The Higher Drama put out of Action

The effect of the war on the London theatres may now be imagined.
The beds and the bevies drove every higher form of art out of it.
Rents went up to an unprecedented figure. At the same time prices
doubled everywhere except at the theatre pay-boxes, and raised
the expenses of management to such a degree that unless the
houses were quite full every night, profit was impossible. Even
bare solvency could not be attained without a very wide
popularity. Now what had made serious drama possible to a limited
extent before the war was that a play could pay its way even if
the theatre were only half full until Saturday and three-quarters
full then. A manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard
worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically
disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and
happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out to be
potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by which time
a relay might arrive in the person of another enthusiast. Thus
and not otherwise occurred that remarkable revival of the British
drama at the beginning of the century which made my own career as
a playwright possible in England. In America I had already
established myself, not as part of the ordinary theatre system,
but in association with the exceptional genius of Richard
Mansfield. In Germany and Austria I had no difficulty: the system
of publicly aided theatres there, Court and Municipal, kept drama
of the kind I dealt in alive; so that I was indebted to the
Emperor of Austria for magnificent productions of my works at a
time when the sole official attention paid me by the British