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But post war apathy is merely a passing phase and there are an increasing number of people intensely alert to almost any point of view. Every year the theatre and the cinema give our minds more and more to feed on. They preach sermons in many obvious and in many less obvious ways and may be said in many respects to have superceded the church. Possibly, without knowing it, we are returning to the old morality plays. Certainly to-day's treatment of birth, marriage and death, though sometimes crude, is usually free from all hypocrisy. We seem to have on the stage and the screen, if not in the church, the beginnings of a renaissance.
9. "AND THE MORAL OF THAT IS . . ."
We are in no mood to-day for routine thought, for outworn dogma or ritual that has lost its meaning, and if the church realized it as much as the theatre, religion would nourish to-day as it never has before. A new phase cannot be influenced by old methods.
We seldom moralize now-a-days about good and evil — and certainly not on the stage and the screen. We prefer, as in Patricia's seven houses, to moralize about our blindness to facts; when we have faced them fearlessly and honestly it will be time enough to see what good or evil they contain. Patricia, inheriting seven brothels, was quite oblivious to the nature of her inheritance, and still less to the fact that running immoral houses, though it has its risks, is a very sound financial business. No doubt they were right to put on this entertaining play, too few of us pay due attention to the profits from brothels — in which we may unwittingly have a share.
What war really means to the individual soldier is another matter we are trying to face honestly and fearlessly. It is useless to put on dull symbolic plays such as the dove and the garpenter, each character representing a nation, they are almost certain to bore us. But it may be useful, as in exercise bowler, to show us once more the idealization of war on the one hand and what it really means on the other. Or again, let us learn, if we need to, how to deal with genius, how useless it is to badger a musician like Bach, full of his silver trumpets, with the petty worries of an ordinary mortal's life. From such plays we learn that a moral, even an obvious or unsatisfactory one, does not necessarily mean a dull play. There are many dull plays without the vestige of a moral.
Amongst the subtler or more atmospheric plays we often have an all-pervading sense of doom, an urge to rescue humanity from the plight we see before us. The standardization of life, for instance, in to-morrow's child gives us a feeling that we are being drawn into the grasp of an impersonal machine of our own making and that, having become part of it ourselves, our fate is inevitable, marrowbone lane is again a play of seemingly inevitable doom but we are concerned with individuals rather than with fate and there appears to be a chance of escape for at least one victim. Now this, now that seems to enslave her, it is a play of a hundred pin pricks
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