Part 5 (2/2)

Dorriforth. No, I don't care for _them_. The people at dinners.

Florentia. Oh. they don't say anything in particular.

Dorriforth. Doesn't that seem to show the effort isn't very suggestive?

Amicia. The conversation at dinners certainly isn't.

Dorriforth. I mean our contemporary drama. To begin with, you can't find it there's no text.

Florentia. No text?

Auberon. So much the better!

Dorriforth. So much the better if there is to be no criticism. There is only a dirt prompter's book. One can't put one's hand upon it; one doesn't know what one is discussing. There is no ”authority”--nothing is ever published.

Amicia. The pieces wouldn't bear that.

Dorriforth. It would be a small ordeal to resist--if there were anything in them. Look at the novels!

Amicia. The text is the French _brochure_. The ”adaptation” is unprintable.

Dorriforth. That's where it's so wrong, It ought at least to be as good as the original.

Auberon. Aren't there some ”rights” to protect--some risk of the play being stolen if it's published?

Dorriforth. There may be--I don't know. Doesn't that only prove how little important we regard the drama as being, and how little seriously we take it, if we won't even trouble ourselves to bring about decent civil conditions for its existence? What have we to do with the French _brochure?_ how does that help us to represent our own life, our manners, our customs, our ideas, our English types, our English world?

Such a field for comedy, for tragedy, for portraiture, for satire, as they all make-such subjects as they would yield! Think of London alone--what a matchless hunting-ground for the satirist--the most magnificent that ever was. If the occasion always produced the man London would have produced an Aristophanes. But somehow it doesn't.

Florentia. Oh, types and ideas, Aristophanes and satire--!

Dorriforth. I'm too ambitious, you mean? I shall presently show you that I'm not ambitious at all. Everything makes against that--I am only reading the signs.

Auberon. The plays are arranged to be as English as possible: they are altered, they are fitted.

Dorriforth. Fitted? Indeed they are, and to the capacity of infants.

They are in too many cases made vulgar, puerile, barbarous. They are neither fish nor flesh, and with all the point that's left out and all the navete that's put in, they cease to place before us any coherent appeal or any recognizable society.

Auberon. They often make good plays to act, all the same.

Dorriforth. They may; but they don't make good plays to see or to hear.

The theatre consists of two things, _que diable_--of the stage and the drama, and I don't see how you can have it unless you have both, or how you can have either unless you have the other. They are the two blades of a pair of scissors.

Auberon. You are very unfair to native talent. There are lots of _strictly original_ plays--

Amicia. Yes, they put that expression on the posters.

Auberon. I don't know what they put on the posters; but the plays are written and acted--produced with great success.

<script>