CLASS PLAYS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 3669, 2 November 1912, Page 4

CLASS PLAYS.

AVHAT THE.PUBLIC LIKES,

Air. Stanley Houghton (author of “Hindle AVakes,” now running at the Playhouse) asks in tlie London “Evening News”: — •‘Does an audience of any class like to see its own life represented on the stage, or does it prefer te see the life of another class ? The question hasbeen raised in connection with the dialect plays that London lias been witnessing recently. “There is, for instance, ‘Bunty’ at the Havmarket; there is ‘Hindle Wakes’ at the Playhouse; there was. for a considerable time, ‘Rutherford and Son’ at tho Vaudeville. London rather onjoys seeing these queer Scottish, Northumbrian, and Lancashire people on the stage. A STRANGE AVORLD TO LONDON.

‘To London they are freaks whose unfamiliar antics are the cause of much entertainment. London gets passing glimpses of a rich, strange world, lying close at hand and yet unaccountably overlooked. “The point is, how would Scotland welcome ‘Bunty’; how would Newcastle welcome ‘Rutherford’ ; and (what i can speak of with rather more certainty) how will Lancashire like ‘JI indie Wakes?’ “To a Lancashire audience the people in ‘Hindlo Wakes’ will be, of course, no freaks at all; they will be simply the people one meets in the street and at the mill every day. “An eminent County Court judge, himself a writer of comedies, once said publidy of Mr Galsworthy’s plays ‘I have enough of this sordid police court business in everyday life. I dont’ w;int to see it when I go to the theatre. I want to bo made to forget it all.’ Will a millliand, in the same way, after seeing a piece about a mill, complain, like the County Court judge, that he has enough of this drab mill business in everyday life, and demand duchesses and diamonds instead by way of a soporific? “The whole thing resolves itself into a question of whether the judge ->«- nohl»_exep_ntion :_w.he.ther. a man

j own life on the stage, or whether lie | prefers to forget all about familiar I things and to be transported for a few moments into realms of romance. And we must not forget that what is ono man’s meat is another man’s poison. What is bare realism to a Lancashire millhand may be wild romance to ih3 London stalls.

ABSENCE OP MIDDLE-CLASS PLAYS. •ta “Consider the state of Loudon Icr many years past. The plays written by leading authors —many of them fine plays, absorbing plays, perfectly devised comedies, moving tragedies—have been convcrned almost exclusively with people of rank and position, or at least with people of wealth. Tli ere have been practically no real middle-class plays except ‘Chains.’ “Where plays havo not dealt definitely with the upper classes they have dealt with some vague indeterminate class in which people who were supposed to bring up a family on £4 a week wore dresses by Paquin. UPPER-CRUST PIECES. “Yet many of these upper-crust pieces have been enormously successful in London. Assume, if you like, that the pits and galleries were filled by persons who were pleased because they 'wanted to be taken out of themselves and made to forget their ordinary life.’ By persons, in fact, to .whom drawing-room manners were pur9 romance. At least it- must be admitted that the stalls, who make the London theatre pay, could find no queer stimulating sensation in the spectacle of their fellows politely drinking tea. “It is evident that the London stalls enjoyed these plays because these plays showed them themselves and the iife they lead. There is no ■record of any peer having fled a West End theatre in despair, complaining that these drab, sordid dinner parties were what be had to put up with every day of his life, and that he expected to be taken out of himself when be invested his half-guinea in a stall.

“We find that Manchester, middle class, likes to sec middle-class plays. Then why shouldn’t a Lancashire working-ciasfi play, which appeals to London because it is unfamiliar, appeal to Lancashire because it is familiar? Human nature is much the .same in Lancashire as in London.”