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Welcome to Michael’s ‘Intimate With Strangers’ Page 11
IDENTITY
A tribute to Tree from the playwright’s point of view is a duty of such delicacy that it is
quite impossible to be delicate about it at all: one must confess bluntly at the outset that
Tree was the despair of authors. His attitude towards a play was one of whole-hearted
anxiety to solve the problem of how to make it please and interest the audience.
Now this is the author’s business, not the actor’s. The function of the actor is to make the
audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people. It is for
the author to make the result interesting. If he fails, the actor cannot save the play
unless it is so flimsy a thing that the actor can force upon it some figure of his own fancy
and play the author off the stage. This has been done successfully in several well known,
though very uncommon cases. Robert Macaire and Lord Dundreary were imposed by
their actors on plays which did not really contain them. Grimaldi’s clown was his own
invention. These figures died with their creators, though their ghosts still linger on the
stage. Irving’s Shylock was a creation which he thrust successfully upon Shakespeare’s
play; indeed, all Irving’s impersonations were changelings. His Hamlet and his Lear were
to many people more interesting than Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Lear; but the two pairs
were hardly even related. To the author, Irving was not an actor: he was either a rival or
a collaborator who did all the real work. Therefore, he was anathema to master authors,
and a godsend to journeymen authors, with the result that he had to confine himself to
the works of dead authors who could not interfere with him, and, very occasionally, live
authors who were under his thumb because they were unable to command production
of their works in other quarters.
Into this tradition of creative acting came Tree as Irving’s rival and successor; and he
also, with his restless imagination, felt that he needed nothing from an author but a
literary scaffold on which to exhibit his own creations. He, too, turned to Shakespeare
as to a forest out of which such scaffolding could be hewn without remonstrance from
the landlord, and to foreign authors who could not interfere with him, their interests
being in the hands of adapters who could not stand up against his supremacy in his
own theatre.
As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help
from the actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree. The
author, whether Shakespeare or Shaw, was a lame dog to be helped over the stile
by the ingenuity and inventiveness of the actor-producer. How to add and subtract,
to interpolate and prune, until an effective result was arrived at, was the problem of
production as he saw it. Of living authors of eminence the two he came into personal
contact with were Brieux and Henry Arthur Jones; and I have reason to believe that their
experience of him in no way contradicts my own.
With contemporary masters of the stage like Pinero and Carton, in whose works the
stage business is an integral part of the play, and the producer, when he is not the
author in person, is an executant and not an inventor, Tree had never worked; and
when he at last came upon the species in me, and found that, instead of having to
discover how to make an effective histrionic entertainment on the basis of such scraps
of my dialogue as might prove useful, he had only to fit himself into a jig-saw puzzle cut
out by me, and just to act his part as well as he could, he could neither grasp the
situation nor resist the impersonal compulsion of arrangements which he had not made,
and was driven to accept only by the fact that they were the only ones which would work.
But to the very end they bewildered him; and he had to go to the box office to assure
himself that the omission of his customary care had not produced disastrous results.
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