These facts are strikingly illustrated5 in the American law courts, where all small matters are managed on the lines of comedy, and all large matters on the lines of hot and lurid6 melodrama7. The recent Thaw8 trial may be taken as a typical case in point, so far as melodrama is concerned. The speeches of counsel on both sides might have been written specially9 for the Adelphi Theatre, and every gesture of the rival declaimers would seem to have been modelled on the style of the adipose10 itinerant11 actor who plays “Othello” in penny gaffs.
So far as the real stage is concerned, the Americans are to be credited with quite a number of startling innovations. They were the sole inventors of the Deadwood Dick kind of play, which[82] involves the tooling on to the stage of an ancient and battered13 mail coach, accompanied by feats14 of unthinkable skill with the shooting irons. I believe, too, that they were the only begetters of the drama that has for its central attraction a real set-to between bona-fide bruisers, who fight with the gloves off and punish one another for all they are worth under American rules.
Then, of course, I must not forget to mention the world-renowned “Tank Drama.” It appears that an American manager happened once upon a time to find himself in a second-hand16 galvanised iron store. Here he discovered an enormous iron tank which he found could be purchased for a song. In a fit of abstraction, and in pursuance of the American tendency to buy anything and everything that can be had dirt cheap, he purchased the tank. And having it on his hands and no particular use for it, he hired a dramatist to write a play around it. To this woolly genius a tank of course suggested water and high dives and swimmers, and before you could say hey, presto17! Mr. Manager found himself in possession of a sensational18, if somewhat humid, melodrama, the like of which had never before been seen on any road.
The Tank Drama toured the States for years on end, to the approval and delight[83] of American audiences, and for anything I know to the contrary, it is still running, the tank itself having by this time, no doubt, grown a little leaky.
In England the public is familiar with melodramas19 in which the principal part is taken by steam-rollers, circular saws, fire-engines, and other pieces of mechanism20. The Tank Drama, however, was the progenitor21 of them all. It was from the Americans, also, that we learnt to grace our melodramas with the presence on the stage of real live cows, racehorses, ducks and geese, faithful dogs, dancing bears, blue monkeys, and educated asses22.
The American public prides itself upon the rapidity with which the national dramatists, from Clyde Fitch or Augustus Thomas to David Belasco or Theodore Kremer, can turn out almost any species of dramatic work to order. On the production of a five-act tragedy recently in New York, it was announced that the author had written “the whole contraption” in under the twenty-four hours. I can well believe it. The majority of American plays that come to us on this side bear unmistakable indications of having been written in haste, and with a single eye to getting through with the labour. This is no doubt due to the circumstance that[84] American managers have a mania23 for producing new pieces, and that the average run of such pieces is exceedingly short. Authors do not feel it to be worth their while to take pains, particularly as the majority of them have to subsist24 by dressing25 up in dramatic guise26 some new and big mechanical invention or some cause célèbre or tragedy in real life or some stupid story, which happens to have caught on, but which they know cannot in the nature of things keep the stage for more than a few weeks.
Although one is continually hearing of the triumphs of this or that American actor or actress in Shakespearean parts, it is a solemn fact that the average of Shakespearean acting27 in America is very much below that of any other country in which Shakespeare is consistently played. I cannot, of course, forget that America produced the late Mr. Phelps and gave us Miss Mary Anderson, whom all the world admired. But these are the exceptions. The rule is that the American actor who plays Shakespeare is a bull-necked, unlettered mummer who has served his apprenticeship28 to the circus business or to the plumbing29, and roars out Shakespeare’s lines with a nasal intonation30 and an absolute lack of understanding. Nine out of ten[85] American actors ought to carry a net with them.
I am aware that it may be contended that the foregoing aspects of the American drama are things of the past, and that in all essential respects the theatre in America is nowadays on an equal footing with the theatre in England. In a considerable measure, this may be so, due, no doubt, to the mixed beneficence of the blessed brotherhood31: Frohman, Klaw and Erlanger.
Yet there can be no getting away from the fact that the American plays and American companies that are from time to time brought to London for our edification fail woefully to interest us.
