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Show in two West-end theatres. Actor-managers began to ask for "non-commercial" plays and when their appeal reached Henry James it met with a quick response. The theatre had both allured and repelled him for many years, and he had already been the victim of a theatrical misadventure. His assertions that he wrote plays solely in the hope of making money should not, I think, be taken as the complete explailation of his dramas. It is pretty clear that he wrote plays because he wanted to write them, because he was convinced that his instinct for dramatic situations could find a happy outlet in plays, because writing for the stage is a game rich in precise rules and he delighted in the multiplication of technical d:rntulties, and because he lived in circles more addicted to the intelligent criticism of plays than to the intcli:gent criticism of novels. The plays he wrote in the early 'nineties are very careful exercises in technique. They are derived straight from the light comedies of the Parisian stage, with the difference that in the 'nineties, for all their advertised naughtiness, there were even str:cter limits to the free representation of Parisian situations en English stages than there are to-day. In Tile Reprobate, a play successfully produced a few years ago by the Stan-e Society, the lady whose hair has changed from bl&ck ~o red and from red to gold is the centre of the drama, she holds the key to the position, but all her complicating effect depends upon the past-pasts being allowed on every stage comparative license of reference. The compromising evidence is all a matter of old photographs and letters, and the play loses in vividness whatever it may gain in respectability. Nobody knew better than the author that Tl~e Reprobate was not a good play. Terror ?fbeing cut forbade him to work on a subject of intrin sic Importance. With another hour guaranteed, a playwright might attempt anything, but "he does not get his hour, and he wdl probably begin by missing his subject. He 20 takes, in his dread of complication, a minor one, and it's heavy odds that the minor one, with the habit of small natu;es, will prove thankless." Other early plays had been converted into novels or tales and so published. One of these, written originally for Miss Ellen Terry but never produced by her, had appeared as an incongruous companion to Tile Turn of tile Screw in the volume entitled The 'Fwo Magics. A few attentive readers had seen the dramatic possibilities of (overing End, and when it was suggested to Henry James that he should convert it into a three-act comedy for production by Mr. Forbes Robertson (as he was then) al!d Miss Gertrude Elliot, he willingly consented. Flying under a new flag, as 'The Higil Bid, the play was produced in London in February, 1909, but only for a series of matinees, the prodigious success of '!be Passing of the 'Third J?lo0r 'Back precluding the possibility of an evening for any other production under the same management. Under the inspiration of the repertory movement, other materi~l was re-cast for acting. 'File Other House was rc-dictatcd as a tragedy. Owen Wingrave became The Saloon, a one-act play produced by Miss Gertrude Kingston in 1910. Finally an entirely new three-act comedy, The OutCI)', was written round the highly topical subject of the sale of art treasures to rich Americans. It was not produced during H enry James's life. At the time when it should have been rehearsed he was ill and the production was postponed. On his recovery, he went to the United States for a year, and when he came back the day of repertory performances had died in a fresh night of stars. When The Outcry was given by the Stage Society in 1917, it was evident that the actors were embarrassed by their lines, for by 1909, when the play was writte~, the men and women of Henry James could talk only In the manner of their creator. His own speech, assisted 2 I |
