The Plays of J. B. Priestley I. [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Before introducing the plays in this volume to the reader, I should like to make some brief observations on dramatic writing and my own particular attitude toward it. Although the dramatist may also be a . man of letters, capable of producing novels, poems, essays, criticism, I believe that drama is not simply a branch of literature but a separate little art, with its own peculiar values and technicahties. (And one day, if I am spared, I hope to deal with this subject at some length, if only as a protest against the nonsense often offered us by literary professors and lecturers who write about the drama without understanding the Theatre.) I hope that the plays in this volume can be enjoyed by a reader, but I must stress the fact that they were not written to be read but to be played in theatres, where if properly produced and acted they come alive. A play that has never found a theatre, actors, audiences, is not really a play at all. A dramatist is a writer who works in and for the Theatre. (It is a significant fact that all considerable dramatists play an active part in the first productions of their plays, and never accept the legendary role of the wistful little author whom everyone in the playhouse ignores.) If there are any Cezannes of the Theatre, working throughout a whole lifetime, misunderstood and neglected, I for one have never heard of them. A dramatist must have actors and audiences in order to reaUse himself: thus he must come to terms with the Theatre of his time. My own time has not been an easy one. I did not begin writing for the Theatre until the early Thirties, the age of the Great Depression; then came the darkening shadow of the coming war; then the war itself; and now this present era of world conflict, in which small groups of weary men who have been given far too much power insist upon staging their own tremendous dramas, dwarfing our own harmless professional efforts. Although various breakaway experiments have been made—and I have made some myself—the theatrical tradition of our time is a naturaUstic tradition, and so I have in the main had to come to terms with it. But to regard me, as some professorial theorists of the drama appear to have done recently, as a typical playwright of the naturalistic tradition seems to me so absurd that I can only imagine that it is a judgment based, like so many judgments from such quarters, on ignorance. Actually I have always fretted and conspired against downright naturalism. I have spent a good many of my working hours devising means to conjure audiences away from the prevailing tradition, after persuading them, perhaps for [vii]