The Career of a Dramatist

Extract

The Elder Statesman is a success within special limits. It is an extension of the model of its predecessors, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk. Anyone familiar with those predecessors could have foretold what was to seen on the boards at Edinburgh last year, could almost have read the text of the play before it was printed. One thinks of another sequence of four closely-related plays concluding with The Tempest.

To make such a comparison, even momentarily, is to pay vast tribute to the later poetic dramatist. But a comparison, momentary or studied, points this capital difference: the poetry of Cymbeline or The Winter’s Tale yields more significance, and therefore more delight, at each re-reading; the verse of The Confidential Clerk or The Elder Statesman says nearly all it has to say, at a single hearing or reading—unlike the poetry of The Waste Land, or even of some of the speeches of the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral, where the resources or reserves appear limitless. This difference in the quality of language has consequences for the theatre. The plays of Shakespeare are a challenge to the producer. Because of the suggestiveness of the poetry, they ask to be produced in all manner of modes, whereas one production of The Elder Statesman cannot—or should not—differ from another production, except in minor points of emphasis depending on the skill of players. A standard production is ensured less by the stage-directions than by a pallid fixity of language.

The Elder Statesman is depressing in that it follows the conventions— conventions which compel a thin language—of its immediate predecessors.