Arthur Wing Pinero

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature:

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934). He left school at 10 to work in his father's solicitor's practice, but, stage-struck from youth, became an actor, and was noticed by H. Irving who later produced some of his plays. His first one-act play, Two Hundred a Year, performed in 1877, heralded a successful and prolific career. The first of his farces, The Magistrate (perf. 1885), involves a series of ludicrous confusions between Mr Posket, the magistrate, and his family; it brought Pinero both fame and wealth. Later farces, such as The School-Mistress (1887), did nearly as well, as did his sentimental comedy Sweet Lavender (1888). His first serious play, on what was to be the recurrent theme of double standards for men and women, was The Profligate (1889); it was praised by Archer, and noted not only for its frankness but also for its absence of the standard devices of soliloquy and aside. Lady Bountiful (1891) was the first of the 'social' plays in which Pinero was deemed to display his understanding of women. The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), returning to the theme of double standards, was a lasting success. The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) again dealt with a woman's dubious past. Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898), a sentimental comedy nostalgically recalling his own passion for the theatre he had haunted as a boy, also had great success. He continued to write, but, although knighted in 1909, lived through many years of dwindling reputation and disillusion, eclipsed by the rising popularity of the new theatre of Ibsen and G. B. Shaw.


The Second Mrs Tanqueray, a play by Sir A. Pinero, first performed 1893.

Tanqueray, knowing of Paula's past reputation, still determines to marry her, in the belief that his love and the generosity of his friends will prove strong enough to counter prejudice and hypocrisy. Ellean, his young convent-bred daughter from a previous marriage, comes to live with him and Paula; soon Tanqueray begins to realize that Ellean, his friends, and his own suspicions are proving too powerful an opposition to his once-loving marriage. whan Paula realizes that she has lost his love, she kills herself. Because of the daring theme Pinero had great difficulty in having the play accepted for production, but once produced it was an immediate and abiding success.

The Speculative Theatre 1871-91

 

—oOo—

Patience

Patience, de Gilbert y Sullivan (1881):




Oh, no. Me suprimen el vídeo de la Opera de Sydney, y el canal, inmediatamente. Pero me la compro, y la veo, y la recomiendo. Patience:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patience_(opera)

Pongo, entonces, otra versión, de los Bristol Catholic Players

Surface tension

Surface tension, a photo by JoseAngelGarciaLanda on Flickr.

The Speculative Theatre 1871-91

Ch. 16 of The Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, by Simon Trussler:

However clear-sighted may have been Karl Marx's diagnosis of the ill-effects of nineteenth-century laissez faire capitalism, his prognosis, especially if misread as a programme for continuing action, was deeply flawed. He acknowledged the skill of the English ruling classes in deflecting revolutionary tendencies through timely concessions: but he recognized less well their capacity to assimilate or, where necessary, to cauterize the traditional culture of the proletariat—the breeding ground of effective subversion.

At the lowly level of recreation, the process of assimilation had been accelerating since mid-century. many of the sports which, though played for generations according to vague but locally recognized oral codes, had been banned as disruptive in their 'unofficial' forms now began to be 'officially' resuscitated—replete with printed rulebooks, top-hatted regulating bodies, and all the class ramifications of 'amateur' and 'professional' status. However, those popular customs which threatened profits as well as peace of mind had, necessarily, to be put down rather than merely contained. And so it was, for example, that the diverse ways in which midwinter had traditionally been celebrated were now tidied up and at first confined to Christmas Day itself: the addition of Boxing Day (following the act of 1871 which established Bank Holidays) was thus made to appear a benevolent concession rather than a grudging acknowledgement of a far ampler ancient right.

Not only were the twelve days reduced to two, but a once-communal feast was turned inward upon the family and the domestic hearth—even the raucous street music of the waits being suppressed in favour of the 'rediscovery' of carols, so much more reverent and demure. And all those charitable ladies who, on Christmas Day, massaged their consciences by doling out to those incarcerated in prisons and workhouses their one decent meal of the year had now, in the cause of temperance, to concede that their healths be drunk in water instead of good ale—while the annual treat was, of course, preferably to be confined to the 'deserving' rather than the recalcitrant poor.

Despite all these tendencies, Epiphany long kept its hold on the popular imagination, although its traditional inversions had become largely symbolic—practical jokes, typically, rendered down to cardboard as the subjects of Twelfth Night cards (which long predated Christmas cards as we know them). Stubbornly, however, seasonal topsy-turvydom did survive—not least in traditions of cross-dressing, an indecorous ebullience which disturbed not only the smug religiosity of the makers of the Victorian Christmas but the discreet hypocrisies of their sexual habits.

And so it was that the subversive transvestism of old became a sanctioned form of sublimation, made manifest in the rituals of pantomime—which, although often a Christmas offering in the past, was now becoming exclusively so. In the process, most lingering associations with the old commedia masks were purged, as Harlequin and Columbine gave way to a transsexually titillating principal boy and principal girl, backed up by a chorus line in fleshings. The Clown was cut down to the likes of Buttons, and Pantaloon unsexed to become the Dame—a male in drag, usually a music-hall favorite drafted in to boost the box-office, as pop stars and television personalities are today.

Drury Lane, notably under the management of Augustus Harris from 1879 to 1896 restored its drifting fortunes by specializing, for ever-lengthening Christmas seasons, in pantomimes of the most spectacular kind—filling out its year with sensation dramas similarly dependent upon extravagant effects, for which the theatre's technical resources as well as its sheer size made it well suited. Such effects ranged from the sinking of the Birkenhead in Cheer, Boys, Cheer (1895) to August Bank Holiday on Hampstead Heath in The Great Ruby (1898) and a full-scale horse-race in The Whip (1909).

[Illustr.] Augustus Harris (1852-96)  under whose management from 1879 Drury Lane interspersed its regular diet of spectacular dramas with an annual 'Christmas' pantomime which might run past Easter. Although condemned by traditionalists for his recruitment of music-hall performers in panto, Harris retained many of its older features, including the Clown and the harlequinade—which duly featured in Babes in the Wood. Dan Leno, whom Harris introduced to the West End in this production, remained teamed with Herbert Campbell in pantomimes at the Lane until both died in 1904. This cartoon was one of the long sequence published in Vanity Fair by 'Ape' and (as in this case) 'Spy', otherwise Sir Leslie Ward.

(Illustr.): Impressions of characters from  Babes in the Wood, Augustus Harris's Drury Lane pantomime of 1888. These were drawn for the  Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic—the journalistic conjunction reminding us of the strong links between the stage and the turf at this time. Dan Leno is shown here in the 'dame' role of the wicked aunt, with Harriet Vernon (she of the redoubtable thighs) as the 'principal boy', Robin Hood. The two babes ('of forty or thereabouts', as the Sporting and Dramatic reminds us) are older music-hall stars, Herbert Campbell and Harry Nicholls.

A NEW BOOM IN THEATRE BUILDING

That the ruling classes were now showing some readiness to alleviate the harshest excesses of the industrial revolution had to do in part with enlightened self-interest, in part with a calculated a ppeal to class allegiances. Thus, because factory owners tended to be free-trading Liberals, and imperialist Conservative government might embark upon industrial reforms without offence to its supporters in the rural shires—while in the process wooing those newly enfranchised by the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, which gave the vote to virtually all male householders. No less important, the Ballot Act of 1872 kept secret from employers and landlords alike the way in which a man cast that vote: and although no woman was yet able to cast hers, the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 marked a first step towards greater economic independence.

Although the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was passed by Gladstone's first Liberal administration, it was thus his successor Disraeli—the first to deplore 'two nations' living in mutual ignorance—who as leader of the Conservative government of 1874 enacted a programme of reforms which one of the first two Labour MPs then elected declared to have 'done more for the working classes in five years than the Liberals in fifty'. Factory legislation significantly loosened the shackles of long hours and insufferable conditions, while trades unions were freed from criminal penalties for strike action and peaceful picketing. Under a Public Health Act, sewage systems were built which have only recently begun to show their age. An Enclosures Act not only brought the private absorption of common land virtually to an end, but increased the provision of public recreation grounds and allotments And local authorities were encouraged to build 'artisans' dwellings'—thus creating the very system of council houses that more recent Conservative governments have been anxious to dismantle.

Although conditions for ordinary working people thus began slowly to improve, the 1870s saw also the start of a severe trade depression which, with only two brief intermissions, persisted almost until the end of the century. But since some of the causative factors—tariff barriers abroad, the end of the railway boom at home—left investors with spare capital, the theatre, as an alternative focus for speculation, ironically benefited, and it was during this period that an 'entertainment industry' effectively emerged.

However, the tale of the two London theatres known as 'the rickety twins' suggests that this development could have its pitfalls. On a site between the churches of St Clement Dane and St Mary le Strand were thus constructed in 1868 and 1870 the back-to-back playhouses best remembered as the Globe and the Opera Comique. Slum clearance in the area to make way for the Aldwych and Kingsway development was already being actively planned, and the speculative builder Sefton Parry therefore erected both theatres of the flimsiest materials in expectation of their imminent demolition—and his own hefty compensation. They were considered serious fire hazards, although in the event both manged just to outlive the century.

