Man From the USSR & Other Plays (31 page)

The second one is murder. Now, murder is all very well at the beginning of a play. It is a very uncomfortable thing to have at its close. The man who has sinned and struggled, etc., is doubtlessly removed. But his murderer remains, and even if we may be plausibly sure that society will pardon him, we are left with the uncomfortable sensation that we do not exactly know how he will feel in the long years following the final curtain; and whether the fact of his having murdered a man, however necessary it might have been, will not influence somehow all his future life, for instance his relationship with the still unborn but imaginable children. In other words, the given effect breeds a vague but quite disagreeable little cause which keeps moving like a worm in a raspberry, worrying us after the curtain has gone down. In examining this method I assume, of course, that the murder is a direct consequence of a previous conflict and in this sense it is easier to bring about than natural death. But, as I have explained, the murderer remains, and the effect is not final.

So we come to the third method, suicide. It can be used either indirectly, with the murderer first killing the hero and then himself, so as to remove all traces of what is really the author's crime, or it can be used directly with the main character taking his own life. This again is easier to pull off than natural death, as it is rather plausible for a man, after a hopeless struggle with hopeless circumstances, to take his fate into his hands. No wonder, then, that of the three methods suicide is your determinist's favorite. But here a new and awful difficulty arises. Though a murder can be, d
la rigueur,
staged directly before our eyes, it is extraordinarily difficult to stage a good suicide. It was feasible in the old days, when such symbolic instruments as daggers and bodkins were used, but nowadays we can't very well show a man cutting his throat with a Gillette blade. Where poison is employed the agonies of the suicidee can be too horrible to watch, and are sometimes too lengthy, while the implication that the poison was so strong that the man just fell dead is somehow neither fair nor plausible. Generally speaking the best way out is the pistol shot, but it is impossible to
show
the actual thing—because, again, if treated in a plausible manner, it is apt to be too messy for the stage. Moreover,
any
suicide
on
the stage diverts the attention of the audience from the moral point or from the plot itself, exciting in us the pardonable interest with which we watch how an actor will proceed to kill himself plausibly and politely with the maximum of thoroughness and the minimum of bloodshed. Showmanship can certainly find many practical methods while actually leaving the actor on the stage, but, as I say, the more elaborate the thing is, the more our minds wander away from the inner spirit to the outer body of the dying actor—always assuming that it is an ordinary cause-and-effect play. We are left thus with only one possibility: the
backstage pistol-shot suicide.
And you will remember that, in stage directions, the author will generally describe this as a “muffled shot.” Not a good loud bang, but “a muffled shot,” so that sometimes there is an element of doubt among the characters on the stage regarding that sound, though the audience knows exactly what that sound was. And now comes a new and perfectly awful difficulty. Statistics—and statistics are the only regular income of your determinist, just as there are people who make a regular income out of careful gambling—show that, in real life, out of ten attempts at suicide by pistol shot, as many as three are abortive, leaving the subject alive; five result in a long agony; and
only two
bring on instant death. Thus, even if the characters do understand what happens, a mere muffled shot is insufficient to convince us that the man is really dead. The usual method, then, after the muffled shot has cooed its message, is to have a character investigate and then come back with the information that the man is dead. Now, except in the rare case when the investigator is a physician, the mere sentence “He is dead,” or perhaps something “deeper” like, for instance, “He has paid his debt,” is hardly convincing coming from a person who, it is assumed, is neither sufficiently learned nor sufficiently careless to wave aside any possibility, however vague, of bringing the victim back to life. If, on the other hand, the investigator comes back shrieking, “Jack has shot himself! Call a doctor at once!” and the final curtain goes down, we are left wondering whether, in our times of
patchable
hearts, a good physician might not save the mangled party. Indeed, the effect that is fondly supposed to be final may, beyond the play, start a young doctor of genius upon some stupendous career of life-saving. So, shall we wait for the doctor and see what he says and
then
ring down the curtain? Impossible—there is
no time
for further suspense; the man, whoever he is, has paid his debt and the play is over. The right way, then, is to add, after “debt,” “It is too late to call a doctor”; that is, we introduce the word “doctor” as a kind of symbolic or masonic sign—not meaning, say, that we (the messenger) are sufficiently learned and sufficiently unsentimental to know that no doctor will help, but conveying to the audience by a conventional sign, by this rapid “doctor” sound, something that stresses the positive finality of the effect. But actually there is no way of making the suicide quite, quite final, unless, as I said, the herald himself be a doctor. So we come to the very curious conclusion that a really ironclad tragedy, with no possible chink in cause or effect—that is, the ideal play that textbooks teach people to write and theatrical managers clamor for—that this masterpiece, whatever its plot or background, 1)
must
end in suicide, 2)
must
contain
one character at least
who is a doctor, 3) that this doctor must be a
good doctor
and, 4) that it is he who must find the body. In other words, from the mere fact of tragedy's being what it is we have deduced an actual play. And this is the tragedy of tragedy.

