World Film and Television Progress (1938)

YOU CANT take it WITH YOU Several people have tried. Alistair Cooke explains why they failed. A scene from the American play ' Idiot's Delight " now running in London. [George Elliot and Anthony Vivian]. Now what is the situation about the production of American plays in London and the production of British plays in New York? I think first that on the score of revivals of classical plays we are about equal. New York sees Ibsen and Shakespeare and Tchekov as often as London. It is in the performance of dramatists of our own day that a list to starboard sets in. The average American playgoer in this city knows English drama of to-day by the plays of these people: Shaw, Lonsdale, O'Casey, Coward, Somerset Maugham, Dodie Smith, Keith Winter, W. H. Auden, Paul Vincent Carroll, J. B. Priestley, Ian Hay. He sees the London theatre and knows the plays of the people who write for it, less well, of course, than you do, but he sees a remarkable number of British plays and players and they are representative. . . . London is nothing like as familiar as it might be with the plays of S. N. Behrman, Paul Green, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, Marc Connolly, M. Erskine, John Howard Lawson, Sidney Howard. So much for the plays, though I don't think that London should feel any duty to reflect in miniature the corresponding Broadway season. But what does matter is that any nation's plays should be accurately and naturally acted when they are staged abroad. Mr. George Jean Nathan, the American critic, once said that if it was American plays you were looking for in London you could expect to find at least one play in which "some hero of American history, like Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, or John Brown, will in the British handling be quite indistinguishable from Sir Thomas Beecham or Mr. Cyril Maude". I* 1» •!• vr I wish I could cap Mr. Nathan's remark by saying that in English plays in New York you will find a country vicar or an earl played in the manner of a friendly cowboy or a real estate agent, but I am afraid it is not true. An Englishman has reason to be proud of the Broadway productions of English plays. Most of the casts of imported plays are imported too and directed by Englishmen; only once this year, in an adaptation of Bar Chester Towers, could it be truthfully said that Miss Ina Claire had treated Anthony Trollope to a night at the Stork Club, or some other fashionable New York night club, whereas only once in my memory was an American play in London performed in the way it would be put on in New York. That was the production of Street Scene in — was it 1930? But supposing that the drama of Great Britain and the drama of the United States were equally well presented on each side of the Atlantic, there would be other snags which producers are hitting all the time and which they say nothing can he done about. I mean snags that anybody would hit who started to choose the other country's entertainment. . . . Ik now no good reason why English people should be thought stupid because they don't like the Marx Brothers or the works of George Kaufman. The name of G. Kaufman is especially apt, because there is no possible doubt this side of the Atlantic 122