Two sturdier products of the new boom in theatre building also opened in 1870—the charming Vaudeville in the Strand, and the first Royal Court, whose situation in Sloane Square testified to the ever-westward drift of fashionable London. On Regent (soon to be Piccadilly) Circus, the subterranean location of the Criterion Theatre, built in 1874 beneath the restaurant of the same name, bore witness to the spiralling land values in the heart of the West End. Even further west, if never quite so fashionable, Hammersmith saw its Lyric Opera House go up in 1888. And in 1881 had opened both the Comedy, in Panton Street between the Haymarket and Leicester Square, and the first Savoy, midway along the Strand. The Playhouse, which followed a year later, was anecdotally another of Sefton Parry's gambles, owing its obscure situation off the Embankment to an anticipated extension of the Charing Cross railway, from which he hoped in vain to profit.

In 1884 the Prince of Wales's opened in Covent Street, off Piccadilly Circus—and then, in 1887, were completed the slum clearances which now drove Charing Cross Road north towards Oxford Street from Trafalgar Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue south-west from Holborn down to Piccadilly. The very heart of theatreland now underwent a rapid transplant, fed by these wide, well-lit, and accessible arteries. In 1888 the first Shaftesbury Theatre went up near Cambridge Circus, where the two roads crossed, to be closely followed by the Lyric, just a little further west: and then, in 1891, arose the great sprawl of the Palace, at first as the Royal English Opera, to dominate the Circus itself. The Garrick had already staked a first claim for the theatre along Charing Cross Road in 1889, and three years later arose the almost abutting Trafalgar, now known as the Duke of York's, with its frontage on St Martin's Lane.

THE VINTAGE VICTORIAN THEATRE

The Empire music hall, Newcastle, pictured in 1891, and probably much as it had been for the previous half century. Note the cane chairs for the orchestra, the plush seats in the 'front stalls' —and the hard benches in the slips. Flock wallpaper and pictures lend a homely touch to the auditorium, which contrasts with the fantasy world conjured up on the stage.

Our illustration shows some typical features of the vintage Victorian theatre: its fully-formed and ornately gilded picture-frame stage, from which any residual trace of apron and stage doors has been eliminated; its rich but highly (and sometimes confusingly) eclectic embellishments; its pit foreshortened or (as here) abandoned before encroaching stalls; and upper tiers ever-extending towards the stage, as new techniques of cantilevering removed the necessity for so many supporting pillars. Other less immediately obvious characteristics were dictated by considerations of safety: these included, besides improved ventilation, a new tendency for the pit to be sunk below ground so that the dress circle was at entrance level, and a requirement that the theatre should be isolated from surrounding buildings by passageways.

Since rooms could no longer be built above the auditorium, the fly-tower now became a dominant external feature, while new scenographic techniques were encouraging the internal improvement and development of the flying space. However, overriding commercial considerations meant that, in comparison with continental practice, front-of-house facilities in the new theatres were meagre, with box-office, cloak-room, and refreshment areas often so cramped as not even to be adequately functional. As, in many such theatres, they remain.

But the most enduringly important innovation in theatre construction to occur during this period lay, of course, in the use of electric lighting. Richard D'Oyly Carte led the way in 1881, his new Savoy not only the first theatre but the first public building of any kind in London to be so lit; and later in the 1880s two disastrous fires within two years at the Theatre Royal, Exeter, accelerated a nationwide conversion from gas which was virtually complete by the end of the century. But D'Oyly Carte continued to illuminate the auditorium as well as the stage during performances, and this hungover habit at first limited the artistic potential of electricity—at a time when Henry Irving was insisting not only on the lowering of the house lights at the Lyceum, but on the retention where possible of gas, which he believed to permit subtler control over his effects.

Irving was, indeed, entirely modern in deploying light not merely for illumination but for dramatic emphasis, a diffusion and variation allowed more readily by the banks of individual gas taps and valves than by the initially more limited controls over the new source. Famously, Irving relished, too, the resources of limelight—not merely for its mellow brilliance in tracking his own actions like a modern follow-spot but for the varying impressions of moonlight and directional or waning sunlight it facilitated.

IRVING AND THE LYCEUM YEARS

In view of his approach to lighting, it is ironic that in other respects the period's leading actor-manager, Henry Irving, was a rather old-fashioned player with a preference for an old-fashioned repertoire. Indeed, in 1877 there even appeared a small, anonymous pamphlet entitled The Fashionable Tragedian—a 'criticism with ten illustrations' which set out to prove that, for all his then burgeoning influence, Irving was, in truth, 'a very bad actor'.

Unlike much of the critical sniping to which he was subjected, this squib in brown paper wrappers merits attention because its authors, William Archer and Robert W. Lowe, were to become respectively the leading critic and theatre historian of their generation. And both clearly sensed, as early in their own careers as in Irving's, that the grip this charismatic performer was already exerting would encourage (as it also exemplified) a spirit of conservatism which for some time yet would insulate the British theatre from the new drama of Europe. For while Irving was not a 'very bad actor', he did, as Shaw perceived and complained, choose to contour his greatness within a corset of very constraining trim.

Having served an old-style extended apprenticeship in the provinces, Irving spent five inconspicuous years in London before being noticed in 1871, at the age of 32, in the role of Digby Grant in James Albery's Two Roses— a role which, ironically, was also to be among the most modern he ever attempted. Albery, whose dilutions of what Archer described as the 'flippant and feebly sentimental small talk' of the 'Robertsonian school of playwriting' kept the new Vaudeville full for 294 performances, was briefly hailed as the natural successor of Tom Robertson—who, already in ill-health, died the following year. However, Robertson proved to have no natural successor—although hes widely imitated knack of making dialogue trip with seeming ease from well-mannered tongues made this an era when affluent amateurs encouraged themselves to believe that acting was an accomplishment easily acquired.

Thus arose a new breed of superior supernumeraries—'extra ladies and gentlemen' who duly got their billing, but seldom in other than walk-on roles. And among the fond (though in this case not so foolish) parents who encouraged their offspring in their histrionic ambitions was one Hezekiah Bateman, who, also in 1871, had gone so far as to take the lease of the old Lyceum Theatre—which was still finding it hard to live up to the pretensions of its portico—as a showcase for the talents of his four daughters.

Bateman duly recruited Irving to the company: but neither the opening play by his own wifre nor the stage adaptation of Dickens's Pickwick Papers which followed caught the imagination of audiences. And so it was very much as a final fling that Bateman agreed to let Irving take the lead in an adaptation from the French by Leopold Lewis of a melodrama entitled The Bells, in which Irving was to take the role of the haunted burgomaster Mathias. The opening night of 25 November 1871 not only rescued Bateman's fortunes but, in the words of Clement Scott—a critic as traditional in his tastes as Archer was innovatory—lifted Irving 'at one bound above his contemporaries'.

That same night, Irving, returning home, is said to have stepped down from his cab and out of his marriage when his socially ambitious wife asked irritably if he was going to go on making a fool of himself all his life. His subsequent career was dedicated to showing that making a fool of oneself might be no bar to social advancement: and in 1895, at the second time of asking, he duly accepted a knighthood—the first such honour for services to the theatre, which could from then on regard itself as officially respectable and respectably official. A knighthood for Squire Bancroft followed in 1897, and for Charles Wyndham, aptly an Edwardian creation, in 1902.

Meanwhile, in September 1872, began Irving's long association with the hack dramatist W. G. Wills, whose reincarnation of the martyr king in the actor's won image for the historical romance Charles I led to his appointment as house dramatist to the Lyceum at £300 a year. Wills's talent, like Lewis's, was mediocre, but in every sense adaptive—and subervient to Irving's requirements, as in his mangling of Goethe's Faust in 1885, to the interests of the actor's Mephistopheles.

Henry Irving's Mephistopheles in W. G. Wills's version of Goethe's Faust (Lyceum, 1885). Against massive costs of over £15,000, the production (five years in the planning) took in nearly £70,000 in its first year and £57,000 in its second. By then Irving had added the grotesque splendours of a scene in the Witches' Kitchen to the climactic Walpurgisnacht revels on the Brocken Mountain, in which (according to Clement Scott) a 'shrieking, gibbering crowd' of witches, goblins, and apes from hell made a terrifying contrast with 'shadowy greys and greens' suggestive of Gustave Doré.

Even the poet Tennyson, then entering his dotage, permitted Irving to shape the part of Philip of Spain in Queen Mary (1876) as a vehicle for his talents, and while the laureate lay dying, Irving went to work on Becket (1893), reconstructing the role of the archbishop and a good else besides.

Irving's first Shakespearean production at the Lyceum, judiciously chosen, was his Hamlet of 1874. He played the title role 'like a scholar and a gentleman', wrote Clement Scott: Irving was 'not acting' but 'talking to himself . . . thinking aloud'. During the run of 200 nights, then unprecedented for a Shakespeare revival, Bateman died, and his widow, after briefly toying with the reins of management, amicably resigned them to Irving in 1878. Irving continued to extend his Shakespearean range, a mannered Othello (1876) and a curiously unromantic Romeo and Juliet (1882) easily outweighed by triumphs as Richard III in 1877, as Shylock in 1879, as Wolsey in Henry VIII in 1892, and as Iachimo in Cymbeline in 1896.

