VI

When the play is “finished,” the processes of collaboration have yet to begin.  The serious work of the dramatist is over, but the most desolating part of his toil awaits him.  I do not refer to the business of arranging with a theatrical manager for the production of the play.  For, though that generally partakes of the nature of tragedy, it also partakes of the nature of amusing burlesque, owing to the fact that theatrical managers are—­no doubt inevitably—­theatrical.  Nevertheless, even the theatrical manager, while disclaiming the slightest interest in anything more vital to the stage than the box-office, is himself in some degree a collaborator, and is the first to show to the dramatist that a play is not a play till it is performed.  The manager reads the play, and, to the dramatist’s astonishment, reads quite a different play from that which the dramatist imagines he wrote.  In particular the manager reads a play which can scarcely hope to succeed—­indeed, a play against whose chances of success ten thousand powerful reasons can be adduced.  It is remarkable that a manager nearly always foresees failure in a manuscript, and very seldom success.  The manager’s profoundest instinct—­self-preservation again!—­is to refuse a play; if he accepts, it is against the grain, against his judgment—­and out of a mad spirit of adventure.  Some of the most glittering successes have been rehearsed in an atmosphere of settled despair.  The dramatist naturally feels an immense contempt for the opinions artistic and otherwise of the manager, and he is therein justified.  The manager’s vocation is not to write plays, nor (let us hope) to act in them, nor to direct the rehearsals of them, and even his knowledge of the vagaries of his own box-office has often proved to be pitiably delusive.  The manager’s true and only vocation is to refrain from producing plays.  Despite all this, however, the manager has already collaborated in the play.  The dramatist sees it differently now.  All sorts of new considerations have been presented to him.  Not a word has been altered; but it is noticeably another play.  Which is merely to say that the creative work on it which still remains to be done has been more accurately envisaged.  This strange experience could not happen to a novel, because when a novel is written it is finished.

And when the director of rehearsals, or producer, has been chosen, and this priceless and mysterious person has his first serious confabulation with the author, then at once the play begins to assume new shapes—­contours undreamt of by the author till that startling moment.  And even if the author has the temerity to conduct his own rehearsals, similar disconcerting phenomena will occur; for the author as a producer is a different fellow from the author as author.  The producer is up against realities.  He, first, renders the play concrete, gradually condenses its filmy vapours into a solid element....  He