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First publication: Individual dates for extracts given after first instance of quotation. Jenny Villiers (novel), Delight, Margin Released, Instead of the Trees, Rain Upon Godshill, Outcries and Asides, The Art of the Dramatist first published by Heinemann. The Story of Theatre first published by Rathbone (illustrated edition). The Arts Under Socialism first published by Turnstile. Theatre Outlook first published by Nicholson and Watson.
Copyright © the Estate of J B Priestley.
Compilation and introduction © copyright Tom Priestley 2005
J B Priestley is hereby identified as author of these works in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author’s estate has asserted its moral rights.
Tom Priestley is hereby identified as author of this introduction and editor of this selection in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
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E ISBN: 9781783192359
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The Theatre and You
Introduction by Tom Priestley
The Making of a Dramatist
The Story of Theatre
Inspiration
Future of the Theatre
Letter to a Theatre Owner
Moment During Rehearsal
Progress in the Theatre
Finance
The Arts Under Socialism
On Critics
Theatre Outlook
‘An International Dramatist’
Dragon’s Mouth
The Art of the Dramatist
Methods and Advice
Letter to a Would-be Playwright
‘I believe now that in our life, as in the Theatre, the scenery and costumes and character make-ups and props are only a shadow show, to be packed up and put away when the performance is over. And what’s real and enduring, perhaps indestructible, is all that so many fools imagine to be flimsy and fleeting – the innermost and deepest feelings – the way an honest artist sees his work – the root and heart of a real personal relationship – the flame – the flame burning clear. And Pauline, I believe that for all our vulgar mess of paint and canvas and lights and advertisement, we who work in the Theatre, just because it’s a living symbol of the mystery of life, we help to guard and to show the flame. Silly as we look, my dear, we’re the servants of the divine secret.’
from Jenny Villiers
1946 (play) and 1947 (novel)
THERE IS no more enchanting box of tricks in the world than a theatre, especially a theatre that makes its own scenery and costumes. I have known quite a number of middle-aged men and women who were compelled, for one reason or another, to take an interest in one of these theatres, and then soon found themselves bewitched by it all, rejuvenated, given a whole range of new interests. I have known more than one fine group of young people who would feel as if the world were suddenly drained of all colour and fun if their theatre were taken away from them. And I have seen, with both amusement and admiration, how this playhouse work has cut right across the various social levels of the community, bringing the classes together on one common footing. You cannot stand on your dignity in this kind of work. You all start together on a new level, and come away from it feeling refreshed, as one always does when that curse of our English life – our class system – has been temporarily removed.
from The Theatre and You, 1938
MY FATHER was always fascinated by the Theatre, and the magic it wove with and for its audience. We shall see how he evolved a theory of how this exactly functioned, which he called Dramatic Experience; this he differentiated from the vicarious pleasure of Show Business, which never engages the total mind and imagination of the spectator, but just involves a mindless curiosity and amusement. But while he believed firmly in what he calls ‘Serious Theatre’, he insisted on the importance of entertainment to leaven the solemnity.
Once he entered the Theatre in the early 1930s, he immersed himself in it, and was soon able to analyse its problems and to suggest solutions. Theatrical historians will be able to judge how far these suggestions were instrumental in changing the way the Theatre was organised after the Second World War, but it seems to me that many of the problems still persist to this day. Possibly some of his solutions were too radical and hence impractical, but they were always based on his love of the Theatre, and his profound feeling of the vital importance of the Theatre for a healthy nation; healthy in mind and spirit, in the world of the imagination, and healthy in the sense of community, growing from the audience itself, a group of people welded together by common experience, sharing for that moment the ‘pity and fear’ of the drama.
He believed also in the continuity of the Theatre, just as he did in the continuity of Literature; both evolving from the past and growing towards the future. The past irradiating the present, and the present the future. He insisted too on the changeability of convention. Each convention is good for its particular age. As time passes, it loses its vitality, and needs constantly refreshing by change and evolution. No convention is better than another; it merely expresses a reaction to the past. The pendulum constantly swings to and fro.
