The end of a saloon in an
old-fashioned country house (Florence Towers, the property of Count
O'Dowda) has been curtained off to form a stage for a private
theatrical performance. A footman in grandiose Spanish livery
enters before the curtain, on its O.P. side.
FOOTMAN.
[announcing] Mr Cecil Savoyard.
[Cecil Savoyard comes in: a middle-aged man in evening
dress and a fur-lined overcoat. He is surprised to find nobody to
receive him. So is the Footman]
. Oh, beg pardon, sir: I thought the Count was here. He
was when I took up your name. He must have gone through the stage
into the library. This way, sir.
[He moves towards the division in the middle of the
curtains]
.
SAVOYARD. Half a mo.
[The Footman stops]. When does the play begin? Half-past
eight?
FOOTMAN. Nine, sir.
SAVOYARD. Oh, good. Well, will you telephone to my wife at the
George that it's not until nine?
FOOTMAN. Right, sir. Mrs Cecil Savoyard, sir?
SAVOYARD. No: Mrs William Tinkler. Dont forget.
THE FOOTMAN. Mrs Tinkler, sir. Right, sir.
[The Count comes in through the curtains]
. Here is the Count, sir. [Announcing]
Mr Cecil Savoyard, sir.
[He withdraws].
COUNT O'DOWDA.
[A handsome man of fifty, dressed with studied elegance a
hundred years out of date, advancing cordially to shake hands with
his visitor] Pray excuse me, Mr Savoyard. I suddenly
recollected that all the bookcases in the library were locked-in
fact theyve never been opened since we came from Venice-and as our
literary guests will probably use the library a good deal, I just
ran in to unlock everything.
SAVOYARD. Oh, you mean the dramatic critics. M'yes. I suppose
theres a smoking room?
THE COUNT. My study is available. An old-fashioned house, you
understand. Wont you sit down, Mr Savoyard?
SAVOYARD. Thanks.
[They sit. Savoyard, looking at his host's obsolete costume,
continues] I had no idea you were going to appear in the piece
yourself.
THE COUNT. I am not. I wear this costume because-well, perhaps I
had better explain the position, if it interests you.
SAVOYARD. Certainly.
THE COUNT. Well, you see, Mr Savoyard, I'm rather a stranger in
your world. I am not, I hope, a modern man in any sense of the
word. I'm not really an Englishman: my family is Irish: Ive lived
all my life in Italy-in Venice mostly-my very title is a foreign
one: I am a Count of the Holy Roman Empire.
SAVOYARD. Where's that?
THE COUNT. At present, nowhere, except as a memory and an ideal.[Savoyard inclines his head respectfully to the ideal].
But I am by no means an idealogue. I am not content with beautiful
dreams: I want beautiful realities.
SAVOYARD. Hear, hear! I'm all with you there-when you can get
them.
THE COUNT. Why not get them? The difficulty is not that there
are no beautiful realities, Mr Savoyard: the difficulty is that so
few of us know them when we see them. We have inherited from the
past a vast treasure of beauty-of imperishable masterpieces of
poetry, of painting, of sculpture, of architecture, of music, of
exquisite fashions in dress, in furniture, in domestic decoration.
We can contemplate these treasures. We can reproduce many of them.
We can buy a few inimitable originals. We can shut out the
nineteenth century-
SAVOYARD.
[correcting him] The twentieth.
THE COUNT. To me the century I shut out will always be the
nineteenth century, just as your national anthem will always be God
Save the Queen, no matter how many kings may succeed. I found
England befouled with industrialism: well, I did what Byron did: I
simply refused to live in it. You remember Byron's words: "I am
sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix
with the earth of that country. I believe the thought would drive
me mad on my deathbed could I suppose that any of my friends would
be base enough to convey my carcase back to her soil. I would not
even feed her worms if I could help it."
SAVOYARD. Did Byron say that?
THE COUNT. He did, sir.
SAVOYARD. It dont sound like him. I saw a good deal of him at
one time.
THE COUNT. You! But how is that possible? You are too young.
SAVOYARD. I was quite a lad, of course. But I had a job in the
original production of Our Boys.
THE COUNT. My dear sir, not that Byron. Lord Byron, the
poet.
SAVOYARD. Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you were talking of
the Byron. So you prefer living abroad?
