March 26, 1940.

WHAT THE THEATRE CAN MEAN TO ALL OF US.

Before I suggest to you what the theatre can mean to all of us - I'd like to tell you first what it means to me personally. There's a reason for this. If I can communicate a little of my own point of view as a playwright, a little of my own enthusiasm for a great and noble art - (an enthusiasm which actually absorbs me pretty much - beyond my will, my intention - and probably my health, certainly my peace of mind!) - if I can give you a little hint of the fever that eats me, I have an idea it will tell you something about yourself, too.

In a lyric poem, you know how the poet - overwhelmed with an emotion, and the necessity to communicate it to paper and to us before it destroys him - you know how he finds the image and the music to do it with - And he pours it out, in his own person - (the "I" working overtime -) seemingly dismayed by his own egotistic response to the universe, dazzled by his own immortal soul.

But what happens? If what he feels is true and just and important and stirring and deeply human - we find he's not only speaking for himself - he's speaking for us. We see his images, we inhabit the mood he's created - the mood of night, or wind, or love, or terror - we share his emotions, we respond to his truth - because his truth is our truth, too, and we have been reminded. This is the way we feel, the way we think, the way our pulses beat and our senses sing.

So let me tell you about myself - Maybe some of it is about you, too. (Anyway, here I am trying not to be charged with Narcissism. Maybe I'm going to. We'll find out in a minute)

The playwright then. Myself. What does the theatre mean to me?

1. It gives me a chance to say what I feel about life.

(You might with some justice ask me why it's so important for me to say what I feel about life. You might say: "What makes you think you've got something to say that anyone wants to hear?!"

(My answer to that has to be: "I don't know whether anyone wants to hear it or not - but I can't keep my mouth shut.")

(2)

I tried it once for a year and it nearly killed me.

Like anyone who lives in relation to an art -- I have to
keep on endlessly giving some form to life, I have to
try to fix moments, moods, people, relationships -- so
that I understand them, give them order, and, as nearly
as I'm able, the great precision and dignity of an art form.
The accident of my sensory equipment makes me do this in
plays.

And I fail all the time. It's never quite satisfactory to
me. (I wish you could see me rehearsing at the Globe -
cutting lines, adding them, tearing things to pieces --
trying to get closer all the time to what I meant to say!)

But the important point is: I can't stop trying to find
out what life is about, and I can't stop trying to say
some of it in the form of a play.

Doesn't my predicament relate to you also? Don't you --
in your various occupations and duties -- try to give
life order and distinction and grace and beauty and
color and meaning? Of course you do. Whoever you are
and whatever you occupy your time with. You paint, per-
haps - or write, or play the piano, or run a house with
finesse and cunning and care. You try to make the life
around you bend more and more toward your concept of the
good life. Better schools, decenter civil administration,
good music, etc. (Lord, you even vote - for congress-
men you think will pass laws that will make a better
shape for the country we live in!)

You can't stop. Don't stop. Make. Create. You'll die
if you don't do what's in you to do.

2. The theatre enlarges my life.

Here we're in the same boat exactly. It enlarges yours
too.

Think - just as a matter of pure information - how
much for instance we know about Ibsen's Norway from
his plays. The provincial, clacking, hide-bound, smold-
ering, ruthless lives. The chicanery. The idle, bored
and dangerous venom of the intellectual woman with no
work to give meaning to her existence - Hedda Gabler.

Think too, of the emotion we experience when, as in
A Doll's House, a woman dares to slam out of her hus-
band's house for the first time in artistic history --
thereby declaring a woman's right to freedom and to a
soul.

(3)

Remember Shakespeare and Shakespeare's young England.
Brawling, high-sounding, vital, self-conscious, bom-
bastic, bearbaiting England -- with a tyrannical old
war horse, Elizabeth on the throne -- and all life
opening to a rude and shattering force among nations.

(Statecraft, cunning, and perhaps lack of conscience
in the modern sense, and a staggering courage -
built England. But I say - Shakespeare
built England. He exposed the heights, and
tragic depths, the complexity, and the lyrical and
infinite reaches of what the Elizabethan only
crudely felt - he gave him meaning and direction -
hecomposed the units of human impulse into a
version of all it was possible for a man to be -
and thus we behold England, that warring, self-con-
fident, dynamic thrust into the world - and into
the mind - that has colored and conditioned them
and us ever since.

(Perhaps some of you think it's a shame - if it's
true - that Shakespeare made the British Empire.
But that's beside the point. No politics today.)

And look how our life expands with a play of
Chekhov - reading it - or better - seeing it in
the theatre. The Cherry Orchard, say.

In that terrible intimacy of looking across foot-
lights through a wall that's no longer there -
the pathetic, the poignant, well-meaning, but
actionless, will-less people, seeing the vigorous
new world creeping up on them, fraying their nerves,
taking their money. And at last we hear the
axe slashing down the cherry orchard - the symbol
of their by now useless lives (but so lovely, so
pitiable!) a good dozen years before the axe
actually fell on that bleak October, 1917.

to all of us
Now the theatre really means a great deal more than I have
time to tell you. You all know that. Still, I hope I have remind-
ed you a little, which is all I can hope to do.

Now that I've mentioned some of the great ones - there's
just time to read part of a scene from one not so great.
I'd like to explain that high comedy seems to me the hardest
kind of play to write. You have to be serious, and you
have to appear not so. And yet every once in a while, like
a small fountain spearing up, the hard clear light of truth
must rise.

March 26, 1940.

But what happens? If what he feels is true and just and important and stirring and deeply human -- we find he's not only speaking for himself - he's speaking for us. We see his images, we inhabit the mood he's created - the mood of night, or wind, or love, or terror - we share his emotions, we respond to his truth - because his truth is our truth, too, and we have been reminded. This is the way we feel, the way we think, the way our pulses beat and our senses sing.

So let me tell you about myself. Maybe some of it is about you, too. (Anyway, here I am trying not to be charged with Narcissism. Maybe I'm going to. We'll find out in a minute)

(2)

## 2. The theatre enlarges my life.

Think too, of the *emotion* we experience when, as in
A Doll's House, a woman dares to slam out of her hus-
band's house for the first time in artistic history --
thereby declaring a woman's right to freedom and to a
soul.

(3)

to all of us
Now the theatre really means a great deal more than I have
time to tell you. You all know that. I hope I have reminded you a little, which is all I can hope to do.