Despite scenic embellishments of a kind which had driven others into bankruptcy, incidental music often specially composed for an orchestra of thirty, and ambitiously choreographed crowd scenes, Irving managed to make more money from Shakespeare and to play him for lengthier runs, than had ever proved possible before. He took no less trouble over lesser plays: his biographer Alan Hughes has thus calculated that the formidable number of 639 people were employed to work on Robespierre, including 355 performers and musician, 236 technicians (the lighting crew alone numbering 38), and 48 administrative staff. 

That was in 1899: later in the same year Irving gave up his management of the Lyceum, which he had recently turned into a limited company. He died six years later, during what he had already declared to be his farewell tour.

A rare photograph of Irving in performance—in Sardou's Robespierre, on tour to New York in 1900 (cameras were banned at the Lyceum, where the production had opened the previous year). Irving as Robespierre is here addressing the hall of the revolutionary Convention in the last act of the play. The picture is, of course, posed, but begins to suggest Irving's concern for the careful orchestration of his crowd scenes. 

As an actor, Irving seems to have exerted a force of will which not only infused his role but took command of his audience. An unusual mixture of the protean and the idiosyncratic, he was physically adept at shrinking, extending, and otherwise dissembling his spidery limbs into a new character, while deploying mannerisms of speech and gait which made him, unmistakably and with deliberation, Irving. An eccentric showman who wooed his audiences rather as Disraeli wooed his Queen, he sustained the dying tradition of a permanent acting company, but not in the spirit of interdependence on which Richard Burbage or even David Garrick had built; rather, Irving was the undisputed first among unequals.

Only his leading lady, Ellen Terry—whose hiring was one of the first acts of his independent management—was permitted to complement rather than challenge his supremacy, and even she had to confine herself to roles which would reflect Irving's brilliance. As Beatrice and Benedick, Portia and Shylock, or Imogen and Iachimo the pair could thus work on an equal footing, but she was unable to play, for example, Rosalind in As You Like It, because there was no role of equivalent stature for the 'partner' who was also the boss. Terry's Imogen, which was much to the taste of virtuous Victorians:

As a manager, Irving well understood his respectable Lyceum audiences and was always responsive to their predictably limited tasts: but within these limits his productions were rigorously rehearsed by disciplined companies, and their polish scrupulously maintained during long runs which would otherwise have fallen apart. And to be found among the names of his company were such harbingers of the theatrical future as George Alexander, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and John Martin-Harvey.


PROSPERITY IN THE WEST END

Irving not only brought commercial and (by his own and his audience's standards) artistic success to the old Lyceum: he also did much to create a climate in which other West End managements might prosper—though all, confessedly, were assisted by favourable economic conditions. Thus, the increase in middle-class incomes consequent upon falling prices and stable salaries after 1873 allowed them not only to shunt many patrons of the pit to a more fitting place—well out of sight in the upper gallery—but also to risk increases in seat prices, thereby boosting profit margins.

And so, despite Tom Robertson's death in 1871, the Bancrofts continued to prosper at the Old Prince of Wales's, prettifying safe classics from Shakespeare to Sheridan with what Bancroft called 'elaborate illustration'. In 1880, following the retirement of the veteran Buckstone, they moved to the Haymarket, which he had left largely unrefurbished: they proceeded to refurbish it thoroughly, gilding the picture-frame of their proscenium arch, cunningly concealing the footlights and orchestra, and, to howls of impotent protest, pioneering the total abolition of the pit. Meanwhile, their protégé John Hare, in partnership with Madge Robertson and her husband W. H. Kendal, was winning the public's initially uncertain favour for the new Court Theatre, the same team later moving successively and successfully to the St James's and the Garrick.

In 1875 Charles Wyndham began his long association with the underground Criterion, where at first he specialized in vasectomized adaptations of French farces, before becoming his own matinee idol in middle age. Augustus Harris was soon to begin his long reign over pantomime at Drury Lane, and Richard D'Oyly Carte to take Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas to triumph from the Opera Comique to the Savoy—whence George Edwardes crossed the road to help John Hollingshead keep 'the sacred lamp of burlesque' burning at the Gaiety. J. L. Toole, taking on the little Charing Cross Theatre in King William Street in 1879, reflected the prevailing managerial self-confidence by renaming it after himself—an American fashion which found few other followers.

The promenade of the Empire, Leicester Square, in 1902. A youthful Winston Churchill was among those opposed to the attempts led by Mrs Ormiston Chant to close down the promenade in 1894 (on the grounds that it was a haunt of 'ladies of the town'). Later, the theatre housed revue, and, after the First World War, musicals were performed there, until it was demolished in 1927 to make way for a cinema.

MUSIC HALL AS BIG BUSINESS

When, as the spectacular centrepiece to A Life of Pleasure (1893), the promenade at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square was recreated on the stage of Drury Lane, a back-handed compliment was being paid to the famous music hall. As the notoriety of the Empire promenade confirms —it was allegedly a favoured haunt of prostitutes—music hall continued to offend the bourgeoisie, though its appeal (like that of horse-racing) united the more raffish elements of the aristocracy with the generality of the working class. This was in spite of the endeavours of those would-be respectable music-hall managers who banned alcohol from the auditorium—an auditorium in which the old, convivial clusters of tables and chairs were giving way before regular rows of fixed seating, and where performers once welcomed with the raised glass of the chairman were now identified by numbers slotted into the invasive and alienating proscenium arch.

Such palatial West End establishments as the Empire, the nearby Alhambra in Leicester Square, and later the surviving Palace on Cambridge Circus were, of course, aiming to attract customers of a different class from those who attended the humbler halls down in the East End, and there were many gradations of neighbourhood hall in between. But after 1888 all had to obtain a Certificate of Suitability by meeting minimum legal standards of safety and sanitation: and the cost of the necessary reconstruction work often required a major injection of capital. Companies were therefore floated to build new halls as well as to rebuild old—often to the designs of 'legit' theatre architects, such as the prolific Frank Matcham.

Some managements also began to accrete first a local chain of halls, and then a larger circuit—the beginnings of the music-hall empires of the likes of Oswald Stoll and Edward Moss. At the same time, a divide began to open up between the top-billing stars who were able to command huge salaries to work the new circuits—Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd being probably the most familiar to emerge during this period—and their lowlier brethren, whose dispensable services were open to exploitation. A long struggle for better conditions began with the formation of the Variety Artists' Association in 1885, well before 'legitimate' players had successfully formed thamselves into a union—a right at last acknowledged by the social reforms of the 1870s.

[Illustration:] Opening bill for the New Cross Empire in 1899. Designed by the prolific Frank Matcham, this typical suburban hall had a capacity of around 2,000. Note the 'credentials of the organizers' whose capital investments are listed along with their 'present market value'.

NEW WRITING—AND A NEW STYLE OF OPERETTA

Managements in the [1870s] required new writing to provide vehicles for the acting talent at their command and to satisfy the expectations of their paying public. Indeed, by the 180s the problem of the English drama was not particularly the absence of a 'literary' output of intellectual substance—none such had existed for over a century—but rather the presence of a deeply bourgeois audience which, scornful of the hearty affirmations of melodrama, had come to prefer the enervated emotional shorthand of the 'society' style. Writers now seen as harbingers of a 'new dram' could and did get their work staged in the West End—just so long as their innovations titillated but did not seriously disturb their audiences.

The production of original work was encouraged by the international copyright agreements which now began to stem the flood of foreign imports and adaptations. The five years of protection from unauthorized translation given to foreign writers in 1852 was extended in 1875 to cover adapted pieces, and in 1887 the Berne Convention strengthened copyright arrangements between most European countries—the most important non-signatory, the United States, following with its own legislation in 1891. Some doubts remained until 1911 as to how far prior publication of a play might endanger performing rights, and this led to numerous one-off 'copyright performances': but the new arrangements did help to encourage reading editions, alongside the ubiquitous acting texts of Lacy and French—whose technical jargon and abbreviations proved forbidding to the uninitiated.

As commissions to adapt foreign plays began to dry up, some writers unwisely made bids for posterity by attempting those five-act historical tragedies in blank-verse for which posterity was presumed to have an unquenchable thirst. As Irving wryly observed in 1880, many of the unknown authors who submitted such works to him by the score 'proudly claimed that they made a point of never going near a theatre'. Even such a piece as Joan of Arc (1871) by the thoroughly professional veteran Tom Taylor, has not only failed to impress posterity ever since but owed such notoriety as it enjoyed in its own day to the realism with which the saintly maid was burnt at the stake.

Among the few writers who achieved both an immediate and more enduring fame, W. S. Gilbert occupies a special place. His 'fairy' comedies for the Kendals at the Haymarket in the early 1870s were, improbably, satiric burlesques in blank-verse in which Gilbert made audiences laugh at their own hypocrisies by transplanting them to fairyland. Despite a prolific early career (in 1872, for example, no fewer than five of his plays were running in London theatres) at first he won more respect than acclaim. His satirical edge was a touch too sharp for comfort, needing not so much to be blunted as to be melodically honed to the music of Arthur Sullivan.

Although John Hollingshead first teamed the pair in the over-erudite Thespis at the Adelphi in 1871, it was only when Richard D'Oyly Carte, in search of a native equivalent to the French opera bouffe, persuaded Gilbert to adapt his Trial by Jury for a musical setting at the Royalty in 1875 that the long, symbiotic association began, finding a first permanent theatre at the Opera Comique from 1877 to 1881. Then the team transferred along with their latest production,  Patience, to the new Savoy Theatre, a slight but salubrious step westwards along the Strand. G. K Chesterton described the characteristic tone of what have ever since been known as the 'Savoy operas' as capturing that 'half-unreal detachment in which some Victorians came at last to smile at all opinions including their own'.