In speaking of this technique, I have begun at the end of a modern tragedy to show what it must aspire to if it wants to be quite, quite consistent. Actually, the plays you may remember do not conform to such strict canons, and thus are not only bad in themselves, but do not even trouble to render plausible the bad rules they follow. For, numerous other conventions are unavoidably bred by the causal convention. We may hastily examine some of these.

A more sophisticated form of the French “dusting the furniture” exposition is when, instead of the valet and the maid discovered onstage, we have two visitors
arriving
on the stage as the curtain is going up, speaking of what brought them, and of the people in the house. It is a pathetic attempt to comply with the request of critics and teachers who demand that the exposition coincide with action, and actually the
entrance
of two visitors is action. But why on earth should two people who arrived on the same train and who had ample time to discuss everything during the journey, why must they struggle to keep silent till the minute of arrival, whereupon they start talking of their hosts in the wrongest place imaginable—the parlor of the house where they are guests? Why? Because the author must have them explode right here with a time-bomb exposition.

The next trick, to take the most obvious ones, is the promise of somebody's arrival. So-and-so is expected. We know that so-and-so will unavoidably come. He or she will come very soon. In fact he or she comes a minute after it has been said that the arrival will occur perhaps after dinner, perhaps tomorrow morning (which is meant to divert the audience's attention from the rapidity of the apparition: “Oh, I took an earlier train” is the usual explanation). If, when promising the audience a visitor, the speaker remarks that by the by so-and-so is coming—this
by the by
is a pathetic means of concealing the fact that so-and-so will play a most important, if not
the
most important, part in the play. Indeed, more often than not the “by and by” brings in the so-called fertilizing character. These promises, being links in the iron chain of tragic causation, are inevitably kept. The so-called
scène à faire,
the obligatory scene, is not, as most critics seem to think,
one
scene in the play—it is really every
next
scene in the play, no matter how ingenious the author may be in the way of surprises, or rather
just because
he is expected to surprise. A cousin from Australia is mentioned; somehow or other the characters expect him to be a grumpy old bachelor; now, the audience is not particularly eager to meet a grumpy old bachelor; but the cousin from Australia turns out to be the bachelor's fascinating young niece. The arrival is an obligatory scene because any intelligent audience had vaguely expected the author to make some amends for promising a bore. This example refers certainly more to comedy than to tragedy, but analogous methods are employed in the most serious plays: for example, in Soviet tragedies where more often than not the expected commissar turns out to be a slip of a girl—and then this slip of a girl turns out to be an expert with a revolver when another character turns out to be a bourgeois Don Juan in disguise.

