# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Theatre (October 1923)

THE THEATRE
THIS (mid-August) is the morte saison of the theatre. It is the period when there are a great many openings and almost nothing that is worth seeing. It is the period when theatres are easy to rent and when they are consequently used for trying out all sorts of dubious and abortive productions with limited means at their disposal. It is also the period when the dramatic critics, after the theatrical intermission of the summer, return with appetites refreshed and appreciation revived. They enjoy an indifferent play more in August than they do a good one in May. If you do not believe this, read Mr Heywood Broun, who is under the impression that he has, since his vacation, witnessed a dazzling succession of splendid plays all distinguished by the most brilliant acting. But then August is the deadest, sultriest, stupidest, most prosaic month of the whole year and, in the dull stagnation of the town, one is perhaps inclined to be extravagantly grateful for the faintest phosphoresence of wit or the meagrest twitch of emotional animation.—I have, to be sure, seen two quite amusing and very well acted comedies—Tweedles, by Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson, and In Love With Love, by Vincent Lawrence—but there is nothing particularly interesting to say about them; and I hope that the readers of The Dial will forgive me if I speak to them for a few moments instead about the comedies of the Restoration.
Once or twice every year in New York there is a solemn and pretentious revival of Sheridan. This year we had both The Rivals and The SchooL for Scandal. But why wouldn't it be a good plan, for a change, to revive Wycherley or Congreve instead? The comedy of the Restoration was much more interesting artistically (if a little less easy to put over dramatically) than the comedy of the late eighteenth century. Sheridan himself admits in The Critic the tameness of the comedy of his own day, debauched by the importation from France of the comédie larmoyante, and what is most vivid and amusing in Sheridan is surely the part that comes nearest to the vein of Wycherley and Congreve. But Sheridan, in keeping English comedy wholesome in order not to offend the taste ​of his time, had to sacrifice its peculiar force, which had lain in its thoroughgoing cynicism. The School for Scandal is really little more than a domesticated version of Wycherley's The Country Wife, with the difference that in The Country Wife Joseph Surface is the hero instead of the villain. As it is, he remains about the most amusing thing in the later comedy and expounds his subversive point of view with far more wit and persuasiveness than quite accords with the vindication of a latter-day morality. In Wycherley, the rustic Mrs Pinchwife drops like ripe fruit for the city gallant, as Lady Teazle should have done, too, if Sheridan had carried out his comic logic.
Congreve and Wycherley were the supreme glorification of Joseph Surface's point of view, except that with them Joseph Surface was not under the necessity of becoming a hypocrite as well ad a cynic: he is frankly out to seduce an attractive woman or to induce a rich one to marry him. And this, expressed with far greater intensity and with far more literary brilliance than Sheridan was ever able to muster, is what gives the comedy of the Restoration its unique importance. There is in English drama no other equally complete rendering of this comic point of view: even Maugham and Oscar Wilde have had to compromise with the domestic virtues. But in Congreve and in Wycherley all the conventional values are inverted: it is the holiday of the worldly and it has all the exhilaration of a holiday. What could be more gratifying and more cheerful than these husbands and wives who are never faithful, these young men whose intentions are never honourable, these coquettes who never want to marry? What could be more bracing than this contact with a world where the most primitive of human instincts are subjected in their nakedness to the scrutiny of the subtlest and most civilized intelligence, where there is no intermediary of the spirit to bridge the gulf between the mind and the body, where there is no obscurement by romantic emotion either savage or sentimental?
New York has now become sufficiently corrupt to enjoy these remarkable comedies. The Phoenix Society in London has recently revived Congreve's Love For Love. Why may we not do the same? Sheridan has become very tiresome and was never quite first-rate at best.
Edmund Wilson