The Savoy Theatre, during the opening production, Patience, in 1881. So closely were Gilbert and Sullivan's light operas associated with Richard D'Oyly Carte's new theatre that they are often known collectively as the 'Savoy operas'. The theatre was the first to incorporate electric lighting, and in its decorations and colouring it was more subdued than earlier Victorian houses. It was to the Savoy that J. E. Vedrenne and Granville Barker moved in 1907 from the Court, staging the first London production of Shaw's  Caesar and Cleopatra. Between 1912 and 1914 Barker staged here his innovatory productions of Shakespeare, further described on p. 271. The theatre was reconstructed in art deco style in 1929, but severely damaged by fire in 1990.

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A scene from HMS Pinafore, by Gilbert and Sullivan:




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THE LEADING WRITERS

Arthur Wing Pinero, whose later 'problem plays' contributed to the theatrical debate over the 'woman question' (to which we shall turn in the next chapter), made an earlier and arguably more deservedly enduring reputation as the writer of a string of successful farces, largely for the Court Theatre. From The Magistrate in 1885 through The Schoolmistress and Dandy Dick to The Amazons in 1893, he rang proficient changes on that distinctively British pattern whereby would-be adultery and its exposure are secondary to the dread of embarrassment and social gaffes—a dramatic emphasis also happily inoffensive to the Lord Chamberlain.

Unlike many other farceurs, Pinero gave the impression of being almost fond of characters who were only a degree or so offset from reality. George Rowell compares the types with those of the Aldwych farces of the 1920s—among them a 'pure and persecuted husband', a 'knowing man of the world' with his 'vacuous companion' , and a 'formidable matron'. These were played respectively by Arthur Cecil, John Clayton, Fred Kerr, and Mrs John Wood—a team whose regular 'lines', well-developed sense of ensemble, and consummate timing must have endowed Pinero's writing with the same ring of confidencethat Robertson Hare, Tom Walls, Ralph Lynn, and Mary Brough were later to give Ben Travers.

[Illustration:] Arthur Cecil as Posket, The Magistrate in Pinero's farce of that name. Seen at the Court in 1885, this was one of the sequence of plays at that theatre with which Arthur W. Pinero (1855-1934) consolidated his early reputation as a farceur. After flirting with a seduction theme in The Profligate (1890), he turned, most famously in The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), to social dramas and 'problem plays': but these have generally worn less well than either the farces or such later comedies as  Trelawny of the 'Wells' (1898) and The Gay Lord Quex (1899). He wrote inextinguishably on, but was out of touch with the style and values of the post-Victorian world.

Among those considered leading writers at the time, Henry Arthur Jones cuts the least appealing figure today. The equivocal stance of his 'problem plays'—and their no less equivocal solutions—must, like Pinero's, await later discussion: meanwhile, in his early work his success depended upon combining an old-fashioned melodramatic instinct—well-matched to the temperament of the actor-manager Wilson Barrett at the Princess's—with a solid storytelling technique and a good ear for dialogue. However, such structural skills were too often blighted by a pervasive and invasive social snobbery—perhaps inspired by contempt for his own petty-bourgeois origins—as early exemplified in Saints and Sinners (1884).

Jones went on to specialize variously in dramas of thwarted or distorted passion, such as Judah (1890), and old-fashioned intrigue comedies of which The Triumph of the Philistines (1895) is a typical and The Liars (1897) a rare superior example. Unfortunately his satire was not only heavy-handed, but betrayed an almost clinical detestation of the common people—also evident in his distaste for 'The Theatre of the Mob', as Jones dubbed it in one of his numerous polemics for a higher drama. Elsewhere, a shrill anti-clericalism sits oddly with an awed reverence for high society—any intended criticism of which is effectively muted by his insistence that those of lowly origins, inhabiting 'the dark places of the earth', are beneath the notice of art. Later, he was to prophesy that 'the epitaph on . . . all this realistic business will be—it does not matter what happens in kitchen-middens'.

Oscar Wilde was outraging and amusing fashionable London by strutting his aesthetic stuff as early as 1881, when Gilbert parodied such greenery-yallery decadence (as it was viewed by the properly grey majority) in Patience. Although, with nice incongruity, Wilde was a cousin of W. G. Wills, it was only with Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and A Woman of No Importance (1893) that he found his own, very different kind of theatrical voice: for within the ostensibly well-made structures of these plays social norms are obliquely questioned by means of that calculated confusion of satire, cynicism, and delight in paradox, which was already shaping the Wildean inverted epigram.

Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which pushed this technique to its comic limits, is a farce rooted in the native stock of situation and mistaken identity rather than in threatened adultery—though here sublime aristocratic insouciance substitutes for the precarious poise which Pinero's middle-class characters strive to maintain. The play is, indeed, in part a parodic reaction to the Robertsonian style of understatement, still dwindling into the drawing-room miniaturism of the likes of James Albery; but where those authors believed that their neatly-turned phrases aspired to some ultimate truth, Wilde delighted in ultimate paradox, avowedly aiming at an 'art divorced from life'.

[Illustration:] George Alexander as Jack Worthing, in mourning for his pretended brother Ernest, in the first production of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest at the St James's in 1895. In an interview published one month before the opening in February, and four months before the libel action which changed the course of his life, Wilde declared of the play: 'It is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy . . . that we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied frivolity'.

Wilde was the first in a line of homosexual dramatists whose legally prescribed distance from social and sexual norms lends ironic weight to their latter-day comedies of manners. In Earnest, his own delight in outraging the proprieties gave us an inimitable slice of art divorced from life—but, as life divorced him so cruelly from art, it was also to enmesh him in the scandal and imprisonment which (compounded, it is now believed, by the debilitating progress of syphilis) led to his premature death.

The would-be successful social critic had to find a more protective persona, and it was through his genius in creating just such a persona that Bernard Shaw secured his dominance over the drama of the ensuing decades. Shaw was, of course, a novelist and critic well before he found success in the theatre—and by the time he pitched himself into the critical front-line in the ealry 1890s two of his contemporaries, Clement Scott and William Archer, had already staked out positions as heads of the opposing forces in a new battle of 'ancients' versus 'moderns'.


ANCIENTS VERSUS MODERNS

Scott, the theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, who also edited the leading general-interest theatre journal of the day, The Theatre, headed the traditionalists, while Archer had sounded his optimistic clarion call for the new in English Dramatists of To-day as early as 1882. Writers such as Robert Lowe and Percy Fitzgerald were at the same time introducing some scholarly discipline into the writing of theatre history and biography, which in the past had been largely impressionistic when not unashamedly anecdotal. Lowe also produced his massive Bibliographical Account of English Theatrical Literature, the first serious attempt to review everything published about the theatre—as valuably distinguished from treatments of the drama as if it were a branch of literature.

Even the theory of acting, which had not much concerned either the profession or its critics of late, began to be debated with some liveliness. As long ago as the 1770s the French encyclopedist and playwright Denis Diderot had written in defence of objectivity as opposed to emotional identification in acting: now, Walter Pollock's translation of Diderot's work as The Paradox of Acting (1883) became central to a dispute which found Diderot's fellow-countryman and disciple, Constant Coquelin (who had published his own study of intellectually controlled acting technique in 1880), ranged against no less an authority than Henry Irving. The isues—and the opinions offered by these and numerous other actors—were summarized and analyzed in Archer's aptly titled Masks or Faces? in 1888.

Thanks to ever-speedier means of transport, this international exchange of ideas was increasingly complemented by the cross-fertilization of theatrical activity. Irving and Wyndham took full companies to America where earlier they would have taken only themselves, while Sarah Bernhardt with the company of the Comédie Française visited London from Paris. From the USA came Edwin Booth to play Othello (to an Iago whicvh far betted fitted Irving's temperament than his earlier Moor), from Italy the great tragedian Tomasso Salvini, and from Germany the company of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen—often regarded as the first director in the modern sense, whose meticulous concerns with ensemble playing certainly influenced Irving's treatment of his Lyceum crowd scenes.

Then in 1891 a visit from André Antoine's Théâtre Libre from Paris inspired the creation of a similar experimental art theatre in London, the Independent Theatre, by the critic J. T. Grein. This provided a living platform on which the 'moderns' might focus their attack against the 'ancients' through their promotion of the already ageing Norwegian dramatist Henryk Ibsen—among whose champions were both Shaw, whose Quintessence of Ibsenism also appeared in 1891, and Archer, whose first complete edition of his works in translation was then in preparation.

However, for most British audiences ibsen remained merely an obscure dramatist from an obscure vcountry whom such intellectuals had made it their business to promote well above the heads of their good selves—and who might therefore consider himself lucky to have had his Doll's House redeemed by the use of its happy ending in Henry Arthur Jones's version of 1884, coyly retitled Breaking a Butterfly. Janet Achurch acted in Archer's more faithful translation in 1889, and this was duly pronounced 'ibscene' by Scott—who two years later was scandalized beyond such punning put-downs into his legendary scream of outrage against the first English performance of Ibsen's Ghosts. Staged as the opening production of the Independent Theatre at the Royalty, on 13 March 1891, this was at once condemned by Scott as 'an open drain, a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly'—and anything phoney about the war between 'ancients' and 'moderns' was clearly over.