THE COUNT. I find England ugly and Philistine. Well, I dont live
in it. I find modern houses ugly. I dont live in them: I have a
palace on the grand canal. I find modern clothes prosaic. I dont
wear them, except, of course, in the street. My ears are offended
by the Cockney twang: I keep out of hearing of it and speak and
listen to Italian. I find Beethoven's music coarse and restless,
and Wagner's senseless and detestable. I do not listen to them. I
listen to Cimarosa, to Pergolesi, to Gluck and Mozart. Nothing
simpler, sir.
SAVOYARD. It's all right when you can afford it.
THE COUNT. Afford it! My dear Mr Savoyard, if you are a man with
a sense of beauty you can make an earthly paradise for yourself in
Venice on ?1500 a year, whilst our wretched vulgar industrial
millionaires are spending twenty thousand on the amusements of
billiard markers. I assure you I am a poor man according to modern
ideas. But I have never had anything less than the very best that
life has produced. It is my good fortune to have a beautiful and
lovable daughter; and that girl, sir, has never seen an ugly sight
or heard an ugly sound that I could spare her; and she has
certainly never worn an ugly dress or tasted coarse food or bad
wine in her life. She has lived in a palace; and her perambulator
was a gondola. Now you know the sort of people we are, Mr Savoyard.
You can imagine how we feel here.
SAVOYARD. Rather out of it, eh?
THE COUNT. Out of it, sir! Out of what?
SAVOYARD. Well, out of everything.
THE COUNT. Out of soot and fog and mud and east wind; out of
vulgarity and ugliness, hypocrisy and greed, superstition and
stupidity. Out of all this, and in the sunshine, in the enchanted
region of which great artists alone have had the secret, in the
sacred footsteps of Byron, of Shelley, of the Brownings, of Turner
and Ruskin. Dont you envy me, Mr Savoyard?
SAVOYARD. Some of us must live in England, you know, just to
keep the place going. Besides-though, mind you, I dont say it isnt
all right from the high art point of view and all that-three weeks
of it would drive me melancholy mad. However, I'm glad you told me,
because it explains why it is you dont seem to know your way about
much in England. I hope, by the way, that everything has given
satisfaction to your daughter.
THE COUNT. She seems quite satisfied. She tells me that the
actors you sent down are perfectly suited to their parts, and very
nice people to work with. I understand she had some difficulties at
the first rehearsals with the gentleman you call the producer,
because he hadnt read the play; but the moment he found out what it
was all about everything went smoothly.
SAVOYARD. Havnt you seen the rehearsals?
THE COUNT. Oh no. I havnt been allowed even to meet any of the
company. All I can tell you is that the hero is a Frenchman
[Savoyard is rather scandalized]: I asked her not to have
an English hero. That is all I know.
[Ruefully] I havnt been consulted even about the costumes,
though there, I think, I could have been some use.
SAVOYARD.
[puzzled] But there arnt any costumes.
THE COUNT.
[seriously shocked] What! No costumes! Do you mean to say
it is a modern play?
SAVOYARD. I dont know: I didnt read it. I handed it to Billy
Burjoyce-the producer, you know-and left it to him to select the
company and so on. But I should have had to order the costumes if
there had been any. There wernt.
THE COUNT.
[smiling as he recovers from his alarm] I understand. She
has taken the costumes into her own hands. She is an expert in
beautiful costumes. I venture to promise you, Mr Savoyard, that
what you are about to see will be like a Louis Quatorze ballet
painted by Watteau. The heroine will be an exquisite Columbine, her
lover a dainty Harlequin, her father a picturesque Pantaloon, and
the valet who hoodwinks the father and brings about the happiness
of the lovers a grotesque but perfectly tasteful Punchinello or
Mascarille or Sganarelle.
SAVOYARD. I see. That makes three men; and the clown and
policeman will make five. Thats why you wanted five men in the
company.
THE COUNT. My dear sir, you dont suppose I mean that vulgar,
ugly, silly, senseless, malicious and destructive thing, the
harlequinade of a nineteenth century English Christmas pantomime!
What was it after all but a stupid attempt to imitate the success
made by the genius of Grimaldi a hundred years ago? My daughter
does not know of the existence of such a thing. I refer to the
graceful and charming fantasies of the Italian and French stages of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
SAVOYARD. Oh, I beg pardon. I quite agree that harlequinades are
rot. Theyve been dropped at all smart theatres. But from what Billy
Burjoyce told me I got the idea that your daughter knew her way
about here, and had seen a lot of plays. He had no idea she'd been
away in Venice all the time.
