Theatre troupe

“ When the time for the performance drew near, the scene almost baffled description. All the approaches to the Comédie-Française were so blocked with people that the actors themselves could with difficulty persuade their excited patrons to make way for them. An enormous crowd surged round the theatre, forced the doors, and struggled and fought for the best places in the pit. ”

“ The entire audience are making heroic efforts all through the play to prevent each other from seeing that they know they are listening to the most finished acting to be seen anywhere, and looking at the prettiest stage pictures ever set. All the actors are all the while trying to conceal the fact that they are doing any good acting. The whole theatre is in a condition of sweet repose, like the placid bosom of a mill-pond on a summer afternoon, when STODDART shoots the Dam.
Well, when you have society theatres, where they do this sort of thing, you must have society plays. ”

“ Now that I have taken you back of the curtain line and out into the front office and shown you just how the wheels go 'round that make the show go, you have become aware that there is something more in the theatre business than a mere group of good actors and singers and dancers doing their best to please you up on the stage. The more the machinery of the stage is kept out of sight, the better the management and the greater the satisfaction, both to the folks behind the curtain and the audience out front. ”

“ The rear [Pg 58] is brought up with a large staff of cooks, water-carriers, etc., whose duty it is to provide for the material comfort of the players in their vagrant life.
Aside from the regular theatrical companies one frequently meets with companies of amateurs who have inherited the art of giving performances on a small scale called “a little theatre.” They are young farmers who delight in the change and excitement of stage life, and who after the crops are harvested are open to engagements until the spring work begins. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again, when walking to the theatre or to the railroad station, to see the town-folk turn curiously, regarding the players with a condescending smile, which curled the corners of the mouth downward as they whispered, "Show people." In larger cities these marks of opprobrium are less pronounced, but, nevertheless, exist. I resented this attitude towards the theatrical profession until I became better acquainted with it. ”

“ They inhabit that mysterious, unexplored back-stage. And a clever manager will encourage this sort of curiosity by advising his people not to show themselves in the street, except unavoidably. The matter of seeing the actors close may be dismissed with a quip,—they might be found respectable upon acquaintance, or, more likely, dull. But the truth about the back of the theatre is the truth about the conjurer’s hat,—there’s nothing there to see, except the pitiful little bag of tricks, the snowstorm and the wind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The stage during rehearsals is like a workshop—a certain amount of noise and confusion is necessitated by the labour going on in it, but no one has time to spare from his share of the job in hand, and the discipline in a good theatre is remarkable. ”

“ I wonder how many people there are who see the manager airing his white waistcoat in his especial stage-box, or envy him as he drives away from the theatre in his brougham, or joyfully takes his cheque on Ransom’s for that last “stunning” and “screaming” new farce that forty pounds were given for, and that ran four nights; I wonder how many of these outsiders of the theatrical arcana know what a persecuted, hunted dog, a genteel galley-slave, a well-dressed Russian serf, is the theatrical manager. ”

“ It is the very height of absurdity to see an amateur company on a stage, and particularly on the stage of a theatre. In the midst of the most solemn tragedy one is compelled to laugh at them. If they have on tights and trunks they try to get their hands into side pockets, and if they carry swords the weapon gets tangled in their legs, and ten to one after the blade has left its scabbard, the wearer will be unable to get it back again. ”

“ And the theatre, with all its actors and scene-painters and costumers and carpenters and musicians, is only an army on a different scale. The forces of the stage answer to the generals and colonels, the marshals and privates, all marching and working and fighting for the same end. ”

“ To do this, he must study out all the "business" of the play in advance of the rehearsals, so he will be able to direct intelligently. When a "star" is rehearsing, he generally directs the rehearsal, thus relieving the stage manager of a great responsibility; but he must be around, and see what is required for the play in the way of scenery and properties and make out complete and detailed plots for scene-men and property-men, and in this particular case where the theatre furnished the actors with all wardrobes (except modern clothes) , the stage manager had also to make out a costume plot. ”

“ It is divided into five acts, and each act is a complete performance. In the first act, which is a sort of introduction to the rest, we have depicted the distress of the players in vacation time, compelling them to let their theatre. Several applicants come forward, offering to take the building for various purposes, and among the rest a Frenchman proposes to hire it for the performance of a farce by his troop of French actors. ”

“ A wise stage-manager, when he uses a set as magnificent, for example, as the memorable garden scene in Miss Viola Allen's production of Twelfth Night, will raise his curtain on an empty stage, to let the audience enjoy and even applaud the scenery before the actors enter. ”