[Illustration: ] Wilde's 'studied frivolity' as ironic liberation: Janet Achurch as Nora Helmer, dancing the tarantella in the middle act of Ibsen's  A Doll's House. This pen and ink drawing was made when the play was staged for thirty performances at the Avenue Theatre in 1892—one of no fewer than five London revivals during the 1890s.

Romance and Realism 1891-1914

 

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Chanson simple

Chanson simple from Jose Angel García Landa on Vimeo.

The Nether Sky

The Nether Sky, a photo by JoseAngelGarciaLanda on Flickr.

The Wall

Lo que oímos The Wall de Pink Floyd en los años 70 finales y en los ochenta, en el cuartito del Cerbuna. El año pasado remasterizaron el álbum:

It does ring a new note now...

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My ResearchGate in 2012

Your published research —me dicen— was viewed 6468 times in 2012.

1766 DOWNLOADS
       
0 UPVOTES

4 REQUESTS

8 BOOKMARKS

También empecé el año con una score muy alta, cerca del máximo, en ResearchGate— pero le dieron un tuneado radical a este índice, y ahora mi posicionamiento es francamente mediocre—y no sé si mejorable—estoy en el 1,59 inferior. En fin, igual que empeoró radicalmente, quizá mejore por imponderables semejantes. En el SSRN voy mejor, posicionado en el 1,50 % superior. La verdad quizá esté en la áurea mediocridad.

En fin: los últimos serán los primeros, y así mi última publicación subida a ResearchGate es una que no contribuirá mucho a subirme los índices ni los pulgares: Reading Notes on some English Classics—unas notas de lectura que tomé hace más de 30 años, cuando leíamos un buen fajo de libros en cada curso de literatura.

Scoring more than most

 

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Va de actualidad

Este blog va de actualidad—no de la actualidad de la actualidad en general, sino de mi actualidad (para eso es un blog personal). Lo que sucede en la actualidad me interesa a veces, unas cosas más que otras evidentemente, pero no necesariamente más que lo que sucedió en otro tiempo y me acabo de enterar yo ahora, o de las cosas que me atraen la atención ahora aunque sabía que deberían habérmela atraído tiempo ha. El mundo pasa simultáneamente, en el pasado y en el presente, y hay que secuenciarlo aquí poco a poco y en parte, seleccionando claro. No es pecado que ahora te llame la atención por primera vez Bleak House, o tal aspecto de esa novela, o las canciones de Reynaldo Hahn, que ya nadie las oye, lástima—o esta canción de hacia 1990 cuando éramos otros y no sabíamos que existía.





Cada cual construye su actualidad con lo que le va atrayendo la atención. Por qué se la atrae, eso podría estudiarse, pero igual otras cosas nos atraen más la atención. Es un error dejarse llevar por principio por la actualidad de los demás, o por la actualidad en general. Hay que hacerse la de uno mismo. Qué pretencioso creer que ya conocemos todos los clásicos y que por tanto no han de estar nunca de actualidad para nosotros, o las curiosidades que jamás llegaron a clásicas...

—y qué pretencioso simular que lo de anteayer ya no es relevante porque estamos de vuelta, porque anteayer estábamos atentos a todo lo que sucedía simultáneamente, estábamos siempre en el centro de la acción, where the action is, atentos al meollo.

Y a lo que ya había sucedido, siempre. ¡Anda ya...!

A letter to no body

Nunca pensé que viviría en 2012

Nunca pensé que viviría en 2012, a photo by JoseAngelGarciaLanda on Flickr.

Comme dit monsieur Faulkner

Comme dit monsieur Faulkner from Jose Angel García Landa on Vimeo.

La preciosa estimación del yo

Un artículo de Pío Moa en Dichos, Actos y Hechos, sobre "el yo y la vida humana", relevante para el tema de la Vanidad y la Autoestima:

La interesante discusión en el blog  sobre el artículo de los tres niveles, se centró en el problema de la evolución, aunque este era solo derivado. Y no fue muy acertado por mi parte hablar de tres niveles  de la vida humana, pues más bien se trataba de la condición humana o de la psique humana, o algo así. La vida humana es otra cosa, se manifiesta en dos vertientes: la vida de cada persona en particular, o biografía,  y la conjunta de las diversas sociedades y naciones, incluso la del total de la humanidad, o historia.

Sobre la primera,  la vida transcurre como un rosario de avatares, accidentes y casualidades, mil  sucesos que solo muy parcialmente responden al designio o voluntad del individuo. Por lo común, el yo se maneja en esos sucesos como el tripulante que intenta llevar una barca a algún sitio, unas veces con el mar en calma, otras con viento favorable y otras con borrascas.  Pero la embarcación le viene dada, no la ha hecho él a su gusto, salvo en muy pequeña medida,  pues se compone de las cualidades físicas, intelectuales y psíquicas, los “dones de los dioses”,  o de los genes, que lo limitan o excluyen de ciertas navegaciones y en cierto grado le impulsan a otras. Y lo mismo pasa con su orientación: con frecuencia, sobre todo en la juventud,  nos hacemos un proyecto ideal de vida que luego la vida misma se encarga de modificar, trastocar o desbaratar por completo: los naufragios vitales no son cosa rara.

A veces suponemos el yo como simple resultado de los “tres niveles” de que hablaba, o meramente de las condiciones y presiones sociales, pero fácilmente vemos que no es así o, mejor dicho, solo lo es hasta cierto punto. Casi nadie está del todo satisfecho  con los dones que ha recibido al nacer, le parecen escasos para sus merecimientos u objetivos, y  el sentimiento más o menos acentuado de frustración está muy difundido. En sus memorias, Lerroux cuenta esta anécdota: En el periódico donde trabajaba de joven había un poeta llamado Luna, jorobado. Un día discutían de la existencia de Dios, y alguien dijo: “Vamos a ver, el poeta señor Luna, ¿qué piensa usted de Dios?” El garabato humano saltó de la silla al suelo, se enderezó tanto como pudo, sacó de debajo de la mesa la navaja cabritera y clavándola con gesto de fiereza sobre el tablero, contestó… soltando redonda blasfemia. El gusano se levantaba iracundo contra el Creador, que había permitido que un alma altiva y ambiciosa se alojase en un cuerpo miserable y ridículo. Creyentes y ateos sintieron cruzado su rostro por el trallazo de la grosería y por el grito de Satanás rebelándose contra la injusticia divina. Por donde el blasfemo resultaba el más poseído de los deístas, confesor de la divinidad a la que injuriaba”. Casi todo el mundo tiene una idea elevada de sí mismo, sea más o menos acertada o equivocada, y lo que menos tolera es el desprecio a su persona. Una persona que se siente menospreciada o tratada con injusticia puede llegar a enfermar psíquicamente o a cometer actos inesperados, crímenes o suicidio.

En cuanto a la presión social solo moldea parcialmente a las personas. La historia muestra la gran frecuencia con que diversos individuos  se rebelan contra su circunstancia social, tanto en un sentido colectivista (tratan de cambiar la sociedad) como personal, rechazando las convenciones o las leyes. Así, el yo resulta hasta cierto punto independiente tanto de los condicionantes sociales como de los condicionantes biológicos, sin que unos y otros sean desdeñables.

Es más, el yo se siente por lo general independiente en alguna medida de su propia vida.  He aquí una frase genial, cuyo autor ignoro, creo que era francés, por lo sutil: “¿Quién no es mejor que su propia biografía?”. O, mejor “¿Quién no se siente superior a su propia biografía?”. La navegación vital incluye numerosos errores, o actos que nos avergüenzan, o humillaciones que nos parecen intolerables y que debemos dejar pasar.  De ahí el gran esfuerzo psíquico por justificar  de mil modos esos pequeños o grandes  desastres, a fin de mantener la preciosa estimación del yo, sin la cual la vida se hace insoportable.

La necesidad de autoestima puede ser exagerada hasta la estupidez, pero existe siempre. Incluso los esclavos la tenían y a menudo trataban de vengarse de sus amos o de burlarlos, como muestran, por ejemplo, algunas obras de Plauto; o como aquel que en la terribles minas de plata de Laurion dejó escrita su jactancia de ser el mejor en el tajo. Algún autor romano, no recuerdo cual, escribió “tantos enemigos tienes como esclavos” o algo así. Pero, en fin, la cuestión es esta:  puesto que el yo se autoconsidera por encima de los condicionantes sociales y biológicos, ¿de dónde sale  él y su autoestima, sea  razonable o deformada, sin la cual la vida le parece indigna o repugnante?


————

—Un argumento muy parecido sobre el imporatante papel de la autoestima y de la autoevaluación del yo en las motivaciones lo hace Mark Twain en What Is Man?

Somos de lo más

 

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Captain Nemo

My Street through the Trees 3

My Street through the Trees 3, a photo by JoseAngelGarciaLanda on Flickr.