The first two volumes of the Oberon collection of J B Priestley’s Theatre presented, in each case, three plays – comedies in Plays One, dramas in Plays Two – with an introduction examining the background, content and circumstances of production.
Now we move to a different area, going, as it were, behind the scenes, out of the auditorium, away from the plush seats, the programmes, the interval drinks, to a world of offices, auditions, rehearsal rooms and workshops; somewhere between the closing pages of the script and the curtain rising on the performance, incorporating casting, publicity, investment, audience figures and reviews. All of these my father mastered, because, as we shall see, he did far more than deliver the text and retire to his typewriter.
He was blessed with tireless creative energy. Glancing through Alan Day’s authoritative bibliography I find 13 plays published between 1932 and 1939, a single one-act play and 11 full-length plays in the 1940s, five one-act and six full-length plays in the 1950s (including Dragon’s Mouth and The White Countess co-written with Jacquetta Hawkes – the latter performed but never published) and in 1964 his masterly adaptation of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. Add to that his collaboration on the dramatisation of The Good Companions which opened in 1931, and it adds up to 32 full-length plays and six one-act plays – an impressive total; many of them produced by his own management company. He also directed at least two: Ever Since Paradise and Dragon’s Mouth.* In the 1930s alone he wrote at least five novels, three major works of non-fiction, several filmscripts, and over 450 articles, as well as 14 full-length plays. He admitted himself that he had probably written too much in his long career, and might have done better to concentrate on one single aspect of his writing and that would have been the Theatre, for which he felt he had a greater natural affinity than for fiction.
In this anthology we follow three strands: first the background to his interest in and love of the Theatre, a kind of theatrical autobiography, told in his own words; secondly his overall view of the History of Theatre up to his day, which gives his view of the path leading from the past to the present of his time; and thirdly his attitude towards the Theatre once he had begun working in it – his views on the weaknesses of the system and his suggestions for their improvement, as well as a profound analysis of the very experience of Theatre-going for any audience.
Interlaced with these are a few articles on aspects of his experience working in the Theatre, and finally notes on his method of writing and advice to young playwrights.
I have occasionally included a note of explanation (in italics), or a short comment to link passages together, but have kept these to a minimum. For an anthology of a prolific writer, it seems wiser to stand aside and let him tell his story.
* Professor Holger Klein in his 1988 book J B Pnestley’s Plays lists 38 published plays and a further 31 unpublished and never performed in the theatre though some were adapted for radio or television, or even reworked as fiction.
Thanks
I would particularly like to thank James Hogan for his encouragement and patience, a rare publisher of the Old School, and Dan Steward for his insightful editing; thanks also to my great-nephew Toby Goaman Dodson, JBP’s great grandson, who helped enormously with research and with taming my laptop; thanks to Tony Yablon for permission to reproduce the 1938 letter to Arthur Berry; and to Michael Nelson of the J B Priestley Society for his useful suggestions; and to Alison Cullingford and John Brooker of the J B Priestley Archive at the J B Priestley Library in the University of Bradford; and to Nicki Stoddart of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, a staunch ally; and to Alan Day for his masterly bibliography.
TP 2005
WHEN I WAS a lad and regularly took my place in the queue for the early doors of the gallery in the old Theatre Royal, Bradford, the actors on their way to the stage door had to walk past us. I observed them with delight. In those days actors looked like actors and like nothing else on earth. There was no mistaking them for wool merchants, shipping clerks, and deacons of Baptist chapels, all those familiar figures of my boyhood. They wore suits of startling check pattern, outrageous ties, and preposterous overcoats reaching down to their ankles. They never seemed to remove all their makeup as actors do now, and always had a rim of blue-black round their eyelids. They did not belong to our world and never for a moment pretended to belong to it. They swept past us, fantastically overcoated, with trilbies perched raffishly on brilliantined curls, talking of incredible matters in high tones, merely casting a few sparkling glances – all the more sparkling because of that blue-black – in our direction; and then vanished through the stage door, to reappear, but out of all recognition, in the wigs and knee-breeches of David Garrick or The Only Way. And my young heart, as innocent as an egg, went out to these romantic beings; and perhaps it was then, although I have no recollection of it, that the desire was born in me to write one day for the Theatre.