In London, quite lately we have been presented with two plays of American extraction and rendered by American companies. One of them “Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch” to wit, at Terry’s Theatre, appears to have been a success, from a monetary32 point of view, and nobody can witness it without entertainment. On the other hand, it suffers from that pea-nutty exuberance33 and thinness of interest which are so characteristically American. The sentiment in it is of the floweriest and slobberiest sort, the comedy forced and jerky, and the setting squalid and depressing to a degree. It is said to be a transcript[86] of life among the American poorer classes, and herein conceivably it is instructive if not altogether uplifting; for it indicates only too plainly that the hackneyed American talk about “the full dinner-pail” and the general snugness34 and decency35 of the existence of the American poor has precious little foundation in fact. Of course, Mrs. Wiggs herself is made to exhibit singularly good qualities of heart, and a certain shrewd and humorous wisdom. But the rest of the characters—not even excluding the weepily-named Lovey-Mary and Mrs. Wiggs’s troops of wild-cat children—are the kind of people whom it sets one’s teeth on edge to meet. If, as I am told, America is full of Cabbage Patches, I can only say that America should hasten to the penitent36 form.
The other play of which London was adjured37 to expect great things was called “Strongheart.” It ran for a couple of weeks or more at the Aldwych Theatre, and was then taken off. “Strongheart” purported38 to give us some highly realistic glimpses of American college life. There was a great deal of American football in it, and a great deal of ra, ra, ra-ing about it. There were also unlimited39 quantities of ra, ra rant12. But the plot exhibited the usual[87] thinness, the construction was slack and loose, and the characterisation feeble and colourless. If the company which supported the handsome Robert Edeson in this particular piece is to be taken as a fair sample, I feel free to conclude that in the lump American actors and actresses are a reasonably poor crowd. Play as they would, the men failed to convince us that they were persons of any particular breeding, and the women said their lines as if they were in pain, and walked through their parts like so many uninspired clothes horses. Of course I know America has many gifted actors and actresses such as William Faversham, James K. Hackett, E. H. Sothern, Julia Merlowe, Olga Nethersole and Mery Mannering—but, as luck will have it, with the exception of the second-named, who is a Canadian, they’re all English. And so is even the inimitable Hap15 Ward40. On the whole, I think America will have to make some very serious strides in the dramatic art before she can fairly hope to show England anything that is worth looking at.
When you turn to the music halls you find the American in equally sad case. There is no performer of note on the English music-hall stage whose training and experience have been American.[88] From the other side we get a few trick bicyclists, wire-walkers, high divers41, and comic speech makers42 whose pea-nutty witticisms43 are obviously culled44 from the comic papers. They help to fill up the programme, without in any sense helping45 to fill up the house.
It is in this connection that the Americans have made a practical avowal46 of their pathetic inferiority; for they are said to have made contracts with some of the leading English stars for appearances in America, on terms which plainly indicate that the American managers must be singularly hard up for talent and quite incapable47 of finding it in their own country.
The fact is, that in this as in a variety of other matters, the American’s cock-sureness and unblushing faith in his personal beauty and powers have led him considerably48 astray. The American really possesses scarcely any talent. All he can do is to boast and shout and advertise. And having little or nothing behind him to boast and shout and advertise about, he is bound in the long run to find himself at a disadvantage. Half the actresses and female music-hall artists of America are successful not because they can do anything, but because they have been “boosted” into fame by the pushful, blatant[89] manager. The sole accomplishment49 of many of them is that they can undress prettily50 in full view of their audiences.
For the rest they bolster51 up their position by extraneous52 escapades rather than by art. They are harum-scarum, feather-brained young women who for the most part would find it exceedingly difficult to get a living by the exercise of their alleged53 smartness before an English public. And as for American actors and music-hall men, the best that can be said of them is that when they are not vulgar they are deadly dull, and the worst that their real sphere of life is the American circus. I wish they would all take to the Tank.
The average American theatrical man, invariably strikes me as being a born circus-man, intended by nature to go around in a gaudy54 procession by day and to fill up his nights showing off wild beasts and freaks and Deadwood coaches. Unconsciously he does all his business and manages all his affairs on circus principles. He is for ever beating the drum and inviting55 the crowd to walk up and see the finest show on earth. The ideal man of his private bosom56 is the late P. T. Barnum, who was the father of advertisement and the originator of the fine art of “boosting.”[90] It was P. T. Barnum who said, or who got somebody to say for him, “When you have anything good, keep on letting on about it, and you will get rich.”
