Lascelles Abercrombie — Playwright

Lascelles Abercrombie - Playwright ESTHER SAFER FISHER I Best known as a critic and poet, LasceIles Abercrombie (1881-1938) was also a playwright deeply concemed with the state of the English theatre in the first three decades of this century. For the most part, he was adversely critical of the commercial theatre of his day, opposed to the twin evils of sentimentality and the factual treatment of contemporary social issues, what he termed "naturalism ." He wanted to create and promote plays which conveyed the type of "symbolic realism" he found in the work of two feIlow Georgians, John Drinkwater and Gordon Bottomley. In Drinkwater's Cophetua, he saw "a bold attempt to break through the accretions of dramatic convention .. . and to achieve a broader, simpler, more frankly symbolic method of drama"' ; and in Bottomley's The Riding 10 Lilhend, he appreciated a play shaped not "according to nature, but according to the curves of beauty, into a symbol of life infinitely more powerful than any actuality could do. '" Abercrombie was attracted to both symbolism and realism, each of which had helped to dissipate the nineteenth century emphasis on sentimentality. Like Yeats, he feared the tyranny of realism, but unlike Yeats, he distrusted the emphasis on imagination. Abercrombie viewed the Irish Dramatic movement as "nothing but the final effort of the great European Romantic movement - the Romantic movement carried to its extreme, Celtic fashion ," and he considered the plays of Yeats and Synge "something shadowy, insubstantial and delicate and only half-human." 3 Perhaps for these reasons he felt that Irish drama did not influence English poetic drama.4 Furthermore, in an approving way, Abercrombie linked masculinity and vigour with a sordid type ofreality characteristic ofmuch English poetic drama, including that of W.W. Gibson and Bottomley. He admired Bottomley's use of myth, legend and figures who, for all their domestication, are in the heroic or epic tradition. He wrote to R.C. Trevelyan, "perhaps Yeats is right in saying ESTHER SAFER FISHER that a play ought not to deal with its own time."5 Yet, for the most part, Abercrombie's plays are set in the present, and the Gharacters are not aristocrats , however primitive, but rustics whose passions are universal. By means different from those used by Bottomley, he wanted to get away from contemporary realistic drama of social conceros and to create plays depicting fundamental human motives and actions. II Abercrombie wrote seven plays: The Adder (1908), A Tower in Italy (1910), Deborah (1912), The Staircase (1913), The End of the World (1914), The Deserter (1921), and Phoenix: {aj Tragicomedy (1922). The Adder, The Staircase, The End of the World, and The Deserter were published as Four Short Plays in 1922; Deborah and Phoenix, each containing three acts, were published in 1913 and 1923 respectively; A Tower in Italy: to which [ shall referbriefiy, was not published until 1976. The central issue in Abercrombie's plays (with the exception of The End of the World) is man's duality, or what he termed Milton's predominant theme, "Fixt fate - free Will"; and for Abercrombie, as for Lawrence, sex was the single most important factor in determining man's fate . [n Deborah, Abercrombie 's first published play, the birth of an illegitimate child leads to Barnaby's madness, Miriam's suicide, and by extension, to Deborah's death. But sex is also the life-force embodied in Deborah who, like her Biblical namesake, is both a mother-figure and a heroine. In Phoenix, character determines fate: Rhodope, who is sexual atrractiveness incarnate, does not fight against her fate; she triumphs over it, whereas the royal family is tom apart by sexual jealousy. In each of the one-act plays, sexual love is depicted as a type of madness over which man has little or no control. In most of Abercrombie's plays, there is little development of character and little physical movement; both characterization and action are conveyed to a large extent by setting and poetry. Because these elements represent Abercrombie 's major contribution to the theatre of his day, I shall concentrate on them, dealing first mainly with setting and then focusing on the poetry of The Staircase and...