5.2 Dialogue and details Continued
Israel Zangwill, in his symbolic play, “The War-God”, has put blank verse to a new use, with noteworthy success. He writes in very strict measure, but without the least inversion or inflation, without a touch of Elizabethan, or conventionally poetic, diction. He managed to use modern expressions, and even slang, without incongruity, while at the same time he is able to give rhetorical movement to the speeches of his symbolic personages. In passages of argument, he can achieve that clash of measured phrase against measured phrase which the Greeks called “stichomythy,” and which the French dramatists sometimes produce in rapid rapier play with the Alexandrine. Zangwill’s practice suggested that blank verse, to be justified in drama, should be lyrical. His verse is a product of pure intellect and wit, without a single lyric accent. It is measured prose and if it ever tries to be more, it fails. He has shown a new use for blank verse, in rhetorico-symbolic drama - no small literary feat.
There is nothing more irritating on the modern stage than a play which keeps on changing from verse to prose and back again. It gives the verse-passages an air of pompous self-consciousness. It is most destructive for a dramatist to pass, in the same work of art, from one plane of convention to another.
A drama with “soliloquies” and “asides” is like a picture with inscribed labels hanging from the mouths of the figures. The challenge of the playwright is to make his characters reveal the inmost workings of their souls without saying or doing anything that they would not say or do in the real world. In serious modern drama the “aside” is now practically obsolete, such that actors are puzzled how to handle it, and audiences what to make of it. To read a letter aloud have validity, but a soliloquy has no real right of existence. It is a purely artificial unraveling of motive or emotion.
As absurd is the “one room one door” rule - the stage scene should provide a probable locality for whatever action is to take place in it, and doors in practical places where they are deemed functional. The prejudice that exists in some fields against the use of any form of written document on stage is as absurd. Letters play a gigantic part in the economy of modern life. Why banish them from the stage? Bernard Shaw, in an article celebrating the advent of the new technique, once wrote, “Nowadays an actor cannot open a letter or toss off somebody else’s glass of poison without having to face a brutal outburst of jeering.” The playwright’s sole and sufficient safeguard is to use his good intellect and common sense, and not to be intimidated with absurd ideas, and use whatever tools are needed on stage to deliver a good job.