“ The performance is at an end, and the gentlemen who haunt the stage-door are beginning to assemble. There are probably a half dozen of them. They stand around sucking the heads of their canes and anxiously awaiting the appearance of their inamoratas. A burlesque company has the theatre this week, and there are probably eighteen or twenty handsome young ladies in the combination. Nearly every one of them is a "masher," and can be depended upon to hit the centre of a weak male heart, with an arrow from her beaming eye, at one hundred yards. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There was that immediate bareness and roughness which seems the first characteristic of the theatre behind the scenes, where the theatre is one of the simplest and frankest of workshops, in which certain effects are prepared to be felt before the footlights. Nothing of the glamour of the front is possible; there is a hard air of business in everything; and the work that goes to the making of a play shows itself the severest toil. ”

“ The tenour of this ordinance was strictly enforced; many young and vigorous actors joined the king’s army, in which for the most part they obtained commissions, and others retired on the scanty pittances they had earned, till on the restoration, the theatre burst forth with new effulgence. The play-bill that announced the opening of the new theatre, in Drury-lane, April 8, 1663, has been already printed in the Every-Day Book. ”

“ Having emptied the trunks with lightning swiftness, he claps down their covers for the rest of the week. Whenever he wants anything for the theatre, he straddles the pile on the quilt, and paws it wildly, but rapidly over, pulling out a shoulder-cape here, a doublet yonder, one boot from the top and its mate from the bottom—all these he pitches into the theatre-basket, and is happy for that day. ”

“ The early years of the twentieth century have been a period of rapid development in the theatre, a development marked by at least two broad phenomena: first, the growing public349 sense of the drama as an art, of which acting is a component part, not the chief end; and, secondly, the revolution in the technique of stagecraft. To sum up the matter in a word, the stage is struggling, rather blindly, to liberate itself from the conventions that intervene between audience and play. ”

“ And when a third performance found all of the same inveterate patrons once more crowding the auditorium, and seven recruits added, the pleasurable excitement of the partners in their venture will be understood by any one who has seen a metropolitan manager strolling about the foyer of his theatre some even ing during the earlier stages of an assured "phenomenal run." ”

“ But the great annual excitement to the peasant under normal conditions is the theatrical performance that takes place in every district. The company brings its own theatre, an enormous mat-shed erection capable of accommodating an audience of a thousand people. This is erected in a few days, and for a week or more historical or social plays are performed. The actors make up and dress upon the stage, on which the more prominent members of the audience are sometimes accommodated. All the actors are men, as women are not allowed to perform ”

“ Yet, under all these disadvantages there have risen up often, in England, and even in our own country, actors who gave a reason for the continued existence of the theatre, who sustained the ill-educated, flimsy troop, which commonly fills it, and provoked both the poet and the playwright to turn their powers in that direction. ”

“ For two movements that are bound to affect the theatre of the future are bringing the lay public clambering over the footlights and crowding in at the stage door. One, the Little Theatre Movement, is almost altogether a lay insurgency. In scores of communities, it has made its way; tradesmen, students, clerks, mechanics, people of leisure and working people with a little leisure, have come together and in a short time have plumbed the silly little mysteries of back-stage, and have brought into their theatres a little bit of the real Mystery of life and art that belongs there. ”

“ Against this it will be argued that spectators can give good advice: in the first place, it is too late to act upon any important suggestion at general rehearsals; then, those who really [Pg 237] offer valuable advice, during the course of rehearsals, are the actors, firemen, scene-shifters, supernumeraries and everybody, in fact, who lives by the stage, and who know the theatre much better than all the Bachelors of Arts and Academicians in existence. ”

“ Amateur night at Creary’s Eighth Avenue Theatre is cut by the same pattern as amateur nights elsewhere. After the regular performance the humblest talent may, by previous arrangement with the management, make its debut upon the public stage. Ambitious non-professionals, mostly self-instructed, display their skill and powers of entertainment along the broadest lines. ”

“ And the more extensive, democratic Community Drama movement is making play-actors and theatre-workers of thousands who have heretofore been auditors. There will always be a professional group of artists of the theatre, but in their theatres there will be a close understanding and perhaps a physical connection between the audience and the stage; in the great, popular theatre it is conceivable that there will be very little distinction between the auditorium and the stage. ”

“ The final general rehearsal was held with closed doors; it is always a mistake to introduce even the most faithful of friends to a general rehearsal: on the day of the performance they tell the plot of the play to their neighbours, or walk about the corridors talking in loud voices, and creaking their boots on the floor. I have never taken much credit to myself for giving theatre tickets to my friends for the first performance; but I have always repented of giving them tickets of admission for a general rehearsal. ”

“ All through the carnival, tragedies, dramas and comedies used to be performed by amateurs in the Court-theatre, for the amusement of his Excellency, the patricians on the civil staff, officers of the garrison, and the good folk of Zara. [125]
Our troop was composed exclusively of male actors, as is the case in general with unprofessional theatres; and young men, dressed like women, played the female parts. I was selected to represent the soubrette. ”

“ 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. ”