Delight 45, 1949, Seeing the Actors
J B Priestley was born on 13 September 1894 in Bradford in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Bradford then was a wealthy town – the world centre of the wool trade – and so combined a hearty provincialism with a cosmopolitanism fostered by the international nature of the trade. There was a healthy appetite for the arts and the funds to promote them. Remember that in those days there was no radio, television or cinema (films started off as a turn in the Music Hall, called the Bioscope). It was a great time for home entertainment – songs round the piano and, a family favounte, charades.
Our favourite scene at home when I was a boy was the Fat Men Scene, which had to be brought in somehow, as even I, with my sterner standard of the game, admitted; and indeed I would not have allowed it to be overlooked. My father and some of his friends needed only a few cushions to be magnificent Fat Men, while I and my like took to pillows and overcoats, and blew out our cheeks until we dissolved, as we always did very soon, into laughter. The antics were simple indeed, and followed a familiar recipe; but all of us, even the stateliest wives of deacons, laughed till we cried. And now, 40 years afterwards, I am a Fat Man, without the help of a single cushion; and every night, on 20 stages, in places I have never seen, they play my charades.
Delight 23, Charades
But Bradford was also well endowed with theatres, as he told me in our conversation for my film Time and the Priestleys:
We had two theatres: the Prince’s played mostly melodramas in repertory, but the other theatre, the Theatre Royal, was a first class date for touring companies, a very nice theatre too, not very big but very good. We had two music halls: the Moss & Stoll and the Palace which was underneath the Prince’s Theatre. I went to both; I went to everything.
In his teens when he was already working in a wool office and writing in his spare time, and he found an unpaid job writing a column for a local Labour weekly, the Bradford Pioneer; this undoubtedly gave him the opportunity to go regularly to both Theatre and music hall.
I was a constant and enthusiastic playgoer, defying the heat and discomfort of those old galleries. I enjoyed almost everything, from Oedipus Rex and The Trojan Women to The Waltz Dream and The Count of Luxemburg and The Merry Widow, of course, though, for some reason I have forgotten now, it was never one of my favourite Viennese operettas, all of which, incidentally, had real scores and orchestras, not just night club noise. I cannot say I enjoyed everything; I had reservations about a certain type of gentlemanly melodrama then in vogue; I remember one called A White Man. Appearing at the Theatre Royal, between Benson’s Shakespeare and Edward Compton’s Sheridan and Goldsmith, these pieces seemed contrived and anaemic, inferior to the full-blooded melodrama we had every week at the other Theatre, the Prince’s -A Royal Divorce, The Face at the Window, and the like. Yes, in my teens I could be said to be stage-struck, and it was an advantage to me long afterwards, when I came to work in the Theatre, that I had left this complaint far behind, like the measles and mumps of my childhood.
Margin Released, 1962
If and when I was ignoring the Theatre Royal I was probably going to the Empire, a fine music hall. These were the great days of the halls, which offered us more talent in a month than the BBC and ITV can scrape up in a year. I have tried – and not without success, I think – to reproduce the atmosphere and flavour of those music halls in a novel called Lost Empires. However, I must add that at that time I knew nothing about how variety worked, had never in fact been behind the scenes.
We had then in Bradford a Playgoers’ Society, which often gave readings of Shaw and other heavyweights. There is a lot to be said for readings of this kind, in which no attempt at production is made but you are given the characters and the lines. Intelligent amateurs often read well but are stiff and awkward in a production, so it is better to let them do play readings, with the characters sitting in a long line but standing up when they are supposed to be in the scene.
Guardian, 5 April 1974
Bradford was a lively though rather grim place, redeemed by wonderful countryside within easy reach. Similarly the ordinanness of everyday life was redeemed by the magic (his favounte word) of the interior world of the imagination, available in Literature and the Theatre. The feeling of mystery, of otherness, is one of the endunng themes of his work. This surely was part of the attraction of the Theatre; it was a window into another world.