THE COUNT. Oh, she has not been. I should have explained that
two years ago my daughter left me to complete her education at
Cambridge. Cambridge was my own University; and though of course
there were no women there in my time, I felt confident that if the
atmosphere of the eighteenth century still existed anywhere in
England, it would be at Cambridge. About three months ago she wrote
to me and asked whether I wished to give her a present on her next
birthday. Of course I said yes; and she then astonished and
delighted me by telling me that she had written a play, and that
the present she wanted was a private performance of it with real
actors and real critics.
SAVOYARD. Yes: thats what staggered me. It was easy enough to
engage a company for a private performance: it's done often enough.
But the notion of having critics was new. I hardly knew how to set
about it. They dont expect private engagements; and so they have no
agents. Besides, I didnt know what to offer them. I knew that they
were cheaper than actors, because they get long engagements: forty
years sometimes; but thats no rule for a single job. Then theres
such a lot of them: on first nights they run away with all your
stalls: you cant find a decent place for your own mother. It would
have cost a fortune to bring the lot.
THE COUNT. Of course I never dreamt of having them all. Only a
few first-rate representative men.
SAVOYARD. Just so. All you want is a few sample opinions. Out of
a hundred notices you wont find more than four at the outside that
say anything different. Well, Ive got just the right four for you.
And what do you think it has cost me?
THE COUNT.
[shrugging his shoulders] I cannot guess.
SAVOYARD. Ten guineas, and expenses. I had to give Flawner
Bannal ten. He wouldnt come for less; and he asked fifty. I had to
give it, because if we hadnt had him we might just as well have had
nobody at all.
THE COUNT. But what about the others, if Mr Flannel-
SAVOYARD.
[shocked] Flawner Bannal.
THE COUNT. -if Mr Bannal got the whole ten?
SAVOYARD. Oh, I managed that. As this is a high-class sort of
thing, the first man I went for was Trotter.
THE COUNT. Oh indeed. I am very glad you have secured Mr
Trotter. I have read his Playful Impressions.
SAVOYARD. Well, I was rather in a funk about him. Hes not
exactly what I call approachable; and he was a bit stand-off at
first. But when I explained and told him your daughter-
THE COUNT.
[interrupting in alarm] You did not say that the play was
by her, I hope?
SAVOYARD. No: thats been kept a dead secret. I just said your
daughter has asked for a real play with a real author and a real
critic and all the rest of it. The moment I mentioned the daughter
I had him. He has a daughter of his own. Wouldnt hear of payment!
Offered to come just to please her! Quite human. I was
surprised.
THE COUNT. Extremely kind of him.
SAVOYARD. Then I went to Vaughan, because he does music as well
as the drama: and you said you thought there would be music. I told
him Trotter would feel lonely without him; so he promised like a
bird. Then I thought youd like one of the latest sort: the chaps
that go for the newest things and swear theyre oldfashioned. So I
nailed Gilbert Gunn. The four will give you a representative team.
By the way
[looking at his watch] theyll be here presently.
THE COUNT. Before they come, Mr Savoyard, could you give me any
hints about them that would help me to make a little conversation
with them? I am, as you said, rather out of it in England; and I
might unwittingly say something tactless.
SAVOYARD. Well, let me see. As you dont like English people, I
dont know that youll get on with Trotter, because hes thoroughly
English: never happy except when hes in Paris, and speaks French so
unnecessarily well that everybody there spots him as an Englishman
the moment he opens his mouth. Very witty and all that. Pretends to
turn up his nose at the theatre and says people make too much fuss
about art
[the Count is extremely indignant]. But thats only his
modesty, because art is his own line, you understand. Mind you dont
chaff him about Aristotle.
THE COUNT. Why should I chaff him about Aristotle?
SAVOYARD. Well, I dont know; but its one of the recognized ways
of chaffing him. However, youll get on with him all right: hes a
man of the world and a man of sense. The one youll have to be
careful about is Vaughan.
THE COUNT. In what way, may I ask?
SAVOYARD. Well, Vaughan has no sense of humor; and if you joke
with him he'll think youre insulting him on purpose. Mind: it's not
that he doesnt see a joke: he does; and it hurts him. A comedy
scene makes him sore all over: he goes away black and blue, and
pitches into the play for all hes worth.