Belén 2012

Aquí el belén de Lucía, para felicitaros la navidad:

Too True to Be Good: Cartografía narrativa

Too True to Be Good: A Political Extravaganza. By George Bernard Shaw. Online at Project Gutenberg Australia
    http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300591h.html
 
La cartografía narrativa consiste en la ubicación de un fenómeno narrativo (un texto narrativo en este caso) en el marco de una narratividad general, o en el marco de la realidad entendida como gran narración o sistema de narraciones. La realidad es otras cosas, por supuesto, además de una gran narrración o un sistema de narraciones; se trata aquí únicamente de un aspecto relevante de la realidad al que estamos prestando atención, o resaltando con nuestra atención.

El estudio del anclaje narrativo, un aspecto concreto de la cartografía narrativa, consistirá en examinar cómo se sitúa una narración a sí misma en relación a otros fenómenos narrativos que dan cuenta del mundo como secuencia temporal organizada e interpretable—que sitúan a esa narración en el marco el mundo entendido como gran relato. Para ver qué tipo de anclaje narrativo se da en una narración, habrá que determinar qué tipo de conceptualización del mundo en tanto que gran relato se está invocando o presuponiendo. La historicidad es una manera específica (moderna, pongamos) de anclaje narrativo.

La cartografía narrativa en sentido amplio también atiende a otras cuestiones, a saber, la cuestión de los géneros narrativos. Dado el mundo como gran historia, hay muchas maneras posibles de hablar de ella, muchos géneros de discurso al respecto. Y un texto narrativo también puede caracterizarse a sí mismo como una manera determinada de presentar el mundo, o puede ubicarse de modo más o menos consciente o explícito en el mapa de los géneros posibles, o aludir a otros géneros que presenten una perspectiva determinada sobre la realidad (en el aspecto que se está tratando) o sobre el propio texto, entrando así en un dialogismo intertextual (del cual nos interesa aquí la dimensión narrativa, historicista o temporal). Hay que apuntar que estas modalidades de representación tienen también su propia historicidad—cuando se nos presenta una historia a través de un determinado género ubicamos históricamente no sólo la historia presentada sino el discurso que la presenta, en un mapa temporal de modalidades narrativas.

La obra de Bernard Shaw Too True to Be Good (1931) se ubica explícitamente en un momento dado de la evolución de la humanidad, más en concreto en el debate entre socialismo y capitalismo en el siglo XX. Shaw, un socialista de costumbres austeras, ve gran parte de los males de la humanidad como consecuencia de la desigualdad de riquezas, y propone en toda una serie de obras la abolición de la propiedad privada. Por tanto, Too True to Be Good se ubicará no sólo en el contexto histórico de una determinada fase del desarrollo del capitalismo, y de la reacción comunista, sino también en el contexto de la obra socialista de Shaw.

Hay que decir que Shaw, con su estilo de vida personal, era muy consciente de que la vida de los ricos no es una condición para la felicidad; que la sobreabundancia de propiedades y bienes puede incluso ser un obstáculo para ella (y aquí es a donde apunta esta obra en concreto). La visión de los ricos como el ideal de vida puede cegar a los pobres sobre la naturaleza de la felicidad, y eso es un problema mayor incluso que el de la propia existencia de desigualdades en los bienes.  La pesadilla insensata que es la vida del rico la describe la Paciente en el acto III: "I was devoured by parasites: by tourist agencies, steamboat companies, railways, motor car people, hotel keepers, dressmakers, servants, all trying to get my money by selling me things I don't really want; shoving me all over the globe to look at what they call new skies, though they know as well as I do that it is only the same old sky everywhere; and disabling me by doing all the things for me that I ought to do for myself to keep myself in health. They preyed on me to keep themselves alive: they pretended they were making me happy when it was only by drinking and drugging--cocktails and cocaine--that I could endure my life."

Son éstos ricos modernos, como queda claro por su tren de vida. El tipo de ricos de quienes se ocupa la obra también la sitúa históricamente.

Otra dimensión de la cartografía narrativa irá dirigida a la obra (texto, fenómeno, etc.) como fenómeno parcial ubicado en el ámbito global de la producción de un autor—a la relación entre el fenómeno narrativo concreto (Too True to Be Good en este caso) y otro fenómeno histórico-temporal narrativizado: la vida de un autor, su sentido y su lugar en ella.

Todos estos fenómenos son perspectivizados por el papel del analista y su situación histórica. Por ejemplo (y haciendo abstracción de la cuestión principal aquí, nuestro interés por la cartografía y anclaje narrativos)—podemos valorar las ideas socialistas de Shaw, vistas a principios del siglo XXI, sobre el trasfondo histórico de la experiencia socialista y comunista del siglo XX, y de ello se seguirían como poco importantes matizaciones a su postura. Podríamos argüir, por ejemplo, cómo Shaw subestima el papel de la iniciativa privada como creadora de riqueza y civilización, o cómo subestima a Stalin, en esta obra de 1931, como opresor de vidas, cuerpos y mentes. Son discursos, éstos de los que participa Shaw, bien ubicados en tanto que fenómenos históricos en el pensamiento occidental—quizá, podríamos especificar, en el seno del discurso histórico que Julian Benda describió como la trahison des clercs.

Shaw, dramaturgo de ideas, abre sus obras con grandes prefacios teórico-filosóficos. Y éstos son de interés para nuestro proyecto aquí porque atienden a diversas dimensiones de la cartografía narrativa. En este caso presenta una panorámica de los sistemas de gobierno social, basados en última instancia en una interpretación de la naturaleza y de las motivaciones humanas—los impulsos egoístas y parasitarios, frente a los altruistas y socialistas, o, tal y como lo pone Shaw, el Imperio frente a la Iglesia. También aludirá a su propia intervención en el debate político en forma de drama, teniendo en cuenta a su público y su trayectoria pasada todo ello de modo explícito. A lo cual hay que sumar el dialogismo implícito que el análisis extraiga ya sea del prólogo, ya de la obra en sí.

Por supuesto que la perspectiva de Shaw (o "la perspectiva de Shaw tal como la interpreta el analista") no coincidirá con la perspectiva del analista, y ello añade dimensiones perspectivísticas y narrativas propias. Por ejemplo, la admiración hacia Stalin o que mencionábamos, y también hacia el fascismo ("Stalin and Mussolini are the most responsible statesmen in Europe because they have no hold on their places except their efficiency"...) —claramente, Shaw no sólo ignora hechos relevantes, eficaces masacres y coerciones que han sido puestos de manifiesto por la historia subsiguiente, sino que su análisis se basa en una interpretación errónea de la naturaleza humana, de las motivaciones de la acción humana, una ceguera casi decidida sobre el funcionamiento de los partidos y estados totalitarios, y una visión muy parcial y tendenciosa de la dinámica social. Ignora o es incapaz de ver la dinámica de opresión y conformismo, de control y de vigilancia mutua, que se da en la sociedad al margen de la adquisición de bienes materiales. Por eso no ve a Stalin como un grotesco y monstruoso acumulador de poder, aunque lo vea como un nuevo Papa, sino como un honesto funcionario dedicado a su trabajo en la máxima austeridad; por eso es totalmente ciego al distinto tipo de parasitismo social y de opresión que ejercen los comisarios políticos, que para Shaw son una especie de monjes laicos. Shaw cree que puede haber un gobierno objetivamente científico de los asuntos humanos al margen de los intereses de lucro personal (en bienes materiales o simbólicos). Eso sí que sería too good to be true: no parece la naturaleza humana responder a esa creencia, pues el lucro no sólo se expresa en objetos caros o cuentas millonarias; la naturaleza humana se lucra a expensas de los demás con poder, opresión, atención, influencia y control.

La obra se abre con un acto en el que un monstruo o microbio gigante dialoga con un médico sobre la paciente que está en la cama. El médico arguye que no hay un microbio conocido que cause el sarampión. Y en efecto no lo había en 1931. Según la Wikipedia, "Measles (also known as Rubeola, morbilli, or English measles), is an infection of the respiratory system caused by a virus, specifically a paramyxovirus of the genus Morbillivirus" ... " In 1954, the virus causing the disease was isolated from an 11-year old boy from the United States, David Edmonston, and adapted and propagated on chick embryo tissue culture. To date, 21 strains of the measles virus have been identified. While at Merck, Maurice Hilleman developed the first successful vaccine. Licensed vaccines to prevent the disease became available in 1963."

El médico reonoce que no tiene tratamiento para el sarampión, y que sin embargo lo simula por el efecto placebo: "Faith is humbug. But it works."

—quizá de allí pasamos a la explicación del título de la obra. Las ideas religiosas son too good to be true, pero quizá en cambio el análisis científico y escéptico de la realidad sea too true to be good, es incapaz de generar el ilusionismo, el efecto placebo necesario para un funcionamiento adecuado de las motivaciones humanas y por tanto de la sociedad. El conocimiento lleva a la desilusión, no a la utopía.

Otra manera de situar la obra en la historia es mediante los detalles de la ambientación y la realidad representada (incluyendo, por ejemplo, el mobiliario e interiores que se empleen en la representación, pero también detalles como la caja fuerte de seguridad, el teléfono o el timbre eléctrico mencionados en el primer acto). Hay que tener en cuenta el posible desfase entre el momento en que se escribió la obra y el momento que escenifica, algo que puede hacerse más o menos explícito con señales deliberadas de historicidad; y también las posibles distorsiones o desfases temporales introducidos por la adaptación o recepción posterior de la obra—por ejemplo reubicaciones en una época anterior o posterior, que pueden a su vez causar incongruencias o tensiones con diferentes aspectos de la obra, su lenguaje o sus representaciones de la realidad. Así, un montaje actual de la obra podría mantener su ambientación en los años 30, o actualizarla en algunos aspectos, introducir teléfonos móviles —etc.

