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Playgoing
88 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1927
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About the author
James Agate
135 books2 followersJames Evershed Agate was a diarist, journalist, and theatre critic for The Saturday Review (1921–1923), The Sunday Times (1923–1947), and the BBC (1925–1932).
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November 20, 2011
This is the second in the series of essays edited by JB Priestley entitled ' These diversions'. I have four of them, two of which are in beautiful limited editions. This book is, i am told on one of its inside pages, Number 7 in the limited edition of 75 signed copies. Once again, as with my edition of Walpole's ' Reading', I have the amazing experience of cutting the pages as I read. I can try to imagine I am an explorer cutting his way through massive undergrowth as i forge my way on to new discoveries. It is a great moment, an adventure. What lies ahead of me on this enclosed page that I have to open out with my paper knife ? I realize that it is a total flight of fancy and rather overblown but it still excites me. I can count on the fingers of one hand or at the most two hands the number of times I have had this experience and there is something wonderful about it.
Anyway, to the essay. Agate was a professional theatre critic and a man who quite clearly had a very high opinion of his own ideas and visions. This in itself is not a big issue as it would be a bit strange if someone who made his profession through commenting and holding forth on various aspects of life was overly reticent or ' backward in coming forward ' but his tongue is rather sharp and his opinions so imbedded in stone that Arthur himself would be hard pushed to make them budge.
Agate has a penchant for quoting great swathes of french . I am not talking about a sentence or two but on a number of occasions he reproduces great paragraphs of the stuff. Now don't get me wrong, french is a lovely language, I studied it at school until I was 18 but unless you are proficient at the idiosyncrasies of a language, nuances and underlying meaning are lost. Quote by all mean if you wish but please give us a translation or at least precis what was being quoted as otherwise those four o five paragraphs dotted through the essay are totaly without point or merit.
Agate writes at great length of actors he has seen and experienced, of plays that have worked and those that have flopped but the essay, as a whole does not work. There is no real continuity or clear running theme and it keeps seeming to mizzle away into the sand. There are some great lines and phrases but on the whole it is a collection of clever one liners or interesting paragraphs which lend themselves to quotation but not to reflection.
There are some unwitting double entendres....that is your actual french....such as, speaking of the actor's craft
' Yet all will be unavailing if he posess a high-pitched, unmusical voice, if his features are undistinguished, or his inches too few '
ooo, matron as Kenneth Williams of blessed memory may have rasped.
He holds what was perhaps the normal view in the 1920's that the actor rather than the play was the thing. Speaking of Mrs Patrick Campbell he writes ' frankly I would rather see a play spoiled by Mrs Pat than made by a lesser actress ' or again he speaks of how the personality of the ' great' actors are too huge to be squashed into roles but the roles must fit the person of the actor. Interestingly, though I wholeheartedly disagree with him I do wonder whether our celebrity led theatre where big names are preferred so as to ' draw in the crowd ' is a return to this weird misplaced adoration. I go to the theatre for the play not for the actor, Agate, quite clearly, would have disagreed.
Even his idols however do not escape his tongue. Writing of Sarah Bernhardt he says how she could have tackled Shakespeare's Cleopatra because of ' the hystercal possibilities of the role '. Could she, he asks, have played Lady Macbeth:
' that she could have plucked nipple from boneless gums is not denied but how about Duncan resembling her father as he slept ? I can see her rolling her eyes like some celestial duck in an Olympian thunderstorm, breathing ethereal blasts of filial piety. Didn't she try to show what a dear Lucrezia Borgia was, apart from that little kink about poisoning'
Now I have no idea of half of what he was talking about with that analogy but it sounded funny and a bit cruel and quite bizarre and perhaps that is what we end up wanting from a theatre critic.
Anyway, to the essay. Agate was a professional theatre critic and a man who quite clearly had a very high opinion of his own ideas and visions. This in itself is not a big issue as it would be a bit strange if someone who made his profession through commenting and holding forth on various aspects of life was overly reticent or ' backward in coming forward ' but his tongue is rather sharp and his opinions so imbedded in stone that Arthur himself would be hard pushed to make them budge.
Agate has a penchant for quoting great swathes of french . I am not talking about a sentence or two but on a number of occasions he reproduces great paragraphs of the stuff. Now don't get me wrong, french is a lovely language, I studied it at school until I was 18 but unless you are proficient at the idiosyncrasies of a language, nuances and underlying meaning are lost. Quote by all mean if you wish but please give us a translation or at least precis what was being quoted as otherwise those four o five paragraphs dotted through the essay are totaly without point or merit.
Agate writes at great length of actors he has seen and experienced, of plays that have worked and those that have flopped but the essay, as a whole does not work. There is no real continuity or clear running theme and it keeps seeming to mizzle away into the sand. There are some great lines and phrases but on the whole it is a collection of clever one liners or interesting paragraphs which lend themselves to quotation but not to reflection.
There are some unwitting double entendres....that is your actual french....such as, speaking of the actor's craft
' Yet all will be unavailing if he posess a high-pitched, unmusical voice, if his features are undistinguished, or his inches too few '
ooo, matron as Kenneth Williams of blessed memory may have rasped.
He holds what was perhaps the normal view in the 1920's that the actor rather than the play was the thing. Speaking of Mrs Patrick Campbell he writes ' frankly I would rather see a play spoiled by Mrs Pat than made by a lesser actress ' or again he speaks of how the personality of the ' great' actors are too huge to be squashed into roles but the roles must fit the person of the actor. Interestingly, though I wholeheartedly disagree with him I do wonder whether our celebrity led theatre where big names are preferred so as to ' draw in the crowd ' is a return to this weird misplaced adoration. I go to the theatre for the play not for the actor, Agate, quite clearly, would have disagreed.
Even his idols however do not escape his tongue. Writing of Sarah Bernhardt he says how she could have tackled Shakespeare's Cleopatra because of ' the hystercal possibilities of the role '. Could she, he asks, have played Lady Macbeth:
' that she could have plucked nipple from boneless gums is not denied but how about Duncan resembling her father as he slept ? I can see her rolling her eyes like some celestial duck in an Olympian thunderstorm, breathing ethereal blasts of filial piety. Didn't she try to show what a dear Lucrezia Borgia was, apart from that little kink about poisoning'
Now I have no idea of half of what he was talking about with that analogy but it sounded funny and a bit cruel and quite bizarre and perhaps that is what we end up wanting from a theatre critic.
Displaying 1 of 1 review