No More Learning

We
playwrights can only thank these players, who have given us the delight
of seeing our work so well performed, working with so much enthusiasm,
with so much patience, that they have found for themselves a lasting
place among the artists, the only aristocracy that has never been sold
in the market or seen the people rise up against it.

It is a necessary part of our plan to find out how to perform plays for
little money, for it is certain that every increase in expenditure has
lowered the quality of dramatic art itself, by robbing the dramatist
of freedom in experiment, and by withdrawing attention from his words
and from the work of the players. Sometimes one friend or another has
helped us with costumes or scenery, but the expense has never been very
great, ten or twenty pounds being enough in most cases for quite a long
play. These friends have all accepted the principles I have explained
from time to time in _Samhain_, but they have interpreted them in
various ways according to their temperament.

Miss Horniman staged _The King's Threshold_ at her own expense, and
she both designed and made the costumes. The costumes for the coming
performances of _On Baile's Strand_ are also her work and her gift and
her design. She made and paid for the costumes in _The Shadowy Waters_,
but in this case followed a colour-scheme of mine. The colour-scheme
in _The Hour-Glass_, our first experiment, was worked out by Mr.
Robert Gregory and myself, and the costumes were made by Miss Lavelle,
a member of the company; while Mr. Robert Gregory has designed the
costumes and scenery for _Kincora_. As we gradually accumulate costumes
in all the main colours and shades, we will be able to get new effects
by combining them in different ways without buying new ones. Small
dramatic societies, and our example is beginning to create a number,
not having so many friends as we have, might adopt a simpler plan,
suggested to us by a very famous decorative artist. Let them have
one suit of clothes for a king, another for a queen, another for a
fighting-man, another for a messenger, and so on, and if these clothes
are loose enough to fit different people, they can perform any romantic
play that comes without new cost. The audience would soon get used to
this way of symbolising, as it were, the different ranks and classes
of men, and as the king would wear, no matter what the play might be,
the same crown and robe, they could have them very fine in the end.
Now, one wealthy theatre-goer and now another might add a pearl to the
queen's necklace, or a jewel to her crown, and be the more regular in
attendance at the theatre because that gift shone out there like a good
deed.
We can hardly do all we hope unless there are many more of these little
societies to be centres of dramatic art and of the allied arts. But
a very few actors went from town to town in ancient Greece, finding
everywhere more or less well trained singers among the principal
townsmen to sing the chorus that had otherwise been the chief expense.
In the days of the stock companies two or three well-known actors would
go from town to town finding actors for all the minor parts in the
local companies. If we are to push our work into the small towns and
villages, local dramatic clubs must take the place of the old stock
companies. A good-sized town should be able to give us a large enough
audience for our whole, or nearly our whole, company to go there; but
the need for us is greater in those small towns where the poorest
kind of farce and melodrama have gone and Shakespearean drama has not
gone, and it is here that we will find it hardest to get intelligent
audiences. If a dramatic club existed in one of the larger towns near,
they could supply us not only with actors, should we need them, in
their own town, but with actors when we went to the small towns and to
the villages where the novelty of any kind of drama would make success
certain. These clubs would play in Gaelic far better than we can hope
to, for they would have native Gaelic speakers, and should we succeed
in stirring the imagination of the people enough to keep the rivalry
between plays in English and Irish to a rivalry in quality, the
certain development of two schools with distinct though very kindred
ideals would increase the energy and compass of our art.

At a time when drama was more vital than at present, unpaid actors,
and actors with very little training, have influenced it deeply. The
Mystery Plays and the Miracle Plays got their players at no great
distance from the Church door, and the classic drama of France had
for a forerunner performances of Greek and Latin Classics, given by
students and people of quality, and even at its height Racine wrote two
of his most famous tragedies to be played by young girls at school.
This was before acting had got so far away from our natural instincts
of expression. When the play is in verse, or in rhythmical prose, it
does not gain by the change, and a company of amateurs, if they love
literature, and are not self-conscious, and really do desire to do
well, can often make a better hand of it than the ordinary professional
company.

The greater number of their plays will, in all likelihood, be comedies
of Irish country life, and here they need not fear competition, for
they will know an Irish countryman as no professional can know him; but
whatever they play, they will have one advantage the English amateur
has not: there is in their blood a natural capacity for acting, and
they have never, like him, become the mimics of well-known actors.
The arts have always lost something of their sap when they have been
cut off from the people as a whole; and when the theatre is perfectly
alive, the audience, as at the Gaelic drama to-day in Gaelic-speaking
districts, feels itself to be almost a part of the play. I have never
felt that the dignity of art was imperilled when the audience at Dr.
Hyde's _An Posadh_ cheered the bag of flour or the ham lent by some
local shopkeepers to increase the bridal gifts. It was not merely
because of its position in the play that the Greek chorus represented
the people, and the old ballad singers waited at the end of every
verse till their audience had taken up the chorus; while Ritual, the
most powerful form of drama, differs from the ordinary form, because
everyone who hears it is also a player.