Shaw alude a su propia reputación como autor de teatro "de ideas," con obras basadas en debates más que en intriga, con las palabras del monstruo o microbio al final del acto I: "The play is now virtually over; but the characters will discuss it at great length for two acts more".

Un aspecto importante de la cartografía narrativa de la obra es su ubicación en el panorama comunicativo—en concreto, en este caso, en la historia del teatro británico o del teatro moderno. En este sentido vemos a Shaw como un socialista de salón, es decir, un autor fundamentalmente integrado (no digamos ya en sus relaciones sociales, su vida personal, etc.) en los círculos sociales e intelectuales más influyentes de su tiempo. Trabaja "para la humanidad", pero dirigiéndose a un público muy concreto que es el suyo, y con un género muy específico que ha de ser recibido por ese público. Por ejemplo, los personajes de Shaw son siempre caballeros, aristócratas, con una conciencia de clase extraordinariamente desarrollada, a la británica—y ése es el trasfondo sobre el cual sus obras se constryen y sobre el que actúan. Shaw no inaugura nuevos protocolos comunicativos, sino que sus obras vienen marcadas como fundamentalmente convencionales, sean las que sean las ideas que en ellas se ventilan. No es sorprendente que muchas de ellas acaben con rituales y arreglos de conciliación social menos radicales de lo que son las proclamadas ideas del autor—matrimonios en la clase alta, pactos entre capitalistas y progresistas, herencias para los intelectuales, desengaños de los idealistas (contemplados con ironía, eso sí), etc. El argumento, y no ya tanto el argumento como la galería de personajes, desactiva por anticipado el socialismo del autor, reubicándolo no en la acción política sino en un debate de ideas (en línea, en realidad, con las tesis "Fabianas" antirrevolucionarias). La benevolencia irónica con que se presenta a las clases altas y la indulgencia con que se tratan sus humores y caprichos contrasta curiosamente con la supuesta virulencia política del mensaje de Shaw; en esto, como en tantas otras cosas, la obra es característica de su época como fenómeno histórico.

Una obra se construye por alusión a géneros anteriores o a referencias culturales que le proporcionan un tono, una estrucutra, una serie de convencione. Por ejemplo, Heartbreak House de Shaw se presenta explícitamente como una pieza "al estilo ruso" —de Chejov, pongamos—sobre temas británicos. En Man and Superman alude a Nietzsche y al darwinismo. En este caso, el acto segundo nos remite a pastiches imperiales humorísticos, quizá en la tradición de Gilbert y Sullivan, o, en la caracterización de la "paciente" del primer acto en su disfraz indígena, a indígenas explícitamente teatrales, de los que sólo se encuentran en el "ballet ruso".

Critica la obra la hipocresía social que cultiva las mentiras y ficciones por su propia conveniencia. Dice Aubrey, el gentilhombre metido a ladrón:

"Make any statement that is so true that it has been staring us in the face all our lives, and the whole world will rise up and passionately contradict you. If you dont withdraw and apologize, it will be the worse for you. But just tell a thundering silly lie that everyone knows is a lie, and a murmur of pleased assent will hum up from every quarter of the globe."

La verdad no tiene valor social en sí: muchas cosas son too true to be good. Quizá esté reflexionando Bernard Shaw sobre cómo muchos de sus mensajes revolucionarios son aceptados por su público únicamente porque el vehículo de los mismos es la ficción, la mentira consensuada.

Otra verdad inconveniente dice la "Paciente" Miss Mopply; que los tres estafadores no son sino "inefficient fertilizers. We do nothing but convert good food into bad manure. We are walking factories of bad manure: that's what we are"—pero Aubrey le reprocha que "there are certain disgusting truths that no lady would throw in the teeth of her fellow creatures--"

Una alusión a H. G. Wells y al creciente pesimismo de estos Fabianos al final de su vida:

(el Sargento, en el acto III): "What must we do to be saved?" There it is: not a story in a book as it used to be, but God's truth in the real actual world. And all the comfort they get is "Flee from the wrath to come." But where are they to flee to? There they are, meeting at Geneva or hobnobbing at Chequers over the weekend, asking one another, like the man in the book, "Whither must we flee?" And nobody can tell them. The man in the book says "Do you see yonder shining light?" Well, today the place is blazing with shining lights: shining lights in parliament, in the papers, in the churches, and in the books that they call Outlines--Outlines of History and Science and what not--and in spite of all their ballyhoo here we are waiting in the City of Destruction like so many sheep for the wrath to come."

La alusión es a Wells, y ciertamente se advierte aquí parte del desencanto que Wells expresará en Mind at the End of Its Tether. El Anciano, padre de Aubrey, hace su aparición para lamentarse de la educación dada a su hijo, que lo ha convertido en sacerdote y en estafador. El Anciano era un escéptico, un librepensador, un defensor de la Verdad, principios que intentó inculcar a su hijo—y ahora ve que la Verdad quizá haga libre a la gente, pero no la hace mejor. Y así ve cómo el universo en el que creía, el universo del racionalista escéptico, se desmorona:

THE ELDER. Yes, sir: the universe of Isaac Newton, which has been an impregnable citadel of modern civilization for three hundred years, has crumbled like the walls of Jericho before the criticism of Einstein. Newton's universe was the stronghold of rational Determinism: the stars in their orbits obeyed immutably fixed laws; and when we turned from surveying their vastness to study the infinite littleness of the atoms, there too we found the electrons in their orbits obeying the same universal laws. Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because it must: the commandments were erased from the tables of the law; and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians. Here was my faith: here I found my dogma of infallibility: I, who scorned alike the Catholic with his vain dream of responsible Free Will, and the Protestant with his pretence of private judgment. And now--now--what is left of it? The orbit of the electron obeys no law: it chooses one path and rejects another: it is as capricious as the planet Mercury, who wanders from his road to warm his hands at the sun. All is caprice: the calculable world has become incalculable: Purpose and Design, the pretexts for all the vilest superstitions, have risen from the dead to cast down the mighty from their seats and put paper crowns on presumptuous fools. Formerly, when differences with my wife, or business worries, tried me too hard, I sought consolation and reassurance in our natural history museums, where I could forget all common cares in wondering at the diversity of forms and colors in the birds and fishes and animals, all produced without the agency of any designer by the operation of Natural Selection. Today I dare not enter an aquarium, because I can see nothing in those grotesque monsters of the deep but the caricatures of some freakish demon artist: some Zeus-Mephistopheles with paintbox and plasticine, trying to surpass himself in the production of fantastic and laughable creatures to people a Noah's ark for his baby. I have to rush from the building lest I go mad, crying, like the man in your book, "What must I do to be saved?" Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma. As I stand here I am falling into that abyss, down, down, down. We are all falling into it; and our dizzy brains can utter nothing but madness. My wife has died cursing me. I do not know how to live without her: we were unhappy together for forty years. My son, whom I brought up to be an incorruptible Godfearing atheist, has become a thief and a scoundrel; and I can say nothing to him but "Go, boy: perish in your villainy; for neither your father nor anyone else can now give you a good reason for being a man of honor."

(...)

Determinism is gone, shattered, buried with a thousand dead religions, evaporated with the clouds of a million forgotten winters. The science I pinned my faith to is bankrupt: its tales were more foolish than all the miracles of the priests, its cruelties more horrible than all the atrocities of the Inquisition. Its spread of enlightenment has been a spread of cancer: its counsels that were to have established the millennium have led straight to European suicide. And I--I who believed in it as no religious fanatic has ever believed in his superstition! For its sake I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshippers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and behold the supreme tragedy of the atheist who has lost his faith--his faith in atheism, for which more martyrs have perished than for all the creeds put together. Here I stand, dumb before my scoundrel of a son; for that is what you are, boy, a common scoundrel and nothing else.

Podríamos ver en la alusión al principio de indeterminación de Heisenberg una consciencia de la obra de verse superada en su propio proceso histórico—señalando no ya al modernismo, sino al postmodernismo, desde unos principios estéticos todavía algo encorsetados por una estética newtoniana heredada del teatro del XIX. Aunque es cierto que el microbio puede postmodernizar la obra de modo impactante. Pero volvamos al diálogo de generaciones o paradigmas, entre padre e hijo.

Aubrey a su vez, tranquilo en su cinismo actual, le reprocha al anciano su propia inmoralidad, que tolera la guerra y los bombardeos si son actos "patrióticos", y contribuyó a hacerlo inmoral a él mismo. La experiencia del desengaño del patriotismo y del heroísmo guerrero también es característicamente moderna, está históricamente situada. Como dice el Sargento en el acto III, "We were not killing the right people in 1915. We weren't even killing the wrong people. It was innocent men killing one another." En sus notas al final de la obra (1932) el autor recalca la manera en que fue la experiencia de la Primera Guerra Mundial para toda una generación la que hizo caer las viejas "verdades" y abrió los ojos a una crisis espiritual e ideológica generalizada.

