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Updated: May 16, 2025
He is a brilliant dramatist, and also, desperately in earnest, and it may well be that they are right who think that his plays will live along after the death of most English works produced since the public and critics were bewildered at the first performance of Widowers' Houses, and he certainly appears to adopt as a policy the theory of stirring up into activity the lethargic stomach of the British playgoer by devices carefully calculated to make him howl.
It is perfectly possible to express to an audience all the involutions of thought, the speculation, doubt, wavering, which reveal the meditative but irresolute mind. As the varying shades of fancy pass and repass the mirror of the face, they may yield more material to the studious playgoer than he is likely to get by a diligent poring over the text.
Precious through all indeed perhaps is the sense, strange only to later sophistication, of my small encouraged state as a free playgoer a state doubly wondrous while I thus evoke the full contingent from Union Square; where, for that matter, I think, the wild evening must have been planned.
All the plays that were labelled "repertory" plays were praised by these earnest students of the drama without any sort of discrimination, and when, as often happened, a very poor play was produced at the Repertory Theatre, any common playgoer who saw it and was bored by it, went away in the belief that he was not educated up to the standard of such austere work and resolved that he would seek his entertainment elsewhere in future.
And indeed, for every play which the Lord Chamberlain has suppressed, the old playgoer of London could point to five which, had he been more intelligent, he might more reasonably have suppressed in its place. But after all those scuffles on the Strand do seem part of the strange customs of a fusty-dusty never-never land.
"If you give way to unforgiving feelings you can never tell quite where they may carry you. But as I was going to say, though I am not much of a playgoer, I was very pleased to have Mr. Iglesias invite me. Only, as I explained to him, I am very liable to find the seats too narrow for comfort in places of amusement, and the atmosphere is often so very close, too.
In Mademoiselle Genée we had a dancer as well entitled to immortality as those about whom our fathers raved, and Russian dancers of brilliance have appeared, but opera and the legitimate theatre pay no attention to ballet except at pantomime season; and whilst probably the average keen playgoer of Paris is acquainted with the names of the orthodox steps, and is aware that in the ballet one begins as petit rat, then becomes a quadrille ballerina, develops into a coryphée, blossoms into a minor subject, grows into a subject, and eventually emerges and reaches the stars as a prima ballerina, few of us know anything about the subject.
"For himself, he was aware," says his biographer, "that he wanted intimate knowledge of the mechanical details necessary for the modern stage, although in early and middle life he had been a constant playgoer, and would keenly follow the action of a play, criticising the characterisation, incidents, scenic effects, situations, language, and dramatic points."
It takes the playgoer a long way back, to be thinking about this old piece and the casts that it has had upon the American stage. The Heir at Law was a great favourite in Boston thirty years ago and more, when William Warren was in his prime and could play Dr.
Whether such an institution would be of practicable service in teaching actors and actresses the rudiments of their art whether it is advisable that they should be taught whether it is possible to teach them are debatable questions that I will not here enter upon. But such an institution would achieve a much more important and lasting result. It would educate the British Playgoer.
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