No More Learning

We can only find out
the right decoration for the different types of play by experiment,
but it will probably range between, on the one hand, woodlands made
out of recurring pattern, or painted like old religious pictures
upon gold background, and upon the other the comparative realism of
a Japanese print. This decoration will not only give us a scenic art
that will be a true art because peculiar to the stage, but it will give
the imagination liberty, and without returning to the bareness of the
Elizabethan stage. The poet cannot evoke a picture to the mind's eye if
a second-rate painter has set his imagination of it before the bodily
eye; but decoration and suggestion will accompany our moods, and turn
our minds to meditation, and yet never become obtrusive or wearisome.
The actor and the words put into his mouth are always the one thing
that matters, and the scene should never be complete of itself, should
never mean anything to the imagination until the actor is in front of
it.

If one remembers that the movement of the actor, and the graduation and
the colour of the lighting, are the two elements that distinguish the
stage picture from an easel painting, one will not find it difficult to
create an art of the stage ranking as a true fine art. Mr. Gordon Craig
has done wonderful things with the lighting, but he is not greatly
interested in the actor, and his streams of coloured direct light,
beautiful as they are, will always seem, apart from certain exceptional
moments, a new externality. One should rather desire, for all but
exceptional moments, an even, shadowless light, like that of noon, and
it may be that a light reflected out of mirrors will give us what we
need.

M. Appia and M. Fortuni are making experiments in the staging of
Wagner for a private theatre in Paris, but I cannot understand what M.
Appia is doing, from the little I have seen of his writing, excepting
that the floor of the stage will be uneven like the ground, and that
at moments the lights and shadows of green boughs will fall over the
player that the stage may show a man wandering through a wood, and
not a wood with a man in the middle of it. One agrees with all the
destructive part of his criticism, but it looks as if he himself is
seeking, not convention, but a more perfect realism. I cannot persuade
myself that the movement of life is flowing that way, for life moves
by a throbbing as of a pulse, by reaction and action. The hour of
convention and decoration and ceremony is coming again.
The experiments of the Irish National Theatre Society will have of
necessity to be for a long time few and timid, and we must often,
having no money and not a great deal of leisure, accept for a while
compromises, and much even that we know to be irredeemably bad. One
can only perfect an art very gradually; and good playwriting, good
speaking, and good acting are the first necessity.


1905

Our first season at the Abbey Theatre has been tolerably successful.
We drew small audiences, but quite as big as we had hoped for, and we
end the year with a little money. On the whole we have probably more
than trebled our audiences of the Molesworth Hall. The same people come
again and again, and others join them, and I do not think we lose any
of them. We shall be under more expense in our new season, for we have
decided to pay some of the company and send them into the provinces,
but our annual expenses will not be as heavy as the weekly expenses of
the most economical London manager. Mr. Philip Carr, whose revivals
of Elizabethan plays and old comedies have been the finest things one
could see in a London theatre, spent three hundred pounds and took
twelve pounds during his last week; but here in Ireland enthusiasm can
do half the work, and nobody is accustomed to get much money, and even
Mr. Carr's inexpensive scenery costs more than our simple decorations.
Our staging of _Kincora_, the work of Mr. Robert Gregory, was
beautiful, with a high, grave dignity and that strangeness which Ben
Jonson thought to be a part of all excellent beauty, and the expense of
scenery, dresses and all was hardly above thirty pounds. If we find a
good scene we repeat it in other plays, and in course of time we shall
be able to put on new plays without any expense for scenery at all. I
do not think that even the most expensive decoration would increase in
any way the pleasure of an audience that comes to us for the play and
the acting.

We shall have abundance of plays, for Lady Gregory has written us a new
comedy besides her _White Cockade_, which is in rehearsal; Mr. Boyle,
a satirical comedy in three acts; Mr.