Among modern tragedies there is
one
that ought to be studied particularly closely by anyone wishing to find
all
the disastrous results of cause and effect, neatly grouped together in one play. This is O'Neill's
Mourning Becomes Electra.
Just as the weather changed according to human moods and moves in Ibsen's play, here, in
Mourning Becomes Electro,
we observe the curious phenomenon of a young woman who is flat-chested in the first act, becomes a full-bosomed beautiful creature after a trip to the South Islands, then,
a couple of days later,
reverts to the original flat-chested, sharp-elbowed type. We have a couple of suicides of the wildest sort, and the
positive-finality
trick is supplied by the heroine's telling us just before the play ends that she will not commit suicide, but will go on living in the dismal house, etc., though there is nothing to prevent her changing her mind, and using the same old army pistol so conveniently supplied to the other patients of the play. Then there is the element of Fate, Fate whom the author leads by one hand, and the late professor Freud by the other. There are portraits on the wall, dumb creatures, which are used for the purpose of monologue under the queer misconception that a monologue becomes a dialogue if the portrait of another person is addressed. There are many such interesting things in this play. But perhaps the most remarkable thing, one that throws direct light on the inevitable artificial side of tragedies based on the logic of fate, is the difficulties the author experiences in keeping this or that character on the stage when he is especially required, but when some pathetic flaw in the machinery suggests that the really natural thing would be a hasty retreat. For instance: the old gentleman of tragedy is expected to return from the war tomorrow or possibly after tomorrow, which means that he arrives almost immediately after the beginning of the act with the usual explanation about trains. It is late in the evening. The evening is cold. The only place to sit is the steps of the porch. The old gentleman is tired, hungry, has not been home for ages and moreover suffers from acute heart trouble—a pain like a knife, he says, which is meant to prepare his death in another act. Now the horrible job with which the author is faced is to make that poor old man remain in the bleak garden, on the damp steps, for a good talk with his daughter and his wife—especially with his wife. The casual reasons for his not going into the house, which are inserted here and there in the talk, keep excluding one another in a most fascinating way—and the tragedy of the act is not the tragedy of the old man's relations with his wife, but the tragedy of an honest, tired, hungry, helpless human being, grimly held by the author who, until the act is over, keeps him away from bath, slippers and supper.

The peculiar technique of this play and of other plays by other authors is not so much the result of poor talent, as the unavoidable result of the illusion that life and thus dramatic art picturing life should be based on a steady current of cause and effect driving us towards the ocean of death. The themes, the ideas of tragedies have certainly changed, but the change is unfortunately just the change in an actor's dressing room, mere new disguises that only
appear
new, but whose interplay is always the same: conflict between this and that, and then the same iron rules of conflict leading either to a happy or miserable end, but always to
some
end which is unavoidably
contained
in the cause. Nothing ever fizzles out in a tragedy, though perhaps one of the tragedies of life is that even the most tragic situations just fizzle out. Anything remotely resembling an accident is taboo. The conflicting characters are not live people, but types—and this is especially noticeable in the absurd though well-meant plays, which are supposed to depict—if not to solve—the tragedy of the present times. In such plays what I call the
island
or
Grand Hotel
or
Magnolia Street
method is used, that is, the grouping of people in a dramatically convenient, strictly limited space with either social tradition or some outside calamity preventing their dispersal. In such tragedies the old German refugee, though otherwise fairly stolid, will invariably love music, the Russian émigré woman will be a fascinating vamp and rave about Tsars and the snow, the Jew will be married to a Christian, the spy will be blond and bland, and the young married couple naive and pathetic—and so on and on—and no matter where you group them it is always the same old story (even the transatlantic Clipper has been tried, and certainly nobody heeded the critics who humbly asked what engineering device had been used to eliminate the roar of the propellers). The conflict of ideas replacing the conflict of passion changes
nothing
in the essential pattern—if anything, it makes it still more artificial. Hobnobbing with the audience through the medium of a chorus has been tried, only resulting in the destruction of the main and fundamental agreement on which stage drama can be based. This agreement is: we are aware of the characters on the stage, but cannot move them; they are unaware of us, but can move us—a perfect division which, when tampered with, transforms plays into what they are today.