger becomes sufficiently serious for good taste to permit the gentleman to withdraw. During the performance, the common people were supplied with beer and apples, of which the actors also frequently partook; while the gentlemen, on their side, smoked their pipes and played at cards; indeed, it was not at all unusual for the elegant habitues of the theatre to begin a game at cards before the commencement of the play. ”

“ We may now observe that, in the third place, the essential nature of the drama is affected greatly by the fact that it is destined to be set before an audience. The dramatist must appeal at once to a heterogeneous multitude of people; and the full effect of this condition will be investigated in a special chapter on The Psychology of Theatre Audiences. In an important sense, the audience is a party to the play, and collaborates with the actors in the presentation. ”

“ The chances are scores to one that the person who wrote that play has been closely connected with the stage for years. Either he was an actor, a theatrical press agent, a newspaper man, a professional play-reader for some producer, or gained special knowledge of the stage through a dramatic course at college or by continual attendance at the theatre and behind the scenes. It is only by acquiring special knowledge of one of the most difficult of arts that anyone may hope to achieve success. ”

“ In these essays the author is largely concerned with the problem of representational versus presentational stage performances. Should illusion be carried to its furthest limits? Should the play be represented, as at the Moscow art theatre, as ‘an independent entity existing side by side with’ the observing audience? Or should it be presented through the medium of the stage? Other matters dealt with are the advantages and disadvantages of ensemble-acting, and long-run plays. ”

“ Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers’ ends, find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down paupers waiting for soup. ”

“ The theatre, having ceased to form an integral part of our social life, has come to be the pastime of people with nothing better to do,—the floating population of our hotels, the shop-girl and her young man enjoying an evening out. The plays produced by the gentlemen who, I am told, control the stage in this country for the moment, are adapted to the requirements of an audience that, having no particular standard from which to judge the literary merits of a play, the training, accent, or talent of the actors, are perfectly contented so long as they are amused. ”

“ First then, a valuable actor must sleep in the pit, and wake early to sweep the theatre, and throw fresh sawdust into the boxes; he must shake out the dresses, and wind up and dust the motion-jacks; he must teach the dull ones how to act, rout up the idlers from the straw, and redeem those that happen to get into the watch-house. Then, sir, when the Fair begins, he should sometimes walk about the stage grandly, and show his dress: sometimes he should dance with his fellows ”

“ Every one who has seen a mummer’s play performed, either in or out of doors, will be aware that the same method obtains in them—the performers are all on the stage or stand together at once, walking forward as each one’s name is mentioned, saying his allotted part, and then standing back again, while the next player has his turn. ”

“ No star or manager should feel grateful to any audience for the success of a play in which he has figured. A play succeeds because it is a living, vital thing—and that is why it has got upon the stage at all. ”

“ Having made this good entrance and beginning, to proceed now unto farther and stronger exercise, it were very good, whensoever there is any play exhibited upon the stage in a frequent theatre, where there is assembled a great audience to hear and see some worthy matter for to pass by it, and to put back thy friends who solicit thee to go thither with them, for to see either one dance excellent well, or to act a comedy; nor so much as to turn back when thou hearest some great shout and outcry, either from out of the race or the grand-cirque, where the horse-running is held for the prize. ”

“ In the common theatre the guests are at home, where the politer forms of good breeding are not so nicely regarded. Every one there falls to, and likes or finds fault, according to his natural taste or appetite. At Court, where the Prince gives the treat and honours the table with his own presence, the audience is under the restraint of a circle where laughter or applause raised higher than a whisper would be stared at. At a public play they are both let loose, even till the actor is sometimes pleased with his not being able to be heard for the clamour of them. ”

“ When that time comes—if it does come—one of the results will undoubtedly be a more flexible theatre, the growth of repertoire companies, the expansion of the activities of popular players. In a more flexible theatre, where repertoire is a rule rather than a strange and dreaded experiment, and where actors pride themselves on versatility and the public honors them for it, the one-act play will again have its place, but not then as a curtain raiser or afterpiece, to pad out an evening or "send the suburbs home happy," but as a serious branch of dramatic art. ”

“ These two instances show that the necessity of economising the attention of an audience is just as important to the stage-manager as it is to the dramatist and the actor. In the main, it may be said that any unexpected innovation, any device of stage-management that is by its nature startling, should be avoided in the crucial situations of a play. ”

“ A general realization of all this will definitely affect one's theater habit and make for the good of all that concerns the art of the playhouse. It will lead the properly prepared person to see a good play competently done, but with no supreme or far-famed actor in the company, in preference to a foolish play, or worse, carried by a "star"; or a play negligible as art or hopelessly passé as art or interpretation of life for which an all-star cast has been provided, as if to take the eye of the spectator off the weaknesses of the drama. ”

“ To the first rehearsal of a play, new or old, the stage-manager sometimes comes with all the salient details of the future performance visualized in advance, knowing just where every character ought to place himself at every moment of the action, and having decided where every piece of furniture shall stand, and how the actors will avail themselves of its assistance. One accomplished stage-manager of my acquaintance, an actor himself, works out with a set of chess-men the intricate problem of moving his characters naturally about the stage. ”

“ In any play which achieves success a curious transference of personality takes place. Before a play begins the audience is separated from the people on the stage by a number of barriers. First of all, there is the curtain, but by and by that goes up. The orchestra pit and the footlights still stand as moats to keep us at our distance. Then the magic of the playhouse begins to have its effect. If the actors and the playwrights know the tricks of the business, they soon lift each impressionable person from his seat and carry him spiritually right into the center of the happenings. ”

“ The specifications of the stage of the Fortune Theater make no mention of a railing.
The Play and the Audience.—It is impossible to criticize Elizabethan plays properly from the point of view of the twentieth-century stage. Many modern criticisms are shown to be without reason when we understand the wishes of the audience and the manner of presenting the plays. The conditions of the entry or the reëntry of a player might explain some of those lengthy monologues that seem so inartistic to modern dramatists. ”