The American business man has always considered that saying to be the extreme height of philosophy.
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1
incorrigibly
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| adv.无法矫正地；屡教不改地；无可救药地；不能矫正地 | |
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theatrical
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| adj.剧场的，演戏的；做戏似的，做作的 | |
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revel
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| vi.狂欢作乐，陶醉；n.作乐，狂欢 | |
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innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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illustrated
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| adj. 有插图的，列举的 动词illustrate的过去式和过去分词 | |
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lurid
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| adj.可怕的；血红的；苍白的 | |
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melodrama
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| n.音乐剧；情节剧 | |
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thaw
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| v.（使）融化，（使）变得友善；n.融化，缓和 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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adipose
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| adj.脂肪质的，脂肪多的；n.（储于脂肪组织中的）动物脂肪；肥胖 | |
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itinerant
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| adj.巡回的；流动的 | |
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rant
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| v.咆哮；怒吼；n.大话；粗野的话 | |
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battered
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| adj.磨损的；v.连续猛击；磨损 | |
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feats
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| 功绩，伟业，技艺( feat的名词复数 ) | |
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hap
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| n.运气；v.偶然发生 | |
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second-hand
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| adj.用过的，旧的，二手的 | |
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presto
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| adv.急速地；n.急板乐段；adj.急板的 | |
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sensational
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| adj.使人感动的，非常好的，轰动的，耸人听闻的 | |
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melodramas
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| 情节剧( melodrama的名词复数 ) | |
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mechanism
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| n.机械装置；机构，结构 | |
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progenitor
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| n.祖先，先驱 | |
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asses
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| n. 驴，愚蠢的人，臀部 adv. (常用作后置)用于贬损或骂人 | |
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mania
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| n.疯狂；躁狂症，狂热，癖好 | |
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subsist
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| vi.生存，存在，供养 | |
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dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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guise
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| n.外表，伪装的姿态 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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apprenticeship
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| n.学徒身份；学徒期 | |
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29
plumbing
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| n.水管装置；水暖工的工作；管道工程v.用铅锤测量（plumb的现在分词）；探究 | |
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intonation
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| n.语调，声调；发声 | |
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brotherhood
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| n.兄弟般的关系，手中情谊 | |
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32
monetary
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| adj.货币的，钱的；通货的；金融的；财政的 | |
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exuberance
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| n.丰富；繁荣 | |
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snugness
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decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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penitent
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| adj.后悔的；n.后悔者；忏悔者 | |
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adjured
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| v.（以起誓或诅咒等形式）命令要求( adjure的过去式和过去分词 )；祈求；恳求 | |
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38
purported
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| adj.传说的，谣传的v.声称是…，（装得）像是…的样子( purport的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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unlimited
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| adj.无限的，不受控制的，无条件的 | |
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40
ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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41
divers
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| adj.不同的；种种的 | |
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makers
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| n.制造者，制造商（maker的复数形式） | |
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43
witticisms
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| n.妙语，俏皮话( witticism的名词复数 ) | |
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44
culled
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| v.挑选，剔除( cull的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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45
helping
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| n.食物的一份&adj.帮助人的，辅助的 | |
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46
avowal
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| n.公开宣称，坦白承认 | |
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47
incapable
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| adj.无能力的，不能做某事的 | |
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48
considerably
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| adv.极大地；相当大地；在很大程度上 | |
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49
accomplishment
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| n.完成，成就，（pl.）造诣，技能 | |
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50
prettily
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| adv.优美地；可爱地 | |
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51
bolster
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| n.枕垫；v.支持，鼓励 | |
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52
extraneous
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| adj.体外的；外来的；外部的 | |
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53
alleged
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| a.被指控的，嫌疑的 | |
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54
gaudy
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| adj.华而不实的；俗丽的 | |
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55
inviting
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| adj.诱人的，引人注目的 | |
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56
bosom
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| n.胸，胸部；胸怀；内心；adj.亲密的 | |
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