| <trailer><p> <Westralian Worker,> <6 April 1917>
| </p></trailer>
| <headline><p> <OUR BOOKSHELF The Repertory Theatre> 
| <Movement> </p></headline>
| <p> We moderns have much to thank Gilbert Murray for 
| in his translations of the plays of Euripides and his 
| contemporaries. He has set up a window through which 
| we may glimpse at the world of thought in which lived 
| the Greeks. When we realise that these plays, which 
| would be regarded as 'above the heads' of modern 
| audiences, were the common intellectual recreation of 
| the ancients, were staged and witnessed by the 
| people, we must realise that there exists either an 
| unfavorable comparison between the mentality of the 
| Greeks and ourselves, or else that the stage has lost 
| its great educative mission, and become a mere pander 
| to the grosser tastes of the multitude. Taking the 
| latter view to be the true one, Lady Gregory and her 
| circle called into being the Dublin Abbey Theatre, 
| the forerunner of a movement that has established 
| Repertory Theatres throughout the world.</p>
| <p>The difference between these theatres and the 
| commercial stage is the difference between the 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> "Worker" </title> and
| the penny-a-liner capitalist journal <mdash>-</mdash> the 
| difference between Peter the Hermit and the Vicar of 
| Bray. The one has a message to deliver. If the 
| message is disliked, it has a mission to make it 
| loved. The other earns a crust by barking 
| acquiescence to Mammon, or, at best, dealing out 
| tinselled trivialities that serve to exclude serious 
| thought. </p>
| <p> Perhaps Lady Gregory's plays, at first sight, 
| appear to have no great message. But it can be said 
| of them that they are genuinely witty, and good 
| literature, therefore unacceptable to the commercial 
| stage, which has debased public taste to a neurotic 
| state of inability to stomach anything but horse-play 
| and sex-obsession. Of course, the Abbey Theatre was 
| not a private play-house for the exhibition of its 
| founder's plays. It sought to revive the taste for 
| genuine dramatic literature <mdash>-</mdash> and 
| succeeded, as the movement everywhere else has 
| succeeded. </p>
| <p> The first Repertory Theatre in Australia was 
| established in Adelaide, and was followed by others 
| in Melbourne and Sydney, and later by less ambitious 
| projects in Tasmania. Sessions of a week or fortnight 
| are held at intervals, and plays such as those of 
| Shaw, Ibsen, Galsworthy, and Audreyeff are staged. 
| Strange to say the attempts have not only been 
| successful in themselves, but have even awakened in 
| commercial stage circles a feeling that public taste 
| was neither so low nor so hopeless as was imagined. 
| It is to the efforts of the Repertory Theatres in the 
| East that Perth playgoers were permitted some time 
| ago to witness Shaw's <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo">
| "Man" </title> and most of the professional 
| actors shockingly misinterpreted, imagining that the 
| whole thing was a farce, instead of being a study in 
| psychology. To the same influence we can attribute 
| the promised performance of Brieux's 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> 
| "Damaged Gods, "</title> for the 
| Repertory Theatres first proved that it was possible, 
| and even popular to stage such plays. </p>
| <p> It is interesting to note that one of the early 
| efforts of the Melbourne Repertory was Louis Esson's 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> "Dead 
| Timber." </title> Esson is an Australian poet and 
| playwright, about whom the only complaint we have to 
| make is that he hasn't written enough. (Most writers, 
| no doubt, err in the other direction.) </p>
| <p><title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> "Dead 
| Timber" </title> deals with a side of bush-life little 
| touched on in serious literature. Most Australian 
| authors are content to see only the true and the 
| beautiful in the Bush, while the city is held up as 
| the sink of iniquity, and the fortress of Mammon. 
| True the Bush gave us much of our national spirit. 
| Into it we dip for rest and inspiration. To it we 
| appeal as to a nation genius. It gave us Eureka and 
| the A.W.U. But the City is the stronghold of 
| democracy and the fountain-head of ideas, while there 
| is a side of the Bush that reminds us forcibly of 
| Edwin Markham's <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo">
| "Man With the Hoe." </title><mdash>-</mdash> </p>
| <p><q> 
| </q></p>
| <p> It is this aspect that 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo">
| "Dead Timber" </title> deals with. The scene is 
| laid in Gippsland. Who has seen a Gippsland clearing? 
| Great grey giants, ringbarked and dead, but still 
| standing. Picture that scene on a miserable, 
| drizzling day <mdash>-</mdash> blue-black sky, muddy 
| paddocks, swollen creek <mdash>-</mdash> everything 
| sodden and wretched. Imagine a family that has 
| struggled with a mixed farm and dairy herd for the 
| best part of a lifetime <mdash>-</mdash> burnt out, 
| flooded out, scorched out by drought, and still no 
| blue sky ahead. And still <q>  
| </q> Free! Mary has grown to the 
| verge of womanhood in this struggle, and her 
| question. <q> 
| </q> is answered by her mother 
| as above. And then Mary meets Andy Wilson, and <q> 
| </q></p>
| <p> Incidentally, one of the objects of the Repertory 
| Theatres in Australia is to cultivate the Australian 
| drama, and to this end lectures and play-reading 
| nights are held, as a branch of the society's 
| activities. In addition an all Australian night, held 
| once a year, is regarded as the high festival of the 
| society. Two other plays of Esson's have figured on 
| the Repertory stage ~~ <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo">
| "The Woman Tamer," </title> and 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> "The Time is Not Yet 
| Ripe." </title> The latter is a skit and character 
| study on Australian politics, and well worth reading 
| at the present time. </p>
| <p> It seems remarkable that the Repertory Theatre 
| idea has never been taken up in the West, especially 
| in view of the frequency of visits from the 
| commercial dramatic companies. But then, to say the 
| least, the West hasn't been furiously progressive in 
| the world of ideas of late. Esson's plays, published 
| in two volumes. <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo">
| "The Time is Not Yet Ripe," </title> and 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> "Three Short 
| Plays," </title> also his verses 
| <title rend="PRE lsquo POST rsquo"> "Bells and Bees," 
| </title> have excited favorable comment both in England 
| and Australia. In fact, he seems to have awakened some of 
| the English critics to the fact that Australian 
| literature isn't necessarily blood and thunder. The 
| plays are published at 2/ and can be obtained through 
| Ross's Book Service, 345 Queen-Street, Melbourne.