THE COUNT. But surely that is a very serious defect in a man of
his profession?
SAVOYARD. Yes it is, and no mistake. But Vaughan is honest, and
dont care a brass farthing what he says, or whether it pleases
anybody or not; and you must have one man of that sort to say the
things that nobody else will say.
THE COUNT. It seems to me to carry the principle of division of
labor too far, this keeping of the honesty and the other qualities
in separate compartments. What is Mr Gunn's speciality, if I may
ask?
SAVOYARD. Gunn is one of the intellectuals.
THE COUNT. But arnt they all intellectuals?
SAVOYARD. Lord! no: heaven forbid! You must be careful what you
say about that: I shouldnt like anyone to call me an Intellectual:
I dont think any Englishman would! They dont count really, you
know; but still it's rather the thing to have them. Gunn is one of
the young intellectuals: he writes plays himself. Hes useful
because he pitches into the older intellectuals who are standing in
his way. But you may take it from me that none of these chaps
really matter. Flawner Bannal's your man. Bannal really represents
the British playgoer. When he likes a thing, you may take your oath
there are a hundred thousand people in London thatll like it if
they can only be got to know about it. Besides, Bannal's knowledge
of the theatre is an inside knowledge. We know him; and he knows
us. He knows the ropes: he knows his way about: he knows what hes
talking about.
THE COUNT.
[with a little sigh] Age and experience, I suppose?
SAVOYARD. Age! I should put him at twenty at the very outside,
myself. It's not an old man's job after all, is it? Bannal may not
ride the literary high horse like Trotter and the rest; but I'd
take his opinion before any other in London. Hes the man in the
street; and thats what you want.
THE COUNT. I am almost sorry you didnt give the gentleman his
full terms. I should not have grudged the fifty guineas for a sound
opinion. He may feel shabbily treated.
SAVOYARD. Well, let him. It was a bit of side, his asking fifty.
After all, what is he? Only a pressman. Jolly good business for him
to earn ten guineas: hes done the same job often enough for half a
quid, I expect.
Fanny O'Dowda comes precipitately through the curtains, excited
and nervous. A girl of nineteen in a dress synchronous with
her father's.
FANNY. Papa, papa, the critics have come. And one of them has a
cocked hat and sword like a-
[she notices Savoyard] Oh, I beg your pardon.
THE COUNT. This is Mr Savoyard, your impresario, my dear.
FANNY.
[shaking hands] How do you do?
SAVOYARD. Pleased to meet you, Miss O'Dowda. The cocked hat is
all right. Trotter is a member of the new Academic Committee. He
induced them to go in for a uniform like the French Academy; and I
asked him to wear it.
THE FOOTMAN.
[announcing] Mr Trotter, Mr Vaughan, Mr Gunn, Mr Flawner
Bannal.
[The four critics enter. Trotter wears a diplomatic dress, with
sword and three-cornered hat. His age is about 50. Vaughan is 40.
Gunn is 30. Flawner Bannal is 20 and is quite unlike the others.
They can be classed at sight as professional men: Bannal is
obviously one of those unemployables of the business class who
manage to pick up a living by a sort of courage which gives him
cheerfulness, conviviality, and bounce, and is helped out
positively by a slight turn for writing, and negatively by a
comfortable ignorance and lack of intuition which hides from him
all the dangers and disgraces that keep men of finer perception in
check. The Count approaches them hospitably].
SAVOYARD. Count O'Dowda, gentlemen. Mr Trotter.
TROTTER.
[looking at the Count's costume] Have I the pleasure of
meeting a confrere?
THE COUNT. No, sir: I have no right to my costume except the
right of a lover of the arts to dress myself handsomely. You are
most welcome, Mr Trotter.
[Trotter bows in the French manner].
SAVOYARD. Mr Vaughan.
THE COUNT. How do you do, Mr Vaughan?
VAUGHAN. Quite well, thanks.
SAVOYARD. Mr Gunn.
THE COUNT. Delighted to make your acquaintance, Mr Gunn.
GUNN. Very pleased.
SAVOYARD. Mr Flawner Bannal.
THE COUNT. Very kind of you to come, Mr Bannal.
BANNAL. Don't mention it.
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