THE ART OF PRODUCTION.

BY FRANK VERNON.

The first and last duty of a producer is loyalty to the author. A curiosity of the brief history of the British genus is that his origin can be traced to a man who would have eliminated authors entirely from the theatre, Gordon Craig. But if his origin has that paradox, it is nevertheless true that the producer has grown up with the “man of letters” dramatist. He was a necessity before literature and the drama, divorced for the hundred years since Sheridan, could be re-married, and if one believes that that re-marriage was in the interests of the theatre, then one is on the side of the producer; if not, à bas the producer! He was a necessity to the new dramatist of ideas, because ideas were a fresh phenomenon in the theatre, and found the theatre unprepared. The liaison-officer was needed, the man who could combine a knowledge of practical stage-mechanics with a sympathetic understanding of an educated dramatist’s educated play for educated people.

You can therefore trace his origin, if you like, rather to the Education Act of 1869 than to Gordon Craig. For before you could have educated plays in the theatre, you had to have an educated audience, and, frankly, the Victorian theatre was not educated. The producer came along and introduced the dramatist of ideas to the theatre manager; he guaranteed him a desirable acquaintance; he sponsored in the theatre the novelty called brains.

In action, the work of the producer is not dissimilar from that of the orchestra-conductor, with this difference – that the conductor controls the public performances of his orchestra, whereas the producer’s task is over when the curtain rises on the first public performance of a play. One might almost prefer the irreverent comparison with the trainer of a football team – but not quite. He sees the play as a whole, he sets the key in which it is to be played, costumed, decorated. From that it follows that while he may or may not be an actor, he should never act in a play he produces. To an actor, his part is more significant than the whole; if it is not, then the worse actor he. This was the bane of production by actor-managers, who inevitably saw their own parts with an actor’s exaggeration, and destroyed the play’s perspective. There is sense of proportion in the star part’s relationship to the whole play when treated by a producer to whom one part is of no more personal interest than another, but often a fantastic distortion of values when an actor-manager produces a play himself. The producer, one says, sets the key, and keeps the whole production from first to last in the key he has decided upon. To do that he must be technically expert, not himself necessarily master of all the arts which go to make the composite art of the theatre, but accurately informed about them, knowing what it is or is not possible to demand of the various craftsmen. He may not be a practical carpenter or a practical electrician, but he knows how the products of those craftsmen can be employed to best advantage in the theatre. He does not teach the carpenter how to hammer a nail; neither should he pretend to teach actors how to act. Actors, not stage-novices, are his human material, and human material treated without decent respect turns intractable.

IMPORTANCE OF PERSONALITY.

It is here, in his relations with actors, that an autocratic attitude in the producer is most perilous. But may one hazard the word “educate” in its true sense of “drawing out”? In that sense the producer’s job is to educate the actors – to draw out each of them the best they can give him, keeping them always in key to the note of the play. Some feeling of discipline, some sense of the captaincy of the producer there must be, or the divergent personalities of the actors would never compose into an even whole; but the producer’s aim is not to impose his personality on the actors, but to expose theirs. He has chosen them with this intent and in the knowledge that the selection of his human material is even more vital than its manipulation; he does not face at the first rehearsal a mine of unexplored possibilities, but a cast whose careful selection results from his sedulous study of contemporary actors. He knows why each has been chosen, and proceeds to draw out their special characteristics. But if an actor transcends the producer’s expectations and gives something beyond anticipation, the producer is not there to stand autocratically by cast-iron preconceptions and to refuse a gift merely because it is unlooked for. Producers are not supermen, and ruin lies in the pose of the superman.

Simplicity in the art of the theatre is the objective of the producer; one supremely right tone or gesture out-values an acre of painted canvas, and there is nothing but danger in the producer with enthusiasms for particular stage effects. Perhaps the producer has invented some new mechanism; he is eager to try it, and in his eagerness becomes unscrupulous; he makes an opportunity to use his effect in a play which does not call for it, which is, quite possibly, actually damaged by an effect alien from its character. And, similarly, survivals of “business” dating from the older plays are disastrous to the new. You cannot put new wine in old bottles. Music, again. They used to die to slow music and made love to a sentimental waltz-tune played by the orchestra. The old stage-manager, promoted producer of a modern play, must still have his music. Suppose A is going to propose to B. Then C, who has just left them, goes supposedly into the next room and plays a sentimental tune on the piano. Delightful subtlety! The truth is that only the young in spirit can enter into the kingdom of producing. Plays date amazingly fast. This is not a question of technique, which is mostly fashion, but of spirit, and only the young in spirit are adaptable and always sensitive to the new.

PRODUCER AS LIAISON OFFICER.

The phrase liaison-officer, already used as explaining the relationship of the producer between the author and the theatre, is applicable also to his relations with the modern decorator of plays, The producer might claim to have introduced the modern artist to the theatre as he introduced the modern author, and while that is not proven, his present relationships with the artist and with the author are on a similar footing. The scene-painter is a sound, honest craftsman, who is, perhaps, a little conservative, and when a play calls for exceptional treatment or stylistic decoration the practice has sprung up of getting designs of scenery and of costume – a complete colourscheme – from some artist of distinction, and of then passing on the designer to the scene-painter and costumier to be executed. In this the producer is, as always, a co-ordinator, and the artist’s designs are the result of preliminary conferences with the producer.