The Theatre itself, however, was much further removed from me then than it is from a teenager now. Except for that foreshortened but brilliant view we had from the gallery, it belonged to another world, closed to us. The gallery queue, where I waited many a freezing hour, used to extend towards the stage door, so that I often saw the actors making their way there. More than twenty years later, I sketched a portrait of one of them, Charlie Appleby in Eden End, but not out of any contemporary experience of him and his kind. The actors then were almost visitors from outer space. I could not imagine them in their digs, drinking bottled beer and eating ham and eggs. Actresses, wickedly painted even off the stage, were even more remote, hardly related biologically to the women and girls one knew, belonging to other orders of being, fays and sylphs and hamadryads. The whole business and interior traffic of the Theatre were unimaginable then; managements and agents and contracts, runs in the West End, bookings for Number One and Number Two tours, authors’ royalties of five, seven-and-a-half, ten per cent of the gross, all were beyond the reach of knowledge, not even to be imagined. Is it surprising then that although I was a playgoer I never even thought of attempting a play?
Margin Released
When the First World War began, he soon volunteered and spent five dreadful years in the army enduring the horrors of the trenches. On demobilisation in 1919 he went up to Cambridge on an officer’s grant, took his degree in two years, married and started earning his living by writing.
The period 1919-24 covers the time when I was up at Cambridge and then left it to freelance in London. I would take a day ticket from Cambridge to London, attend a matinee, then an evening performance, and get the late train back. Many of the galleries in those days were terrible. You were so high you were hardly inside the theatre; you sat on wooden benches about six inches wide,– and all you saw of the actors were the tops of their heads. My most memorable experience came at the end of this period, in 1924, when Fagan brought his production of The Cherry Orchard from Oxford to the Royalty Theatre. It was ‘all a wonder and a wild desire’.
Guardian, 5 April 1974
Good theatre seats were comparatively dear then, so if we could not find somebody, a dramatic critic or friendly editor, to give us complimentary tickets, we went to the pit or gallery. I remember paying about ninepence or so at the old Alhambra to see the most astonishing galaxy of prima ballerinas that ever blazed on one stage. And the Lyric, Hammersmith was cheap enough, and there Nigel Playfair’s production of The Beggar’s Opera was running. We knew every word and note of it, used to roar them out round the piano, but still returned, time after time, to the Lyric. It seemed to me then – and after a quarter of a century of work in the Theatre, I am not prepared to change my mind – an enchanting production, the best in its kind we have ever had in this country, never beaten by later attempts to get away from Playfair’s style, Lovat Fraser’s décor, Frederick Austin’s modest but rather luscious arrangement of the music. On the other hand, although I saw the production, I was never an enthusiastic admirer of the other long run, The Immortal Hour, at another old theatre brought out of shabbiness and neglect, the Regent, near King’s Cross. But if you wanted perfection of a very different theatrical style, extreme naturalism, there were the productions of Galsworthy’s plays by Basil Dean at the St Martin’s, where so many good actors learnt their trade. You might dislike this kind of play this method of production, yet you could not deny Dean the triumph of his formidable qualities, which we are beginning to miss in the Theatre. There was also some good new work being done up at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, by Norman Macdermott. And Gerald du Maurier, who as actor-manager had every virtue except the courage necessary for experiment, was still at Wyndham’s. I was told not long ago, by way of a rebuke, that our London post-war Theatre might no longer be creative but that it has reached greatness in its interpretation; but it seems to me – and I speak of one of my own trades – that outside Shakespeare both the production and the acting in the 1920s were generally superior to ours. But then the economics of the Theatre were much sounder. It had hardly begun to have colossal rivals that drew on its talent without making any adequate return for their loans and raids.
