World Film and Television Progress (1938)

about his standing as a comic writer. He has a type of humour which seems to be indigenous to this country, but it is liked and understood almost as well by visiting French and Germans. When You Cant Take It With You was produced in London the theatre was warmed by hardly a single smile. What sense or satire is there, the London critics asked, and justly, in a piece which shows a little business-man coming home by accident with a grand duchess? Well, that would be highly fantastic in London. It is not, however, so fantastic in a city like New York where 500 impoverished Russian dukes and countesses live, where, indeed they have banded themselves together into an association called "Russian Nobility, Inc.", which puts on once a year a great ball, costumed in the court dress of Nicolas II. You Can't Take It With You is one kind of play that nobody should have dreamed of exporting. If some theatre manager — if that unhappy theatre manager, should be listening he may fairly ask just what kind of play was it? Well, I would say it's a play built around local whimsicality. I know scores of people who have aunts and uncles exactly like that family and when Americans see it they warm to recognisable types and humours. But although you can safely translate mathematics, ideas and dollars into pounds, though you can even sometimes translate a national humour, one thing will not travel — it is your own local or family kind of whimsy. Private humour should be enjoyed in private, and so far as You Can't Take It With You is concerned, privacy means New York City. Let's look at another play which is packing houses here but ran only a short time in London. I mean the farce Room Service. Again the London critics complained that here was a fantasia which could hardly be tied up with ordinary living. To its English audience it seemed like a puzzle ingeniously put together but not adding up to anything real or very funny. Yet Room Service depended for its fun on your being familiar with the way an American Hotel is operated. The very title is a native coining. I have many times had to rescue Englishmen who had little time to catch the boat and picked up the telephone in their bedroom, and expected that by talking to the same person they would get their bill, their luggage collected, their meals paid for and possibly their laundry returned and did not know that these services were decentralised. In New York Room Service is almost the funniest play I expect to see. I say "almost" because there will be another one along next season. There always is. Its humour lay in the pathetic demands put on a hotel system which claims to attend to most human demands. After all, in a hotel where you can have drinks, or ice water, or a sandwich sent up to your room at any time of night and day, it is funny to take it for granted that you can call the manager and ask him to take care of a suicide for twenty minutes. Here were two men stuck in a hotel room they couldn't afford. They ^couldn't sneak out, because there would be the manager waiting with the bill. They have exhausted the hotel's patience and credit. Even the room service. the food has been cut off. They sit there wondering how to keep alive and as the night creeps along, one of them, a little white, says "I see spots before my eyes; spots as big as Hamburgers". Over by the bed, his friend says bitterly, "If you see one with onions, save it for me". These touched off the audience to laughter, but also to pity because the two men were two recognisable Americans who might at that moment be stuck in a hotel downtown Broadway. I understand the London production slowed down the lines and exaggerated the business so that the actors remained actors instead of turning into people. So what you were likely to see was a play of fantastic ideas; what we saw was a play of pathetic and uproarious facts. Similarly, the imagination somehow stumbles at the idea of Miss Gladys Cooper playing Mrs. Sam Dodsworth, because Sinclair Lewis did not dream of anybody remotely like Gladys Cooper, any more, I suppose, than Shakespeare was thinking of Mae West when he wrote Lady Macbeth. Several other charges have been made by one side against the other, but they are in effect boomerangs. They sting the people who throw them. Let me illustrate. You have heard about 100 per cent Americans — an unpopular race in England — but it may interest you to know that in some of the imported English plays the American critics recognise 100 per cent Englishmen. Mr. Robert Benchley, reviewing an English play he liked, said it was fine once you got used to the intense glandular activity of the young people in the first act, once they had stopped bouncing. Another charge is that of sentimentality, of a recognisable national brand. We are agreed, 1 hope, that the Americans have a very special and pretty nauseous way of being sentimental, over friendship, over giving a helping hand, over many a thing you have seen in the movies and blushed at; but the Americans recognise also a special brand of English sentimentality. They never can take seriously our heart-searching plays about the troubles of people like Young Woodley. They find something typical of us in our three-act tragedies about what we would call "sensitive young men". Here is a sentence of an American critic after a visit to such a play in London "It seems you will always find in London several imitations of Tchekov in which the repressed young wife of the master of the house will, at the end of the second act, throw herself passionately into the arms of any male character who can play the piano, provided, provided only, he was gassed in the last war." The situation to-day, as I see it, is this. It is a true statement that Americans like ice-cream with chocolate sauce; it is a true statement that the English like roast beef with horseradish sauce; what our theatrical producers have done and continue to do is this. They say "Come and sit down at our table; we pick the best foods of all nations. On the menu to-day is a fine dollop of icecream which, as you're English, sir, we shall serve to you with horseradish sauce." The American gets the roast beef and finds he really rather likes it, but in the cause of international goodwill and good manners, he takes it with chocolate sauce. This is an extract from a radio talk relayed from America on May 25th, and is reproduced by kind permission of the B.B.C. ■hhBL A scene from ./. B. Priestley's '/ Have Been Here Before' 123