En el happy end el coronel Tallboys es ascendido por error, aunque observa "la justicia es justicia aunque se haga por error"; su hijo que evitó el servicio militar se ha hecho durante la guerra "so enormously rich that I cannot afford to keep up his acquaintance"; la estafadora Sweetie se casa con el recto Sargento, convencido de que caracteres distintos garantizan la armonía del matrimonio. Y la Sra Mopply, madre de la paciente, se libera del mundo de mentiras en que ha vivido toda su vida, fingiendo ficciones convenientes, y se libera también de su papel de madre sacrificada y sufridora:

MRS MOPPLY. (...) What do you know about myself? my real self? They told me lies; and I had to pretend to be somebody quite different.

TALLBOYS. Who told you lies, madam? It was not with my authority.

MRS MOPPLY. I wasnt thinking of you. My mother told me lies. My nurse told me lies. My governess told me lies. Everybody told me lies. The world is not a bit like what they said it was. I wasnt a bit like what they said I ought to be. I thought I had to pretend. And I neednt have pretended at all.

—y si el escepticismo del Anciano se ha visto alterado, ella por su parte declara que "I will never believe anything again as long as I live."

—y se reconcilia con su hija, que la aborrecía en su vida de señoras ricas, habiéndose liberado ahora ambas del peso de sus identidades respectivas. Es una cierta desconstrucción del personaje teatral, ciertamente.

El servicial  cabo Meek les proporciona a todos pasaportes para Beocia, un sueño utópico situado en una dimensión distinta de la URSS: "The Union of Federated Sensible Societies, sir. The U.F.S.S. Everybody wants to go there now, sir." Pero sólo hay visado para Tallboys, por su afición a las acuarelas; los demás habrán de volver a Inglaterra, como el público al acabar la obra.

Aubrey, abandonado por su amante, se dedicará a predicador, que era su vocación; un predicador sin credo ahora. Y erigiénsose en portavoz del autor, ha de despedir a todos con uno de los característicos sermones de Shaw, y decir las verdades aunque sean inconvenientes:

AUBREY [rising] If I may be allowed to improve the occasion for a moment--

General consternation. All who are seated rise in alarm, except the patient, who jumps up and claps her hands in mischievous encouragement to the orator.

MRS MOPPLY    }    [together]    {    You hold your tongue, young man.
SWEETIE    }        {    Oh Lord! we're in for it now.
THE ELDER    }        {    Shame and silence would better become you, sir.
THE PATIENT    }        {    Go on, Pops. It's the only thing you do well.
AUBREY [continuing]--it is clear to me that though we seem to be dispersing quietly to do very ordinary things: Sweetie and the Sergeant to get married [the Sergeant hastily steals down from his grotto, beckoning to Sweetie to follow him. They both escape along the beach] the colonel to his wife, his watercolors, and his K.C.B. [the colonel hurries away noiselessly in the opposite direction] Napoleon Alexander Trotsky Meek to his job of repatriating the expedition [Meek takes to flight up the path through the gap] Mops, like Saint Teresa, to found an unladylike sisterhood with her mother as cook-housekeeper [Mrs Mopply hastily follows the sergeant, dragging with her the patient, who is listening to Aubrey with signs of becoming rapt in his discourse] yet they are all, like my father here, falling, falling, falling endlessly and hopelessly through a void in which they can find no footing. [The Elder vanishes into the recesses of St Pauls, leaving his son to preach in solitude]. There is something fantastic about them, something unreal and perverse, something profoundly unsatisfactory. They are too absurd to be believed in: yet they are not fictions: the newspapers are full of them: what storyteller, however reckless a liar, would dare to invent figures so improbable as men and women with their minds stripped naked? Naked bodies no longer shock us: our sunbathers, grinning at us from every illustrated summer number of our magazines, are nuder than shorn lambs. But the horror of the naked mind is still more than we can bear. Throw off the last rag of your bathing costume; and I shall not blench nor expect you to blush. You may even throw away the outer garments of your souls: the manners, the morals, the decencies. Swear; use dirty words; drink cocktails; kiss and caress and cuddle until girls who are like roses at eighteen are like battered demireps at twenty-two: in all these ways the bright young things of the victory have scandalized their dull old prewar elders and left nobody but their bright young selves a penny the worse. But how are we to bear this dreadful new nakedness: the nakedness of the souls who until now have always disguised themselves from one another in beautiful impossible idealisms to enable them to bear one another's company. The iron lighting of war has burnt great rents in these angelic veils, just as it has smashed great holes in our cathedral roofs and torn great gashes in our hillsides. Our souls go in rags now; and the young are spying through the holes and getting glimpses of the reality that was hidden. And they are not horrified: they exult in having found us out: they expose their own souls; and when we their elders desperately try to patch our torn clothes with scraps of the old material, the young lay violent hands on us and tear from us even the rags that were left to us. But when they have stripped themselves and us utterly naked, will they be able to bear the spectacle? You have seen me try to strip my soul before my father; but when these two young women stripped themselves more boldly than I--when the old woman had the mask struck from her soul and revelled in it instead of dying of it--I shrank from the revelation as from a wind bringing from the unknown regions of the future a breath which may be a breath of life, but of a life too keen for me to bear, and therefore for me a blast of death. I stand midway between youth and age like a man who has missed his train: too late for the last and too early for the next. What am I to do? What am I? A soldier who has lost his nerve, a thief who at his first great theft has found honesty the best policy and restored his booty to its owner. Nature never intended me for soldiering or thieving: I am by nature and destiny a preacher. I am the new Ecclesiastes. But I have no Bible, no creed: the war has shot both out of my hands. The war has been a fiery forcing house in which we have grown with a rush like flowers in a late spring following a terrible winter. And with what result? This: that we have outgrown our religion, outgrown our political system, outgrown our own strength of mind and character. The fatal word NOT has been miraculously inserted into all our creeds: in the desecrated temples where we knelt murmuring "I believe" we stand with stiff knees and stiffer necks shouting "Up, all! the erect posture is the mark of the man: let lesser creatures kneel and crawl: we will not kneel and we do not believe." But what next? Is NO enough? For a boy, yes: for a man, never. Are we any the less obsessed with a belief when we are denying it than when we were affirming it? No: I must have affirmations to preach. Without them the young will not listen to me; for even the young grow tired of denials. The negativemonger falls before the soldiers, the men of action, the fighters, strong in the old uncompromising affirmations which give them status, duties, certainty of consequences; so that the pugnacious spirit of man in them can reach out and strike deathblows with steadfastly closed minds. Their way is straight and sure; but it is the way of death; and the preacher must preach the way of life. Oh, if I could only find it! [A white sea fog swirls up from the beach to his feet, rising and thickening round him]. I am ignorant: I have lost my nerve and am intimidated: all I know is that I must find the way of life, for myself and all of us, or we shall surely perish. And meanwhile my gift has possession of me: I must preach and preach and preach no matter how late the hour and how short the day, no matter whether I have nothing to say--

The fog has enveloped him; the gap with its grottoes is lost to sight; the ponderous stones are wisps of shifting white cloud; there is left only fog: impenetrable fog; but the incorrigible preacher will not be denied his peroration, which, could we only hear it distinctly, would probably run--

--or whether in some pentecostal flame of revelation the Spirit will descend on me and inspire me with a message the sound whereof shall go out unto all lands and realize for us at last the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory for ever and ever. Amen.



The audience disperses (or the reader puts down the book) impressed in the English manner with the Pentecostal flame and the echo from the Lord's Prayer. But fine words butter no parsnips. A few of the choicer spirits will know that the Pentecostal flame is always alight at the service of those strong enough to bear its terrible intensity. They will not forget that it is accompanied by a rushing mighty wind, and that any rascal who happens to be also a windbag can get a prodigious volume of talk out of it without ever going near enough to be shrivelled up. The author, though himself a professional talk maker, does not believe that the world can be saved by talk alone. He has given the rascal the last word; but his own favorite is the woman of action, who begins by knocking the wind out of the rascal, and ends with a cheerful conviction that the lost dogs always find their own way home. So they will, perhaps, if the women go out and look for them.

————

Vemos que la obra se evalúa a sí misma en el discurso final del personaje, convertido en trasunto del Autor como Profeta, y se expone a sí misma como una revelación, "too true to be good", del interior de las mentes y de las actitudes de las personas, arrojadas a una crisis de sus verdades convencionales tras el shock de la Primera Guerra Mundial, y el temor a la Segunda que se ve venir. El anclaje narrativo de la obra en la historia es por tanto excepcionalmente consciente y deliberado, cosa no extraña tratándose de una obra de vejez de un autor célebre por su visión crítica del mundo en que vivía.

El autor continúa en propia voz en las notas sobre la obra escritas para el festival de Malvern (1932), sosteniendo que a pesar de las palabras del Viejo escéptico no ha abandonado ninguna de sus posiciones críticas escépticas y socialistas, y que para los males sociales y espirituales del momento, "extremely practical and precise remedies, including a complete political reconstitution, a credible and scientific religion, and a satisfactory economic scheme, are discoverable by anyone under thirty (the older ones are past praying for)". También justifica la extraña estructura de su obra en atención a una necesidad de mantener la atención del público:

"When people have laughed for an hour, they want to be serio-comically entertained for the next hour; and when that is over they are so tired of not being wholly serious that they can bear nothing but a torrent of sermons.

My play is arranged accordingly."

 

 

George Bernard Shaw

—oOo—