63-4
PAR TIS
AN
REV lEW
the cntIcs in particular have succeeded in getting hold of two wrong
ends of the stick; they either abuse the new dramatists for not learning
their business, by which they mean compressing their ideas into worn
out, competent forms, or they mistake the improvisations for art and
praise the new dramatists for "moments of poetry" or "moments of
good theater" which are exactly the least coherent, the most juV'enile,
the least promising aspects of their work. It would not be impossible
by diligent application for the new dramatists to climb on the old West
End competent success car, if they were willing to stop most of what
is original in their outlook. Two plays, classed sometimes as belonging
to the new school, have done exactly this:
Five Finger Exercise
and
The Long and the Short and the Tall
have all the competence a play
like
A Taste of Honey
lacks, yet for all their appearance of revolt, they
are basically the old plays we have seen for so
long-Five Finger Exer–
cise
in direct descent from Mr. Noel Coward's early triumph
The Vortex;
The L ong and the Sh ort and the Tall,
the Second World War's
Journey's
End-there
is just enough of the new in them to make the matinee
ladies feel that they are up-to-date. This way lies one kind of death for
the new dramatist. On the other hand, to praise the shapelessness, the
improvisation is to condemn the new dramatists to a dependence on
actors and directors to disguise their incompetence as much as the more
competent dramatists have for so many years depended upon the bril–
liance of English acting and directing to disguise their complete want
of ideas.
Nevertheless in the best of these young dramatists, in particular in
Miss Delaney and in Mr. Wesker, there is a real sincerity (neither faked
conscious sincerity nor self-satisfied naivete) which, when combined
with sharp eyes and ears, acts in such young writers as a substitute for
more mature thought and gives real promise of development. Their
plays remain, however, so dependent upon the scene portrayed and
the dialogue heard, the convincingness of feeling and vision rather than
of thought, that to read them before seeing them is likely to prevent
any but the most theatrically imaginative from discerning their real
worth. It is in the conviction that
A Taste of Honey
and
Chicken Soup
with Barley
are worthwhile plays and plays of promise-promise already
indeed further fulfilled by Mr. Wesker in
Roots-that
I have chosen to
review them with a short account of their present hopes in the English
theater rather than by any detailed examination of printed texts that
cannot support too close inquiry.
