be seen every night in the theatres oldfashioned farcical
comedies, in which a bedroom, with four doors on each side and a
practicable window in the middle, was understood to resemble exactly the
bedroom in the flats beneath and above, all three inhabited by couples
consumed with jealousy. When these people came home drunk at night;
mistook their neighbor's flats for their own; and in due course got
into the wrong beds, it was not only the novices who found the resulting
complications and scandals exquisitely ingenious and amusing, nor their
equally verdant flappers who could not help squealing in a manner that
astonished the oldest performers when the gentleman who had just come in
drunk through the window pretended to undress, and allowed glimpses of
his naked person to be descried from time to time.

Heartbreak House

Men who had just read the news that Charles Wyndham was dying, and
were thereby sadly reminded of Pink Dominos and the torrent of farcical
comedies that followed it in his heyday until every trick of that trade
had become so stale that the laughter they provoked turned to loathing:
these veterans also, when they returned from the field, were as much
pleased by what they knew to be stale and foolish as the novices by what
they thought fresh and clever.

Commerce in the Theatre

Wellington said that an army moves on its belly. So does a London
theatre. Before a man acts he must eat. Before he performs plays he must
pay rent. In London we have no theatres for the welfare of the people:
they are all for the sole purpose of producing the utmost obtainable
rent for the proprietor. If the twin flats and twin beds produce a
guinea more than Shakespeare, out goes Shakespeare and in come the twin
flats and the twin beds. If the brainless bevy of pretty girls and the
funny man outbid Mozart, out goes Mozart.

Unser Shakespeare

Before the war an effort was made to remedy this by establishing a
national theatre in celebration of the tercentenary of the death of
Shakespeare. A committee was formed; and all sorts of illustrious and
influential persons lent their names to a grand appeal to our national
culture. My play, The Dark Lady of The Sonnets, was one of the incidents
of that appeal. After some years of effort the result was a single
handsome subscription from a German gentleman. Like the celebrated
swearer in the anecdote when the cart containing all his household goods
lost its tailboard at