(in most modern plays scenery is not illusive; everything visible
is as real as in your drawing room at home) is that it is
unconvincing; whilst the imaginary scenery with which the
audience provides a platform or tribune like the Elizabethan
stage or the Greek stage used by Sophocles, is quite convincing.
In fact, the more scenery you have the less illusion you produce.
The wise playwright, when he cannot get absolute reality of
presentation, goes to the other extreme, and aims at atmosphere
and suggestion of mood rather than at direct simulative illusion.
The theatre, as I first knew it, was a place of wings and flats
which destroyed both atmosphere and illusion. This was tolerated,
and even intensely enjoyed, but not in the least because nothing
better was possible; for all the devices employed in the
productions of Mr. Granville Barker or Max Reinhardt or the
Moscow Art Theatre were equally available for Colley Cibber and
Garrick, except the intensity of our artificial light. When
Garrick played Richard II in slashed trunk hose and plumes, it
was not because he believed that the Plantagenets dressed like
that, or because the costumes could not have made him a XV
century dress as easily as a nondescript combination of the state
robes of George III with such scraps of older fashions as seemed
to playgoers for some reason to be romantic. The charm of the
theatre in those days was its makebelieve. It has that charm
still, not only for the amateurs, who are happiest when they are
most unnatural and impossible and absurd, but for audiences as
well. I have seen performances of my own plays which were to me
far wilder burlesques than Sheridan's Critic or Buckingham's
Rehearsal; yet they have produced sincere laughter and tears such
as the most finished metropolitan productions have failed to
elicit. Fielding was entirely right when he represented Partridge