Mr Forbes Robertson and
Sir Herbert Tree, for instance, had never felt the real
disadvantage of which managers have to complain. This
disadvantage was not put directly to the Committee; and though
the managers are against me on the question of the censorship, I
will now put their case for them as they should have put it
themselves, and as it can be read between the lines of their
evidence when once the reader has the clue.
The manager of a theatre is a man of business. He is not an
expert in politics, religion, art, literature, philosophy, or
law. He calls in a playwright just as he calls in a doctor, or
consults a lawyer, or engages an architect, depending on the
playwright's reputation and past achievements for a satisfactory
result. A play by an unknown man may attract him sufficiently to
induce him to give that unknown man a trial; but this does not
occur often enough to be taken into account: his normal course is
to resort to a well-known author and take (mostly with misgiving)
what he gets from him. Now this does not cause any anxiety to Mr
Forbes Robertson and Sir Herbert Tree, because they are only
incidentally managers and men of business: primarily they are
highly cultivated artists, quite capable of judging for
themselves anything that the most abstruse playwright is likely
to put before them, But the plain sailing tradesman who must be
taken as the typical manager (for the West end of London is not
the whole theatrical world) is by no means equally qualified to
judge whether a play is safe from prosecution or not.
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