I am not at all sure that she has
the makings of a dramatist, or that if she writes another play it will
be better than this one. You do not necessarily get to your destination
by taking the right turning at the beginning of the journey. The one
certain thing is that if you take the wrong turning at the beginning,
and follow it persistently, you will not get to your destination at all.
The playwright who writes merely for the stage, who squeezes the breath
out of life before he has suited it to his purpose, is at the best only
playing a clever game with us. He may amuse us, but he is only playing
ping-pong with the emotions. And that is why we should welcome, I think,
any honest attempt to deal with life as it is, even if life as it is
does not always come into the picture.
TOLSTOI AND OTHERS
There is little material for the stage in the novels of Tolstoi. Those
novels are full, it is true, of drama; but they cannot be condensed into
dramas. The method of Tolstoi is slow, deliberate, significantly
unemphatic; he works by adding detail to detail, as a certain kind of
painter adds touch to touch. The result is, in a sense, monotonous, and
it is meant to be monotonous.
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