Excerpt from Three Plays

The English-speaking peoples should get into the habit of reading plays. Poetry and the Drama are bracketed together in catalogues, and the bond between them is more than the occasional overlapping of their forms. They are at their best not only in form the most concentrated but in spirit the most vital of literary arts. They are perhaps the ultimate test of an imaginative writer; they are certainly the ultimate test of an imaginative reader. And imaginative readers send up the standard of a whole country's literature.

Now those of us whose reading extends at all beyond the daily paper read poetry now and then or can at least pretend to a knowledge of it, and even the daily paper has its verses; the cause of poetry is won. The cause of play-reading is worth advocacy. Read a play: you are kept strictly to the point of the matter its author has in hand, he will not swell your mind with descriptions of sunsets or the colour of the heroine's eyes or the hero's hoots; it is his business so to tell you the story that it fructifies in your mind in the telling. The words must be pregnant with more than their casual meaning. They must be a key which admits you, if you are alert to follow, into the peopled world of the play. When you analyse in the cold print the apparently meagre means by which the vision was created you become conscious - and a little proud, perhaps, as a good reader should be - that you too have shared in the work of imagination.

I am inclined to think that all good plays are plays good to read if better to see, but I do not press that point. I do insist though that there is no such thing as the play good for the study but not for the stage. That phrase Fails to cover a multitude of incompetencies. A play is either dramatic - that is, fit for the test of the Theatre - or it is nothing much.

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