The music-hall of today is nothing but the ghost of what it was in the early 1920s in London. It had already passed its peak even then, but some of the ripe old turns were still with us. You could look in at the Coliseum, as I often did on a winter afternoon, and see Little Tich and Harry Tate, and there were still some glorious drolls at the Holborn Empire (a sad loss; it had a fine thick atmosphere of its own), the Victoria Palace and the rest. There were no microphones and nobody needed them. There were no stars who had arrived by way of amusing farmers’ wives and invalids on the radio. There were no reputations that had been created by American gramophone records for teenagers. The men and the women who topped the bills had spent years getting there, learning how to perfect their acts and to handle their audiences. Of course there was plenty of vulgar rubbish, but all but the very worst of it had at least some zest and vitality. And the audiences, which laughed at jokes and did not solemnly applaud them as BBC audiences do now, were an essential part of the show, they too had vitality, and were still close to the Cockneys who helped to create, a generation earlier, the English music-hall of the great period, the folk art out of which, among other things, came the slapstick of the silent films, especially those of Chaplin.
‘Coming to London’, London Magazine, February 1956
From about the middle of the 1920s I did little Theatre-going. I was living well out of London, hard at work on books.
Guardian, 5 April 1974
Hard at work indeed. Between 1923 and 1929 he produced 15 books, of which five were reprints of essays published elsewhere. The fifteenth was his bestseller The Good Companions, not his own favourite novel but certainly his most successful. This was followed in 1930 by Angel Pavement, another success; now at last the pressure was off him to produce book after book and he could turn from Literature to the Theatre.
We can catch a glimpse of what he felt and thought about the Theatre, before he himself entered it professionally, from an article he wrote in 1930, ‘I Look at the Theatre’, with the topical byline, By J B Priestly [sic] (Novelist, author of The Good Companions):
I do not pretend to be a serious student of the Theatre – my main interests are elsewhere – but I have been a steady playgoer ever since I was a schoolboy I like the atmosphere of the playhouse, especially when the playhouse admits to a certain artificial gaiety and is rather pretty and absurd in gilt and coloured lights. Those bleak modern theatre interiors, suggesting a place for scientific lectures, repel me, and I believe that behind their austerities there is a mistaken idea of the Theatre. The basis of the Theatre is entertainment. Thus, a performance of Hamlet is superb entertainment; it may be many other things too, but first and foremost it is superb entertainment.
This does not mean that the Theatre cannot be serious. I do not really prefer farces and revues to tragedies or what for want of a better name we must call ‘serious plays’, but nevertheless I find myself going to see farces and revues far more often, for I certainly prefer a good farce or revue to a bad tragedy or serious play.
[…]
The modern Theatre became entirely serious for me, something that could conjure beauty out of life, when I sat through my first performance of The Cherry Orchard. Here, in this strange play about a group of idle and fantastic Russians, the thing was done. Here was life in all its abundance and richness, its pathos and humour, its terror and beauty. Throughout this play, you feel you are in a definite place that exists somewhere, and not in some vague generalized Theatre scene.
Most modern plays do not satisfy me, even though they may possibly entertain me for an hour or so, just because they have in them little sense of character and atmosphere. They are an affair of puppets moving in a vacuum. The situations in which their characters find themselves may be dramatic enough, but if these characters seem to you people made of cardboard, creatures who had no existence before the play began and will have none when it is over, it is difficult to take such situations very seriously.
I want to come out of the theatre, not feeling that I have been hocus-pocussed into being emotional for an hour about something that will be gone like smoke from my mind the next day, but feeling that I have just been given a great chunk of experience and that my memory has been correspondingly enriched.
Time after time, I have read notices of plays that were blamed because ‘nothing happened’ in some particular act, and I have seen the play afterwards and discovered that those acts were easily the most satisfying, just because they gave me a rich sense of life. I have no objection to plays that are crammed with action and strong situations; they are melodrama; and melodrama can be great fun. It does not belong to the serious Theatre, however. And it is not debates on questions of the day, not is it symbolism or producer’s antics, that will make the serious Theatre entirely serious and satisfying. It is character and atmosphere.
Theatre Arts Monthly, August 1930
He collaborated on the stage version of The Good Companions and no doubt tried his hand at playwriting on his own, but to no avail – before producing his first solo play, Dangerous Corner, which plunged him into the world of the Theatre.
