Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. 2
Book Description
Readers of the discourse with which the preceding yolume is prefaced will remember that I turned my hand to playwriting when a great deal of talk about the New Drama and the actual establishment of a New Theatre (the I ndependent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New Drama in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had...
MoreReaders of the discourse with which the preceding yolume is prefaced will remember that I turned my hand to playwriting when a great deal of talk about the New Drama and the actual establishment of a New Theatre (the I ndependent), threatened to end in the humiliating discovery that the New Drama in England at least, was a figment of the revolutionary imagination. This was not to be endured. I had rashly taken up the case; and rather than let it collapse, I manufactured the evidence. Man is a creature of habit. You cannot write three plays and then stop. Besides, the New movement did not stop. In 1894, some public spirited person, then as now unknown to me, declared that the London theatres were intolerable, and financed a season of plays of the new order at the A venue Theatre. There were, as available new dramatists, myself, discovered by the Independent Theatre (at my own suggestion) ;and Mr. John Todhunter, who had indeed been discovered before, but whose Black Cat had been one of the Independent ssuccesses. Mr. Todhunter supplied AC omedy of Sighs. I, having nothing but unpleasant plays in my desk, hastily completed a first attempt at a pleasant one, and called it Arms and the Man. It passed for a success: that is, the first night was as brilliant as could be desired; and it ran from the 21st A pril to the 7th July.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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