ABSTRACT
. . .One has only to read a play by Chekhov before seeing it staged to realize that this dramatist, unlike almost all other dramatists of his time, is primarily concerned with his artistic material, his theatrical medium, rather than with any of the usual dull Ibsenite preoccupations with plot and problem. The trouble with the English theatre is that it is at least half a century behind all the other arts. Our dramatists are, aesthetically, and therefore ideologically, contemporaries of the nineteenth-century Abstract Artists, such as the painter Watts; and just as any intelligent art-critic would sooner, like Mr. Porteus, endure an evening at the ‘highbrow films’ than ten minutes in a gallery filled with plastically vapid abstractions labelled ‘Hope’ and ‘Love Shut Out,’ I had sooner attend political meetings or all-in wrestling matches every night for a week than face another performance of a play about ‘Life’ or ‘Love’ (meaning adultery) or ‘Sex’ (dominant or otherwise). But unfortunately, our actors have become so used to these fake ‘problem plays’ concocted by playwrights without any special talent or even interest in their theatrical medium that most of them are by now positively incapable of acting at all. . . .
