The Theatre of Somerset Maugham

THE THEATRE OF SOMERSET MAUGHAM No living dramatist is so easy to see whole as Somerset Maugham, for he completed his "theatre" twenty-five years ago and since 1933 has steadfastly refused to return to playwriting. We can see his dramatic work with useful perspective, like that of Galsworthy and Barrie. A few new plays in recent years have vaguely carried his name tag in large print, for an obvious reason, such as Theatre and Jane, but he did not write these plays. In fine print one reads that they derive from Maugham's fiction, as Rain did in 1922. Unlike Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, Sir James Barrie, and even Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham knew when the time came to stop writing plays, and he stopped. In the Preface to the sixth and final volume of the published plays (1934) he writes: "I am conscious that I am no longer in touch with the public that patronizes the theatre.... It is high time . . . to retire. I do so with relief." He saw that tastes were changing, that the demand for a "good story" was growing less insistent, that the notwell -made play pleased a generation impatient with literary contrivance , that what he considered good workmanship was yielding to what he considered sprawl, that his crispness, "sticking to the point," directness of attack were becoming unfashionable. His reputation in America, and to a less extent in Britain, is now at a low ebb. Although a dozen of his plays are often performed by British repertory and civic theatre groups and occasionally by American 'little" theaters, the experimental, college, and off-Broadway playhouses pay little attention to him. Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker devotes half a line to Maugham; Francis Fergusson ignores him completely. (Only in France, where his plays are frequently produced , does he receive serious attention from eminent critics. ) Although he abandoned playwriting twenty-five years ago when the relative failure of Sheppey made him aware of changing tastes in the theater he has never been hostile to the new drama. In his eighties he annually sees the new plays in Rome, Paris, and London; he reads the "New Criticism" with relish; many young European playwrights are his friends and are welcome visitors at "Villa Mauresque." It is doubtful that he foresaw the critical, if not popular, triumph of the indirect and sometimes fuzzy, the ascendancy of the sitting-room and scullery drama over the elegant drawing-room variety (back to Zola and the early Hauptmann), the literary archness in treatments of ancient myths, the survival of the religious theme-and the preten211 212 MODEBN DRAMA February tious religiosity-theme as well, the obsession in a confused and jittery age with the neurotic and agonized soul-searching. Whatever his vision, he grew tired of playwriting and realized that he had no more plays to write. Unlike Halvard Solness he heard with composure the new generation knocking on the door, and turned gladly to his fiction and essays. His first play was written in 1896, his last one in 1933. Of the thirtytwo plays three are adaptations: The Noble Spaniard, from the French of Grenet-Daucourt-this preposterous Victorian farce delighted London audiences when in it was revived in 1954; The Perfect Gentleman. from Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme-the adaptation formed the first part of a complete performance of Richard Strauss's opera Ariadne in Naxos; and The Mask and the Face, from the popular Italian comedy by Luigi Chiarelli. Two are of one act and forgotten: Schiffbriichig and Mademoiselle Zampa. In thirty-seven years, then, he wrote twenty-seven original plays, which would seem a modest total until we recall his vast output of novels, short stories, and critical prefaces during this period. Maugham spent his boyhood in the home of a narrow clergyman uncle, who viewed the theatre with the professional horror proper in the 1880's. Not until the boy at eighteen went to Heidelberg for a year did he see a play. Then he was suddenly introduced to the new drama of Ibsen, Hauptmann, and other early naturalists. Night after night he went to the grubby local theatre and afterwards in a...