It was in May 1932 that I arrived in the London Theatre. The play was Dangerous Corner. It was brilliantly directed by Tyrone Guthrie, who introduced many new devices that are now commonplaces of production, and, though it had no star part, Flora Robson’s performance dominated it. The irony department had followed me through the stage door. The play itself was a trick thing, in which time divided at the sound of a musical cigarette-box. I wrote it in a week, chiefly to prove that a man might produce long novels and yet be able to write effectively, using the strictest economy, for the stage. It was so poorly received by the daily press – This is Mr Priestley’s first play and we don’t mind if it is also his last’; that kind of welcome – that there was talk on the Saturday of taking it off, after five performances. If it had been taken off that night, I doubt if the play would ever have been heard of again. But with more favourable Sunday notices, especially from James Agate and Ivor Brown, it had a comfortable run, and six years later it was revived… I kept away from the Theatre until I knew my children’s food and clothing could be paid for, and it was out of a desire to escape the worst effects, once I was working in the Theatre, that I formed my own production company. This took me into the thick of it, but for some years I enjoyed being there, working on the production side with friends like Irene Hentschel and Basil Dean and Michael MacOwan, and on the managerial side with other friends like A D Peters, J B Mitchelhill and Thane Parker. Working in the Theatre with people is tricky, especially if you are the author as well, because in there, away from daylight and common sense, everybody knows best. Not being really sure of anything, we all pretend to be absolutely certain about everything. So friendship, as distinct from the false good-fellowship that comes and goes so quickly, prevents colleagues from turning into so many irritants…
Shaw did not approve of my production company (I must add here that with one enterprise or another I did help some other dramatists to reach the public.) At that time Shaw was declaring that any manager who revived his plays at cheap prices would make a fortune. He had only to make a telephone call or two and then find his cheque-book to begin testing the truth of this assertion, but he never did. He told me – more than once, I think – that management would ruin me; it was a short cut to bankruptcy. He was quite wrong.
Margin Released
When he was young he even had ambitions as a performer. In our filmed conversation I had asked him if he did any performing, and he told me: ‘A little – yes. I had thoughts in that direction. I remember I appeared several times at the Mechanics Institute, which offered entertainment, but not of the highest!’
Once I had to do some acting of a sort in the West End, for about ten performances. This was not a publicity stunt but an attempt to save a farcical comedy, When We Are Married, that had just opened and finally had a long run. Frank Pettingell, who played the comic lead, a drunken West Riding photographer, was injured in a motor accident, so Basil Dean, a man not easily denied, rushed me on as a drunken West Riding photographer, at least a part not obviously beyond my physical and mental range, no Hamlet or Romeo. I cannot say if I was a good or bad actor, but I certainly knew my own lines, never fluffed or ‘dried’, and duly got my laughs. I didn’t enjoy the experience. I seemed to be always waiting for a climax, a moment of truth and glory, that never arrived. Probably because I was not really an actor, I found it all curiously elusive, frustrating, unrewarding. And to paint one’s face after an early lunch, all for the benefit of matinee audiences, waiting for the tea they had ordered, was horrible. Perhaps it was then that I began to dislike audiences, enjoying rehearsals of my plays but avoiding performances of them. In London especially, people giggle and guffaw too easily; they visit a theatre to be tickled. I always preferred if possible to open plays in the North, where they sat with tightened lips and narrowed eyes, grimly awaiting their money’s worth.
Margin Released
After two and a half years as a dramatist-manager, he was co-director of the Duchess Theatre, in his words ‘perhaps the prettiest intimate theatre in London’, and ‘fortunate to have been, so far, more successful than I expected’. On a visit to New York he reflected on the Theatre as he knew it then:
I broke into the Theatre after establishing a reputation for other kinds of work, which was not altogether an advantage but which gave me a certain perspective and detachment.
The commercial theatrical manager is often criticised as being a mere box-office hound, a pander to fashionable silliness of all kinds. This is true of some managers, though quite a few of them are ready to risk a good deal on work they like but that may have no appeal to the big public. My first criticism – and the one that chiefly influenced me when I decided to become my own manager of the Theatrical world – is that it is a terrible waster of one’s time and energy. Getting a play out in the ordinary way is like trying to play croquet in Alice’s Wonderland, where, if you remember, the hoops would walk away, the balls would disappear, and the live mallets wriggled all the time. That is what happens in the theatrical world. You never know where you are.
If book publishers were as chaotic as most theatrical managers the book trade would be a bedlam in a few months. I admit that it is much more difficult producing plays than it is publishing books, but, nevertheless, the business has been needlessly complicated. When I write a play – as long as the people whose judgement I trust are satisfied about it – I want to feel that there is a theatre and stage of the right size waiting for it, that the right players are there ready to interpret it. I do not want to feel – as most dramatists are compelled to feel – that now the play is written the real labour and torment are just beginning, that months of lunatic negotiating are ahead of me.
The trouble is that with a few exceptions the author is still traditionally in the Theatre a person of small consequence – that shabby little fellow who sits at the back during rehearsals, somebody of about the same importance as the second leading lady’s husband. Yet the fact remains that there are two – and two only – really important people in the Theatre: the author who writes the words and the player who speaks them.
A dramatist of promise deserves the interest and affectionate encouragement of everybody who loves the Theatre. If he writes a poor play, he should be told so. The greatest dramatists in the world’s history have written poor plays now and again. An artist must be allowed to experiment, to take a chance. After all it is not easy to write a good play. The Theatre as a vital modern institution cannot exist without a supply of good new plays.
New York Times, 16 December 1934
Theatre activities were disrupted by the outbreak of war in 1939; my father’s energies were diverted to what he saw as his contnbution to the war effort, largely his broadcasts, the famous ‘Postscnpts’, and the less known but more frequent overseas broadcasts.
It was only in 1943 that he could turn his mind to the post-war Theatre, as we have seen in ‘Future of the Theatre’ (see p 73). The same year saw the production of his strongest wartime play They Came to a City and in 1944 a play Desert Highway which he wrote for and gave to the Army. That year he wrote what has turned out to be his most successful play An Inspector Calls which was first produced in Russia in 1945 as there was no London theatre available. My parents saw it there on a prolonged visit to Russia in the autumn of 1945. It opened in London in October 1946. There followed a busy period for J B Priestley in the Theatre. In 1947 he was chosen to be Britain’s delegate for the Arts to UNESCO; his play The Linden Tree opened in London; sadly neglected since, it had the best first London run of any of his plays, 422 performances; he gave a lecture to the Fabian Society, later published as a pamphlet, ‘The Arts Under Socialism’ (see p 91); he also published ‘Theatre Outlook’, extracts from which appear later (p 130). He had a busy time in, and out of, the Theatre.
I enjoyed working in the Theatre but never saw it, as so many people did then, as a glittering playground. In the terms of that time, I was a bad Theatre man. I never attended first nights nor rushed backstage to tell actresses they had been wonderful. I disliked the West End Theatre in its glamour-gossip-column aspect. Though often successful, I was never a fashionable playwright. So far as I appealed to any particular class, I would say this was the professional middle class. (This possibly explains why I was so widely and often produced abroad, where Theatre-going tended to be more serious – not so much a party-night-out affair as it was in the West End.) Again I never cultivated the friendly acquaintance of star players, managers, critics – excluding the few who were my friends anyhow.
Guardian, 5 April 1974
Maybe a bad ‘Theatre man’, but he was certainly dedicated to the Theatre, and was always looking for ways in which it could be improved structurally, better organised for actors and audiences so as to provide the richest expenence at a reasonable cost. He summed up his time in the Theatre in 1977 just seven years before his death:
As a highly professional dramatist, with plays going all over the world, I have had a curious relationship with the Theatre. It might be said that I have seen both more and less of it than most professional dramatists. More of it because when actually working in the Theatre I have not been confined to the role of author but have played several other roles, as a director of two producing companies. I have seen less of it because, unlike many of my colleagues, when not actually working in the Theatre I keep away from it, being busy with other things. I can think of some people I have known who never seemed to get away from the Theatre, who ate it, drank it, breathed it, almost as if they never saw daylight. This has some professional advantages, bringing with it an expertise and a sense of theatrical fashion, but it lacks the nourishment to be had in the world outside the Theatre, – if my plays have travelled far – as indeed they have – it may be that the best of them have gained from this nourishment, have brought something of the world outside on to the stage, have not been too theatrically theatrical.
Wondering what was happening abroad, I have just gone through my play agent’s financial statements for the last few months. The result surprised me. Money has come in from Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Scandinavia, Spain and the USA. Now there is no new dramatic material here. It is entirely a question of theatrical or TV performances of plays written thirty to forty years ago. And what conclusion can I come to here? That I am already a classic? Perhaps not; but surely that I am at least halfway there, though I doubt if there are many people here in England who would put forward even that claim for me. This is the trouble about not being an out-and-out thorough-going Theatre man, just popping into it to do some work and then popping out again to take a look at the world. I am paying for some dubiety and detachment. But a freedom from fuss and silliness is well worth the price demanded. Or isn’t it, remembering that my old love for the Theatre, an essential part of my youth, hasn’t entirely vanished yet?
Instead of the Trees, 1977
MEN MUST have been performing long before history began. Primitive men believed in what we now call ‘sympathetic magic’ – the idea that if you act something you can make it happen. A hunting tribe running short of meat might decide to act the discovery and killing of a deer. If so, somebody had to pretend to be the deer, and others pretend to be the successful hunters. In its own fashion, this is as much a performance as a production of Hamlet.
As religions developed, the public rites connected with them involved some elements of production, acting, performance. Long before Athens became a city-state and the home of a magnificent civilisation, the Greeks had made use of choral hymns and dances in their worship; and during seasonal fertility rites had enjoyed revels and masquerades in which the performers pretended to be birds and other animals. It is generally held that we can discover in hymns and dances the origin of Greek Tragedy, and in revels and masquerades the origin of Greek Comedy.
Although theatres grew up everywhere in Greece, it is to Athens at its height during the fifth century BC that we owe the complete development of the Theatre and one of the greatest dramatic styles the world has known. It was a completely communal art: performed not for private amusement but at great public festivals, where the most important dramatic poets competed for civic prizes.
Although this classical Greek drama was true drama, its general style and atmosphere might suggest to us a kind of solemn opera rather than a play. Both tragedy and comedy were originally formal and conventional, following strict rules broken later by dramatists of genius. Both included music and dancing. Both employed a Chorus which, in tragedy, spoke with the voice of the community, expressing common points of view.
Tragic dramatists did not invent stories and characters. Their dramas were based on myths and legends familiar to everybody. Suspense and surprise were absent from this Theatre, but in terms of high poetic tragedy this was an advantage. The poets could concentrate upon giving their own interpretation of familiar stories. Since everybody knew what must happen, the poets could make use of dramatic irony,-could show a proud man who thinks himself master of his fate, moving inevitably to the doom which the audience knows awaits him.
Unlike later dramas, which could be printed and so endlessly duplicated, ancient Greek dramas only existed as fragile manuscripts. Far more of them have disappeared than have survived. But the surviving dramas, coming to us almost miraculously after centuries of war, invasion, revolution, show us what a height Greek tragedy suddenly achieved. Tradition has it that the poet Thespis of Athens first used an actor as well as a chorus-leader, and this has brought him his own immortality for whatever concerns acting has since been called by the name ‘Thespian.
The first of the three great Greek tragic masters, Aeschylus (525-456 BC), introduced a second actor, which really made drama as we understand it possible. He was also celebrated for his startling effects, such as the tremendous entrance of Agamemnon in a chariot.
The second of these great tragic poets, Sophocles (c 496-06 BC), was less of an innovator, but he introduced a third actor, made less use of the chorus, and is said to have been the first dramatist to insist upon painted scenery.
The third, Euripides (c 484-06 BC) made still less use of chorus, but greatly increased the number of characters in his plays. (There are as many as eleven in The Phoenician Women.)
Oresteia